Samizdata

Anyone who knows anything about oppressive totalitarian regimes knows that nothing is as it seems and politically loaded public displays in such countries should be dismissed out of hand. This rule should have been applied to the images from Saddam ruled Iraq of convoys of taxis, with tiny coffins of dead infants strapped to their roofs slowly driving through the streets of Baghdad. The children were allegedly killed by United Nations sanctions.

The moving scenes, accompanied by crowds of women screaming anti-Western slogans, were often filmed by visiting television crews. The western media, so shrewd and cynical when it comes to reporting on Western politicians and so naive and gullible when manipulated by dictators’ propaganda, provided valuable ammunition to anti-sanctions activists such as George Galloway, who routinely blamed Western governments for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. And to the Guardian, who regularly reported on the beastly US and its minions as being responsible for the death of the (cynically paraded) babies and the on-screen grief of their mothers (mock grief of the members of the Iraqi Women’s Federation).

As expected, the reality behind the Ba’athist regime’s dystopian methods is slowly coming out. In the case of ‘baby parades’ Iraqi doctors in Baghdad tell Charlotte Edwardes, a Telegraph reporter that UN sanctions did not kill the hundreds of infants displayed over the years – it was neglect by the former regime.

According to the Telegraph, Iraqi doctors say they were told to collect dead babies who had died prematurely or from natural causes and to store them in cardboard boxes in refrigerated morgues for up to four weeks, until they had sufficient corpses for a parade.

Many of the children died, they say, as a result of the Iraqi government’s own neglect as it lavished funds on military programmes and Saddam’s palaces in the knowledge that it could blame sanctions for the lack of medicines and equipment in hospitals and clinics. Dr Hussein al-Douri, the deputy director of the Ibn al-Baladi hospital in Saddam City, a Shia district in eastern Baghdad explains:

We were not allowed to return the babies to their mothers for immediate burial, as is the Muslim tradition, but told they must be kept for what became known as ‘the taxi parade’. The mothers would be hysterical and sometimes threaten to kill us, but we knew that the real threat was from the government.

Asked what would have happened if he had disobeyed the orders, Dr al-Douri replied: They would have killed our families. This was an important event for the propaganda campaign. The government then ordered members of the Iraqi Women’s Federation, an organisation funded by the regime, to line the streets of Baghdad and wail and beat themselves in mock grief.

Dr Amer Abdul al-Jalil, the deputy resident at the hospital, said:

Sanctions did not kill these children – Saddam killed them. The internal sanctions by the Saddam regime were very effective. Those who died prematurely usually died because their mothers lived in impoverished areas neglected by the government. The mortality rate was higher in areas such as Saddam City because there was no sewerage system. Infectious diseases were rampant.

Over the past 10 years, the government in Iraq poured money into the military and the construction of palaces for Saddam to the detriment of the health sector. Those babies or small children who died because they could not access the right drugs, died because Saddam’s government failed to distribute the drugs. The poorer areas were most vulnerable.

We feel terrible that this happened, but we were living under a regime and we had to keep silent. What could we do?

What could they do? Not much, if they wanted to live and continue in their profession. But those who lapped up Saddam’s obvious propaganda for their own purposes should now recant their accusations as loudly as they heaped them.

Let’s hear it, the Galloways of this world!