German Couple Deliver Food, Medicine to Iraqi Children

By Sam Cahnman

Klaus Doltz sees sick children every day at the intensive care unit of the Hamburg Children's Hospital in Germany. His wife, Alexandra, is a midwife who brings children into the world. Together they have a five-year-old daughter.

So, when they saw television journalist Michael Born's vivid pictures of sickly Iraqi babies and children getting sicker and dying because of the lack of medicines and medical supplies, they couldn't just sit still. Last summer Doltz found himself in Baghdad with a $2 million truckload of children's medicines, baby food and a few medical supplies destined to help those innocent Iraqi children.

The United Nations trade embargo on Iraq specifically exempts food and medicines but since Iraq cannot export oil, it lacks the cash to import all but a small amount of the medicine its people need.

Getting the precious cargo to Iraq wasn't so easy. The couple started by collecting 10 to 12 boxes of children's medicines, worth about $50,000, from Alexandra Doltz's patients. She operates her midwife practice out of their Bebensee home, near Hamburg. Klaus Doltz, a medical assistant in intensive care and anesthesiology, then contacted Born to see how they could get the medicine to needy Iraqi children. Born, through his journalistic contacts, arranged for the medicines, accompanied by Alexandra Doltz, to be shipped to Baghdad.

There Born did another television report on the distribution of the children's medicines in Iraq, and on the continuing tragic plight of the sickly and dying children there. After that report aired on March 31, 1993, the Stern TV network, which aired both reports, was flooded with letters, phone calls and faxes from Germans who wanted to help the Doltzes send more medicine and food to Iraqi children.

But it took more than money to get the goods to Iraq. Doltz also needed a government export license. He easily got one for the medicines, but for the baby food, the government first had to get the approval of the U.N. Sanctions Committee, according to Doltz. After three months of waiting and no export license, Doltz took matters into his own hands. "We couldn't wait any longer because the baby food was going to go bad," he explained.

Doltz had the boxes loaded on an airplane and flown to Jordan. "I can't say how we got it out of Germany," Doltz reports. "What we did was illegal." Since some of the drugs, such as insulin, required refrigeration, the goods were transferred in Amman to a refrigerated truck. Doltz and another volunteer, Andreas Fiebig, arrived in Baghdad with the truck on a hot Sunday in August.

Their first stop was the government Press Center for foreign journalists, where they distributed a few of their scarce medicines to the handful of grateful officials on duty. Doltz and Fiebig then took the truck to the Central Children's Hospital and another large children's hospital in Baghdad, where they unloaded the fruits of their mercy mission.

At the hospitals Doltz met with technical people, who reported they were also desperately in need of spare parts to repair baby incubators and other medical devices.

Doltz plans to follow up on those requests, but makes it clear that his only motive is to help children. "The embargo is between governments," he said. "But the children are being hurt. I am not a friend of Saddam Hussain. I think what this man did [invading Kuwait] was not the right way. But the sanctions are not right either. When it hurts children, it's not the right way."

Before the Gulf war, Iraq imported $500 million of drugs per year, according to U.N. Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs in Iraq Mohammed Zajjari. Doltz's shipment of drugs, baby food and medical supplies was worth $2 million.

"What we are doing is a drop in the bucket," Doltz concedes. "But someone must begin with this. It's better to help only a few people than to help none."

be purchased with a doctor's prescription. So, Doltz directed his contributors, most of whom had children of their own, to ask their pediatrician or general practitioner to write a prescription for the drugs needed by the Iraqi children. The contributors then went to the drug store, purchased the medicines prescribed and sent them to Doltz.

Medical assistant Doltz also got some drugs from his employer, the Hamburg Children's Hospital, and from the German drug companies, Ciba Gigy and Hevert.

This time 1,600 Germans filled 225 boxes, a whole truckload, with almost 10 tons of food and medicine. They also collected an EKG machine donated by a hospital, needles and syringes used for blood transfusions, and $17,000. The money was used to transport the German "CARE Package,'' 22 times larger than the first shipment, to Iraq.