Southland Muslims Seek to Ease US Led Embargo on Iraq
by Teresa Watanabe, Times Religion Writer
Los Angeles Times, 25th December, 2000

When Imam Moustafa Al-Qazwini celebrates the end of the Muslim holy
season
of Ramadan on Wednesday, he will redouble the prayers he has said every
day
for the last 10 years.

The Pomona cleric, the scion of a prominent religious family who left
Iraq
two decades ago, will ask God to bestow mercy on the Iraqi people
suffering
under the impact of American led sanctions against the nation. As he
does
every Eid al-Fitr--the end of Ramadan, regarded as the season's most
spiritually powerful night--he will take up a collection for the Iraqi
people.

Ten years after the United Nations Security Council imposed broad
economic
and military sanctions on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait, such
efforts
are being joined by members of other religious groups with petitions,
protests and prayer meetings.

In San Pedro, two schoolgirls have started a postcard campaign urging
an end
to sanctions that has netted more than 100,000 signatures--including
that of
Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. Faith-based organizations are
stepping up a national campaign of civil disobedience to ship supplies
to
Iraq without the required U.S. government permission; sanctions are
crumbling as well among U.S. allies, who have begun challenging them
with
dozens of unauthorized flights into the nation.

"Iraq has been forgotten, but the agony of the people continues," said
Al-Qazwini, who raised $8,000 from his family and friends at his Costa
Mesa
mosque during the last Muslim holy season but is concerned this year
that
the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has pushed the issue from the
forefront of
public attention.

Religious leaders are under no illusion that their grass-roots efforts
will
touch the hearts or change the minds of U.S. policymakers. Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright vigorously defended the sanctions earlier this
year, saying that lifting them would give Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein the
money to rebuild his weapons of mass destruction. She also said that
the
Iraqi people's plight should be blamed on Hussein, not the sanctions,
because his regime was not allowing full distribution of food and
supplies
approved for import under the U.N. sanctions program.

In remarks last week, Secretary of State-elect Colin Powell pledged to
re-energize the sanctions. Nonetheless, faith leaders are vowing to
escalate
their efforts against them.

"We will intensify our opposition to this morally bankrupt policy,"
said the
Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., emeritus pastor of Holman United Methodist
Church
in Los Angeles, who visited Iraq in March. "I am simply shamed that my
government is . . . making the innocent suffer. There must be a better
way
to demonstrate opposition to Saddam Hussein than killing children."

Exactly how much the sanctions have contributed to disease,
malnutrition and
death in Iraq is disputed. In the last decade, experts agree, infant
mortality and malnutrition rates have increased; electrical production
and
access to clean water have been significantly reduced. But there is no
clear
consensus on why or whose fault it is, according to sanctions expert
David
Cortright of the Fourth Freedom Forum research group in Indiana.

Opponents of sanctions frequently cite UNICEF reports that say the
measures
are contributing to the deaths of 4,000 children a month who are
deprived of
adequate nutrition and medicine.

Beyond the human toll, activists say, the pressures of war and
sanctions are
causing the disintegration of a 6,000-year-old civilization, the cradle
of
ancient Mesopotamia, fabled site of the Garden of Eden, home of Abraham
and
birthplace of everything from agriculture to legal codes.

In more modern times, experts say, Hussein's harshly repressive regime
nonetheless parlayed its oil revenues into a society with national
health
care, six-hour workdays, free and compulsory education, a bustling
middle
class and an active feminist movement.

Today, visitors to Iraq come back overwhelmed by the degree of misery,
depression and death. They report scenes of begging children,
widespread
joblessness, and families hawking everything they can to survive--from
treasured libraries to personal photo albums.

In an interfaith visit to Iraq this year, Los Angeles social studies
teacher
Linda Tubach says she was shocked by the number of children she saw in
hospitals dying of such preventable maladies as diarrhea, and the
desperate
mothers who besieged her, asking her to "make it stop."

At schools Tubach visited, 85 children were crammed into single
classrooms
with no books, desks or even pencils.

"It was heartbreaking," said Tubach, whose interest in the Mideast was
sparked in 1989, when she joined a teachers' delegation to the
Palestinian
territories. "I've never seen anything like it, and I hope I never
will."

Faith leaders acknowledge that they walk a moral tightrope, trying to
balance the need to contain a dangerous regime with outrage over
measures
they believe are devastating the innocent.

The issue has split the peace camp over whether all sanctions should be
lifted or just economic ones. It is also forcing a deep rethinking
about
sanctions: Peace activists have traditionally embraced them as an
alternative to war but now "are connecting with the fact that sanctions
themselves can be an act of violence," according to Sonia Tuma of the
American Friends Service Committee in Pasadena.

"It's a moral dilemma when you face a regime such as the one you have
in
Iraq, but it's clear that sanctions as currently constructed are
morally
unacceptable," said Gerard Powers of the National Conference of
Catholic
Bishops.

The bishops have showered more attention on the Iraq sanctions than any
other foreign policy issue, taking it up three years in a row at their
annual conference, according to Powers. The National Council of
Churches of
Christ in the USA, representing 60 million American Protestants, has
actively engaged in advocacy against the sanctions and emergency relief
to
the needy there, including sending sheets for 27,000 hospital beds.

Heads of the Catholic and Protestant organizations were among 24
Christian
leaders to sign a letter to President Clinton last year urging an end
to
economic sanctions--although many support continued political and
military
ones.

The movement is spreading beyond the faith community. Earlier this
month,
United Teachers-Los Angeles, the teachers union, passed a resolution
condemning the sanctions as genocide. Before that, Local 535 of the
Service
Employees International Union, which represents Southland nurses and
social
workers, also called for an end to sanctions. In Congress, 70 members
recently signed a resolution against sanctions.

Aiming to push the issue beyond petitions and prayers, the Quakers and
another faith based group, Fellowship of Reconciliation, have launched
a
"campaign of conscience" to dispatch four water purifiers to Iraq
without
the required U.S. permission. In the homes of many of the Southland's
tens
of thousands of Iraqi Americans, people tick off the names of dead or
ill
loved ones, convinced they were, directly or indirectly, victims of the
sanctions.

Radiya Al-Marayati, who immigrated to the United States in 1967 with
her
family, remembers her niece, beautiful Asmaah, who wrote poetry and
aspired
to become a teacher. She died of kidney failure in 1994 at the age of
17.

There was her brother, Kathum Jawad, a kind-hearted attorney who
visited the
sick and elderly as a hobby. He died of leukemia in 1994 at the age of
50.
There was her father, Hajji Jawad, who died shortly thereafter of liver
failure. Al-Marayati believes he actually died of a broken heart: The
sanctions had forced him to close his family's prosperous candy
factory,
sending their luxurious standard of living into a deep dive. He had
begun to
frequently weep over the death of his eldest son and his nation's dark
future, she said.

In Pomona, Moustafa Al-Qazwini has lost two more relatives in the last
month
to what he believes were premature deaths from diabetes and heart
disease.
"Every time we call, there is news of death," he said.