October 2000

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

Iraq Album, Summer 2000

Alan Pogue describes himself as "a social justice advocate with a camera." His mother gave him a camera to take with him to Vietnam where he served as chaplain's assistant and combat medic, but all the while taking photographs. He has kept at it over the last 30 years, most recently documenting conditions in Chiapas, Mexico, and in Iraq. Pogue will be in the Boston area late October and early November, speaking and exhibiting with the Merrimack Valley People for Peace and the National Lawyers Guild. [For information: Jane Cadarette, PO Box 573, North Andover, MA 01845-0573; 978/686-5777 <jcadarette@worldnet.att.net>]

This summer Pogue traveled in Iraq, revisiting friends made on previous journeys and documenting a delegation from Voices in the Wilderness who spent six weeks in Basra, guests of working families there, living without airconditioning during the season of 120 degree days, on the rations ordinary Iraqis live on. Pogue has sent a few photos from his album, along with scribbled explanations.

As much as the people of Iraq have suffered they have also gone on with their lives as best they can. Children, as the ones in Basra, will play anywhere. Farmers must plant and harvest. Musicians must make music even with worn out strings. Painters paint with what ever brushes are at hand. Iraqis are creative, inventive (they did invent the wheel and writing), and very patient. Doctors are the worst off. They have been well-educated and work in large general hospitals, but the equipment is broken and medicine is in short supply or absent. Antibiotics are beyond improvization. Yet Neam Ahmad makes ceramic art of such beauty that the heart is lifted. The Atala family raises enough food for hundreds. The Kurdish Iraqis in the City of Olives are robust and opimistic. But heaven help you if, as Kamal, you become seriously ill. Many people, including US government planners, knew in 1991 what would follow the distruction of the Iraqi electrical and water systems. Kathy Kelly and others were on the border of Iraq in 1990. Veterans for Peace lobbied and marched against the Gulf War. Kathy Kelly formed Voices in the Wilderness in 1996 and they have taken some thirty delegations to Iraq. Veterans for Peace has decided to rehabilitate water treatment plants since bad water is what is killing so many Iraqis, particularly children.

Kota-Hussan and Hag Kito pose with their grandbaby Ekram. They live in a small Kurdish town named The City of Olives which is twelve miles north of Mosul. Behind them is an enormous pile of sesame seeds which will be made into sesame oil. This, along with olive oil for soap making as well as cooking, is the family business and it is doing very well. The Kurds have been under attack by the Turkish government since 1923. Even now, the US government allows the Turkish Army and Airforce to enter Iraq and kill as many Kurds as they like.

Opening the door of peace is Neam Ahmad, an artist in Mosul, northern Iraq. She holds one of her ceramic works, a dove on a branch. Her largest piece was a four-tiered fountain, the bowls of which were covered with bas-relief fish that seemed ready to leap into the air. My attempt at praise was to tell her that her work would do very well in the United States. Her reply was that her work would do very well in Iraq if my government would only stop bombing her country. Indeed, near her kiln there were cracks in the cement wall from the floor to the ceiling caused by US missiles. The no-fly zone for Iraqi planes has not kept American planes from harming the residents of Mosul.

The photograph permanently etched in my mind is of Kamal, like too many children in Iraq, dying from a preventable and treatable illness. Phil Steger (a Catholic Worker from Seattle) messages his abdomen; Bert Sacks the Voices delegation leader, is on the right. The title of the photograph is "Touching the Wound" after the fact that many of us are like St. Thomas who had to touch the wound before he would believe. The place--Al Mounsur Children's Hospital, Baghdad. Death by sanctions is as final as death by hydrogen bomb or rifle bullet. When Kamal died there was no loud noise or blinding light, no one running around with a machine gun. No news organization at his bedside. Frail Kamal simply faded away as did more than one hundred Iraqi children, that day and every day for the last ten years.

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