November 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Dispatches from Iraq

Ramzi Kysia is a Muslim-American peace activist, working with the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (www.epic-usa.org). He is co-coordinator of the Voices in the Wilderness (www.vitw.org) Iraq Peace Team (www.iraqpeaceteam.org), a group of American peaceworkers pledged to stay in Iraq before, during, and after any future US attack.

How do you face the mass destruction of human beings? As peaceworkers living in an Iraq under sanctions and the threat of war, it's a question we all struggle with.

Photo: courtesy Voices in the Wilderness

Anna Riatti, Baghdad coordinator of the Italian NGO "Bridges to Baghdad," is passionate and usually cheerful about her work. But her voice drops when she talks about George Bush's threatened war, "It will be a disaster. I don't want to think about it. The Iraqis are still here, they are still alive--after 10 years of war, after 12 years of embargo, you are surprised how they are still managing. They are really fantastic, and they are so kind, so kind... [but] after the bombing, what can they do? The UN will leave, the NGOs will leave...afterwards there will be civil war. I cannot imagine it. I don't want to think about it."

Bridges is in many ways a model for our work as peacemakers. In Italy, they organize demonstrations and direct actions, bring fact-finding delegations to Iraq, and advocate for political change. In Iraq, they provide humanitarian assistance to those in need.

Bridges to Baghdad is also at the front of the fight against the de-education of Iraqi society. Of all the sectors of Iraqi society, education is the worst hit, and the one that has not yet even begun to recover. Education is cash-intensive, and under the Oil-for-Food program no cash is allowed into Iraq. You can't import a school. UNICEF maintains that "[t]he state of many of the schools in Iraq is not just a disincentive to education but also a public health hazard for children." (Situation of Children in Iraq, UNICEF 2002)

Fabio Alberti, president of Bridges to Baghdad, says, "I feel like my soul is in danger. I'm afraid for my soul. Violence calls new violence and it may never end. It will come to our homes. And I feel scared for my Iraqi sons. Our activities have saved the lives of hundreds of children and I know their faces, their names. People think about places like Afghanistan, like Iraq, as something abstract. For me it's difficult not to see Zeina, to see Mohammed, when I think of Iraq. They are not abstract. They are very real."

Bridges to Baghdad is a model of how to struggle against war, and Anna and Fabio are some of my heroes. Facing the mass destruction of human life in Iraq, I wonder if George Bush knows that the human beings his war will consume are as real as he is? I wonder whether we--as a race, as the human race--will ever find the strength to once and for all overcome the hatreds and greed that drive war. Most of all, I wonder if George Bush has ever felt his soul in danger, and if he has then how dare he destroy these people?

[Bridges' website (in Italian only) is:www.unponteper.it/it/baghdad/index.html Their address is Un Ponte Per... (A Bridge To...), Via Guglia 69/A, 00186 Roma, Italy. Fabio's email is: fabio.alberti@tiscalinet.it]

Felicity Arbuthnot is a British journalist who writes frequently on Iraq.

Under the draconian embargo imposed by the United Nations on Hiroshima Day 1990, Iraqis were totally reliant on outside contracts for everything from seeds to satellites, pharmaceuticals to pots and pans. Yet in the two years since flights have been again arriving (though sparsely) in the country, the sense of isolation and despair is evaporating and signs of regeneration abound.

In Abu Nawas street, famed for its Tigris-side restaurants, where succulent freshly caught, herb embalmed, fish are grilled on charcoal, the craftsmen have been at work. Last year, vast oak tree trunks lay across the pavement in front of† beautiful, but long derelict 19th-century buildings. Now the trunks are silken, golden polished, vast oak doors inches thick, and one interior already transformed, ancient walls treated and repointed; another of the growing number of galleries displaying sculpture and ceramics is set to open.

Iraqis, traditionally a late-night people, have spent the last decade mostly at home, struggling with the rigours of the embargo and a sort of national depression. Now the squares are full until late at night and sidestreets are thronged with board game players, the air filled with the scent of hookas, freshly baked flat bread, and falafel.

The US seems determined to bomb a people emerging from a near twenty-year limbo--the eight year Iran-Iraq war (1982-1988), the 1991 Gulf War, and a twelve-year embargo. "Of course they will bomb," says Father Jean-Marie Benjamin, priest, author, and documentary maker, "It is just a case of when. There are 550,000 US military personnel in the region already and maybe they will use nuclear weapons. Donald Rumsfeld has already said he would use nuclear weapons."

At the Al Mansour Children's Hospital are reminders that one kind of nuclear weapon has already been used on Iraq: the depleted uranium (DU) weapons used in the 1991 Gulf War. Cases of child cancers and leukemia seem to have a common denominator--they all occur in heavily bombarded areas. DU remains radioactive and chemically toxic for billions of years and has also been linked to cancers and birth deformities among returning Gulf War veterans from a number of countries.

Jean Estrada of the organization Emergency, which responds to medical crisis for victims of war, warned of "a humanitarian catastrophe if there is an attack. The major trauma injuries which would occur simply could not be dealt with-- nurses have left, skills and facilities are out of date... they simply could not cope."

Iraqis, regardless of whether for or against the regime, are implacably united on one thing: they will never allow a foreign-imposed government and invasion force to take over their country. Defiance of foreign domination is a spirit which is close to the surface in every Iraqi one meets. In the region, the idea that the crisis is about Saddam's woeful human rights record or the return and freedom of the weapons inspectors is laughable. It is, they say, about a country said to be 'swimming on a sea of oil.'

Joe Quandt is a member of the Voices in the Wilderness Iraq Peace Team. At home in the US, he participates in a regular interfaith gathering in Schenectady, NY, called "People of Faith for Justice in Iraq."

Today is Referendum Day in Iraq. Four of us from the Voices in the Wilderness peace team are meeting with a group of doctors, professors, and city dignitaries in Babylon. We are introduced to Dr. Makki Alwash, clearly a highly regarded leader (I learn later that many of the doctors with us today were once his students). Henry Williams, one of our group, tells Dr. Makki Alwash of our bringing medicine to various hospitals, and calls the sanctions a crime. "I want to thank you for this, but you must tell your people that America is responsible for this crime. Why don't we have good water, civilized water? Why? There is a terrible increase of viral hepatitis and Mediterranean anemia here. Why? No tools to do pre-natal diagnosis. Why? My own wife comes to me with a lump on her breast, cancer, I am an oncologist, there are no treatments I can give her and I must watch my own wife die this way." Tears stand in his eyes. And mine.

Asked what message he would send to America on this day, he is decisive: "Leave us alone! We know they only want to take the oil. Bush says he works for humanity purpose. This is not humanity purpose! More than 24 bombings near my house in 4 months. The children are afraid. You want to liberate Iraq. To liberate, you kill? Better for your government to solve their own problems than to come here for the oil."

Before the Gulf War, Iraq had the finest medical treatment facilities in the Middle East. If you had a serious illness, you went to Iraq. Merjan Hospital where Dr. Makki teaches was bombed during the war.

That evening, Henry and I sit together on his porch looking back across the Tigris to Saddam Plaza. Fireworks are starting. Then red tracer fire. Henry identifies it for me, else I'd never have known. "What's that?" I ask at the burst of a new sound. "Automatic fire."

I (who sleazed out of 'Nam by brokering a 4-F rating at my pre-induction physical) have never heard automatic weapons fire before. Like so much that I've experienced in the last four days, it is new. I wonder if the plaza over there is full now. Amazingly, five floors down and across the four-lane street, we can hear domino players in the outdoor tea garden, dominoes clacking on the boards.

We look at each other, shake our heads at the irony of people playing games as their nation prepares for war.

This is how they are preparing. By playing games and firing weapons into the October night sky. Drawing together. Attending mosque in increasing numbers. Rededicating their sense of community, their relationships. Making art. Making deals. Fixing the sidewalks. Constructing new buildings. Enjoying life. "Where do you get your power to go on?" I'd asked the dignified Mr. Hassem at Iraqi Innovation for Plastic Arts. "From 6000 years, Mr. Joe," he'd answered. "6000 years."

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