by Matthew McAllester
Middle East Correspondent, NewsDay 6/18/00
Baghdad, Iraq -- From the corridor
outside the crowded pediatric ward
came the scream of a mother in the
first seconds of mourning.
Looking from side to side, a woman
in a black head scarf carried the limp
body of her 1-year-old daughter
Yousser out of the ward's
examination room. Her tears fell on
the scarlet fabric of the last dress
Yousser would ever wear. As she
stood cradling her dead daughter, the
woman started to explain how she
had first brought Yousser to the
hospital 10 days ago after the little
girl developed bloody diarrhea.
Today she had brought her back, but
it was too late.
Again the moan of a mother. This
time from inside the examination
room. It was 3:03 p.m. -- seven
minutes since Yousser had died.
"Another one," said Dr. Uldram Ahmed, chief resident of the pediatric
section of Ibn Al-Baladi maternity and pediatric hospital in a poor part
of
Baghdad known as Saddam City.
Lying on his back inside the examination room was Ali Hussein. Facing him
on a wall of the room was a photograph of two chubby, European-looking
toddlers giggling as they fed long grass to a kid goat. Ali was not like
those
children. He looked brittle. The right nostril of his nearly fleshless
nose was
crusted in blood. His minuscule hands were curled and motionless. He was
10 weeks old and looked like he'd lived through a century. His teenage
mother leaned over him as Dr. Ghassam Rashid Al Baya pressed his
stethoscope to the naked baby's gray chest.
"He died?" asked Ahmed, who was looking on.
"Yes," Al Baya replied, still listening to Ali's chest for a sound he knew
he
would never hear.
"Second one dead," Ahmed said. "Look at the bloody vomitus." Ali's last,
crimson breath formed a tiny wet cloud next to his head on the orange wrap
he lay on.
"He died," Al Baya confirmed, tucking his stethoscope away into the pocket
of his white coat. "He passed."
Ali's mother enclosed him in the stained orange blanket and glided out
of the
room in silence. He was the third that day. The first died at 8 a.m. The
second was Yousser. And there was another, a 4-month-old girl, Rinda
Satar, across the corridor gasping what Ahmed said would be her last
breaths. Two of them, Ali Hussein and Rinda Satar, were from the same
neighborhood, Hai Al Tarek.
The hospital didn't even keep a record of their mother's names or their
addresses. The women walked out of the building with their babies in their
arms. All around the hospital the old electric clocks were stopped at different
times. 12:52. 4:11. 5:32. And 1:07 in the room where Ali Hussein died.
It was a perfectly average day at Ibn Al-Baladi.
"You see, they died of poor feeding, loss of weight," said Al Baya, who
earns
the equivalent of a dollar and a half per month. He's 30 years old and
has
been a doctor for six years. He has lost count of the number of babies
who
have died in his hands. Today's dead suffered from malnutrition, stomach
infections, bacterial infections, chronic loss of weight, the doctors said.
The
usual. With proper nutrition, clean water, efficient sanitation and sufficient
medical supplies, most of these babies would survive, the doctors said.
It
hasn't always been this way. Not that long ago Iraq had one of the best
health care systems in the Middle East. Infant mortality rates were
comparatively low. But now this is normal at Ibn Al-Baladi.
"It is one of the results of the embargo," Al Baya said. "This is a crime
on
Iraq. What is wrong with these poor children? Are they soldiers that they
have to be treated like this? They are not soldiers."
Al Baya may have lost count but other people are trying to record the
numbers of children who have died in Iraq since the UN Security Council
imposed economic sanctions on the country in August 1990. While not the
only way of judging the effect of the sanctions, the number of children
who
have died is perhaps the most stark indication of its impact on the Iraqi
people.
UNICEF, the United Nations' children's organization, last August put the
number of children under age 5 who have died since the start of the
sanctions at 500,000. From 1994 to 1999, UNICEF says, more than one in
10 Iraqi children who live in the main part of the country under the control
of President Saddam Hussein died before they reached the age of 5. A similar
survey for the period from 1984 to 1989 had the death rate at less than
half
the current rate. Iraq blames the United Nations and the Western powers
--
mainly the
United States and Britain -- who insist on maintaining the embargo.
The United States insists that Hussein is to blame for refusing to allow
arms
inspectors free rein in Iraq, for refusing to spend government revenue
on
essential services, for mismanaging the medical supplies imported under
the
UN's Oil for Food Program and for exploiting the common people of Iraq
for
propaganda purposes.
"We've been pretty clear about not wanting to see babies dying," said a
State
Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Those 500,000
babies died needlessly because of a government that doesn't care about
them."
"It has transcended the bounds of tragedy," said Riyadh Al Qaysi, Iraq's
deputy minister of foreign affairs. "It's a concrete genocide."
The apportioning of blame is highly politicized. Deciphering where that
blame
truly lies is difficult.
"There is a total lack of logic on either side, with the American government
or the Iraqis," said a senior diplomat in Baghdad.
There may be no better place to look at the roots of Iraqi suffering than
Hai
Al Tarak, the neighborhood of little Ali Hussein and Rinda Satar. It is
right on
the edge of Baghdad, on the frontier of Saddam City, itself a vast slum
of 2
million people.
Over and over, the water is named as the chief culprit behind the dying
babies of Hai Al Tarek.
"The water is so dirty, cloudy," said Jassima Abed, 32, the mother of Rinda,
the dying four-month old. "There are worms in the water and it has a bad
odor."
Rinda had similar symptoms to Ali Hussein: Bloody diarrhea, loss of weight,
lethargy, vomiting. In the hospital, she lay on stained blankets, her breath
rasped and the skin around her stomach was drum-tight. The doctors said
the actual cause of death would be a bacterial infection.
Such tragedies are commonplace in Hai Al Tarek.
In the single-room hut of mud bricks she shares with her husband and two
children, Samira Kassim, 23, flapped at the flies that buzzed around her
and
talked of how her 4-year-old son, Mazen Karim, died in February.
"He started to lose weight day after day and his skin started to stretch.
I took
him to the hospital on December 29th. They put oxygen on his nose but he
was in a coma. He didn't want to eat. It's because of the water and the
dirtiness around. I always told him not to use it or play in that water
but I
expect he did."
Kassim lost another son two years ago. She is pregnant again. Her children
bathe once a week in the dirty water, which they get from a neighbor's
pipe
and store in plastic containers in the room. Often, there's not enough
water
coming out of the taps. She throws the family's urine from a bucket into
her
front yard where it evaporates in the sunshine. Her children play in the
street,
which is covered in garbage and has an open sewage ditch running down the
side. Her husband works for the Baghdad sewage system and makes the
equivalent of five dollars per month.
In 1990, fewer than a thousand people lived in Al Tarek. Now there are
more
than 30,000 living in sloppily built homes of bricks, mud and concrete
blocks. There is no sewage system. Trucks sometimes come and remove
the solid waste from the homes. Ditches of urine and other liquid waste
line
nearly every street where barefoot children play. A huge disused canal
full of
toxic water and raw sewage sits between Al Tarek and Saddam City. The
water in Al Tarek, residents said, is frequently smelly, cloudy and, as
Abed
said, full of worms. It's so bad that sometimes Al Tarek people fetch water
from the main parts of Saddam City, itself an impoverished mini-city where
herds of goats chew at piles of garbage in the street.
"We are always sending requests to the mayor for new water pipes and the
answer is always there are not enough pipes and pumps because of the
embargo," said Jihad Nasser, 59, the mukhtar or unofficial head of the
community. "The government promised a sewage system but when the war
started none came."
And so the people of Al Tarek drink whatever water they can find. Saad
Behnam Abdullah, at the end of another 16-hour day in his tatty office
as
director general of the Baghdad Water Supply Authority, said he was not
at
all surprised to hear about the deaths of the children in Al Tarek.
On his wall was a wistful poster of a large plan the authority had in the
late
1980s -- before the embargo -- to build new reservoirs, pumping stations,
treatment plants and pipelines around the city. None of that has been started
even and the city's aging water and sewage pipes are cracking all over
the
place.
The problem with Baghdad's water is not its quality when it leaves the
pumping stations, he said. It's that the water and sewage pipes have started
to disintegrate and that means raw sewage is being sucked into the water
supply en route to people's homes. Anupama Rao Singh, the UNICEF
representative in Iraq, also said this is the main problem. With hardly
any
money to spend on the systems, Abdullah and his colleagues can't hope to
repair the pipes.
A vicious cycle is going on underground in Baghdad. When the water and
sewage pipes leak, the nearby ground shifts and settles, causing further
cracks. And that causes more leaks. And then the ground shifts and settles
again. It's getting worse all the time, Abdullah said. When asked how much
it
would cost to repair the system, Abdullah erupted in bemused and tired
laughter.
At Al Tarek, the problems are worse than for most of the city, he said.
The
supply of water there is low, he said. It's at the end of the line and
the water
pressure is at its weakest, and as Al Tarek continues to grow, the demand
for water is pushing people to tamper with the pipes.
"The lack of quantity is forcing people to find other ways to get water
and
it's not good for their health," he said. "They're bursting pipes, getting
that
water mixed up with polluted water and sewage, pumping water on their
own from the mains pipes. That creates a negative pressure, which can suck
in sewage. They are causing this pollution but they're obliged to do it.
They
don't have water. This has caused so many cases in the hospital."
Who's to blame for this?
"America," said Kassim without hesitation. American officials say that
such
responses are the result of fear of Hussein's regime and lack of
understanding of the situation. If Kassim had blamed the Iraqi government
while speaking in front of a government official, the consequences for
the
family might have been dire. Foreign reporters in Iraq have government
minders with them at all times except in meetings with diplomats and aid
workers.
In one of the few moments that a reporter had away from the minder, a
medical worker departed from the party line. "The people can't say what
they really feel," the medical worker said. "It's the political regime
that's the
problem. Of course they blame the government."
American officials say the Hussein regime mishandles the supplies that
come
into Iraq under the Oil For Food program. Established in late 1996, the
UN-administered program allows Iraq to sell large quantities of its oil.
The
UN handles the profits. The Iraqi government requests supplies, a UN
committee reviews the requests and, if approved, the goods are shipped
to
Iraq. In Northern Iraq, which is currently run by two Kurdish parties,
the
UN directly administers the distribution of aid. In the south and central
parts
of Iraq, still under Hussein's control, the Iraqi government runs the aid
program.
UN officials in the south dismiss the American government's claims about
widespread and manipulative Iraqi mismanagement.
"Not one of the observer mechanisms has reported any major problems in
humanitarian supplies being diverted, switched or in any way misused,"
said
George Somerwill, spokesman for the UN in Iraq. Rather, aid workers said,
the program is clunky, bureaucratic and operates in a country whose
infrastructure has been devastated.
"Not all contracts are approved [by the UN committee] in time," said Dr.
Hussien Zakar, officer in charge of the World Health Organization in Iraq,
which monitors the distribution of medicine and the Iraqi health care system.
"Not all shipments arrive in sequence. They're not always efficiently
distributed. There's a lack of transport and funds for that."
These same problems with the embargo make it difficult to do anything
about the water and sewage mess, UN officials say. The sanctions
committee has repeatedly withheld approval for engineering equipment the
Iraqi government says it needs for the water or sewage systems because,
the
committee says, the equipment could also be used for the Iraqi military.
UN
officials in Baghdad say most of these objections, especially those raised
by
the United States and Britain, are not valid.
Iraqi government officials also say they have no money to spend on the
new
trucks for distributing medication, partly because the Oil for Food program
allows them no cash allowance, only materials.
"Saddam finds money to spend on trucks for his army," the State
Department official said. "Why doesn't he spend it on distributing
medication?"
Another point American officials like to make about the Iraqi government's
expenditure choices is the comparatively healthy state of Iraq's private
hospitals. Newsday made an unscheduled visit to one private hospital in
Baghdad and conditions there were markedly better than in the public
hospitals visited.
"There are very obvious disparities within the country," said Singh, of
UNICEF. A simple car journey testifies to that. Drive from central Baghdad,
past some of the city's new private hospitals with expensive German cars
parked outside, then through the boulevards of Saddam City and into Al
Tarek and you see that disparity.
In Al Tarek, in Kassim's room, her neighbor Aria Rishak Ghelan told how
she too had lost a child.
It was April 21 of last year, she said, when she noticed that her 5-year-old
boy Sajad Abbas had started to suffer from the same symptom that all the
sick children from Al Tarek seem to have -- diarrhea.
"I took him to Al Qadissiya hospital and the next day I lost him," she
said.
"At 9 a.m. he died. Nobody explained why.
"I was married twelve years ago," said Ghelan, 29, who wore a black head
scarf and was barefoot. "Life was good then and we were living with my
husband's parents."
That was before the embargo. Three years ago, with a growing family, they
had to find their own home and the only place they could find was Al Tarek,
which is where people in Baghdad go when they have no other option. Most
people there build their own homes out of whatever they can find on any
patch of land they can find. They have no legal right to live there.
"There are many things here," Ghelan said. "We don't usually get enough
to
eat, the water is bad and there is sewage outside."
"It is a horrible life," said Ghelan, who has four surviving children.
"If the
conditions continue like this it will just get worse."