Counting corpses

>> John Pilger's newest film documents the casualties of a decade of UN sanctions against Iraq

by CRAIG SEGAL

Veteran journalist John Pilger's latest film Paying the Price, Killing the Children of Iraq is as well researched as it is opinionated--and that's saying a lot. The film opens with Pilger's Aussie voice booming over shots of twitching, cancer-riddled Iraqi babies. "This is a film about the punishment of a whole nation," Pilger preaches. "The killing of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them young children, the silent victims of an endless war against civilians waged by Western governments."

Screened two weeks ago by local anti-sanctions group Voices of Conscience, Pilger's film is the latest in over a dozen works documenting the horrors, propaganda and secret agenda of military conflicts stretching from Vietnam to the Gulf War.

In Paying the Price, Pilger takes us back 10 years to Iraq's oil-influenced invasion of Kuwait. Within months, a group of nations led by the U.S. and Britain--and approved by the United Nations--land an army in Saudi Arabia to prepare for Operation Desert Storm. They then bomb the bejesus out of Iraq to prepare for the land invasion. But many of the missiles were coated in radioactive depleted uranium. And many blame the use of depleted uranium--which spread throughout the country, into the water, food and air--for skyrocketing cancer rates and birth defects which turn babies into monsters.

To make matters worse, the UN imposed severe sanctions on Iraq in 1990--still largely in place--which block many essentials from getting into the country. Critics--and Pilger is clearly one--say the combination of the sanctions and uranium have killed more people than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Pilger's film is packed with interviews of high-level sources. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck are former co-ordinators of the UN humanitarian program in Iraq who quit their jobs over the sanctions.

"We are waging a warfare through the UN on the people of Iraq," says Halliday, who himself broke the UN's own sanctions to smuggle medicine to Iraqi babies. "We're targeting civilians. Worse, we're targeting children. What is this about?"

Another scene has Pilger interviewing Peter van Walsum, currently in charge of the UN Sanctions against Iraq. When Walsum sarcastically tells Pilger that sanctions are not meant "as a development aid" to help the Iraqi people, Pilger--not afraid to cross the line into editorializing--bursts into laughter at the apparent lack of sensitivity.

But Montreal's Voices of Conscience would argue that apathy exists beyond the UN. The group has been trying to get the film aired on local TV, but so far with little success. Radio-Canada turned it down, though it was aired on Britain's ITV and is scheduled to play on BBC World. "We were extremely disappointed," says Voices member Marc Azar. "It was a stupid decision, considering that we're dealing with a genocide here."

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