sanctions and the church
failure of moral leadership
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton
Within five months after the sanctions were first imposed against Iraq—by December of 1990—William Webster, Director of the CIA, testified to the U.S. Congress that the sanctions were working almost one hundred percent. Hundreds of thousands of deaths and indescribable suffering inflicted on the whole nation of Iraq have been the result. Indeed, the United Nations is waging a form of cruel warfare that seems almost unmatched in the history of human wars.
And yet, for some reason, religious leaders in the United States and the United Kingdom—the two nations most responsible for the continuation of the sanctions—have been almost completely silent. This failure in moral leadership is highlighted by the actions of religious leaders in the past couple of years who have come to realize and deplore the failures of the Christian churches fifty years ago during World War II.
In the Catholic community, Japanese bishops have confessed their failure to oppose the aggressive and cruel warfare perpetrated by their nation. German bishops and French bishops have done the same, especially in regard to the Holocaust. Repentance for past failures is admirable and perhaps someday U.S. bishops will repent of our failure to condemn the movement toward "total war"—all-out attacks on noncombatants—that took place during World War II and culminated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a "butchery of untold magnitude," in the words of Pope Paul VI.
But moral leadership that waits fifty years to react is still a failure. Real moral leadership cries out and denounces gross evil and violence when it is happening. So far, as a body, U.S. religious leaders have been sinfully silent and have provided no specific moral guidance for the U.S. community and its political leaders.
In November 1997 I made an attempt to put a resolution before the National Conference of Catholic Bishops at their General Meeting. Because my motion to put this on the agenda involved a change of the rules for our meetings, it needed a two-thirds vote of those present, which was 168 votes. The motion received 163. However, merely raising the issue caused some bishops to confront the moral issues surrounding the embargo for the first time.
Since that meeting I have again visited Iraq, and I feel an even stronger need to awaken a moral response to what we are doing to the people of Iraq. This time I visited the southern part of the country where the worst of the bombing and ground war took place. Truly this was a place where "total war" happened. Carpet bombing by B-52s, fuel-air explosives, uranium-tipped missiles, bombing and strafing along "the highway of death"—every high-tech weapon in the U.S. arsenal was used. The result was killing on a scale unmatched for a war of such short duration. Besides those who were killed or wounded in that violence, every one in the area continues to suffer and die because of the almost total destruction of the infrastructure that makes a modern city function: the water purification system, the electrical system, the waste disposal system, the transportation system and so on. Probably the most devastating and frightening result is the radioactive debris spread around the area because of the uranium-tipped missiles.
The results of this brutal war-making especially overwhelmed me during a visit to a hospital in Basra. A group of us from the U.S. were waiting in the lobby of the hospital for the medical director, Dr. Feras Abdul Abbas, to come and greet us. He had not been notified of our visit ahead of time, and probably was not sure of who was waiting to see him.
I spotted him walking down the hall before he saw us. He was moving slowly and looked very tired. His face seemed sad. But as he got closer he looked up and saw us. Immediately his whole face lit up and he broke into a smile. When I moved to greet him and shake his hand he said, "You make me happy. I smile from my heart. You make me strong." Just the fact that we were there and had brought at least token help in the form of medicines obviously gave him encouragement to keep on with his work at the hospital. As we chatted he said to me, "What you see here today will make you very sad. If you stay in Basra for two days it will break your heart."
We didn’t stay two days but what I saw did break my heart—even as it provoked in me a deep and abiding anger. The conditions in the hospital were appalling. In a part of the country where temperatures reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, there is no longer any air conditioning. Flies are everywhere. Mothers must constantly brush them away from children too weak to do this themselves. Beds are without sheets. Paint is crumbling from the walls. Everything is in a state of disrepair.
Three children are vividly impressed on my memory. A tiny infant, lying naked on the bed, his body severely malnourished, obviously in great distress, but too weak to even cry—and the doctor’s words, "He will die this evening or during the night." A mother who cried so easily as she held and comforted her daughter, eight or nine years old, who would die soon. This would be her third child to die. And a twelve-year-old girl who was suffering from kidney failure. I remember her eyes. They showed the pain she felt constantly but most of all they expressed a profound sadness. I found myself unable to maintain eye contact. I had to look away as I wept for her.
Of course, these children, and all the others in the hospital and throughout the country, should not even have been ill. In ordinary circumstances they would have been healthy and carefree, as any child has a right to be. Even if they were somehow afflicted, there would be medicine and medical equipment and good hospital care to restore them to health. Knowing this is what causes me to be angry.
Iraqis previously enjoyed a high standard of living. They had the best health care, education, social security, and public welfare programs in the region. They had an abundance of food, although 70 percent of it was imported. The sanctions have brought hunger, disease, and misery to Iraq because they have caused the economic structure to collapse. Despite survival strategies of working several jobs, selling off possessions, and begging, most Iraqis have suffered a severe decline in their living standards. About 20 percent of the population exists in extreme poverty on a par with the poorest countries in the world. A woman religious from the Dominican Order described the situation: "We are ground down, exhausted by years of death. Since the Gulf War 600,000 have died from malnutrition and lack of medicine. We live with death."
It is surely long past the time for religious leaders to speak out and denounce this barbarous attack against the Iraqi people. In the Roman Catholic Christian tradition there is a clearly developed theology about the use of sanctions. This theology is a special application of the generally accepted theology among Christians for the justified use of lethal violence in war. The U.S. Catholic bishops provided an authoritative presentation of this theology in a pastoral statement promulgated in November of 1993: The Harvest of Justice Is Sown in Peace.
First, we set forth the criteria to be used to morally assess the imposition of economic sanctions:
- Concerns about the limited effectiveness of sanctions and the harm caused to civilian populations require that comprehensive sanctions be considered only in response to aggression or grave and ongoing injustice after less coercive measures have been tried, and with clear and reasonable conditions set for their removal.
- The harm caused by sanctions should be proportionate to the good likely to be achieved; sanctions should avoid grave and irreversible harm to the civilian population. Therefore, sanctions should be targeted as much as possible against those directly responsible for the injustice, distinguishing between the government and the people. ... Embargoes, when employed, must make provisions for the fundamental human needs of the civilian population. The denial of basic needs may not be used as a weapon.
- The consent to sanctions by substantial portions of the affected population is morally relevant.
- Sanctions should always be part of a broader process of diplomacy aimed at finding an effective solution to injustice.
Based on my own experience as well as documented reports from many international groups, including agencies of the UN, I can state unequivocally that the current sanctions violate these criteria and must be condemned.
Furthermore, these sanctions, together with the forty-two days of continuous bombing, clearly constitute cruel and deliberate counter-population warfare. Such warfare has been condemned by the most authoritative teaching body of the Catholic Church, The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965):
With these truths in mind, this most holy Synod makes its own the condemnations of total war already pronounced by recent Popes and issues the following declaration: Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.
Leaders of the church in Iraq plead with us to end the sanctions. In August 1997 Archbishop Gabriel Kassab of the Southern Region of Iraq stated: "Epidemics rage, taking away infants and sick by the thousands. Those children who survive disease succumb to malnutrition, which stunts their physical and mental development. Our situation is unbearable! ... We appeal to the people of conscience to work to end the blockade of Iraq. ..."
And lest anyone be deceived by the so-called Oil for Food resolution, Archbishop Kassab denounces Resolution 986 as merely serving "to divert world attention from the tragedy, while in some respects aggravating it."
And his judgment on Resolution 986 is supported by Denis Halliday, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, who stated on 12 January 1998 that Iraq would need in the neighborhood of $30 billion per year to meet its current requirements for food, medicine, and infrastructure. Resolution 986 initially allowed Iraq to sell up to $2.14 billion worth of oil every six months. After allocations are taken out to pay for Gulf War reparations and UN administrative expenses, the amount of money available to the average person in central and southern Iraq is twenty-five cents per person per day.
Currently, the UN is offering to allow Iraq to sell $5.26 billion worth of oil every six months. However, Iraq says that it cannot pump more than $4 billion worth of oil because of the deterioration of oil-field equipment under sanctions. This claim was corroborated by a team of experts working for the United Nations, who stated that "the deplorable state of Iraq’s petroleum industry will prevent it from exporting the $5.26 billion worth of oil." In light of damages caused by seven years of comprehensive sanctions coupled with Gulf War bombardment, even the $5.26 billion offer is grossly inadequate to repair Iraq’s shattered infrastructure, a medical system near total collapse, and a destroyed economy.
Clearly, whatever the intent of these sanctions, they violate clear moral laws, specifically as articulated in the Catholic Christian tradition. But they also violate the basic human rights of the Iraqi people proclaimed in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights because they deprive innocent people of food and medicine, basic requirements for normal life.
Nothing less than prophetic denunciation of those sanctions is the minimum responsibility of anyone who claims to be called to religious leadership.
One religious leader who has been consistent in his denunciation of the Persian Gulf War is Pope John Paul II. In March of 1991 he proclaimed: "I myself, on the occasion of the recent tragic war in the Persian Gulf, repeated the cry, ‘Never again war!’ No, never again war, which destroys the lives of innocent people, teaches how to kill, throws into upheaval even the lives of those who do the killing and leaves behind a trail of resentment and hatred, thus making it all the more difficult to find a just solution of the very problems which provoked the war."
On 8 June 1998, in a speech in Baghdad, Cardinal Roger Etchegarary, speaking on behalf of the Vatican, stressed that, "it is not enough to say the Church is for peace. ... She must, with every fiber of her daily existence, perform works of peace and justice. And this work must answer the concrete needs of each country." Then he went on to point out that the Church’s efforts "go beyond any political or military strategy, denouncing both the mad arms race as well as the injustice of an economic weapon, when it only ends up wounding innocent people, especially children" [emphasis added].
Now is the moment for all religious leaders to make this cry our own and demand that the wounding and killing of innocent people, especially children, be stopped. The Church must not fail again.
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