Right Stuff

Letters

Vol. 13 No. 6 · 21 March 1991

From David Bull

In his article ‘Right Stuff’ (LRB, 7 February), Alexander Cockburn returns to themes relating to Amnesty International’s 19 December 1990 report on Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait –themes which he has previously raised in US publications and to which our US section has already replied. He continues to claim that reports of the large-scale killing of babies removed by or on the orders of Iraqi security forces are ‘entirely untrue’ and that Amnesty International ‘swallowed whole’ an account to this effect by one Red Crescent doctor.

Here are the facts. In our 19 December report we detailed the torture and extrajudicial execution of hundreds of thousands of victims and the imprisonment of several thousand prisoners. The report was based on medical evidence and in-depth interviews with more than a hundred people from about a dozen countries, including interviews by Amnesty International investigators who travelled to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to talk to victims of abuse, doctors who treated them, other medical personnel, relatives and eye-witnesses. As with all reports where Amnesty International is unable to enter the country concerned, it has been impossible to verify all details. Nevertheless, Amnesty International remains convinced that its report paints an accurate picture of horrifying violations inflicted on victims of many nationalities in Kuwait. Subsequent information has served only to confirm the wide range and intensity of violations we reported.

With regard to the deaths of the babies, Amnesty International believes there is compelling evidence of large-scale killing of incubator babies. Testimony to support this has come from a range of sources of different nationalities, including members of the Red Crescent, medical personnel working in hospitals where the incidents occurred; other medical personnel and people who handled bodies of the victims after their deaths and were involved in documenting these deaths; people who were involved in the burial of the bodies of scores of infants; and a few individuals who reported on specific incidents. All testimonies we received referred to large-scale killings of babies who had been removed from incubators. After our report appeared, conflicting reports emerged about the number of killings. We returned to the sources that were still available and went to others as well. Nothing in our subsequent inquiries gave grounds for revising our overall view about the large scale of the killings, although it is impossible to verify specific figures.

In keeping with Amnesty International’s working policies, we shall continue to collect information on these and other human rights violations by Iraqi forces in Kuwait. But it must be emphasised that this is only part of our human rights work, not only in this region but throughout the world.

David Bull
Director,

Alexander Cockburn writes: In the 46 lines it gave to the charges of mass murder of over 350 premature babies, starting on page 57 of its 19 December report, Amnesty International relied on four testimonies, of which only one purported to be an eye-witness account of incubator theft leading to the death of 15 premature babies thus evicted. The most sensational account, that of a Red Crescent doctor on the payroll of Kuwait’s government-inexile, concerned 312 babies, supposedly murdered in the maternity hospital, but the doctor soon reduced the figure to 72, claiming to have buried this number in a graveyard. He did not claim to have been an eye-witness. The second-hand evidence of another volunteer gravedigger accounted for another 36 babies from another hospital ‘buried in one day alone in August’. A final allegation of incubator theft leading to the death of a set of quadruplets was similarly second-hand.

The imprimatur given by Amnesty International to the incubator stories was astonishingly laconic. Its report contained no evaluation or commentary. Mr Bull’s ‘range of sources’ mustered in his third paragraph remains hazy and appears to be different ways of describing the same small number of people. It was not necessary for Mr Bull to defend the full report, as he does in his second paragraph, since I never questioned anything in it beyond the incubator charges. He padlocks himself to his guns on these charges but soon may be calling for a key. Reports from Kuwait in the aftermath of the war are not supportive of Amnesty’s position. In its 1 March edition the Washington Post ran a dispatch from its correspondent William Claiborne, containing the following: ‘At the Kuwaiti Maternity Hospital, part of the al-Sabah medical complex, obstetrician Mohammed Mahfouz said the Iraqis periodically looted equipment that was in short supply in Iraq. But he said the hospital was able to function throughout the occupation. Mahfouz said the Iraqis did not steal any infant incubators as they were alleged to have done early in the war, but added they did take some advanced equipment for sonar scanning and for in vitro fertilisation.’ Similar démentis of the incubator story have appeared in the New York Times and, in the testimony of a Filipino nurse, on the BBC. Rather than stubbornly clinging to a position imprudently adopted, Mr Bull should perhaps be asking why it was that Amnesty International so blithely gave its support to allegations markedly similar to the atrocities laid on Germans by British propagandists during the First World War. I hope to help answer that question for him in these pages in the near future.

Vol. 13 No. 11 · 13 June 1991

From David Bull

In his response to my letter Alexander Cockburn (Letters, 21 March) suggests that Amnesty International has been guilty of ‘stubbornly clinging to a position imprudently adopted’ concerning incubator babies in Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation. This is not the case. Such was the scale of Amnesty International’s concerns in Kuwait – and these included the babies story – that it sent a mission to Kuwait at the very earliest opportunity. The mission’s prime concern was the wave of arbitrary arrests, torture and killings that had swept Kuwait since the withdrawal of Iraqi forces. However, given that this was the first opportunity to visit the country since 2 August 1990, it was obvious that the whole pattern of human rights violations during the Iraqi occupation would be further investigated. These investigations found that the pattern and scale of atrocities committed by Iraqi forces had been accurately reflected in our December report. With regard to the incubator babies, however, the mission was faced with conflicting information and concluded, on balance, that the evidence available was such that a correction should be issued.

The mission was shown alleged mass graves of babies (although it was not established how they had died), and it spoke to medical sources in Kuwait, including a Red Crescent doctor, who were still claiming that babies had died as a result of being removed from incubators. Officials at Al-Rigga cemetery maintain that mass graves contain the bodies of about a hundred and twenty babies buried during August and September 1990. They insist that the deaths resulted from removal from incubators, but cite as evidence only vague reports, allegedly from bereaved families.

In the light of this, Amnesty International examined the conflicting evidence and concluded that the story did not stand up. The organisation remains unable to determine how many babies died, or how they died. Credible medical opinion in hospitals discounted the allegations of deaths by removal from incubators and this led Amnesty International to issue an update (19 April 1991) with corrections to the December 1990 report. When the December report was issued, the babies story, although shocking, was consistent with the known violations committed by Iraqi forces over the previous decade in Iraq. Amnesty International included the allegations in its December 1990 report after receiving testimony from a range of medical and other sources in various locations.

The organisation takes great care to check and update the information it publishes, and is always ready to issue corrections if previously published data are shown not to stand up. Mr Cockburn’s comments about groups like Amnesty International releasing reports to generate necessary funding is offensive. Amnesty International would never allow financial interests to influence our impartial advocacy of human rights.

David Bull
Director, British Section, Amnesty International