IRAQ: For the Children, Sanctions are deadlier than the bombs I

[GIV c/o Gerhard Lange]

Cover story

*Iraq: for the children, sanctions are deadlier than the bombs*

By TOM ROBERTS
Baghdad and Basra, Iraq

The imam stood in the center of a circle of women who were kneeling,
praying and studying the Quran at the mosque in the Adamia neighborhood
of Baghdad. Abdul Gaforer Al-Quisi, spiritual leader of the mosque,
introduced the American visitors, who had just sat through his extended
tirade against the Clinton administration. He explained that every time
the women studied Quran and prayed, they prayed "against the American
administration."

His voice rising, he said through an interpreter, "Each of these women
has lost a husband, a son, a brother in the war or children to the
sanctions. So you can see how they hate America."

The pause that followed seemed to last forever, a deep silence begging
some response, a defense, an explanation, something. Everyone, it
seemed, was straining for what was to come next. Chicagoan Kathy
Kelly quietly asked the imam through the translator if she could say
something.

"Certainly," he motioned her to come forward and engage in the
discussion.

She moved forward and knelt, filling a small opening in the circle
of women. "Like all Iraqi women," she said softly, waiting for the
translation, "you have taught us." Then, touching the arm of the woman
next to her, she said, "And we are sorry." The gesture brought tears
to those in the circle and some of the onlookers. The imam was silent.
The woman leading the teaching, the servant of the Quran, walked across
the circle with a cloth for Kelly to dry her eyes, and she, in turn,
dried the eyes of the woman next to her.

As if on cue, the call to evening prayer sounded from the main part of
the mosque. Time for the men to leave the women's section. Kelly dared
one more request of the imam as the group was leaving. "May we," she
said, motioning to include the other American women who had joined the
kneeling circle, "stay and pray?"

"Of course," he said.

The moment disarmed, the discussion had gone where Kelly always wants
it to go, person to person, beneath the hardened lines of battle. It
is one of the guiding motives of the group she leads, Voices in the
Wilderness, a campaign to end the economic sanctions against the people
of Iraq. Kelly, more than most, knows that the geopolitical conflict
that has reached down into these women's lives is terribly complex and
that Iraq's President Saddam Hussein bears a measure of responsibility
for aggravating it. Yet she also knows those subtleties mean little to
a mother who has watched a child starve to death or die of a disease
that Iraqi doctors could have treated if there were no sanctions.

The women went on to pray, the Americans listening and mimicking
movements. And then, through a translator, they began to share: the
Iraqi women about the losses of loved ones to war; the Americans about
how some had spent time in jail for protesting U.S. military policy.
By the time the men returned, the women were smiling and embracing. It
looked like an interfaith kiss of peace.

The scene incorporated the extravagant Arab hospitality for which this
region of the world is known and Kelly's absolute conviction that
pacifism is the world's only hope. In this case a moment was
transformed. Perhaps it takes a dreamer to press on, for in the case
of Iraq and the United States, there is an ocean of moments in need of
transformation.

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New languages, new images
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Waging war in the post-Cold War era comes with a new set of language
and images. Smart bombs and Stealth bombers are supposed to assure that
our battles are swift and clean and limited to one-way damage. Because
of computer-guided weapons and planes that can outsmart radar, our wars
are conducted mostly at night. They tend to come with ready-made names
-- Desert Storm, Desert Fox -- as well as TV graphics and that enduring
symbol of post-Cold War coverage, the darkened skyline of some faraway
city seen through the mint-jelly haze of nighttime photography.

Kathy Kelly won't make any of the Pentagon's P.R. materials and CNN
won't incorporate her into any of its logos, but if the wars continue,
she might well become another fixture of this age's battle zones. She's
a wisp of a figure in flowing skirts, balanced by a rich tangle of red-
brown curls, worn pulled back, and thick-heeled clunky black shoes.

If there were a logo, it would show her, briefcase in hand, leading a
delegation through some faraway city in daylight, insisting that humans
find an alternative to bombs and sanctions. Mary Poppins does civil
disobedience.

She's a hard-nosed dreamer, the unlikely defier of the U.S.-inspired
United Nations' sanctions against Iraq. For nearly three years she has
directed a kind of alternative travel agency, arranging for a steady
flow of Americans to a land where they are not supposed to go, bearing
medicine and school supplies forbidden under the sanctions. She is
determined to make this largely unseen war visible, and that
determination is continuously fueled by the plight of the children.

She is a living explanation of the fact that pacifism is not necessarily
passive. "We ask soldiers to risk their lives, to lay down their lives,
in war. What do we ask of pacifists?" So she keeps going to Baghdad.

Hers is a ground campaign, a tactic that apparently still evades the
high-tech stuff with a very low-tech strategy. Getting to Baghdad today
requires a Rube Goldberg approach to travel that begins with a 12- to
15-hour flight from the United States to Amman, Jordan. In Amman, Voices
in the Wilderness delegations stay in a hotel -- two flights up off
the street and then to spartan rooms accessible by one tiny, creaky
elevator -- for a brief overnight before taking off around 5:30 the next
morning on another 12- to 15-hour jaunt.

The final leg of the journey is through the vastness of the desert,
hundreds of monotonous miles through flat, beige landscape cut by
surprisingly well-maintained two-lane and four-lane highways. Travel
is accomplished in a van or bus loaded with bottled water for the
stay in Iraq.

Two previous delegations have landed in a roadside ditch for hours
because drivers fell asleep. This time, Kelly insisted on two drivers,
an extra should the first driver get sleepy.

It takes about six hours to get to the border with Iraq, where the
bureaucrats in this lonely outpost are strangely welcoming as they
go about scratching who-knows-what on large, antiquated ledgers and
stamping who-knows-what on visas. They considerately use separate
pieces of paper so the Iraqi stamps don't show up on the passports,
a matter that could complicate travel to some other countries. The
passports are then checked at no fewer than four points as the bus
winds through a maze of roadways that makes sense, no doubt, to
someone.

In between the passport checking is a stay of several hours, spent
mostly in a large reception room that looks like an outsized living
room, carpeted and with comfortable furniture and a wall-sized oil
portrait of Saddam Hussein. For the uninitiated, it is a foretaste of
what is to come: Saddam the ubiquitous. It seems a contest is on in
Iraq to see how many ways and on how many surfaces and in how many
poses the leader of the country can be depicted. It is the iconography
of a dictatorship in which severe punishment -- life imprisonment or
death -- is constitutionally provided for criticizing or speaking ill
of the president.

In all, it takes 25 to 30 hours to get to Baghdad from the United
States, depending on your starting point. Kelly is almost a regular
commuter. This trip in mid-April is her ninth to Iraq in three years,
the 23rd for Voices in the Wilderness since it began shuttling
delegations here in 1996. The April delegation is also the largest,
totaling 15, and made up mostly of Catholic Workers. The senior in
the group is 69-year-old Mary K. Meyer, who for the past 11 years has
run a Catholic Worker house for up to 25 homeless men in Kansas City,
Kans. The youngest is 24-year-old Jeff Guntsel, a former punk rock
drummer who now works full-time for Voices. The group is accompanied
by three journalists, two from the United States, one from Argentina.
It is an unwieldy group at times that taxes the good will of Kelly's
contacts in Iraq, but also perhaps is a sign of growing momentum behind
the movement.

The Catholic Workers, who live a life of voluntary poverty serving the
poor and marginalized in the United States, had to raise funds for their
travel. The groups, representing Catholic Worker houses or communities
in Kansas City, Mo., Kansas City, Kan., Binghamton, N.Y., Ithaca, N.Y.,
and Hartford, Conn., were surprised at the outpouring of support.
Some were able to raise tens of thousands of dollars, far more than
necessary, and donated the unused funds to Voices in the Wilderness and
to purchase medicine.

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Civil disobedience is primary
-----------------------------

In Baghdad the medicine along with the bottled water is stashed in
a room in the Al Fanar Hotel, which serves as home base for the
delegation and which once must have been a fine hotel. Today it is
dingy; paint is peeling from the walls; a number of young men who
work here sleep on the floor at one end of the dining room at night.

The first floor reeks of the kerosene that the manager says is used
to fire the generator in the basement, a hedge against the constant
electrical blackouts. When driving through the city you can tell
which neighborhoods are undergoing blackouts by the dead traffic
lights. "No, it was not like this before the sanctions," said the
workers at the hotel and the taxi drivers. "Before sanctions,
everything worked, everything was fine."

Except for two Italian women, representatives of an Italian peace
group, who maintain rooms at the hotel, and a native Jordanian, now
from Holland, who pronounces, the first evening in perfect English,
that "all governments are shit," the hotel appears empty.

Three days into our stay, two busloads of Muslims from India show up
for several days. They are touring holy sites on their way home from
the hajj, the trip to Mecca that all devout Muslims are encouraged to
take at least once in their lives. The group is gone most of the day,
but as soon as it returns in late afternoon so do several young Iraqis
selling black leather jackets. For some reason these Indians, in
flowing pastel cotton garb, are greatly attracted to the black leather
jackets. Part of the sales pitch is to hold a flaming lighter under
one of the sleeves to prove the material isn't plastic.

Soon after the Voices delegation arrives in Iraq, Kelly calls a meeting
and restates the points of a briefing that all of the groups have heard
before embarking on the trip. There are certain nonnegotiables about
the purpose of Voices in the Wilderness. Such clarity of purpose,
we would learn later from Westerners living here, has earned the
organization valuable credibility. As one seasoned observer told the
journalists: "The government [of Iraq] is using her to some extent,
but then the government is using everyone. But she is very clear about
her purpose, and people [in the United Nations, for instance, and among
members of the press] have respect for her."

Kelly emphasized that Voices, though it brings into the country a token
amount of medicine, is not a relief agency, so she warns against making
promises of medicines or treatment or money. Do not give false hope.
People are desperate, she said, and saying no or explaining that nothing
can be done will be extremely difficult.

The organization is here to deliberately defy the sanctions, to set up
a nonviolent confrontation over a policy that the group believes is
tantamount to full-scale war against the most vulnerable in Iraqi
society.

The sanctions that were first imposed in August 1990 by Resolution 661
of the U.N. Security Council after Iraq invaded Kuwait have been in
place without letup for nearly 10 years. In modern history there has
been no parallel to the complete and total isolation from the rest of
the world to which Iraq has been subjected. The resolution set out "a
full trade embargo barring all imports from and exports to Iraq" except
for medical supplies, foodstuffs and other humanitarian items "as
determined by the Security Council sanctions committee," according to a
document produced by the United Nations Oil-For-Food program office in
Iraq.

It was only in May 1996 that the Oil-For-Food program came into being,
allowing Iraq to sell a small amount of oil each year to purchase a
minimal amount of food and medicine.

Over the course of the embargo, the basic unit of currency, the Iraqi
dinar, was devalued to such an extent as to be virtually worthless.
Before 1990, one dinar was worth three-and-a-half U.S. dollars. Now it
takes just under 2,000 dinars to make a dollar. So a 250-dinar note,
the most commonly used bank note these days, once worth about $800 in
U.S. currency, is now worth about 12 cents.

Iraq, which once imported nearly everything because of its oil riches,
could buy almost nothing after the embargo was put in place. Even under
the current system of oil for food, the country is purchasing but a
fraction of what it needs to sustain itself and certainly nothing that
would begin to rebuild the war's damage to oil production facilities
and water and sewage treatment plants.

Saddam Hussein notwithstanding, almost overnight, Iraq went from being
one of the richest, most progressive of the Arab states to a crippled
society, denied access to its principal natural resource, with a
civilian infrastructure and an economy in ruins.

Sanctions once may have been viewed as a humanitarian alternative
to bombing. In the case of the total freeze placed on Iraq, though,
people like Kelly are convinced that sanctions have become more
deadly than bombs. They are worse than bombing military targets, she
argues, because they target the most vulnerable and helpless in Iraqi
society.

For acting on such convictions, Voices in the Wilderness was threatened
in December with a $120,000 fine by the U.S. Department of the Treasury's
Office of Foreign Assets Control for engaging in prohibited transactions
"relating to the embargo against Iraq." Specifically, the group has been
cited for delivering donated "medical supplies and toys" to Iraq. Four
members of the campaign face an additional $43,000 in fines for traveling
to Iraq.

In January, the Office of Foreign Assets Control again warned Voices
against traveling to Iraq and delivering medical supplies, noting that
violation of the embargo could draw criminal penalties of up to $1
million in fines and up to 12 years in prison, and civil penalties of
up to $250,000 per violation. Those penalties, she advises all who
travel in the delegations, could be applied to anyone who joins the
effort.

The threats have not stopped the campaign. Since that December warning,
the delegations have been almost constant, including one in early March
made up of Nobel Peace Laureates Mairead Maguire of Ireland and Adolfo
Perez Esquivel of Argentina. They were accompanied by Jesuit Fr. John
Dear, director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation USA.

That was followed by a group from Boston. Just before the group of
Catholic Workers showed up, a delegation of activists from Philadelphia
had been in Iraq with a group representing Physicians for Social
Responsibility. And toward the end of the Catholic Workers' stay a
group of Dominican sisters from across the United States showed up.
They had been moved by a letter sent out a year ago by Dominican Master
General Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, who wrote, on returning from a visit to
Iraq, that the Iraqi Dominican sisters had told him, "We are ground
down, exhausted by years of death."

Radcliffe continued, "It is as if the embargo had sometimes seemed to
shut out even God. ... What this people hunger for more than anything
else is a word of hope."

So Kelly is once more explaining to another delegation the simple
purpose of Voices in the Wilderness and the need to abide by the rules
that Iraq has put in place in light of the bombings and sanctions.
Taking pictures on the street is prohibited unless a "minder," an
employee of the Red Crescent Society, the equivalent of the Red Cross
in Muslim countries, says it is all right to do so. Journalists with
the group are advised that outside of Baghdad interviews can be
conducted only with a minder present and often translating, and only
those pictures allowed by the guides can be snapped.

She also warns against attempting discussions about Saddam Hussein.
Because of the severity of punishment for anything construed as
critical, people never mention his name. For a visitor to do so could
place someone in jeopardy. The assumption is that rooms are bugged
and telephone lines are tapped.

The point is hammered home as we make our way through meetings and
interviews. Only the U.N. offices and the papal nuncio's sitting
room are free of pictures or portraits of Saddam Hussein. To this
Westerner's ear, it seemed that everyone had a version of an oath of
loyalty to Saddam that was part of any presentation. It was easy
to imagine that, in a society where conversations might quickly be
reported up the line, such obeisance is a natural part of any public
exchange.

Even in the private quarters of Archbishop Djibrail Kassab of Basra,
a picture of Pope John Paul II was slightly off to the side above the
bishop's chair. A photo of Saddam Hussein with the bishop was directly
above the chair.

In the offices of the imam mentioned earlier, pictures showed Saddam in
two prayer poses, one in military uniform and one in civilian clothes.

In the southern city of Basra, the hotel we stayed in hosted a photo
exhibit, including disturbing images of children killed when American
bombs fell on a crowded neighborhood in the city. The exhibit was a
celebration of a national day for photographers. Sure enough, as the
exhibit was put in place, a large painting of Saddam Hussein, this time
in a casual sport coat with an open-collar shirt and straw hat, camera
in hand, was placed on a prominently positioned easel. Saddam, the
universal tourist.

He was everywhere, but few mentioned his name.

The most wrenching rule of all: Don't hand out money to the shoeshine
boys in front of the hotel. Pay for shoeshines, pay generously if you
like, and get your shoes shined as often as you like, but do not just
hand out food or money. If the word gets out that is happening, the
crowds of shoeshine boys will be unmanageable and the work of future
delegations of Voices in the Wilderness will be compromised.

The shoeshine boys, about six of them outside our hotel, are wonderfully
personable kids who range in age from about 10 to 14. Kelly knows some
of their families. In other times, there were shoeshine boys throughout
Baghdad, say those familiar with pre-sanction days. In recent years,
however, their numbers have greatly increased, and many are doing it not
just for extra money, but to help support their families. The shoes of
this delegation were unrecognizably shiny by the time we left Baghdad.

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Albright: A price worth paying
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The government of Iraq's media center is a drab building in central
Baghdad. The hallways are dimly lit, only a few light bulbs are working
and there's always the chance the electricity will go out. Yet even in
the dimness, just outside the Umm Al Ma'arik Research Center on the
second floor, something familiar catches the eye.

Taped to the wall, blown up large, is the 1996 exchange between Lesley
Stahl of the CBS program "60 Minutes" and then-U.S. Ambassador to the
United Nations Madeleine Albright.

Stahl, speaking of the results of the U.N. sanctions against Iraq: "We
have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more
children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"

Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we
think the price is worth it."

On the poster here, Albright's response is shortened to: "Yes, we think
the price is worth it."

Granting that it is a hard choice, it is still difficult to read much
subtlety or nuance into that response. If it was the intention of
Albright, now U.S. secretary of state, to send the Iraqi government an
unmistakable message about U.S. resolve, she also sent along a public
relations bonanza.

Even more chilling, in this 10th year of sanctions, is the degree to
which that response describes what is happening inside Iraq today. For
whatever else may be true -- and truth here can be as slippery as the
oil that remains underground -- the doctors we speak to, the United
Nations observers and workers, the papal nuncio and the archbishop of
Basra all say children are dying in inordinate numbers, of diseases
that should not kill, because of the U.S.-inspired sanctions imposed
by the United Nations.

Other signs of cultural stress and deterioration are everywhere. Former
teachers are driving cabs and selling cigarettes on the streets. Former
accountants and other professionals are serving as translators and
minders for the Red Crescent. Elementary schools lack pencils and paper.
College students beg for current books and periodicals. They have no
access to the Internet. Doctors lack medicines and most haven't seen a
current medical journal in nearly a decade. Hospitals lack everything --
medicine, equipment and such basics as linens and alcohol.

Baghdad, once a rich and bustling city, is deteriorating at a distressing
pace, according to Iraqis and non-Iraqis who have known it over time. Its
international hotels are mostly empty, and one of its prime boulevards,
Abu Nuwas Street, along the west bank of the broad Tigris River, has
turned shabby, its once beautifully landscaped park now a series of dusty
patches and weeds. The whole city seems on a march in reverse.

The ever-present little orange and cream cabs that clatter at breakneck
speeds around Baghdad look like survivors of some demolition derby. No
spare parts and no new autos for the common Iraqi have made it through
the embargo in almost a decade. Door handles have fallen off, upholstery
is in tatters, windows don't work and doors won't open. But the drivers
keep driving, with great abandon and in vehicles that burn minimally
refined fuel and spew clouds of fumes continuously. If Iraq has any
advantage over the rest of the world it is in its fuel prices. A liter
sells for pennies, cheaper than a liter of bottled water.

The general embargo that has virtually cut off this country from the
rest of the world has so far widely missed its main target -- Saddam
Hussein and his governing apparatus -- while apparently causing massive
collateral damage to innocent bystanders.

Nowhere is the slow dying of Iraq more evident or grotesque than in its
children. From the shoeshine boys who will follow a Westerner for blocks
before giving up the chance for a few dinars, to the increasingly
frequent hints of red in what should be rich, dark hair -- a sure sign,
we are told, of malnutrition -- the record that is building is a jarring
one. The relentless flow into the now-primitive hospitals of tiny bodies
racked with waterborne diseases, pneumonia, malnutrition and what doctors
say is a wildly accelerating rate of childhood cancers, is damning
evidence that the children of Iraq are paying the heaviest price for the
political and military struggle in which they have no say.

Inside the research center -- in name only at this point, since little
data is being gathered in any conventional sense in Iraq -- Nasra
Sadoon, an author and director of the center, noted the previous day's
news of the killings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.
"Clinton said yesterday that 'We must teach our children to solve
problems through dialogue, not violence.' We wish he would apply the
principle to Iraq.

"I think America wants to colonize Iraq. We cannot accept any foreign
hegemony," she said. "The American people should understand, they have
no right to interfere in the internal affairs of another country."
Beneath the swagger and clash of geopolitical titans, a culture is
unraveling, a people is being brought to its knees, and no one seems
quite clear to what end. Whatever the ultimate goals of the United
Nations and the United States, say those we interview, Iraq is slowly
dying, quietly, largely out of sight of most Americans. We are killing
it softly with sanctions.

* * *