Committing a war crime

by Michael Jansen

While Washington expresses concern that "terrorists" could explode a "dirty bomb" containing nuclear waste on a Western city, killing hundreds of people and leaving a radioactive residue which will cause cancer for years to come, the US is dropping "dirty" depleted uranium bunker bombs on Iraq and selling 500 of these devices to Israel.

Depleted uranium (DU) is a radioactive by-product of uranium enrichment used in bunker-busting bombs, missiles, tank shells and armour piercing bullets. Radiation released by DU weapons is said to be 10 times more potent than that produced by nuclear testing.

During the 1991 campaign in Iraq, the US and UK fired 944,000 DU rounds, or some 2,700 tonnes of DU tipped munitions, at Iraqi civilian and military targets. When they explode, DU weapons scatter fine radioactive particles which are carried by the wind and ingested by human beings, animals and plants. The indestructible particles last forever. Therefore, the areas where DU munitions has been deployed - the Middle East, the northern Indian subcontinent and the Balkans - have been contaminated with endlessly destructive radioactive dust.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimated that half a million people would die by the end of the 21st century due to radioactive debris and dust left in Iraq, which makes its way into the rivers, lakes and seas of the world and the atmosphere which surrounds it. While Jordan has expressed concern about possible contamination by airborne particles escaping from Israel's nuclear reactor, there is a far greater danger from DU dust blown across the desert from Iraq.

Doug Rokke, ex-director of the US army's DU project in 1994 and 1995 and a former professor of environmental science at a Florida university, said: "They're using it now, in Fallujah; Baghdad is chockablock with DU - it's all over the place."

An Iraqi doctor specialising in blood disease at one of the capital's universities told this correspondent that thousands of Baghdadis had developed cancer since 1991 and warned that incidence of the disease will rise due to the use of DU munitions during the 2003 war. Dr Jenan Ali, a senior specialist at the Basra College of Medicine, said that in the decade after the 1991 war there was a 100 per cent rise in child leukaemia and a 242 per cent increase in all cancers in the region.

Birth defects are also much higher than normal. Malignancies and defects have also soared in Afghanistan since the 2001 US war, but no statistics are available in that chaotic country.

While the Pentagon uses DU munitions to save the lives of its troops, DU may be killing more than the number who would have died if this munitions had not been deployed. The use of DU in 1991 and 2003 is also considered responsible for malignancies in US veterans and birth defects amongst their children. While only 467 US troops were wounded during the 1991 war, of the nearly 600,000 discharged personnel one third are receiving disability compensation and another 25,000 cases are pending. The figure does not include those who have died. Amongst the 169,000 veterans of the current conflict, 16 per cent had applied for treatment by July 2004.

Rokke, who unsuccessfully attempted to clean up Iraq after the first Gulf War, is amongst the victims. He went to Iraq a fit soldier but returned home with respiratory problems, cataracts and crumbling teeth, the latter due to DU exposure. Twenty of the personnel working on the project died, most of the rest are ill. A Pentagon report revealed last month that eight out of 20 men who served together during the 2003 invasion of Iraq now have malignancies. This group was apparently exposed only to DU and vaccines which do not cause cancer. The New York Daily News reported that four out of nine military police repatriated from Iraq had tested positive for DU contamination.

Rokke, who discovered that DU contamination cannot be cleaned up following the 1991 conflict, called the use of DU munitions a "war crime". He stated: "There is a moral point to be made here [about the deployment of these weapons in 2003]. This war was about Iraq possessing illegal weapons of mass destruction - yet we are using weapons of mass destruction ourselves. Such double standards are repellent."

According to an August 2002 UN report, the use of DU munitions breaches the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter, the Genocide Convention, the Convention against Torture, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980, and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.

Rokke observed: "A nation's military personnel cannot wilfully contaminate any other nation, cannot cause harm to persons and the environment and then ignore the consequences of their actions."

This is precisely what three US administrations have done and continue to do. Since DU blockbusters are now being dropped on the restive towns of Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi and Baqouba, death by cancer and leukaemia can be expected to linger in their streets and homes, the fields nearby, and to be carried far and wide by the prevailing winds and the Tigris River.

The World Health Organisation says that the worldwide cancer rate could rise by 50 per cent by 2020, but (under pressure from the world's superpower?) claims that DU is not responsible. Experts critical of the use of this weapon insist that DU is a major factor.

The most horrific aspect of the DU scandal is that the US military, the most powerful on the face of the earth, does not have to use DU weapons of mass destruction to defeat Washington's pathetic adversaries - poorly armed Bosnian Serb forces, scratch Taleban militias, pathetic Iraqi units weakened by more than two decades of warfare and 13 years of sanctions. DU contamination is a war crime which does not need to be committed.

This article was published in the Thursday, September 30, 2004 edition of the Jordan Times. It is used here with permission.