INDEX:
Basra
KATHY KELLY
SARAH SLOAN
KADOURI AL-KAYSI
CHRISTOPHER ALLEN-DOUCOT
KEN FREELAND
SCOTT SCHAEFFER-DUFFY
“To Feel What Ima Feels”
Earlier this month, several members of the Iraq Sanctions Challenge stood at the bedside of Mustafa, one of at least a dozen dying children in a crowded, wretched ward of the main hospital in Basra, Iraq's southern port city. His mother, tall, thin and quite beautiful, sat cross legged on the mattress beside him, waving away flies, as the doctor explained to us that the child, hospitalized for the past twenty days, now suffered from dehydration, diarrhea, acute renal failure and extensive brain atrophy. Lacking equipment and medicine to diagnose and treat Mustafa, the doctors could only stand by, helpless and frustrated, while the child's condition worsened over three weeks time. If Mustafa survives, he will be severely crippled.
Ima Nouri, his mother, is 35 years old. Her serious eyes, large and luminous, followed us as we paused before each bedside. She seemed surprised when we asked her to tell us a little about herself. We learned that she lives in a rural area north of Basra and has two children at home whom she misses very much.
We asked the doctor to tell her that we are so very sorry, that we want to tell people in the US her story, that we will try hard to end the sanctions. She smiled slowly, nodded. Then we mentioned that people in the United States were celebrating Mother's Day on this day and asked if she had a message for mothers in our country. Ima suddenly became animated.
"Yes," she said, "I have two messages. First, tell them, from Iraqi women, that these are our children and we love them so much." Stroking Mustafa's face, she continued, "Ask them to please try to help us protect them and take care of them. And, for American women, -- I want them to feel what I am feeling."
Her message to us could not be more clear. If people in the US could feel her anguish, humiliation, horror and despair -if they could feel the loss experienced by Iraqi mothers when their children are sacrificed to US policy, -then perhaps we would find the energy and passion to end the sanctions. If people here could feel Ima's frustration and fear, they would realize that Iraq's children are innocent victims, caught between two opposing forces. The main issue is not whether Iraq's government is criminal, nor even whether the US has acted criminally. The main issue is that only dialogue and conciliation can save the lives of these children, and such discussion is urgently needed.
When the possibility of discussion and dialogue is raised, some will say that only economic sanctions or military force will make Iraq comply with UN agreements (in other words, either starve the civilians or bomb them). We believe there is no human benefit in backing any government into a corner and causing greater desperation, as the economic sanctions have already done in Iraq. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's February 1998 visit to Baghdad showed that conciliation and negotiation prompted increased cooperation and continued dialogue.
Iraq's children bear the brunt of UN/US economic warfare - a war that employs a hideous
weapon of mass destruction: economic sanctions. Ima Nouri wants us to protect
these children, to feel what she feels. Truthfully, we can only begin to feel the pain
Iraqi mothers endure. May their pleas strengthen our resolve to protect the
children who are caught, right now, malnourished, sick, disabled and dying - they are not
bargaining chips, they are children. And they have a right to live.
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I visited two hospitals in Basra (one was an accidental unannounced visit). One used to be the best hospital in Basra; now, paint chips off the walls, the floors are dirty (floor cleaner is banned), the sinks are clogged, and air conditioner has not worked for two years, they write orders on old electrocardiogram sheets, and they are teaching with a textbook from 1986. Their only sheets and curtains were the donations of a November delegation. There is a two-year-old the size of a three-month-old. Patients are not treated soon enough and they are discharged too soon. Seven years ago the doctor had never seen a leukemia patient, and now he never sees one live.
The doctor said that he cannot talk to the mothers because "there is no hope. They
look to my eyes for hope, but there is none...Still, I continue with this life. I have
anger, but I smile..." I saw one child dying because of chemical deficiencies, and
contamination, sewage, and insect problems. "Maybe now, maybe the next day" this
child died. They used an injection only available at this hospital to treat the child, but
the child's body resisted. He required the new generation drug, but this is not available,
so he died. "This [these children] will disappear from the surface of the
earth." This is "not acceptable. The US government prefers oil over human
beings. [points to a dying child] This child doesn't know a thing about chemical weapons,
but he pays." After taking us to many patients, a delegate asked if a child would
die. The doctor responded, "Look, they are all going to die." Before the
sanctions, doctors received 200 dynars per month, which was enough on which to live. Now,
they receive 5,000 per month (about four dollars), but they cannot live on this.
Transportation between home and work is too expensive, so they often must sleep in this
hospital. There is a constant sound of children crying. Medical students often
cannot find work. One graduate from the number one science college in the country now
sells cigarettes in the street for 2,000 dynars a month.
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History of Basra, Iraq
Basra, the largest city in the south of Iraq, is situated along the west bank of Shatt-al-Arab River 55 kilometers from the Persian Gulf and about 552 kilometers from Baghdad. It is linked on one side with the desert so you may hear the jingling of camel bells mingled with the horns of ships passing nearby. This is al-Qurna where the Tigris joins the Euphrates. It is the legendary spot of the Garden of Eden.
Basra had a prominent place in the history of Iraq and Islam. It was built by the Arabs in 636 A.D. on a site a few miles away from the present city. It soon became an important commercial town as well as a great center of Islamic and Arabic culture.
Basra is sometimes called the Venice of the east because it is laced with canals all over. Sinbad the Sailor of Arabian Nights fame is associated with Basra from whence he started each of his fabulous seven journeys.
On May 10, 1988, a group of American citizens including Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit, Kathy Kelly, and Walter Black visited hospitals in Basra including the Basra City Center Hospital. We toured two hospitals and we found no medicines in the emergency room. It is like this every day. The emergency room is full of children but the hospital beds are empty. The reason is that the mothers realize the doctors have nothing with which to help their children, so the children are taken home to die. There are so many pieces of equipment in the hospitals that are broken. They need spare parts but the U.S./U.N. refuse to allow Iraq to import these. Dr. Abdel-Amir Al-Thamiri thanked us for the medicines we gave to the Basra City Center Hospital. However, he told us that this ton of medical supplies would be used up within 24 hours. He needs a steady supply of medicine, but he especially needs medical text books and current medical journals. However, he said all of our problems would be solved if the embargo were lifted.
My Experience in Basra
When I left Basra in 1960, I remembered Basra as a beautiful city of one million people. The city was very well maintained with greenery everywhere. There were happy people and even during the eight years of war with Iran the city did not loose its beauty. By May 10, 1998, it was a completely different scene. The city’s infrastructure was in shambles...roads; bridges; buildings, including hospitals and schools; electric and water services were destroyed.
For the first time in Basra’s long history there were homeless people. Even fully employed people struggle for their daily existence. A couple, both employed as teachers, receive a wage equal to $3.00 per month each. Even with additional government food rations, there is nothing left after the first half of the month. They subsist on tea and bread for 2 weeks.
Whenever I spoke to my friends or my relatives, they always asked me when the sanctions
will be lifted. I always answered them: I hope soon. Most of them said
that they had nothing against the American people, but they are against the U.S. policy
towards Iraq. They know that their children are dying and that all the people of
Iraq are suffering because of the U.S. insistence to keep the sanctions in place.
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We left Baghdad for Basra at 6:30 AM. The bus ride lasted about 7.5 hours. We traveled through the desert passing through many military check points. I asked our host from the Foreign Ministry Office why we were waved through each checkpoint; he told me that the checkpoints knew in advance of our travel. We also passed several military posts and a couple of bases along the route. Of course we couldn’t see much from the highway, but what we could see was rundown and barren.
When we arrived in Basra we went directly to a hospital. our visit was unannounced because we went to the wrong hospital. Since we arrived without warning this visit is proof that what we saw at other hospitals during scheduled visits was not staged. (I am sorry but I do not have the name of the hospital) Visiting patients in the wards we met dozens of children with dysentery. The water in Basra is worse than the water in Baghdad for several reasons: 1)Basra was more severely damaged in the Gulf War and the Iran/Iraq war; 2) Basra is down river, therefore sewage is more concentrated, 3)Basra does not have steady electrical power, we were in the city for less than 24 hours and power went out 3 times.
The children are malnourished and underweight. When they get sick from drinking the contaminated water their condition deteriorates rapidly. We met Jafra Abas, she is 5 months old, dehydrated, vomiting regularly, and she weighs 6.6 pounds. We met Hassan Sadun: 14 months old, sick with dysentery; Hassan weighs 12 pounds. We met Hawraat ? who is 2. Hawraat entered the hospital with a fever, skin rash and bloody diarrhea. Hawraat has dysentery. He entered the hospital weighing 26.4 pounds, when we met him he weighed 17.6 pounds.
The hospital itself shows the signs of wear. There are no working fans or air conditioners. many screens are broken. The hallways and stairwells are dimly lit. In several places wiring is exposed.
We next went to Basra General Children’s Hospital. The conditions of this hospital and of the patients were consistent with those we witnessed in the first hospital. At Basra Gen. Children’s Hospital I saw many children laying motionless on their sheetless beds, too weak to shoo the flies out of their noses, eyes and mouths. In some rooms there are two children per bed and moms with children on the floors. We met with Firas Abdul Abass M.D. he escorted us through the hospital. We met a 7-month-old child weighing 14.3 pounds; the child had rickets. Dr. Abass explained that the children get dysentery from the dirty water. The dysentery causes bloody diarrhea which leads to anemia and then renal failure. The children get dehydrated and many are unable to receive IV due to a lack of needles. The children die from the renal failure. Normally they wouldn’t get sick like this to begin with; the treatment for renal failure in dialysis. However because of the sanctions the hospitals do not have the parts to repair the dialysis machines and so the children die a slow and painful death. We asked Dr. Abass the prognosis of each patient. he grew frustrated, not with us but with his unwavering response. Finally, he said: “They are all going to die.... The US government wants the next generation of Iraqi children to be weak and retarded.” When we first met him he told Bishop Gumbleton: “I smile from my heart when I see you. Your make me strong. You will be sad when you leave here. If you were to stay here for two days it will break your heart.”
All of us who toured the wards that day wept openly. The mothers take their sick and frail children to the hospital looking for hope and the doctors struggle to maintain their sanity and the patient’s dignity in the midst of a nightmare. If Americans were to see puppies in an animal hospital suffering without proper medicine or machinery in a broken down and dirty hospital, they would be outraged. Are puppies more precious than children?
On a separate note. During our visit in Basra we went to Mass and were later hosted by
the Catholic Archbishop. the Archbishop served us a very nice meal that was donated by a
wealthy parishioner. Midway through the meal we realized that after the bottled water was
gone the Archbishop’s staff was serving us tap water. Several of us have since had
diarrhea. I have been sick since then and I have lost more than 10 pounds. I am amazed at
how easy it was to get sick. The horror is that what is an inconvenience for me is a death
sentence for an Iraqi child. We must pray and work to end the sanctions.
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About ten of us attended a Mass concelebrated by Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, one of our delegates, and Msgr. Djibrael Kassab, the Archbishop of Basra. After introducing him during the sermon, the Archbishop gave Bishop Gumbleton the microphone. It was so invigorating and refreshing to hear a clergyman, in a church, express such solidarity with the people of Iraq (translated into their language, of course) who are the victims of sanctions, and to hear it declared in no uncertain terms that the sanctions are an evil, and therefore to be morally opposed as any other violation of Christian morality. As if to emphasize this point, the electricity went off right in the middle of his oration.
(The Minister of Trade informed us the following day during our visit to the food Distribution Center that Iraq is operating on 1/3 the electricity it had prior to the Gulf War.)
As hot as it is in Basra, the church began to get very hot very quickly, with no
ceiling fans or air conditioning. One of our delegates was having a particularly
tough time, and was sweating profusely. He said he suddenly felt a refreshing breeze
behind him, and looked back to see a couple of Iraqi women fanning him from the pew behind
him! But the people took it all in stride — they're used to these periodic
power outages. They opened the windows wide, and the doors of the church, and
somehow we all managed until the power returned some 20 minutes later.[ ]Later on,
the archbishop set out for us a lavish table at his residence: "Not typical sanctions
food," he assured us — one of his better-off parishioners had underwritten
this evening's hospitality — and this graceful gesture in a city which
according to the Archbishop has an unemployment rate of 87%!
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Tape Transcripts at Basra Pediatric Hospital
Dr. Kiras Abdul Abass:
“...Yesterday three children died in one unit of the pediatric ward. We have four units. They were two to four years old. The first had congenital heart disease. Because I couldn’t do the cardiac surgery, the baby died. The second one had bloody diarrhea and renal failure. Because there’s no hemodialysis, because there’s no spare parts, we can’t do it. The third one died from severe dehydration resulting from gastrointestinitis.... Before we had sanctions we could save the first through cardiac surgery. Renal failure can be prevented and if it occurs in the acute stage we do dialysis and can save his life. And the third one--dehydration is treatable! But when we received this baby we had not enough fluid to correct his dehydration resulting in the complication arrhythmia because of hypokalimia resulting in death. Until seven years ago I never saw leukemia. I only read about it in books. But now we have at least one or two new leukemia cases a week and because of the shortage of anti-leukemia drugs, all of them died.”
Question: “Do you spend time talking with the mothers?”
[in a whisper] “I can’t tell the mother, ‘Your baby will die. There’s no hope.’ I can’t. Many of them look to our eyes. They look for hope in our eyes, but we have no hope. We have no hope. This makes us sad, makes us tired. But in spite of that we will continue.”
Comment by delegate: “We are so angry that you have to go through this.”
“I also am angry all the time, but I smile....I am patient with patients to do the best for them.”
Over 80 delegates from the U.S. successfully traveled to Iraq the second week in May to deliver more than $4 million worth of medicines. This country of 22 million people has been suffering under eight years of UN-sponsored sanctions.
The delegates were from various political, social, religious and non-religious persuasions. They came together as the Iraq Sanctions Challenge to bring humanitarian aid, but also to openly defy the genocidal sanctions that have killed an estimated 1.5 million Iraqi people, a great majority of them children and the elderly.
The group refused to request a license from the U.S. Treasury Department "allowing" it to take the medicines to Iraq. The refusal, which made everyone on the delegation subject to U.S. penalties, was a strong political statement against the illegality of the sanctions.
How did these delegates, ranging in age from 17 to 86, organize such an historic endeavor in less than two months? Much of the credit goes to the International Action Center, whose chairperson is former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. The IAC organized a March 21 conference on Iraq in New York City at which the idea of the challenge was raised to dozens of participating organizations. Then the conference put out a call to progressive activists to keep the pressure on against U.S. aggression in the Gulf by breaking the sanctions, which are an act of war.
Support from fellow passengers
and Jordanian groups
Close to 150 boxes stamped "Medicine for Iraq" in bold letters came with the delegation, but the journey was not an easy one for the medicines nor the delegates bringing them. It began for many of the Iraq Sanctions Challenge delegates at JFK airport on May 6 as they boarded a plane for Amman, Jordan.
During the flight, some of the delegates told fellow passengers about the goals of the ISC. As a result, $300 was raised from sympathetic passengers, many of them Jordanian citizens.
When the plane finally arrived in Jordan, officials from the Jordanian Bar Association, National Engineers Association and the Arab Medical Union met and shook the hand of every delegate.
An impromptu press conference was held at the Amman airport while the challengers held banners in Arabic and English. The boxes of medicines were loaded onto a truck that accompanied three Iraqi busloads of delegates on the more than 18-hour trip across the desert to Baghdad.
No planes are allowed to fly directly into Iraq due to the sanctions.
When the buses crossed a dam outside Baghdad, a group of 10 to 12 young Iraqis ran to greet us, chanting over a bullhorn. As we wound through the outskirts of Baghdad, people waved and honked. They could read the banners and placards against sanctions taped onto our buses.
Members of the press were waiting at the Al Rasheed Hotel for the arrival of the delegation.
‘George Bush—criminal!’
The first thing you see when you walk into this hotel is a portrait of George Bush on the floor, the mass butcher of the Iraqi people during the 1991 Gulf War. Next to his name is the appropriate word for him—criminal.
It had taken the delegation two days to get to Baghdad. We were tired and sweaty but in good spirits and happy to reach our destination.
The first day was spent delivering medicines to the Ministry of Health and to a number of hospitals, including the Saddam Central Hospital for Pediatrics and a large hospital outside Baghdad in one of the poorest areas. There are 13 government-run hospitals and 22 smal ler private clinics in Baghdad. Iraq is not a socialist country, but nevertheless care in governmental hospitals is free.
One doctor told us that before the war, Iraq had 2,000 ambulances in service. Since the sanctions were implemented, the number of ambulances in Iraq has shrunk to 200, and many of those are idle for lack of spare parts. There is also a staggering shortage of nurses, since 50 percent were foreign born and have left Iraq because of the sanctions.
Tour of children’s wards
The delegation toured the children’s wards. We saw children literally dying of preventable diseases linked to malnutrition and lack of medicines. The hospitals were in terrible physical shape—we saw broken-down incu ba tors, nonfunctioning washers, flood ed bathrooms and no sheets.
The most heartbreaking sight was that of mothers trying to fan flies away from their suffering children in heat over 100 degrees. All the mothers wanted the delegation to take pictures of their sick children to let the people of the U.S. know how the sanctions are retarding their physical and mental development.
One doctor told us that certain operations are being routinely postponed because of the lack of up-to-date surgical tools. Patients are forced to make a choice between dying in the hospital or dying at home.
There is a steady increase in tuberculosis and malaria because of deteriorating sanitation conditions. Hallways have been turned into emergency areas. Some times two to three patients share a bed.
Sharon Eolis, a nurse practitioner from New York, told WW that she has worked with children and adults in working class and poor communities "but I have never before seen the kind of devastation perpetuated by the sanctions against the Iraqi people. Iraqis are suffering from epidemics of measles and whooping cough because there are no vaccines. Others are severely malnourished, resulting in marasmus and other birth defects.
"The only answer," Eolis said, "is to end the sanctions immediately."
Some delegates took medicines to other cities, like Basra and Mosol, which are even harder hit by the sanctions.
The group was taken on a tour of the Al Amiriya bomb shelter in Baghdad, now a museum. Our guide, who introduced herself only as the "mother of Ghadda," lost nine family members including her daughter Ghadda when the U.S. dropped a "smart" bomb on the shelter on Feb. 17, 1991. Only 14 people survived; 1,186 were massacred, many of them children.
Who could come away from this visit without a deep hatred for U.S. imperialism? All around us were the stark reminders of death—shrapnel, craters and exposed light fixtures. There were remnants of burnt skin, bloodstains and imprints of vertebrae on the walls—a reflection of the incredible impact of the bombing on a defenseless people. Pictures of the dead covered the walls.
One could not help but cry at this experience.
Meeting with deputy prime minister
A highlight of the trip was a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. He opened by telling us, "Your visit is very impressive and very symbolic. Your presence in Iraq shows there is no quarrel between the people of Iraq and the people of the U.S." Aziz challenged the U.S. government to open up a dialogue with the Iraqi government and to stop punishing the Iraqi people.
Aziz spoke on many issues, including the U.S. military presence in the Gulf and the $50 to $60 billion annually this costs U.S. taxpayers. He answered Clinton’s absurd charge that one Iraqi presidential site—the U.S. insisted on inspecting all of them—was as big as Washington, D.C. Aziz pointed out that all the Iraqi sites put together equal 31 square kilometers, while Washington covers 177,000 square kilometers.
The deputy prime minister took questions on many sub jects, from the Kurds to nuclear disarmament.
During our brief stay in Baghdad, the delegates toured a water treatment plant and food distribution site; visited grade schools; heard a talk on depleted uranium; and visited mosques and ancient sites like Babylon.
The visit culminated with a demonstration against the sanctions by the delegates at the U.S. interests section of the Polish Embassy.
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