Mystery in Iraq
Are US Munitions to Blame for Basra Birth Defects?
Christian Werner/ DER SPIEGEL
It sounds at first as if the old man were drunk. Or perhaps as though he had
been reading Greek myths. But Askar Bin Said doesn't read anything, especially
not books, and there is no alcohol in Basra. In fact, he says, he saw the
creatures he describes with his own eyes: "Some had only one eye in the
forehead. Or two heads. One had a tail like a skinned lamb. Another one looked
like a perfectly normal child, but with a monkey's face. Or the girl whose legs
had grown together, half fish, half human."
The babies Askar Bin Said describes were brought to him. He washed them and
wrapped them in shrouds, and then he buried them in the dry soil, littered with
bits of plastic and can lids, of his own cemetery, which has been in his family
for five generations. It's a cemetery only for children.
Though they are small, the
graves are crowded so tightly together that they are almost on top of one
another. They look as if someone had overturned toy wheelbarrows full of cement
and then scratched the names and dates of death into it before it hardened. In
many cases, there isn't even room for the birth date. But it doesn't really
matter, because in most cases the two dates are the same.
There are several thousand
graves in the cemetery, and another five to 10 are added every day. The large
number of graves is certainly conspicuous, says Bin Said. But, he adds, there
"really isn't an explanation" for why there are so many dead and
deformed newborn babies in Basra.
Others, though, do have an idea
why. According to a study published in September in the Bulletin of Environmental
Contamination and Toxicology, a professional journal based in the
southwestern German city of Heidelberg, there was a sevenfold increase in the
number of birth defects in Basra between 1994 and 2003. Of 1,000 live births,
23 had birth defects.
Double and Triple Cancers
Similarly high values are
reported from Fallujah, a city that was fiercely contested in the 2003 war.
According to the Heidelberg study, the concentration of lead in the milk teeth
of sick children from Basra was almost three times as high as comparable values
in areas where there was no fighting.
Continued:
Continued:
Jawad al-Ali has worked as a
cancer specialist at the Sadr Teaching Hospital (formerly the Saddam Hospital),
housed in a sinister-looking building in Basra, since 1991. He remembers the
period after the first Gulf war over Kuwait. "It isn't just that the
number of cancer cases suddenly increased. We also had double and triple
cancers, that is, patients with tumors on both kidneys and in the stomach. And
there were also familial clusters, that is, entire families that were
affected." He is convinced that this relates to the use of uranium
ammunition. "There is a connection between cancer and radiation. Sometimes
it takes 10 or 20 years before the consequences manifest themselves."
The term uranium ammunition
refers to projectiles whose alloys or cores are made with "depleted,"
or weakly radioactive uranium, also known as DU. When German soldiers are
deployed overseas, they are given the following information: "Uranium
munitions are armor-piercing projectiles with a core of depleted uranium.
Because of its high density, this core provides the projectile with very high
momentum and enables it to pierce the armor of combat tanks."
When DU explodes, it produces a
very fine uranium dust. When children play near wrecked tanks, they can absorb
this dust through their skin, their mouths and their airways. A 2002 study at
the University of Bremen in northern Germany found that chromosomal changes had
occurred in Gulf war veterans who had come into contact with uranium
ammunition.
The German Defense Ministry
counters that it isn't the radiation that constitutes a health threat, but the
"chemical toxicity of uranium."
Living in a Garbage Dump
London's Royal Society
presented one of the most comprehensive studies on the issue in 2002, but it
only addressed the potential threat to soldiers. It concluded that the risk of
radiation damage is "very low," as is the risk of chronic kidney toxicity
from uranium dust.
This may reassure soldiers, but
not Mohammed Haidar. He lives in Kibla, a district in Basra which, like others
in the city, resembles nothing so much as a garbage dump. Kibla is a
neighborhood of squalid, make-shift shops and shacks -- with shimmering,
greenish liquid flowing through open sewers and plastic containers filled with
rotting material.
Haidar, who teaches mathematics
at a high school, could afford to live in a better neighborhood. But he spends
every spare dinar on treatment for his daughter Rukya. The three-year-old is
sitting on his lap, resembling a ventriloquist's doll. She is an adorable
little girl with pigtails and ribbons in her hair. But she can't walk or speak
properly.
When Haidar turns his daughter
around, two openings in her back become visible. She has a cleft spine, the
externally visible sign of hydrocephalus, as well as an implanted drainage tube
to remove excess cerebrospinal fluid. In Germany, children with cases like hers
are often treated with prenatal surgery, but not in Basra. In fact, Haidar and
his wife are glad that Rukya is even alive. She is their first and only child.
"We both grew up in Basra. I hold the United States responsible. They used
DU. My child isn't an isolated case," Haidar says.
The term "DU" seems
to be just as widespread in Basra as birth defects are.
DU ammunition was used twice in
the Basra district: outside the city in the 1991 war, and in the city proper in
2003, when British troops were advancing toward the airport. West Basra is the
urban district with the highest incidence of leukemia among infants.
"Those who were children
in the first war are adults today," says Khairiya Abu Yassin of the city's
environmental agency. She estimates that 200 tons of DU ammunition were used in
Basra. The Defense Ministry in London claims that British troops used only
about two tons of DU ammunition during the war. Either way, the remains of
tanks destroyed in the war with the help of DU ammunition littered the streets
until 2008.
Propaganda Fodder
It was impossible to keep
children and salvagers away from the wrecks, says Abu Yassin. "We
installed signs that read: Caution -- Radiation. But people don't take a threat
seriously when it doesn't act like the bullet from a gun."
DU is a sensitive issue, and not
every doctor in Basra is willing to go on record commenting on it. The reasons
for the reticence have to do with the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein: The
alleged radiation threat coming from remnants of armor-piercing ammunition
provided popular propaganda fodder.
In the United States, no major
newspaper has yet published a story on the genetic disorders in Fallujah.
Britain's Guardian, on the
other hand, criticized the silence of "the West," calling it a moral
failure, and cited chemist Chris Busby, who said that the Fallujah health
crisis represented "the highest rate of genetic damage in any population
ever studied." Busby is the co-author of two studies on the subject.
Still,
it is difficult to precisely pinpoint the cause of the defects. Spinal chord
abnormality can also be triggered by a folic acid deficiency at the beginning
of pregnancy, for example. Furthermore, very few Iraqis can afford regular
pregnancy exams. As a result, many defective embryos are carried to full term,
in contrast to what normally happens in Europe or the US.
Wolfgang Hoffmann, an
epidemiologist at the University of Greifswald in northeastern Germany, has
been collaborating with fellow scientists in Basra for years. "Birth
defects often look very disturbing in photos," he says. "But they are
always isolated cases and are not necessarily useful for identifying
trends."
Hoffmann cites the lack of
comprehensive data and questions the epidemiological reliability of reports. He
does believe, however, that indications of increasing rates of cancer in Basra
should be taken very seriously, partly because the data for Basra is more
reliable.
Part 2: Searching for the Truth
The "plausible risk
factors" for childhood leukemia, says Hoffmann, "undoubtedly include
the contaminated environment, but also the lack of prevention, the trauma
suffered by parents and the devastated medical infrastructure." The
statistical increase in the number of children with leukemia since 1993 is also
a function of cases not having been fully documented before 2003.
Janan Hassan, an oncologist
with the Basra Children's Hospital, participated in a study that was just
published in the Medical
Journal of the Sultan Qaboos
University in Oman. It states that although the rate of childhood leukemia in
Basra remained stable between 2004 and 2009, compared with other countries in
the region, there is a trend toward very young children contracting the
disease.
As such, she believes that
objections are only partially applicable. There is a "strong
increase" of genetic defects as a cause of leukemia, she notes. "And
the cases are coming from precisely the areas where there was heavy fighting.
How do you explain that? By saying that reporting requirements have
changed?"
Sabria Salman named her son
Muslim, but it didn't protect him. Muslim, now 10, recently underwent surgery
to remove a 500-gram tumor on his upper arm. He doesn't scream in pain anymore.
Instead, the boy has a permanent grin on his face, as if he no longer had the
strength to change his expression. He perspires heavily and has trouble
breathing. There is a drain tube protruding from his left arm, and the right
arm is wrapped in a dressing that's stained red along the edges.
Salman calls it "cancer in
the muscles." The boy broke his shoulder two years ago, and since then his
body has made little progress towards healing.
'Bombs in Our Neighborhood'
The hospital pays for the
chemotherapy, although radiation therapy would be more effective for his tumor.
But radiation is only available abroad or in Baghdad, where there is a
five-month waiting list -- and the family doesn't have that much time anymore.
The mother prays to Allah, and when the interpreter asks her who is to blame
for her son's affliction, she says: "The war is to blame. The pollution.
There were many bombs in our neighborhood."
Uranium may be a factor, but
other substances used in the production of ammunition and bombs are also
implicated, toxic heavy metals like lead and mercury. "The bombardment of
Basra and Fallujah may have increased the population's exposure to metals,
possibly resulting in the current increase in birth defects," states the
Heidelberg study.
Furthermore, when the Rumaila
oil field near Basra was set on fire in 2003, a cloud of soot full of
carcinogenic particles drifted across the city. And another factor could also
be at play. Since Saddam was overthrown, Iraq's neighbors, Iran, Syria and Turkey,
have diverted substantially more water from the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers.
The current in the Shatt-al-Arab, formed by the confluence of the two rivers,
is now so weak that salt water penetrates inland from the Persian Gulf all the
way to Basra.
This means that wastewater from
industrial facilities downstream from Basra, like the Iranian oil refinery in
Abadan, are no longer being adequately diluted, increasing the concentration of
heavy metals in groundwater.
Abu Ammar lives with his family
on the grounds of Saddam's former navy command center. The quarters are
cramped, with 10 people in a room, and the situation of several other families
on the grounds is no better. It is yet another impoverished Basra neighborhood
-- the riches of the Basra oil wells, omnipresent in the neighborhood in the
shape of stinking fumes, have yet to trickle down to the people.
Three Eyes for Three Children
Ammar has spread out a plastic
rug on the floor and placed a can of 7-Up and a pastry for each of his visitors
on the rug. The family -- or what is left of it -- squats around the rug.
Saddam's thugs executed two of Ammar's brothers. The cousin sitting next to him
still has a piece of shrapnel from an attack wedged behind his eye, the mother
died of grief, his wife no longer goes outside -- "and these are our
children…," he says.
He points to a 21-year-old
woman, a seven-year-old girl and a little boy, sitting next to each other. They
don't have the same parents, but all three have the same narrow faces, and
together they have only three eyes.
The sockets of their missing
eyes look like the inside of an oyster, milky and shapeless. The young woman,
Madia, attends the local college. She doesn't like going there, she says, even
though she covers half of her face with her veil. "What caused this? I
think my mother inhaled something chemical when I was inside of her," says
Madia.
It's easy to assign the blame
for these eerie birth defects to something called "DU ammunition,"
made in the USA. It's easier than thinking about the deleterious effects of
lead and mercury in the soil and the tomatoes, or of the soot in the air and
the toxic materials in the water. But that doesn't relieve those involved in
the war from responsibility. It isn't enough to declare a war to be over. Even
though Iraq now has elections and the tyrant has been hanged, the war is still
in the soil, in the air and in the children.
Omran Habib heads the Basra
Cancer Research Group. He earned his Ph.D. in London and now works as an
epidemiologist at the University of Basra Hospital. "The war did an
enormous amount of damage here," he says. "DU is certainly not good
for our health. Nevertheless, even the presence of uranium in the urine of
patients doesn't imply causation."
A Bundle in White
The World Health Organization
(WHO) is currently assembling a report on DU ammunition. It will reflect the
current state of research on the issue, but it will hardly provide any new
insights. With the help of the University of Greifswald, a cancer registry has
been developed for the Basra region and will serve as the basis for all future
study. Still, even as further research is needed, if only for the children's
sake, it will come too late for many.
It's certainly too late for the
body lying inside a little white bundle of material, tied together at both ends
like a piece of candy, lying on a pile of dirt along the edge of the children's
cemetery in Basra. It was supposed to be his first son, says the father,
standing next to the body. Yesterday the child was still moving inside the
mother's stomach. Today the father was simply handed a bundle.
The body-washer on duty sighs
loudly while digging the grave, hoping to increase his baksheesh. Then he
places the bundle into the hole, says a few words of prayer, makes some
adjustments to the bundle and covers it with earth. Off to the side, a chicken
is pecking at a piece of a "Capri Sun" container sticking out of the
soil.
Afterwards the men smoke. The
father is given a piece of cardboard and writes down the name of his son,
copying it from the combined birth and death certificate they gave him at the
hospital. The gravedigger will scratch the name into the cement. The boy was
going to be named Hussein Ali. The father writes the name of his dead child for
the first and last time.
The man remains motionless. Who
wonders about blame at such a moment? He seems empty, completely at a loss and
robbed of a tiny life.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire