2007 Nuclear-Free Future Education Award
Siegwart-Horst Günther, Deutschland
Siegwart Horst Günther had already spent decades as
a doctor in the Middle East researching and treating the
epidemiological problems of patients, when, in 1991, he
was appalled to stumble across a number of Iraqi
children born with congenital deformities. The children
betrayed symptoms unlike any he had previously
witnessed: their immune systems tottered on the edge of
collapse, and they suffered from dreadful maladies and
skin conditions. Günther suspected that the ailing
children or, while they were being carried to term, their
mothers, had come into contact with large doses of
radioactivity. One source was widely available: the
collection of Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers and
other vehicles rusting in the desert.
In 1991, the United States and its Persian Gulf War allies blasted Iraqi
convoys with armor-piercing uranium munitions. To
this day the military salvage littering the Iraqi
landscape – from the ‘Highway of Death’ to the suburbs
ringing Basra – are playgrounds for children.
To make fuel rods for nuclear reactors, uranium
must be refined, a process that spins off depleted
uranium as waste. How can this radioactive byproduct be
disposed of economically? A German military supplier
(»Rheinmetal Defence has an international presence«,
the firm boasts of itself) came up with the solution: DU
is almost twice as heavy as lead, and Rheinmetal shell
casings hardened with DU possessed an enhanced
capability of armor penetration. The problem is, the
moment a DU round hits its target, it unleashes a
firestorm of low-level radioactive oxide particles that are
chased through the air by desert winds to be inhaled or
absorbed by plants, animals and human beings.
Professor Günther returned to Berlin with a DU
shell he had discovered in the Iraqi desert to have it
spectrographically analyzed. Indeed, the shell was
radiating ionizing rays, but the outcome of going public
with his discovery – part of the cocktail of toxic agents
that accounts for the ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ – was to be
fined some 3000 marks by German authorities for transporting a dangerous material into the country. In the
meantime the doctor is himself so health stricken that
he has been forced to give up his medical researches.
Still, in 2005 he published Was heißt Ehrfurcht vor dem
Leben? ("What Does Reverence for Life Mean?") about
his experience of working together with Albert
Schweitzer from 1963-65 in Lambarene, and in 2006
his autobiography, Zwischen den Grenzen; Mein Leben
als Zeitzeuge. For the mainstream media uranium weaponry
remains no theme, yet for the human gene pool it
portends a giant threat. With Horst Siegward Günther
the jury of the Nuclear-Free Future Award honors for
the third time – after Souad Al-Azzawi (2003) and Asaf
Durakovic (2004) – a hero activist who dared investigate the ghoulish aftermath of DU weaponry use
directly at the scene of the crime.
from Dr. Wolfgang Heuss
(English version, Craig Reishus)
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