Mark Zeitoun: War exacts human price that cannot be repaid

If we insist on attacking countries already on their knees, let's at least not delude ourselves about the benefits of humanitarian assistance.

When I hear of fighting in or around Basra, I think immediately of the falcon-hunters and salt-gatherers. Both are new phenomena, developed around an enormous lake of raw, pure sewage in the middle of the desert near Iraq's second-largest city.

The lake – a lesser-known effect of the complete economic sanctions imposed by the UN 12 years ago – is the end-point of the city's human, hospital and industrial waste. It's a toxic brew and public health catastrophe that attracts birds and, through evaporation, creates tons of salt.

The birds attract the hunters; the salt attracts the poor. Over the year that I spent there as a humanitarian-aid water engineer with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the whole new, apocalyptic ecosystem even attracted the odd journalist.

Journalists were a rare enough breed back in 2000-2001, with no war machine yet to be imbedded into.

More importantly, there was no interest in the average Iraqi child's tragic life under the dual yoke of a brutal dictatorship and the genocidal UN sanctions policy.

There was no interest either in the paltry sums of humanitarian aid provided to combat the effects of these sanctions (compare the $500 million spent by the UN, the ICRC and various embassies in 1999 with a $15.5 billion Gross Domestic Product, the oil-exports of which are disallowed by different UN agencies to be spent inside the country).

No interest even in the absurd fact that assistance to a country with the world's second largest oil reserves would be needed – or provided – in the first place.

Back then, pre-9/11, there was much more interest in the issue of depleted-uranium. Nato use of the radioactive by-product in Kosovo was wreaking havoc with the kidneys of British veterans; American veterans of the first Gulf War also mounted an effective campaign against it.

At the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, the wandering freelance journalists were left to wonder (aloud) if the villagers' children's grotesquely deformed heads or leukemia was really due to the firestorm of bombs unleashed upon these people in 1991.

After all, I pointed out, it could also be due to the industrial and hospital waste found in their drinking-water source (the Euphrates), or else the ever-present pools of human sewage, the unchecked spread of whatever disease from their livestock, the effect of unregulated use of pesticides and fertilisers, the prolonged consumption of un-iodised salt, etc.

And if they saw a little girl limping to school, it was not worth wondering about the effects of depleted-uranium – she'd been maimed by a landmine, or cluster-bomb or any other unexploded object left behind by either the U.S., the Iraqis or the Iranians. War is brutal, and it always affects children the deepest.

Assurances

This changes not with repetitious assurances by earnest talking heads of any force of a quarter of a million men trained and ready for combat. And it is certainly not altered by another round of too-little humanitarian aid arriving too late.

Like Afghanistan, most of Iraq was severely crippled before it was attacked. Consider the giant Basra Teaching Hospital, the only surgical hospital in all of the south. Years of neglect had left this inefficient, poorly-insulated building a place where people go to die, not to be cured.

The classy and dedicated British-trained director of the hospital worked 12-hour days to keep it barely functional.

My diary records him on the subject of post-operation infection rates two days after U.S./UK strikes temporarily knocked out the power to Basra in the full, humid 50 plus degrees Celcius heat of the summer: "I lose too many patients these days.

We currently prescribe double the amount of fluids, but we still lose the patients. We thank you for the work already completed and underway, but on a day like today, with no electricity to power the air-conditioners, it's a disaster".

The Ibn Al Rashid Infectious Diseases hospital (whose waste mixed with the neighbouring AIDS hospital before flowing untreated into the Euphrates just downstream of Baghdad), was equally humid and mortal, offering a fertile environment for the reproduction of viruses and diseases it was supposed to be curing.

It takes a fully-funded, fully-functioning Ministry of Health to support nation-wide health care, and the $10 to 50 million being spent in this sector by the humanitarian aid agencies although crucially important and desperately needed could at best sustain this situation and not improve it.

Just as the attempts at food and water-distribution by the U.S./UK's forces do little to reduce the immediate and long-term risk of humanitarian catastrophe currently looming in Basra, Hilla and Baghdad.

Any large city, especially one so weakened by a full decade of sanctions and despotism, needs a fully-functioning municipality to provide its basic services, and its people need to access their farms for food, their hospitals for treatment.

Encircling and besieging a vulnerable city quite naturally and undisputedly creates more damage than any amount of biscuits and bottles of water can repair. These places must breathe freely soon or thousands risk death.

But before dying they will live in absolute fear. My Iraqi friends still working there attest to this. They – educated in the U.S., Switzerland, India, Russia, Iraq or elsewhere – are in good spirits, and are working around-the-clock to restore running water. Most of the time the occupying forces will see the flags on their vehicles and refrain from shooting, but that doesn't stop their kids from wetting their beds every night.

No control

It also gives them no control over, or faith in, the accuracy of missiles launched from hundreds of kilometres away, and they describe to me the fear of hearing them approach for interminable seconds before the strike.

My friends will keep working, however, applying band-aids to a country dying of sabre-wounds.

The message must get through to the uninformed public and belligerent decision-makers: humanitarian assistance is no solution. Not prior to a conflict, not during and not afterwards. Even a massive reconstruction and development effort – if indeed one is sincerely implemented – can rebuild the roads and power plants, but cannot reverse the children's trauma.

I'm not optimistic that history will record that all of this was absolutely avoidable, and I know that our leaders will repeat mistakes, stricken as they are with chronic myopia.

But I retain hope that we will realise the realities of war and the limited benefits of our humanitarian aid, and work harder on political solutions within an international framework next time around.

Until we attempt to do so, we are mocking the notion of universal human rights, wasting money on futile assistance, destroying the environment and disfiguring and scaring the living hell out of children.

The writer is a Canadian freelanc