John Pilger
crossfire
Kevin Toolis’s article last week about Peter Hain, “Hain’s world”, contributed to the promotion of Hain as South Africa’s “son of the soil” and bold liberal voice in Tony Blair’s government, but left much unsaid.
These days Hain is seen very differently in Britain from the portrait painted by Toolis, who failed to reflect the widespread contempt felt for his ambition-driven period as Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq.
Toolis quotes me as having accused Hain of “being responsible for 500 000 civilian deaths” in Iraq. This is false. Hain has been one of a number of apologists, in London and Washington, for the disastrous policy on Iraq.
Toolis also gives the impression that I compared Hain personally with Saddam Hussein. This, too, is false. What I have compared is the number of Iraqis killed by the dictator and by Anglo-American driven sanctions, pointing out that human rights lawyers say that Western politicians who condone and incite great suffering, as Hain has done with unusual aggression, bear secondary responsibility for a crime against humanity, “raising questions under the Genocide Convention”, according to an authoritative report to Kofi Annan.
The scale of the crime is placed in perspective by professors John and Karl Mueller of the University of Rochester in the United States. “Even if the [United Nations] estimates of the human damage to Iraq are roughly correct,” they write, sanctions have caused “the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history”.
Toolis echoes the line Hain has liked to push that he has been victimised as a “traitor” by “what remains of the British left”. In this way criticism of him can be deflected or dismissed as an internecine squabble and his shared culpability for the crime of sanctions minimised.
Denis Halliday, the distinguished former assistant secretary general of the UN, has no connection with the British left. Neither has Hans Von Sponeck, who succeeded Halliday as chief UN official in Iraq. Both resigned after 34 years with the UN rather than implement what Halliday described as “genocidal sanctions” that “are destroying a society”. Both regard Hain with disgust: in Von Sponeck’s words, he is a disseminator of “contaminated information”.
Indeed, what has so upset those who have witnessed the suffering and death in Iraq, as I have, is the deceit in Hain’s articles and public statements on the subject. These have been scripted by Foreign Office officials using the familiar, weasel lexicon that was described at the 1994 arms-to-Iraq inquiry as the product of a “culture of lying”.
It has been Hain’s enthusiasm for propagating the lies that has been shocking. You get a sense of this from a recent letter he wrote to the New Statesman, in which he claimed that “about $16-billion of humanitarian relief was available to the Iraqi people last year”. This was entirely false. Quoting UN documents, Von Sponeck replied that the figure was actually for four years and that, after reparations are paid to Kuwait and the oil companies, Iraq is left with just $100 a year with which to keep one human being alive. That is why, as Unicef has reported, half-a-million children have died as a direct result of the bombing of infrastructure and the effect of sanctions.
That Hain has privately expressed doubts about sanctions, which he rejected for Zimbabwe, saying they would “hurt the ordinary people, not the elite”, is a measure of his ambition to be a Cabinet minister. That he has invoked his anti-apartheid record to back up his promotion of sanctions is bleakly ironic. Each time he has abused principled, informed critics like Halliday and Von Sponeck as “dupes of Saddam Hussein”, there is an echo of the apartheid regime calling a young Hain “a dupe of communism”.
Time and again, Hain claimed the so-called no-fly zones in Iraq and the Anglo-American bombing that has lasted 10 years, were legal. I put this to Dr Boutros Boutros Ghali, secretary general of the UN when the zones were invented by the US. He said there was nothing in any Security Council resolution that approved or even mentioned them.
“Are they illegal under international law?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied.
Hain repeatedly denied that civilian targets were being hit by British and US aircraft. Yet he was fully aware of a report by the UN security sector that found that, during a five-month period surveyed, almost half the casualties of the bombing were civilians. They included shepherds, their families and their sheep, fishing villages, food warehouses. UN staff in Iraq are now so terrified of the bombing, they refuse to deliver humanitarian supplies during the afternoon.
Hain also defended the use of depleted uranium (DU) in the Gulf war, claiming there was “no evidence” of its insidious after-effects. At the same time he vigorously supported the denial to Iraq, under sanctions, of equipment needed to clean up the contaminated battlefields, as well as drugs to treat cancer victims whose numbers, according to the British Medical Journal, have increased sevenfold in southern Iraq.
I put Hain’s statements to Professor Doug Rokke, the US Army health physicist who led the “clean-up” of DU in Kuwait, and now has 5 000 times the permissible level of radiation in his body and is ill. He replied: “There is no reasonable doubt about this. As a result of the heavy metal and radiological poisoning of DU, people in southern Iraq are dying from cancer.
“At various meetings and conferences, the Iraqis have asked for the normal medical treatment protocols. The US Department of Defense and the British Ministry of Defence have refused them. I attended a conference in Washington where the Iraqis came looking for help. They approached myself. They approached the British. They were rebuffed.”
I was once a friend of Hain. I made a film defending him when he was wrongfully accused of a bank robbery, a disgraceful episode not unrelated to his anti-apartheid activism in Britain.
I don’t know why principled people turn; alas, Hain has plenty of famous company. Ambition is a common thread. He has since been demoted to junior energy minister, no doubt because his apologetics for the great crime in Iraq were a tad too enthusiastic and embarrassing.
This is not to suggest he won’t end up with a Cabinet job. Blair, the bomber of Baghdad, is said to like his stuff.