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Mass graves found in Iraq

Realist | 27.05.2003 09:43

Mass graves containing thousands of dead have been found in Iraq. Relatives watched as the remains of long lost friends and relatives were unearthed. At least 15,000 bodies are thought to be buried, the remains of Iraqi people who rose up against Saddam 12 years ago at the end of the last Gulf War.

This has been called the Iraqi killing fields and has shocked the world. It proves that the war to topple Saddam was right! Saddam Hussein is thought to have murdered at least 300,000 of his own people during his 24 year reign of terror and forced another million into exile as refugees!

Saddam has rightly been described as the new Hitler!

Realist
- Homepage: http://www.hrw.org/photos/2003/iraq/

Comments

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Mass graves

27.05.2003 10:19

There are almost certainly mass graves in Turkey, especially in the Kurdish south-east, but since the regime there hasn't been overthrown but still sits confidently in the midst of NATO, these have not been bought to light. The whereabouts of many people detained by Turkish police and gendarmes over the past two decades have never been established. In January 2001, for example, two active members of a legal but still harassed pro-Kurdish party (HADEP) were summoned to a local army base. They went and have never been seen since, although the officer commanding the base has received a promotion from his superiors.

The Crimson Repat

The Disappeared of Chile?

27.05.2003 13:14

Thousands of Chilean workers, socialists and liberals were murdered by Pinnochet in Chile in 1973. The Chilean coup took place, ironically, on 9-11, the same day and month as the WTC attack. But there was no service in new York City last September to commemorate the deaths in Chile. The 11th September this year is the 30 anniversary of this CIA backed coup.

Why hasn't the US invaded Chile to arrest Pinnochet as they supposedly did in the case of Saddam and the Iraq invasion? Why was this blood-stained butcher allowed to return to Chile from Britain two years ago instead of handing him over to the Spanish judge who wanted to try him for human rights abuses?

Your hypocrisy is truly breathtaking.

Chris Edwards

a grave issue

27.05.2003 13:31

There may be mass graves in other parts of the world, but does that excuse those in Iraq?

sceptic

Those deaths could have been prevented

27.05.2003 13:43

Yeah, we all know Saddam is/was a mass murdering shitebag, but the US and Britain is partially culpable for the deaths of a lot of those people dug up recently - As you may recall, George Bush told those Shi'ites to rise up against Saddam, and then lifted the no-fly zone specifically to let the Republican Guard butcher the rebels using Hind helicopters.

Saddam's worst crimes, other than perhaps the invasion of Kuwait, were committed with the support and encouragement of the US and British governments. When he stopped obeying orders, his partners in mass murder turned round and attacked his country - killing hundreds of thousands of civilians through sanctions and thousands more through armed aggression.

Suppose I helped you commit a murder by supplying the weapons and setting up the opportunity. Would it be a righteous moral act for me turn round and blow up the house you live in, and much of your neighbourhood as well?

Aim Here

facts, facts ...

27.05.2003 14:32

"George Bush told those Shi'ites to rise up against Saddam, and then lifted the no-fly zone specifically to let the Republican Guard butcher the rebels using Hind helicopters."

When was the no fly zone lifted? I thought it had been in force ever since Guilf War I.


"killing hundreds of thousands of civilians through sanctions"

Sanctions have never had such an effect. Sanctions have been applied to South Africa, to Rhodesia, to Cuba with no such effect. Medicines were never embargoed. And from the news reports of the gold bullion found around the country, there was no shortage of money to pay for them.

"Suppose I helped you commit a murder by supplying the weapons and setting up the opportunity."

Most of Iraq's weapons were actually supplied by Russia. Those Hind helicopters you mentioned? The Russian T54 tanks?

Setting up the opportunity? Bush Snr's only mistake was not to have backed the rebellions more directly.

"much of your neighbourhood as well?" - which part of the Middle East other than Iraq?

sceptic

Facts

27.05.2003 14:54

The No-fly zone was lifted briefly in March 1991, very shortly after the war, and during the Shi'ite rebellion.
Can't cite a reference off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure that google will help you out there.

Russia certainly supplied a lot of arms to Iraq. I never once said, or would say, that the Russian government aren't a gang of mass murdering crooks, so why that's relevant, I'm not sure. On the other hand, you expressed support for the actions of the UK and US government, while condemning an atrocity that they helped commit in the same paragraph.

As for the sanctions never hurting anyone, I'll defer to authority and take the word of various Denis Halliday, Hans von Sponeck, Madeleine Albright and the United Nations over some random stranger on indymedia. No offence.

And for my silly wee analogy, by 'neighbourhood' I meant the ordinary people of Iraq, and by 'murderer' I meant Saddam Hussein and his regime. Sorry for the confusion.

Hope this helps.

Aim Here

facts

27.05.2003 15:45

The northern no fly zone was set up shortly after Gulf War I in an attempt to protect the Kurds. The southern no fly was set up later, and so was never 'lifted'.

The point about Russian arms? Your quote: "Suppose I helped you commit a murder by supplying the weapons".

"killing hundreds of thousands of civilians through sanctions" - find me a Madeleine Albright quote for that.

sceptic

Albright quote

27.05.2003 16:11

Lesley Stahl (60 Minutes): '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?'
Madeline Albright: 'I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it.'

(there's tape of this exchange too, oh sceptic one..)

kurious

shoras!

27.05.2003 16:24

To sceptic, the US purposely allowed the 1991 revolution to be crushed. They allowed Saddam to keep using his helicopters on purpose when it was obvious how he'd use them, they prevented the rebels from getting arms caches of Saddam that the coalition/US troops had captured, and american forces flew overhead and watched while they were slaughtered. Its debatable why they didn't want it to succeed, but it was basically I think a bit of all of this:

-Turkey, Saudi Arabia etc didn't want it to succeed
-didn't want 'instability' in Mid East
-wanted a military coup and a new iron fisted junta, not a revolution

Also the fact that it was a real revolution, not just Kurdish nationalists and Shi'ite muslim. Shoras (worker's councils) were set up in many places and flourished, and there was lots of agitation amongst the people with slogans about shoras being a new way of administering society etc, similar to the soviets. The Kurdish nationalist groups opposed these developments also.

That never gets mentioned in the western media, just like the fact that the 1979 Iranian revolution was really a worker's revolution, with masses of shoras everywhere, committees taking over the factories and running production-even setting oil prices and so on, peasants grabbing land and setting up committees also, women's organisations flourishing, and so on and so on. The mullahs and the guy who came back from exile (can't remember his name) however managed to gain power and wage a counter-revolution against the shora movement.

shoras!

kurious and kuriouser

27.05.2003 18:01

kurious: you are not quoting Albright but quoting Stahl. Who is, of course, one of those people from the nasty corporate news media that never tells the truth ....

Name me one item on that list of sanctions that could kill a million children. Or one that could kill one child. Just one. Any one. Name it.

And as to the idea that the US allowed the rebellion to be crushed ... well, there are those who think the earth is flat, too.

sceptic

Pilger, amongst others,wrote about it

27.05.2003 18:09

i thought it wos common knowledge that Bush had betrayed the Shi'ites at the end of Gulf war one , all the reports from the Basra, Gulf war 2, by the BBC mentioned the fact.
Bush helped Saddam crush the rebellion the people were afraid of getting shafted by fork tongued yankkkees again ..
Pilger goes into detail in his latest book which reminds me I leant it to someone and they never gave it back......

septic

Facts again

27.05.2003 19:07

Sceptic, are you stupid or in denial or something?
Maddy was asked in an interview whether it was right for the US to kill half a million kids - if this charge was false, it would have been her job to deny or refute it. Instead she went on to try to justify it. How is that NOT an admission of guilt?

As for the no-fly zone, you are sort of right that the NFZ wasn't officially declared until after the uprising. But there was certainly a de-facto no fly zone, in that any Iraqi aircraft taking off would have been shot down by coalition forces. This was made clear at ceasefire negotiations.

There was one exception made, and that was at a meeting between General Schwarzkopf and Iraqi commanders on March 3rd. At this meeting, the US, to the surprise of the Iraqis, agreed that the Iraqis could use helicopters to crush the uprisings then taking place, provided there weren't coalition forces nearby.

Aim Here

stupid and in denial

27.05.2003 19:36

UNICEF figures for infant mortality in Iraq:

1960 171 per thousand under five;

1995 117 per thousand under five.

Half a million children - now let's see - calculators out chaps ....

Another set of figures for 2000:

Population of Iraq 22 million. 35.04 births/1,000 population. Therefore 550,000 births per year. Over ten years, half a million children would represent a 10% mortality rate - i.e., 100 per thousand.

Now, someone else will no doubt point out that infant mortality went up after the first Gulf War. This would be hardly surprising, given the conditions in Iraq at the tiem. [Now tell me, what was the title to this original thread?]

ANd something else - no one had yet been able to tell me in what way, shape, or form, sanctions would have affected infant mortality. Tell me, please, someone, what items were embargoed??

sceptic

Hehe, nice abuse of statistics.

27.05.2003 20:24

Nice try, but we're not stupid. You obviously want us to overlook the fact that the infant mortality rate fell markedly between 1960 and 1990. UNICEF themselves actually point this out.

"In July and August 1999, UNICEF launched the first surveys of child and maternal mortality in Iraq since 1991. The findings revealed an ongoing humanitarian emergency in Iraq.

During the 1980s substantial progress was made in reducing child mortality throughout Iraq. If this reduction in child mortality had through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer child deaths (under-five) in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998.
"

Taken from
 http://www.unicef.org.uk/news/Iraq1.htm

Aim Here

now read what I wrote more carefully

27.05.2003 20:38

like my penultimate paragraph?

Yes, of course infant mortality went up in Iraq in the 90s. You do not to invoke sanctions to explain this.

1. Iraq invaded Kuwait; the UN sanctioned the war that led to the driving out of Itaqi forces from that country. Find me a country where the infant mortality rate has not risen in the aftermath of being heavily defeated in war.

2. The defeat was followed by two separate rebellions crushed with extreme force. I doubt this did a lot for the welfare of Iraqi infants.

3. I did say - look at the title of this thread. Mass graves. Children often don't thrive when their mothers or fathers have been shot.


Finally - a question I ask for the fourth or fifth time - what items were embargoed that would have led to the death of half a million children. And, second, why did this have such a dramatic effect in Iraq when no other country [Rhodesia, Cuba etc] which has had sanctions applied has suffered similarly?

sceptic

Okay then

27.05.2003 21:05

And if you'd followed the link I gave you, you'd see that UNICEF blames the sanctions regime for the rise in child mortality. It also says your figure of a 10% mortality rate is roughly right.

As for HOW the sanctions killed people, The World Health Organistion said:
"Since the economy as a whole is under siege, widespread unemployment and shortages of hard currency have resulted in significant erosion in the purchasing power of most families. They can no longer buy the food and medicines they need, the housing and utilities they require and, most importantly, the balanced food stuffs families need to maintain adequate nutrition. "

In other words, the people can't afford to eat properly, or buy medical help, so they get malnutrition or die of curable diseases.

This has been exacerbated by the inability to properly repair the water and sewage and electricity systems after the Gulf War, due to the embargo. And there was a scarcity of medical equipment, despite your assertion to the contrary:
"Recent estimates on the number of major surgical operations during the last five years indicate a reduction of around 40% compared with the period prior to the sanctions. In addition to unreliable electrical power supply, on which the basic requirements of surgical intervention depends, there is an acute shortage of anaesthetics, surgical instruments and other essential necessities needed for surgical interventions. "

To be fair, the medical situation improved slightly since about 1995, due to Security Council resolution 986 ('Oil for Food'). But
"... restoration of health facilities, warehouses, transport and logistics has gone at a slow pace due to lack of funds. Importation is subject to approval of contracts by the 661 Committee of the Security Council. The list of items on hold is often very long and of a very large value. "

There were also malaria epidemics in the early 1990s, caused by a lack of insecticides due to sanctions.

This stuff is dead easy to find - most UN documents nowadays are on the net.

Here are three of them:

 http://www.emro.who.int/Publications/EMHJ/0604/20.htm
 http://www.who.int/disasters/repo/5249.html
 http://www.who.int/disasters/resource/pubs/000396.html

There are plenty more of these. Perhaps you should learn to use Google...

Aim Here

sanctions again

27.05.2003 21:36

Were insecticides a embargoed item?

Now I quote from one of your references [so kind of you to provide them for computer illiterates such as myself]:

"The severity of the Iraq humanitarian disaster arises from the massive and swift degradation of the country's infrastructure as a result of the two wars Iraq was engaged in (the war with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Gulf War). A review of the progress of the programme shows that shortages of medicines, medical supplies and equipment have been relieved and distribution of supplies is reasonably efficient in most parts of the country. Yet, there has been no significant reduction of disease-specific deaths and illnesses. Malnutrition and under-nutrition are now chronic, and health facilities remain in a poor condition."

and:

"However, restoration of health facilities, warehouses, transport and logistics has gone at a slow pace due to lack of funds."

Now think of all those palaces of Saddam and his cronies - no shortage of funds there.


Now there's Cuba - economic sanctions since the 1960s. Lower infant mortality rate than Washington DC, according to an earlier post.

And, by the way, economic sanctions - weren't they imposed by a UN Security Council resolution? And aren't we always supposed to abide by UN resolutions?

sceptic

The war was part of it

27.05.2003 22:20

Nobody's saying that the war wasn't a factor. But Iraq wasn't allowed to rebuild necessary civilian infrastructure afterwards because of twelve years of economic sanctions.
Had there been no sanctions, Iraqi infrastructure would have been repaired, and within two or three years, the infant mortality rate would have returned to normal.
By themselves, wars don't cause hundreds of thousands of deaths in the decades after they finish....

For example, Germany was utterly destroyed in World War 2, far worse than Iraq was, but the post-war infant mortality rate rise was a one or two year blip in an otherwise steadily downwards trend. Germany's infant mortality rate in 1955 was roughly comparable with that of Ireland, and less than that of Spain, European countries which were untouched by the war.

Cuba is an entirely different case. There are no UN sanctions on Cuba, merely a unilateral economic blockade by one country, the US (though obviously that's a major problem for Cuba's economy, given its geographical situation). Other nations can, and do, trade with Cuba, although the US doesn't like it much. The Soviet Union, for example, was a major trading partner of Cuba for the first 30 years of the blockade.

Aim Here

sanctions

27.05.2003 23:09

OK - I ask again - what where the embargoed items that prevented Iraq rebuilding its infrastructure?

sceptic

Well, since you ask

28.05.2003 10:46

For the major part of the sanctions regime, there was no list of banned items. Between 1991 and December 1999, more or less EVERYTHING was embargoed. There was a ban on economic activity with Iraq. That meant Iraq couldn't export anything, couldn't receive any foreign investment,and couldn't import anything, other than some foodstuffs and medical items.

This was an all-out economic strangulation. Inflation skyrocketed because money was now next to worthless - there was nothing to buy. Nobody in Iraq could afford to hire workers to do all the rebuilding, or indeed do anything. Hence unemployment skyrocketed too. In a third world country, that's a killer, particularly where you have to pay for medical attention.

The GDP of Iraq plummeted to between half to one third of what it was before the war, and stayed there. That's a terrifying statistic. If it drops by even 1% in Britain, the newspapers scream blue bloody murder.

Iraq has always relied on imported food to feed it's people.
Food may have been theoretically importable, but how could Iraq pay for it, in any sustainable manner? Oil for Food was only implemented in 1997, and even then only allowed it's citizens a starvation ration - what economic activity was allowed was immediately consumed, with little left over to rebuild the water, sanitation and electricity infrastructure.

This is how the sanctions killed people. It wasn't a simple case of insulin being banned so the diabetics died, or chlorine being banned so the water was contaminated- with Iraq, we bombed and embargoed the country back to a state of poverty. And poverty kills.

I suppose it was, in theory, possible to have repaired the infrastructure under the sanctions regime. Iraq could have gone the Pol Pot route and forced it's largely unemployed citizens at bayonet-point to rebuild the country in return for their meagre food rations. Would you have been happier with that?

Aim Here

Septic Wank

29.05.2003 12:25

Septic's hilarious isn't he?

So blinded by his own bullshit that he can't smell the coffee even when it is forced up his nose!

Cheney D