vendredi 13 septembre 2013
The Toxicity of Everyday Survival in Iraq (Parts 1 and 2)
The Toxicity of Everyday Survival in Iraq (Part 1/2)
5 SEPTEMBER 2013
OMAR DEWACHI
http://www.fairobserver.com/article/toxicity-everyday-survival-iraq-part-1
An American war experiment in Iraq has exported toxicity and disability across the world. This the first of a two partseries.
For more than two decades, Iraq has been the subject of a large-scale toxic warfare experiment. Operation Desert Storm, fought in 1991, was the first time in military history that depleted uranium (DU) — a nuclear waste by-product — was systematically employed against both military and civilian targets. US forces used DU on a much larger scale during the war and occupation that started in 2003.
The effects of this toxic and biological experiment go beyond body counts and the epidemiological evidence of illnesses. They also go beyond the environmental contamination caused by DU-laden weapons. Toxicity has penetrated the quotidian realities of life in Iraq. It is what Iraqis have to endure and negotiate every day in the face of physical, political, social, and environmental degradation — what I call here, the “toxicity of everyday survival.”
From Cold to Hot Wars
The original research on the use of DU in warfare, dates back to the Cold War era. In the 1970s, US military laboratories began experimenting with alternative heavy metals and alloys to use against the Soviet’s newly developed line of military armor and tanks that were resistant to conventional lead- and steel-based anti-tank ballistics.
Depleted uranium is 2.5 times heavier than steel and 1.5 times heavier than lead. It is also relatively cheap because it is produced from processed uranium nuclear industrial waste. It has many of the “penetrating qualities” that were sought at the time. Thus, projectiles were given the sexually charged name of “DU penetrators.” Moreover, DU was superior to other heavy metals and alloys for its incendiary effects.
While uranium exists in nature in various forms and is used in a number of building products, its use in warfare in high concentrations unleashes a spectrum of toxicity. The bio-toxic life of the DU projectile is released on high-speed impact with the surface of its target. The collision produces colossal kinetic heat, which causes metal to disband and flesh to burn and disintegrate. When the DU projectile pierces a target, such as a vehicle with passengers, its explosive heat carbonizes all forms of life and machinery.
As DU disintegrates under the high heat of the explosion, it turns into its particle form — uranium oxide — which lingers in the vicinity. These particles are water insoluble and their size can be about one-hundred times smaller than a white blood cell. They contaminate water and soil and enter into the food chain. The particles are so small that they can be blown by wind for tens of kilometers. The uranium aerosol enters the body through ingestion or inhalation, or through coming in contact with an open wound.
The toxicity of DU does not come only from its capacity to kill life, but also its ability to create an array of pathologies and afflictions. In the lungs, the radioactive uranium dust has a bio-toxic lifespan of close to one year. It can cause many acute symptoms due to its immediate chemical toxicity, which irritates and destroys lung tissue. As it makes its way to the blood stream, the uranium oxides bind with organic compounds to form chemical and organic complexes that deposit in the bones, lymphatic system, liver, and kidneys. DU’s radioactive toxicity, more than its chemical toxicity, affects the development of different kinds of malignancies and genetic mutations. Still, the chemical and irradiation toxicity occur simultaneously to produce a series of acute, chronic, and deadly ailments.
Empire’s Toxic Laboratories
One tragic irony in the DU toxicity that afflicts Iraq is that while the US developed this weapon for Cold War purposes, it was used for the first time after that war ended. Operation Desert Storm was the first post-Cold War conflict, and the first occasion for the US to experiment with its DU arsenal. Since then, it has been a weapon of choice for imperial adventurism and military operations elsewhere as well.
The US military deployed hundreds of tons of DU during the 40-day military campaign, Operation Desert Storm. Much of its use was concentrated in the south of Iraq, as well as in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, where the main combat between Iraqi military and American-led coalition forces took place. Doug Rokke, the former head of the Pentagon’s Depleted Uranium Project, described Operation Desert Storm as “the most toxic war known to man.”
The force of this toxic storm was emblematic in images of incinerated bodies and the miles of destroyed military vehicles on Highway 80 (the “Highway of Death”) between Kuwait and Basra. The US military used DU-laden weapons to target alleged storage sites and depots of chemical and biological weapons that released more toxicity in the air. The DU arsenal was also used to hit many civilian targets, such as power supply and water purification plants across the country. The US military used DU-laden weaponry even more systematically and expansively during the 2003 invasion and throughout the occupation. In urban warfare, it was fired at vehicles and buildings in highly populated civilian areas. It was employed in “counter-insurgency operations,” such as the two battles of Fallujah in 2004.
For two decades, the use of DU and its effects have been a subject of political and scientific controversy. In the US, this controversy played out in scientific evidence of the links — and official denial of those links — between DU and the variety of inexplicable conditions that afflicted US veterans. These conditions, loosely termed the “Gulf War Syndrome,” affected up to one in four Gulf War veterans. The Pentagon criticized scientific research-based evidence as inadequate, and continued to deny veterans’ healthcare claims based on exposure to DU. The Pentagon asserted the “safety” of DU-weaponry on the basis of a number of questionable reports by the RAND Corporation and the Institute of Medicine, a non-profit organization.
In 2004, the results of a five-year Pentagon-sponsored study insisted that DU was neither sufficiently toxic nor radioactive to cause health threats to soldiers. One official involved in the study reported that DU is “a lethal, but safe weapons system.” The study has been criticized as a cover-up, including by the US National Academy of Science. The Pentagon maintains that the destructive capacity of DU is militarily advantageous, and therefore, a legitimate and necessary element of the US arsenal. Since 1991, American and British DU weaponry has been deployed in a number of military operations. It was used during the 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo and in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Concerns over increasing cancer rates and other DU-related afflictions have also been on the rise in these countries. Israel also allegedly used DU weaponry in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2008-2009, and its recent airstrike on targets in the Syrian capital, Damascus.
At present, there are no international laws or treaties banning the use of depleted uranium. Therefore, it is up to individual states whether to acquire and use DU-laden weapons. Countries, including Germany, Canada, Czech Republic, Norway, and the Netherlands, have pledged not to use depleted uranium. Only the US and Britain have admitted to using DU in their military operations.
The Breakdown of Health Care in War-Torn Iraq
In the aftermath of the 1991 war, Iraq witnessed a surge of unexplained cases of physical deformities in both human and nonhuman lives in areas that were subjected to heavy bombardment and shelling by the US military. Farmers complained about genetically mutated livestock and crops. There was a rise in unexplained miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer among infants and children. In the words of one Iraqi pediatrician working in Basra: “Something happened to our environment during that war.”
Most research and observations by Iraqi doctors and scientists were dismissed by the US as regime propaganda. Still, the transformations in Iraq’s environment transcended the breakdown of physical life; it generated shifts in structures of health care in the country. The UN-imposed sanctions compounded the impact and effects of environmental toxicity plaguing the country. Across Iraq, cancer wards became emblematic of this breakdown of the depleted capacity of medicine and science to save and revitalize life. In the capital’s main pediatric hospital, families from all over the country rushed their infants and children to seek treatment for different kinds of complex conditions. Doctors nicknamed the cancer ward, “The People’s Republic of China,” in reference to its overcrowded and congested conditions. Often, more than one child shared the same bed in the six-bed-occupancy rooms. Mothers and relatives slept on the hospital’s floor next to their sick children.
In this mélange of care and toxicity, doctors struggled to save lives in the face of lack of basic supplies, shortages of cancer medications, and the deterioration of care facilities and economic conditions brought on by the sanctions. Over the course of a decade and in the face what I call “ungovernable life” — life that is reduced to its mere vital survival and stripped of its potential for revitalization — many doctors fled the country in search of better careers, and to escape the precariousness of Iraq.
This breakdown of structures of care still lingers more than ten years after the US invasion. Every year, tens of thousands of Iraqis have to travel abroad to seek medical care. Their therapeutic itineraries take them to various regional private medical hubs such as India, Iran, Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. Unlike the caricature of the medical tourist who travels for cosmetic surgery or other elective procedures, many Iraqis sell belongings or depend on assistance from family, friends, tribes, and political parties to fund treatment for critical health problems.
In Beirut, the American University Medical Center (AUBMC) buzzes with Iraqi patients seeking critical medical and surgical care. They come from all ages, social backgrounds, and governorates. Close to one-third of the approximately 5,000 Iraqi patients who have frequented this one hospital since 2003, come for cancer surgeries, radiation, or chemotherapy. Although cancer care is free in Iraq, patients opt to pursue costly survival options abroad because of the unwieldy bureaucracy and the shortages of cancer medication and technology at home.
The Toxicity of Everyday Survival in Iraq (Part 2/2)
12 SEPTEMBER 2013
OMAR DEWACHI
An American war experiment in Iraq has exported toxicity and disability across the world. This is the last of a two part series. Read part one here.
Over the past ten years, the Iraqi leadership and corrupt government institutions have been unable or unwilling to provide basic healthcare to citizens, especially for the rising numbers of cancer cases. In the south of Iraq, even poor families from the impoverished rural areas are left with no option but to seek care in neighboring Iran.
The collapse of medical care has also been mirrored in the breakdown of trust between doctors and patients; this is another essential reason that patients seek care abroad. Iraq’s health system is plagued by mis-diagnosis, mistreatment, and neglect. Patients accuse doctors in Iraq of being incompetent, greedy, and indifferent. One patient, commenting on the lack of trust in medical doctors, summed it up: “All the good doctors have left, and the ones who remain have lost their humanity.” While Iraq was once celebrated as one of the leading countries in the region for its medical capacities and infrastructure, the degeneration of Iraqi health care began under the effects of the 1991 war and 12 years of sanctions.
Thousands of Iraqi doctors and specialists have escaped the country to seek security and careers elsewhere. Since 2003, this exodus has increased due to ongoing violence that targets doctors directly. Hundreds, if not thousands, of doctors have been threatened, kidnapped for ransom, and/or assassinated. Some doctors have refused to perform surgical operations on patients for fear of retribution or demands for “blood money” from angry family members who might not accept unfavorable outcomes. The Iraqi Parliament recently passed a law allowing doctors to carry arms for their own protection.
Injury and Survival
The political and social malaise continues to be shaped by the failure of the political leadership to rebuild the country’s infrastructure. In Iraqi cities, people are forced to deal with paralyzing traffic congestion, security checkpoints, concrete walls, and the noisy hum and fumes of diesel generators that are used to compensate for war-caused electricity shortages. Poverty, disability, and unemployment are rampant. Sectarian violence in the form of car bombs, suicide bombers, and militia attacks hit streets, neighborhoods, markets, and religious sites, turning the urban space into a slaughter spectacle. Killers are elected to parliament, and religious and political leaders incite violence as they secure wealth, property and power. Corruption festers in this everyday toxic environment.
The injury and survival journey of Abu Ahmed, a 35-year-old man from Fallujah, illustrates this everyday toxicity. In July 2006, during the height of the sectarian violence, Abu Ahmed was shot in the face by an American paramilitary sniper who, he presumes, was a Blackwater contractor because of their presence in Fallujah at that time. The bullet pierced his windshield and ripped through his face. He was rushed by passers-by to the nearest hospital in Fallujah. There, doctors replaced lost blood and cleaned his wound. The bullet, which was extracted from his face, destroyed large parts of his left cheekbone, leaving a two-inch crater which makes it impossible for him to close his mouth fully. Abu Ahmed had to readapt slowly to the most basic daily functions of drinking and chewing food.
The hospital in Fallujah could do only so much. Abu Ahmed was told that he needed a more specialized hospital and surgeons capable of providing facial reconstructive surgery. At the time, he would not dare to venture to the capital because of the violence. Patients were being kidnapped from hospital beds and killed by a Sadrist militia group that had infiltrated the management of the Ministry of Health. His only alternative was to seek care outside the country.
Abu Ahmed’s extended family managed to raise some money by selling a small piece of land. With that and his own savings, Abu Ahmed decided to head to Amman to seek the opinion of a specialist. During that period, waves of Iraqis displaced by the sectarian violence were leaving the country for Jordan and Syria. Jordanian officials systematically denied entry to Iraqi Shi’a forcing them to settle temporarily in the more hospitable Syria.
Abu Ahmed, a Sunni from the province of Anbar, had been working as a driver between Amman and Fallujah for years. Indeed, he had been driving back from Jordan when he was shot. When he went to seek medical treatment, however, Jordanian customs officers denied him entry. Trying to explain the reason for his trip, he removed the yeshmagh (kuffiyah) wrapped around his face to show them his injury. After listening to his story, the customs officers were even more insistent on rejecting him. Surveying his wound, they expressed their suspicion about Abu Ahmed’s involvement with a “terrorist group.” From their point of view, what else could explain why US paramilitaries shot him in the first place!
When Abu Ahmed returned to Fallujah, he was advised to try Syria, where medical and surgical treatment was much cheaper than Jordan. After receiving his first reconstructive surgery in Syria, his family pressed him to make repeat trips for cancer tests because his injury is, both literally and figuratively, an open wound, and therefore, all the more vulnerable to toxicity. Abu Ahmed’s family, like many Fallujah residents, was concerned about the rising cancer rates following injuries from American ammunition.
According to Abu Ahmed, this kind of risk management practice has become common knowledge as people experience and deal with rising cancer rates, genetic mutations, birth defects, and disabilities. In 2003, his tribe was targeted in a full-scale US air strike that killed eleven people and injured dozens, including women and children. A number of those who were injured fell sick shortly thereafter and died from rapidly developing cancers or other unexplained conditions. The tribe was attacked by US forces on a number of other occasions as well.
In 2012, Abu Ahmed underwent surgery at AUBMC to reconstruct his facial injury with bone and skin grafts. While the surgery restored his functionality and some of the cosmetic aspects of his wound, he lives with the fear and prospect of developing cancer. For him and his extended family, war injuries and cancer are tightly knit phenomena in these webs of toxicity. His wound is not a mere metaphor of the precariousness of the social body; it is the interstitial materialization of war in his everyday survival.
Conclusion
Since 1991, Iraq has been one of the main sites for a US war experiment that has exported toxicity and disability across the world. Hundreds of known sites are contaminated with depleted uranium (DU) in Iraq. According to one report, the cleanup costs are estimated at $30 million. Recent medical and environmental research in Iraq have just begun to officially document links between the high rates of cancer and congenital birth defects in a number of Iraqi cities to exposure to DU and other toxic weapons. Still, with the ongoing US denial of the lethal and lingering toxicity of DU, and the current political disarray in Iraq, there is little hope that this issue will be addressed anytime soon.
Iraq’s toxicity and the resultant social scars run as deep as the molecular and genetic makeup of society and will afflict generations to come. Despite the end of the occupation in 2011, toxicity still shapes everyday survival in Iraq. The body of Abu Ahmed and millions of Iraqis continue to endure America’s poisonous gift of liberation. Their lives and wounds might be vulnerable to toxicity, but they are open, and shared. They seek everyday survival under conditions that stand as a testament to the horrors of empire’s toxic experiment.
*[This article was originally published by Jadaliyya.]
mardi 10 septembre 2013
DÜNYA TÜRKLERİ AVRUPA PLATFORMU (DÜTAP) MEETING
DÜNYA TÜRKLERİ AVRUPA PLATFORMU (DÜTAP) MEETING - BRUSSELS
9th September 2013
(Please click on picture to enlarge)
lundi 9 septembre 2013
Kerkük'te patlama '2 ölü 19 yaralı'
Arşif
Irak'ın kuzeyinde bulunan Kerkük şehrinde meydana gelen eş zamanlı 2 patlamada 2 kişi hayatını kaybetti 19 kişide yaralandı. Güvenlik güçleri patlamaya hazır 2 aracı ise etkisiz hala getirdi.
Kerkük'ün kenar semtinde sivillere yönelik bombalı saldırı gerçekleştirildi. 4 bomba yüklü araçlar planlanan saldırıda 2 bomba yüklü araç patladı. Patlamada 2 sivil hayatını kaybetti, 19 sivilde yaralandı. Meydana gelen saldırı nedeniyle çevre evlerde maddi hasar meydana geldi. Güvenlik güçleri bölgede yaptıkları araştırmada 2 adet patlamaya hazır bomba yüklü aracı tespit ederek etkisiz hala getirdi.
Patlamanın neden kendi bölgelerinde yapıldığını anlamadıklarını ifade eden Abdulhusein Huseyni, " Biz ne asker, nede polisiz. Sadece işçiyiz. Bu bize yapılan ikinci saldırı. O kadar fakiriz ki zararlarımızı karşılayacak paramız bile yok"
mercredi 4 septembre 2013
Parliamentary Elections in Iraq's KRG and Turkmens, Bilgay Duman, ORSAM Middle East Specialist
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Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is preparing to hold parliamentary elections on Sept. 21, 2013.
The parliamentary elections, which were fixed for Sept. 21 after long disputes, are of great importance in terms of the domestic policy of the KRG. A critical turn is also about to be taken in terms of the influence of especially the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), led by Massoud Barzani, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), led by Jalal Talabani, which jointly hold power in the KRG, on Kurdish internal politics in the coming period. This is because Islamist Kurdish parties, especially the Gorran Movement, have been preparing for the elections with great hopes. Following the health problems of Talabani, the future of the strategic alliance between the KDP and the PUK is unclear. Besides, the performance of political parties, other than the KDP, will also attract interest should the PUK lose power. Therefore, if the elections are held fairly and transparently, it is highly likely that there will be changes in the internal political and administrative structure of the KRG as a result of the elections.
Where do Turkmens stand in this process? Those elections are as significant for Turkmens as they are for Kurdish parties in the KRG. In accordance with the KRG parliamentary elections law passed in March 2009, Turkmens were allocated five seats in the 111-seat KRG Parliament. Accordingly, during the KRG parliamentary elections held on July 25, 2009, four Turkmen lists -- the Independent Turkmen Movement, the Turkmen Reform Movement, the Turkmen Democracy Movement and the Arbil Turkmen List -- competed for the five seats in parliament. The Iraqi Turkmen Front (ITF), which is the most popular and biggest political Turkmen group in terms of organizational structure, political background and representation capacity, did not take part in the KRG parliamentary elections.
As a result of the elections, the Turkmen Reform Movement and the Arbil Turkmen List won a seat each, while the Turkmen Democracy Movement won three seats. The Independent Turkmen Movement, on the other hand, did not receive sufficient votes to win a seat in parliament. However, major disputes took place regarding the votes received by the Turkmen Democracy Movement, and it was alleged that votes had been illegally transferred to the party, which is known for its close relations with the KDP. The fact that the vast majority of votes that the Turkmen Democracy Movement received came from Duhok, where the Turkmen population is a minority, raised doubts and increased allegations that the KDP wanted to control the Turkmen votes.
Turkmen political groups to run in elections
The objections did not change the result, and the Turkmen Democracy Movement became the Turkmen movement with the biggest number of members, winning three seats in the KRG Parliament. In addition, Turkmens were provided with a ministry in the government that was formed in the post-2009 election, and Sinan Çelebi, the brother of Arbil Turkmen List's leader, Mahmoud Çelebi, was appointed as the minister of industry and trade.
The Turkmen political groups that will take part in the elections to be held on Sept. 21 are:
- The ITF;
- the Arbil Turkmen List;
- the Turkmen Progressive Movement (a joint list between the KDP Turkmen Office, the Turkmen Cultural Center and the Turkmen Democratic Party);
- the Turkmen Change and Renewal List (formed under the leadership of the Turkmen Reform Movement); and
- the Turkmen Democracy Movement.
Considering the increasing number of Turkmen lists taking part in elections before each electoral period in the KRG, it might be concluded that Turkmens have been engaged in politics in the KRG. While Turkmen parties took part in the 2005 KRG parliamentary elections in a joint list led by the KDP and the PUK, four Turkmen lists took part in the 2009 elections. Though it was initially stated that six lists would participate in the parliamentary elections to be held on Sept. 21, the Turkmeneli Party declared it was withdrawing from the elections to support the ITF. Thus, five Turkmen lists will now compete in the KRG elections.
Quota system
However, the fact that Turkmens were provided with a quota within the political system in the KRG limits Turkmens from proving themselves politically. It might be suggested that there is an imbalance in the current quota system when it is compared with the population of Turkmens in the KRG. It would not be wrong to assert that a Turkmen voter who believes that the influence of Turkmen parties will be limited in a quota system avoids voting for Turkmen parties. Similarly, even if Turkmen parties took part in the elections with the quota, they try to grow beyond the quota by establishing close relations with major political parties and lists after the elections. Hence, Turkmen politicians believe that the Turkmen quota in the KRG Parliament should be increased or, if they believe that a real Turkmen potential could emerge, they should agree to drop the quota.
On the other hand, maybe the most important difference between the 2013 elections and the previous ones is the fact that the ITF is taking part in the elections under its own name. As is known, the ITF suspended its dialogue with Kurdish parties for a long time, especially due to the Kirkuk issue, and kept its distance from KRG politics because of the KRG's claims on Kirkuk. Also, the KRG prevented the ITF from conducting politics within the borders of the region and exerted pressure on ITF offices. Furthermore, the offices and bureaus of the ITF were seized with the support of peshmerga forces and given over to some Turkmen parties and organizations alleged to be pro-KDP. However, Kurdish groups reduced their pressure on Turkmens upon Turkey's recommendation, and the ITF showed moderation towards Kurds in politics in parallel with developing relations between Turkey and the KRG after 2011. As a result, the Arbil office of the ITF was reopened and a dialogue was established between the ITF and KRG politicians.
Excitement and pressure
The restarting of the ITF's political activities within the KRG caused excitement among Turkmens in the region. It is clearly felt when one talks to Turkmens in the KRG. Nevertheless, it is necessary to touch on some issues at this point. Despite the re-launching of the ITF's political activities in the KRG, it is not yet certain whether the front will receive the support of the Turkmen people. The people still feel pressure even if there have been developments in terms of rights and freedoms in the KRG. Turkmens in particular feel this pressure more than others. Therefore, Turkmens might worry that the KRG would exert more pressure if they voted for the ITF. Hence, the Turkmen people in the region could either vote for other Turkmen lists that have better relations with the KRG, like before, or vote directly for Kurdish parties. Many Turkmens in the KRG are directly or indirectly related to the government as they work in government offices. Therefore, Turkmens try to avoid pressure by voting for the party in power or the dominant party instead of voting for Turkmen lists. In addition, another reason is believed to be Turkmens' desire to become integrated in the system in the KRG. Turkmens were excluded from the system in the KRG for a long time due to their political conflict with Kurds. They either worked directly in Kurdish institutions and organizations to become integrated in the system or had to work together. With a realistic point of view, namely based on the idea that it is not possible to make their presence felt, Turkmens endeavored to become integrated in the system.
While the KDP and the PUK -- the dominant parties of the KRG -- held power, they did not make it possible for an opposition to be formed. The emergence of the Gorran Movement and Islamic groups as opposition after the 2009 elections disturbed the parties in power in the KRG. Thus, the reports of many international organizations show that the ruling powers in the KRG exerted pressure on opponent political groups through media organs, political organizations and government offices as well as through jurisdiction and academic studies.
In such an environment, it does not seem possible for Turkmens to preserve their identity and to be active in the political system. Therefore, the majority of Turkmen political organizations in the KRG have adopted a pro-government stance. The fact that the ITF will take part in the 2013 elections makes the situation different. From this point of view, the performance of the ITF before the elections is important in terms of the Turkmen identity. But opposition parties in particular raise allegations regarding electoral fraud in elections in the KRG. The suspicions over whether the Turkmen votes will be rigged or not raises question marks in people's minds.
3 September 2013
http://www.orsam.org.tr/en/showArticle.aspx?ID=2390
lundi 2 septembre 2013
The search for Suleiman the Magnificent's heart
Later this month a team of Hungarian researchers will publish a report on the whereabouts of the heart of one of Ottoman Turkey's most famous sultans. But why has this become such an important historical riddle to solve?
The French statesman Cardinal Richelieu described it as "the battle that saved civilisation" - the siege of the Hungarian castle of Sziget, 447 years ago, almost to the day.
The Muslim Turks finally took the town in September 1566, but sustained such losses, including the death of their leader, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, that they did not threaten Vienna again for 120 years.
Now researchers are digging in the soil - and the archives - for the good sultan's heart.
"When Hungarians walk through the grounds of the castle in Szigetvar they imagine they are walking through a Hungarian castle. But of course, that is not true," says Norbert Pap, Professor of Geography at the University of Pecs, as we stroll along the beautifully restored brick ramparts.
He smiles. "This is in fact the Turkish castle. The Hungarian one was destroyed in the siege of 1566."
Like the rolling hills of the surrounding Zselic region, each fold of history concerning that siege and what followed, seems to conceal another. And each substitutes another version of events.
On the surface the legend is easy to follow.
Suleiman the Magnificent arrived here with up to 100,000 crack Ottoman troops in early August 1566.
From Our Own Correspondent
The castle was on his route to Vienna, which he confidently expected to capture, and thus pave the way for the addition of great chunks of Western Europe to his dominions.
The air trembled to the beat of the big war drums - made, as they still are today, in the handsome city of Edirne. I once bought one there for my son.
But Miklos Zrinyi, the commander of the castle, and his garrison of only 2,300 men put up such a brave fight that the Turks were stopped in their tracks.
Zrinyi died in the final sortie from the burning castle.
Suleiman died in his tent - some sources say from surprise at his Pyrrhic victory. He was 72, after all, and had been fighting the Hungarians for 40 years.
His body was taken back to Constantinople, but his heart was buried here, in a tomb which subsequently became a Catholic church, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, or so reads the inscription on the Turbeki church, just east of the town.
But that's just a fairy story, Prof Pap explains. The plaque was put there in 1916 by the local priest, for political reasons.
At that time Hungary - or the Austro-Hungarian Empire - was an ally of Ottoman Turkey, two ancient empires stumbling to their ruin in the mud and blood of World War I, and they needed symbols of undying friendship.
Now Prof Pap has been tasked with finding the true burial place of Suleiman's heart, also for political reasons.
Relations between Hungary and Turkey are enjoying a big revival.
Who was he?
Sultan Suleiman I, born 1494, died 1566
Known as the Magnificent, or the Lawgiver on account of his creation of a legal code which lasted hundreds of years
He ruled the Ottoman Empire when it was at its most powerful militarily, its richest and most culturally influential
When he died, the empire stretched into parts of North Africa, the Balkans and present-day Hungary
The two prime ministers get on well. The number of Turkish tourists visiting Hungary has leapt by 45% in the last year.
But there are only 500 beds in this sleepy town, where tens of thousands once slept in tents, listening to the nightingales, preparing for battle.
At stake are a five-star hotel or two, and the further restoration of the castle and a host of Ottoman-era monuments. But everything hinges on finding the resting place of Suleiman's magnificent heart.
There are several maps. One from 1689 even marks the supposed burial place. Others in the war archive in Vienna were prepared for the Habsburg troops who retook the town in the 1680s.
Suleiman had already laid siege to Vienna in 1529
There is more information in the archives of the Vatican, in Venice, in Budapest, and in Istanbul.
There is more information in the archives of the Vatican, in Venice, in Budapest, and in Istanbul.
KAZANCI PARTICIPATED IN THE RECEPTION ORGANIZED ON THE OCCASION OF THE 30TH OF AUGUST
KAZANCI PARTICIPATED IN THE RECEPTION ORGANIZED ON THE OCCASION OF THE 30TH OF AUGUST
Iraqi Turkmen Front Turkey Representative Dr. Hicran Kazancı
participated in the ceremony and reception organized at the Çankaya Palace on
the occasion of 30th of August, Victory Day to which he was invited
as the guest of President Abdullah Gül.
President Gül welcomed the guests together with Mrs. Gül at Çankaya
Palace where the 30th of August reception was held for the first
time.
The reception which was held in the ceremony hall in Çankaya Palace was
attended by numerous invited guests including the Head of TBMM Cemil Çiçek,
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Mrs. Emine Erdoğan, Chief of the Armed
Forces General Necdet Özel and Mrs. Kamuran Özel, Deputy Prime Ministers Bekir
Bozdağ, Beşir Atalay and Ali Babacan and various members of the Council of
Ministers, commanders-in-chief of armed forces, ambassadors, bureaucrats,
relatives of martyrs, veterans, academicians, businessmen as well as
representatives of non-governmental associations.
dimanche 1 septembre 2013
We've moved on from the Iraq war – but Iraqis don't have that choice, by John Pilger
Great article by John Pilger:
We've moved on from the Iraq war – but Iraqis don't have that choice
Like characters from The Great Gatsby, Britain and the US have arrogantly turned their backs and left a country in ruins
John Pilger
The Guardian, Sunday 26 May 2013 18.00 BST
Iraq's ministry of social affairs estimates 4.5 million children have lost one or both parents. This means 14% of the population are orphans. Photograph: Reuters
The dust in Iraq rolls down the long roads that are the desert's fingers. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school playgrounds, consuming children kicking a ball; and it carries, according to Dr Jawad Al-Ali, "the seeds of our death". An internationally respected cancer specialist at the Sadr teaching hospital in Basra, Dr Ali told me that in 1999, and today his warning is irrefutable. "Before the Gulf war," he said, "we had two or three cancer patients a month. Now we have 30 to 35 dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48% of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with, then long after. That's almost half the population. Most of my own family have it, and we have no history of the disease. It is like Chernobyl here; the genetic effects are new to us; the mushrooms grow huge; even the grapes in my garden have mutated and can't be eaten."
Along the corridor, Dr Ginan Ghalib Hassen, a paediatrician, kept a photo album of the children she was trying to save. Many hadneuroblastoma. "Before the war, we saw only one case of this unusual tumour in two years," she said. "Now we have many cases, mostly with no family history. I have studied what happened in Hiroshima. The sudden increase of such congenital malformations is the same."
Among the doctors I interviewed, there was little doubt that depleted uranium shells used by the Americans and British in the Gulf war were the cause. A US military physicist assigned to clean up the Gulf war battlefield across the border in Kuwait said, "Each round fired by an A-10 Warthog attack aircraft carried over 4,500 grams of solid uranium. Well over 300 tons of DU was used. It was a form of nuclear warfare."
Although the link with cancer is always difficult to prove absolutely, the Iraqi doctors argue that "the epidemic speaks for itself". The British oncologist Karol Sikora, chief of the World Health Organisation's cancer programme in the 1990s, wrote in the British Medical Journal: "Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Iraq sanctions committee]." He told me, "We were specifically told [by the WHO] not to talk about the whole Iraq business. The WHO is not an organisation that likes to get involved in politics."
Recently, Hans von Sponeck, former assistant secretary general of the United Nations and senior UN humanitarian official in Iraq, wrote to me: "The US government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern Iraq where depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and environmental dangers." A WHO report, the result of a landmark study conducted with the Iraqi ministry of health, has been "delayed". Covering 10,800 households, it contains "damning evidence", says a ministry official and, according to one of its researchers, remains "top secret". The report says birth defects have risen to a "crisis" right across Iraqi society where depleted uranium and other toxic heavy metals were used by the US and Britain. Fourteen years after he sounded the alarm, Dr Jawad Al-Ali reports "phenomenal" multiple cancers in entire families.
Iraq is no longer news. Last week, the killing of 57 Iraqis in one day was a non-event compared with the murder of a British soldier in London. Yet the two atrocities are connected. Their emblem might be a lavish new movie of F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Two of the main characters, as Fitzgerald wrote, "smashed up things and creatures and retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess".
The "mess" left by George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq is a sectarian war, the bombs of 7/7 and now a man waving a bloody meat cleaver in Woolwich. Bush has retreated back into his Mickey Mouse "presidential library and museum" and Tony Blair into his jackdaw travels and his money.
Their "mess" is a crime of epic proportions, wrote Von Sponeck, referring to the Iraqi ministry of social affairs' estimate of 4.5 million children who have lost one or both parents. "This means a horrific 14% of Iraq's population are orphans," he wrote. "An estimated one million families are headed by women, most of them widows". Domestic violence and child abuse are rightly urgent issues in Britain; in Iraq the catastrophe ignited by Britain has brought violence and abuse into millions of homes.
In her book Dispatches from the Dark Side, Gareth Peirce, Britain's greatest human rights lawyer, applies the rule of law to Blair, his propagandist Alastair Campbell and his colluding cabinet. For Blair, she wrote, "human beings presumed to hold [Islamist] views, were to be disabled by any means possible, and permanently … in Blair's language a 'virus' to be 'eliminated' and requiring 'a myriad of interventions [sic] deep into the affairs of other nations.' The very concept of war was mutated to 'our values versus theirs'." And yet, says Peirce, "the threads of emails, internal government communiques, reveal no dissent". For foreign secretary Jack Straw, sending innocent British citizens to Guantánamo was "the best way to meet our counter-terrorism objective".
These crimes, their iniquity on a par with Woolwich, await prosecution. But who will demand it? In the kabuki theatre of Westminster politics, the faraway violence of "our values" is of no interest. Do the rest of us also turn our backs?
www.johnpilger.com
• This article was amended on 27 May 2013. The original referred to the A-10 Warthog aircraft as the A-10 Warhog.
samedi 31 août 2013
War Crimes Are US Depleted Uranium weapons
The term "Depleted Uranium" is fundamentally Orwellian. Depleted Uranium is NOT depleted in any meaningful sense. DU is natural Uranium (more than 99% U-238) with the fissionable Uranium (less than 1% U-235) removed.
War Crimes Are US
Depleted Uranium weapons: Why shouldn’t it be a war crime to poison civilians with radiation?
By William Boardman
 |
August 28, 2013
Depleted Uranium [DU] is a very dense, inexpensive, easy-to-shape metal which provides excellent protection against conventional munitions. The same qualities that make depleted Uranium excellent defensive armor turn lethal when used as offensive munitions." - U.S. Army training film
An anonymous phone call to the Florida Dept. of Emergency Management alerted airport officials that there was an open 55-gallon drum full of old airplane parts made with depleted Uranium near a fence in a scrap section of the Opa-locka Executive Airport near Miami, Florida. The first thing everyone did was panic.
They evacuated that part of the airport and established a 150' radius "hot zone" around the suspect drum. They called the local fire and rescue team and called the state and federal environmental protection agencies, and all that calling brought the media in for a one-day story that played on the major TV networks and other media, with headline language like "Uranium scare forces evacuation" and "found exposed" and "hazmat crews on the scene."
"It's a radioactive substance no one wants to be exposed to, radiation it's not something you want to be exposed to, it can affect your bodily functions," Miami-Dade Fire Rescue spokesman Lt. Arnold Piedrahita told CBS News.
That was July 25, and by the end of the day, the most interesting part of the news was a report, only in USA Today, that from the start the 55-gallon drum was labeled "depleted Uranium" containing U-238 (a radioactive isotope of Uranium that remains radioactive for billions of years). Properly handled and contained, DU is not all that dangerous, as the emergency teams soon concluded. And the DU in the drum was in solid form, which is the safest form - DU is a far greater threat to humans as liquid, dust, or aerosol, forms far more common in combat zones.
The Opa-locka DU turned out to be an integrated element of airplane parts decades old, dating from the time when the heavy metal (about 68% denser than lead) was commonly used in airplanes for counterweights. (Boeing and McDonnell Douglas dropped this practice in the 1980s.)
Once officials understood the problem, they reduced the "hot zone" to a five-foot radius, and pictures show firefighters chatting within arm's length of the drum. And the story dropped out of the news without further clarification.
Only one news report among those sampled, by PressTV, connected the unnecessary American panic over a DU drum in Florida with the equally unnecessary American disregard for its genocidal use of DU weapons in Iraq and elsewhere, poisoning civilian populations for generations to come.
Suppose that for more than 20 years, a nation uses weapons that it knows are not only a threat to its own soldiers, but will cause civilian casualties for at least a generation. Would such a nation be a serial war criminal?
Military experimentation with depleted Uranium began in the 1950s, with the goal of developing an effective anti-tank weapon to use against Soviet tanks. As a dense, heavy metal that sharpens itself as it penetrates a hard surface, DU had the added military virtue of igniting spontaneously and burning at temperatures of 3,000 to 6,000 Degrees C.
In 1991, the United States, the United Kingdom, and likely other allies used DU weapons in Kuwait and Iraq during the Gulf War. This was the first time these weapons had been used extensively in combat (Israeli forces had battle-tested them in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War). The weapons - DU bombs, missiles, shells, and bullets - worked to devastating effect militarily. They also poisoned the ground, water, and air around their targets, most of which were not cleaned up.
"The primary impact that [depleted Uranium] had in the Gulf War was - it's one of the reasons that the war was so short. It's one of the things that helped us win that war so quickly," Col. Eric Daxon, U.S. Army, says in the documentary "Invisible War."
DU weapons are weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), as defined by international law and the U.S. Code (18 USC, sec. 2332c).
DU weapons are arguably illegal under international law, both as low level nuclear weapons and as indiscriminate civilian-killing weapons. In a July 1996 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice (or World Court) somewhat fudged on the question, ducking on the legality of weapons, but stating that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would likely be contrary to international law.
In June 2000, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia publicly explained its decision not to conduct a criminal investigation of alleged war crimes committed by NATO for killing civilians with depleted Uranium weapons, cluster bombs, and other weapons. There was no need to conduct "an in-depth investigation" into the whole bombing campaign or into specific incidents, the Tribunal explained, because there was "simply no evidence of the necessary crime base for charges of genocide or crimes against humanity." The Tribunal did not add that an in-depth investigation would run the risk of finding such evidence (some of which had already been provided by Amnesty International in a report titled "Collateral Damage").
DU weapons are a low-intensity form of atomic warfare, absent nuclear explosions. The weapons penetrate, explode, and burn on contact. They leave radioactivity behind to kill civilians in much the same way as Robert Oppenheimer proposed, by spreading plutonium on enemies in World War II (a proposal that was apparently not implemented). But they do it with lower intensity.
Since 1991, the United States and other countries have used depleted Uranium WMDs fighting in a number of other countries, reportedly including (but not limited to) Bosnia, Herzegovina, Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. American drone strikes presumably use missiles armed with DU penetrators. Israel has used DU WMDs in Gaza.
All the target countries have significant Muslim populations.
The term "Depleted Uranium" is fundamentally Orwellian. Depleted Uranium is NOT depleted in any meaningful sense. DU is natural Uranium (more than 99% U-238) with the fissionable Uranium (less than 1% U-235) removed.
Discovered in 1789, natural Uranium is widely distributed around the world (more common than silver, mercury, or gold in the Earth's crust). Uranium is the source of most of the world's radioactivity and contributes to background levels of radiation everywhere. Natural Uranium comprises three radioactive isotopes: Uranium-238 (99.27%), Uranium-235 (.72%) and Uranium-234 (.005%), all of which remain radioactive for thousands of years (U-238 has a half-life of more than 4.4 billion years). "Natural Uranium" is not "natural," it is not Uranium as found in nature. "Natural Uranium" has been mined, milled, and concentrated for enrichment - it is roughly 1,000 times more radioactive than Uranium in nature.
Natural Uranium can serve as nuclear reactor fuel, but most reactor fuel has been enriched by increasing its percentage of U-235 about five-fold (to 3-4%). To make nuclear weapons grade Uranium, U-238 is usually enriched to 85-90% U-235. The atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima in 1945 used 64 kilograms (about 141 pounds) of 80% enriched Uranium.
Enriching Uranium for reactor fuel and weapons leaves most of the U-238 behind as unenriched waste, or "depleted" Uranium. As nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors have proliferated since 1945, the nuclear nations of the world have accumulated more than a million tons radioactive waste, which seemed at first to have little or no apparent use, but have required continuous care and expense to keep it from endangering the public.
Accurate current figures are hard to get, but generally accepted estimates are that the United States and Russia each have close to 500,000 tons of depleted Uranium (although one estimate by Nukewatch in 2013 puts the U.S. total at 740,000 tons). As many as 15-18 other nations are thought to have another 100,000 tons or more of depleted Uranium, mostly held by the United Kingdom (50,000), France (30,000), Germany (16,000), Japan (10,000), and China (2,000).
Every ounce of that million-plus tons of depleted Uranium is hazardous waste that would need to be safely stored for billions of years - if someone hadn't thought to use it as a weapon. Who cares how lethal the stuff is when you're using it on your enemy?
In the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. used up a mere 400 of its 500,000 tons of depleted Uranium on parts of Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, firing thousands of DU bullets, tank shells, and artillery shells, and dropping thousands of bombs.
The U.S. got rid of another 10-20 tons or so in the Balkans during 1994-99, and has used unmeasured amounts on target ranges in Hawaii, Okinawa, Panama, Puerto Rico, South Korea, and elsewhere.
At the same time, something unexpected was happening: Depleted Uranium was apparently dangerous to soldiers on the American side as well. Soldiers who handled the munitions got sick. Soldiers who went to depleted Uranium targets got sick. What became known as Gulf War Syndrome was apparently caused, at least in part, by exposure to the low level radioactive debris that could cover the skin or be easily inhaled or swallowed.
When UN investigators inspected depleted Uranium targets in the Balkans, they found that American DU was contaminated with other radioactive elements - including Americium, Neptunium, Technetium, and Plutonium. Americium decays into Plutonium. Plutonium is 200,000 times more radioactive than U-238.
While others countries issued warnings to their troops, the Pentagon's Lt. Col. Victor Warzinski told the Christian Science Monitor, "Residual depleted Uranium from battlefield engagements in Kosovo does not pose a significant risk to human health."
Taking a contrary view, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) studied post-war Balkan ecological conditions and recommended closing contaminated areas to public access and decontaminating the sites as quickly as possible. Noting that DU particles remained in the air two years after the war, UNEP recommended continued monitoring of air and groundwater, where DU is most likely to be ingested into the human body, where its alpha radiation is most dangerous.
"The people responsible for the spreading of 400 tons of DU there [Southern Iraq] in 1991 were conducting a very peculiar sort of experiment - one in which the 'guinea-pigs' were the soldiers and civilians present ... and in which the 'experimenters' did not want to know the results." - Peter Low, introduction "Depleted Uranium" (2003)
Officially, 679,000 American soldiers served in the 1991 Gulf War. More than a third of them, approximately 250,000, have been categorized as suffering from Gulf War Syndrome. Preferring not to use that term, the Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA) describes the same phenomenon as " a cluster of medically unexplained chronic symptoms that can include fatigue, headaches, joint pain, indigestion, insomnia, dizziness, respiratory disorders, and memory problems ... a chronic multisymptom illness." Symptoms identified by others also includemuscle pain, cognitive problems, rashes, diarrhea, and terminal tumors.
The VA could focus on treating soldiers' symptoms without being overly concerned about causality. The stakes are very different for the Pentagon. If depleted Uranium was debilitating a third of their troops, the military might have to give up one of its more effective weapons - one that no enemy had any defense against, and one that no enemy had in its arsenal for retaliation. Sacrificing the health of some soldiers (and maybe enemy civilians) was an easy choice for military leaders. The hard part would be to conceal the starkness of that choice, an effort now in its third decade.
As evidence continues to mount that depleted Uranium in the environment is a lifetime health threat, public awareness has risen only slowly, even among most members of Congress. Since the 1991 Gulf War, the Pentagon has taken the necessary course to defend its control of a unique weapon - always denying that there's any problem, withholding as much information as possible, stonewalling investigation as long as possible, controlling studies whenever possible, employing misdirection and confusion, and silencing truthtellers within.
At the end of the Gulf War, the Pentagon had some 4,000 Iraqi tanks and other armored vehicles that were destroyed by DU weapons. The Pentagon recognized that these radioactive wrecks represented a "substantial risk" to human health, and so they buried as many as they could in Saudi Arabia.
So far the Pentagon has been remarkably effective in burying reality. The effects of depleted Uranium are a war crime being covered up in plain sight.
"Unborn children of the region [are] being asked to pay the highest price, the integrity of their DNA." - Ross B. Mirkarimi, The Arms Control Research Centre, from his report: "The Environmental and Human Health Impacts of the Gulf Region with Special Reference to Iraq," May 1992.
In 1991, Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a former U.S. Army colonel, was chief of the Nuclear Sciences Division of the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, and worked at the VA hospital in Wilmington, Delaware, treating veterans, including Gulf War veterans. He had served in the Gulf War. In his new job, the government mandated him to test other veterans for radiation exposure.
Educated at the University of Zagreb (MD and PhD) and Oxford University in England, Dr. Durakovic was then 51 and a published poet, with a distinguished academic career in Canada and the U.S. By all accounts, he took his work seriously and soon discovered American veterans suffering from radiation exposure from DU weapons debris. He described his experience in a 2004 interview for Indybay.org:
... after Gulf War I, I found that about 75 percent of the patients that were referred to me from the New Jersey veteran's hospital were contaminated with depleted Uranium isotopes. When I started this work, I sent the samples of urine of those patients who showed the symptoms, which I associated with internal contamination of isotopes, to the military radiochemistry lab in Aberdeen, Maryland. And they were never analyzed.
Furthermore, they claimed they never received those urine samples. After pressure was placed on them, after a few months, they said they analyzed them but all of them were negative. But they would not release the results. I repeated the studies of the same soldiers, and I found that many of them were positive. So it was obvious the government lied.
After that time, I received an order by the director of the military hospital, the Veterans Adminstration hospital, in Wilmington, where I was the chief of nuclear medicine. The order was to stop my work on Uranium. I refused, because I was mandated by the government of the United States to do that work.
Since I did not want to stop the work, they put pressure on me. They got my access to the computer for the patient management [files]. They harassed me on a daily basis. And ultimately, they said to me if I don't stop the work, I'll be fired and nobody will ever hire me again.
I still refused, even after calls from the highest levels of the government. They even used my colleagues from the military to call me from different parts of the country to stop the work. Since I continued, they fired me in 1997. And I was the only doctor who was a specialist in nuclear medicine for the state of Delaware, working for the government. So obviously, they had good reason to eliminate me from the health care system.
In February 1997, Durakovic wrote President Clinton on behalf of Gulf War vets asking for an inquiry into DU contamination. There is no record of a response from Clinton. Two months after writing his letter, Durakovic lost his job. A year later, two of his original 24 soldier-subjects were dead and 12 seriously ill.
Fired by the government and blacklisted, Durakovic returned to Canada, where he founded the Uranium Medical Research Centre (UMRC, umrc.net), whose "mission is to conduct and publish independent, objective, and expert scientific and medical research on the effects of Uranium and transuranic elements." UMRC's current projects include Uranium exposure studies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, and Port Hope, Canada, as well as a project titled "Social Geography of Uranium Battlefields."
After tests, Dr. Durakovic found decay products of DU in 14 of the 24 patients. "I only discovered indirectly in September 1991 that depleted Uranium had been used on the battlefield. I was horrified. When scientists conduct experiments using this material, we dress like astronauts. Our soldiers had no protection. And this attack could have potentially exposed the entire population of the Gulf region. Soil samples from Iraq show radiation levels more than 17 times the acceptable level." - Felicity Arbuthnot, New Internationalist, Issue 305 (September 1998).
Mainstream media have not covered depleted Uranium to any significant extent, especially in comparison to such arguably much less dangerous killers as O.J. Simpson (1994) or George Zimmerman (2013). During that same 20-year period, CBS News' "60 Minutes" (for example) has apparently devoted 12 minutes to the issue, in December 1999, when the program focused on the contrast between the protective gear (including gloves and respirators) the Army gave clean-up crews and the absence of any protective gear for soldiers doing clean-up.
This isolated 12-minute segment nevertheless drew a prompt response from the Department of Defense's (DoD's) Undersecretary of the Army Bernard Rostker, head of DoD's Office of Gulf War Illnesses. In a DoD press release, Rostker didn't challenge the accuracy of CBS reporting negligent exposure of U.S. troops to depleted Uranium and other toxins. Instead he complained that CBS "did not focus on whether or not those exposures have proven to be harmful."
The press release went on to quote Rostker saying: "We had an obligation to do the training. We told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in our licensing that we would provide this training. It's something we should have done.... Yes, we didn't do what we should have, but ["60 Minutes"] chose to gloss over the fact that the lack of training did not result in any medically significant consequences for any of the people that were exposed.... The danger of being exposed was known to be so trivial - nonexistent."
According to the press release, "After years of monitoring service members exposed to DU, the VA has determined DU has had no health impact on these service members.... There is no lingering danger in the Gulf from the substance.... Service members deployed there have absolutely nothing to fear...." DU is now part of America's arsenal and it's here to stay, Rostker said, because it gives U.S. forces an important advantage both offensively and defensively.
Rostker touted a Pentagon five-year study of 33 vets who suffered depleted Uranium wounds from friendly fire (since no one else had DU weapons): "Those were the 33 that were most exposed to depleted Uranium. Sixteen of those still have depleted Uranium fragments in their bodies in ways that can't be surgically removed without destroying underlying muscle.... There were some elevated Uranium counts in those who still have fragments, as one would expect, but no radiological impact that could be noted and no impact on the kidneys, which is the organ where one would expect to see damage if there was to be damage."
Take a dim view of Pentagon testing, warned Dr. Durakovic in 2004:
... what they did, they studied only soldiers who were wounded by the shrapnel. And we know very well the shrapnel wounds are not an important contributing factor in contamination with Uranium isotopes. Not many people are wounded by DU shrapnel.
They did not select the proper population, and furthermore, they tested only total Uranium, which was not elevated, even in my patients. They did not test different isotopes of uranium, which would provide an insight into the ratio of the isotopes, which determines what kind of uranium it is. So the Pentagon, their laboratory, measured only total concentration of uranium, which is of no importance.
In 2001 the U.S. and its allies invaded Afghanistan. The U.S. denies accusations that depleted Uranium weapons have been used there. The Germans prepared a training manual for the troops they sent as part of the NATO force in Afghanistan, published in late 2005, that said: "US-aircraft used, amongst others, armour-piercing incendiary munitions with a DU-core" during the invasion and thereafter.
In the spring of 2011, Afghan President Hamid Karzai accused the U.S. and its 47 Nato and other allied countries of using weapons with chemical and nuclear components, apparently a reference to depleted Uranium weapons. A Scientific American review of Karzai's remarks took it for granted that DU weapons have been used in Afghanistan, but minimized their likely scope and danger. Perhaps tellingly, the review noted "the U.S. military's claims that it is no longer using DU weapons in Afghanistan." [emphasis added]
Last year an Afghan researcher, Dr. Mohammad Daud Miraki, said he and others were finding 62.7% o Afghanis showed signs of radiation poisoning, with Uranium isotopes in their urine at 300-2,000% above normal. Miraki criticized both U.S. and Afghan governments for failing to investigate the findings: "We forwarded [our] reports to the US three years ago to the State Department, and from US officials we have gotten only lip service unfortunately. But the Afghan government equally, since it has no control, it's an installed regime."
No such ambiguity exists in Iraq, where the U.S. admittedly used tons of depleted Uranium weapons, starting with the "shock and awe" bombardment even before the invasion of 2003.
"A decade after the night that American bombs first rained down on Baghdad, the president joked about wearing a green tie for a belated St. Patrick's Daycelebration. Congress noisily focused on whether spending cuts would force the cancellation of the White House Easter egg roll. Cable news debated whether a show about young women has too much sex in it. But on one topic, there was a conspiracy of silence: Republicans and Democrats agreed that they did not really want to talk about the Iraq war." - N.Y. Times, March 19, 2013
In Baghdad, the anniversary was marked by a dozen of so bombings that killed at least 56 and injured more than 200 Iraqis. And that was the good news.
In a different sort of commemoration of the beginning of the second war on Iraq, a Dutch peace organization funded by the Norwegian government, IKA Pax Christi, published "In a State of Uncertainty," a 52-page book that begins to do what the United States, the United Nations, and most of the rest of the world have failed to do - provide a broad assessment of the use of DU weapons, their location and quantity, their environmental and health consequences, and the means and costs of restoring a devastated country and its people.
That's the bad news: Iraq's two-decade-old health crisis. Iraq is a country that had decent, modern health conditions until the U.S. waged the 1991 Gulf War, then imposed crippling sanctions followed by the 2003 illegal war and occupation. In the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein was an American friend against Iran, the CIA judged Iraq to have health facilities that were among the best in the Middle East.
The wars were destructive, but a decade of sanctions, mostly under the Clinton administration, may have been worse. In May 1996, then UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright appeared on "60 Minutes." Correspondent Leslie Stahl asked: "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And - and you know, is the price worth it?"
"I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it," Albright replied.
She later said she regretted the remark, but she never spoke out for a more humane policy. "Half a million dead children," that's when American policy crystallized - half a million dead children, the price is worth it, when it's not our children.
"I have worked in Fallujah as a Pediatrician since 1997 but began to notice something was wrong in 2006 and began logging the cases; we have determined that 144 babies are now born with a deformity for every 1000 live births. We believe it has to be related to contamination caused by the fighting in our city, even now, nearly 10 years later. It is not unique to Fallujah; hospitals throughout the Anbar Governorate and many other regions of Iraq are recording increases. Every day I see the strain this fear puts on expectant mothers and their families. The first question I am asked when a child is born is not 'is it a boy or a girl?' but 'is my child healthy?'" - Dr. Samira Alaani, petition on Change.org
Now the country that the U.S. destroyed and abandoned struggles with an epidemic of epidemics - an epidemic of miscarriages, an epidemic of stillbirths, an epidemic of birth deformities, an epidemic of cancers, an epidemic of death and deformity of biblical proportions, largely brought on by attacks by one of the world's newer nations against the Cradle of Civilization.
The catalogue of sufferings is framed this way by Project Censored:
America's Gulf War, intermittent bombings in the 1990s, the 2003 war, and aftermath left a toxic legacy.
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