A MOM IN IRAQ

              Krista Clement
              February 4, 2000

              FARMINGTON, Pa. -- I have just returned from Iraq
              to my clean, "safe" and well-ordered life with my five
              healthy sons, with clean air to breathe and drinkable
              water to be had with the simple turn of a tap. Yet life
              can never be the same.

              Many times a day, when I sit down for a meal or see a
              healthy child, I have to fight back tears as memories
              well up from our tiny glimpse into the man-made hell of
              a land being choked to death by my country, a land
              where a child dies every six minutes as a result of our
              sanctions.

              Still before my eyes is the face of a 6-year-old child
              suffering from leukemia. She is but one of thousands of
              Iraqi children, each dying a slow and agonizing death.
              And this innocent child, like so many other Iraqi
              children, does not even know she is an Iraqi. Yet she is
              being put to death by our sanctions because she is an
              Iraqi.

              Beside another bed a mother wept as she watched her
              little girl slipping into a coma. This is the third time she
              has watched one of her children die, each before they
              reached their 3rd birthday. I could not even begin to
              imagine her agony.

              We claim that any weapons of mass destruction Iraq
              may still have must be destroyed. Yet we refuse to end
              the sanctions--a weapon of mass destruction that has
              killed more than a million people, most of them children.