Transcript
THE BARONESS NICHOLSON OF WINTERBOURNE: The situation that we all thought was correct about the marshes was of course in most instances taken from fragmentary data that had come to us from marsh people who had escaped, the bulk of whom are in Iran, and also from satellite photographs and from desultory visits that a few of us managed to make, myself included, over the period of time that the marshlands was under drainage.
I've had the good fortune of having eight days there in the wake, may I say, of two outstanding programs on the marsh people which really put them on the map by David [Meresh] and by the ABC team. Thank you so very much indeed for quite exceptional, outstanding work which brought this topic in front of everybody well before the hostilities commenced. David, it is wonderful.
The key, however, is that there are many more people alive and in the marshes—not well, not happy, not where they ought to be. Twenty thousand families, the tribal leaders told me, have still survived. One village I went to had 10,000 people in it. Massive. So I think the figure from the marsh people themselves of around 200,000 in the marshlands still, misplaced, bullied, tormented, and really very badly treated. Nonetheless, I think 200,000 may very well be a ball park figure we can work with. Then there's at least 50,000 inside Iran that David and I were filming recently.
So there's a whole great group of people and I think my benchmark is that it is those people to whom we must listen. It is those people whose land and territory and farmland this is. And curiously, the people themselves were among the most productive in the food chain of Iraq. What Saddam actually did was willfully and malevolently destroy a major portion of food production of Iraq. So this is rural regeneration and fishing regeneration of a wide variety of products that were produced and marketed over 5,000 years in a self-sustaining, mixed farming economy of the type and style that we all wish still survived.
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