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| Iraq | |
| Doctors say Hussein, not UN sanctions, caused children’s deaths | |
| 2003-05-23 | |
| Via Instapundit. EFL. Throughout the 13 years of UN sanctions, Iraqi doctors told the world that the sanctions were the sole cause for the rocketing mortality rate among Iraqi children. "It is one of the results of the embargo," Dr. Ghassam Rashid Al-Baya told Newsday on May 9, 2001, just after a dehydrated baby named Ali Hussein died on his treatment table. "This is a crime on Iraq." It was a scene repeated in hundreds of newspaper articles by reporters required to be escorted by minders from Saddam Hussein's Ministry of Information. You mean the journalists simply repeated what Saddam told them to? We all know CNN would never do that! Now free to speak, the doctors, including Ibn Al-Baladi, tell a very different story. Along with parents of dead children, they said in interviews this week that Hussein turned the children's deaths into propaganda, notably by forcing hospitals to save babies' corpses to have them publicly paraded. Reason #127 why removing Saddam was right.
I wonder if the good leftie blogs will even notice. Under the sanctions regime, "We had the ability to get all the drugs we needed," said Ibn Al-Baladi's chief resident, Dr. Hussein Shihab. "Instead of that, Saddam Hussein spent all the money on his military force and put all the fault on the USA. Yes, of course the sanctions hurt - but not too much, because we are a rich country and we have the ability to get everything we can by money. But instead, he spent it on his palaces." Palaces instead of drugs for children. The U.S. government and others long have blamed Hussein's spending habits for the poor health of Iraqis and their children. For years, the Iraqi government, some Western officials and a vocal anti-sanctions movement said UN restrictions on Iraqi imports and exports were at fault. "Saddam Hussein, he's the murderer, not the UN," said Dr. Azhar Abdul Khadem, a resident at the Al-Alwiya maternity hospital in Baghdad. Doctors said they were forced to refrigerate dead babies in hospital morgues until authorities were ready to gather the little corpses for monthly parades in coffins on the roofs of taxis for the benefit of Iraqi state television and visiting journalists. The parents were ordered to wail with grief — no matter how many weeks had passed since their babies had died — and to shout to the cameras that the sanctions had killed their children. Afterward, the parents would be rewarded with food or money. Of course, if they didn't ... The propaganda campaign was organized by the ministries of health and information and by the Iraqi Intelligence Service. "The mukhabarat would go all over Iraq gathering the dead bodies, put them in coffins, make a whole line, put them on top of taxis and make big propaganda out of it," said a former agent. We knew this months ago, I'm sure Sean Penn said something about this after his visit to Baghdad. Didn't he? "They would bring the women from the Baath Party and make them stand in the street and start screaming and yelling... The truth is that there are people suffering and dying from the embargo, but the mukhabarat were taking advantage of it and making a bigger story out of it." The government minders who accompanied the journalists and translated for them were employed by the mukhabarat. Their presence at interviews added to the intimidation of already terrified doctors. "I am one of the doctors who was forced to tell something wrong — that these children died from the fault of the UN," Shihab said. As recently as just before the start of the war, he said, he had told visiting journalists and peace activists that the sanctions were to blame for the high death rate among infants at his hospital. "But I am afraid if I tell the true thing ..." Shihab paused and laughed with a mixture of relief and shame. Using the present tense in English to describe the pre-war past, he continued: "They will kill me. Me and my family and my uncle and my aunt - everyone." An honest man, allowed to be honest at last. Before Shihab came to Ibn Al-Baladi 10 months ago, he worked at the Al-Alwiya hospital, where he went through the refrigeration ritual. Recounting the story, he alternated between nervousness and resignation in a way that suggested he was caught between impulses to tell the truth and to avoid admitting conduct unbecoming a doctor. "We gave the families food and milk so that we can make them do this — the movies with them crying, making it the fault of the UN for the dying of their babies." The last baby parade involving Ibn Al-Baladi was in 2001, said Kamal Khadoum, an administrator at the hospital. He said he did not know why the practice was stopped. The authorities would take 20 to 30 babies from the hospital each time, he said, adding that he did not know how many in total would be gathered for what he and the others usually referred to as "the taxi parade." "I felt I was doing wrong, but I was so afraid not to follow orders," Khadoum said. You and about 20 million others. The refrigerators have been replaced by a more modern morgue. Khadoum opened the old ones on Wednesday afternoon and stared at them quietly. What troubles him most, he said, was not being allowed to release the children's bodies to Muslim parents who wanted to follow the Islamic practice of burying the dead as soon as possible. In the hospital's neighborhood, a religiously observant, Shia Muslim district long called Saddam City, bereaved parents took the policy hard. "Some of the families tried to take their children by force, so sometimes we needed to call the police to persuade them to keep them here for the parade," Khadoum said. "They went crazy." Remind me what a devout Muslim Saddam was. Now that Iraqi health-care workers can speak openly about Hussein's exploitation of their youngest patients, the courageous words of one doctor, who took his life in his hands to speak in hushed English out of the hearing of the government minder in another Baghdad hospital in May 2001, can be seen as a majority viewpoint. "The people can't say what they really feel," the doctor mumbled two years ago. "It's the political regime that's the problem. Of course they blame the government." Wonder if he's still alive. | |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #5 Colorado Conservative, Who gives a f*ck where they (Hollywood communists) are as long as they aren't on my TV? ;o) |
| Posted by: badanov 2003-05-23 18:56:52 |
| #4 CC, it's "geek speak". A good definition is here. Steve's using sense 1, "to imperfectly transform information." (OT, you might poke around on that site. You'll find explanations for many of the strange terms seen on the net.) |
| Posted by: Old Grouch 2003-05-23 18:27:14 |
| #3 Where oh where is the cabal of Hollywood leftists now? Sean, Susan, Danny, Ed, Jaenene ... I beseech thee to come forth. I want to hear some apologies, and pretty damn soon. I am unfamiliar with the etymology and usage of "munge". Please edify. |
| Posted by: ColoradoConservative 2003-05-23 15:20:18 |
| #2 It was pointed out by many that the UN 'Oil for Food' program should have been called 'Oil for Palaces'. |
| Posted by: mhw 2003-05-23 14:39:29 |
| #1 Ack: I munged the following paragraph in the upper 1/3 of the article, and it's important: The U.S. government and others long have blamed Hussein's spending habits for the poor health of Iraqis and their children. For years, the Iraqi government, some Western officials and a vocal anti-sanctions movement said UN restrictions on Iraqi imports and exports were at fault. "Saddam Hussein, he's the murderer, not the UN," said Dr. Azhar Abdul Khadem, a resident at the Al-Alwiya maternity hospital in Baghdad. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2003-05-23 12:31:23 |