In the past ten days, Mr. Blair has said at least three times – including once on the floor of the House of Commons – that the United Nations is claiming that some 300,000 bodies lie in mass graves in Iraq, and that this alone justifies the US-UK invasion.
In making this claim, Blair is doing with this evidence exactly what he did with the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.
He is stretching it to the limit, and even telling a partial untruth; he is obscuring the bits which contradict his view of the world; and he is attributing an authority and a reliability to the information which it does not have.
First, the figure does not come from the United Nations. Blair has emphasised the UN as the source, and stressed that the figures does not come from the British or American governments. But the real source is a private non-governmental organisation in America called Human Rights Watch. UN officials may have lent credence to the figure by quoting it in their speeches, but it is not an official UNn figure.
Nor is it an official Red Cross figure. The International Committee of the Red Cross is the body which is responsible in international law for establishing the names of people missing in conflict. It is not the role of a private, unaccountable organisation like Human Rights Watch. While Red Cross officials in Geneva say they might privately accept it as a working basis for evaluating the scale of their task, they absolutely refuse to give the figure their official support. "We would not say that there are 300,000 people missing in Iraq," Antonella Notari, a spokesman, told me.
Human Rights Watch currently has two staff in Iraq. This compares with about 800 Red Cross staff, and a substantial United Nations presence. The International Committee of the Red Cross has had people in Iraq ever since 1980, and the United Nations has had a huge operation there since the end of the Gulf War in 1991. By contrast, Human Rights Watch has had its few staff in the main part of Iraq only for the last few weeks.
Moreover, Blair is quite wrong to imply that the 300,000 figure (which in any case he has inflated a little from the actual Human Rights Watch figure of 290,000) is the numbers of people killed by Saddam. This is not even what Human Rights Watch claims. Their report speaks of an estimated 290,000 missing, "many of whom are believed to have been killed". In other words, their deaths have not been established, and some or all of them may still be alive.
