Iraq (Hansard, 2 April 1993)

§ Miss Emma Nicholson (Torridge and Devon, West)

We have started our debate, as we always do, with Prayers, and as I said the Lord's Prayer this morning, the words, "deliver us from evil" struck hard in my heart because it is an evil upon which I ask the House to concentrate.

May I match that Christian prayer with the cry that is on the lips of the marsh Arabs and which echoes Allah's words revealed in the Koran 1500 years ago: He is Allah most gracious: we have believed in Him, and on Him we have put our trust, so soon will you know which of us it is that is in manifest error. Say, 'See you? If your stream be some morning lost … who can then supply you with clear flowing water? The House has been kind to me in allowing me time for debate over the two years during which I have been working for the people of Iraq, and especially for the people of southern Iraq. It is their needs on which I ask the Minister to concentrate. I shall compare them a little with the needs of northern Iraq, which are large. Today I want to focus upon the forgotten people, the marsh Arabs, the Ma'dan, and the people who are sheltering in those marshes with them. In all, there are about 600,000 people.

The debate is timely, because it takes place in the wake of a special meeting that the Foreign Secretary and subsequently the Prime Minister held with the Iraqi National Congress. The Minister of State, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Grantham (Mr. Hogg), who is here for the debate, was also present. I should like to put on the record the keynote points that the delegation representing Iraqis from the north, the centre and the south through membership of the new Iraqi National Congress, which is fully representative of all the opposition bodies, raised with the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary on 30 March.

First, they called for a new United Nations Security Council resolution to enact resolution 688. Secondly, they asked for the full implementation of resolution 688, and they asked the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary to concentrate on discussing methods of reversing the current repressive measures instituted by Saddam's regime.

Thirdly, they asked for the removal of the extensive and ecologically destructive activities of the regime in the marshes, such as on the dams and drainage channels. I shall return to that. Fourthly, they asked for the removal of the economic blockage against Iraqi Kurdistan in the north, especially the denial of petroleum products, without which people there cannot keep warm. They also asked for the cessation of arbitrary executions in Baghdad, the 736 release of all political prisoners and the return of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deportees to their homes all over Iraq.

Manifestly, these last two right and proper requests are beyond us in the House just now, but the extension of the no-fly zones to include all of Iraq is a possibility. More important would be the adoption by the Security Council of the recommendation of the special rapporteur on human rights in Iraq to place human rights monitors all over Iraq. In the wake of that, the delegation requested a security zone, a safe haven, in southern Iraq. Finally, they asked for a war crimes trial for Saddam Hussein himself.

I know of the sympathetic hearing and the deep understanding which the Foreign Secretary, the Prime Minister, the Minister of State and Foreign Office officials extended to the Iraqi National Congress at the meeting. This morning gives me an opportunity to put on record in Hansard some of the reasons that lie behind the congress's requests. They are the sufferings of the people in the marshes; the destruction of a wonderful historic part of the world that can never be re-created; and the problems that face the United Nations in its legal tangle, which seemingly prohibits it from helping the Arabs who are locked into the marshes and facing destruction by Saddam Hussein's forces.

A little while ago, by courtesy of Iran, I and my colleagues in Tehran and in the south of Iran managed to arrange a 10-day visit by a very brave journalist from The Observer—its senior foreign reporter, Shyam Bhatia. His report was published in five pages of The Observerfive days ago. Last week, the paper allowed me to describe my thoughts in an article. The situation is truly desperate. Most days, I get information from the marshes by fax, and sometimes by telephone, too. The people there report that things are terrible.

The work that I have been carrying out has been to do with organising medical and food aid, so the medical needs of the area land on my desk each week. As I wrote in The Observeron Sunday, cholera has now started in the marshes—a terrible death, which we have not known in the west for many years. Hardly any food is available because of the blockade by Government forces. Skin and gut infections, diarrhoea, typhoid fever, food poisoning, eye diseases, conjunctivitis, gynaecological and pelvic inflammatory diseases, dental and gum diseases and sunstroke—all these are taking their toll. I have been in the marshes when the temperature exceeded 50 deg C, and there is no shelter, giving rise to sunstroke. All these diseases are widespread and largely untreated.

Polluted water is all there is to drink. Last autumn, it appeared that Saddam Hussein was poisoning the waters, but knowledgeable people, scientists, tell me that it is not necessary to poison the marsh waters. Just draining them is enough; the water level becomes so low that the salts and acids in the water become concentrated, and that poisons the people. There is nowhere to put sewage, human or animal, so everyone I know in the marhes has constant dysentery. Children cannot be immunised; there is no cold chain of refrigeration to get the vaccines in, so there are no vaccines in the marshes. Polio, measles, whooping cough, mumps and other childhood diseases are rampant. The children are stunted because breast milk is in short supply owing to severe maternal malnutrition. Without even the most primitive obstetric services, mothers just die in labour.

737 On top of all this, there is constant military bombardment. The famine has been caused not just by natural factors or a lack of water; we are talking about a planned destruction of a people and of their wonderful environment. Now that the marshes have dried out, it is easy to use incendiary bombs. In January, February and March, telegrams from the marshes to me described villages, people and animals being burnt to death. The rice farms that supplied the staple diet for the marsh Arabs have been burnt out. The fish have died—they used to provide protein—and the water buffalo have just fled because of the bombardments.

The marshes are losing water fast. I do not know whether the latest suggestion by two American senators would be useful—bombing the dams to release the Tigris and the Euphrates again.

We are talking about an historic area. The House Library contains a book called "Ancient Iraq", written by Charles Roux and first published in 1964. Updated in 1992, it has gone through four reprints. It reminds us of the history of this part of Iraq, going right back to the Sumerians 6,000 years ago. After them came the Akkadians, and the Assyrians, and so we can recall the waters of Babylon, beside which people sat down and wept. Echos of the Old Testament are to be heard throughout the history of the Iraqi marshes, that unique part of the world where the Tigris and Euphrates have provided the great flow of water which has given these people a way of life.

I know that the Ma'dan pre-date the Arab invasion of Iraq. They are a unique and historic people. Their antique language pre-dates Arabic, which differs from it significantly.

This area contains a great deal of special wildlife. Hon. Members will recall Gavin Maxwell's wonderful book, "Ring of Bright Water", which was about an otter. Few will recall, however, that the otter, Mijbil, was discovered in and brought back from the marshes of Iraq. It was a unique variety of otter, common in the marsh areas. It is called lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli. It was a previously unknown species. The area also contains wild boar, various kinds of terrapin, some rare and threatened species of bird, such as the pigmy cormorant, dalmatian pelicans, marbled teal, red-breasted geese, lesser white-fronted geese, white-tailed and imperial eagles, Bara reed warblers, Iraqi babblers and grey hypercolius. Some of these birds are there all the year round and are specific to the area.

We should look at the marshes of Iraq as a wetland of unique importance. It is half the size of Switzerland, and it has survived for a long time as an area rich in all kinds of fish, some of which are probably unique to it. The world conservation monitoring centre recently declared the marshes of Iraq a site of primary ecological interest.

As the House knows, I have been describing the sufferings of the people in Iraq for nearly two years. If I turn now to the destruction of this wonderful environmental area, it is not because I have any less concern for the sufferings of the people—the more I visit, the more I learn, the more appalled I am by how harsh their suffering has become. But the world tends to say that these are just another group of suffering people—what can we do about them? So perhaps if we ask the world to think about the ecological impact, those who write letters about 738 the destruction of the rain forest will bend their minds and hearts to the destruction of an area replicated nowhere else in the world and now being physically destroyed.

Last week, I received a fax from Ayatollah al-Hakim in Tehran. He told me of yet another new dam keeping the waters away from the marshes. In the west, we have become so used to reacting to television programmes and pictures that we may have forgotten to use our imaginations. Perhaps our imaginations are no longer vivid enough to understand the impact of this drainage on a people's heritage—a drainage so profound and so disgraceful that this land, above water for the first time in history, is becoming completely visible.

Saddam Hussein says that this drainage, which he now admits is happening, is for agricultural purposes, but scientists tell me that the land is of such poor quality that it will not sustain even one meagre harvest. It is not the sort of land that can create the wealth that will feed people; it is not land on which subsequent harvests will flourish. There will be just one meagre harvest and then no more.

In desperation, the Amar appeal, of which I am chairman, is conducting a major survey of the marshes. It will be spearheaded by the chairman of the wetlands committee of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, of which the United Kingdom and most member states of the United Nations are members. It is an unusual body, as it covers private organisations such as the World Wild Fund for Nature.

What will the survey consider, and why is it so critical? We will examine the evidence for recent changes in hydrology and other environmental conditions in the marshlands complex of southern Iraq. We will describe the environmental, ecological and human conditions before the hydrological modification and other changes in environmental character. We will assess the effects of hydrological and other environmental conditions in terms of changes to the flow regime, water quality, soil, vegetation and land use, fisheries and the habitat for wildlife, especially for endangered, rare and threatened species.

We will then evaluate the likely impacts of the changes on the maintenance of the ecological character and environmental quality, on the character of agriculture in the region and on human communities within the region, with particular reference to food security, the local economy, transport, health and social welfare, culture, education and amenity. We will look at human communities outside the region, with particular reference to environmental impacts, resource implications and heritage values, and will make recommendations for restoration and rehabilitation, where appropriate, of the ecological and environmental integrity of the area.

We will also look at more human aspects, such as education, and we hope to match the ecological side of the report, which will be spearheaded by Dr. Ed Maltby of Exeter university, to whom I have already referred, with a report that will be conducted under Professor David Morley, the immediate past head of the Institute of Child Health. His chapters will be buttressed by those on education.

It is vital that we carry out this work. The Iraqi environmental protection group, headed by Sayeed Jayfar and Ibrahim Uloom, pulled together and published in January this year all the known material on the destruction of the marshes and the drainage projects, and it makes disheartening reading. I know that, because the Security 739 Council held a special meeting for me in December, as I told this place in January, where I was able to show all the captured maps showing the irrigation and its consequences. But since then, nothing has been done, so we have asked the International Union for Nature Conservation—that great body—whether it will conduct the survey under its umbrella, and it is considering doing so.

At the moment, the director-general says that the Amar appeal is an inappropriate body to ask it to do so. I have, therefore, asked our Government and the Governments of the United States and Holland to apply, but, most important, two days ago, through the good offices of the president, Prince Philip, I was able to contact the World Wildlife Fund International in Geneva, where I found a home for this thinking—the director, Claude Martin, who was interested and who understood at once.

It seems that ecologists and environmentalists have been watching and waiting for a trigger that would enable them to act. Their concern is shared by us, and it matches the concern of the Amar appeal friends and supporters about the human aspect of the matter. I am very hopeful that the survey will provide those in authority throughout the world with the material that they may care to use to stop the destruction of the marshes and of the people in the marshes.

We believe that the study is an important matter. Meanwhile, as it proceeds—it has begun even though nobody has invited us to do so, because the scientists recognise the need for haste—the people die. This week, therefore, I met Dr. James Grant, the executive director of UNICEF, and 10 days ago I went to New York and saw Mr. Eliasson, the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, and begged for their help. I learned that the United Nations is not prepared to act. Resolution 688 covers the entirety of Iraq, and the member nation that proposed it, France, was firm and fierce in wording it, yet the United Nations has turned away from considering the marshes of Iraq and has thus condemned 600,000 people to certain death.

It is not just the starvation, illness or the lack of water which will result in human and wildlife extinction. Access routes run along the top of the dykes, which mean; that not only Land-Rovers but tanks can drive into the heart of the marshes. There is currently a brief cessation, because late March and early April always bring floods. Those floods are now hardly coming into the marshes, because the dykes have stopped the rivers, but none the less there is a little water. We believe that, when that water ceases, as it will in April and May, the killing fields will begin in earnest. The people inside are not armed to defend themselves. The ones whom I have seen on my own trips have just carried old rifles and few bullets.

I want to read only the last paragraph of a letter that I received yesterday from Mr. Eliasson from New York. He kindly says that it was a pleasure to meet me and that he admires my work, but that is not the point. He says: As I explained in New York, the United Nations, in the present situation, is not in a position to assist directly in support of your concrete programmes. That means no aid for the marshes, as we are the only people who are giving aid. He goes on: I have, however, taken careful note of the proposed study of the marshes and will be consulting with my colleagues as to what we can do in this regard. The subject certainly deserves increased attention by potentially interested parties. I know that the United Nations is the servant of its members, and that it is up to us to decide what we want to 740 do. There is no shortage of material. The special rapporteur for human rights in Iraq, the former Foreign Minister of the Netherlands, delivered his report on 19 February. It made terrible reading. On 5 March, members voted on it and proposed a resolution, which was good. It was adopted by a vote of 46 for, one against and 16 abstentions. Again, they stated their deep concern about the grave violations of human rights by the Government of Iraq and said that these have led to a deterioration of the situation of the civilian population in southern Iraq, particularly in the southern marshes.

The motion states that the members express their strong condemnation of the massive violations of human rights, of the gravest nature, for which the Government of Iraq is responsible, resulting in an all-pervasive order of repression and oppression which is sustained by broad-based discrimination and widespread terror, in particular: Summary and arbitrary executions, orchestrated mass executions and mass graves throughout Iraq, extrajudicial killings, including political killings, in particular in the northern region of Iraq, in southern Shiah centres and in the southern marsh area; The widespread routine practice of systematic torture in its most cruel forms; Enforced or involuntary disappearances, routinely practised arbitrary arrests and detention, including of women, the elderly and children and consistent and routine failure to respect due process and the rule of law; Suppression of freedom of thought, expression and association and violations of property rights; The unwillingness of the Government of Iraq to honour its responsibilities in respect of the economic rights of the population. The motion goes on and on and on. It requests the Secretary-General to take the necessary measures in order to send human rights monitors to such locations as would facilitate improved information flows and assessment and would help in the independent verification of reports on the situation of human rights within Iraq. Knowledge, knowledge and more knowledge is what we are asked to provide. I am happy to give the United Nations the knowledge that it is not gaining for itself from the marshes. However, while the knowledge flows, people are dying and no aid will be given to the marshes in case that jeopardises the northern aid or creates other political tensions. The toehold in Basra recently achieved by UNICEF is the Deputy Secretary-General's sop to Cerberus. The marshes are surely the hell beyond the jaws of Cerberus.

I will end with a thought that came to me as I listened to Ayatollah Al-Hakim in Tehran. At the end of a meeting at 3 am, we were all very tired. I had just come from a four-hour meeting with a wonderful man—an Iranian appointed by the President of Iran to take responsibility for all Iran's relationships within Iraq—Mr. Agamohamadi. He was a former Member of Parliament before he was appointed by the President to his new task. He is a large ray of light on the horizon. He spent a month inside Iraq during the uprising under the care of Mr. Talabani. He saw the horrors. Some of the things he told me were indeed horrific. He said that we had seen nothing yet.

Mr. Agamohamadi went there and brought out some of the people who had been injured by the chemical bombs in the attack. He saw thousands of people being killed, running here and there, not knowing what to do or where to go. He saw many mothers killed with their babies held to their chests. He saw families of five or six killed together. He saw all that with his own eyes. He said that if a person 741 opposes Saddam's regime today, all his family will be in danger and under threat. It is impossible to calculate the number of missing people, because the number is unlimited. That short statement encapsulates the reason for my four-hour meeting with Mr. Agamohamadi.

Later, I spoke to Ayatollah Al-Hakim about that meeting. It was very late, and somehow his attention was drawn back to the early 1980s, when he was captured and imprisoned. He was placed in a deep cell with no light. It was damp and he had no water or food. He was taken out only to be tortured. He was tortured ferociously for weeks on end and after each torture session thrown back into the cell. The man who was in the cell before him had gone completely mad. Ayatollah Al-Hakim held on, and he said nothing. In the end, his torturers gave up on him after three months. They said that he must have had something rather curious wrong with him which meant that his flesh could not feel pain. He had not cried once, but their perception was not true: he felt it all.

After Ayatollah Al-Hakim had told me this, he turned to Sheik Mahmoodi and said, "I don't know why I'm talking like this. Sheik Mahmoodi had a much worse time than me." Sheik Mahmoodi told me what had happened to him and then said, "But that is little compared to what some people went through."

As we spoke, 300 people were entering Tehran from Iraq. They had been released from prison, which was astonishing. They had served 10, 11 or 12 years—we must remember that Saddam Hussein took control in 1979. Later in the week, they began to die because, as they left prison, they had been given thallium injections. To have hope dashed so cruelly is unbelievable.

I say to my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister, to the House and to anyone who will listen that this is a tyrant whose evil is unbelievable. If we fail to help, what right have we to say the Lord's Prayer, to seek delivery from evil for ourselves, so readily and happily each day? What right have we to look the Iraqi victims in the eye?