by Dana Visalli
Christian Peacemaker Teams
dana@methow.com

The leading Shia cleric in Baghdad, Sayyid Ali Mussawi Al Waadh, said in a recent interview, “The Iraqi people have suffered enough.” And so they have. The air in Baghdad smells and tastes like burning tires. Much of landscape looks like it was set in place by a fleet of dump trucks. Sewage oozes out of cracks in the street while buildings crumble and electrical supply sputters and runs dry. The 200 billion dollars spent by the West to bomb and pummel Iraq during the two Gulf Wars hasn’t improved the lives of the Iraqi people one iota. Twelve years of sanctions not only ensured that Saddam Hussein would not buy new and improved weapons, but also that the garbage trucks wouldn’t run, drinking water wouldn’t be chlorinated, the sick wouldn’t get medicine and children wouldn’t get textbooks or even pencils (pencils were on the sanctions list until 1998 because the U.S. feared the graphite in them could be used for arms manufacture). In this context it is all the more remarkable, in the midst of this decay and disintegration, that individuals and organizations are rising Phoenix-like.

Alexander Christof was sitting pretty in Germany in 1995, an increasingly wealthy architect drawing plans for increasingly wealthy clients. But he was increasingly discontent with his life, gorged as it was on possessions, power and prestige but devoid of the satisfaction of serving the real needs of the human community. The emotional aridity of his life finally compelled him to make changes. He divested himself of his business, took stock of the skills he had to could respond in some way to the abiding needs of the human family, and together with his wife started Architects for People in Need, or APN. In 2001 APN came to Iraq, to try to offer to the Iraq people the basic amenities of life that their own government and the governments of the world had denied to them.

by Jo Wilding

Drums announced the coming of the parade, men and boys, the red, white and green of the Kurdish flag, with a many-pointed gold star in the middle, the placard featuring Mustafa Barzani, the murdered Kurdish leader. The Kurds have been stateless people in the empires of others more or less forever, ruled by the Ottomans, the British, the puppets of the British and, until 1991, the Baathists. Winston Churchill authorised the crushing of their demand for an independent state in Kurdistan in the 1920s with poison gas.

Today, with the signing of the interim constitution, there is a federal state of Iraqi Kurdistan. At last. At long, long last.

“Maybe they don’t understand us,” a voice behind me said. “I think perhaps they are Russian.”

Sinan and Selim are studying English at Salahudin University in Erbil. It’s a strange thing, but a lot of Kurdish people are unaware that the weapons they talk about, the weapons Saddam used against them, were sold to him by the UK, the US, Germany, France and so on, paid for with funding granted by the US in the full knowledge of what he was doing to the Kurds.