MFT59

(Note: Wendy Vasquez, a member of the Des Moines Valley Friends Meeting, traveled to Iraq in June with an AFSC Campaign of Conscience delegation. The following is her statement at a June 18 press conference.)

It was very, very hard to hear the things I heard in Iraq and see the things I saw. Maybe the worst part was to see so many dying children in the hospitals, dying of starvation and of cancers for which there was neither technology nor adequate medications, seeing the desperation of the doctors, trying to convince us so that we would come back and act in our country, seeing the parents, caring for their own children in the hospitals because there is no money to pay nurses, parents insisting on unwrapping their children with legs broken from rickets, wasted away from malnutrition, pressing slips of paper into our hands with the names of medicines written in Arabic that would save their child. No American, seeing this, would support our sanctions policy. And to go from these hospitals out into the street where playful children would follow us around, laughing, and to know that these children may be the next ones to go.

We met and spoke with people at all levels: directors of NGO's operating in Iraq, the director of UNICEF, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, numerous administrators of different Iraqi government programs, a former Iraqi ambassador to the UN, and the deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz. We also had many conversations with everyday people: the staff in the hotels we stayed at; people working in the hospitals, schools and other places we visited; people we met walking around; taxi drivers; people who invited us into their homes. Everyone said the same thing: Please go back and tell them what you saw.

We saw a garbage truck heading for the dump, and 20 or 30 people running behind it hoping to salvage something. We saw a sewage treatment plant where one side was shut down because they needed a pulley and had been waiting for two months for the order to be approved [by a decision-making body within the UN Sec. Council], and the other side had a filter that let most of the sediment fall back down into the water because it was broken and couldn't be repaired; and in any event the aeration tank had never been completed because of the war and there were no chemicals to purify the water anyway. We went to a village to visit a water project, and when I went to look at the school I saw there was not one window that was not broken, all the screens were torn out, and a father told me they had no paper, no pencils and "Teacher absent." Teachers in Iraq make $2 per month.

"Everyone said the same thing: Please go back and tell them what you saw."

Who knows that we dropped 300 tons of depleted uranium (DU) during the Gulf War, and that there has never been a cleanup and that there is a huge wave of cancers in the south, for which there is no technology and virtually no treatment available?

We went to the cancer unit of Basrah General Hospital. The director told us, "Every single one of these patients is going to die. When a father asks me, ‘What can I do for my child?’, I tell him, 'You can't do anything, and I can't do anything either."' We in the US don't know about these realities, because if we did we would never tolerate, much less defend the sanctions policy. Instead we would insist on an international effort to clean up the DU, and we would send experts and specialists to save those people who are still dying from a war we thought was over a long time ago.

We have no diplomatic ties with Iraq, no channels of communication with their government. All of us were very aware that in the absence of any other alternative, the government of Iraq was hoping to use us to convey their message to the US government: We don't want war, bring in the inspectors and they can go wherever they want; just suspend the sanctions--we're not even asking that you lift them--just that you suspend them so more people don't die while you verify that we don't have weapons of mass destruction.

The weight of that charge to communicate this message is horribly heavy for me, since I have never even been to a press conference before, much less tried to talk to a lawmaker. But I will hold in my mind the image of what I saw, and force myself to do it.

Our senators and representatives should go themselves to Iraq and find out what our policy is doing to the people there. I am certain that they will receive the same humbling welcome we did. I am certain that if they go, our sanctions policy will end.