Abu Gouda, 50, an ex-factory worker, now sells vegetables in al-Adhamiya market. (Dahr Jamail)

By Dahr Jamail

BAGHDAD, Nov 9 (IPS) - Violence is taking a heavy toll in Iraq, but everyday economic difficulties could be hurting people more.

Nearly 20 months into the occupation, Iraqis find themselves in a desperate situation, with countless struggling to survive.

U.S. President George W. Bush said at a speech at the U.S. Army War College May 24 this year that the United States wants “freedom and independence, security and prosperity for the Iraqi people.”

Prosperity now looks like 70 percent unemployment. A recent study found that if the food ration programme set up by Saddam Hussein’s regime during the U.S.-led sanctions was disbanded, more than 25 percent of Iraqis would starve to death.

Bush had also praised “a growing private economy” in Iraq after the former governing council approved a new law “that opens the country to foreign investment for the first time in decades.”

For an explanation of this vigil please read Lawton Peace Vigils For Camilo Mejia

We held a vigil in two separate places on Tuesday, returning in the morning to the entrance to the cemetery, and in the afternoon vigiling at a large Xmas display, on a grassy meridian where 100 colorful and cheerful “nutcracker” toy soldiers stood tall and erect in neat rows. We interspersed ourselves among them in the front row facing traffic, each of us holding a large, vinyl, color picture of one of our Iraqi friends — children, families, people we’ve visited their many times. Bob stood in the middle of our row with a sign reading “Free Camilo. Conscience is not a Crime.”

The local ABC television affiliate came to film and interview us. Kathy and Bert were quite compelling, saying that, like children here in the US, children in other lands also dream of happiness and security and have as much right to them. We support Camilo’s decision to refuse to be a continuing part of a war which (like all wars) inevitably maims, kills, and damages children, killing their futures in countless ways. “He’s our Prince of Peace,” Kathy said. The journalists were genuinely moved by Camilo’s story, and they hoped to air a 2-minute segment on prime-time TV this evening.

As the US military assault on Fallujah intensifies, we feel sure that American troops will have more and more reasons to feel genuinely conflicted about their participation in this war. Here in Lawton, Oklahoma, we consider the words of Camilo Mejia:

“I admit that in Iraq there was the fear of being killed, but there was also the fear of killing innocent people, the fear of putting myself in a position where to survive means to kill; there was the fear of losing my soul in the process of saving my body…I was afraid of waking up one morning to realize my humanity had abandoned me. I say without any pride that I did my job as a soldier. I commanded an infantry squad in combat and we never failed to accomplish our mission.”

During our vigil outside a cemetery, we had the opportunity to leaflet passengers in cars as they came to a stop at a traffic light. Many of the people who accepted our flyers were soldiers from nearby Ft. Sill, where Camilo is a prisoner. Farah remarked on “the almost pained look” on the faces of some of these soldiers when she asked them “Have you been to Iraq?” And we were all struck by their apparent interest in our vigil.

I’ll end with a poem, written today at the vigil

Letter To Camilo

Camilo,
in the armored, seven headed logic
of military justice,
you are pathological
infectious
a foreign cell in the bloodstream
a virulent disease to be isolated, surrounded, smothered.

We seek no chink in that armor.
Rather,
like scientists gone underground
and gathered in makeshift laboratories,
we seek the purest strain
of that virus
and every opportunity
to spread it,
hoping, in time,
to help infect the entire body

Read the Lawton Journal Day Two, and Day Three.