April 13, 2004

Story from BBC NEWS

The scale of the fighting in the Iraqi town of Falluja last week is becoming clear as a shaky ceasefire takes hold.

A group of five international charities estimated that about 470 people had been killed, while hospital officials put the death toll at about 600.

Reuters television footage from Falluja showed corpses of children, women and old men lying in the street beside body parts no one has had time to collect.

“Hospitals and medical staff are overwhelmed,” the five charities said.

They added that they were “asking desperately for blood, oxygen and antiseptics”.

The group said that at a conservative estimate, about 1,200 had been wounded, according to Reuters, which did not name the aid agencies involved.

by Thalif Deen
Published on Monday, April 12, 2004
by the Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS - The U.N. Secretariat, accused of nepotism and corruption in overseeing Iraq’s multi-billion-dollar, oil-for-food program, is expected to name an independent commission this week to investigate the widespread charges of abuse.

Critics say the world body’s credibility rests on the outcome of the probe, but other observers argue it is the reputations of the “big five” of the U.N. Security Council that are at stake since they were responsible for overseeing the program

It’s the members of the Security Council, most significantly the United States and its allies, who were responsible for approving all contracts in the oil-for-food program.

This is one more in a long series of efforts by Washington to divert responsibility for its own failures to blame the United Nations instead.

by Jo Wilding

I’m sorry it’s so long, but please, please read and forward widely. The truth of what’s happening in Falluja has to get out.

Hamoudie, my thoughts are with you.

April 11th Falluja

Trucks, oil tankers, tanks are burning on the highway east to Falluja. A stream of boys and men goes to and from a lorry that’s not burnt, stripping it bare. We turn onto the back roads through Abu Ghraib, Nuha and Ahrar singing in Arabic, past the vehicles full of people and a few possessions, heading the other way, past the improvised refreshment posts along the way where boys throw food through the windows into the bus for us and for the people inside still inside Falluja.

The bus is following a car with the nephew of a local sheikh and a guide who has contacts with the Mujahedin and has cleared this with them. The reason I’m on the bus is that a journalist I knew turned up at my door at about 11 at night telling me things were desperate in Falluja, he’d been bringing out children with their limbs blown off, the US soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were being stopped at the US military checkpoint on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down.

He said aid vehicles and the media were being turned away. He said there was some medical aid that needed to go in and there was a better chance of it getting there with foreigners, westerners, to get through the american checkpoints. The rest of the way was secured with the armed groups who control the roads we’d travel on. We’d take in the medical supplies, see what else we could do to help and then use the bus to bring out people who needed to leave.

I’ll spare you the whole decision making process, all the questions we all asked ourselves and each other, and you can spare me the accusations of madness, but what it came down to was this: if I don’t do it, who will? Either way, we arrive in one piece.

We pile the stuff in the corridor and the boxes are torn open straightaway, the blankets most welcomed. It’s not a hospital at all but a clinic, a private doctor’s surgery treating people free since air strikes destroyed the town’s main hospital. Another has been improvised in a car garage. There’s no anaesthetic. The blood bags are in a drinks fridge and the doctors warm them up under the hot tap in an unhygienic toilet.