Letter from the Strike Community Anti-War Pickets in Galway and London to Caritas Internationalis and Trócaire regarding
MEDICATED POWDERED MILK AND INFANT FORMULA GOING TO IRAQ AS “HUMANITARIAN AID”

21 July 2003

BY POST AND EMAIL

Dear Caritas Internationalis and Trócaire,


We write from the Anti-War/Occupation Pickets outside Mill St Garda [Police] station in Galway (Ireland) and the Community Anti-War Picket on Parliament Square in London (UK), both called by the Global Women's Strike.

It was brought to the pickets’ attention that one of your areas of focus in Iraq now is ‘…a supplementary feeding programme for 10,000 malnourished children – that will come in the form of medicated powder milk distributed by doctors in the 14 centres that Caritas operates within Iraq’.[1] But we all know that safe water is still not available or affordable to mix up this formula; and we know that even without polluted water, babies given the powdered milk are at high risk of becoming ill and even dying.[2] Even before the war started, only 53% of people had access to clean water as a result of the 1991 Gulf war. (Before then, 92% of people had had clean water.)

We on the Pickets decided to write letting you know how alarmed we are.

Your shipment forms only a small part of the risk to the lives of so many children and their mothers by the occupying powers in Iraq. For example, at the end of March, over five million tonnes of infant formula were sent to Iraq as part of the UK's "humanitarian" aid for distribution by the military[3]

Formula is a weapon of mass destruction. Even before polluted water is added, because formula is made from cheap waste ingredients, it is often contaminated with bacteria and other pollutants. As you must know, it silently kills 1.5 million a year, overwhelmingly the most vulnerable infants in the global South. Thus promoting formula is promoting genocide,
as many health and infant experts internationally have established – which is rarely challenged, but often censored. Not surprisingly, the governments that have been bombing civilians and destroying the infrastructure of survival have also actively supported formula everywhere in all kinds of ways.[4] Both bombs and formula are used to kill.

Breastfeeding, source of the basic survival food of humanity, is treated as if it was some subsidiary biological (and therefore unimportant) activity that ‘only women’ are involved in. The global market pushes it aside, but can that happen without any outcry from organisations claiming to protect us? The present crisis cannot be the excuse for actions that would in fact deepen the crisis, putting infants further at risk. When its life-saving properties are most desperately needed, breastfeeding is under further attack.

Breastfeeding mothers are among the dead and injured. The formula companies, which have always lived up to the infamous name of ‘baby killers’ given them by the massive global pro-breastfeeding movement, have no interest in finding non-profit ways to help children whose mothers have been killed. Pharmaceutical companies, which have an interest in peddling drugs without regard for their devastating effects, must not be allowed to profit from wreaking havoc while being seen as benefactors. Which dairy, formula and/or pharmaceutical companies have supplied the medicated milk?

We look to you to urge and initiate alternatives, and to reject the measures proposed by those who put profit before the sanctity of human life at our most tender age, especially in the global South. Donor milk or wet nursing can be organised as the alternatives to formula if only a bit of the resources used for weapons and their delivery of death are used instead for the protection of life. Breastfeeding has already been undermined in Iraq through 12 years of draconian sanctions. Powdered milk was included in the meagre weekly food aid provided to many families with small children. Mothers were malnourished. In part due to less breastfeeding, child malnutrition and deaths tripled. In response to this, a movement, no doubt begun by women, had started to promote breastfeeding, and before the current war the high child death rate had begun to go down.

These undermining actions under sanctions and at present will be in violation of the 1981 WHO Code for the Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes and its subsequent Resolution that stipulates: “to exercise extreme caution when planning, implementing or supporting emergency relief operations by protecting, promoting and supporting breastfeeding for infants…”. [Footnote: World Health Assembly Resolution 47.5, 9 May 1994] This Code was a hard-won internationally agreed standard to put a brake on the corporations’ ruthless pursuit of profits including by exploiting humanitarian crises. It makes no provision for the routine distribution of formula or other breast milk substitutes in any situation, and it would be appalling if aid agencies ignored it.

Your role alongside the military, cannot be as distributors for the multinational formula industry which welcomes crises of all kinds as opportunities to expand their markets. This would further undermine the pro-breastfeeding movement in Iraq and everywhere, helping to ensure that even when the bombs stop, the killing goes on. The war has made it clearer than ever that even ‘human rights’ and ‘humanitarian assistance’ can be turned into the tools of death and profit.

Those of us from Ireland, a country with a long history of resistance to occupation and whose people experienced their own genocide from malnutrition and disease, find it particularly shameful that an Irish aid agency is involved in this. Do those in Ireland who donate every year to Trócaire’s Lenten campaigns know of your policy which amounts to undermining breastfeeding, and therefore the health of future generations, in this case in Iraq? In Ireland women are already fighting this killing policy, which has a firm hold, of formula over breast. Why would an Irish aid agency want
to export and inflict it on mothers and babies who are far more vulnerable, not least because they do not have access to free, clean water and are short of food?

Can you tell us as a matter of priority: who will receive the medicated milk, in what cities and what parts of the countryside, and among which sectors of people? What is the medication and what illnesses will it purport to treat? We fear these additives are added danger. No matter how desperate, every mother has a right to know what is being offered to her beloved child; is it clear to Iraqi mothers what this medication is, and have they been asked if it is acceptable to them that their children receive it? Or will mothers made desperate by their own and their children’s hunger be pressed into using powdered milk? (Is this the democracy imposed by the bombing?) Did you distribute powdered milk and infant formula when you worked under Saddam Hussein’s regime and under sanctions?

Can we count on you to support and protect breastfeeding in Iraq? Will you insist that breastfeeding mothers are given extra food and enough clean drinking water so that they can feed their children themselves with breast milk? If the milk is also intended for older children, can they be offered instead proper nutritious food? There is plenty of money for military occupation; is there money for children to eat? Can we count on Trócaire, a major Irish charity, and on Caritas, an international network of Catholic charities based in the Vatican itself, to work for that?

We look forward to knowing your policies on the life and death issues we raise.

Please reply to: Global Women’s Strike Community Anti-War Picket, c/o 10, Galway Bay Apartments, Salthill, Galway, Ireland; and Community Anti-War Picket, Global Women’s Strike, Crossroads Women’s Centre, 230a Kentish Town
Road, London, NW5 2AB

Yours sincerely,

Signatories attached from the London and Galway anti-war pickets

Copy to:
Sébastien Dechamps
Regional Desk for the Middle East and North Africa
General Secretariat, Caritas Internationalis
Palazzo San Calisto
00120 Vatican City
Email: caritas.internationalis@caritas.va


Mr Yousif Cyril Bahoshy
Caritas Iraq
C/o Nonciature Apostolique
Baghdad, Iraq


Caritas Iraq
Hai al-Wahde
St-52
Mahala 904
Zaqaq
74 House 3
Baghdad Iraq


Mr Faiq Bourachi
Caritas Liaison Officer for Iraq in Amman
PO Box 448, Tllal Al Ali
11953 Amman, Jordan

Caritas Liaison Office Headquarters
Shmeissani
Odeh Abu Taia
1st floor, Al-Hamra Building # 1
Amman, Jordan
Email: caritas@go.com.jo


Caritas Social Action
39 Eccleston Square
London, SW1V 1BX, UK
Email: caritas@cbcew.org.uk


CAFOD
Romero Close
Stockwell Road, London SW9 9TY, UK
Email: hqcafod@cafod.org.uk


Iraqi Women’s League
155, King’s Cross Road
London WC1X 9BN, UK
Email: lppc@ukonline.co.uk


Sheila Kitzinger, Oxford OX29 7RH, UK

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[1] Sunday Tribune 13/04/03, p.13.

[2] The US military also privatised the clean water sent as ‘humanitarian
aid’, in order to ’revitalise’ the local economy it had destroyed. So
people who have nothing have had to pay for water. See New York Daily
News - http://www.nydailynews.com, Tuesday, April 1st, 2003

[3] Soldiers were also to advise mothers how to use the formula. London
Evening Standard, 31 March 2003, p.10

[4] For an account of this see The Milk of Human Kindness – Defending
Breastfeeding from the global market & AIDS industry, Crossroads Books, 2002
http://allwomencount.net/Publications/MHKOrderForm.htm Leaflet and review
enclosed

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