Pieces of Hell

Julian Borger, diplomatic editor The Guardian, Friday June 6, 2008

Thousands of child refugees from Darfur, some as young as nine, are being abducted and sold to warring militias as child soldiers, a British human rights group reports today.

The organisation, Waging Peace, has filmed testimony in refugee camps in eastern Chad, describing how children, mostly boys between nine and 15, have been forcibly taken from their families by camp leaders, who are then trafficking them to militias.

Today's report singles out the Darfur rebel group fighting the Khartoum government, the Justice and Equality Movement, as the main offender. But it says a variety of groups, including the Chadian army and opposing rebels, are also involved.

"This recruitment is taking place every day, in full view of the CNAR [Chadian government body in charge of refugees] and Chadian armed forces, who turn a blind eye to what is going on, and despite the presence of EU troops," the report says.

The EU force in Chad, Eufor, will be made up of more than 4,000 troops, half of them French, and is due to be fully deployed by next month. Waging Peace is calling on the force, led by an Irish lieutenant general, Patrick Nash, to protect the refugee camps from the militias and to help stop the trafficking.

Louise Roland-Gosselin, the head of Waging Peace, said: "The deployment of the EU force means there is supposed to be security in the camps, but it hasn't come true. People feel deceived."

Roland-Gosselin said it was impossible to know how many children were being abducted, but the UN estimated last year that between 7,000 and 10,000 child soldiers had been forcibly recruited in Chad, where more than 250,000 refugees from Darfur are in camps. She said the problem had worsened since then, despite attempts by UN agencies and aid groups to negotiate an end to trafficking.

One of the refugee leaders opposed to the practice told Waging Peace: "Now it's worse, it's not only aggressive but worse ... They are selling anybody, you know, the boys from nine to 15 in the camp they are just selling them."

He accused other senior men in the camp of being involved in the trade.

Another refugee leader told Waging Peace: "We are very concerned about the future of our children who have survived the killing in Darfur. We want them to study and have a future. We don't want them to join the fighters and become useless."

Serge Male, the head of the UN's refugee agency UNHCR in Chad, said: "For a good while we have been trying to call attention to child recruitment in the camps, both forced and voluntary. We definitely condemn this and we are dealing with the Chadian authorities, the UN agencies and all the parties who have something to do with this."

"I can't say," he replied.

I explained that I was a lawyer with a professional interest in crime. He looked at me with something approaching interest. "Well, you know that most crime is caused by drugs?"

"Yes," I lied.

"These dogs can smell the smallest trace of a drug on a person. Once the dog has picked up a scent of drugs on them, we have the right to search them. If we find drugs on them, we can then search their homes and in their homes we usually find all manner of incriminating articles."

Who needs a warrant when you've got a dog? Olfactory surveillance - the monitoring of personal odour - is on the increase. The number of dogs trained in the detection of criminal suspects and substances is growing. But dogs aren't the only tool envisioned for the future. The Home Office is known to have funded at least one study into the feasibility of releasing swarms of trained bees to search out target odours. The US has similar plans for moths, bees, wasps and cockroaches, and Russia has cross-bred jackals with dogs for an enhanced sense of smell. Even yeast has been genetically manipulated to react to molecules of interest to the security services. Companies across the globe are designing and touting "electronic noses", machines that seek to mimic the mammalian sensory apparatus, in an attempt to satisfy new security demands.

"Headspace" (a term borrowed from the beat generation, where it connoted psychological privacy) is the technical term for the area surrounding an object or person in which their odour can be analysed. But odour detection is not limited to the discovery of drugs and explosives. Scientists and electronic nose entrepreneurs claim headspace analysis can reveal everything from the substances people have been in contact with and their emotional state, to their personal identity and ethnic origin. Although the science behind this field is nascent and the scientific validity of such claims is hotly disputed, they are gaining in stature. Researchers believe the unique smell that we each emit is tied to the makeup of the major histocompatibility complex, a group of genes found on the surface of T-cells that are crucial to the immune system. Several police dog handlers attribute their dogs' knack for identifying criminals to an ability to detect the scent of fear emitted by the guilty, and a synthesised version of this scent is available as a training aid. Scientists are undertaking research into how potential aggressors - or even, for instance, people with schizophrenia - might be identified by the odours they emit. In the 90s an electronic nose company based in the UK was approached by the South African police for the "odour signature" of black people. A company representative told me they refused to supply it, but could have done. He said that ethnic signatures are quickly obtainable by finding patterns between the molecules present in the headspace of different ethnic groups. He added that his electronic nose had already been trained to detect at what stage a woman was in her menstrual cycle, "just by sniffing her from the other side of the room".

Once referred to as the "neglected sense", the science of olfaction is experiencing a resurgence of interest and researchers predict that, in the near future, our knowledge of it will rival that of the visual sciences. Biologist Lyall Watson outlines the pivotal role played by the olfactory system in his book Jacobson's Organ and the Remarkable Sense of Smell: "There is a general and universal system of chemical communication in which all living things are involved. The result is a coordinated ecological mechanism for the regulation of who goes where, and how many can afford to do so." The security services want to tap into this primordial information, then exchange and use it in border controls and the wars on crime, terrorism and antisocial behaviour. Watson predicts that a heightened olfactory consciousness will enable us to "get to know who the good guys are". The security services seem to think the science of olfaction is already sufficiently advanced to enable them to do this.

Last summer, Der Spiegel magazine revealed that the German police had been collecting human scents from political activists to enable their dogs to trace persons they believed might try to violently disrupt the G8 summit. China has established a "scent bank" of odours sampled from criminal suspects and crime scenes. According to a document leaked to the Observer, GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, has been evaluating the merits of odour as a means of personal identification.

Common law jurisdictions across the world are struggling to come to terms with this sensory mutation of police searches and interrogations. The case law is strewn with conflicting decisions on the extent to which olfactory surveillance requires regulation. So far, New South Wales in Australia is the only state to have put it on a statutory footing. The Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Act 2002 specifies the limited circumstances in which drug detection dogs can be used and requires regular parliamentary review of the exercise of these powers.

The supreme court of South Australia dismissed the argument that a dog "sniff" is an invasion of privacy on the basis that odours emitted from a person are routinely exposed to the perception of the public at large. But this reasoning ignores the fact that odour detection "tools" - such as trained dogs and electronic noses - enable the police to perceive information beyond the range of the human senses, placing them firmly within the category of "new surveillance" techniques first identified as a threat to legal regulators by Gary Marx, professor emeritus of sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. According to Marx, in extending the senses, new surveillance "challenges fundamental assumptions about personal and social borders that have been maintained not only by values and norms and social organisation but by the limits of technology to cross them". The threat is obvious: these new methods promise to render traditional investigatory techniques obsolete.

The New South Wales supreme court refused a request in 2001 to regulate olfactory surveillance on the basis that a dog's nose is no more than "an extension of the police officer". But this is a dangerous argument that ignores the privacy issues linked with the expanding range of information sought by olfactory surveillance, as well as the invasive threat of other technologies under development. We are right to fear the new surveillance, even when we have nothing to hide, because it reaches beyond the rule of law, stripping us of our privacy (the right to determine the extent to which we release personal information about ourselves) and leaving us vulnerable to arbitrary state interference.

In 2001, the US supreme court recognised this new threat to privacy. In Kyllo v United States, the police had aimed a thermal-imaging device at Danny Kyllo's residence to detect heat emanations associated with high-powered marijuana grow-lamps. The court held that when the police obtain by sense-enhancing technology any information regarding the interior of a home that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical intrusion, it constitutes a search. The court observed that this would ensure preservation of that degree of privacy and protection from government intrusion that existed when the US constitution was drafted. Justice Souter has since stated that "if constitutional scrutiny is in order for the imager, it is in order for the dog".

In Britain, there has yet to be any challenge to the legality of sniffer dog operations. The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) is adamant that a sniff does not amount to a search and that an indication from a trained dog amounts to reasonable grounds of suspicion for a stop and search. Acpo reasons that because the dog is deployed to "scent the air surrounding an individual person" and indicate the presence of the smell "in the close vicinity of an individual" no search of the person takes place. In this way, Acpo distances the subject from the source of the scent, to justify its denial that the sniff amounts to a search - and then re-links the subject to the scent to justify a tactile search.

Acpo guidance on the use of sniffer dogs concedes that a police-dog sniff could amount to a search if a person is "funnelled" past the dogs. The guidance clearly states that the police should not funnel people past a sniffer dog because officers have no powers to insist that a member of the public submit to a dog sniff. But commuters, confronted with police dogs at the top of escalators, are faced with little choice on exiting a station. "We don't have any power to tell people to walk past the dog," one senior dog handler conceded. "But we can take advantage of the natural environment." Officers treat attempts to evade a dog as grounds of reasonable suspicion for a stop and search.

Smell has historical associations with sin, which may explain why some people find the experience of being sniffed by a police dog offensive. The devil has often been described as identifiable by his "sulphurous stink". In the late 1500s, odour was used to identify witches in Europe. Odour remains a deeply personal attribute, which most of us seek to disguise. Patrick Süskind sums up the accusatory nature of a nasal interrogation in his novel Perfume: "All at once he felt as if he stank ... The child seemed to be smelling right through his skin, into his innards. His most tender emotions, his filthiest thoughts lay exposed to that greedy little nose ... "

The suspicion generated by an alert from a sniffer dog is difficult to dissipate, as the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and the supposed "scent of death" illustrates. Three months after Madeleine's disappearance, dog handler Martin Grime (then working for South Yorkshire police, now for Jersey police on a freelance basis in the search for human remains at Haut de la Garenne) flew out to Portugal to help review case evidence. He was accompanied by his "advanced dog" Eddie. Up until then, corpse-detection dogs had only ever been used in this country to help the police to locate human remains. Eddie the dog reportedly reacted to Mrs McCann's clothing. Almost overnight, the McCanns turned from victims into suspects, and the crowds who had surrounded them in support began to boo and jeer at them in the street. Seemingly as a result of the dog's reactions, the Portuguese police made the McCanns official suspects.

However, the accuracy of sniffer dogs is hugely exaggerated in the popular consciousness. Even the courts in England and Wales appear to have taken the reliability of the dog for granted. In Devon in 1999, the police were called to a house because a slice of fruitcake had been stolen from it. The police attended with a dog. The dog sniffed around the kitchen area and then appeared to follow a track 100m away from the house. The dog stopped and indicated at an abandoned car, in which a homeless man was sleeping. No fruitcake crumbs were found on the man or in the car. The man was interviewed and denied involvement. He said he had been sleeping rough in a barn. It was cold and he had found the car unlocked. He was convicted on the basis of the dog indication and inferences from his decision not to give evidence in court. In 2000 the Court of Appeal upheld his conviction for burglary.

In the US, scent line-ups are used. People have been convicted of robbery, rape, and even murder when the primary evidence against them is, in effect, a bark.

In fact, remarkably little is yet known about how the sense of smell works and there is a shocking shortage of reliable empirical research on the accuracy of detection dogs. The only substantial body of research was conducted in Australia. The Privacy Ombudsman of New South Wales reported its review on the use of drug-detection dogs to parliament in 2006. His research revealed that 74% of those searched following an indication by a dog were found not to be in possession of illegal drugs. This statistic adds weight to Justice Souter's statement that the "infallible dog" is a "legal fiction".

While many police dog handlers appear to hold a genuine belief in the "magic powers" of the dog (Russell Lee Ebersole was convicted of fraud for selling police officers in the US dogs said to be able to indicate which substances they were detecting by pointing their noses at letters of the alphabet), others are even more sanguine. A senior police dog handler told me that the dog's heightened olfactory sensitivity is not its only asset: "Admissions flow out of people indicated like a gush of air - they're so relieved not to have anything on them." A police sergeant who has received national recognition for his drug work laughs at the exaggerated portrayal of drug dogs' abilities in the street addict's mind: "They think they can detect drugs from 300m away!'

María de Jesús González was a practical woman. A very poor single mother, the 28-year-old's home was a shack on a mountain near the town of Ocotal in Nicaragua. She made the best of it. The shack was spotless, the children scrubbed. She earned money by washing clothes in the river and making and selling tortillas.

That was not quite enough to feed her four young children and her elderly mother, so every few months González caught a bus to Managua, the capital, and slaved for a week washing and ironing clothes. The pay was three times better, about £2.60 a day, and by staying with two aunts she cut her costs. She would return to her hamlet with a little nest-egg in her purse. She bought herself one treat - a pair of red shoes - but she would leave them with her family in Managua, as they were no good on the mountain trails she had to go up to get home.

During a visit to Managua in February she felt unwell and visited a hospital. The news was devastating. She was pregnant - and it was ectopic, meaning the foetus was growing outside the womb and not viable. The longer González remained pregnant, the greater the risk of rupture, haemorrhaging and death.

What González did next was - when you understand what life in Nicaragua is like these days - utterly rational. She walked out of the hospital, past the obstetrics and gynaecological ward, past the clinics and pharmacies lining the avenues, packed her bag, kissed her aunts goodbye, and caught a bus back to her village. She summoned two neighbouring women - traditional healers - and requested that they terminate the pregnancy in her shack. Without anaesthetic or proper instruments it was more akin to mutilation than surgery, but González insisted. The haemhorraging was intense, and the agony can only be imagined. It was in vain. Maria died. "We heard there was a lot of blood, a lot of pain," says Esperanza Zeledon, 52, one of the Managua aunts.

González was not stupid and did not want to die. She knew her chance of surviving the butchery was small. But being a practical woman, she recognised it was her only chance, and took it. The story of why it was her only chance is an unfolding drama of religion, politics and power that has made Nicaragua a crucible in the global battle over abortion rights. This central American country has become the third country in the world, after Chile and El Salvador, to criminalise all abortions. It is a blanket ban. There are no exceptions for rape, incest, or life- or health-threatening pregnancies.

González was told at the hospital that any doctor who terminated her pregnancy would face two to three years in jail and she, for consenting, would face one to two years. "Nicaraguan doctors are now afraid of going to trial or jail and losing their licence," says Leonel Arguello, president of the Nicaraguan Society of General Medicine. "Many are thinking that instead of taking the risk, it is better to let a woman die."

For the Nicaraguan rich, a problematic pregnancy need not be a death sentence. You can fly to Miami or bribe a discreet private clinic in Managua. But in this wretchedly poor country most young women do not have money. Their choice is to go through with a pregnancy that may kill them, or attempt a DIY termination that may kill them.

As a result of the blanket ban enacted last November at least 82 women have died, according to advocacy groups. "This new law intentionally denies women access to health services essential to saving their lives, and is thus inconsistent with Nicaragua's obligations under international human rights law," says Human Rights Watch.

Nicaragua is famous for its misfortunes: the Somoza dictatorship, the civil war, the impoverishment, the natural disasters. Pro-choice groups say article 143 of the new penal code should be added to that list since it bucks the international trend towards greater abortion access and drags women back to the dark ages.

The anti-abortion camp, in contrast, is euphoric. The new law, it says, is a beacon in the fight to protect the unborn. It is time to celebrate. "Now it is all penalised. And Catholics agree that is should be this way," says Roberto González, 50, a Franciscan priest in Managua. "The population sees the church as behind the law - behind the pressure that succeeded in getting the government to change the law."

Abortion has long been illegal in Nicaragua but there had been exceptions for "therapeutic" reasons if three doctors agreed there was a risk to the woman's life. Those exceptions were no longer necessary, said the Nicaraguan Pro-Life Association, because medical advances obviated the need to terminate pregnancies. "The conditions that justified therapeutic abortion now have medical solutions," says a spokesman. Pope Benedict XVI welcomed the ban but added that women should not suffer or die as a result. "In this regard, it is essential to increase the assistance of the state and of society itself to women who have serious problems during pregnancy."

Nicaragua provides no answer to the debate about when, between conception and birth, life begins. But in the case of González it is clear when it ended: at 28 years. According to Zeledon, the doctors left González with few illusions. "When she came back from the hospital she was very upset. They said they couldn't help her. She knew what this meant: I think she knew she was going to die." Her children have been taken into care and her mother now lives alone. The only mementos of González's visits to her aunts in Managua are some clothes and the red shoes.

No one knows how many other women have died, or are going to die, as a result of the law. The Pope seemed to acknowledge an increased risk to women's health but Nicaragua's government has made no formal study of the law's impact. Women's rights organisations say their 82 documented deaths are the tip of the iceberg. The Pan-American Health Organisation estimates one woman per day suffers from an ectopic pregnancy, and that every two days a woman suffers a miscarriage from a molar pregnancy. That adds up to hundreds of obstetric emergencies per year.

Human Rights Watch, in a recent report titled Over Their Dead Bodies, cited one woman who urgently needed medical help, but was left untreated at a public hospital for two days because the foetus was still alive and so a therapeutic abortion would be illegal. Eventually she expelled the foetus on her own. "By then she was already in septic shock and died five days later," said the doctor.

Another woman, named Mariana, said she obtained a clandestine abortion because her pregnancy aggravated a permanent health condition. "I was very afraid. It was very traumatic not to be able to talk about it, because it is a crime. The abortion saved both me and the two children I already have." The report said the potentially most harmful impact was that girls and women were afraid of seeking treatment for pregnancy-related complications, especially haemorrhaging, in case they were accused of having induced an abortion.

Doctors say they have been put in an impossible position. "We face extremely grave ethical conflicts, all because of politics," says Carla Serrato, a gynaecologist from Nicaragua's state-run Alemán Nicaragüense Hospital. Ligia Altamirano Gómez, an obstetrician, says they fear being overruled by the law. "We are pushed toward illegality."

In an attempt to clarify matters, the health ministry issued protocols last December that said doctors should respond to most obstetric emergencies, including ectopic pregnancies and post-abortion care. To terminate an ectopic pregnancy is legal, it turns out, because since the foetus is not in the womb the procedure would not be an abortion. But such is the climate of fear and confusion that the protocols are widely ignored and misunderstood. The doctors who turned González away from the hospital in Managua thought it was illegal, as did medical staff the Guardian interviewed in Ocotal, González's home town.

"The ban has people frightened. You could lose everything - that's the first thing on your mind," says Dr Arguello, a leading critic of the ban. So far there have been no prosecutions but many doctors are unwilling to take the risk on behalf of women who are often poor, uneducated and from a lower social class.

It is a grim irony that this is happening under a Sandinista government - a movement whose ranks once included advocates for feminism and abortion rights. That was in the 1980s, when the Sandinistas were secular marxists, wore combat fatigues and fought a bloody civil war against US-backed Contra rebels. Things changed. The war ended and the Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega, lost the presidency in a 1990 election. Church and state were supposedly separate but clerics wielded political clout, none more so than Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo. His hostility sank Ortega's attempted comebacks in 1996 and 2001 elections.

In the run-up to last November's election, the cardinal spearheaded a campaign for a blanket abortion ban. Ortega, desperate to regain power, mobilised the Sandinistas behind the cardinal's campaign and helped get the ban enacted just days before the poll. The former revolutionary, now reinvented as a devout Catholic, was rewarded with the presidency.

Ortega, who did not respond to interview requests for this article, has stayed pious in power. Last month he whipped Sandinista assembly deputies into voting with rightwing parties 66-3 to uphold the ban. Many former officials are disgusted with a leader and party they no longer recognise. "It's cynical and it's sad, especially when you consider our high rate of sexual violence and very young mothers," says Moisés Arana, a former mayor of Bluefields. "Here there is a lot of religiosity but only a little Christianity."

The Sandinistas may have changed but Nicaragua's revolutionary heritage has left it with some of Central America's most outspoken feminists. That their former comrades-in-arms are the agents of conservative oppression, as they see it, has them breathing fire. "This is wrong, all wrong. And we are going to fight it all the way," says Ana María Pizarro, a doctor and leading activist. Earlier this month feminists interrupted mass in Managua's metropolitan cathedral to protest against the ban.

The legal strategy is to ask the supreme court to declare the law unconstitutional - while fully expecting to lose since it is stacked with government supporters - to clear the way for a campaign involving the UN and international courts of human rights. They expect to get a sympathetic hearing in Europe, not least at an abortion conference in London later this month organised by Marie Stopes. There are likely to be calls for donor countries such as Britain, Spain and Denmark to threaten to cut aid to Nicaragua. So far there has been so sign of that.

The campaign's problem is that at home it is politically outgunned and unpopular. Lobbying for abortion rights, however limited, is a hard sell to a population largely deferential to the pulpit. The taboo is especially strong in rural areas. Edith Morales, an extrovert mother of two in Sahsa on the Miskito coast, is loud and proud when discussing indigenous rights and her impoverished community's needs. But when discussing the termination of an ectopic pregnancy she had 15 years ago, an act that probably saved her life, she lowers her voice, as if it was something shameful. "People here are very conservative," she explains. Asked if she supports the ban on therapeutic abortions, she shakes her head, and murmurs no.

At the other end of the country, in Bluefields, Inspector Martylee Ingram has the same, almost apologetic tone. She is discussing the harrowing case of an 11-year-old girl, Vera, who has been raped and is now 27 weeks pregnant. Asked if Vera should have the baby, she hesitates. The law says yes and her job is to enforce the law. The inspector shakes her head. "But me, as a woman and policewoman, I'd say no. I feel like she shouldn't have it. It's a baby having a baby. She might not survive."

Last month an assembly vote on whether to uphold the law was an emotional and boisterous affair with dozens of girls and women in the public gallery chanting in protest. Separated by just a sheet of glass, the two sides were a study in contrasts. One comprised mostly elderly men in suits, some of whom opened their speeches by saying "I am a Catholic". The other comprised mostly young women in jeans and T-shirts. "Shame, shame, shame on you all," shouted one teenager. "Daniel Ortega is a rapist," shouted another, a reference to allegations the politican raped his stepdaughter. (He was acquitted of all charges.)

Among the police officers keeping an eye on the protesters was a twentysomething woman with a slight bump beneath her blue uniform. She was four months pregnant and anxious, it turned out, because she had been diagnosed with toxic plasmosis, a bacterium that enters the bloodstream during pregnancy and can gravely damage the foetus. She watched the votes stack up in favour of the blanket ban and shook her head, but said nothing.

British military scientists sent hundreds of Indian soldiers into gas chambers and exposed them to mustard gas, documents uncovered by the Guardian have revealed.

The Guardian understands that the British military did not check up on the Indian soldiers after the experiments to see if they developed any illnesses. It is now recognised that mustard gas can cause cancer and other diseases.

Many suffered severe burns on their skin, including their genitals, leaving them in pain for days and even weeks. Some had to be treated in hospital.

The trials have been thrown into the spotlight by newly discovered documents at the National Archives which have shown for the first time the full scale of the experiments.

The Indian troops were serving under the command of the British military at a time when India was under colonial rule.

The experiments took place over more than 10 years before and during world war two in a military installation at Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan. They were conducted by scientists from the Porton Down chemical warfare establishment in Wiltshire who had been posted to the sub-continent to develop poison gases to use against the Japanese.

The Indian tests are a little-known part of Porton's huge programme of chemical warfare testing on humans. More than 20,000 British soldiers were subjected to chemical warfare trials involving poison gases, such as nerve gas and mustard gas, at Porton between 1916 and 1989.

Many of these British soldiers have alleged that they were duped into taking part in the tests, which have damaged their health in the years after the trials.

The reports record that in some cases Indian soldiers were exposed to mustard gas protected only by a respirator. On one occasion the gas mask of an Indian sepoy (a private) slipped, leaving him with severe burns on his eyes and face.

The tests were used to determine how much gas was needed to produce a casualty on the battlefield.

In 1942 the Porton scientists reported that there had been a "large number" of burns from the gas among Indian and British test subjects. Some were so harsh that they had to be sent to hospital. "Severely burned patients are often very miserable and depressed and in considerable discomfort, which must be experienced to be properly realised," wrote the scientists.

Other soldiers were hospitalised for a week after they were sent into a gas chamber wearing "drill shorts and open-necked, khaki, cotton shirts" to gauge the effect of mustard gas on their eyes.

The trials had started in the early 1930s when Porton scientists wanted to find out if mustard gas inflicted greater damage on Indian skin compared with British skin. More than 500 Britons and Indians were exposed to mustard gas.

Alan Care, a lawyer representing British troops tested at Porton, said: "I would be astonished if these Indian subjects gave any meaningful consent to taking part in these tests, particularly as they were conducted during the days of Empire. No one would have agreed ... if they knew beforehand what was going to happen."

Porton officials have argued that trials took place in a different era, during a conflict, and so their conduct should not be judged by today's standards.

The Ministry of Defence could not say whether the Indian soldiers were volunteers in the experiments. It said: "The studies undertaken at the Chemical Defence Research Establishment in India included defensive research, weapons research and physiological research. These studies supported those conducted in simulated conditions in the UK in a different environment."

Chemical warfare

Porton Down, founded in 1916, is the oldest chemical warfare research installation in the world. Until the 1950s Porton developed chemical weapons such as mustard gas and nerve gas. In the 1940s and 1950s Porton also devised biological weapons, chiefly anthrax bombs.

Today Porton's primary task is to develop defensive equipment to shield the armed forces against chemical and biological weapons. Porton believes that the British armed forces are equipped with some of the best defensive equipment in the world.

Porton has always recruited members of the armed forces to take part in experiments. The most controversial resulted in the death of airman Ronald Maddison in 1953 when liquid nerve gas was dripped on to his arm. An inquest in 2004 found that he had been unlawfully killed.

Last year the government paid compensation to three servicemen who had been given LSD without their consent.

Noel Sharkey
Saturday August 18, 2007
The Guardian

The deployment of the first armed battlefield robots in Iraq is the latest step on a dangerous path - we are sleepwalking into a brave new world where robots decide who, where and when to kill. Already, South Korea and Israel are deploying armed robot border guards and China, Singapore and the UK are among those making increasing use of military robots. The biggest player yet is the US: robots are integral to its $230bn future combat systems project, a massive plan to develop unmanned vehicles that can strike from the air, under the sea and on land. Congress has set a goal of having one-third of ground combat vehicles unmanned by 2015. Over 4,000 robots are serving in Iraq at present, others in Afghanistan. And now they are armed.

Most robots currently in combat are extensions of human fighters who control the application of lethal force. When a semi-autonomous MQ-1 Predator self-navigated above a car full of al-Qaida suspects in 2002, the decision to vaporise them with Hellfire missiles was made by pilots 7,000 miles away. Predators and the more deadly Reaper robot attack planes have flown many missions since then with inevitable civilian deaths, yet working with remote-controlled or semi-autonomous machines carries only the same ethical responsibilities as a traditional air strike.

But fully autonomous robots that make their own decisions about lethality are high on the US military agenda. The US National Research Council advises "aggressively exploiting the considerable warfighting benefits offered by autonomous vehicles". They are cheap to manufacture, require less personnel and, according to the navy, perform better in complex missions. One battlefield soldier could start a large-scale robot attack in the air and on the ground.

This is dangerous new territory for warfare, yet there are no new ethical codes or guidelines in place. I have worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination is terrifying. Policymakers seem to have an understanding of AI that lies in the realms of science fiction and myth. A recent US navy document suggests that the critical issue is for autonomous systems to be able to identify the legality of targets. Then their answer to the ethical problems is simply, "Let men target men" and "Let machines target other machines". In reality, a robot could not pinpoint a weapon without pinpointing the person using it or even discriminate between weapons and non-weapons. I can imagine a little girl being zapped because she points her ice cream at a robot to share. Or a robot could be tricked into killing innocent civilians.

In attempting to allay political opposition, the US army is funding a project to equip robot soldiers with a conscience to give them the ability to make ethical decisions. But machines could not discriminate reliably between buses carrying enemy soldiers or schoolchildren, let alone be ethical. It smells like a move to delegate the responsibility for fatal errors on to non-sentient weapons.

Human soldiers have legal protocols such as the Geneva conventions to guide them. Autonomous robots are only covered by the laws of armed conflict that deal with standard weapons. But autonomous robots are not like other weapons. We are going to give decisions on human fatality to machines that are not bright enough to be called stupid. With prices falling and technology becoming easier, we may soon see a robot arms race that will be difficult to stop.

It is imperative that we create international legislation and a code of ethics for autonomous robots at war before it is too late.

Noel Sharkey is professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield
noel@dcs.shef.ac.uk

 A mother of four, Jalil sought out employment, but job opportunities for women had decreased since the US invasion.

 She begged shop owners, office workers and companies to hire her but was treated with what she calls chauvinistic discrimination.

 Within weeks of her husband's death, a doctor diagnosed her children with malnutrition.

 Fighting tears, she recalled the desperation which led her to the oldest profession: "In the beginning these were the worst days in my life. My husband was the first man I met and slept with, but I didn't have another option … my children were starving."

 She left the house in a daze, she recalled, and walked to the nearest market to find someone who would pay her for sex.

 She said: "I'm a nice-looking woman and it wasn't difficult to find a client. When we got to the bed I tried to run away … I just couldn't do it, but he hit and raped me. When he paid me afterwards, it was finished for me.

 "When I came home with some food I had bought from that money and saw my children screaming of happiness, I discovered that honour is insignificant compared to the hunger of my children."

 Iraqi widows desperate
Prior to the US invasion, Iraqi widows, particularly those who lost husbands during the Iran-Iraq war, were provided with compensation and free education for their children. In some cases, they were provided with free homes.

However, no such safety nets currently exist and widows have few resources at their disposal.

 According to the non-governmental organisation Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), 15 per cent of Iraqi women widowed by the war have been desperately searching for temporary marriages or prostitution, either for financial support or protection in the midst of sectarian war.

 Nuha Salim, the spokesperson for OWFI, told Al Jazeera: "Widows are one of our priorities but their situation is worsening and we are feeling ineffective to cope with this significant problem. Hundreds of women are searching for an easy way to support their loved ones as employers refuse to hire them for fear of extremists' reprisals."

She said the NGO has documented the disappearance of some 4000 women, 20 per cent of whom are under 18, since the March 2003 invasion.

OWFI believes most of the missing women were kidnapped and sold into prostitution outside Iraq.

Although few reliable statistics are available on the total number of widows in Iraq, the ministry of women's affairs says that there are at least 350,000 in Baghdad alone, with more than eight million throughout the country.

Bitter trade
As Iraqi families continue to fall on hard times, some have been forced to make the most painful of decisions – selling their daughters.

Abu Ahmed, a handicapped father of five who is himself a widower, sold his daughter Lina to an Iraqi man who came to Iraq to "shop" for sex workers. Abu Ahmed said he could not afford to buy food for his other children.

He told Al Jazeera: "I'm sure that whatever she is, at least she is having food to eat. I have three other girls and a son and what they paid me for Lina is enough to raise the remaining ones."

Abu Ahmed had been initially approached by Shada, the alias of a woman living in Baghdad, who sought young women for Iraqi gangs running prostitution rackets in neighbouring Arab countries.

She told Al Jazeera that her role was to convince young women from impoverished families that a better life awaited them beyond the country's borders.

She said: "Families don't want them and we are helping the girls to survive. We offer them food and housing and about $10 a day if they have had at least two clients."

"Our priority is virgin girls; they can be sold at very expensive prices to Arab millionaires."

Shada said she sleeps in a different house every few nights as armed groups have marked her for trial and assassination.

Escape from Jordan
OWFI's Salim says cases like Lina's have become very common as poverty is increasing in Iraq and desperate families sometimes sell their daughters for less than $500 to traffickers.

But increasingly, young Iraqi women arrive in neighbouring capitals to find that prostitution carries a heavy and dangerous price.

Suha Muhammad, 17, was sold to an Iraqi gang by her mother, herself a prostitute, after her father was killed.

When she arrived in Jordan, she was gang-raped by four men who told her they were teaching her the tricks of the trade.

She told Al Jazeera she had been sold to a gang that caters to VIPs in Syria and was often shuttled to Amman, the Jordanian capital, for high-profile clients.

After six months, she escaped: "I ran away and an Iraqi family helped me by driving me to the immigration department where they helped me get a passport to return to Iraq.

"My aunt is now taking care of me in Baghdad. She never imagined that my mother could sell me, but unfortunately women in Iraq are not important and respected."

Traffic
Mayada Zuhair, a spokesperson for the Baghdad-based Women's Rights Association (WRA), said Iraqi and Arab NGOs are trying to monitor the trafficking of young women from the war-ravaged country to neighbouring destinations.

She told Al Jazeera: "We are trying to find out the fate of many widows and teenager girls who were trafficked. Unfortunately it is not an easy process and without international support, funding, and resources, we fear more young Iraqi women will be taken abroad to work in the sex trade."

In the meantime, however, prostitution remains the only option for Nirmeen Lattif, a 27-year-old widow who lost her husband in an attack on Shia pilgrims south of Baghdad.

When she turned to her husband's relatives for financial support, they could not afford to help her.

She says she tries not to think of the gravity of what she does or the dishonour it carries in conservative Muslim society.