Eyewitness report
Voices in the Wilderness

Voices in the Wilderness is a Chicago-based organization whose sole purpose is to advocate lifting the sanctions against Iraq. Here are reports from three VitW travellers.
Maryland ~ Ellen Barfield went with the 10th VitW delegation, which spent January 3-18, 1998 in Iraq.  Barfield, formerly of Pantex, TX, now lives in Baltimore. 
When I visited Iraq with a peace delegation in October of 1991 I saw the same dreadful conditions I saw this January. The only real difference this year was the hopelessness in the eyes of the people.  We all assumed in 1991 that soon the Iraqis could rebuild. Now, though, they have suffered through over 7 years of a totally shut down economy with no end in  sight, and in fact nothing but more threats from the U.S., the nation that insists this situation continue. Iraqis can only grit their teeth and plod through another day.  
Iraqi society is approaching collapse.  Electric and water treatment plants, intentionally bombed in '91, have of necessity been patched back together but are barely able to function.  Chlorine for water purification is a prohibited "dual use" item.  The Iraqi dinar is almost nothing, plunging from a value of $3.30 in 1990 to $0.00058 or less now.  People sell furniture, clothing, anything they still have, in fields outside the cities, just trying to hold on a little longer.  In schools students sit on the metal frames of desks without seats or writing surfaces, reading tattered 7-year-old or older textbooks, and pencils are another prohibited item (they contain graphite, which may be used in weapons).
In the hospitals we saw malnourished children, or those with diarrhea from contaminated water, who could not eat and had no intravenous equipment or glucose; tiny premature infants two to each incubator, which only kept them warm but could not provide oxygen or proper humidity; kidney dialysis patients in a ward where most of the machines did not function and re-use of supplies meant a high likelihood of septicemia; children with leukemia and other cancers suffering with no pain medication, and lucky to receive any cancer drug at all; pneumonia patients sharing oxygen masks, and trading germs, if they had oxygen at all. Almost all the patients we saw are unlikely to still be alive today.
The hospitals were cold, dark, and dirty.  The families brought heaters, light bulbs, blankets, food from home, if they had those things. Many of the hospital beds were empty, not because people were not sick, but because supplies and medicines were so depleted that the chance of anyone being helped was slight.
The Ameriyeh shelter, where hundreds of women and children were killed by bombing in '91, is now a shrine. A woman who lost her whole family [8 children, her sister and her sister's children] in that attack has collected photos of the many victims and she now lives in a small trailer house on the shelter grounds and works as the curator of a heart wrenching exhibit. She quietly points out body shadows on the wall just like at Hiroshima, and hand prints, and patches of skin and hair still adhering [to the walls and floors.]
Our delegation was the first one from VitW to be able to visit Iraqi Kurdistan, which is administered separately from the rest of Iraq. Aside from the same deadly shortages which affect the rest of the country, the Iraqi Kurds also suffer from the vicious fighting among 22 different factions vying for control there. Iran, Syria, and Turkey all supply arms and money to various of these factions in an effort to control their own Kurdish minorities who they fear will rise up in a unified bid for Kurdish autonomy.  
U.S. hypocrisy is showing especially strongly regarding Turkey, which has abused its own Kurds, supplied killers in Iraqi Kurdistan, and made repeated incursions there with U.S. supplied money and arms. Invading a neighboring country and abusing the Kurds are supposed to be what made Saddam Hussein such a monster.
Almost 100,000 Iraqi Kurds have had to flee their village homes due to the fighting. We visited two shelters in Erbil for these "Internally Displaced Persons." (They do not qualify as official refugees because they did not cross a national border.)  The conditions in these shelters were horrendous.  As many as 14 family members were crammed into one tiny room with plastic sheeting over the broken windows to keep out the northern cold. Basement rooms had no windows and were almost pitch dark. Raw sewage ran down the stairs. One water faucet in the basement served each entire building, and children lugged buckets of water up 5 or 6 flights.
Three members of our delegation, Jane Hosking and John Heid from Duluth, MN, and I, were able to stay in Iraq a few days longer than usual and do a 3 day fast and vigil at the main U.N. compound in Baghdad. The days of our action, January 15-17, were chosen to express our remorse over the bombing in '91, which began the evening of the 15th U.S. time, and early the morning of the 16th Iraqi time. We held banners in English and Arabic which called for an end to the embargo, especially focussing on the suffering children.
The U.N. headquarters was on a busy street, so many people saw us and honked and waved. Many workers for U.N. humanitarian agencies in the building talked with us and expressed their gratitude for our presence. Even some of the UNSCOM weapons inspectors there thanked us too.  Scott Ritter, a former U.S. military officer who served in '91, arrogantly led his team of UNSCOM inspectors out of Iraq on the 16th, guaranteeing us generous coverage from reporters waiting for his press announcement. Ritter's team was the one on which all but two members were U.S. or British citizens [some of whom were ex-CIA operatives], and the Iraqis understandably objected.
"U.S. news reports have recently been full of the belligerence of the few weapons inspectors, mostly U.S. or British, who have traipsed through convent graveyards and elementary classrooms, bullying nuns and children, and claimed to be looking for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Our delegation heard stories of these ridiculous and insulting raids several times. Both in '91 and this January other weapons inspectors quietly told us that the Iraqis were cooperative and that they (the inspectors) were able to do their jobs.
There is strong evidence that the current so-called weapons inspection crisis . . . is more of our government's campaign to justify insane military spending. A new enemy has been created with the racist propaganda about the so-called evil Arab, with Saddam Hussein as the personification. Remember the over-blown assessment of Iraq's military cap-abilities before the bombing in '91, and what a lopsided massacre that turned out to be?
Even for those who believe the U.S. should run the world, it is hard to justify continuing the oppression of Iraq. . . .  
WMDs are of great concern, but Iraq was and is hardly the world or regional leader in that regard. Weapons control should be extended to the entire region, most especially Israel, a producer and leading possessor of WMDs. The Arab countries are understandably angry at the double standards of the U.S., which supports Israel in ignoring U.N. resolutions regarding its behavior, but insists that Iraq comply with U.N. resolutions regarding weapons inspections. Too, U.S. arms merchants, with government encouragement, have poured weapons into Middle Eastern countries except for Iraq since 1991. 
The WMD at work in Iraq now is sanctions. An employee of our Baghdad hotel said,  "Iraqis are waiting for miracles."  Miracles are quite rare, but given the current political climate, it seems that nothing less will soften our collective heart here in the U.S. . . . Please call or write your federal elected officials and the State Department and urge an end to threats invasion, and an end to the embargo. ~  Houston Peace News, 4/1998. 
Ohio ~  Rick McDowell, a puppeteer and actor, is from Akron.
In May, 1998, when I traveled to Iraq for the third time in nine months with VitW, nearly six months since the implementation of UN Resolution 986 (Oil for Food), . . . I found a deterioration of all conditions necessary to sustain life. 
Seven years of the most comprehensive sanctions in modern history have reduced Iraq and its people to utter destitution. . . . 
The UN reports that public health services are near a total  breakdown from a lack of basic medicines, life-saving drugs and medical supplies.
The World Health Organization reports a sixfold increase in the mortality rate for children under 5, an explosive rise in the incidence of endemic infections such as cholera, typhoid and malaria, and a markedly elevated incidence of measles, poliomyelitis and tetanus. Most Iraqis have subsisted on a semi-starvation diet for several years.
The oil for food resolution is a failure, its promise of food and medicine having proved to be too little, too late. . . . The resolution doesn't provide for critical spare parts to repair and maintain water and sewage treatment facilities and medical infrastructure.
Without hard currency, the economy has collapsed. . . . As the population struggles for survival, the social fabric is disintegrating.
A young doctor at a Baghdad hospital said, "Our life is over." Another doctor asked, "What does your country gain from our suffering?"
More horrific is the pain in the eyes of the mothers who wait in hospitals with their children. For far too many mothers it is a death watch. The toll of these sanctions on an entire generation of children is incalculable.
The lack of public debate over UN-US participation in this massive violation of human rights is astonishing. ~ Akron Beacon Journal, July 26, 1997
Wisconsin ~ Erik Gustafson, Army veteran of the Gulf War, was in Iraq for eight days in June of 1997 with a VitW delegation. He is a college student at U of W, Madison. 

Douglas Baker was with Gustafson at two slide presentations Erik  made in Wisconsin. 
When most Americans think of Iraq, they think of dictator Saddam Hussein. But for Gulf War veteran Erik Gustafson, he thinks of Mohammed Rahman, a severely malnourished, hospitalized 11-year-old.
Last summer, days after Gustafson visited the boy who Iraqi doctors said was 'failing to thrive,' Mohammed died.
Who is responsible for the death of this boy? It is not Hussein, said 27-year-old Gustafson when he visited Sauk Prairie (WI) last week. Rather, the fault lies with the US government. [He spoke at an adult forum and a high school history class.]
Gustafson wants for Americans to realize their government's foreign policy has had a sustained, destructive impact upon real people. . . .He would like for every American to know the name of an Iraqi civilian.  "This is a lesson I hope and pray that you learn: That the Iraqi people are not their government." 
[When Gustafson visited Houston in March, he new the names of every sick child, every mother, every doctor on the slides he showed his audiences.]
Gustafson visited the bomb shelter that was destroyed during the Gulf War. [O]ver 400 people [most of them women and children] were killed by an incendiary missile.
Gustafson told the class, "As an American, I felt responsible (for the destruction and death). As a soldier, I felt responsible.
"In the military, you subscribe to a sense of honor,' he said. According to that honor, soldiers do not kill civilians."
[Gustafson considers the doctors of Iraq to be heroes, as they work with little resources and pay to care for the sick and dying. One such physician asked him to tell the American people that, "The Gulf War did not change our humanity. We are not animals."]
This thoughtful ex-soldier said that the Iraqi middle class had disappeared under the sanctions. A middle class and a civil society, Gustafson said, are the best defenses against tyranny. He challenged all his audiences to think critically about information on Iraq provided by the media.   
Gustafson was stationed in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. He and many members of his unit felt that they were mainly fighting  for oil.  ~ Douglas Baker, The Sauk Prairie Eagle, Sauk Prairie, WI, Feb. 26, 1998        ¨