The Iraqi dictator says his country's children are dying in their thousands because of the West's embargoes. John Sweeney, in a TV documentary to be shown tonight, says the figures are bogus. Here he reports from Iraq on his findings Terrorism crisis - Observer special Observer Worldview
Sunday June 23, 2002 The Observer
The witness against the government of Iraq walked stiffly into the room, metal callipers buckled to heavy medical shoes. They had tortured her two years ago. She is now four.
Her father had been suspected of involvement in a plot to kill Saddam Hussein's psychopathic son, Uday. He fled to the north of Iraq, but the secret police, the mukhabarat, came for his wife, still in Baghdad, and tortured her. When she wouldn't break, they tortured 'Anna' in front of her.
Her father, 'Ali', is a thick-set Iraqi who worked in Saddam's privileged inner circle. He described what they did to her: 'They had a wooden stick. They would squeeze her feet and ask "Has Daddy called you?" - she understood - "Does Daddy contact you?"'
She is a victim of Saddam's brutality, proof that he is prepared to dispense violence against even his country's children. By a cruel irony, her father is also witness to Saddam's efforts to portray those same children as victims of Western sanctions, which he claims have cost hundreds of thousands of young lives.
Osama bin Laden justified the 11 September attack on America by referring to a million dead Iraqi children - killed by sanctions. But there is a belief among many Iraqis that Saddam is inventing the numbers.
Ali, outraged that Saddam's torturers may have crippled his daughter for life, spoke openly about how the regime's propaganda has faked mass baby funerals - 'evidence' of the 7,000 children under five the regime claims are being killed each month by sanctions.
Small coffins, decorated with grisly photographs of dead babies and their ages - 'three days', 'four days', written usefully for the English-speaking media - are paraded through the streets of Baghdad on the roofs of taxis, the procession led by a throng of official mourners.
There is only one problem. Because there are not enough dead babies around, the regime prevents parents from burying infants immediately, in the Muslim tradition, to create more powerful propaganda.
The taxi drivers do what they are told - as everybody does in Saddam's Iraq - to their evident disgust. Before Ali defected to the north, one friend of his, a taxi driver, explained how it worked: 'I went to Najaf [a town 100 miles south of Baghdad] a couple of days ago. I brought back two bodies of children for one of the mass funerals. The smell was very strong.'
Ali continued: 'The taxi driver didn't know how long they'd been in freezers, perhaps six or seven months. The drivers would collect them from the regions and would be informed of when a mass funeral was arranged so they would be ready. Certainly, they would collect bodies of children who had died months before and been held for the mass processions.'
A second, Western source, went to visit visited a Baghdad hospital and, when the official Iraqi minder was absent, was taken to the mortuary. There, a doctor showed the source a number of dead babies, lying stacked in the mortuary, waiting for the next official procession.
Anna was the youngest witness to child torture by the Iraqi government in an investigation, The Mother of All Ironies, to be broadcast by BBC2's Correspondent today. It found six other adult witnesses in the Kurdish safe haven in the north - the only part of Iraq where people are free to speak.
The most chilling witness was one of Saddam's torturers, who was captured spying against the Kurds this year. 'Kamal' told us: 'They would bring the son in front of his parents, who were handcuffed or tied, and would start off with simple methods of torture, such as cigarette burns. Then they started using other methods of torture, more serious ones.
'They would tell the father that they'd slaughter his son, and they'd bring a bayonet out, and if the parents didn't confess they'd kill the child. 'The interrogator has the right to kill the child, or perform any other butchery, whatever's necessary.' And then Kamal chuckled.
It is an absolute of the government of Iraq - and others - that thousands of Iraqi children are dying every month because of sanctions. We managed to get a cameraman to accompany a fact-finding trip into Iraq this year by the Great Britain-Iraq Society, led by its chairman, Labour MP George Galloway.
At the start of the trip Galloway, in Iraq for the ninth time in two-and-a-half years, said: 'Every six minutes an Iraqi child will have died under the embargo. That's every six minutes of every day, of every night, every year for 12 years.'
In 1999 Unicef, in co-operation with the Iraqi government, made a retrospective projection of 500,000 excess child deaths in the 1990s. The projection is open to question. It was based on data from within a regime that tortures children with impunity. All but one of the researchers used by Unicef were employees of the Ministry of Health, according to the Lancet.
The dead babies are blamed by Saddam's regime on cancers and birth defects which first appeared in 1991 and were, it says, caused by depleted uranium weapons. While no one should underestimate the lethality of these weapons and the stupidity of the US military machine, the claim does not make radiological sense. According to Dr Nick Plowman, head of clinical oncology at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, the claim 'is ridiculous. It flies in the face of everything learnt from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.'
Cancers do not develop overnight. Bombs that fell in 1991 could not have caused cancers or birth defects in that year. Fast leukaemias might occur in four or five years, heavy tumours around now, said Plowman.
Richard Guthrie, a chemical weapons researcher at Sussex University, said: 'It's much more likely to be chemical weapons. There are serious clusters of cancers in the south of Iraq near Basra. In the late Eighties, Basra was almost taken by Iranian human-wave offensives, and Saddam stopped these by dropping chemical weapons on them and, by accident, on his own people.
· John Sweeney's report will be shown in