Iraq’s Children Still ‘Paying the Price’
Center for Research on Globalization, Canada
by Felicity Arbuthnot Global Research
‘No man is justified in doing evil on the grounds of expediency’. Theodore Roosevelt. ‘He never slept in a bed of myths, He didn’t live his childhood’. Ali Ahmed Said, Victims of a Map, Saqi Books.
Three years before the invasion of Iraq, a small film crew were near Mosul, in northern Iraq, filming John Pilger’s soon to be award winning documentary: ‘Paying the Price - Killing the Children of Iraq’, for which I, with former U.N., Assistant Secretary General and former U.N., Co-ordinator in Iraq, Denis Halliday, were Senior Researchers. Halliday, a man of towering integrity, had resigned from the U.N., after 34 years, calling what that institution had been pressured in to doing to Iraq, primarily by the US and UK., as a result of sanctions - in reality, a crippling, water tight, old fashioned siege - ‘genocide …I did not join the U.N., to kill kids.’ He added: ‘We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral.’ (The Independent,15th October 1998.)
Pilger, the crew and I, were standing, ankle deep in dead, dismembered, sheep, on a tranquil plane, in ancient Nineveh, which belied the violence (apart from the sheeps’ remains) rained down on villagers, often daily, by U.S., and U.K., aircraft, patrolling the (anything but) ’safe havens’ in northern Iraq. The patrols, of course, entirely illegal. The sheep were all that remained, to mark a sunny Friday (the Sabbath) where four children, the youngest five, the oldest thirteen, their father and grandfather, had been minding their flock. All were blown to pieces by U.K., or America’s brave ‘boys’, marauding safely thousands of feet above.
Suddenly, the camera swung on me and Pilger asked how I had discovered this place. I explained finding it by chance, then talking to locals, with a colleague, when we were researching an issue of New Internationalist, devoted to Iraq, some months before (New Internationalist, issue 316: ‘Iraq : What the United Nations have done’.) Due to the climate, the site and remains, were little changed. Expanding on tragedies, beyond count, over many visits, I found myself concluding : ‘It is the children who are paying the price for this embargo’.
The children, any country’s most vulnerable, paid the highest price for the embargo and are now ‘paying the price’ for the illegal invasion. America and Britain’s shocking, shameless, price.