Jordanians accuse US of preventing pencils from reaching Iraq pupils

    AMMAN, Jan 26 (Agence France Press) -

    A Jordanian committee for solidarity with Iraq on Wednesday accused Washington of trying to prevent it from sending millions of pencils to Baghdad in a challenge to UN-imposed sanctions on that country.

    The 50 six year old students of Al Shemar Al School
    in Basra. Sept., 1998.
    -photo by Chuck Quilty, Voices in the Wilderness

    A committee member made the charge after police prevented them from holding a press conference in a public place to announce details of the dispatch Friday to Baghdad of 3.2 million pencils for Iraqi schoolchildren.

    "There are American pressures on the (Jordanian) government to prevent us from sending the pencils to the Iraqi schoolchildren," Salem al-Nahhas of the National Mobilisation Committee for the Defence of Iraq told journalists.

    According to the non-government organisation pencils are banned from entering Iraq under the nine-year-old UN sanctions on Baghdad because they have dual usage: lead pencils contain graphite which could be used for military ends, notably in nuclear reactions.

    The evidence lies dying in Basra

    By Robert Fisk in Beirut
    (The London Independent)
    25 January 2000

    In IRAQ, there are doctors aplenty who would like to meet the Royal Society's scientists.
    Baby boy Muntiha, less than one day old with
    congenital malformation. The baby has stumps for arms and legs.
    Basra, Sept., 1998.
    In a hospital with 35-40 deliveries/day, they are now averaging
    13 congenital malformations/ month.
    On the day of our visit, there were 3 such births.
    -photo by Chuck Quilty, Voices in the Wilderness
    In the main Basra teaching hospital, the cancer sufferers who live near the fields where depleted uranium shells (DU) were fired by the hundreds in 1991 queue at the door of the tiny cancer clinic each morning. But will the British scientists meet them?

    Will they go to Iraq and study the documentation of Basra's leading cancer specialist, Dr Jawad al-Ali, who has maps showing the rate of leukemia growth in the areas where Saddam's tanks were torn apart by DU in the last days of the war?

    I think not. When Iraq asked the World Health Organisation to investigate DU two years ago, a team of experts arrived to see if such a study was feasible; but no investigation took place. And what about Kosovo? The US used DU rounds in its attacks across the Serb province - and then arrogantly refused to tell UN investigators the location of its attacks. The Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, admitted as much in the Commons last autumn. Why? Why cannot we be told where these rounds were fired?