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18.04.03, 19:05
Charity's anger as US halts aid plane
Jamie Wilson
Friday April 18, 2003
The Guardian
Save the Children yesterday accused the US military of allowing children to
die after it refused to grant permission for a plane loaded with medical
supplies to land in northern Iraq.
As a team of Oxfam engineers took off from Manston airport in Kent with
tonnes of water sanitation equipment bound for southern Iraq, Save the
Children said it had been trying for more than a week to fly in enough
medical supplies to treat 40,000 people and emergency feeding kits for
malnourished children.
The US military has said the charity cannot fly aid supplies into the cities
of Arbil and Mosul until the area is safe. But Rob MacGillivray, Save the
Children's emergency programme manager, said the UN had already declared it
safe.
"The doctors we are trying to help in Mosul have been struggling against the
odds for weeks ... but now the help we have promised them is being endlessly
delayed," he said.
"The lack of cooperation from the US military is a breach of the Geneva
convention and its protocols, but more importantly the time now being wasted
is costing children their lives."
But while aid agencies described the situation in southern Iraq
as "desperate", Air Marshal Brian Burridge, the commander of UK forces in the
Gulf, rejected suggestions that coalition bombing had badly damaged
infrastructure in Basra, insisting that electricity and water supplies
were "the same" as before the war.
However, he conceded that most hospitals were short of supplies
