Activists Seek End To Iraq Sanctions
By Cheryl Wittenauer
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, Aug. 5, 2000; 9:46 a.m. EDT
The Rev. Bob Bossie spent a good part of his life in peace work –
protesting nuclear arms and U.S. military involvement in Central America
in the 1980s, and later the Persian Gulf War and sanctions in Iraq.
The Roman Catholic priest from Chicago had been part of a daring
international peace team that camped on the Iraq-Saudi Arabia border in
late 1990 in a symbolic attempt to prevent the Gulf War. He later
worked, again unsuccessfully, to end economic sanctions that the United
Nations imposed on Iraq on Aug. 6, 1990.
"But after a couple years, I hung up my hat, because most of what we did
seemed so ineffectual," he said. "There were a few stalwarts like Sister
Anne Montgomery and (former U.S. Attorney General) Ramsey Clark who
continued the call for us to do something."
In late 1995, a call came from Chuck Quilty, a 58-year-old former
chemical engineer from Rock Island, Ill., who quit his job at a weapons
plant 30 years earlier as an act of conscience.
He wanted Bossie and a handful of friends to find a way to end the
sanctions, a policy that was aimed at ousting Saddam Hussein but which
activists note has managed only to strangle Iraq's economy and kill an
untold number of its citizens.
"We decided we had to confront the sanctions by violating them," Quilty
said.
A meeting in peace activist Kathy Kelly's Chicago apartment was the
catalyst for the anti-sanctions group, Voices in the Wilderness –
"voices for children in a wilderness of compassion" – and the spur for
a movement to end the sanctions.
Today, the movement consists of dozens of groups assembling this weekend
in Washington for a National Mobilization to End the Sanctions Against
Iraq. Sponsors range from three of the nation's oldest peace groups –
Fellowship of Reconciliation, Pax Christi USA and the American Friends
Service Committee – to the American Muslim Council.
The anti-sanctions movement includes Gulf War veterans, and spans most
faiths and ages – from college students and 20-somethings to
gray-haired veterans of the 1960s antiwar movement.
They hold street rallies, prayer vigils and fasts, run letter-writing
campaigns and issue pleas for change. In recent months, opponents have
shown up at speeches by Vice President Al Gore, Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright and retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf to ask them
directly about the morality of the sanctions policy.
In January 1996, members of Voices in the Wilderness told the Justice
Department they were going to deliver a symbolic offering of medicines
to Iraq in defiance of the sanctions, and at the risk of $1 million in
fines and 12 years in jail for each violation.
Since that first trip, Voices has led more than 30 delegations of U.S.
citizens to Iraq to see the effects of the sanctions. Their tours
include visits to pediatric wards of dying children and inoperative
water treatment plants. Bad water has created an epidemic of dysentery
and infectious diseases, resulting in thousands of child deaths.
UNICEF says the number of infant and child deaths in Iraq has doubled in
the decade since the sanctions began.
Kelly, 47, calls the sanctions "the most urgent moral crisis of our
time."
"It's as though we're saying we're holding 7,000 of your children this
month unless you topple your leader, and if you don't believe us, look
at the statistics,' "she told a Kansas City, Mo., audience on a recent
Midwest speaking tour. "There's an incredible child sacrifice, and yet
this vital piece of information is not getting out."
Strict trade sanctions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait are
being kept in place, primarily by the United States and Britain, until
U.N. inspectors certify that Iraq is free of weapons of mass
destruction.
Iraq is allowed unlimited oil sales under a U. N.-approved program.
Proceeds, however, go to a U.N. fund to be used only to buy food,
medicine and other essential goods and modernize Iraq's oil facilities.
U.S. officials at the United Nations "don't foresee changing the
sanctions regime at any point in the near future," said Mary Ellen
Glynn, spokeswoman for U. N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. "It's within
(Saddam) Hussein's capacity to feed his people through the oil-for-food
program."
Not even the movement's most optimistic adherents believe the sanctions
will end soon, but there are a few cracks in the policy.
Critics include former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who now says Iraq
is essentially disarmed, and two former U.N. humanitarian coordinators,
Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck.
Last month, the Ann Arbor, Mich., city council passed a resolution
calling for sanctions to be lifted. Kelly and Halliday have been
nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
"This major disaster is happening because of political decisions in
London and Washington," said Doug Hostetter, international secretary of
Fellowship of Reconciliation, which plans soon to deliver water
chlorinators to Iraq with or without the U.S. government's blessing.
"We as American citizens have a major obligation to stop it. We are
moral citizens first. To those who blame Saddam, I say we're not
responsible for the things Saddam does. We are responsible if the
actions of our government keep Iraqi children from food and clean
water."

© Copyright 2000 The Associated Press