Issue No. 610
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31 Oct. - 6 Nov. 2002 Issue No. 610 Features |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
The politics within
Depleted uranium makes impressive coating for bombshells. It also summons a familiar mix of political gimmickry, technical obfuscation, and humanitarian dithering, Hala Sakr reports
After the Gulf War in 1991, Iraqi doctors began publishing alarming figures about the rising frequency of malignancy and congenital malformations, particularly in southern Iraq and around Basra. "Cancer cases rose from 5,884 cases in 1989 to 14,752 in 2001. Leukaemia has particularly increased in the south, where we detected depleted uranium (DU). And birth defects climbed from 1.9 per cent of births in 1989 to 7.4 per cent in 2001," Ayed Mohan Al-Delaimi, director general of preventive medicine at the Iraqi Ministry of Health told Al-Ahram Weekly.
According to Ashraf El-Bayoumi, professor of chemistry at Michigan State and Alexandria universities and former head of the Iraq observation unit of the World Food Programme, "DU was first tested in combat during the Gulf War in 1991, where between 300 and 800 tonnes were used by the allied forces against Iraq. Later DU weapons were used in smaller quantities in the Balkans (1994) and Yugoslavia (1999)." "Kuwait was not spared either," he added, referring to the huge explosion that occurred in the US-army base in Doha in July 1991. As much as four tonnes of DU burned in fire, causing widespread health and environmental hazards. An American radiological contamination team, sent to the site after the fire, confirmed that it had caused oxidation and dispersal of DU.
Due to its high density, DU is used to increase the piercing power of shells and to render tanks less vulnerable to penetration from conventional rounds. It is a by-product of the enrichment process used to produce weapons-grade nuclear material and nuclear fuel. Around 50 years of nuclear weapon and nuclear fuel production in the US have left massive quantities of DU. According to El-Bayoumi, about one million tonnes of DU have been created in this fashion. "Storing such large amounts of radioactive and poisonous material presents a burden to the US government, which therefore provides it free-of-charge to arms manufacturers who reap huge profits as a result," he explained.
A report documenting the aftermath of the Gulf War, 1993- 1995, was published by the German Ahriman-Verlag in 2000, under the title: Uranium Projectiles, Severely Maimed Soldiers, Deformed Babies, Dying Children. "This time, the US had the added bonus... of being able to dispose of the dangerous waste generated by their atomic industry conveniently and cheaply. Today's Iraq is thus a nuclear waste dump -- with shocking consequences for the population," the report stated.
NATO and US military officials repeatedly disputed such reports. "The reasons for the denials are related to legalistic aspects, compensation issues and human rights consideration," said El-Bayoumi.
The Scottish publication The Sunday Herald ran an on-line article by F Arbuthnott and N Mackay, on 7 January 2001, in which the authors quote Doug Rokke, former director of the Pentagon's Depleted-Uranium Project, on the matter. "US and British military personnel, as part of NATO, willfully disregarded health and safety and the environment by their use of DU, resulting in severe health effects... I and my colleagues warned US and British officials that this would occur. They disregarded our warning because to admit any correlation between exposure (to DU) and health effects would make them liable for actions wherever these weapons have been used," Rokke said.
At a meeting of the National Vietnam and Gulf War Veterans Coalition, November 2000, Rokke said that: "Since 1991, numerous Department of Defense (DOD) reports have stated that although DOD officials have stated over and over that the vital chemical and biological logs were misplaced or lost, US Government Accounting Office representatives and the Pulitzer Prize winning author Seymour Hersch have verified that these logs were ordered destroyed in Florida, during December 1996, while Congressional committees were conducting hearings on potential exposures."
"This is all about liability! Therefore the truth must be suppressed. If what happened is acknowledged, then specific individuals within our government and other governments will be required to accept responsibility for the consequences of deliberate actions," Rokke charged.
The issue burst on the public scene when six Italian veterans who had served in Kosovo died of leukaemia. "It was only then that the appropriate attention was triggered," said Iraq's Health Minister Umeed Medhat Mubarak. Iraqis were not the only people at risk, yet US officials continued to minimise the hazards and disassociate the increased cancer cases in Iraq from DU effects.
"This pattern of American official behaviour is not unusual. It is remarkably similar to other situations, particularly the case of the Agent Orange (a defoliating herbicidal that had been used in Vietnam to expose the revolutionary combatants to US war planes and caused cancer to many US Vietnam veterans). It was only recently that the US National Academy of Science admitted some link between Agent Orange and the cancer it induced. Perhaps, 30 years from now, they would issue a similar report in relation to DU," El-Bayoumi commented.
El-Bayoumi also recalled what happened to US soldiers who had been exposed to radioactive fallout during testing of atomic bombs in the 50s. Out of 300,000 exposed, only about 400 received compensation because of the difficulty to document and provide the required evidence. (Suggested reading: Howard Rosenburg; Atomic soldiers, American Victims of Nuclear Experiments; Beacon Press; 1980).
In his address to the war veterans, Rokke said, "too many individuals around the world are suffering and dying because of our (US) deliberate action. The health and environmental problems are not limited to Iraq or surrounding areas... Similar adverse health and environmental effects have been identified within and around US military installations or Department of Energy facilities in Alabama, Washington, California, Alaska, Tennessee, Korea, Panama, Germany, Philippines, Maryland, Nevada, Florida, California, and especially surrounding the US Navy range on the Vieques, Puerto Rico."
In the early 90s, German professor Siegwart-Horst Günther, while teaching infectious diseases and epidemiology at Baghdad University, had the opportunity to conduct extensive studies in Iraq related to the health consequences of DU. His research established similarities between symptoms of exposure to DU and the so-called Gulf War Syndrome exhibited by US and British soldiers and their children. El-Bayoumi pointed out that "the pattern of the different kinds of cancer in southern Iraq are also very similar to those in areas near Chernobyl, the site of the nuclear reactor's explosion."
The lethal substance was to rear its head again, in Afghanistan this year. Dai Williams, independent researcher and occupational psychologist wrote a report titled: Mystery Metal Nightmare in Afghanistan? "The immediate concern for professionals and employees of aid organisations remains the threat of extensive DU contamination in Afghanistan," he said. This concern is expressed by Robert James Parsons in his article: Deleted Uranium in Bunker Bombs: America's Big Dirty Secret (Le Monde Diplomatique, on-line, March 2002).
Several Pakistani newspapers raised the matter in their reports on the war in Afghanistan. The daily Dawn cited "a leading military expert claiming that since October 7 (the beginning of the strikes on Afghanistan), the US Air Force has been raining down DU shells at targets inside Afghanistan". The Weekly Independent asserted that "weapons loaded with processed nuclear waste have been used as secret weapons in the US-led air strikes against the Taliban."
"It is unquestionable that DU was used in Iraq. The evidence provided by Iraqi scientists cannot be neglected. Conclusive evidence requires an independent study. And this should have been the role of the World Health Organisation, WHO. Instead, the case was lost between the WHO and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)," El-Bayoumi said.
"The US government is not keen to have such evidence, for financial and political reasons. Financially, thousands of American veterans could succeed in receiving due compensation. Politically, they could provide grounds for war crime accusations," El-Bayoumi elaborated.
Early in 2001, Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor at the International War Crimes Tribunal, stated that NATO's use of DU could be investigated as a possible war crime, "if coherent results emerge directly linking the use of DU ammunition with health problems".
The WHO has repeatedly been criticised for not acting promptly on the matter. Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, Robert James Parsons stated that "the WHO undertook no proper epidemiological study, only an academic desk study. Under pressure from IAEA, WHO confined itself to studying DU as a heavy metal chemical contaminant."
Similar criticism of the position of the WHO and IAEA appeared in a recent press release issued on 8 October 2002 by Public Citizen, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader, the Green Party presidential candidate for 2000. The release accused the WHO of contributing to the global campaign led by IAEA to promote "commercialisation and consumer acceptance of irradiated food". The report claimed that the WHO has "ceded to IAEA, whose mission is preserving the nuclear industry not the health of the people, the ultimate power of researching the safety of irradiated foods".
Abdel-Aziz Saleh, former deputy regional director and consultant to WHO's Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office (EMRO), said that "the issue of DU in Iraq has been brought to the attention of the WHO at least seven to eight years ago. The WHO's perspective was... that we needed to develop a scientific plan for how to handle the problem."
In 2001, the WHO published a monograph on DU, which again drew much criticism. Parsons wrote that "it was a review of existing scientific literature... mostly restricted to chemical contamination. The very few articles on radiation [the monograph used] came from the Pentagon and the Rand Corporation, the Pentagon think-tank. The recommendations were plain common sense and repeated advice previously given by WHO and repeatedly echoed by aid organisations in Kosovo."
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) also published a report on DU which, according to Parsons, is "frequently cited by those claiming that DU is innocuous". He questioned the independence and neutrality of both agencies. "The Kosovo assessment mission, that provided the basis for the UNEP analysis, was... using maps supplied by NATO."
In August 2001, a team from the WHO, headed by Abdel- Aziz Saleh, conducted a visit to Baghdad to investigate the lraqi claims. Saleh told Al-Ahram Weekly that "the development of the protocol for scientific studies of the potential effect of DU on health was the main outcome of our visit. This is, by all means, a very good step forwards." As yet, the scientific investigation needed to fill the knowledge gap has not been accomplished. "The delay in conducting the studies is not within the hands of the WHO. We should try to carry this out as soon as possible but, in the meantime, we are aware of the possible long-term effects," Saleh added.
Many organisations, including the International Action Centre, led by former US Attorney-General Ramsey Clark, and Amnesty International, have for years called for an international ban of the use of DU altogether. In his speech to the war veterans, Rokke, former director of the Pentagon's Depleted- Uranium Project, asserted that the Americans have "the ultimate obligation, as leaders of the world to provide medical care or medical care recommendations to all that are sick, [and] to complete environmental remediation of contamination caused by our deliberate actions, throughout the United States and the rest or the world".
According to El-Bayoumi, "pressure has to be applied by various means for an independent investigation by the WHO of DU health hazards in Iraq, Kuwait, former Yugoslavia and perhaps Afghanistan, in preparation to ban the use of these weapons. They harm civilians and the environment and their effect persists for years."
He stressed that an "Independent objective investigation should be undertaken by people who are not connected to DU manufacturers in any way and who are not officials of governments that had used DU. It should be conducted by people with a clean record from various parts of the world."
"I am sure that there are people within the WHO that are eager to carry out such an investigation objectively. But the UN, under the current new world order and the hegemony of the US government, seems incapable of fulfiling its basic commitments," he lamented.
Source: Ramsey Clark et al, Metal of Dishonour, 2nd edition, International Action Centre. New York:1999
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