The 4.5 million year war crime

During the first Gulf War, and since, American forces have deployed weapons tipped with Depleted Uranium on civilians. Here, Gordon Wishart explains why the use of DU constitutes a crime against humanity, and what the substance with a radioactive half-life of millions of years will do to us, our children, and our world.
The course of military action taken by US-backed Israeli Defence Force (IDF) in Lebanon may have dire consequences for the people and environment of the Middle East for millions of years.
Photographic evidence suggests IDF forces fired Depleted Uranium shells upon Lebanese territory and civilian populations.
Israel’s use of DU is unconfirmed.
Israel does have the capability to produce a DU arsenal. However, it also has the capability to produce tungsten-based munitions which are not as effective in military terms and are more expensive to produce, but do have a similar appearance.
The BBC, amongst others, filmed many bright white explosions in the towns of Southern Lebanon.
These pictures indicate the 10,000 degree pyrophoric temperatures associated with the high impact of Depleted Uranium weapons.
The carbonised bodies of the victims of IDF attacks also back up this theory as carbonisation occurs at high temperatures.
Israel’s acquisition of 100 GBU 28 Laser Guided Bunker Buster Bombs from the US during their attacks on Lebanon are a matter of public record.
In fact, many Voice readers will recall them passing through Prestwick Airport en route to the combat zone.
Bunker Busters are the weapon of choice when targeting underground complexes such as those used by Hezbollah.
Each warhead can contain up to 2000 lbs of Depleted Uranium.
Prestwick Airport’s marketing team could be forgiven for the presumably unintentional irony of their motto: Pure Dead Brilliant.
Hizbollah was criticised last week by Amnesty International for the deaths of Israeli civilians.
Hizbollah “indiscriminately targeted” civilians when it fired its rockets into Israel.
The IDF also received condemnation for its use of indiscriminate weapons such as 1.2 million cluster bomblets, phosphorous bombs and bio-toxins. These weapons are illegal because they cannot differentiate between civilian and military targets. So are DU weapons.
The tactics of US-backed IDF forces suggest they did not deviate from a scorched earth policy.
A military power that is capable of scattering millions of bombs across towns and farmland just before harvest and three days before a ceasefire may be guilty of other crimes against humanity, including contaminating the same targets with thousands of kilos of ceramic uranium oxide dust.
If, indeed, DU weapons were used, Israel has invited a terrible scourge not only upon Lebanon but also upon itself and its neighbours.
Depleted Uranium is highly radioactive and highly toxic.
When DU warheads explode, they combust into minute uranium oxide particles. Scientific studies show these particles can become airborne and travel over one hundred kilometres. High radiation readings were taken in Hungary and Greece after the bombing of Kosovo.
Massive amounts of DU have also been detected in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and southern Iraq following Gulf Wars I and II.
Huge levels of DU can be detected in the mountains in Eastern Afghanistan. Israeli authorities may have exposed their own populations to high levels of radioactive materials.
The health defects caused by uranium oxide particles are well documented, and include massive increases in cancer, tumours and child birth defects to name but a few.
It is estimated that at least 40 per cent of each Depleted Uranium munition combusts into particles so small they can be breathed in. To date, hundreds of thousands of kilos of Depleted Uranium missile warheads, ammunition, and tank rounds have been fired in the Middle East.
The consequences to the Israeli and Lebanese economies are potentially devastating. Tourist economies are unlikely to return to viable levels if tourists realise they risk birth cancer and birth defects in their children.
Agricultural produce is less likely to maintain market confidence if there is a risk of mutated produce.
Significantly, the use of Depleted Uranium weaponry represents a war crime.
Under international law, victims of war crimes are entitled to reparations. Therefore, if Israel has joined the US, UK, Canada and Australia as the countries who have ignored the moral objection to using DU weapons, it may have to share their future headache over the amount of damages they must pay to countries who have suffered the extreme environmental damage from their chosen course of military action.
The people in Lebanon, on the other hand, while suffering massive hardships may be able to benefit the human race.
All aid groups, reconstruction collectives, peace-keeping troops, soldiers and civilians must be aware of the risk that they may be exposed to uranium oxide particles.
Hopefully, this is not the case. If it is, however, the people in Lebanon could help document the tragedy of DU.
Scientific studies on populations who live near DU-contaminated areas could help establish, once and for all, the devastating effects DU has on human life.
Unlike Afghanistan and Iraq, the Lebanese have regrouped under their own authority.
It may be down to the Lebanese to expose the deceit of the coalition of the willing, that depleted uranium is safe.

* See www.llrc.org and www.umrc.net

Indiscriminate killer

Depleted Uranium weapons are illegal. Last November, the European Parliament issued, for the third time, a call for a moratorium on their use.
The entire European Community had been reminded that depleted uranium weapons, as weapons of indiscriminate effect, remain illegal under a host of international conventions.
This declaration is backed by the 2003 report by the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights.
Humanitarian Law includes all treaties governing military operations, weapons and protection of victims of war.
When a weapon is to be determined legal or illegal, it must obey the laws and customs of war. DU weapons fail four important tests.
Firstly, the “territorial” test states weapons may not have an adverse effect off the legal field of battle. In other words, the weapon must be restricted to the combat zone.
Unfortunately DU particles “re-suspend” and cannot be kept on the field of battle, instead they become airborne and hit illegal targets such as hospitals, nurseries, houses, farms and even neighbouring countries- not exactly precision bombing.
Secondly, weapons can only be used for the duration of an armed conflict - the “temporal test”. DU weapons violate this criterion because their particles continue to act billions of years after the war is over. Ceramic Uranium aerosols do not switch off.
Third, the “humaneness” test. In common with the leaders of Western Democracy, DU is guilty of causing “unnecessary suffering” and “superfluous injury”.
How does DU kill? Genetic birth defects, cranial facial anomalies, lymphatic cancer, kidney disease, bone decalcification, missing limbs, tumours and deformed infants. Anyone disagree?
Finally, the “environmental” test holds that no weapon should have an unduly negative effect on the natural environment. DU weaponry cannot be used without contaminating the water supply and agricultural land necessary for the survival of local populations.
Scientific studies from the South Iraq have evidence of DU particles remaining in local vegetation and water sources. DU decontamination operations are complex and labour intensive, they are also too expensive for poor countries to afford.
There are also strong legal grounds for considering the use of DU weaponry in military operations as a war crime.
The Fourth Geneva Convention (Protection of Civilians) description of “grave breaches” includes: “wilful killing... or inhumane treatment... wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health” of civilians.
The genocidal effects suffered by generation after generation long after hostilities cease provide another strong ground for consideration of DU targeting as a crime against humanity.
As we enter the autumn lobbying season, it is more important than ever to ensure our elected representatives challenge the use of depleted uranium weaponry and back the European Parliament’s moratorium. Please apply the pressure.

* See http://www.cadu.org.uk

The untold story of the DU children

The Voice’s correspondent in Baghdad, Isam Rasheed, has been compiling evidence of the effects of Depleted Uranium on babies born into contaminated regions of Iraq.
DU-related birth defects and childhood cancers are two of the great, underreported horror stories of the US-led invasion, and date back to the Americans’ first deployment of the material in 1991.
Isam has reported the story of a 12-year-old boy who, aged 10, played in a field contaminated with DU.
At the age of 11, he was diagnosed with leukaemia.
Then there is the story of Mohammad Mushtak, only months old, who bears the hallmarks of DU poisoning in a massive tumour growing out of his back.
His mother lived near a DU-contaminated site during her pregnancy. Mohammad is her only child, yet medical help is almost unattainable in Iraq.
Another child, Yosif Aadil Salih, was born with dreadfully deformed feet and hands. Corrective surgery is again virtually unattainable here.
DU, known as the ‘silent WMD’, is cited as the cause of the massive increase in Iraq of cancer, kidney problems and autoimmune disease in children, and horrific birth defects, from babies born with organs external to the body to babies born without brains, spines, sexual organs at all.
In 1989, the incidence of such birth defects was 11 in 100,000 in Iraq. By 2001, it had risen to 116 in 100,000.

From unlawful banners to unlawful balloons

by Dick Barbor-Might

The local magistrates were greatly concerned. It was a large gathering and they were alarmed by the sheer size of the crowd.
Around 50,000 people were assembling in St Peter’s Field. But the magistrates had four squadrons of regular cavalry available as well as several hundred infantrymen and a detachment of the Royal Horse Artillery.
And there were the part-time cavalry - notables, gentry and merchants’ sons - who in these troubling times had enlisted in the Cheshire Yeomanry and the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry. And then there were the 400 special constables.
By midday, the magistrates had had enough. The special constables were ordered to form two continuous lines and then, as the crowd linked arms to resist them, the Yeomanry and finally the Hussars were ordered into action.
The demonstrators were dispersed and the organisers arrested and charged with “assembling with unlawful banners at an unlawful meeting for the purpose of inciting discontent”, subsequently receiving terms varying from one to two-and-a-half years.
The Attorney and Solicitor Generals expressed their satisfaction and when Parliament reconvened the Home Secretary introduced the “Six Acts”, one of which (the Seditious Meetings Prevention Act) prohibited the holding of public meetings of more than fifty people without the consent of a sheriff or magistrate.
That was in 1819, the Peterloo massacre.
Fast-forward 187 years. It is a Saturday and the Stop the War demonstration is being shepherded through the streets of central Manchester. We were about the same number as had assembled on that August day in 1819 to listen to Orator Hunt, to demand justice and universal suffrage and to be beaten down as the cavalry sabred the crowd.
But Saturday’s demonstration in Manchester was permitted and the speakers made their points unmolested. So indeed did New Labour, as we could see for ourselves as we passed by the GMEX Conference Centre (a red banner proclaiming “Manchester welcomes Labour”).
Here Tony Blair would soon receive an ecstatic welcome at the conference. “In the city that inspired Britain’s radical tradition,” wrote Tristram Hunt in next day’s Observer, “conference might give thanks to the leadership of one of its true sons.”
On Saturday, we came to a temporary halt on the approach to the rail bridge and so had leisure to observe half a dozen suits with dark glasses, looking as though they were auditioning for Men in Black. Alongside them were a trio of policemen with baseball-style caps and body armour, flexing their legs as they calmly stared down upon us.
Four days later I was in Manchester again but this time for an unlicensed demonstration, a “rally of resistance”.
As I approached St Peter’s Square (all that is left of St Peter’s Field) I noticed large numbers of police officers in shiny yellow tunics, amongst them mounted police and a trio in body armour and baseball hats.
The demonstrators were assembling in an open space by the central library, close to the thin sliver of grass and overhanging trees known as the Peace Garden where Military Families against the War had camped the previous week.
Here now was a chief inspector, frustrated that these protestors would not seek his permission to assemble.
Eventually he acquiesced. Individuals passed a loud hailer from hand to hand, denouncing Blair’s wars and Trident replacement. Others wrote messages to attach to balloons.
Meanwhile 200 or so police officers stood by, outnumbering the demonstrators by two or three to one.
It changed in a moment.
The balloon holders started to move the hundred yards towards the high security fence that surrounded GMEX where Bill Clinton had just delivered his encomium to Blair and Brown as the twin architects of New Labour.
The fence was symbolic for the protestors. So also it must have been for the chief inspector or for his superiors. Already he had issued a warning.
A double cordon of police was thrown around the central group of demonstrators and there all stood while the chief inspector imposed his authority.
No, they could not go into the Peace Garden and, no, they could not disperse then and there but only as and when he chose, and then two by two.
A 76-year old man, last out from the cordon, spoke of his contempt for the unnecessary show of force. Three police dogs barked hysterically, held tightly on leashes.
A smartly dressed woman from Mail on Sunday came out from the conference hall and asked what it was all about.
I watched as she was officiously followed about by a woman police officer who held a video camera a foot or so from her nose.
As it turned out, the journalist was Cherie Blair’s sister, Lauren Booth. As she later wrote in the Mail on Sunday:
“I tried to find out what was going on. Police Sergeant 03078 jammed a camera in my face, warning me that my details would be kept on file and ‘studied.’
“She cited ‘new terrorism laws’ as the reason for filming everyone there...”
In 1819, people were killed in Manchester but in 2006 the deaths in question are in Iraq or Afghanistan or Lebanon or in some future nuclear holocaust.
Indeed, the worst that happened last Wednesday was that people were frogmarched off or arrested for swearing or detained for an hour or so - or filmed, the details to be ‘studied.’
And now it is the Labour Party, that used to honour the demonstrators who were killed at Peterloo, that passes laws against unlicensed assemblies and that directs the police who in turn decide what will and what will not be permitted.
In 1819 it was “unlawful banners” that tried the patience of the authorities, in 2006 - “unlawful balloons”.

—page eight—

Lula struggles in Brazilian elections as the radical left gains new ground

by Jack Ferguson

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has failed to secure the votes necessary to return to power in the first round of the Presidential election.
This has dashed the hopes of the supporters of his Worker’s Party (PT).
Although the PT is supposedly a socialist party, and in local government has made some real and dramatic changes, in national government Lula’s regime has followed the tired, neo-liberal, right-wing policies of privatisation, deregulation and cutting jobs and wages.

Corruption
And that’s even before the voters found out about the corruption scandals that have engulfed his administration. The PT stands accused of buying the support of other parties in Congress, then, two weeks ago, two men with links to the party were arrested carrying $800,000 in cash, which detectives believe was to have paid for a dossier of corruption allegations against the president’s rivals.
The scandal led Lula to sack his campaign manager. He then pulled out of key final TV debates with other candidates, in a move which appears to have been seen as desperate by Brazilians.
Lula secured 48 per cent of the vote, as opposed to 41.4 per cent for former Sao Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin, of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB ).
Despite his best efforts to please the business community, as well as the World Bank and IMF, by implementing right wing, pro-business policies, it’s clear his crisis-hit administration has not got their full confidence.
The two candidates will now face each other in a run-off vote.
Lula is a former metal worker and trade union leader who made his name in the struggle against Brazil’s military dictatorship and subsequent presidential challenges after the return to formal democracy.
Despite the traditional working class base of his party, his campaign has centred on who best could represent the interests of business.
This has been a decisive factor in his failure to win outright. Third in the race was Heloisa Helena of the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSoL), a breakaway from the PT. Heloisa will be known to some Voice readers, having taken up an invitation to speak at a meeting organised by SSP members in Glasgow a few years ago.

Expelled
She was expelled as a Senator from the PT in 2003 for refusing to support government cuts. She secured 6.85 per cent of the vote, tipping the balance away from Lula.
Whilst many in Brazil have been left disoriented by Lula’s betrayal of their hopes, the formation of PSoL, and a new trade union federation that is more grassroots-led, directly democratic and includes membership from unemployed and workers in the black economy, has given hope to Brazilian socialists.
The encouraging result for Heloisa is a promising sign whilst the two main candidates argue over who best can further the international big business agenda.

* http://www.pslweb.org/

French peace boat bomber won’t face further action

Twenty-one years after the French secret service sank the Rainbow Warrior, off the coast of Auckland, the New Zealand government has stated it is now unlikely to act over claims that the brother of a French presidential candidate was behind the bombing which killed one man.
According to Antoine Royal, brother of Segelone Royal, it was their brother Gerard who attached two mines to the hull of the Greenpeace ship, which was anchored in Auckland harbour on 10 September 1985, preparing to protest against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific.
Antoine was quoted by Le Parisien newspaper as saying that Gerard had been a lieutenant and agent of the French foreign intelligence agency, DGSE, in Asia at the time.
“He was asked in 1985 to go to New Zealand, to Auckland Harbour, to sabotage the Rainbow Warrior,” he is reported as having said.
One crew member, the photographer Fernando Pereira, was killed by the bombs, which blew a gaping hole in the ship’s hull.
This state terrorism was internationally condemned and two state agents - Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur - were eventually arrested and convicted for manslaughter.
However, though sentenced to ten years, they were released into French custody after only one, and were hailed as heroes on their return home.
The French government of the time, led by the late Francois Mitterand, insisted that the secret service had carried out the attack without their knowledge.
But an article published in French newspaper Le Monde last year contradicted this.
Written by Admiral Pierre Lacoste, former head of the French secret service, it claimed that Mitterand had not only known about the attack, he had sanctioned it.
Following the latest claim, the New Zealand authorities say it is not in the national interest to open the case they closed in 1991.
Segelone Royal is the favourite to win the presidential candidacy for France’s opposition Socialist party.

North Italian city turns housing scheme into prison for the poor

The Anelli housing estate in Padua, northern Italy, is close to ruin.
Three high-rises were evacuated last year, but the remaining three, despite being unfit for human habitation, continue to be occupied, by people who have nowhere else to go.
People trapped by poverty and circumstance, such as the several hundred African immigrants who have been shunted here out of sight by a local government that would prefer to forget its dependence on immigrant labour.
And forget the appalling poverty that stalks this place, the gang-fights and drugs problems, the violence and intimidation.
Rather than provide increased social support and better accommodation to solve at least some of these problems, the local authority has come up with an ingenious solution - they’ve built an 85 metre long, 3 metre high wall around the problem, effectively screening Anelli off from the rest of the world.

Checkpoint
Now you can only enter via a police checkpoint and yes, comparisons with Israel’s divisive Apartheid Wall in Palestine have been made.
To locals, it’s Padua’s Berlin Wall.
“The people on the other side of this wall don’t want to know the people in here,” says Ibude Agboneta, a Nigerian immigrant.
“They built this wall to hide the problems. But they will not solve the problems in this city by blocking them out.”
Life for immigrants is bitterly hard here.
They work in the menial jobs, as cleaners, construction workers, carers, for a fraction of the wages of their Italian counterparts and on much poorer terms.
And in so doing, underpin the whole of the local economy.
Padua, a city of 250,000 people, would collapse without its 70,000 immigrant workers, who do the jobs Italians would rather not.

Exploitation
The law here decrees that immigrants must have a job contract on arrival and stay only two years.
This opens the door for horrendous exploitation of immigrant workers, who are not only paid less, but receive no sickness benefit or holiday pay and are expected to work long hours.
“If you obey the rules in this city, and you don’t ask too many questions, you can stay.
“But if you challenge your boss and ask why you get paid less than the Italians, you will be unemployed in an instant!” says Ibudi, who works as a cleaner, sometimes for 22 hours out of 24.
Padua is in Veneto, a stronghold of the Northern League, who have gained ground through punting a strongly anti-immigration message.