The Death of a Nation Is a Catalog of Individual Horrors and Tragedies

By Rick McDowell

In late May of 1998, word arrived that our friend Frial and her family had escaped desperate conditions in Iraq, only to become economic refugees in Istanbul, Turkey. Frial, a Chaldean Catholic, managed the day shift of a small hotel in Baghdad, where delegations from Voices in the Wilderness often lodged. Her family’s struggle to survive had become so desperate that Frial, her 82-year-old mother, and her brother, sister-in-law and their four young children resorted to a dangerous alternative. They embarked on a risky journey to Turkey, gambling that the odds facing them in Istanbul ultimately would be more favorable than the hopelessness they endured in Iraq.

Nasra, a mother of seven small children, lived in Baghdad with her husband, who sold packs of gum on the streets in a frustrating attempt to feed and house his family. Formerly homeless, they had recently moved, with help from their church, to a tiny two-room apartment in a poor area of Baghdad. In January 1999, I learned that Nasra had escaped her children’s relentless cries of hunger and the bleak uncertainties that plagued her. She had doused herself with kerosene and set herself on fire.

Walid and Rami are brothers who support their mother and three younger brothers by shining shoes on the streets of Baghdad. Kind, gentle and bright, the brothers’ future is almost certain to be one of struggle and destitution. Economic sanctions have forced the boys to forego a previously mandatory education, in order to feed their family. Their father, in a desperate move for survival, recently fled Iraq, leaving the youngsters as sole breadwinners for a family of six.

In March 1999, I visited one of a growing number of Iraqi orphanages. Increasingly, children are abandoned by anguished parents who can no longer care for their most basic needs. Mesmerized by the beauty and grace of the children, I was suddenly jolted out of complacency by a little girl’s question: “Why does the U.S. bomb us?”

Also in March, I attended a traditional Thursday evening gathering of about 20 people who were longtime friends. Included were a widely respected economics professor turned carpet salesman, a heart surgeon, professionals, businessmen and artists. We shared a meal and the participants sang and danced to the rhythms of a lute player.

In the lulls between the musical selections, the friends talked about the past and present. They lamented that in three years’ time, most of them will have left Iraq in search of a better future. Recognizing themselves as the last generation to have grown up with full exposure to Iraq’s rich cultural traditions, they lament the loss, all the while anticipating a forced migration into a world that has by and large forsaken their nation.

The Iraqi dispersion can be laid at the doorstep of economic sanctions. Since August 1990, an estimated two to three million professionals have left to seek employment and more secure futures for themselves and their children. The once thriving Christian population, large numbers of whom were employed in the tourism industry, has been reduced by one-third. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees have left for Jordan, Turkey, the U.S., Europe and Australia, leaving behind family, friends, traditions, and a dying nation.

After each of my eight trips to Iraq over the past two and a half years, I have returned to speak of children and families who suffer and die because of the consequences of economic sanctions. These include death, not only of innocent people—thousands of them children—but also of a nation.

U.S. support of the U.N. policy of forced starvation has led to the destruction of the nation’s infrastructure and has deprived Iraqis of a social safety net readily available before the Gulf war. The U.S. and U.N. not only have deprived Iraqi children of adequate food, medicine and educational facilities, the economic sanctions have destroyed the hopes, dreams and future of an entire generation.

Implementation and enforcement of these sanctions, coupled with frequent airstrikes, constitute low-intensity warfare—as one Iraqi journalist stated, “a war of attrition”—which has led to a culture of desperation and hopelessness for Iraq’s 22 million people. U.S. support of sanctions constitutes complicity in a crime against humanity which has led to the death of over one million people and continues to take the lives of between 5,000 and 6,000 Iraqis each month. The crime is no longer about the abrogation of international treaties and conventions. It is about the killing of a nation.

The U.S. obsession with destroying Iraq, the cradle of civilization, has encouraged Iraq’s population to close ranks behind its leadership. Most Iraqis with whom I’ve spoken direct their anger at the U.S. government, which they believe authors a policy designed to destabilize their government, to dismember and destroy their society and to eradicate any trace of Arab unity, including OPEC and the Arab League. They suspect the ultimate goal is to impose U.S. hegemony in the region. Deep resentment frustrates educated Iraqis as they watch U.S. policies lead to an increase in illiteracy, xenophobia, fundamentalism and tribalism in Iraq.

U.S. foreign policy has also fueled a regional arms race. As Jordan’s economy falters, the U.S. response is a $300 million aid package. But $200 million of this is designated for weapons. As millions of Egyptians go to bed hungry, U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen has offered a $3 billion aid package of which $2 billion is for arms. Although Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf states were reeling in 1998 from the impact of low oil prices, nevertheless they purchased tens of billions of dollars worth of U.S. military hardware.

Turkey, which regularly bombs Kurdish military targets in northern Iraq, continues to arm itself with U.S. weapons. Israel, with an estimated minimum of 200 nuclear warheads, continues to receive billions of dollars in U.S. arms annually. The U.S., which since 1990 has built and maintained military bases throughout the region, can best be described as the Middle East’s merchant of death.

I am hesitant to compare today’s Iraq to another era, but more and more Iraqis and other Middle Easterners I encounter are making analogies to Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. The German people endured intense hunger and deprivation under harsh sanctions imposed after World War I. This was a key part of the sequence that brought to power Adolf Hitler, who carried out the genocide against Europe’s Jews, gypsies and other “undesirables.” Western nations largely ignored first the desperation of the German people and then the cries of the victims of the Nazis.

Fifty years later, the people of the world continue to atone for the silence that contributed to the deaths of millions. Fifty years from now our children and grandchildren will be atoning for our complicity of silence which has led to genocide in Iraq.

The world has drastically changed in these intervening years. While the Holocaust was perpetrated by a single nation, the transformation of Iraq into a death camp has been orchestrated by the organization which rose from the ashes of World War II.

The U.N. symbolized hopes and dreams of a world sickened by war, slaughter, and injustice. The U.N. charter was designed to prevent cimes against the human family and to protect nations from the scourge of war. Now the U.N.’s credibility is being diminished world-wide. We wonder, will the present U.N. leaders preside over the burial of the great hope that U.N. leadership could move the world toward a just and lasting peace?

Most people in the world are coming to believe that U.S. leadership, with its self-serving and morally bankrupt policy of economic sanctions and militarism, is destroying U.N. credibility. Countless people in the Middle East remind us that the U.S. cannot escape what it has sown. A policy which has led to so much suffering and death will one day come home to harm the American people.

I am reminded of my first journey to Iraq, when a Catholic priest told me that Baghdad is finished and Christianity in Iraq is dead. As we drove through the streets of Baghdad that day, not so long ago, he said that the greatest tragedy of his long life has been to see the proud people of Iraq reduced to beggary.

I think of Walid and Rami, shining shoes and begging money from pedestrians. Their bright smiles, welcoming waves and commitment to family still give me reason to hope, even as the grim reality of Iraq haunts all of my waking hours.

Rick McDowell co-coordinates Voices in the Wilderness, a Chicago-based campaign to end the U.N./U.S. economic sanctions against Iraq. Since August of 1996, he has traveled to Iraq eight times. In late April 1999, he left with U.S. members of the Dominican religious congregation to Iraq, the ninth time he has led a delegation for Voices in the Wilderness, traveling in open violation of the U.N./U.S. sanctions against Iraq.