wfn.org | Delegation to Iraq calls for end to sanctions

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.UMC.ORG>]

March 23, 2000	News media contact: Linda Bloom·(212) 870-3803·New York
10-21-71B{163}

By United Methodist News Service

Living conditions for the Iraqi people continue to deteriorate under the
strain of nearly a decade of economic sanctions, according to an interfaith
delegation that has just returned from visiting the country.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation group, which included two United
Methodists, will recount its experiences and lobby Congress for a lifting of
the sanctions during April 4 meetings in Washington.

The trip to Iraq was part of a national "Campaign of Conscience for the
Iraqi People," which is co-sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and
the American Friends Service Committee. The fellowship is a nonprofit
interfaith organization dedicated to peace and justice issues, nonviolent
alternatives to conflict and the rights of conscience.

The Rev. James Lawson, a United Methodist pastor and fellowship chairman,
led the 11-member delegation with Ibrahim Abdil Muid Ramey of the Muslim
Peace Fellowship.

Lawson told United Methodist News Service that the purpose of both the
campaign and the delegation's trip is "to try to escalate education ... and
the movement against the sanctions."

He said there's movement in Congress now on this issue, especially since
"some 70 representatives have signed a letter to President Clinton calling
for an end to the sanctions."

Visits to hospital, schools and humanitarian projects run by the United
Nations were part of the itinerary of the March 7-18 trip. "What we were
trying to do is see the results of the sanctions on the people," explained
the Rev. Richard Deats, a United Methodist pastor and former missionary to
the Philippines who has worked for the fellowship for 28 years.

Since the sanctions were imposed, Iraq has been unable to rebuild its
infrastructure or even provide adequate food and medicine for its people.
"In the '80s, Iraq had the highest standard of living in the Middle East,"
Deats said. "Today, Iraq ranks with Bangladesh and the other poorest
nations."

Education also has plummeted. The group visited a high school chemistry
class where 50 students sat in a room with no textbooks or chemistry
equipment.

The biggest crisis revolves around the large-scale death of children. A
report issued last August by UNICEF estimated that half a million Iraqi
children under age 5 have died since 1990 as a result of the sanctions.

That type of infanticide exists because no hospital can get parts or
continuous electricity for its baby incubators, Lawson said. In the
hospitals that the delegation visited in Baghdad and Basra, "there's no baby
incubator operative at this moment," he added.

At one leukemia ward for children, the attending physician told the
delegation that all he could do was try to comfort the families. "He said,
`We now call this the ward of death because the children we bring to this
ward we know will die,'" Lawson explained. He noted that the arrest and cure
rate for leukemia elsewhere in the world is at 60 percent.

Deats added that doctors couldn't get adequate antibiotics or even pain
relievers for children suffering from diseases. The diseases include an
increased incidence of cancer, which may be linked to the depleted uranium
used in bombs and missiles during the Gulf War.

In fact, bombing of southern Iraq continues on a regular basis, according to
Deats. A mother in a suburb of Basra told him that one of her sons was
killed and another wounded when a missile hit the street where they were
playing. 

Deats admitted that about 15 years ago he thought sanctions were a good
nonviolent alternative to war. But practiced at such a comprehensive scale,
he explained, sanctions "can be a weapon of mass destruction, it's just in
slow motion. It's like a silent killer."

The World Council of Churches called recently on the United Nations to end
the sanctions. In a Feb. 18 letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the
Rev. Konrad Raiser, the WCC's chief executive, said the time "is overdue"
for the Security Council to lift all sanctions affecting Iraq's civilian
population.

"We believe that economic sanctions can provide a nonviolent alternative to
war when applied under strict conditions and carefully monitored," Raiser
wrote. "Though in its Resolution 1284 (in 1999), the Security Council
returned to the question of delivery of humanitarian goods, it has still not
appropriately or clearly defined sanctions against Iraq, nor has increasing
monitoring diminished the suffering of the Iraqi people."

# # #

*************************************
United Methodist News Service
Photos and stories also available at:
http://umns.umc.org