FROM BASRA TO BAGHDAD
February 2003 1930
REPORTER: Dean Jeffreys
I can't believe I'm returning to Iraq. Last time I was here, 12 years ago, I was retreating along this road from Baghdad, which was being bombed. I remember hiding out in a shelter while bombs rained down outside and Scud missiles headed for Jerusalem.
PEACE ACTIVISTS SING: Together we'll have victory hand holding hand, hand holding hand, together well have victory, hand holding hand.
In 1991, I was part of an international peace team of 90 activists that had camped here in this pilgrim shelter near the Saudi Arabian border. We spent four weeks in the desert, positioning ourselves as a human buffer between the Iraqi and allied forces to try and stop the war.
RADIO NEWS: President Bush, speaking to the American nation, said ground forces were not involved.
NEVILLE WATSON, PEACE ACTIVIST: You know, truth is always the first casualty in war. And really, nobody knows anything.
Neville Watson, a Uniting Church minister from Perth, was with me in the 1991 Gulf Peace Camp. We were often woken in the middle of the night by the roar of coalition bombers flying overhead on their way to bomb Baghdad.
REPORTER (1991): Well, last night was the most afraid I've ever been. To actually hear the planes and hear the bombs and hear the reports that people are dying. Then the reality really hit that, you know, here we are in the middle of two armies. Yeah, I was starting to feel it. I really was.
As the war escalated, the Iraqi army wanted us out of the peace camp and evacuated us.
Now, 12 years later, I'm back in Iraq with a new international peace team. Once again, war is in the air. I joined these peace activists here in Baghdad to add my support to the growing global opposition to the war. Neville Watson is also back, as is Kathy Kelly, another veteran from the 1991 peace camp.
KATHY KELLY, PEACE ACTIVIST: This war can be stopped, and you can almost taste the possibility of stopping this war.
One of our first moves was to demonstrate outside the UN office in Baghdad.
REPORTER: Today's protest out in front of the United Nations by the Iraq peace team is actually about supporting the UN process now. And already we're seeing a lot of pressure mounted by the United States to discredit that whole process.
NEVILLE WATSON: I believe that the ordinary person has to make a stand against war. Political leaders wage war, but ordinary people should never sever the ties that bind them to each other. And that's why some of us have decided to stay in Iraq, even if the war occurs.
STEVE CLEMENS, PEACE ACTIVIST: I think it's important for me, as an American, to communicate to them that they're not my enemy and that we are kind of one humanity.
KATHY KELLY: So what's required? The full and unfettered weapons inspection. But let that process go forward unhindered with the aim that at the end of the tunnel, there's a lifting of the economic sanctions, which I'll be very glad to say have been a weapon of mass destruction. I've seen that destruction here.
A group of us from the peace team decided we would hit the road and see for ourselves. We wanted to know just what the situation of the Iraqi people was and how they felt about another war. We headed south towards Iraq's second biggest city, Basra, where some of the heaviest ground fighting of the Gulf War occurred. When you change American dollars, you can see the economy is in big trouble. Before the Gulf War, one dinar was worth US$3. Now it takes 2,500 dinar to buy $1. Another reminder of the cost of war was here on the locally known highway of death. This is where the Iraqi military were attacked as they were retreating from Kuwait during the Gulf War. Iraqi officials told us that some of the coalition fighter planes that blasted the convoy fired shells that contained depleted uranium.
NEVILLE WATSON: Here's an example of the type of thing that was thrown about during the war. And it's not just small quantities. 35 tonnes of depleted uranium was spread around this area during the war.
REPORTER: We've been told not to touch anything here. And I'm glad it's not a windy day so there's no dust. But I'd say if you walked around here with a Geiger counter, it would go crazy.
NEVILLE WATSON: Depleted uranium is a by-product of nuclear fission. It's still got uranium 235 in it. When it impacts, 40% of it is vaporised. Carcinogenic particles then go into the dust and into the air and into the water table.
We visited Basra Hospital to check out what impact any radiation might have had on the local peoples' health. This girl had just been admitted.
DOCTOR: She's suffering from leukaemia. Leukaemia mean the cancer of blood. And the main cause of leukaemia here, and the cause of increasing cases of leukaemia in this country in these years, is the effect of the depleted uranium.
The doctors told us that because of the UN sanctions, they lack a consistent supply of cancer-fighting drugs. They can do little more than provide blood transfusions and wait for these tiny children's lives to end. This young girl is in the final stages of leukaemia.
DOCTOR: This is a miserable case. We didn't see these cases before the war. But now after the war, there are many, many cases of leaukeamias.
NEVILLE WATSON: Well, this isn't the only hospital I've been to. I've been to quite a few lately and the more I see of it, the more I'm convinced that there is a causal link between the depleted uranium and the birth defects that we've been seeing. It can't be proved, but the numbers are consistently coming up all the time. There would be an outcry if that happened to our kids back home. It's happening to the kids here and nobody seems to give a damn.
There is a doctor in our team, David Hilfiker, from Washington. He brought some medical supplies with him to give to the Iraqis.
REPORTER: So David, what are these and where did they come from?
DR DAVID HILFIKER: I bought them. They came from a store in Washington. They're all over-the-counter medications - aspirin, ibuprofen, vitamins, cold medicines, that kind of thing.
REPORTER: And who are you giving them to? We're giving them to the clinic of the Chaldean church here. This is the bishop. We're just hoping that they can use the medications.
BISHOP OF CHALDEAN CHURCH: I want to say thank you and God bless you. We are very happy that you are sharing us with our suffering.
DR DAVID HILFIKER: Thank you. It's very little.
BISHOP: No, its not little.
Dr Hilfiker runs the risk of a $10,000 fine back in the US for bringing in these medicines in defiance of the UN blockade. That hasn't stopped Kathy Kelly. She's been bringing in medicines since 1996.
KATHY KELLY: We break the law. We break the US laws in an act of non-violent resistance. For that we're threatened with 12 years in prison and a $1 million fine and a $250,000 administrative penalty. In fact, I was just fined $10,000, I guess about four weeks ago, and the organisation, another $10,000. But we won't pay those penalties. We'll instead direct the money into paying for what we do believe in, which is our right to practise the works of mercy and not the works of war.
The more we saw, the more we realised that the real victims of the war in Iraq are the children. Here, what we regard as a lifesaver, water, can be a deadly killer of them.
NEVILLE WATSON: Many of the water plants were hit by bombing, and also the electric grid was taken out, so that the water plants no longer operated. And the tragedy of the sanctions is that they haven't been able to be repaired. They are simply sucking water out of the river and they are pumping it out without any chlorination, and the net effect is that water-borne diseases are being distributed throughout the whole of the community. And water-borne diseases with young children become very serious. We can throw off the effects of diarrhoea, but a young child has no such chance.
I was constantly reminded of a United Nations report from 1999 that claimed since the Gulf War, 50,000 children under the age of five were dying unnecessarily each year in Iraq.
KATHY KELLY: Now what crimes did those children commit? And why should their deaths be utterly neglected by the world community while we fixate, almost as though it's an obsessive-compulsive disorder on whether or not Iraq could pose a threat to any of its neighbouring states, which have been loaded up with weapons, many of them from the United States. Or whether or not Iraq might pose a threat to US ability to control Iraq's oil.
Despite the prospect of war, nothing disturbs the devout faith of the Iraqi people. I was invited by an Islamic Sufi Sheik to visit his mosque and experience their sacred rituals. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. For hours, the faithful chanted to the beat of drums, whipping themselves up into a trance as they communed together. By nightfall, more than 300 Sufi followers had gathered at the mosque, and there was no let-up in the chanting. But then something very unusual occurred. A man, having achieved a trance-like state, is believed by the Sufis to be able to perform miracles. Like eating a fluorescent light globe without visible discomfort.
DR ALI, SUFI SHEIK (Translation): These extraordinary acts cannot be performed if supported by material power, only by spiritual power. These are not human acts. These are acts by God.
REPORTER: It is getting a bit too much now theyre poking things in their eyes.
I asked the Sheik what he felt about the possibility of another war.
DR ALI: (Translation) All Iraqis feel that they just want peace and that they dont want to lose even one hand span of their land. They hate war. They hope a war will never erupt. And they pray for that.
For many Iraqis, the Gulf War has never ended. They live in the no-fly zones in the south and the north of the country, patrolled by US and British warplanes, to protect the locals from Saddam's aggression. But in Basra, we found people who were innocent victims of coalition bombing raids. Waad Hassan and her brother Assad were walking to school one morning when a coalition bombing raid on their suburb occurred.
WAAD HASSAN (Translation): We didnt expect missile strikes. We were walking to school for exams when bombing started.
Waad Hassan lost a kidney in the air raid that destroyed four houses. Her brother was also injured when a wall collapsed on him.
WAAD HASSAN (Translation): I would like to say that they are cowards. Their threats dont scare us, nor did their missile. Well remain steadfast in the face of America, God willing.
REPORTER: We're on our way now to a family that lost three members when a bomb, a so-called smart bomb, landed directly on their house and killed three people.
The American missile that went so disastrously astray on January 25, 1999, reduced this whole street to rubble.
HASSAN ABBAS, FATHER: (Translation): I was at work when the incident took place. I was told to go home to find out what happened. I had no idea then. I went to my house to find it in a pool of water. It was a two-storey house. I had all collapsed. Three of my children, Nour, Doha and Zeinab were removed from under the rubble. This is Doha. This is Nour. Its not easy to lose your kids, whom youve raised. Nour was nine years old. She was in third grade. I returned to find her dead.
MOTHER: We had seven kids. Only two are left. No one is dearer than your kids, not even a father or a mother. No one is dearer youre your kids.
HASSAN ABBAS: My feelings are like those of every Iraqi. Heavy bombing, a house teeming with family members , then the missile. I dont think the Americans made a mistake. I think they did it to spread panic and chaos in the country.
NEVILLE WATSON (Praying): My God, you are peace. From you is peace and unto you is peace.
NEVILLE WATSON: One of the phrases that we often hear these days is we have no quarrel with the Iraqi people, only their leader. That's the rhetoric of war. President Reagan used it when he bombed Libya. Bush Sr. used it when he bombed Iraq, and the problem with it is that when the smoke clears, it's not the leader who is buried. It's the ordinary innocent men, women, and children.
February 2003 1930
REPORTER: Dean Jeffreys
I can't believe I'm returning to Iraq. Last time I was here, 12 years ago, I was retreating along this road from Baghdad, which was being bombed. I remember hiding out in a shelter while bombs rained down outside and Scud missiles headed for Jerusalem.
PEACE ACTIVISTS SING: Together we'll have victory hand holding hand, hand holding hand, together well have victory, hand holding hand.
In 1991, I was part of an international peace team of 90 activists that had camped here in this pilgrim shelter near the Saudi Arabian border. We spent four weeks in the desert, positioning ourselves as a human buffer between the Iraqi and allied forces to try and stop the war.
RADIO NEWS: President Bush, speaking to the American nation, said ground forces were not involved.
NEVILLE WATSON, PEACE ACTIVIST: You know, truth is always the first casualty in war. And really, nobody knows anything.
Neville Watson, a Uniting Church minister from Perth, was with me in the 1991 Gulf Peace Camp. We were often woken in the middle of the night by the roar of coalition bombers flying overhead on their way to bomb Baghdad.
REPORTER (1991): Well, last night was the most afraid I've ever been. To actually hear the planes and hear the bombs and hear the reports that people are dying. Then the reality really hit that, you know, here we are in the middle of two armies. Yeah, I was starting to feel it. I really was.
As the war escalated, the Iraqi army wanted us out of the peace camp and evacuated us.
Now, 12 years later, I'm back in Iraq with a new international peace team. Once again, war is in the air. I joined these peace activists here in Baghdad to add my support to the growing global opposition to the war. Neville Watson is also back, as is Kathy Kelly, another veteran from the 1991 peace camp.
KATHY KELLY, PEACE ACTIVIST: This war can be stopped, and you can almost taste the possibility of stopping this war.
One of our first moves was to demonstrate outside the UN office in Baghdad.
REPORTER: Today's protest out in front of the United Nations by the Iraq peace team is actually about supporting the UN process now. And already we're seeing a lot of pressure mounted by the United States to discredit that whole process.
NEVILLE WATSON: I believe that the ordinary person has to make a stand against war. Political leaders wage war, but ordinary people should never sever the ties that bind them to each other. And that's why some of us have decided to stay in Iraq, even if the war occurs.
STEVE CLEMENS, PEACE ACTIVIST: I think it's important for me, as an American, to communicate to them that they're not my enemy and that we are kind of one humanity.
KATHY KELLY: So what's required? The full and unfettered weapons inspection. But let that process go forward unhindered with the aim that at the end of the tunnel, there's a lifting of the economic sanctions, which I'll be very glad to say have been a weapon of mass destruction. I've seen that destruction here.
A group of us from the peace team decided we would hit the road and see for ourselves. We wanted to know just what the situation of the Iraqi people was and how they felt about another war. We headed south towards Iraq's second biggest city, Basra, where some of the heaviest ground fighting of the Gulf War occurred. When you change American dollars, you can see the economy is in big trouble. Before the Gulf War, one dinar was worth US$3. Now it takes 2,500 dinar to buy $1. Another reminder of the cost of war was here on the locally known highway of death. This is where the Iraqi military were attacked as they were retreating from Kuwait during the Gulf War. Iraqi officials told us that some of the coalition fighter planes that blasted the convoy fired shells that contained depleted uranium.
NEVILLE WATSON: Here's an example of the type of thing that was thrown about during the war. And it's not just small quantities. 35 tonnes of depleted uranium was spread around this area during the war.
REPORTER: We've been told not to touch anything here. And I'm glad it's not a windy day so there's no dust. But I'd say if you walked around here with a Geiger counter, it would go crazy.
NEVILLE WATSON: Depleted uranium is a by-product of nuclear fission. It's still got uranium 235 in it. When it impacts, 40% of it is vaporised. Carcinogenic particles then go into the dust and into the air and into the water table.
We visited Basra Hospital to check out what impact any radiation might have had on the local peoples' health. This girl had just been admitted.
DOCTOR: She's suffering from leukaemia. Leukaemia mean the cancer of blood. And the main cause of leukaemia here, and the cause of increasing cases of leukaemia in this country in these years, is the effect of the depleted uranium.
The doctors told us that because of the UN sanctions, they lack a consistent supply of cancer-fighting drugs. They can do little more than provide blood transfusions and wait for these tiny children's lives to end. This young girl is in the final stages of leukaemia.
DOCTOR: This is a miserable case. We didn't see these cases before the war. But now after the war, there are many, many cases of leaukeamias.
NEVILLE WATSON: Well, this isn't the only hospital I've been to. I've been to quite a few lately and the more I see of it, the more I'm convinced that there is a causal link between the depleted uranium and the birth defects that we've been seeing. It can't be proved, but the numbers are consistently coming up all the time. There would be an outcry if that happened to our kids back home. It's happening to the kids here and nobody seems to give a damn.
There is a doctor in our team, David Hilfiker, from Washington. He brought some medical supplies with him to give to the Iraqis.
REPORTER: So David, what are these and where did they come from?
DR DAVID HILFIKER: I bought them. They came from a store in Washington. They're all over-the-counter medications - aspirin, ibuprofen, vitamins, cold medicines, that kind of thing.
REPORTER: And who are you giving them to? We're giving them to the clinic of the Chaldean church here. This is the bishop. We're just hoping that they can use the medications.
BISHOP OF CHALDEAN CHURCH: I want to say thank you and God bless you. We are very happy that you are sharing us with our suffering.
DR DAVID HILFIKER: Thank you. It's very little.
BISHOP: No, its not little.
Dr Hilfiker runs the risk of a $10,000 fine back in the US for bringing in these medicines in defiance of the UN blockade. That hasn't stopped Kathy Kelly. She's been bringing in medicines since 1996.
KATHY KELLY: We break the law. We break the US laws in an act of non-violent resistance. For that we're threatened with 12 years in prison and a $1 million fine and a $250,000 administrative penalty. In fact, I was just fined $10,000, I guess about four weeks ago, and the organisation, another $10,000. But we won't pay those penalties. We'll instead direct the money into paying for what we do believe in, which is our right to practise the works of mercy and not the works of war.
The more we saw, the more we realised that the real victims of the war in Iraq are the children. Here, what we regard as a lifesaver, water, can be a deadly killer of them.
NEVILLE WATSON: Many of the water plants were hit by bombing, and also the electric grid was taken out, so that the water plants no longer operated. And the tragedy of the sanctions is that they haven't been able to be repaired. They are simply sucking water out of the river and they are pumping it out without any chlorination, and the net effect is that water-borne diseases are being distributed throughout the whole of the community. And water-borne diseases with young children become very serious. We can throw off the effects of diarrhoea, but a young child has no such chance.
I was constantly reminded of a United Nations report from 1999 that claimed since the Gulf War, 50,000 children under the age of five were dying unnecessarily each year in Iraq.
KATHY KELLY: Now what crimes did those children commit? And why should their deaths be utterly neglected by the world community while we fixate, almost as though it's an obsessive-compulsive disorder on whether or not Iraq could pose a threat to any of its neighbouring states, which have been loaded up with weapons, many of them from the United States. Or whether or not Iraq might pose a threat to US ability to control Iraq's oil.
Despite the prospect of war, nothing disturbs the devout faith of the Iraqi people. I was invited by an Islamic Sufi Sheik to visit his mosque and experience their sacred rituals. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. For hours, the faithful chanted to the beat of drums, whipping themselves up into a trance as they communed together. By nightfall, more than 300 Sufi followers had gathered at the mosque, and there was no let-up in the chanting. But then something very unusual occurred. A man, having achieved a trance-like state, is believed by the Sufis to be able to perform miracles. Like eating a fluorescent light globe without visible discomfort.
DR ALI, SUFI SHEIK (Translation): These extraordinary acts cannot be performed if supported by material power, only by spiritual power. These are not human acts. These are acts by God.
REPORTER: It is getting a bit too much now theyre poking things in their eyes.
I asked the Sheik what he felt about the possibility of another war.
DR ALI: (Translation) All Iraqis feel that they just want peace and that they dont want to lose even one hand span of their land. They hate war. They hope a war will never erupt. And they pray for that.
For many Iraqis, the Gulf War has never ended. They live in the no-fly zones in the south and the north of the country, patrolled by US and British warplanes, to protect the locals from Saddam's aggression. But in Basra, we found people who were innocent victims of coalition bombing raids. Waad Hassan and her brother Assad were walking to school one morning when a coalition bombing raid on their suburb occurred.
WAAD HASSAN (Translation): We didnt expect missile strikes. We were walking to school for exams when bombing started.
Waad Hassan lost a kidney in the air raid that destroyed four houses. Her brother was also injured when a wall collapsed on him.
WAAD HASSAN (Translation): I would like to say that they are cowards. Their threats dont scare us, nor did their missile. Well remain steadfast in the face of America, God willing.
REPORTER: We're on our way now to a family that lost three members when a bomb, a so-called smart bomb, landed directly on their house and killed three people.
The American missile that went so disastrously astray on January 25, 1999, reduced this whole street to rubble.
HASSAN ABBAS, FATHER: (Translation): I was at work when the incident took place. I was told to go home to find out what happened. I had no idea then. I went to my house to find it in a pool of water. It was a two-storey house. I had all collapsed. Three of my children, Nour, Doha and Zeinab were removed from under the rubble. This is Doha. This is Nour. Its not easy to lose your kids, whom youve raised. Nour was nine years old. She was in third grade. I returned to find her dead.
MOTHER: We had seven kids. Only two are left. No one is dearer than your kids, not even a father or a mother. No one is dearer youre your kids.
HASSAN ABBAS: My feelings are like those of every Iraqi. Heavy bombing, a house teeming with family members , then the missile. I dont think the Americans made a mistake. I think they did it to spread panic and chaos in the country.
NEVILLE WATSON (Praying): My God, you are peace. From you is peace and unto you is peace.
NEVILLE WATSON: One of the phrases that we often hear these days is we have no quarrel with the Iraqi people, only their leader. That's the rhetoric of war. President Reagan used it when he bombed Libya. Bush Sr. used it when he bombed Iraq, and the problem with it is that when the smoke clears, it's not the leader who is buried. It's the ordinary innocent men, women, and children.