“Since ‘liberation’ there have been no more supplies of medicines” 

Bert De Belder 

Two doctors of the Medical Team of Geneeskunde voor de Derde Wereld (Medicine for the Third World) are on their way back. They are Dr. Harrie Dewitte en Dr. Colette Moulaert. At 6.30 this morning they started their journey to Amman together with a BBC and Reuters convoy. They arrived at 5 p.m. They were accompanying the injured British cameraman Paul Pasquale, who had been cared for by Dr. Geert Van Moorter after the American shelling of the Palestine Hotel. 

Meanwhile Dr. Claire Geraets and Dr. Geert Van Moorter were visiting several hospital in Baghdad. Al-Kindi hospital is now being protected by people from the neighbourhood. These people do not put up with the looting anymore and they do not understand why the country is stripped off its social infrastructure. ‘All this had been constructed stone by stone by our people’, they are wailing. The enormous warehouses of the Ministry of Public Health (10000 square metres) are entirely unprotected.  It is not far from the plundered French embassy. The generators for the refrigerators have already been stolen, so the right temperature for keeping medicines and vaccination is no longer secured. ‘Only the Ministry of Oil is protected by the Americans’, Geert wrily observes. 

It was in Al-Anour Hospital that Geert went to assist after the notorious bombing of a market. There Dr. Hakim Razzuqi proudly states that his hospital has stayed open all the time, though sometimes with only 30% of the staff. Many employees indeed didn't get past the checkpoints manned by American troops. Dr Razzuqi points at the shortages of water, electricity and oxygen. Until  8 April the hospital kept punctually receiving medicine from the Ministry of Public Health which functioned well. "Since 'liberation' all provisioning has stopped", the doctor sighs. Even today new casualties are arriving, a thirty-odd persons. Most of them with dirty day-old wounds. Only now they venture or are able to come to our hospital. Some of them had been refused passage by US-troops. 

Dr. Ahmed Sudad lives nearby and is giving a hand in the hospital. "He told me that here and there children find like iron triangles covered in white material", Geert says. "Like a balloon or sometimes looking like a flower. If you touch them they explode and you get nastily injured. They may be mini-bombs coming from cluster bombs. Little Mohamed, four years old, was wounded that way. I gave Belgian children's drawings for peace to some little patients. They were pleased. Ali, a seven-year-old, could not be helped anymore. We were witnesses of the child dying after he had got injured by stepping on an explosive like that. We could hear his mother wailing in the passage, heartrending... A 'clean' war wasn't it ?" 

Back in his hotel Dr. Van Moorter found a note shoved under the door from the dentist Dr. Al-Rahmani, whose ill child he had met earlier on. The little boy suffers from haemophilia, a disease of the blood, and urgently needs the medication Factor VIII. 'The Americans and the humanitarian organisations are able to fly so much stuff into this place now', Dr. Van Moorter says, 'I'm going to demand that they supply us with life-saving Factor VIII too, otherwise the child will die.'