Iraq gas survivors face ``genetic timebomb'' -UK TV

RTw 21.02.98 15:01


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By Giles Elgood
LONDON, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Ten years after Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against his own people in the town of Halabja, the survivors are the victims of an appalling genetic legacy, a British television team has found.
As fears grow that the Iraqi leader may use his chemical arsenal in the event of U.S.-led strikes against him, the people of Halabja bear witness to the long term effects of such weapons on a civilian population.
Journalist Gwynne Roberts, who went to Halabja in 1988 after 5,000 people died when they were bombed in a mustard gas and nerve agent attack, revisited the town in January to find out what happened to the survivors.
In a documentary "Saddam's Secret Timebomb" to be broadcast on Britain's Channel Four television on Monday, he found that those mostly Kurdish survivors had paid a terrible price.
He also said the United Nations had done a secret deal with Iraq under which the world body would not disclose the names of the western companies which had supplied the ingredients for Saddam's chemical arsenal.
And a British scientist who travelled with him found that the medical conditions she saw in Halabja and those shown by veterans complaining of "Gulf War Syndrome" were identical although differing in severity, indicating a link between the syndrome and the effects of poison gas.
The scientist, Professor Christine Gosden, a geneticist from Liverpool University, said the people of Halabja were suffering from much increased rates of leukaemia, asthma, bronchitis, mongolism, respiratory diseases and heart failure.
The number of miscarriages was four times that of the neighbouring town of Suleimaniya, she said. Women were not able to have normal children or the children they already had suffered from severe abnormalities.
"So it is a genetic timebomb," Gosden said. "This is something that continues to explode in these people's lives long after the shells have gone off."
She said she believed chemical weapons caused the body's cells to replicate in deviant ways, causing genetic mutation.
"This will lead to cancers, miscarriages, infertility, birth defects and will genetically damage future generations," she said.
The survivors of Halabja gave harrowing accounts of what had happened that day in March 1988 when Kurdish rebels and Iranians moved into the town and the Iraqis launched a chemical attack.
"We started to vomit. Many people were collapsing around us and dying. The gas smelt of garlic and rotten apples," a shopkeeper said.
Another man said: "This is the house of my neighbour Nawaz, who used to run the teashop in Halabja. All eight members of his family were killed. Afterwards he went crazy because of the gas and killed himself with a knife."
Other survivors had appalling skin disfigurements, aggressive cancers or were unable to stand up or go to the toilet without help.
Roberts said that while wanting to show the effects of what Saddam had done to the people of Halabja, he also wanted to make clear that the Iraqi leader had been supplied with chemical ingredients by the western countries now backing military strikes.
He said the "precursor" ingredients had come from countries as far afield as South America and Europe, with Germany named by many as the main culprit.
Rolf Ekeus, former head of the United Nations inspectorate charged with destroying Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, conceded a secret deal to conceal the identity of the suppliers had been approved by the U.N. Security Council.
"I think the decision I took together of course with the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) was that for the time being, during investigation, we will protect the names for the purpose of getting information," Ekeus said.
Ekeus, now Swedish ambassador to the United States, said governments would "never have forgiven us" if the U.N. weapons inspectors had disclosed the identities of supplier companies.

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