Seeing for themselves

By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

The dozen Dominicans who visited Iraq this month found it to be “stunningly beautiful.”

But they also saw the stunningly cruel results of the Gulf War and ongoing U.S.-supported sanctions.

Before they went, the 10 sisters, one priest and one lay associate had read the UNICEF reports saying that upwards of 6,000 children a month die from preventable diseases and from malnutrition, directly related to sanctions. They had heard about huge increases in the rate of childhood cancers, especially leukemia and lymphomas. They had seen pictures of mothers holding their dying children.

Then they saw for themselves.

Dominican Father Richard Woods recalled an infant with a tumor the size of a large orange in his mouth.

“This little boy will die,” said the priest, moments after ariving at O’Hare from the March 5-19 trip. “He’s nine months old. But there’s nothing they can do.”

The pediatric hospital in Basra, in southern Iraq, is crowded with similar cases, he said.

Medical officials in Iraq blame the growing rate of cancers on radiation poisoning from the use of depleted uranium weapons against Iraqi tanks during the Gulf War. But the battlefields cannot be cleaned, because sanctions make it impossible to get the needed equipment. The children with cancer cannot be treated with radiation or chemotherapy, because the hospitals cannot get the drugs, said Woods, a visiting professor at Dominican University in River Forest.

“You see the mothers sitting there with these children, and you know they are most likely going to die,” Woods said, calling it a “massacre of the innocents,” perpetuated by the mistakes of both the U.S. and Iraqi governments.

	Dominican Sister Roberta Popara prepares to travel to Iraq. Catholic New World / Sandy Bertog

Other children have been born with a variety of birth defects, the likes of which doctors in Iraq had never seen. Some are born without eyes, without noses, without limbs. Some defects are reported to be similar to the defects seen in American children born to Gulf War veterans.

Other kinds of birth defects also have increased, including spina bifada—perhaps because it has become difficult for pregnant women to get folic acid, said Dominican Sister Rene Weeks of La Jara, Colo.

“Some of the things we take for granted are things they really miss,” she said.

The group was the third Dominican “Voices for Veritas” delegation to travel to Iraq since 1999. Their purpose was twofold: to raise awareness in the United States about the devastation the sanctions have visited on ordinary people, and to offer love and support to the Iraqis, especially the Dominicans working in schools, hospitals and parishes there.

The journeys violate the U.S. travel ban to Iraq, putting everyone who goes at risk for fines and jail time, but so far no one who has gone has been arrested.

Sister Roberta Popara, a doctoral candidate at Chicago Theological Union, said she thinks the Dominican groups traveling can help make Americans aware of the situation because they have no political agenda.

“We go out of a faith-based reason,” Popara said. “Maybe we can move people’s hearts and stir the moral consciousness of people, help them see that the other person has a right to self-determination and basic human rights.”

Given the regime in Iraq, she acknowledged, the people likely would not enjoy all such rights even without the sanctions.

“The current government doesn’t provide a full measure of rights,” she said. “But the sanctions aren’t working. They are hurting the people, not the government.”

Because the travelers had spoken with members of the previous two groups, they knew for the most part what to expect.

But the contrast between the beauty of the country and the warmth of its people, and the suffering caused by the aftermath of the Gulf War and the eight-year Iran-Iraq war before that brought many of the travelers up short.

The group visited Baghdad, Basra in the south, and Mosul in the north. They found startling contrasts: Michael Jackson music videos played on television while babies were dying from diarrhea caused by contaminated water—a result of the destruction of water filtration plants in bombing raids.

“Some of these visits were exhausting,” Woods said. “The people were very warm, very hospitable. They would offer us tea or whatever they had. But the suffering was extreme, especially in the south.”

Conditions generally seemed better in Mosul than further south, which took the brunt of the Gulf War and of bombings since then, Woods said.

It was while sightseeing there that Popara and Sister Beth Murphy of Springfield had one of the defining experiences of the trip for them. The sisters visited the Mosque of Nebi-Yunis, believed by some to be the burial site of the prophet Jonah in the ancient city of Nineveh.

A woman there asked where they were from. When they said they were from the United States, “she held out her hand and said ‘Welcome. Your country is my country,’” Murphy said. “The irony of it—what our country has done to her country—put a knife through my heart.”

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