MER - Washington - 19 February, 1998:

    Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has specifically called U.S. policies toward Iraq         "war crimes" and "genocide".  This on-the-scene report from today's THE GUARDIAN, written by         Maggie O'Kane, tells part of the human story.  But it is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
 
    Already prostrate and wreathing in misery, and all but defenseless in the face of the American      Empire, this is the country the American-led modern-day armada is now about to further bomb and lay awaste.
 
    The complicity of the contempoRary United Nations is also shameful.  MER has learned that senior U.N. officials have literally been screaming at each other about the terrible human suffering in Iraq for which the U.N. is now partly responsible, urgently seeking ways to disassociate the U.N. from U.S. policies.

    But its probably too late.  The most likely outcome of the Secretary-General's 11th-hour trip to Baghdad will be to allow the Americans to twist his visit into vindication that diplomacy was exhausted; when in fact the Americans have done everything possible to ensure that nothing but bombs would prevail.
 
    If the U.N. had any sense left the Secretary-General would reach a reasonable arrangement with the Iraqi government -- not difficult to do in fact at this point -- and then the Security Council would finally remove itself from this madness with a resolution the Americans would no doubt veto.  So be it.  It's time for the U.N. to wake up and restore its own dignity and legitimacy.

THE GUARDIAN - 19 February, 1998 - by Maggie O'Kane:

    There is a new weapon in the Western powers' line-up against the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. It is not as hi-tech as the stealth bomber, it lacks the punch of the cruise missile and it can only be seen under a microscope. Travelling on the back of the female sand fly, it strikes hardest in the spring.
 
    On the second floor of al-Quadisiya hospital on the outskirts of Baghdad, the children's ward has on show some of the collateral damage from this new microscopic weapon. Kena Azar is six months old and  wrapped up so only his head is peeping from a pink-and-cream blanket.
 
    The parasite moved first into his bone marrow, to eat the cells that make his blood, and now it has taken over his liver and spleen. He is sleeping easily, for this parasite kills without pain.
 
    The hospital, with its scruffy foam mattresses, battered metal beds and grubby sheets, does not have the pentostan medicine that Kena needs to help his six-month-old body fight.
 
    "He has a 10 per cent chance of living. Before the sanctions and with the medicine, it would have been 90 per cent," says the consultant, Dr Alia Sultan.
 
    In the 1960s leishmaniasis, known as the "black plague", was common in Iraq.  Now it's back. A shortage of insecticides (banned under United Nations sanctions), and the collapse of the sanitation system with the absence of spare parts (because of the sanctions), have seen the sand fly flourish again.
 
    In the bed beside Kena lies Saleema Jura's second-born child, who is recovering from gastro-enteritis, the most common infection in Iraqi children, caused by bad sanitation. Ms Jura, aged 30, calls the doctor over and begs him gently to help her eldest son, Ali, aged four, who is at home.
 
    She shows a piece of paper with the name of another unobtainable medicine. "Please help me, if there is anything I can give to my baby.  He was walking and talking and everything, then he got this infection and now he can't move his legs or speak any more."
 
    Dr Sultan explains that Ali has a viral infection of the brain that is untreatable in Iraq. "He needs physiotherapy, speech therapy, things we don't have any more."
 
    As the doctor walks away Ms Jura turns suddenly and says: "You can tell all those people abroad that Ali really was talking and playing.  Then all of a sudden he got this and I have nothing to give him. That    is what your people have done to my child."
 
    She is crying now and without warning picks up her child and leaves the ward, signing herself out to go home to her elder son.
 
    Dr Sultan says: "Last week a woman came in with a very weak child suffering from diarrhoea and vomiting. I told her she had to admit herself and the child, because the mothers have to stay since we    don't have the staff.
 
    "She told me she could not admit herself to the hospital. I will have to let him die, she said, I have four children at home to keep alive."
 
    The economic sanctions weapon, used for the past seven years in the belief that it will compel President Saddam to comply with UN resolutions on disarmament, has led to a six-fold increase in infant  mortality, according to the UN Children's Fund (Unicef).
 
    A study last year by the Harvard medical group put the number of Iraqi children dead or ill because of sanctions at half a million.  In 10 out of 15 beds in this children's ward at al-Quadisiya hospital - just one of Baghdad's 12 hospitals - at least half are here because of sanctions.
 
    There is despair in this hospital: absolute despair. Dr Ali Rasim, aged 32, the paediatrician on the ward, says: "I have watched children dying here from renal failure because we didn't have sodium bicarbonate - that's baking soda."
 
    In the premature delivery suite, the incubators are patched with sky-blue supermarket bags; there are no bulbs in the incubators' overhead lights and a mother is holding an oxygen tube, as thick as a pencil, under the nose of her 3lb baby who has a head the size of an apple.
 
    "There are no oxygen masks left for the babies, and these are the thinnest tubes we have," says Dr Rasim, almost apologetically.
 
    In the next ward a nine-month-old boy in a pink jumper is whimpering as his mother is forced to tie his arm to the metal bed frame with string. There is no other way to hold the intravenous drip.
 
    Dr Juad Rashid, the hospital's consultant paediatrician, says: "In all my seven years of training, I only saw one case of typhoid - now I'm seeing them every week. We will have an epidemic by the summer."
 
    Britain and the United States continue to be the strongest supporters of economic sanctions and all that comes with them - now, the rebirth of the sand fly and her black plague.
 
    "I am a soldier without a weapon," says Dr Rashid. "The rockets and missiles that are coming for our children are viruses and epidemics, and I have nothing to fight for them with. Why are you making war on our children?"