A modern-day massacre of the innocents.

Last Christmas, when many Americans were celebrating both the holiday and the end of the U.S.'s bombing of Iraq, a delegation from Voice in the Wilderness (VITW)--its 19th--was in Iraq delivering relief supplies, violating U.N.-imposed and U.S.-supported sanctions.

Rejecting arguments in support of the sanctions, VITW--an international group devoted to nonviolence as a means of social change--believes them to be as much a weapon of mass destruction as those chemical, biological, and nuclear ones over which the conflict with Iraq wages.

Since the imposition of sanctions, the Iraqi economy, social order, and infrastructure, especially its public-health system, are at the point of collapse. Medical supplies are hard to come by and hospitals are in disarray. Most urban water-treatment facilities do not function, and only 50 percent of rural residents have access to potable water. Worst of all is the effect on children.

According to United Nations sources, 576,000 Iraqi children have died since 1990, and 6,000 are dying monthly. One third of Iraqi children are malnourished, and 1.5 million are expected to suffer from malnutrition and unchecked illness. In effect, the numbers point to a decimation and crippling of a generation of Iraqis.

While VITW acknowledges its donations are only a drop in the bucket, they hope their trips--for which the U.S. Treasury Department has threatened a $163,000 fine for violating the sanctions--will help motivate people to get the U.S. government to end the sanctions, which Pope John Paul II has called "pitiless. ... The weak and innocent cannot pay for mistakes for which they are not responsible."

In a parish talk, theologian, activist, and VITW member Jim Douglass challenged U.S. Christians to oppose sanctions and see the face of Christ in the suffering Iraqi people, who, regardless of whether they support the regime, are caught in the middle. "Iraq," Douglass said, "is the body of Christ.... Are the Iraqi people then the `least of these' whose treatment is the standard by which we as a nation shall be judged?"

The VITW Web site's address is www. nonviolence.org/vitw.