Cover
story Iraq's horror is worst activist has seen
By ROBERT McCLORY
Special Report Writer
She has visited many of the world's hot spots in the past nine
years -- Bosnia, Croatia, Haiti, Jordan, Nicaragua -- in her role as one of
America's most active pacifists. But nothing she encountered in other war-torn
venues prepared her for the unrelenting horror of Iraq some six years after the
end of the Gulf War.
"The children are dying -- more than 4,500 a month under the age
of 5," said Kathy Kelly, citing statistics released by the United Nations in
late 1996. "What we are doing is waging biological warfare against a civilian
population."
Since the end of the war some 600,000 Iraqi children have perished
due to starvation and disease, according to the United Nations.
Indeed, the sanctions imposed on post-war Iraq are the most severe
laid on any nation in modern times. And though they have failed to provoke the
ousting of President Saddam Hussein or to convince a special U.N. commission
that he is not still smuggling arms into his country, they have had a decided
effect. Iraq, whose economy is based almost entirely on the sale of oil, is
able to export only a trickle. It cannot purchase medicine, machinery, spare
parts, agricultural supplies or even chlorine to purify the water. Malnutrition
and water-borne diseases like cholera and typhus are rampant, with the
youngest, the oldest and the poorest most vulnerable. The country's once modern
infrastructure is falling apart, and the unemployment rate is estimated at 85
percent.
People sit in the streets of large cities like Basra and Baghdad
offering for sale their electrical appliances, clothing, blankets, even the
doors from their houses, in order to buy food. These pervasive city-wide flea
markets have proven attractive to foreigners looking for bargains.
A sewage pumping station in Basra broke down more than a year ago,
turning many streets into permanent rivers of raw waste.
The middle class as well as the poor have been deeply affected by
the sanctions. According to a Time magazine report, the head of a government
department uses his car as a taxi after work. His wife takes in laundry. A
woman fluent in four languages, who formerly ran a flourishing car rental
service, has been forced to sell her furniture and cooking utensils.
Yet, noted Time, the middle class is not in a revolutionary mood.
It is simply trying to survive. Meanwhile, the ruling class and the very
wealthy live as comfortably as ever. According to an American diplomat, "The
Iraqi leadership has chosen to spend its money on itself and not on its
starving population."
Kelly, 44, is a soft-spoken, gentle-appearing Chicagoan and a
veteran of the Catholic Worker movement who has been arrested more than 40
times and spent a year in federal prison for her anti-war efforts. She was a
part of the 72-member international Gulf Peace Team that camped on the border
between Iraq and Saudi Arabia in 1991 just as Operation Desert Storm was
getting underway. The protesters were forcibly removed by the Iraqi military
when the shooting started.
Now Kelly is a major organizer of a group called Voices in the
Wilderness, which has been carrying food and medicines into Iraq for more than
a year in open violation of the sanctions. Others prominent in the group
include veteran anti-war activist Bradford Lyttle, Northwestern University
graduate student Brad Simpson, Sacred Heart Fr. Robert Bossie and Catholic
Worker organizer Chuck Quilty. In the most recent visit in late March, Kelly
and a few others distributed their meager supplies at Baghdad's Al Mansur
Hospital where they had previously encountered many children suffering from
leukemia.
"We showed the doctor a picture taken last August of two children
-- Muhammad and Noora," said Kelly. "We wondered if the medicines we brought
might be used to help them." Calmly, she recalled, the doctor explained that
Muhammad had died two days before their arrival and Noora two weeks before
that.
The condition of hospitals all over the country is abominable,
Kelly said, with the sick lying on blood-stained beds without sheets or on the
floor. At the Pediatric and Gynecological Hospital in Basra, they saw a row of
14 incubators standing idle because replacement parts are unavailable. In one
wing of the hospital housing scores of sick people, only one toilet was
working. Since the electricity goes off five or more times a day, much of the
life-sustaining electrical equipment that still works is virtually useless.
"I held dying children in my arms," said Kelly. "Some were gasping
for breath, too weak to move. I asked a mother if she had any message for the
United States. She said, 'I would only ask them what they would do if this was
their child.' "
Amid all this tragedy, Kelly was struck by the strength and
courage she encountered. "So many examples of heroism," she said. "We met
doctors working around the clock for next to no income, hotel desk clerks who
introduced us to the neediest families in their neighborhood, a widow managing
somehow to care for eight children, a civil engineer who vented his frustration
to us and immediately said, 'Now what can I do to help you.' We saw all of
these people laboring to share with other needy people their resources, income,
homes and even their seemingly impossible hopes."
Kelly was especially struck by Dijbraeel Kassab, the Chaldean
Christian archbishop of southern Iraq. He is, she says, "the inheritor of
Archbishop [Oscar] Romero's mantle, a genuine voice of the poor." Kassab, one
of the few priests still active in Basra, had opened all church buildings to
the homeless and was relentless in trying to secure clothing, food and supplies
for the poor. "He is constantly in the streets," said Kelly, "visiting the
sick, begging for help anywhere he can find it."
Last December, the U.N. passed Resolution 986, which allows Iraq
to sell $1 billion in oil every six months; this has resulted in the
establishment of thousands of emergency food stations throughout the country.
Kelly said the help amounts to a drop in the bucket and crisis conditions still
prevail everywhere. Kelly, who raises the awful specter of Iraq in numerous
public appearances, asked, "Are we in this country content to just let this go
on? Are we prepared to take responsibility for a whole future generation of
malnourished and stunted persons?"
She is well aware that the United States places blame for the
human devastation in Iraq on Saddam's shoulders, but she rejects what she calls
"a consistent policy of suffering imposed on the innocent for our political
gains." Last January during the Senate confirmation hearings for Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright, Kelly and four other members of Voices in the
Wilderness interrupted the proceedings to plead their cause.
Kelly, the first to rise up in the visitors' section, said, "A
half million Iraqi children have died because of U.S.-U.N. sanctions. Please,
Mrs. Albright, you could do so much good." Kelly was promptly ushered out of
the hearing, but the others raised their voices one by one, creating a lengthy
disturbance. When calm returned Albright said, "I am as concerned about the
children of Iraq as any person in this room. ... Saddam Hussein is the one who
has the fate of his country in his hands."
The next day Albright was praised in the press for displaying "her
celebrated cool under fire." Kelly and the other protesters issued a press
statement saying, "Iraqi children are totally innocent of oil power politics.
All those who prevent the lifting of sanctions, including Madeleine Albright,
are not. One-line disclaimers of responsibility may appear admirable, but the
children are dead and we have seen them dying."
The slow genocide has aroused the concern of other individuals and
organizations as well. In a letter to the chairman of the U.N. commission
investigating Iraq's compliance with the weapons ban, former U.S. Attorney
General Ramsey Clark wrote, "No failure to comply with the U.N. condition can
possibly justify the collective punishment of the entire nation and the direct
deaths of infants, children, the elder population and the handicapped. You are
fully aware that no hidden arms or arms program in Iraq can possibly pose the
threat to life anywhere that the sanctions inflict on Iraq every day. These
sanctions kill more people each week than Iraq with all its armies and materiel
... could inflict on foreign armies ... when Iraq was under assault" in
1991.
Each time Kelly or other Voice of Wilderness members go to Iraq
they advise the State Department of their intentions. And each time they
receive a letter of warning: "You and members of Voice in the Wilderness are
hereby warned to refrain from engaging in any unauthorized transactions related
to the exportation of medical supplies and travel to Iraq."
The penalties, they are informed, range up to 12 years in prison
and more than $1 million in fines. Yet federal authorities have made no attempt
to arrest or charge those who flaunt the ban. Kelly hopes she and her
companions will be prosecuted during one of their future trips. "What an
opportunity!" she said. "To go before a jury with the evidence of starvation
and malnutrition, to show the small supplies of medicine and food our
government forbids us to bring the dying. I would dearly relish such an
opportunity."
Another Voices in the Wilderness delegation is slated to travel to
Iraq in late May. Among the visitors will be a U.S. veteran of the Gulf
War.
National Catholic Reporter, May 23,
1997
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