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Sun. May 25, 2003

The Baby Parade

The Baby Parade – For a long time, it’s been considered by many a True Fact that UN sanctions were directly responsible for the deaths of a half million Iraqi children. Saddam used to have monthly propaganda parades with dead babies on top of taxicabs to play on this idea. It was debunked by many before the war even began, but of course, that was tossed aside as partisan claptrap from warmongers.

Will you believe the Iraqi doctors?

“Under the sanctions regime, ’We had the ability to get all the drugs we needed,’ said Ibn Al-Baladi’s chief resident, Dr. Hussein Shihab. ’Instead of that, Saddam Hussein spent all the money on his military force and put all the fault on the USA.’ [...] ’Saddam Hussein, he’s the murderer, not the UN,’ said Dr. Azhar Abdul Khadem, a resident at the Al-Alwiya maternity hospital in Baghdad.”

“Doctors said they were forced to refrigerate dead babies in hospital morgues until authorities were ready to gather the little corpses for monthly parades in coffins on the roofs of taxis for the benefit of Iraqi state television and visiting journalists. The parents were ordered to wail with grief – no matter how many weeks had passed since their babies had died – and to shout to the cameras that the sanctions had killed their children, the doctors said. Afterward, the parents would be rewarded with food or money.”

“What troubles him most, he said, was not being allowed to release the children’s bodies to Muslim parents who wanted to follow the Islamic practice of burying the dead as soon as possible. In the hospital’s neighborhood, a religiously observant, Shia Muslim district long called Saddam City, bereaved parents took the policy hard.”

“’Some of the families tried to take their children by force, so sometimes we needed to call the police to persuade them to keep them here for the parade,’ Khadoum said. ’They went crazy.’”