A speech at "A Day and Night for the People of Iraq"
in Kensington Town Hall, London, 6 May 2000by John Pilger
John Pilger is an award-winning journalist and the producer of "Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq," a documentary shown in the UK on prime-time TV on March 6, 2000.
I'd like to concentrate mainly today on propaganda and what it really is about in a free society. I received a letter from Robin Cook a few weeks ago. He wrote to me to say he could not be with us today because of a prior engagement. I invited him after he said in parliament in answer to Tam Dalyell, that he was always prepared to debate the issue of sanctions. I took him up on this and asked him to debate Denis [Halliday] and Hans [von Sponeck]. Mr Cook is understandably a busy man, or in the sneering or rather disloyal words of a one of his junior officials who spoke to a colleague of mine: "The Foreign Secretary doesn't want to be skewered." Had Robin Cook accepted my invitation he would have faced, I believe, a moment of truth; he would have been asked about a propaganda campaign waged by the Foreign Office and the American State Department. In many years of reporting on governments and their lies, I've never known anything quite like it. The Foreign Office these days appears to be consumed by what one of its former officials, Mark Higson who headed the Iraq Desk during the Arms to Iraq scandal, described to the Scott Inquiry as a culture of lies.
Now this three page letter which some of you may have received had you bothered to write to Mr Cook or anybody else at the Foreign Office says it all. It is currently being sent to MPs and members of the public who have written to the government following the recent showing of my film. In paragraph after paragraph it tells lies, not merely distortions, lies.
It says the British government is not obstructing vitally needed humanitarian supplies going to Iraq when in fact Britain has supported an incessant American campaign of obstruction, so blatant that even Kofi Annan complained publicly.
The letter says that Iraq fails to distribute over a quarter of all medical goods, which lie in the warehouses. This has been refuted time and again. For example the World Health programme has insisted that Iraq maintain buffer stocks in warehouses and increase them. As Hans von Sponeck has pointed out, 88% of all humanitarian supplies get to where they are meant to go -- and I think he has updated that figure -- it is even higher now.
The letter claims that there is no credible research data that links the use of Depleted Uranium with the seven-fold increase in cancer in southern Iraq. This is a breathtaking lie. Since 1943 when the atomic bomb was developed there has been an abundance of documented evidence that Depleted Uranium destroys lung tissue and leads to cancer. The UK Atomic Energy Authority quoted a theoretical 500,000 potential deaths in the region following the Gulf War, if only a fraction of DU dust was inhaled. Anybody who has heard the expert and moving testimony of Professor Doug Rockie is left in no doubt of the effects of DU on the civilian population in the region. And what makes this particular Foreign Office lie criminal is that under its sanctions policy the British government denies Iraq the equipment and expertise with which to clean up its contaminated battlefields as Kuwait was cleaned up, while at the same time the Sanctions Committee in New York, dominated by the US and Britain, has blocked and delayed a range of medical equipment that diagnoses and treats cancer, along with chemotherapy drugs. The reason given for blocking these drugs is that they might be used in weapons of mass destruction. The WHO sent a team to Iraq to investigate this. It was led by Professor Carol Secoura, head of the WHO Cancer programme, an eminent specialist. He described the dual use theory applied to anti-cancer drugs as ludicrous and said there is no possibility of converting these drugs into chemical warfare agents. Vital vaccines for children are banned because they might be dual use; but Robin Cook says they are not banned, or rather John Davies, Head of the Iraq Desk at the Foreign Office says they are not banned. According to Davies, the British government must be reassured that the use of every batch of vaccine ordered by Iraq is not for weapons. That so called reassurance can only be given by UN Weapons Inspectors, says Davies, but these were expelled from Iraq in 1998 after they were used to spy for the Americans. According to Davies, no other UN personnel can be trusted. So in this way, the Foreign Office can say that Britain does not technically ban vaccines to Iraq; but for the children of Iraq this sophistry means death from preventable disease.
The letter lords the latest Security Council resolution, Resolution 1284: a complicated, qualified, arcane mess. Almost designed to be rejected by Iraq. John Davies has told colleagues of mine that this resolution changes nothing whatsoever. In other words, it reflects the whole sanctions policy -- it is cynical. Davies attended a conference at Cambridge University last year and was given the special privilege of his remarks being off the record. I always thought a University like Cambridge was meant to be place of free flowing ideas; civil servant who say one thing in private while their Minister says something else in public should be invited to these conferences, but the rest of us should not have to take a pledge of secrecy. For too long the so-called "Chatham House Rules" have denied open public discussion on matters of grave public interest. Let them come and speak the truth to everybody.
I haven't the time to describe every lie in this three-page letter, every deception. It says that I fell for the Iraqi line on the bombing by Britain and America that goes on almost every day. When innocent people are killed by British and American pilots, what is the line? That it didn't happen? That a shepherd and his family of six were not killed by a pilot who made two passes at them? That fishermen were not killed sitting fishing? That villagers were not attacked? All this happened and was verified by UN staff, but because it happened in Iraq the lying machine at the Foreign Office can dismiss it as a line. Between 30 and 40% of causalities, as I understand it, from the bombing are civilians. That is not a line; it's a fact. The United States has conducted 24,000 combat missions over southern Iraq since December 1998, many of them bombing missions. That's not a line; it's a fact. It's the longest Anglo-American bombing campaign since World War II, and it's hardly reported. I met the parents of six children who died in their beds when an American missile struck their street in Basra. I should have said to the fathers, holding pictures of their dead children, I'm sorry that's a line.
Of the bombing, the Foreign Office letter says: "Our actions are entirely lawful." How can they get away with making such a statement? Hans has referred to that kind of lie which in my book meets the David Irving standard. The bombing of Iraq has no basis whatsoever in international law: it was never approved or ratified or anything else by the Security Council -- and that's a fact. I asked the former Secretary-General, Dr Boutros Boutros Ghali, when I met him about this and he was Secretary General in the early '90s, and he verified it, that it had no basis in international law.
Now listen to this sentence from the letter: "Saddam Hussein makes sure there are plenty of malnourished children to film for TV." I can't really describe the obscenity and offence caused by those words and its effect on those of us who have been to Iraq and have watched children die in front of us and find them everywhere. They die, of course, for want of basic medicines and equipment, thanks largely to policies made in London and Washington. John Davies, the civil servant in charge, has never been to Iraq. The junior official who signed this letter, Jamie Cooper, has never been to Iraq. Robin Cook and Peter Hain and Tony Blair, the moral crusader, have never been to Iraq.
Of course, the issue is an old one. It is about those impeccable men in suits who live impeccable middle class lives and who condemn to death thousands of people at great remove in distance and culture. Kissinger did it when he and Nixon killed half a million Cambodians with their illegal bombing. Reagan did it with his illegal attacks on the people of Central America. George Bush did it with his slaughter of Iraqis in 1991, which he called the greatest moral crusade since World War II. You may not have noticed because it has hardly had any publicity, but he has just published a book in which he has told the truth at last: it was all about oil, he said. The moral crusade had nothing to do with it. Imperial governments have been doing it for as long as anyone can remember: from a safe distance, killing people for strategic and commercial advantage. Without Britain as its biggest arms supplier, Indonesia would not have been able to oppress the people of East Timor for as long as it did. A year after New Labour came to power the Blair government secretly urged British arms manufacturers to sell an additional 3000 million pounds worth of arms to the Suharto dictatorship. Right at that time the Indonesian people and the East Timorese people were struggling to free themselves. In other words, from a safe distance, Tony Blair and Robin Cook and the rest were prepared to prolong the agony of that country for commercial gain. They are prolonging the agony of Iraq so that as junior partner to Washington, Britain can draw advantage and gain from a new American oil protectorate that now stretches from Turkey all the way to the caucuses of the former Soviet Union, or one that is being developed. None of this has much to do, frankly, with Saddam Hussein, whose power was partly invented anyway by Washington and London and probably still has a role to play in their eyes by presiding over a crippled nation. But Iraq certainly is a model, and it's a model we should look closely at for what might happen in the future: policy unofficially called Bomb Now, Die Later. After Vietnam the United States decided it was politically problematic for any American soldiers to die abroad, and that has been the policy. It is now a policy in this country, which you kill from a distance and you kill mainly from the air. You bomb first, isolate the country with sanctions, bomb its infrastructure, isolate it with sanctions, and bypass it. Yugoslavia is already undergoing great suffering because of food shortages, and we'll see, unless we begin raising our voices now, this policy extended to other countries throughout the world in the future. I do think as a journalist that it is important that all of us understand that great power is unsentimental: it has no use for the truth. Or as Claude Coburn once wrote: never believe anything until it is officially denied.
I think its time that in a democracy, those of us who are journalists in a democracy, we simply didn't present the rest of the world in terms of its usefulness to western power, that we didn't on behalf of western power censor by omission or minimise the culpability of our own governments. If we are to call ourselves free journalists I think we have to regard ourselves not as agents of power but as agents of people, and Iraq is the best example of that. It's all historically now staring us in the face, or it should be; it has just gone too far. Too many lies have been told -- we can't go on like this.
The Cold War was largely a lie. All the declassified documents now tell us that Britain and America did not believe for a moment that the Russians were coming. The nuclear arms race was largely a lie. The so-called missile gap between the Soviet Union and the United States was an American propaganda invention. The Vietnam War, which claimed 5 million lives, was largely a lie. Ho Chi Minh appealed to the Americans in the 1940s, and Vietnam was divided only because Washington sabotaged peace talks in 1954. And of course these sanctions against Iraq are largely a lie too. If their stated aim was to weaken the regime of Saddam Hussein the very opposite has happened, as anybody who has been there has observed.
I am truly sorry that Robin Cook had to decline my invitation to come today. He also declined, as some of you will know, to appear in my film without impossible conditions imposed by his spin-doctors. Of course, as one of his officials, again disloyally, told us: "The Foreign Secretary does not wish to appear in a film with dying babies." I can understand that, especially if you are defending a policy which is killing babies. So I asked for Peter Hain, the Junior Minister of the Foreign Office, who was also unavailable unless he could make a speech at the end of my film. Peter Hain, the ambitious Peter Hain, another who crossed over, another intellectual and moral contortionist who slanders critics of sanctions as apologists for the Iraqi regime.
I once knew Peter Hain very well. We were both thrown out of Cardiff Arms Rugby Oval when he was demonstrating against Apartheid and I was there as a sympathetic reporter. We became friends, and I made a film defending him when he was stitched up by the conspiracy laws; indeed he described me the other day in print as his old friend.
I offer this advice from an old friend: the sanctions policy you defend, Peter Hain, is disintegrating under the weight of its indecency, its immorality and its illegality. Sanctions against the Iraqi people breach a multitude of international laws, including the Nuremberg Charter and the Covenant against Genocide. So take care, Peter, that you are not the fall guy, the ambitious patsy, who is left to defend a murderous policy that is undoubtedly a crime against humanity. Think, Peter, of the company you keep and the words of Denis Halliday: History will slaughter those responsible.
(End)
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