BASRA, Iraq, 18 May 2003 — British troops laden with grenades, mortars and land mines turned up at a boys’ school in the Iraqi city of Basra yesterday to warn pupils about the dangers of the unexploded ordnance littering the country. Surrounded by scores of excited Iraqi boys, Warrant Officer Nick Pettit showed what different types of land mines and weapons look like, and told pupils to stay away from them at all costs.
“Every day in Basra explosions are happening and injuring people, children and grown-ups,” he said. His words were translated throughout by a female Arabic interpreter. The presentation at the Mutawara School for Boys was part of a British military initiative in collaboration with UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, to warn Iraqis about the dangers of unexploded ordnance, and eventually to clear it.
But the task has hardly begun. In scores of sites around Basra, unexploded shells, mortars and even surface-to-surface missiles lie scattered around bombed-out wastelands. Scavengers, many of them children, pick through the wreckage - and more deaths are reported every week. In one of the worst incidents, at least six children were killed in an area north of Basra last Monday when an Iraqi bomb they were trying to dismantle exploded.
Sgt. Ian Dickson of the British Royal Engineers in Basra said around five people each week are killed or injured in the city by unexploded ordnance, since the US-led war to topple president Saddam Hussein ended last month. In Basra General Hospital, children and teenagers lie in gloomy wards with the remnants of their hands and feet wrapped in thick bandages mottled with blood. Doctors say they treat several cases each week, and blame the injuries on ignorance.
In one bed lay 18-year-old Haider Ali, who lost several fingers when an anti-aircraft shell he was playing with exploded. His uncle said he had warned him just half an hour before the accident not to play with ammunition. UNICEF official Ben Love said ammunition from all the conflicts Iraq has fought in the last two decades was still scattered around the country, and clearing it would take time. “Nobody has ever seen this level of pure contamination,” he said. “There is just so much of it. You just can’t go and deal with it at the click of a finger.”
Meanwhile, Iraqi academics voted to choose new deans for Baghdad universities yesterday as part of a US-led campaign to rid the country of the influence of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. The unprecedented polls were held under US monitoring as higher education resumed in Baghdad for the first time since the US-led war that ousted Saddam on April 9. US troops encircled Baghdad University and swarmed the campus where elections took place. Professors in three of Baghdad’s five universities said they had never voted democratically before.
Baghdad University staff nominated nine candidates for the position of dean. Most nominees stood on stage in a lecture auditorium and said they were never Baathists, although professors said most were. “But there are good Baathists. Many of us were forced to become members by the regime,” one professor said.
US higher education adviser Andrew Erdmann told 5,000 staff at Baghdad University that the US-led forces would not keep Iraqi academics in any public institution if they were associated with weapons of mass destruction, involved in gross human rights violations or were core Baathists. He said the elected deans would be reviewed to ensure they met the standards set by US civil administrator Paul Bremer to extricate Baathists from society.
