COLLATERAL DAMAGE.

Iraq under the sanctions

Although neither is listed among the official Gulf War casualties, Iqbal Fartous and Candy Lovett are both war victims, two women who have suffered immensely as a result of the United States' decision to wage war against Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people. Fartous, who lives in Basrah, survived the official war in 1992, only to lose her young son, Hider, in 1998 when the U.S. resumed bombing as part of Operation Desert Fox. Lovett, a Gulf War vet, lives with a variety of physical and emotional scars from her tour of duty, which included days of body-burying detail along a stretch of an Iraqi road nicknamed "Death Highway."

This year, the two women met, and in a moment of powerful forgiveness, each experienced some healing. For Lovett, it was nothing short of a miracle.

Like many vets afflicted with Gulf War Syndrome, Lovett suffers from a variety of ailments, including arthritis, congestive heart failure, seizure disorder, and thyroid troubles. She can only walk with the help of arm crutches. In fact, her pain had become so unbearable that at one point she was devouring books by Dr. Jack Kevorkian and plotting her own suicide.

But worse than her physical pain was the emotional trauma of having participated in what she now believes was an unjust war and learning the truth about the devastating impact of the economic sanctions and continued bombing against the Iraqi people. A few years ago, Lovett decided that she needed to make amends. "I thought if I could just go back to Iraq and ask one person to forgive me for what our country has done and continues to do, it would be worth it and would ease my conscience," she says.

She got the chance to do just that as part of a delegation sponsored by Veterans for Peace last August. During a tour of bombed-out houses near Basrah, Lovett met Fartous and asked her for forgiveness. The Iraqi mother knelt down and told the former army private, "You are a war victim also. It's not your fault, but you are forgiven."

Fartous' son died from multiple shrapnel wounds, but thousands of Iraqi children are dying from treatable illnesses such as pneumonia, diarrhea, and other water-born illnesses, according to Unicef reports. In the southeastern Abul Khaseeb Valley, nearly 80,000 people have been without clean water because the area's four water treatment facilities were destroyed during bombing and have remained inoperable because of the sanctions. Now, one of those treatment facilities has been repaired, thanks to the Iraq Water Project sponsored by Veterans for Peace, an organization of vets that sees itself as a watchdog for the American military.

"We raised money and then paid Iraqi contractors to fix the treatment facility," explains Michael Carley, director of the water project, who brought a group to Iraq to work on the project. "But a secondary goal is to use the project as a means to educate the public in the United States about the devastating effect of sanctions in Iraq. Sanctions are nothing more than a war against civilian people. We can't stand by and have this genocide enacted in our name."

T he vets aren't the only Americans working to end the sanctions in Iraq. Kathy Kelly, founder of Voices in the Wilderness, is practically a one-woman campaign to educate the American public about the suffering the Iraqi people continue to experience. "Iraq used to be a sophisticated society where the greatest childhood medical problem was obesity," says Kelly. "Now all of a sudden they're back to almost a pre-industrial age where they can't even make phone calls."

The war and continued bombing ("People don't realize we're bombing them every four days," says Kelly) account for only a small percentage of the more than a million dead--half of whom are children. The majority of the Iraqis who have died are victims of the economic sanctions that prohibit the importation of food, medicine, and other necessities. The "oil for food" deal brokered by the United Nations has only marginally improved conditions, according to Kelly.

"There are still wards full of dying children, only now they're a little more comfortable on the road to death," she says. "People are still earning pitifully small salaries of meaningless money to support many more people in their households who are unemployed."

In defiance of international law, Voices in the Wilderness sends delegations of Americans to Iraq with food, medicines, and other supplies. Kelly has accompanied delegations with nuns, bishops, Nobel Peace Prize winners, and congressional aides. "We're not only resisting unjust and punitive laws, but we're also trying to educate people about this. The war has not ended. It's just changed into an economic war that affects the most vulnerable."

For many Iraqis, the only way to avoid the suffering is to literally get out of the country, and those who can leave, do. They tend to be the best-educated, causing a "brain drain" of doctors, teachers, and engineers, which only compounds the country's other problems. Because many highly educated Iraqis are Catholic, the Chaldean Catholic community in Iraq has shrunk considerably; estimates say that one quarter of the nation's 1 million Catholics have emigrated in the past decade.

Church leaders have been busy with relief efforts, but are also working hard to keep the Iraqi Catholic community viable. Archbishop Djibrael Kassab has spearheaded many relief efforts, traveling to the United States to raise money and working with the Red Crescent to distribute food, clothing, and medicine.

"He really urges people to have hope," says Kelly, who met the archbishop back when he was Father Kassab. "He wants to keep the community together so they can support and be of service to each other."

ALAN POGUE is a photographer living in Austin, Texas. HEIDI SCHLUMPF is assistant editor of U.S. CATHOLIC.