MER - Washington - 4 March:
   All the talk about supposed Iraqi weapons masks a reality few officials in the U.S. wish to discuss -- the spreading cancer plague brought on by the use of tens of thousands of "depleted uranium" weapons by the U.S.
  With huge amounts of such uranium stockpiled from the days of the cold war, the American military used this dangerous metal to build tank-busting artillery shells oblivious to its long-term consequences.
   Now there is an epidemic of cancer in Iraq caused by these weapons -- an epidemic now spreading across destroyed Iraq which is likely to grow worse and worse for years to come.  And with the Iraqi health system itself destroyed, and U.S. sanctions further crippling the country, large and still-growing numbers of people are suffering terribly.
   In a just world the Americans would be held accountable, tremendous compensation would be paid the Iraqis, and as former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has said "war crimes" indictments would be issued.  A good case can certainly be made that there is either criminal intent or culpable negligence
involved with these "depleted uranium" weapons.
   But this is not a just world and not only are the Americans getting away with their crimes but they are still plotting more destruction for Iraq and more use of these same weapons whose effects are every bit as terrible as the "possible" chemical and biological weapons the Americans claim Iraq possesses -- but
has not used.
   In short, if anyone has been using weapons of mass destruction causing tremendous harm to the civilian population, the United States is right at the top of the list.
   Working together with Channel 4 in England, this article was published in THE INDEPENDENT today by one of the world's most courageous journalists, Robert Fisk. And this evening Channel 4 televised a report on "Iraq's Cancer Epidemic".
  Who among the American TV networks will have the courage, not to mention the decency, to show this documentary in the United States, the country responsible for this human misery?

             ALLIES BLAMED FOR IRAQ CANCER TORMENT
                       by Robert Fisk

Baghdad:
Seven years after the end of the Gulf war, a nightmare "epidemic" of  leukemia and stomach cancer is claiming the lives of thousands of Iraqi civilians who live near the former war zone, including children so young that they were not even born when hostilities ended. Iraqi doctors in the southern city of Basra have recorded a fourfold increase in cancer - especially among young children - since 1991.

Doctors fear that farms which produce most of the city's food have been contaminated by depleted uranium shells used by the Allies during the last tank battles of the war. But some Iraqis suspect that American and British bombing of Saddam Hussein's chemical warfare factories may be to blame - or that US aircraft may themselves have used some form of chemicals in their attacks.

The mother of Ali Hillal, an eight-year-old child, who lay dying in the al-Mansur hospital in Baghdad last week, told me that after Allied aircraft had bombed a broadcasting station near their family home in
Diala in 1991, she smelt "a burning, choking smell, something like insecticide". Two doctors interviewed by The Independent believe that the fumes from burning oil refineries may have contained carcinogens;
another spoke of "radiation" from bombs during the war.

Even child cancer patients who might survive, however, are in some cases dying for lack of vital medicines that could save their lives. At the al-Mansur hospital - which has treated hundreds of children in the past three years - Dr Yasser Road, the chief resident doctor, told me of the desperate need for Vincristine and Methortrexate for leukemia patients. Some children are receiving the left-over medicines of infants who have already died.

Five-year-old Latif Abdul Sattar, from Babylon, also bald from chemotherapy - he looks like a Chernobyl victim - was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma three months ago but has been given only a 60 per
cent chance of survival because he is being treated with a substitute for Vincristine.

Dr Jawad Khadim al-Ali, a member of the Royal College of Physicians who is a cancer specialist at Basra's largest hospital, says that in 1997 he treated 380 cancer patients in his own clinic - compared to scarcely 80 per year before 1991.

In a country which is disintegrating under the effect of sanctions, there are no official government statistics on the startling increase in cancer reported by doctors. Perhaps fearing that cities may have been polluted by bio-chemical warfare products from bombed factories, the Iraqi health ministry has made no effort to publicise the tragedy. And since most of the victims are Shiites - the Muslim sect which rebelled against Saddam Hussein's rule in the aftermath of the war - there is little incentive for the Iraqi regime to care.

In his hospital oncology department, Dr al-Ali has pinned to the wall a set of maps of Basra governorate and Nasiriyah city, showing that most new cancer cases come from areas immediately to the east of the tank battles between US and Iraqi forces in February of 1991.

"There are canals as well as farms throughout this area," Dr al-Ali said. "There are rivers there. And always the wind comes from the west, towards Basra." When Dr al-Ali finished showing me his maps, we walked into the hallway outside to find a mass of young women and several old men waiting to see him, all of whom had developed cancer in the past five years.

A woman with a crutch had a bone tumour in her thigh. A young woman in a black chador - a non-smoker with no history of cancer in her family - was suffering from lung cancer; a woman of 51 wearing an Islamic scarf, a schoolteacher and mother of five children, suddenly pulled up her blouse to reveal a missing right breast. "I have breast cancer," she sobbed. "Four years ago, they removed my right breast. Then I had a re-occurrence on my neck. Now I have pain in my left breast. Please help us. We are human beings like you." Like most cancer patients in Iraq, she is likely to die. "Cancer isn't contagious," Dr Raouf says. "But it's moving from south to the north of the country as if it was an infectious disease."