“We can’t show you any evidence because this is satanism, you know,” said Allawi, his neighbour yesterday, “but when someone in the neighbourhood is practising black magic, all the locals know.” Firm in this conviction, a fortnight ago, the people of Rogojampi took the law into their own hands.
Forty-year-old Mr Salam was out when the mob called – so they tore down his little house. Women in the neighbourhood had been becoming mysteriously sick, with swollen bellies that no doctor could diagnose or cure. After praying to Allah for guidance, the victims had dreamed that Salam was responsible, and the local wise men had agreed. She will take pounds 3,000- worth of drugs back to Iraq with her, enough to last for two years.Mariam appeared at a public meeting in London last night, and is due to hand in a thank-you letter to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, at Downing Street today.. But the questions remain: are we helping to cure those whom we ourselves contaminated?.
MARIAM HAMZA, the Iraqi girl brought to Britain for cancer treatment, said farewell to hospital staff yesterday before beginning her long journey home. The four-year-old leukaemia victim (pictured above) was brought to Scotland with her grandmother in April by George Galloway the Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin. His mission was aimed at highlighting the suffering of the Iraqi public as a result of UN sanctions, but critics accused him of allowing her plight to be used for Iraqi propaganda.
Speaking at Yorkhill Hospital, Glasgow, yesterday, Mariam’s guardian in Scotland, Faten Hamed, thanked everybody for all they had done for Mariam.She said: “We would like to thank everybody at the hospital and the Glasgow people.Everybody has been so kind and generous.”The youngster is looking forward to seeing her family again and meeting her two-month-old baby sister for the first time. “In 1989, we received 116 cancer patients in the whole area; last year, the figure was 270 Already in the first 10 months of this year, it’s 331 No one will give us the equipment to test the soil. Probably we are all polluted.”His story might be less convincing if it did not sound so similar to those of the American and British Gulf war veterans whose illnesses – and deaths – have still not been explained by our governments.The medicines paid for by Independent readers have now reached the children of southern Iraq and there were some painful, emotional handshakes from the doctors when they arrived. “It takes longer to cure here now and we get advanced cases, sometimes associated with encephalitis.” He reopens his file. An American military report written in 1990 states that cancers, kidney problems and birth defects are among the health effects of uranium particle contamination.”Even the common cold in Basra is changing its features,” Dr Ali says.
One of the symptoms of leukaemia is bleeding from the nose – now every child that has a nose- bleed is brought here by panic-stricken parents.”The Americans – along with their British allies – fired thousands of depleted uranium shells from tanks and aircraft into the fields around Basra in the last days of the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, projectiles which burn up on impact and scatter radioactive dust around the target; dust that can be transported by wind or water and inhaled by breathing. We are getting patients with carcinoma cancer below the age of 20 – one of my patients is 22, another 18. I have just received a 15-year-old girl, Zeinab Manwar, with leukaemia – she will live only a year. My God, I have performed mastectomies on two girls with cancer of the breast – one of them was only 14 – this is unheard of!”Dr Akram Hammoud, director of the paediatric hospital, is no less appalled.
