Iraq talk is eye-opener (From Stroud News and Journal)

Iraq talk is eye-opener

BABIES born without heads and starving people forced to cook with raw sewage - these were just some of the examples of life of modern-day Iraq which featured in an eye-opening and moving talk in The Space this week.

Gareth Evans of the sanction-busting campaign group Voices in the Wilderness was speaking about the plight of the ordinary Iraqis and how military strikes are likely to affect a country which is already on its knees.

Mr Evans, who last visited Iraq in May, gave a first hand account of what he had seen and how the sanctions designed to weaken and topple Saddam Hussein's regime had failed. "We must remember that Iraq is not populated by one man," he said.

"There are 22 million other people in Iraq and they are the people who are suffering."

"The sanctions are absolutely punitive and they have completely failed. "They hurt the population more than any regime or administration."

He described how Iraq, an emerging first world country with a well-developed infrastructure and welfare state, had been bombed back into the stone age during the Gulf War and the air strikes and sanctions which followed meant it had never had the chance to get back on its feet.

"Sanctions have killed many hundreds of thousands more people than the bombs," said Mr Evans.

"A country that's been literally patched together is now facing complete implosion." He said the people were in no condition to be rising up to overthrow Saddam because their priorities were trying to find food for the next meal and fight of sickness.

Mr Evans said hospitals were short of supplies because of the sanctions and are struggling to treat patients who, already weak, are being affected by a range of diseases from the impure water they are having to rely on.

"These families are drinking, cooking with and bathing in 80 per cent raw sewage," he said. "Children are dying through lack of clean water."

In the maternity wards of Basra, close to the border with Kuwait, the effects of depleted uranium ammunition used during the Gulf War are still being felt.

"We saw babies that were being born without heads, or who had organs outside their bodies, or who had limbs missing and were just torsos," he said.

"And there has been a colossal rise in the incidence of cancer."

There is also a huge underlying problem of mental illness in Iraq brought on by the extraordinarily awful circumstances people have found themselves in according to Mr Evans.

Asked what threat he thought Iraq posed to the rest of the world if left to its own devices, he said absolutely none.

"We find ourselves in a totally manufactured situation without precedent in human history," he said.

Mr Evans claimed a greed for oil was more of an issue than international security.

Those who attended the talk in Stroud were visibly moved by what they had heard and seen.

As one young mum asked: "What shall I say to my boys when they see, on TV, British planes dropping bombs on innocent children like them?"

For more local angles on international issues, see this week's SNJ.