[casi] DU - Panos

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· September 2001
· July 20
Search Features
 FAR001IRA |  30/05/2003 | 1044 words
Depleted uranium: weapon of (long-term) mass destruction
By Felicity Arbuthnot 
BAGHDAD (PANOS) ­ The small city of Diwania in southern Iraq is home to
10-year- old Mustafa Ali who has acute myeloid leukaemia. Wan and wide-eyed,
the cancer has affected a nerve in his right eye. His embarrassment at
losing his hair ­ because of chemotherapy ­ is evident. His father, engineer
Ali Ismael Tamader Ghalib, gives up work a week every month to bring his son
to Baghdad for treatment.

³If there is another war, more children will suffer,² he said weeks before
the latest war. ³We must stop this slaughter of innocents; what have these
children done to deserve this?² Tears streamed down his wife¹s face,
dripping on to her immaculate black abaya.

The Al Mansour Teaching and Paediatric Hospital in Baghdad is Iraq¹s
foremost medical teaching centre. When the twice-weekly cancer clinics are
held, it is near impossible to squeeze through the crowds that spread into
the grounds; parents holding, carrying, clutching their children for
diagnosis and treatment.

After the 1991 Gulf War, Al Mansour filled with a disproportionately high
number of patients from heavily bombed cities in the south of Iraq. Between
1978 and 1992 there were 270 cancer and leukaemia cases recorded there. But
between November 1992 and October 2002, the hospital recorded 1,714 cases ­
a six-fold increase. Those patients included 10-year-old Mustafa and scores
of other children from Diwania and other heavily bombed areas.

With the latest war in Iraq and the post-war looting, treatment at Al
Mansour will have ceased, effectively condemning Mustafa, other children of
Diwania and all the first Gulf war¹s cancer victims to death. This war has
confirmed Ali Ismael¹s worst fears.

Just 10 months after the 1991 Gulf war, Iraqi doctors were already
bewildered at the rise in rare cancers and birth deformities. They were
comparing them to those they had seen in textbooks relating to nuclear
testing in the Pacific in the 1950s. That depleted uranium (DU) weapons had
been used in Iraq was then unknown.
Basra, southern Iraq, was in the eye of the original Desert Storm. In 1997,
senior paediatrician at the Basra Maternity and Paediatric Hospital Dr Jenan
Hussein completed a thesis comparing the effects there with Hiroshima.
Cancers, leukaemias and malignancies believed linked to DU, she found, had
risen up to 70% since 1991.

³There is every relation between the congenital malformations, cancer and
depleted uranium. Before 1991, we saw nothing like this. Most of these
children have no family history of cancer,² she said.

DU, or Uranium 238, is a waste product of the uranium enrichment process. It
has little commercial value, but when conventional bullets and shells are
coated with DU, it makes them armour-piercing. Radioactive particles from
spent DU shells do not disappear after explosion. The Pentagon says there
are some 320 tonnes of DU left over from the 1991 war. Three weeks into the
latest war, independent Britain-based DU researcher Dai Williams said 2,000
tonnes of residual DU dust is a conservative estimate.

In April 1991 the UK Atomic Energy Authority sent a report to the Ministry
of Defence warning of a health and environmental catastrophe in Iraq.
It estimated that a residue of 50 tonnes of DU dust could now lead to half a
million ³potential deaths² from cancer ³in the region² within 10 years. With
estimates of 2,000 tonnes of DU residue, the ³potential deaths² could be
astronomical.

The evidence on the destructive nature of DU is clear: sick Gulf war and
Balkans veterans, tested in 2000 at the World Depleted Uranium Centre in
Berlin, were found to have three times more radioactive contamination than
the residents of Chernobyl, Ukraine ­ site of the world¹s worst nuclear
accident. A 1996 survey that studied the families of 267 US Gulf veterans
showed that 67% of children conceived after their fathers had returned from
the Gulf, had rare birth deformities.

DU has thrice been condemned as a weapon of mass destruction by UN
Sub-Committees. Even the US Army Environmental Policy Institute agrees: DU,
it said in 1995, is ³radioactive waste and, as such, should be deposited in
a licensed repository².

But in spite of all the evidence ­ or perhaps because of it ­ DU continues
to remain an integral part of the NATO arsenal. And now, attempts are being
made to cover up its devastating effects.

When, in 1999, Finland¹s Minister of Environment, Dr Pekka Haavisto was
appointed chairman of the UN Environment Programme unit investigating the
use of DU in Kosovo, doors slammed in the face of this highly respected
expert. In Washington, de-classified documents relating to DU use were
suddenly re-classified ­ a pattern followed in all the NATO countries he
doggedly visited, Haavisto told a UN conference in 2001.

When his team arrived in Kosovo, their movements were restricted by the
military, but they still managed to produce a 72-page report outlining deep
concerns. However, by the time it underwent the tortuous UN Œeditorial¹
process, it was reduced to two pages.

In an internal memo from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico
(the laboratory that brought the world the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs)
headed The Effectiveness of Depleted Uranium Penetrators, the reason for the
apparent cover-up becomes clearer. Dated 1st March 1991, the day after the
Gulf ceasefire, a Lt Col Larson wrote to a Maj. Ziehman: ³There has been and
continues to be a concern regarding the impact of DU on the environment.
Therefore if no one makes the case for the effectiveness of DU on the
battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and therefore be
deleted from the arsenal.²

The memo ends: ³I believe we should keep this sensitive issue at mind, when,
after action, reports are written.²

With hospital records in Iraq being destroyed while US troops stand by and
do nothing, it is now unlikely we will ever know the true extent of the
health effects caused by the last war. As for the latest war, based on the
amount of DU used, the health effects can only be exponentially worse.

Uranium 238 has a half-life of some 4.5 billion years, meaning the DU dust
will outlive the sun. Kuwait and Iraq may have been relieved of Saddam
Hussein, but the cancer patients, the Œliberators¹, the new born and the
unborn will pay the price until the end of time.

Felicity Arbuthnot is an award-winning investigative reporter from Britain

This feature is published by Panos Features and can be reproduced free of
charge. Please credit the author and Panos Features and send a copy to MAC,
Panos Institute, 9 White Lion St, London N1 9PD, UK. Email:
media@panoslondon.org.uk
     


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