The evidence lies dying in Basra
By Robert Fisk in Beirut
25 January 2000
In IRAQ, there are doctors aplenty who would like to meet
the Royal Society's scientists. In the main Basra teaching
hospital, the cancer suffererswho live near the fields where
depleted uranium shells (DU) were fired by the hundred in
1991 queue at the door of the tiny cancer clinic each
morning. But will the British scientists meet them?
Will they go to Iraq and study the documentation of Basra's
leading cancer specialist, Dr Jawad al-Ali, who has maps
showing the rate of leukemia growth in the areas where
Saddam's tanks were torn apart by DU in the last days of
the war?
I think not. When Iraq asked the World Health Organisation
to investigate DU two years ago, a team of experts arrived
to see if such a study was feasible; but no investigation took
place. And what about Kosovo? The US used DU rounds in
its attacks across the Serb province - and then arrogantly
refused to tell UN investigators the location of its attacks.
The Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, admitted as much in
the Commons last autumn. Why? Why cannot we be told
where these rounds were fired?
Will the Royal Society's experts visit Kosovo? Will they ask
Nato for the information it refused to give to the UN? And
what if Nato treats them with the same disdain?
They could do worse, for example, than visit the
bombed-out paramilitary police barracks in Djakovica,
where DU fired by American A-10 aircraft exploded in the
very centre of the city. But will they go to other parts of
Yugoslavia? Will they visit the areas around Belgrade where
DU was also used? Will the British government, indeed,
allow them to go there?
And what kind of brief is it that tells the scientists they are
to "review the available evidence"? If this is to be anything
more than a palliative to shut up the Gulf War veterans who
suspect they are dying of DU poisoning, these six experts
have to find the available evidence lying in the fields of
Kosovo and southern Iraq, not just trawl through published
reports and military denials. At one of Nato's May press
conferences, spokesman James Shea stated that there was
no evidence suggesting DU was dangerous, citing a report
which turned out to be inaccurate. Is this the sort of stuff the
experts will be "reviewing"?
For almost two years, Defence Ministry officials have been
claiming in letters to MPs that "the Government has not
seen any peer-reviewed epidemiological research data" on
affected populations, mentioning my own reports in The
Independent of deformities, cancers and birth defects in
southern Iraq. Is this, then, what this team is meant to do -
to provide the Government with some "peer-reviewed" data
without any serious on-site inspection? I rather suspect it
is.