On 20th August 1998, the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan was destroyed on the orders of President Clinton. The official justification for this was that the factory was making chemical weapons for use by terrorists - the evidence for which supposedly came from a single soil sample which was said to come from the site. How that sample was obtained was never explained, but it was claimed that a substance called EMPTA was found in it and that this was sufficient evidence to order the bombing of the plant, despite the fact that EMPTA has a number of legitimate uses.
In the aftermath of the bombing this explanation quickly unravelled. The site was strewn with aspirins and other medicines, and those involved in the clean-up were shown working on the site without the sort of special protection which would be necessary had chemical weapons been made there. The US were invited to go and inspect the site to find clear evidence to justify their actions, but they refused to go. Independent inspectors who had previously visited the site and those who visited the wreckage afterwards confirmed that all the evidence pointed to the factory making medicines. And there were no reports of civilian casualties in the surrounding area from the sort of pollution that you’d expect when 14 cruise missiles hit a chemical weapons facility.
But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t deaths. Medicines are vital to save lives, but are also very big business for some of the biggest corporations in the world - largely US owned companies. The Al-Shifa factory produced 50% of the country’s medicines, and the vast majority of its drugs used to combat malaria, and it was able to do this at a fraction of the cost of such medicines on the world market. It was also the only factory producing anti-TB drugs in the region, and could produce enough of those to treat more than 100,000 people at a cost of only £1 per month.
In the aftermath of the factory’s bombing the Sudanese government was unable, because of both lack of money and sanctions placed against them, to acquire sufficient replacement medicines, and were refused requests to re-supply them through emergency aid. One can only wonder at the number of deaths that resulted. Germany’s ambassador to Sudan, Werner Daum, has said that “several tens of thousands” would be a reasonable guess.
Does the US ever launch unilateral military action unless it is trying to protect its financial interests or somehow establish some sort of economic control or influence in an area? Every indication is that it doesn’t. For all of its claims made that it intervenes on justifiable grounds there are always many more virtually identical situations in which no intervention is made because it would not be in US economic interests to do so. How many innocent lives are sacrificed for these interests, and for how long will the international community allow it to happen?