By Robert Fisk
PHIL GAMER telephoned me this week to ask how he could makecontact with the doctors treating Iraq's child cancer victims. Hehad been reading our series on the growing evidence of linksbetween cancers in Iraq and the use of depleted uranium shells byAmerican and British forces during the 1991 Gulf War.
During the conflict, Gamer was in the Royal Army MedicalCorps. He was not in the front lines, but he handled the uniformsof Britain's "friendly fire" casualties - men who wereattacked by US aircraft using depleted uranium rounds. And now hesuffers from asthma, incontinence, pain in the intestines and hasa lump on the right side of his neck.
I know what those lumps on the neck look like. This month I'veseen enough Iraqi children with tumours on their abdomen to feelhorror as well as anger. When Hebba Mortaba's mother lifted herlittle girl's patterned blue dress in the Mansour hospital inBaghdad, her terribly swollen abdomen displayed numerousabscesses. Doctors had already surgically removed an earlierabdominal mass only to find, monster-like, that another grew inits place.
During the 1991 war, Hebba's suburb of Basra was bombed soheavily that her family fled to Baghdad. She is now just nineyears old and, so her doctors told me gently, will not live tosee her 10th birthday.
When I first reported from Iraq's child cancer wards lastFebruary and March - and visited the fields and farms aroundBasra into which US and British tanks fired thousands of depleteduranium shells in the last days of the war - the BritishGovernment went to great lengths to discredit what I wrote. Istill treasure a letter from Lord Gilbert, Minister of State forDefence Procurement, who told Independent readers that my accountof a possible link between DU ammunition and increased Iraqichild cancer cases would, "coming from anyone other thanRobert Fisk", be regarded as "a wilful perversion ofreality." According to his Lordship, particles from the DUhardened warheads - used against tank armour - are extremelysmall, rapidly diluted and dispersed by the weather and"become difficult to detect, even with the mostsophisticated monitoring equipment." Over the past fewmonths I've been sent enough evidence to suggest that, had thisletter come from anyone other than his Lordship, its implicationswould be mendacious as well as misleading.
Let us start with an equally eloquent but far more accurateletter sent to the Royal Ordnance in London on 21 April 1991 byPaddy Bartholomew, business development manager of AEATechnology, the trading name for the UK Atomic Energy Authority.Mr Bartholomew's letter - of which I have obtained a copy -refers to a telephone conversation with a Royal Ordnance officialon the dangers of the possible contamination of Kuwait bydepleted uranium ammunition. An accompanying "threatpaper" by Mr Bartholomew, in which he notes that while thehazards caused by the spread of radioactivity and toxiccontamination from these weapons "are small when compared tothose during a war", they nonetheless "can become along-term problem if not dealt with in peacetime and are a riskto both military and civilian population".
The document, marked "UK Restricted" goes on to saythat "US tanks fired 5,000 DU rounds, US aircraft many tensof thousands and UK tanks a small number of DU rounds. The tankammunition alone will amount to greater than 50,000lb of DU...ifthe tank inventory of DU was inhaled, the latest InternationalCommittee of Radiological Protection risk factor...calculates500,000 potential deaths."
"The DU will spread around the battlefield and targetvehicles in various sizes and quantities ... it would be unwisefor people to stay close to large quantities of DU for longperiods and this would obviously be of concern to the localpopulation if they collect this heavy metal and keep it." MrBartholomew's covering letter says that the contamination ofKuwait is "emotive and thus must be dealt with in asensitive manner".
Needless to say, no one has bothered even to suggest aclean-up in southern Iraq where Hebba Mortaba and other childvictims are dying. Why not? And why doesn't the Government comeclean and tell us what really happened?
Here is a clue. It comes in a letter dated 1 March 1991 from aUS lieutenant colonel at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to aMajor Larson at the organisation's Studies and Analysis Branchand states that: "There has been and continues to be aconcern (sic) regarding the impact of DU on the environment.Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of DU onthe battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptableand thus be deleted from the arsenal. If DU penetrators provedtheir worth during our recent combat activities, then we shouldassure their future existence (until something better isdeveloped)."
So there it is. Shorn of the colonel's execrable English, themessage is simple: the health risks of DU ammunition areacceptable until we - the West - invent something even morelethal to take its place.
So with tens of thousands of 1991 Gulf War veterans sufferingunexplained and potentially terminal illnesses and with thousandsof Iraqi civilians, including children unborn when the war ended,now suffering from unexplained cancers, I can only repeat what Iwrote last February: that something terrible happened at the endof the Gulf War about which we have still not been told thetruth. As former acting Sergeant Tony Duff of the Gulf WarVeterans put it to me yesterday, "a lot of things we are nowcalling victories about the Gulf War will be seen one day asatrocities - I wonder whether this is why the powers that bedon't want this DU thing to come out?"
And what exactly is this awful secret which we are not allowedto know? Is it, as Professor Malcolm Hooper, professor ofmedicinal chemistry at Sunderland University remarks, the resultof the US-British bombing of Saddam Hussein's Sarin and Tabunpoison gas factories (around 900 facilities were bombed, it nowturns out). Or is it the secret DU factor?
I don't know whether this can be classed as a war crime. Butanyone who thinks there's no connection between our use ofdepleted uranium ammunition in the 1991 Gulf War and the tide ofsickness that has followed in its wake must also believe inFather Christmas.
Does Lord Gilbert believe in Father Christmas, I wonder?
This article first appeared in the October 16, 1998, issue ofthe The Independent, UK.