Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1999, pages 14-17

Two Views

In Iraq, Whose Interests Are Served By Killing An Entire Nation By Starvation, and Threatening Still More Bombings?

Eyewitness to The Ghastly Human Consequences of the Continued U.S.-U.N. Embargo On Iraq

By Sali Qaragholi

There are those who urge us to bomb Iraq, another country full of people, like our own, without thinking, or wanting us to think, about where those bombs will fall, on whom, and for what purpose. Meanwhile, the people of Iraq wait in fear for bombs to descend from the heavens, again.

I am an Iraqi-American. My parents immigrated to this country when I was seven, and I have lived here ever since. I love this country and the people in it. And I am grateful to the people of the United States for giving me the chance to consider myself one of them. Looking around at dictatorships around the world, I do not take this honor lightly.

Some people say that you should love a country or leave it. I think that if you love a country, you will want to see it be the best that it can be; you will want it to live up to its greatness. I believe with all of my heart that what we Americans are doing, what we are allowing our country to do to the people of Iraq, is wrong.

My family lives in Baghdad—my grandparents, aunts, cousins. Like their neighbors and fellow countrymen, they have been under a worldwide embargo for eight years. They have felt the pain of it, and have watched as their friends and countrymen despair for food and medicine.

Politicians may be able to explain why the nightmare for the people of Iraq persists, even though the Gulf war ended seven years ago, but I cannot begin to grasp how we can continue to look away while our government spearheads the sanctions campaign that has led to untold suffering, but to no change in the government of Iraq. I do not understand how it is possible for us to justify a policy that has killed half a million children in Iraq, according to a 1996 U.N. report, and that reportedly leads to the deaths of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children every month.

We as Americans have a choice: to know what is going on in Iraq today, at the hands of our government, and thus at our hands, or to blind ourselves. We are all tired of the ceaseless pain in the world, tired of hearing about it, tired of hurting over it. But this pain—the pain of the people of Iraq—is something that we are imposing on another people. It is not a pain caused by an act of God or by historic ethnic hatred. Numbers cannot adequately explain how the sanctions are hurting the Iraqi people, but another Iraqi-American who has made the journey to Iraq can perhaps tell us what our policy is doing.

Ayad is a friend of my uncle. I met him years ago when I was a teenager. He and his ex-wife, Pebby, lived on a farm, raising horses. They divorced a couple of years ago and now he is remarried to Marina, a woman who rocks him to sleep the nights he sobs because of what he has seen on his journey to Iraq. If you let him, he will take you there with him, not to upset you but because you have a right to know what our country’s pro-sanctions policy is doing to the people in Iraq.

I had not seen Ayad in maybe six or more years. I was walking to Barnes and Noble in Charlottesville, Virginia, to do a project for school when I saw him. We were both shocked. He was standing outside with his son, Khalil, who was about three feet shorter when I last saw him, a toddler with a gorgeous smile.

Ayad told me he had been thinking about me recently because of the war drums beating about Iraq. He said he thought he would see some article by me in the papers since he knew I wrote about the war, in this magazine, seven years ago. We sat down to a cup of coffee, he started talking, and then I had to write down his words because people had to know. He said to me:

You know, I can talk but I can’t write to save my soul. When I cry at night about all of this my wife tells me to talk, because when I talk I feel that at least I am doing something, getting it out. But what is the use if no one else hears it?

I went to Baghdad a year ago. Things have gotten worse since then, but you will get the picture from what I have to say.

I took nine bagfuls of food and medicine with me when I went. I crossed over from Amman to Baghdad by car.

For three weeks, I hardly ate. I couldn’t. I was sick to my stomach with the guilt of eating when everyone around me was slowly starving. I brought food, but it was like a sand grain in a desert compared to the need even of my immediate family and friends. People do eat in Iraq, but only enough to sustain a lengthy starvation, an eroding of your body, increasing malnutrition.

My God, where can I start? How can I describe to you the living hell these people endure, people like you and me, no different, with kids and mothers-in-law and wives and husbands. They are dying. We are killing them. We are killing them.

It is impossible for people in this country to understand how this embargo we enforce against Iraq correlates to the people’s daily lives. The oil-for-food provision which our country constantly feeds us to assuage our guilty consciences about starving another people for seven years—the single most brutal embargo at least in the modern history of the world, which is enforced by the entire world at our unfailing insistence—does nothing; it is a drop in the ocean. First, much of the money which is allocated from these funds goes to war reparations. Second, the food and medicine that does get bought is minuscule compared to the needs of an entire country. Let me tell you about the hospitals, the total lack of medicine...

My aunt Layla, a pharmacist, is head inspector of all the hospitals in Baghdad, and thus a good source of information about the state of supplies. She told me that all the medical equipment in the country is obsolete, useless. The technology the Iraqis have comes mainly from machinery they purchased from the U.S., Great Britain, Japan and other nations more than a decade ago. On top of the fact that the machinery is useless because the technology is outdated, it doesn’t even work. Parts have been blocked from entering the country. Absolutely no computer parts, for example, are allowed into the country, so doctors can’t take a simple x-ray.

There is little medicine. If hospitals get any, it is a box or two of various kinds of medicine which don’t even last long enough to be put on the shelves. The medicines that do get in have expired by the time they reach the people. When I was in the hospital, I noticed that the doctor, a friend of my aunt’s, was giving someone medicine which had been expired for a year. When I questioned her about it she said to me, “Honey, it doesn’t matter. We thank God if we can get any medicine at all, expired or not.” There is no aspirin.

My brother is a dentist. He has had an ear infection for three years. There is no penicillin in the country so every night, he goes to bed but can’t fall asleep because of the piercing pain in his ear. I have sent him three boxes of penicillin but it never reaches him—stolen. I feel bad for my brother but I know that in that country, it won’t go to waste—it is desperately needed.

Tell me more about the hospitals, I ask him.

When I went there, there were lines and lines of people, in different degrees of decay. I guess here we would consider them all emergency patients—they would have to be to be desperate enough to go to doctors who get paid so little they can’t afford to buy a pair of shoes, with no medicine to treat them. But there, there is no longer emergency care. Every case is an emergency, and people are numb with despair. They vomit in the hallways, and no one rushes to them, because there is no hope, and nothing to be done. People waste away. They wait on benches or standing, and they don’t know whether they will be seen that day or whether they have to crawl back to the hospital the next day.

The food. My God, the food—

Ayad starts crying now. He can’t help himself. I sit there with mouth agape in Barnes and Noble. His young boy looks away, embarrassed, and I think how bitter, how insanely comical it is that we are sitting in a coffee shop in the country which may be about to bomb our original homeland, surrounded by people who don’t know the pain their brothers and sisters—yes, brothers and sisters—in Iraq are going through; pain inflicted by our government. They must know; they would want to know—

I told you that the whole time I was there I could hardly swallow any food. I ate only enough to please my mother—you know how mothers are. I went to various parties which were given in my honor by family members I hadn’t seen in almost three decades. I know that they went out of their way to put food on the table, the best their meager salaries could afford, to show their appreciation of me. Their pride—my God, I can’t believe the human spirit can sustain pride in conditions like that—would not let them refuse to spend the little money they had on a relative they hadn’t seen in more than a generation.

The people who came to these parties, and my relatives who gave them, could only focus on the food. Their entire objective was to eat. It was all so scary. This was supposed to be a party, where people talked while they ate, mingled and chattered. But nobody said a word. When they began to eat, silence filled the room; they had one thing in mind only: to eat as much as they could, to stuff the food down as fast as they could because they did not know when their next meal was going to be. I took pictures of them, eating like that. I did not want to forget the horror.

I don’t think people in this country understand what the embargo is doing. They don’t understand how it correlates to people not eating, not having medicine to treat even the most common diseases, which end up being life-threatening, and life-consuming. They don’t understand how it correlates to children never tasting candy. When I went outside of our home I always took pocketfuls of candy—stuff I got at K-mart. Kids would come up to me begging in the street, and I would hand them these wrapped candies. They didn’t know what they were. They looked up to me with their gaunt, haunted eyes and I had to explain to them that they had to unwrap them and eat what was inside.

My sisters’ children, alive for a couple of years longer than the embargo has been in place, had never tasted bananas. I brought boxes with me from Jordan, along with other food, clothes and medicine. When I gave a banana to my niece, she looked puzzled, and then proceeded to bite the banana without peeling it.

In the evenings, around 6, the wind would start to blow in Baghdad. The whole city smelled like a toilet. I couldn’t understand where this horrible stench was coming from. When I asked my brother, he told me that it was because the embargo banned chemicals from coming into the country, including chlorine, and so there was nothing with which to treat the sewage system or water. The sewage sits until it decomposes, flies and rats proliferating in it and spreading further disease to the already sick population.

You can’t drink the water. The people there do, of course; they have to, but you and I couldn’t. The babies, along with the rest of the population, have to deal with constant diarrhea and severe stomach pains. I never drank the water while I was there for the three weeks—until the last day. I had brought bottled water with me, but the last bottle stood empty the last day, and without my knowing it, my brother had filled it with regular tap water. I drank it and was violently ill for three days—diarrhea, excruciating stomach pain.

The hardest part is to explain to you the people’s despair. I don’t think anyone could understand it unless they saw it themselves. In the morning, as Americans, we get up and go about our day. We know we have to do x, y, and z. There, they wake up and want to go back to sleep. There is nothing to wake up for, nothing to live for. We took hope away from them, from the kids. We killed the old people—they are dead bodies walking, going through the motions, waiting to die. The scariest part is the youth. They don’t want to go to school. Not because like other kids in this country they want to play, but because there is nothing that they could hope to do, or to be. My nephew told me, Uncle, why would I want to go to school. The greatest thing I could hope for would be to be a doctor, and then what? My dad is a doctor and he doesn’t even make enough to buy me a pair of shoes, or to buy meat.

Farid, my cousin, owns a shoe shop. A pair of shoes cost about 20,000 dinars. (The exchange rate now is about 1,600 dinars to one dollar.) My engineer cousin makes less in a month than the cost of a pair of shoes.

Women have stopped working. It’s not worth it for them. A secretary, for example, gets paid about 8,000 dinars a month (approximately $5). It costs her that much in transportation; so it’s better to stay at home.

People ask in this country why fanaticism comes about. What we are doing to Iraq is directly leading to religious fanaticism there.

Ask yourself: when you have nothing, when your life is full of despair, when there is no hope, what do you do to sustain yourself? Where do you turn? What is your one hope of salvation? Faith. Religion.

My mother was one of the first women in Baghdad to discard the veil—this was in the 1930s. She was a professional woman like many of her friends and relatives. Now, my sisters, almost 60 years later, are all veiled.

Religion is the sole relief for the whole society. They can only endure the madness that has become their lives by believing that there must be a reason for it, that it is God’s will.

Before this embargo, Iraq had one of the most promising cultures and one of the wealthiest economies in the region. The country was full of educated professionals. The people were conscientious, honest, hard-working.

The women in the country were some of the most advanced in the Middle East. Iraq set the standard for the treatment of women—they filled colleges and the workplace, were sent to study abroad on scholarships. The strength of a society is in its women. They are the teachers of our future generations. Today, the women are slaves to need. We have deprived a generation of children of being able to look beyond their daily meals.

The people of Iraq live in fear of the bombs that are poised to fall on them again. It isn’t enough that they suffered through 42 days of constant, deafening bombardment. Now, again, they have to fear the living hell of having fire descend from the sky, deafening.

They fear that one of the first targets (as happened during the Gulf war) will be the electrical plants, and they will have to live in darkness, again.

The little food that is in the country, the little they can manage to horde in their freezers, will go bad in a matter of days. And, like the last time around, the food will be poisoned. Those who are desperate to eat it will end up as they did last time, in the hospitals—the hospitals without equipment, without medicine, and with doctors as desperate as the patients.