Apr 15, 1998
Reuters

By Dominic Evans

AMMAN, April 15 (Reuters) - A British member of parliament flew a young Iraqi cancer victim to London on Wednesday, saying she was a symbol of the suffering inflicted on her country by war and sanctions.

MP George Galloway kissed the hollowed-eyed and frail four-year-old Mariam Hamza, whose condition Iraqi doctors say is linked to radioactive pollution left in Iraq by Western forces, as she was carried off a flight to Amman from Baghdad.

"We hope Mariam will show the British public that Iraqis are people too... not monsters, not demons," said Galloway, who is campaigning to end economic sanctions on Iraq.

He said Hamza's leukaemia may have been caused by British and U.S. bombing in 1991, and could not be properly treated because of the embargo imposed for Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

"I hope Mariam will light a candle which will illuminate the terrible picture we have left behind," Galloway told reporters at Amman airport after his plane, granted rare U.N. permission to fly out of Iraq, arrived from Baghdad.

Airport officials said Galloway, a member of Britain's ruling Labour Party, later left for London with Hamza and her elderly grandmother.

Galloway said his visit to Baghdad hospitals had shown that Iraq had become a "dark place."

"It is a very sad place and its 22 million people are sad and desperate," he said.

Iraq blames the sanctions, which cut off most of its lucrative oil exports, for the death of around 1.5 million people, suffering a marked increase in malnutrition, sickness and infant mortality.

It is allowed to sell $2 billion of oil every six months and spend part of the proceeds on humanitarian needs, but says much more will be needed to build up its depleted medical facilities.

The United States and Britain, the two countries who have taken the toughest line on Iraq, say President Saddam Hussein's government has only itself to blame for failing to meet U.N. demands on dismantling its weapons of mass destruction, and delaying acceptance of its deal for limited oil sales.

The sanctions cannot be fully lifted before U.N. inspectors are satisfied Iraq has destroyed its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Galloway said the sanctions were flawed, punishing the Iraqi people but leaving the Iraqi government stronger than ever.

"A policy which is not moral and is unsuccessful seems to me to be a policy which must be changed," he said. "The Iraqi people never elected their government and they can't remove it no matter how much we make them suffer."

As he spoke in Jordan, the British government said it was sending an extra four Tornado bombers to the Gulf to keep up military pressure on Iraq to abide by U.N. resolutions.

"We have an army of soldiers and sailors in the Gulf. Why don't we also send an army of cancer experts with drugs and diagnostic equipment to try to get to the bottom of this epidemic?" Galloway said.

He said Jordan's Princess Sarvath, wife of Crown Prince Hassan, had agreed to be the patron of the "Mariam Appeal" to raise money for her treatment and send cancer drugs and equipment to Iraq to help other patients.

Galloway said the United States and Britain had a "case to answer" over a reported sharp rise in cancer rates in Iraq, which he said might be linked to their use of uranium-tipped weapons in the 1991 Gulf War when they recaptured Kuwait from Iraqi forces.

"There is a very real suspicion that the use of uranium-tipped weapons in the south of Iraq, which is where the child comes from, is involved in the cancer,'' Galloway said.

Galloway said earlier in Baghdad 927,000 rounds of bullets and 30,000 tank shells, both uranium-tipped, were fired in southern Iraq by U.S. and British forces.

He said that added up to 300 tonnes of uranium dust which could pollute the region for over 1,000 years.

"That's a lot of nuclear poison," Galloway said.

He said Hamza was from a village 150 km (90 miles) from Iraq's southern border with Kuwait, an area bombed by British and U.S. forces in the fighting three years before she was born.

"We believe that these uranium-tipped weapons were used both in her village and against her father on the same front when he was fighting there," he said in Amman.

"We can't prove that the link is there but we say there is a case to answer," Galloway said. "A 600 percent increase in cancer cases can't be an accident." REUTERS

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