HUMANITARIAN CATASTROPHE MUST BE ADDRESSED BY THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR CREATING IT

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday April 17, 2003 15:06 by flanagan head_office at labour dot ie Ely Place, Dublin 2

SPEECH BY MICHAEL D. HIGGINS TD Labour Party Spokesperson on Foreign Affairs, During Dail Statements on Humanitarian Situation in Iraq Wednesday, 16 April, 2003

The Minister of State's outline of the humanitarian situation is a good description of Iraq before the war. We knew how many children were malnourished - some 24% - how many people were dependent on the food programme - 16 million totally dependent and 18 million who might be food insecure - and how many children were being treated in the therapeutic feeding centres in the 63 paediatric hospital. We also knew the consequences of bombing infrastructure.

It was on to this population that people decided to use the instrument of war.That is why, without apology to anybody, I condemned this war on behalf of the Labour Party from the beginning. It is hypocrisy of the greatest kind to say that the plight of the Iraqi population is being discovered after the bombing and the war. All these facts were known as a result of the sanctions. The degree to which the people had been reduced was known.

It is academic to ask how much of the responsibility was that of Saddam Hussein and how much the sanctions. The people were as they were before the bombs were released on them. There is also nothing academic about the fact that Baghdad was subjected to aerial bombardment, including one 72 hour sequence of unremitting bombardment.

The consequences were known since 1991, including the protection of the infrastructure and the hospitals. No attempt was made to protect the hospitals,yet one was made to protect the oil. Should I apologise to somebody for apportioning blame for those who visited this disaster on this country? Have we not an obligation in this House to sometimes speak about morality and truth and apportion blame where it properly lies?

We are responsible for that which we facilitated. When we allowed troops through Shannon Airport we linked ourselves to what happened to the people of Iraq. We cannot walk away now, wash our hands and imagine that we will wring our hands. We would be putting ourselves on the same level as the cousin who arrived with a bunch of flowers to a hospital in Kuwait to visit the little boy Ali who had been transported there.

It is time for us to be honest and to be able to say, if we are interested in the recovery of the authority of the United Nations, that it had inspectors in Iraq who were making progress but whose work was undermined. There are those who ask me if I was wrong in predicting 100,000 deaths, to which UNICEF had referred, or the 400,000 secondary deaths. I am glad so many people in Baghdad escaped and kept their lives. I had been informed that people would be kept in their houses by the Ba'ath Party, that they would be used as human shields and that a siege would be put around Baghdad, with its population of five million people. If half the population went to villages and relatives and are now able
to return to their looted houses, I welcome that.

However, I do not take lectures from anybody in this House. In 1998 in this House I condemned Saddam Hussein's regime for the massacre of the Kurds in Halabja. It is equally my responsibility to say that there are those who must take responsibility for this destruction visited on the people of Iraq. Is it to be seriously suggested that a war can be planned, involving the expenditure of EU 65 billion, and widespread destruction can be visited all over a country of 26 million people, yet the protection of a hospital cannot be anticipated?

It is offensive to say there are many millions of decent Iraqis. There are 26 million people in Iraq and they are all decent people. I am not here to pass judgememt on who is or is not a decent Iraqi, as the Minister of State purports to do.

There is a need for the various views on this situation to combine. I did so at the meeting today of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs when I submitted a proposal on dealing with the humanitarian situation. However, I wish to place on the record of this House that I am not using that initiative as a cover for not having any opinion on the questions the Government has avoided for all of this session. There is no answer to the issue of the morality of a pre-emptive strike and international law. The Government also fails to answer the question raised by the war aims, which began with the discovery of the
weapons of mass destruction and quickly became regime change.

On the question of the status of Resolution 1441 at a meeting of the Security Council on 8 November 2002, Mr. Negroponte, speaking on behalf of the United States, said there is no threat in the resolution and no mention of the question of an attack. In the House of Commons, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, none of whose statements can be believed, repeated that there was no automatically in Resolution 1441. It was stated three times in the House of Commons.

Am I supposed to ask if there is confusion as to the meaning of Resolution 1441?The Government said opinion is divided. The war would be legal, but it was unnecessary and immoral. There was a diplomatic process, but it was not allowed to conclude. To those who want to wring their hands about the situation in Iraq,the best way to have made everybody safe and to avoid what we are seeing on television was to have not proceeded with the war.

The situation today is full of confusion. The Government says it is in favour of the United Nations having a central role. There is an immense difference between a central and a lead role. The Minster of State correctly said that 16 million people were being fed by the food programme. In the three Kurdish governorships this was done directly by the United Nations agencies. In the south centre of the country, including Baghdad, it was done through a network of warehouses. The food went to approximately 43,000 distribution centres where people paid approximately ten cent for a food parcel, comprising 2,250 kilocalories per day and 40 grams of protein. It was a survival diet.
On summing up, will the Minister of State tell me what is in place of those 43,000 outlets? Who is supplying the food? The amount of food required is not twice what was ever transported, it is five times greater. The largest volume of food ever transported at a time of emergency was between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the amount of 100,000 tonnes per month. What is required now is 500,000 tonnes per month, but it is not for only three months.

Reference has been made to the oil for food programme and the new resolution which allows Kofi Annan to administer it for 45 days. He can spend the resources in the oil for food programme's account, but those will quickly become exhausted unless oil is pumped and sold. That raises the issue of who will pump the oil and for whom in Iraq. Will the oil industry be denationalised during the reconstruction?

On the edge of this process we see the figure of Mr. Chalabi a friend of Paul Wolfowitz and of Richard Perle who described him as the philosophic voice of Iraq. Mr. Perle refers to the United Nations as the old chatterbox on the banks of the Hudson which will still be bleating after the USA has finished. I do not hesitate to condemn these people. Mr. Chalabi received a 22 year sentence of hard labour in 1989 for alleged embezzlement of Petra Bank in Jordan. Mr.Chalabi has been handing out oil contracts to his friends already. Is that liberation for Iraq? Is it on the money from the oil he sells that the people of Iraq will rely for their food?

When I spoke to the headquarters of the International Red Cross yesterday week,one of the principal workers had been shot and the organisation was not in a position to help the Al Jazeera team about whom I had received a phone call. The headquarters of the Al Jazeera team had been shelled and they were feeling insecure. The Red Cross told me its members were not working at that time because of what had happened to its own worker.

The question arises of where are the humanitarian corridors along which food might be delivered. As I placed my motion before the Committee on Foreign Affairs yesterday, two hospitals were functioning. Now, it is claimed there are between 12 and 14, but they do not have the capacity to provide a sterile environment for people who are badly burned or wounded. These people will die of septicaemia and it is a further obscenity that Sky, CNN and Fox, who ran propaganda campaigns right through this war, display a young child being brought flowers in a Kuwaiti hospital by a member of the Al-Sabbah family.

Why is there no reference in the speech we have heard of when we will receive an estimate of the number of civilians killed and injured and of the number of combatants killed and injured? We know about the British and Americans with whose families I sympathise. Nobody should have their heart broken by the loss of lives of relatives in war. When will we see the figures? Do we know exactly what is needed by hospitals and, if not, when will we? The real questions concern food, medicine and the reconstruction of Iraq. We know from UNICEF,which Deputy Gay Mitchell quoted, that there has been a threefold increase in the number of children presenting with diarrhoea and all of the other illnesses which come from contaminated water.
As if that was not enough, leading academics in the United States of America went to the Pentagon twice to beg for the protection of the museum in Bagdhad and to speak of the Koranic library. The matter was also raised by scholars in London. Robert Fisk wrote in The Independent yesterday:

When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning flames 100 feet high were bursting from the windows. I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that
"this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire". I gave the map location, the precise name, in Arabic and English. I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there was not an American at the scene and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.

I visited a museum which held 170,000 pieces - 10,000 of which could go on exhibition - dealing with a culture that is 9,000 years old. It has been a written culture for 7,000 years. One of the two books forming the basic law of humanity, "The Code of Hammurabi", was held there. As I watched pictures of the new EU members at Athens, which was referred to as the cradle of democracy, I remembered that we learned of Greek philosophy through the Arabs of Spain. We learned about algebra, architecture and astronomy from them and we are not talking now of idle destruction. The heritage destroyed represented thousands of
years of world history which the Pentagon could not be bothered to protect. It could not protect the museum and it could not protect the library, but it has no excuse.

The Pentagon has known since 1991 what was held in all of these institutions which leads one to ask if the United States of America can ever be listened to ever again at UNESCO. Should we listen to it? UNESCO is sending a team to examine the damage to the cultural heritage of Iraq.

I look back now at all that has been said during this Dáil term in relation to this awful and appalling war. To the war mongers who celebrate and suggest we were wrong because not enough people were killed to fulfil our predictions, I say that any loss of life for the kind of project being pursued was a disgrace and a blot on the morality of us all.

We touched it because we allowed the planes to go through Shannon and we came up with half excuses to explain it. It was said that to change things would upset a long-standing arrangement and would be perceived as unfriendly. We have surrounded ourselves with half apologies and we must now insist that the United Nations be the lead agency. We must now insist that we be immediately given information through the Red Cross in accordance with the Geneva Convention.

I want to hear the number of civilian deaths, I want to know what number of injured persons are at risk, I want to know what is needed in hospitals and I want to know what is has been put in place of the 43,000 outlets that provided food to the people. I want to know that we will go to UNESCO and lend our voices to the other voices of condemnation which say that it is immoral to visit war on a broken people.

It is a disgrace to humanity in front of the whole world to sit back and allow a whole culture which affects the entire world to be destroyed because you could not be bothered to help. The assistant curator of the museum went out with four staff and begged people to send a tank or even a few soldiers with guns to protect an institution he ran on behalf of the whole world.

This is not a time to avoid placing responsibility where we all know it lies. We should help the people of Iraq, but not use that as an excuse to avoid the responsibility of placing the burden precisely where we should. We should end the sanctions and help Iraq.