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Change Your Life! |
The hung up hat on the head again |
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August 6, 2000
UNDATED, AP - 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, Illinois, 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 strangled Iraq's economy and - by leaving a lack of food, medicine and clean water - killed 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 United States' 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 anti-war 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 Madeline 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 U.S. Justice Department they were going to deliver a symbolic offering of medicines to Iraq in defiance of the sanctions, and at the risk of dlrs 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 an audience in Kansas City, Missouri, on a recent 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. 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." |
