Published in Common Ground magazine, December 1998
Is She the Enemy?
By Patrick Mazza
Last fall, returning from a journey to deliver medicine to Iraq, Bert Sacks took a side trip to a place of special import for him as a Jew -- Auschwitz, the death camp in Poland where over one million Jews died during the holocaust.
That figure had an added significance to Sacks. It is comparable to the number of Iraqi children, elderly and sick who have died as a result of economic sanctions imposed since the end of the Gulf War. To Sacks, the sanctions imposed by the United Nations under pressure from the United States are an Auschwitz in progress -- With no chance of changing the Iraqi government, the sanctions are only inflicting death and misery on the people.
To make another comparison, the death rate among Iraqis is higher than that of Vietnamese during the war there. "We are doing Vietnam only our government has gotten more skillful and our people have become apathetic," Sacks says.
That is why he and others in his group risk severe penalties to bring medical supplies to Iraq and bring back news of the suffering in that country. They want us to know what is happening.
"As a Jew, I always heard, `Where were the good Christians? Where were the good Germans 55 years ago?'" Sacks says. "Well, I can't stand by and be a good American when my country is doing this."
Sacks has been visiting Iraq since 1996. His third visit took place in October. Shortly after he returned I sat down with him to talk about what he saw in Iraq and what he sees in our country -- not evil, but a pervasive confusion Sacks believes is at the root of our problems.
Mazza: Would you describe one incident or view which encapsulates the suffering you've seen over there?
Sacks: The delegation I was traveling with visited Basra, the southernmost city in Iraq, 70 kilometers away from what we call the highway of death (where U.S. planes caught Iraqis retreating from Kuwait. The planes fired depleted uranium ammunition, which penetrates and incinerates armoured vehicles. One U.S. pilot said, "It was a turkey shoot."). We were visiting in the maternity and gynecology hospital, meeting with a doctor. The doctor in our group had asked her to show us pictures of the birth defects. There's been a great increase in birth defects, childhood cancers and leukemia. (The 350 tons of depleted uranium shells fired in Iraq, much of which burned into microscopic particles and leaked into the environment, is strongly suspected.) This doctor spread out in front of her photographs of several dozen children who were born without a nose, without an eye, without an anus, with the legs not separate from each other, horrible things to look at. And I could imagine what it must be like for the delivering doctor to have to show a baby like this to the mother.
Then the doctor told us a story about a child who had leukemia. They did have chemotherapy to give the child. But the child died because at the age of one-and-a-half when a child should normally get measles vaccines there were no vaccines. The child died from measles. To use sanctions to deny adequate vaccinations and Tylenol and anesthetics, clean sheets for the hospitals, is a terrible thing to be doing. This doctor then looked up. She was a very professional woman. But in the stress of this conversation she began to cry. It certainly affected me very much. Then she looked up when she composed herself. And she said, "This is a crime. This is a crime which your country is doing."
Strangely I felt very empowered. This woman had given me such a clear, direct statement that I felt very moved and strengthened. In my desire to do something back I rushed to the car and got her an Arab translation of the purpose of our group in going to Iraq, which is to risk 12-year jail sentences and million-dollar fines to help bring attention to the great sufferings that sanctions are causing. They've caused half a million children's deaths in Iraq, and an equal number of deaths among elderly and sick people over an eight-year period that they have continued. This is a crime. The doctor is correct.
Mazza: Could you describe what you do when you go over there?
Sacks: Each time we go with four of five Americans. Some people from the U.K. have joined other groups. The organization we travel with is called Voices in the Wilderness. It's based in Chicago. People from all over the United States have traveled with it. We bring humanitarian aid. Last year we brought $40,000 worth. I did a calculation of how long it would last the 22 million people in Iraq, given the rate at which they purchased medicines before sanctions, $1 million a day. It would last 15 minutes. We are not a humanitarian organization primarily. We're an organization committed to a single purpose of trying non-violently to end these cruel, unjust U.S.-U.N. sanctions against the people of Iraq. And we do it simply by the acts of civil disobedience and coming back and speaking about the conditions we see to people here in this country.
Mazza: You could be charged at any time. Have you or any member of your group yet been charged?
Sacks: No. None of us have. And we now think it's unlikely, because we think the federal government is unwilling to confront the publicity of sentencing American citizens for the crime of bringing aspirins and antibiotics to save the lives of the 6,000 children who are dying every month in Iraq. These are deaths above and beyond what the rate was before sanctions among children under five.
Mazza: What is the origin of those statistics and how were they verified?
Sacks: UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund is one of the sources of these statistics. (Data from a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization study placed the overall death toll of sanctions to December 1995 at 567,000 children under the age of five.) This month, Denis Halliday, the assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, and the man responsible for the oil-for-food program in Iraq, said flat out, "Sanctions are starving to death 6,000 Iraqi infants every month. ... I no longer want to be part of that." (Quoted in the New York Times, he gave that as the reason for resigning from his U.N. post. "Higher Hopes in Bagdhad for Ending U.N. Embargo," New York Times, Oct. 18, 1998, p.4)
The most thorough scientific-medical study that I'm aware of was done in 1991, covering the first eight months after the end of the Gulf War. The report which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in September 1992 said that 47,000 children under the age of five had died in those eight months. That comes to roughly 6,000 children every month. So from multiple sources, this clearly comes to hundreds of thousands of children's lives. It may be argued whether the number is 400,000, or as the Chicago Tribune put in a front page story of March this year, 700,000. But beyond any reasonable doubt the number of children who have died is many times more than the number of soldiers who died, and more than all the people who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or also Bosnia.
Mazza: What are the specific connections? How does the operation of the sanctions kill people?
Sacks: We need to understand two basic facts that are not in dispute by anybody. First, before sanctions Iraq used its oil to purchase from abroad 70 percent of its food and 70 percent of its medicine. When sanctions were imposed their essentially single source of foreign revenue was cut away from them, which means that 70 percent of their food and medicine budget has been cut away. (That has been only partly relieved by the oil-for-food program.) The other fact that's essential to understand is when you hear the phrase bombed or destroyed infrastructure, you have to know that we bombed all 20 electrical generating plants in Iraq. In Bagdhad you'll see concrete water towers that were destroyed. In Basra we saw a metal one all crumpled by a bomb. A sewage plant outside of Basra far away from any other target was destroyed by our bombing. Those are not military targets.
The justification is given by Col. John Warden in the Washington Post and on PBS Frontline in 1991 -- By destroying the electrical infrastructure it gave us "long-term leverage" on the Iraqi government. Please stop and think what it would mean to be denied electricity for months and years. It means you don't have the ability to pump fresh water, to process sewage in a city of five million. Many of the diseases are caused not only by malnutrition and lack of medicines, but by the terribly unsanitary conditions. Bagdhad now has to pump its sewage raw into the Tigris River, which becomes the drinking water of Basra several hundred miles downstream.
Mazza: Let me step into the role of the devil's advocate, and it certainly seems an apt description. What about what the U.S. government says, that the sanctions must stay until it's verified that Iraq has given up all weapons of mass destruction?
Sacks: If this is the position of the U.S. government, I would say a kinder action would be to drop a small Hiroshima-size atomic bomb on Iraq every year. It would kill the people more quickly, more kindly. If the idea of killing 1,000 children every week by bombs is horrific to us, why do we think that starvation, measles, death by diabetes, cancer and leukemia is somehow acceptable? It is not. To make it more explicit, our willingness to deny the civilian population of a country food, medicine and safe drinking water, in order to coerce the government of that country, is a violation of international law. This is the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It's a violation of people's right to life and security. It's a violation of the most fundamental, humane requirements we must have with other people, especially to the children of the world. And it's turning an entire country, and an entire group of people against the West. The Arabs and the one billion Muslims in the world see this as an act of great cruelty.
Mazza: During the Vietnam War there was that famous saying, "We had to destroy the village to save it." Here it seems like what the U.S. is saying is, "We have to cause mass destruction to stop it."
Sacks: In the name of preventing weapons of mass destruction, we are employing a weapon of mass destruction, which is sanctions. And it has become a biological weapon of mass destruction, because of the unsanitary water that we've created and because of the lack of vaccines for basic childhood immunizations.
Mazza: Is there any prospect whatever that sanctions could change the government or government policy there?
Sacks: Even our own argument, that we made repeatedly, that the leader of Iraq does not care about his own people, is an argument against sanctions. It makes no sense to punish the people. The leader of the country is not hungry. We argued that we are doing this in order to have the people rise up and overthrow their leader. But by all accounts, sanctions have strengthened the hold of the ruling party. The people blame the United States, principally through its perversion of the United Nations with our veto power, which allows the U.S. to stand up against the rest of the world.
Mazza: What does this all say about our country? What's happening to our country when it seems we can cause at least one-sixth of what Germany did to the Jews with hardly a ripple? Are we just being Good Americans, "Good Germans"?
Sacks: That's had a profound effect on me since I'm Jewish. Every time I re-enter my own culture and experience this culture shock, I am able to see very clearly that I am living in a country where a great many people have learned not to care about what's right and what's wrong. I'm speaking of decent kind people who are perhaps vegetarians and are concerned for animals, who meditate and wish kindness for all the beings on the planet. And yet we've come to be such a confused country. This is my best understanding. It's very important, I believe – What's happening here is an expression of our confusion, not of evil. We have become so confused in the way we've learned to live our lives that we don't see what we are doing. The people I speak with in the media clearly are keeping this story very much from many Americans. They have responsibility, yet they are confused in what they do. My friends, when they first hear this, who turn away from doing anything, are confused, frightened. They feel apathetic. "What can I do?". But that contributes to their own feeling of powerlessness. My deepest wish is to free myself from this confusion so I can help the people in my own country to free themselves from this very mistaken way of living we're choosing for ourselves, of which Iraq is a prime example.
Mazza: It struck me that you said "learned not to care."
Sacks: It's in our nature to care. You can see it whenever you do something kind for somebody in that spontaneous, good way that's unpremeditated, not calculating. When you do something out of that goodness of your heart for someone else, it's doesn't matter if that person says thanks. You feel that natural bond with a human being. Can I quote Rumi? "Love has no calculating in it." When we act out of kindness, we're acting from our true nature. When we create an Iraq, we're acting out of confusion.
Unfortunately, many people in the peace and justice movement also act out of confusion. When they look out with clenched fists and anger in their voices, speak to the administration or the media with the quality of anger and violence, it spreads the anger and violence. It's our struggle as people who really want to work for peace to free ourselves from those afflictive emotions, so that we can first become peaceful ourselves to work for peace. Otherwise it won't work.
Mazza: What are people around the world saying? How do people look at this country?
Sacks: As guilty as the crazy regimes we're trying to control. We in our country have gotten so used to not caring about right and wrong that we are speaking with dishonesty. We have gotten used to hearing from our leaders the reason we needed to go to the Gulf War was our concern for democracy and human rights in Kuwait. Everyone was winking at each other -- Of course, we know that's not true. People around the world hear us saying things they recognize as not true, and view us as liars. They look on us as people who say they want to be policemen of the world, but we become policemen only when it serves our purpose. We help abet crimes, such as those of General Suharto and Indonesia in the invasion of East Timor. Far from saying a larger country may not take over a smaller one, we continued to supply F-15 fighters to Indonesia. And the rest of the world sees this more clearly than we do.
Mazza: We're kind of the new Roman Empire in a lot of ways.
Sacks: Yes.
Mazza: So what can we do?
Sacks: My advice is to pick one issue. It's impossible to take all of the issues on. One would indeed feel overwhelmed. But it is possible to pick one. Mine happens to be Iraq. If your issue happens to be toxic waste, or campaign reform, perhaps a parliamentary system in this country rather than the two-party, little-choice system, they're all so interrelated. Pick one issue and work on it. That will give you a feeling of powerfulness. It will also transform you. This is spiritual work if it's done properly. And it needs to be done properly. Otherwise, one just contributes to the mess.
The other day I met the man who's in charge of the East Timor Action Network. He thanked me for going to Iraq. I thanked him for his work on East Timor. That is so much support. It is a feeling of living in a society that we want to live in. Unless we work to create it it won't occur. And as we work to create it, we transform our world. We create that beloved community we want to see.
Mazza: What motivates you? What gives you the juice to do this?
Sacks: I have a passion for this. In truth, it's not something chosen intellectually. It began four years ago when I became aware that deaths of children in Iraq were still going on even though they weren't reported in the newspapers. At one level, what gives me the passion to do this is the immense level of injustice I feel we are perpetrating. It is such a teaching opportunity to show people how empty our arguments are, how they make no sense, how we are doing something out of such confusion.
At a deeper level, since I have been to Iraq three times, I have images of the people I know. I need to serve as their spokesperson. There is no one else for them here. The number of us that have gone now have to fulfill this very important function.
And finally, I do this for my own sake. This activity is my own yoga. It's helping to free me from the constricting and wrong mental habits that I learned growing up in this country. I lived most of my life in this country. Like many other people, I believe I suffer from reactions to the violence and dishonesty that we have come to accept. And I wish to change it, because I think that there are many positive aspects of our country too that need to be redeemed from the confusion that we live in.
For more information about local efforts to end sanctions, call (206) 789-5565. For information about the national Voices in the Wilderness campaign, call (773) 784-8065. Visit www.nonviolence.org/iraq on the Internet for more information about these and other groups working for peace and justice in Iraq.