Thu, Oct 11, 2001 page6

• Conflict after conflict, dead babies are a component of `atrocity propaganda'

  • THE GUARDIAN
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  Just as the Germans in World War I were said to have tossed Belgian babies on their bayonets, and the Iraqis were said during the Gulf war to have thrown Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators, so -- according to Osama bin Laden -- the Americans have been baby-murdering on a grand scale. He and his associates replay this theme repeatedly.

  Yet the number of "dead babies" varies somewhat.

  After the first day of Anglo-US bombing, bin Laden went out of his way to announce in his obviously pre-prepared videotape: "A million innocent children are dying at this time as we speak, killed in Iraq without any guilt."

  The same accusation was used as an attempt at self-justification earlier this year in the US trial of a bin Laden associate, convicted of the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

  There had been more than one million deaths in Iraq, the defense claimed in June in New York. The 24-year-old prisoner Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-O'whali, told the FBI he had been prepared to die as a martyr to "wipe away the tears of the mothers whose children have been murdered from American policy."

  Three years previously, in February 1998, the text of bin Laden's fatwa urging jihad against the Americans was published in al-Quds.

  Bin Laden described "the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and ... the huge numbers of those killed, in excess of a million."

  Eighteen months prior to that, his estimate had been slightly more modest. In an interview with Nida'ul Islam magazine in October 1996, bin Laden was quoted as referring to: "America and Israel killing the weaker men, woman and children in the Muslim world and elsewhere ... the death of more than 600,000 Iraqi children because of the shortage of food and medicine ... resulted from the boycotts and sanctions against the Muslim Iraqi people."

  It seems chillingly clear that, in the training camps, bin Laden's young Muslims have it dinned into them again and again that the Americans kill babies.

  One way of looking at these very deliberate evocations by bin Laden of dead Iraqi infants is to say that they merely provide confirmatory evidence of a long-standing unholy alliance between Saddam Hussein, the atheistic "Butcher of Baghdad," and bin Laden, the mad mulla of the Afghan mountains.

  This would no doubt be the position of "hawks" such as the former British foreign secretary, David Owen, who argued in the UK's Daily Mirror newspaper this week that intelligence links between Iraq and bin Laden's al-Qaeda justify a second wave of military action to finally remove Saddam.

  But the awkward fact is that it was not bin Laden who originated these claims of baby-killing in Iraq. It was America's critics in the West.

  The journalist and film-maker John Pilger has been among the most trenchant. Writing in the Guardian last year he said: "This is a war against the children of Iraq ... the most ruthless embargo in modern history. According to the United Nations Children's Fund, the death rate of children under five is more than 4,000 a month -- that is 4,000 more than would have died before sanctions. That is half a million children dead."

  Bin Laden simply took the Pilger figure and, with each successive speech, more or less doubled it.

  But are Pilger and his western colleagues correct? In part the answer is that there were never any dead babies at all. The "dead babies of Iraq" are a statistical construct.

  The half-million figure can be traced back to a WHO report published on March 25, 1996, titled The health conditions of the population in Iraq since the Gulf crisis. The WHO sent a consultant epidemiologist to Iraq in 1995 and, relying on Iraqi figures, said infant death rates had soared by 600 per cent over the four years from 1990 to 1994. The New York-based Center for Economic and Social Rights then extrapolated in May, saying: "These mortality rates translate into a figure of over half a million excess child deaths."

  And so, on the US 60 Minutes TV program on May 12 1996, the then secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, was asked: "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?"

  Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it."

  In July last year a more thorough UNICEF survey suggested the previous figure was double the truth, that is, 250,000 children might have died. But as sanctions had been going on twice as long by then, the statistical estimate remained the same.

  UNICEF said: "If the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under five in the country as a whole in the eight year period 1991 to 1998."

  Saddam blames US sanctions for this child mortality, while the US blames Saddam for deliberately letting infants die. But however theoretical the figures, over whatever period, and however controversial the reasons, it seems hard to dispute that babies are dying unnecessarily in Iraq. Bin Laden's propaganda may be exaggerated and one-sided. But he does appear, objectively, to have a sort of a point.
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