From the Fayetteville Observer, Thursday February 13, 2003

Siler City

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows." Nowhere is this truth more evident than in Iraq, where 12 years of U.N. sanctions as well as increasingly regular bombing by the United States have killed hundreds of thousands Iraqis and brought us to the brink of a U.S. invasion that could kill many more.

I just returned from a trip to Iraq with a delegation that included Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit, Mich., as well as four members of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows who lost loved ones in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and who take their organization’s name from King’s quote. Their mission has been to turn their grief into action for peace.

We went to Iraq in search of Iraqi mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and children who had also suffered the loss of loved ones to war. We hoped that if we could know Iraqis and their suffering and bring their stories back to the United States, more people here would reject the cry to war and work to end the sanctions.

Ours was not a fact-finding mission to verify the effects of the sanctions. UNICEF has already documented the sanctions’ horrendous death toll. And a UNICEF report dated November 2002 recognized that despite the fact that Iraq has one of the largest food-rationing systems in the world and spends a high proportion of its oil revenues on food, the sanctions are still causing chronic malnutrition in 1 million Iraqi children under age five.

We went to bear witness to this suffering and to listen. What we found was that among the Iraqis we met, nearly all had suffered loss of some kind.

Even though we came from the United States, the country responsible for much of this suffering, the people of Iraq welcomed us with compassion. We visited the home of Ikbar Nasser Imud, widow of Jamil Fedah who was killed last December by a U.S. bomb attack in the southern no-fly zone while working his job as a driver for a petroleum company. Ikbar welcomed the women of our delegation into her room where she sat with female relatives still deep in mourning.

Together she and the women from Peaceful Tomorrows shared their grief and their desire for peace. "We know that there is a difference between American society and the American government," Ikbar said.

We went to the Ameriya shelter, a civilian bomb shelter that the United States hit twice in succession during the 1991 Gulf War, killing hundreds of people inside, mostly women and children. Until recently, the shelter looked much like areas of New York City after Sept. 11, 2001 -- its walls covered with pictures, flowers and mementos of the victims, a memorial to their deaths. Now the Iraqi government has temporarily removed the mementos to transform the site into a museum, but the grief remains palpable. We gathered there with the surviving family members, such as Said Ahnied, who lost his wife and seven children in the attack. They showed us pictures of their dead loved ones and told us the stories of their loss.

Earlier that same day we had visited the Al Monsour Pediatric Hospital in Baghdad and met Ali, a 13-year-old boy suffering from leukemia who, like many of the children on his ward, cannot acquire all the medicine for his treatment protocol because of the sanctions. The United States, which can veto any contract to import goods to Iraq, has repeatedly prohibited medications for treatable diseases, such as Ali’s leukemia, calling these drugs "dual use" items.

Consequently, Ali’s prognosis is very poor. There I stood, his American visitor whose government has been unwavering in its support of the sanctions, despite full knowledge of the accompanying death toll. And yet when I moved to take his photo, Ali tried hard to smile at me.

I found it wrenching to say goodbye to the people we met in Iraq. The reality that they could be dead — in two weeks, a month, six months — because of a U.S. invasion stood like an icy pillar between us that no words of comfort or reassurance could diminish.

To more than one person, I said upon departure, "I am holding you in my heart." But I could read the doubt in their eyes:

"What good will that do me?"

What good indeed, unless more of us in the United States can hold the people of Iraq in our hearts and, like the families of Peaceful Tomorrows, turn our grief and compassion into action for peace?

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