LONDON, April 19: The United States is ignoring the plight of children in northern Iraq by refusing to allow a plane full of medical supplies to land in the city of Arbil, a British aid agency said on Friday.
Save the Children disputed the US line that it was unsafe to land at Arbil, saying the city, between Mosul and Kirkuk, was “as safe as many parts of London”.
“I can only guess that is because they have other priorities because the suggestion that it is not safe is very difficult to accept,” Save the Children representative Brendan Paddy told BBC Radio from Arbil.
“Medical supplies have to come in from the outside and at the moment that doesn’t seem to be happening.”
He said American flights were entering the area every day.
A US military spokesman told the BBC from the Gulf that while the area around Arbil was safe for military planes, which could defend themselves, civilian planes might be in danger.
He said he hoped the Save the Children plane could land “within days”.
The plane is ready to leave an airfield in Britain with enough medical supplies to help 40,000 people for three months.
Iraqi hospitals — especially those in Mosul, which have been seriously affected by fighting and widespread looting following the collapse of the Iraqi regime — lack essential medical and food supplies.
Save the Children accused the United States on Thursday of breaching the Geneva Convention by failing to open up access for aid. Under the convention, occupying forces are obliged to protect civilians, restore law and order and facilitate humanitarian relief.
“What is more difficult to understand is not the ignoring of the Geneva Convention but ignoring the plight of the kids that we’re seeing every day in Mosul,” Paddy said.
EU PLAN DEPLORED: A medical group that has shared the Nobel Peace Prize slammed on Saturday a European plan to airlift wounded Iraqis for medical treatment as ill-informed and possibly harmful.
“No one doubts the generosity of the intentions of the offer. But I believe it is ill-informed about the reality of the situation here in the hospitals,” Dr. Jean-Baptiste Richardier, co-founder of Handicap International, said.
European Union leaders holding their first talks since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government pledged in Athens on Wednesday to organize the airlift for wounded Iraqis, particularly children.
But Handicap International said the offer had created great expectations among scores of war wounded who did not need to be airlifted and was making it more difficult for local doctors to help them.
“When I toured the hospitals this morning the patients came to me with desperate expectations,” Mr Richardier said.
“When I explained it may not happen for them (the airlift), because what we are talking about here is hundreds of war wounded, they had a begging attitude and they came at me with a certain level of aggessivity,” he said.
He said the family of one young woman who lost her leg to gangrene after suffering a shrapnel wound became “very aggressive and it turned out to be a very hot debate in the middle of the hospital.”
“And this happened again and again,” he said.
He urged the EU to clarify how many of the wounded it intended to take care of, whether it was “100, 200, 1,000 or just a few kids.”
He added that the level of medical competence in Iraq was sufficient to treat the vast majority of cases.
Handicap International was awarded one-half of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize as part of an international campaign to ban landmines.
The other half went to the campaign’s coordinator, Jody Williams of the United States. —AFP
