Madmen in the desert

Finding the Paradox - the Path to Enlightenment

Madmen scream and roar in the Kuwaiti desert. Theirs is the voice of death, but they never get on television, so there isn't really anything to worry about - is there?

As you read this, over 500 wells are burning with a sound like hundreds of jet turbines in the Kuwaiti desert. A cloud of black carbon soot extends over Kuwait through Saudi Arabia to Bahrain. It extends into southern Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan. An inch of black oil has settled high in the Himalayas. Smoke from the fires hovers over our heads right now in Vancouver, smoke that has helped to confound our weather this summer - and, according to Scientific American, weather all around the planet.

The smoke cloud has circled the globe several times already. Unusually high concentrations of soot have been discovered over places as diverse as Tokyo, Hawaii, Montana, and China. Places that have experienced some of the severest rains and flooding in over a century. Britain and parts of Europe have been affected. Northern Chile, a place known for its dryness is undergoing floods. Some of these conditions have been exacerbated by recent volcanic eruptions in Japan and the Philippines, however climatic information shows that since January severe weather anomalies have occurred all around the world. Scientists are reluctant to say all these weather conditions were caused by fires in Kuwait, but certainly if you take a bell-jar representation of planet Earth's atmosphere, inject a million tons of carbon soot gases into it every day, you are going to affect climates. The big question now is, how soon will these fires be put out and what further anomalies can we expect?

You probably don't know that what is happening in the Gulf now is the greatest environmental disaster in modern history. Our victory parades were premature; the real war continues. Now it is an eco-war with ramifications even more horrific than the damage suffered by the combatants in the gulf to date.

One of the very few people who does know is Randy Thomas. Mr. Thomas is an environmental journalist, knowledgeable in British Columbia forestry and pollution. He left for the middle east early in of 1991 to assess the ecological damage to the area. His consulting capacity in the Gulf was through GEERT (Gulf Environmental Emergency Response Team), whose mandate was to funnel appropriate technologies to the governments in the Gulf region and to find beneficial, cost effective and environmentally benign solutions to an ecological disaster. He was entirely self-financed, self transported and, in conjunction with two members of Earth Trust, formed the entire response of the Coalition governments, to the greatest ecological disaster of all time.

How did we get into this mess?

Without condoning or pardoning Saddam Hussein, Iraq has had legitimate complaints with Kuwait over its borders for many years. After the war with Iran, Iraq was many billions of dollars in debt — a debt financed in large part by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states who supported Iraq against Iran. Iraq had a considerable trouble making those repayments. There was a lot of tension between the countries.

According to Kuwait Ministers, the CIA and the American government urged Kuwait to increase production, thereby driving the price of oil down and further damaging Iraq. There is also documented evidence of an American drilling company - related to the Bush administration - slant drilling on the border, into the Remaya Oil Field of Iraq. They were stealing oil from financially desperate Iraq, goading Saddam Hussein. He warned them twice, to desist, massing 100,000 troops on the border, even telling the American ambassadress that he was about to invade if he could not get satisfaction.

She replied, "We have no opinion on this matter. We will not interfere in disputes in this region."

Kuwaiti officials say the Americans promised Kuwait, "We will be there within 24 hours of an invasion. Don't worry, you're covered!" So in a sense, the Allies, the Americans in particular, created another Noriega, another monster who got out of their control. They had to find a provocation to put him down.

The United States benefited enormously. Many Kuwaiti intellectuals and academics say, "We were set up! The United States set out to destroy Kuwait and then they saved us from a very brutal occupation. We are beholden to them as saviours."

There is a lot of confusion. To Thomas and other observers, it's quite clear that the U.S. decided to break the control of the suppliers of its oil addiction, particularly Saudi Aria and Kuwait. If in fact, that was their design, and there is some circumstantial evidence to support this — they have succeeded.

In 7 short months they have irrevocably changed the geo-political situation in the Gulf. Once dependent on its suppliers, they have bankrupted Saudi Arabia, ruined the economy and country of Kuwait and managed to become the benefactor, the saviour, if you like, of both countries against a common enemy which they helped to create. The U.S. benefits enormously in securing its oil supplies, in assuring a place for a permanent military presence in the Gulf and for putting the upstart Arabian countries in line with an unmistakable warning.

"Don't play games with our oil supply ever again! You know who has the power here!" Other OPEC countries are certainly on notice as well. In fact, the whole planet is now on notice that there is one global cop calling the shots. This war was an explicit warning to 3rd world nations. To put it bluntly, "Do not to step out of line!" A show of force and a show of media control unprecedented in history.

Despite the bleak political analysis, Thomas is no cynic, his real message is that whether we point fingers at Saddam Hussein, (deservedly so), George Bush or anyone else, this eco-war is beyond blame because of its sheer magnitude. Thomas is convinced that Mother Earth cannot absorb another war of this magnitude and possibly not even the consequences of the Gulf War already passed.

He describes an oil spill which, according to Saudi Environmental officials, is 25 times larger than the Exxon Valdez. He flew the length of this slick twice with the Saudi Air Force, documenting it on videotape. So far, his is the only videotape of the 'super-slick' in existence. He speaks of heavily oiled marshes and wetlands destroyed, precious wetlands that were already in decline from urbanisation and industrialisation throughout the Gulf, of endangered sea-grass beds, coral reefs, of the hatcheries for turtles, shellfish, fish which are concentrated in the endangered northern Gulf.

Mr. Thomas has obviously been shaken to the core by what he has seen. He thinks of it as an epic disaster in the most biblical sense.

He seems uncertain as to where to begin, but once started, he goes on literally for hours, listing facts and figures of calamity - without ever repeating himself. He seems like a man who's been to hell. Having returned, he is uncertain about how to present the lurid details.

He lists the interlocking environmental emergencies: accelerated desertification caused by hundreds of miles of tank tracks; revetments and trenches; tens of thousands tons of munitions blowing up, destroying the micro-organisms that anchor desert sands, keeping them together; of temperature drops of 30 degrees Fahrenheit which he experienced while driving south under the smoke cloud. Photosynthesis was all but blocked by the soot cloud. Acid rain, having fallen throughout the region, triggered an early bloom in plants. Perennial plants germinated to find themselves in summer, not autumn.

He is very concerned.

Together with two members of Earth Trust, he prepared an environmental impact study for the third son of the Emir and briefed various cabinet ministers in Kuwait. He warned that the ecology of Kuwait was unravelling at such a rate, that the viability of Kuwaiti society would soon be at risk if those in power did not move very quickly. To date virtually nothing has been done.

Mr. Thomas advocates an international response with the same kind of manpower, equipment, financial resources and resolve as was shown by the powers when they first precipitated the war. That is not happening.

As with the Treaty of Versaille, we may be looking at the seeds of the next war; a war to be fought over diminishing crops and fresh water supplies. From the southern Soviet Union through Iran massive damage by acid rain has endangered crops as well as human life. Wide spread contamination of ground water supplies is occurring as lakes of oil a mile long sink into the desert sands, into the fresh water below. He photographed oil in the inlet arms of desalination plants in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The actual inlet pipes are located in the Persian Gulf, five feet underwater, but as the oil weathers, it becomes neutrally buoyant, hovering at between three and five feet underwater. Kuwaiti scientist, Dr. Sami Yakoub, and a doctor from the U.S. National Cancer Research Institute, Dr. Shamidan, are quoted as saying that mixing hydrocarbons, (oil), with the chlorine used in desalination plants virtually guarantees cancer in anyone who drinks it.

The particulate matter given off by the oil field fires is estimated at a current rate of 1 million tons per day, and is extremely toxic, extremely carcinogenic. Dr. Natshell from the British Commonwealth Health Department warned that these particulates, measured at unusually high levels and unusually large sizes, are very easily respirated in human lungs. He predicted a significant jump in lung cancers in Kuwait within the next 10-15 years.

"Living in Kuwait today is like living in Chernobyl after the reactors blew." says Thomas, "You know that every breath you take is laden with mega-tons of very deadly toxins, but you never know exactly what types or in what amounts. So the stress level is very high."

Before he left the area in early May, flocks of birds were falling dead out of the sky in Kuwait City. Sheep, horses and goats were dying in fields. Pets died in people’s living rooms. People are now beginning to ask, "If this is happening to the animals around us, what is happening to us?" — this after months of denial that there was any problem at all.

Only eight weeks after the war, the wreckage that is everywhere in Kuwait had rusted to a degree that bespoke years of corrosion. This phenomenon indicates, according to scientists, a very, very high level of sulphur dioxide and CO2 in the air. Estimates are that daily emissions total 850,000 tons of carbon soot, (a far more effective sun block than volcanic ash), 100,000 tons of SO2, (which forms sulfuric acid in the presence of any moisture - including human mucous tissue); 50,000 tons of CO2, (greenhouse gas), as well as 2,000-3,000 tons of nitrous oxides, (the SO2 and nitrous oxides also attack in the ozone layer).

"So watch out for further effects on the human immune system and crops throughout the region" Thomas warns, "and we're not talking Kuwait any longer, but an area extending all the way over to India!"

Dr. Abdulla Toukan, top scientific advisor to the King of Jordan, claims that his computer model showed that after all fires were extinguished, the soot would precipitate out of the atmosphere within 3 months. A further 8 fire fighting teams have entered Kuwait, bringing the total to 12. That's the good news. The worrying news is that while some hope the fires will put out in 1 year, other pessimists - Red Adair, for one, think it could be much longer, probably more like 2 or 3 years. That would have horrific consequences for the entire planet.

The crux of the problem of course, is who is to pay to shut these things off? Kuwait is paying for it. Kuwait does not want to pay for it. Kuwait has been nearly bankrupted by this war as has Saudi Arabia. They do not want to pay for an environment that has never even been a consideration in the Gulf among Arab states. So the short answer is, no one over there wants to pay. The Allies not only don't want to pay for the clean-up, they don't want to admit that there is a problem, that their victory came at such a cost. We have seen almost a complete cover-up of the true extent of this disaster. Fragmentary information, a few articles here and there, have trickled out, but just as the shooting war was so artfully media-managed by Washington and the Allied governments, so too the eco-war has been covered up; its true extent is virtually unknown.

The members of the Gulf Environmental Emergency Response Team opened the Kuwait Environmental Information Center in the center of Kuwait City, in the International Hotel, in order to collect the environmental information and get the word out to anyone. They were talking to military people, corporate people, students and media. Daily they went to the major television networks and print media, doing many, many interviews. They tried very hard to interest them in the unfolding environmental disaster which, as one old-style journalist admitted, was the biggest story of the 20th Century. Individual TV producers, and reporters did their best but were constantly second-guessed by headquarters thousands of miles away. The news managers made a decision very early on that this was not news. From that point on it became very hard to get a coherent picture publicised in any of the media. Thomas produced a video, which has been on all the major networks, but only in fragmentary terms.

Why haven't we heard about this before?

Scientific American revealed that the American government suppressed information of the soot particles over Hawaii as early as March, subsequently forbidding Department of Energy officials and scientists to speak to the media — at all — concerning their environmental data on the Gulf.

The news media embarked upon a course of self-censorship –wanting, it would appear, to curry favour with the powers that be, as they had with the Reagan administration. This continued throughout the Gulf war. The media, with very rare exceptions, accepted their spoon-fed, cafeteria style disinformation, very complacently. This extended naturally into the eco-war.

Thomas is very forgiving of the media. "I can only say from my personal experience that in a war situation you are completely bound by military strictures because of the many hazards in the area, because of checkpoints, troop movements. You are very much constrained as an official journalist as to where you can go, what you can do. As environmentalists, we were much freer, we went basically where we wanted to go and in many cases, the military assisted us. So we were able to get photographs, videotape and information that regular journalists did not have access to, particularly in Saudi Arabia. I was coming across as an environmental consultant, as an environmentalist, and I was doing a lot of consulting work and it was legitimate, not as a journalist, per say."

Thomas urges world governments to move immediately to eliminate bureaucratic roadblocks that have been holding equipment up at the borders; that they utilise existing military airlift capability. Huge C5-A's are flying (empty) over there, picking up troops, bulldozers, and earthmoving equipment, that could be very well utilised in the desert, and flying them home! Why not use those aircraft to fly equipment in? He thinks that the 12 teams there now could really get a handle on the fire situation if they had the proper support.

Once the fires are out, assuming you can extinguish a burning lake of oil a mile long — and there are several of those — once those are out, it will be necessary to literally clean the carbon off the desert and begin an immense restoration project of a very delicate, desert ecology.

It is possible. For example, when the turtle nesting grounds were threatened on several off-shore islands off Saudi Arabia, a large contingent of United States marines were flown out to the islands with civilian volunteers to clean those beaches so the turtles could come ashore and breed.

If Kuwait is not interested, or cannot deal with a problem that is admittedly bigger than any country can handle by themselves, especially a country devastated by this occupation, then why not simply go in and do the job ourselves? This is an enormous opportunity, a very critical opportunity for the international community, for the world to come together in face of a common global, ecological threat. We should act together out of international self interest, if nothing else. Thomas feels that we're going to be having more of these crises, and that they seem to be accelerating. To him the worst part of the tragedy in the Gulf is that we didn't 'get the lesson'. "If we are allowed to ignore this enormous calamity that is going on right now," he says, "it does not bode well for our survival. I am a purveyor of very heavy information. It's shocking. It's staggering and it's meant to be."

He talked to hardened journalists, war correspondents; people that had covered the world for years. No one knows quite how to describe this. They all decided that they were on some bizarre movie set and it couldn't be real, but their body was reacting with a total panic reaction. "I don't want to leave your readers or my viewers simply numb and stunned by yet another disaster." he says, earnestly, "I would hope people become aware and yes, alarmed enough to act personally, immediately. The message I got from this experience was that we must break our petroleum addiction. We must do everything we can personally to reduce our consumption of petroleum products and to move to alternatives which already exist and which are coming on-stream. Secondly, we have to contact our political leaders, (so-called), and insist that Canada take a leading international role in the clean-up response in the Middle East, in the Gulf States." Certainly a government that encouraged this war from the outset has a moral obligation now to attend to the mess they helped to create."

Earth Trust is a conservation group that went into Kuwait originally with an ornithologist (a bird expert), Rick Thorpe, from the Department of Conservation, New Zealand, to identify, rescue and assist millions of migrating birds that were coming up from North Africa and the southern Gulf in late March of 1991. Thomas went with them into the coastal areas which were heavily mined, and fortified, day after day looking for the birds. They never arrived. They saw only the tiniest fraction of the millions of the plovers, grebes, terns, cormorants and flamingos that normally arrive there every year. These birds have a very limited internal food supply. Over generations of migration they have a direct A-B route, genetically encoded, and very little ability to divert - certainly not around a 300 mile oil slick - or a smoke cloud stretching clear across the Asian sub-continent. Some showed up in countries far off their usual course, most did not show up at all. In the end they had very few birds to rescue. The birds that they did see were heavily oiled and beyond help.

One of Thomas' last encounters with any creature in Kuwait, was with a huge purple heron which had flown in off the sea and settled in to a tar pit, an enormous pool of crude oil. It was completely saturated with crude oil, and was dying before his eyes. He had eye to eye contact with this creature only a couple of feet away. He promised that bird that her message would get out to the rest of the world. The photographs he took have appeared in papers throughout Europe and Canada. He has written about the incident and the bird is on his videotape. "Very appalling to see the creatures dying." Thomas says softly, " It's very, very hard to see their suffering."

The children of Kuwait brought about an important transition for him. In the great Berghan oil field is Akhmadi, a community of about 6,000 people. It is situated in the heart of the burning wells. The team immediately realized that the people here were being subjected to very dangerous levels of toxics on a daily basis. The people had to be assisted. They were certainly as important as any wild creature in the region. They established a Kuwait environmental action team, comprised of eight of Kuwait's tops scientists and a few dozen university student volunteers. They drew up a questionnaire and commenced a house by house survey of Akhmadi and 7 other districts closest to the burning oil field. Questions asked people about their health, if it had changed since the fires, and if the government was doing enough to assist them. This study became so controversial that findings were never officially released, though they were leaked to the media. 86% of the people interviewed in Akhmadi said they wished to be relocated to a safer location. International media exposure to their plight was gained in some measure, but to this day they have not been evacuated. The children had been kept indoors for 7 months of occupation and the parents said, "We can't keep them inside any longer." So children were playing in the streets under very a toxic smoke cloud without any protection, respirators, or gas masks.

We'll never know the actual body count from the war. The most recent figures come from Greenpeace researchers and UN observers. The consensus is that somewhere between 160,000 to 200,000 people died. Civilian casualties account for 40,000 to 50,000 dead in Iraq. That's the shooting war. In the eco-war that followed, choloera, dysentry, diarrhoea, potentially will claim hundreds of thousands more casualties according to UN observers. 50,000 to 60,000 further casualties are estimated in the uprisings that followed the end of the war.

Is this right?

The targeting of civilian infrastructure is proscribed by the Geneva Convention - you may not attack power facilities, fresh water facilities, sewage facilities of a civilian population. You may not attack civilian targets, certainly not power stations and water facilities in the far north of Iraq - as described by Ramsay Clarke, who just returned from a tour of that country. He said they even blew up the Pepsi Cola plant in Bahsra to make sure that there was absolutely nothing to drink. He describes entire suburbs flattened. and hospitals that were hit. The television saw repeated video footage of smart bombs going down air shafts and open windows. In fact the military themselves say, up to 85 or 90% of their weapons were not smart-guided and were dropped from higher altitudes because of the small arms and anti-aircraft fire.

All of Iraq was hit. No part escaped bombing. The loss of civilian lives directly was very light considering the volume of ordinance dropped. If you can talk about 40,000 or 50,000 civilian dead as light.

The bulldozing of bodies into mass graves is also in direct contravention to the Geneva Convention. Thomas spent quite a few hours on the highway to hell, leading from Kuwait to Iraq and has horrific videotape of what looks like a junkyard of vehicles. "Very eerie," he says, "because you felt the terror surrounding that road. An area in the desert that offered no cover, no where to run. And yet, not a single corpse, not a single body. I never saw a human corpse in my entire time in Kuwait. They were removed from the vehicles immediately and bulldozed into mass graves." On that highway alone, 15,000 to 20,000 died.

Letters that Thomas had taken out of the bunkers and translated, say that the Iraqi soldiers had not been paid in 7 months, that they had almost no food. Kuwaitis who had many grudges against their occupiers, actually gave Iraqi soldiers water and in some instances, food, because they were literally starving and because they were just kids, 18 year old conscripts. They couldn't stand to see them starve. Those are the kind of people that were butchered in full retreat on the road to Iraq. The Geneva Convention says you may not destroy a retreating army or an army unable to defend itself.

Former Attorney General Ramsay Clarke is initiating a commission to delve into war crimes. He's talked to American soldiers who witnessed the execution of Iraqi prisoners and other atrocities. His team has been out scouring the United States, interviewing GI's and others that had been in the Gulf during the war, preparing a list of war crimes to be tried internationally. He is not omitting the Iraqis who committed horrendous atrocities in Kuwait in terms of torture and rape. Certainly Saddam Hussein is on that list.

We have been lied to. This war was a sham and an atrocity. Canada lost a great deal among the Arab nations. We detonated more than bombs. Canada detonated its image as a peacemaker, perhaps for all time.

Anyone wishing to become involved or wanting more information should contact the GEERT office here in Vancouver. Their address is 2156 West 12th, in Kitsilano. Telephone (604) 736-1399 or fax (604) 736-5879.

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