By Mohammad Mertaban
“As I went outside, the streets were covered with dust and
smoke, pieces from buildings collapsing to the floor, and
everywhere you looked, there were parents outside screaming their
children’s names. I was running everywhere yelling,
“˜Haidar! Mostafa!’
Finally, when I turned the corner, I saw my young one, Mostafa,
and I began to cry. He was completely covered with blood, even the
inside of his eyes to the point where I thought he was blind. As
the child was screaming, I started to wipe the blood and dust off
his face and then asked him “˜Mostafa, do you know who I am?
Do you know who I am? Can you see me?’
He responds, “˜Yes, Mama, you’re my Mama.’ Then
I asked, “˜Where’s your brother, Haidar?’
As I set him down and made sure he was okay, I looked over to
where he pointed and saw a pile of dirt with a body buried
underneath it. I ran to the pile, and uncovered the body, and to my
surprise, it was Haidar, yet he wasn’t breathing.
I shook the body crying, “˜Haidar! Haidar!’ There was
no hope, no heart beat, no pulse.”
This is a story that I heard with my own ears from the person
who knows it best herself: Umm Haidar, an Iraqi mother living under
the 11-year-old United States-United Kingdom sanctions.
The area where she currently lives is called Missile Street, due
to that dreadful day of U.S. bombing. Umm Haidar wanted me to relay
this to the American people and ask them, “Why? What is it
that my son did to the United States? Does the U.S. feel that
children his age are a huge threat to their power?”
Indeed, the U.S. continues to bomb Iraq, and its sanctions,
coupled with the crippling grip of a tyrannical regime led by
Saddam Hussein, continue to kill children like Haidar.
According to the United Nations Children’s Fund, the
sanctions alone directly kill 5,000 children like Haidar per month.
As journalist Ramzi Kysia put it, “If Americans can’t
understand how that’s possible, then maybe they can
understand this: according to UN agencies and relief organizations
in Iraq ““ organizations such as UNICEF and the International
Committee of the Red Cross ““ sanctions have caused at least
500,000 excess deaths among children under the age of 5.
That’s a children’s 9-11 every month for the last 11
years: 250 World Trade Towers full of babies and toddlers, crashing
to the ground.”
Perhaps this is why the global coalition to place sanctions on
Iraq has now dwindled to only two countries: the U.S. and the
U.K.
To give a picture of the nature of these sanctions, these are
some of the items banned from entering Iraq: baby food, bandages,
blankets, children’s bicycles, chlorine and other water
purification chemicals, medical swabs, notebooks, pencils, sanitary
towels … and the list goes on.
In essence, the U.S. directly placing sanctions on these items
blocks access to medical care, education, food and shelter for the
Iraqi people.
This is a direct infringement on their lives, and even more, a
direct infringement on their humanity.
In 1996, when informed of the half-million children who have
died as a direct cause of the sanctions, Madeline Albright, then
U.S. Secretary of State, justified these deaths with a simple
answer, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price
““ we think the price is worth it” (60 Minutes,
1996).
What could possibly be worth denying medical treatment to
millions of children with leukemia and doing nothing about the fact
that countless babies are born deformed from depleted uranium left
over from U.S. tanks used in the Gulf War? What could be worth than
denying a starving child her sustenance to live, or preventing a
third-grade classroom from having the materials to educate? What is
worth sleeping easy at night while we know that the actions of our
government are forcing mothers to send their children to sleep that
same night without food?
But Albright still thinks the price is worth it.
In June 2001, I took part in a two-week delegation with an
organization called Life For Relief and Development, a United
Nations non-governmental organization that works from the United
States. The goal of this delegation was to assess the current
situation in Iraq and report back to our communities.
Before I actually arrived in Baghdad, I was extremely nervous
knowing everything I had seen about Iraq, all the pictures of the
deformed children, of the women in “clinics” screaming
for medical aid for their young ones, and of old Iraqi women crying
over the loss of their families ““ all this was going to
become a reality right before my eyes.
As I arrived in Iraq, nothing could prepare me for what I was
about to see: a people completely decimated by the effects of 11
years of sanctions. A country in which deformed orphans littered
the streets, once beautiful houses lay in rubble, and hospitals
overwhelmed with the horrific smell of dead bodies, mostly
children.
During this delegation, we visited hospitals, homes of families
that have lost members in U.S. bombings, orphanages and some of the
poorest slums in the world. In fact, while we were in Iraq, the
United States actually bombed Mosul, a city in Northern Iraq, and
we could have been killed had we decided to go there two days
before. The bomb was dropped on a soccer field full of children
playing together. It killed 24 children and injured about 40. I saw
this with my own eyes.
As a matter of fact, we were able to visit the hospital that
treated these casualties and speak with these horror-stricken
children. It was one of the most painful moments of my life ““
to actually talk to someone who was physically damaged because of
the action of this “super power.”
When thinking about waging war on Iraq, it is vital to
understand the state of destruction and complete humanitarian
suffering that describes the conditions faced by its people. What
is often the first thing to be forgotten in discussing war is the
effect on the innocent civilian population of the country. As we
can see from the Persian Gulf War, those who are hardest hit when
bombs start dropping are not Saddam Hussein nor the Iraqi
government ““ but the innocent families who love neither their
oppressive government nor the American bombs that rain on them from
the sky.
Without seeing the people of Iraq as human beings who love, cry
and die like you and I, it becomes very easy to simply look at
these innocent deaths as “collateral damage,” a
military term that makes it easier to swallow the murder of
innocent people during times of war.
Thus, we must begin to ask ourselves, when does the time for
destruction end and the time for construction begin?
For in this War on Terrorism, in which the objectives, causes
and methods used are all uncertain to the global public, there lies
only one certainty: the spilling of innocent blood did not end on
Sept. 11.
Wherever this war spreads to, bloodshed will continue to be
spilled in the name of counter-terrorism, and the days of Iraqi
mothers burying their children before their fifth birthday will
continue into the unforeseeable dark future.