“Dear God, We’re Destroying Everything That Lives”: A Report From the Baghdad Sanctions Conference

By G. Simon Harak, S.J.

For the first four days of May this year, I joined more than 400 delegates from all over the world at a Conference on the Sanctions in Baghdad, Iraq. As the only delegate from the U.S., I was representing Voices in the Wilderness, a Chicago-based campaign to end the U.S./U.N. sanctions on the Iraqi people.

The conference began with a plenary address from Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, which set the tone and the agenda for the rest of the meeting.

Aziz’s speech was hard-hitting but controlled, backed by analysis the reader has no doubt heard before: that the new unipolar world has led to U.S. unilateralism in world affairs. The U.S. has used various coercive measures to bend the U.N. to its will and, in particular, to initiate and maintain the killing economic sanctions on Iraq.

[Many of those coercive measures are documented in Phyllis Bennis’ Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s U.N., published by Interlink in 1995, or more recently in Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga (Random House, 1999).]

When even those measures fail to satisfy the U.S. drive for domination, Aziz declared, the U.S. resorts to unilateral action, as it has with the bombing of Iraq, which began in mid-December 1998 and which continues almost daily. In naming this ongoing bombing “aggression” against Iraq, Aziz’s analysis agreed with that of Pope John Paul II, and most international lawyers and human rights workers.

Aziz said that Iraq had been dealing seriously and patiently with the U.N. for eight years. He diplomatically refrained from discussing UNSCOM, the U.N. body charged with searching for weapons of mass destruction.

In fact, UNSCOM had already been discredited by the revelations that from its earliest days it was thoroughly penetrated by the CIA and the Israeli Mossad. Chief UNSCOM inspector and former U.S. Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter had reported that the last round of UNSCOM requirements in particular were designed so that they could never be met in order to rationalize renewed or continued U.S. bombing.

Although Iraq had been saying that all along, now Aziz diplomatically refrained from saying the political equivalent of “I told you so.” Aziz pointed out, however, that the situation in Iraq has changed immeasurably since 1990, and yet the sanctions have remained essentially the same.

Aziz addressed the presence of U.S. armed forces in the Gulf, in Kuwait and in Saudi Arabia. He argued that such forces had accomplished a de facto U.S. military occupation of the Arab states, because they exercise overt and covert pressure on Arab governments and peoples.

This is an important point. Few Americans know, for example, that the bombing of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya took place on the eighth anniversary of the very day, Aug. 7, 1990, that the first U.S. troops had set foot in Saudi Arabia to begin the Desert Shield buildup to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Few Americans recall that the U.S. promised to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia “as soon as Iraq was no longer a threat.”

The larger point of Aziz’s speech—and the concern that drew so many hundreds of representatives from so many countries—was that such U.S. unilateralism, so clearly demonstrated in the case of Iraq, posed a threat to the very kind of internationalism which the U.N. was founded to foster and maintain. With Iraq as an object lesson, the international community, and especially the developing nations, can infer that defiance of U.S. demands will lead to severe punishment.

There followed two plenary sessions at which a number of representatives spoke. Many were members of their country’s parliament or government; more were delegates of non-governmental organizations. Every speaker denounced the sanctions in the strongest terms. I also spoke at the plenary, telling of my witness to the extraordinary suffering and extraordinary courage of the Iraqi people—experiences shared by all the delegates of Voices who have come to Iraq. I explained Voices’ active nonviolent campaign of civil disobedience in bringing medicine and toys to Iraq, and in direct challenge to U.S. policy at home.

But the real work of the conference came after its division into three sub-groups to consider the effect of the sanctions. Each sub-group was presented with a well-researched and -argued paper on the political, legal or humanitarian impact of the sanctions.

In the humanitarian group, I heard about more recent research on depleted uranium’s ruinous poisoning of the air, the water and the land of Iraq, and of its mutating effects on Iraqi newborns.

I heard about the destruction of cattle by foot-and-mouth disease in Iraq, where 2,398,967 head of livestock have been infected. Foot-and-mouth disease is an acute, highly contagious, viral infection of domestic and wild cloven-hoofed animals that threatens humans as well in Iraq and now other states around it.

I heard about the screw-worm infection, which attacks date palms. By now 15 million date trees—half the date trees in Iraq—are dead from screw worms, which attack small children as well. And we might note that the screw worm is not native to Iraq—or to the Middle East. Yet it occurred in five epicenters in Iraq within a few days.

All that is in addition to the 5,000 and more children under the age of 5 whom the sanctions kill every month. Further, a distressing study has been completed by Dr. Amal Swidan on 10- to 14-year-old Iraqi girls who suffer from low weight, small hearts and livers, and chronic malnourishment. Thus the next generation of Iraqis yet unborn will suffer even higher rates of morbidity and mortality.

In the face of all this, I struggled to present my prepared paper: how the efforts of Voices in the Wilderness fit into a growing movement of resistance to the sanctions in the U.S. It seemed so little, and so late.

After three days, I found myself repeating, in a kind of stunned mantra, “Everything that lives. Dear God, we’re destroying everything that lives.”

Voices in the Wilderness also was invited to attend a smaller follow-up meeting on May 4. As chair, Aziz kept the focus on mobilizing popular opinion against the sanctions. Efforts will be made to establish a Web site, he said, so that those of us working against the sanctions can have rapid access to information from within Iraq on the effects of the sanctions, and to hear Iraq’s side when charges are leveled against it. The same Web site will also be used for the groups to “network” across the world and support each other in the struggle against the genocide—and ecocide—in Iraq.

There are many ways to join this struggle. I will be happy to come and speak at any time with any group that wishes to hear about Iraq and to help its people. Other delegates from Voices also are available.

Contact me, G. Simon Harak, S.J., St. Mary Parish, 5502 York Road, Baltimore, MD 21212-3899, parish: (410) 435-5900, personal: (410) 435-1060, fax: (603) 843-9075; e-mail GSHarakSJ@hotmail.com.

Or contact Voices in the Wilderness, 1460 West Carmen Ave., Chicago, IL 60640, phone: (773) 784-8065; fax: (773) 764-8837; e-mail: kkelly@igc.apc.org; Web site: www.nonviolence.org/vitw

The problems are genocide, ecocide, the destruction of an entire society, and the disruption of an already fragile international order. With so much at stake, I consider the campaign to end the economic sanctions on Iraq to be the pre-eminent struggle for justice in our time.

G. Simon Harak is a priest at St. Mary Parish in Baltimore, MD.