Mary Alice Davis
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, August 31, 2000
 

When you leave the land of the lucky and enter
geopolitical purgatory, a few props help bridge the
conversational gaps.

"I always take balloons," says Austin lawyer D'Ann
Johnson, explaining her reliable street strategy for
playfully connecting with children as a traveling
human-rights advocate.

On recent travels in ravaged Iraq, she took an extra
ice-breaker -- a sweetly evocative black-and-white
photo of herself and her 9-year-old daughter. Without
fail, the parents and children she met kissed the
photo. The gesture moved her, communicating without
words a universal benediction: "Blessed be this
child."

Iraq's children have not been blessed. International
aid agencies estimate that about 500,000 of them have
died from assorted horrors during a decade of economic
sanctions: starvation, ruined schools, lack of
medicine, undrinkable water, ruined sewers, land mine
explosions, birth defects. The toll runs around 5,000
children a month. At 22 million, the nation's
population is just ahead that of Texas.

Of the myriad wretchedness caused by the lingering
trade embargo, one thing in particular makes Johnson's
voice waiver as she describes it: No longer can Iraqis
obtain enough wood for coffins. She said an old man
wept as he described how the bodies must be placed
directly into the ground.

Also disheartening was evidence of the deteriorating
status of women in a nation in which they had once
marked progress. Girls are now infrequently educated,
she said. Mothers have sold their jewelry and
furniture to buy their children food. "After 10 years
of sanctions, they have nothing left to sell," she
said.

The trade embargo was imposed by the United Nations
and the United States in August 1990 after Iraq under
Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and began the Gulf War.
The sanctions were justified as a way to make Saddam's
military disarm. Their actual effect has been quite
different.

As the world marked the 10-year anniversary of the
sanctions, Johnson toured Iraq with a group that works
to end them, Voices in the Wilderness. For about a
week, she left her job as executive director of the
Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association and assumed
the role of reporter and representative of the
Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. The society
supports efforts in Congress to end the sanctions.

Also on the tour was her partner, the Austin-based
documentary photographer Alan Pogue. It was Pogue who
had taken the picture, titled Mother Love, that
Johnson used to introduce herself to people she met
while touring hospitals, women's sewing co-ops and
other sites.

At one hospital, she delivered to physicians a gift
from the Austin Quakers, a basic book on pediatric
medicine. She also peered into empty hospital supply
shelves and wept to see doomed infants with birth
defects or leukemia from weapons radiation.

Unemployment in Iraq is running above 50 percent, she
said, and estimates of per capita income have
plummeted by half or more. The United Nations says
deaths among children have doubled under the trade
embargo.

Before the embargo, Iraq imported about 70 percent of
its food. The United Nations "food for oil" program
that lets Iraq sell some oil in exchange for
life-giving goods is capriciously implemented and
meets only a fraction of the need, Johnson said.

Are the sanctions helping achieve U.S. foreign-policy
goals? Few think so. An unlikely alliance of
human-rights activists and export-conscious business
interests are attacking the sanctions as not only
cruel but politically pointless. Human-rights
advocates stress the cruelty, noting that more people
have died as a result of the sanctions in Iraq than
died in the atomic bomb destruction of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.

Business interests point to the loss of exports. The
sanctions cost the United States as much as $19
billion a year in lost exports, according to a study
by the Institute for International Economics. The same
study found that since 1970 economic sanctions have
achieved policy goals only about 13 percent of the
time.

A U.N. subcommittee on human rights this month
released a report also concluding that the sanctions
in Iraq have been ineffective. That report augments
mounting cries for change -- in Congress, in board
rooms, among international aid agencies and in the
news media.

Johnson adds one voice to the chorus, asking that the
children be remembered. And be blessed.

*

For information about the sanctions on Iraq, one good
place to start is the special report of the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer last year. "Life and Death in
Iraq," based on staff research in Iraq, is posted on
the Web at www.seattlep-i.com/iraq. Reprints also are
available from the Seattle newspaper.

Some data in this column was taken from the series.

Davis is an American-Statesman editorial writer.