By Kathy Kelly

It’s ironic that my most treasured Christmas moments have come in a largely Muslim country.

It is December 1998, and, after an intense and illegal bombing campaign at the very beginning of Ramadan, we have spent a week with children in Baghdad learning to sing “We Shall Overcome” in Arabic. The sweet voices of those children sustain me to this day.

It is December 1999, and in a particularly run-down area of Basra, a little boy pulls a milk crate by a frayed rope. Inside the crate, bundled in a muddied, ragged blanket, an obviously malnourished baby gazes calmly at me, undisturbed by the flies that surround him. This is a nativity under siege. That child’s innocent, suffering gaze, drives me to this day.

Goal posts have continuously been shifted. Initially, sanctions were imposed because Iraq had occupied Kuwait. When Iraq vacated Kuwait, it became an issue of disarmament. And then you had to deal with resolutions that were so intangible, so loosely defined - for examples, phrases like, "Iraq before sanctions can be lifted must have cooperated in all respects." What does "in all respects" mean? It’s very open to interpretation and therefore to prolongation of sanctions if you have in mind to keep your thumb on Iraq. And this is what we have seen. So the looseness of international sanctions law, plus poorly worded resolutions or to paraphrase the U.S. government, resolutions with "constructive ambiguity"–I’m sorry, ambiguity yes, constructive I’m not so sure–have facilitated this whole 11-year drama involving the Iraqi people. Read more…

By Ramzi Kysia

I lay in bed in the mornings listening to a wind that drowns the call to prayer and whips at my windows, “wake up, wake up, wake up.” But even awake I can’t shake the nightmare. Corpses piled high in the streets. This is Baghdad at the end of 2001 - soon to be the city of the Dead.

I was in New York City on September 11th, and the one source of hope I have today is in how generous the people of New York were after the terrible attacks of that day. I take comfort in the feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood that I overwhelmingly felt in the aftermath of that terror. And I take comfort in the cries for peace that I heard and saw as well. The messages scrawled on sheet after sheet at the peace shrine in Union Square read, “We don’t want a war,” “Give peace a chance,” and, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

By Ramzi Kysia

When I first visited Iraq in the summer of 1999, I wrote that nothing could have prepared me for my trip - for the incredible hospitality of the people, or for the incredible brutality of the sanctions. Since then, I’ve seen reports that sanctions against Iraq were crumbling, and I had hoped that the lives of the Iraqi people were much improved.
I was wrong.

Chronic unemployment, underemployment, and hyperinflation are still the rule, and most Iraqis are still struggling in terrible poverty. 11 years after the Gulf War, the electricity has not yet been fully restored, and much of the country’s infrastructure remains in disrepair. The hospitals here are just as crowded, and almost as poorly stocked, as I remember from 1999. The doctors complain just as much about not having enough medicines, or the proper medicines. And the children are still dying by the thousands every month.