The Frozen-Baby Parades

Sanctions-era child deaths are back in the news today, as Newsday reporter Matthew McAllester—the guy who was held captive by Saddam?s sputtering regime for eight days during the war—goes back and interviews doctors from some of the same hospitals that until recently served up sanctions-are-killing-babies propaganda to western reporters.

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.

This is hardly the final word on the correlation between sanctions and child mortality in Iraq over the past 13 years, a subject so heavily politicized that even the pro-war crowd enthusiastically propagated the false high-end estimates to support their cause. But it will be interesting to see what the Saddam-era Iraqi sources for the sanctions stories say now.