From: Kathy Kelly, Co-coordinator, Voices in the Wilderness
To: Senator Carl Levin, Chair, U. S. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on Iraqi Oil Allocations to Foreign Leaders

July 29, 2005

Dear Senator Levin,

Greetings from Geneva, Switzerland, where nine companions and I are on day 14 of a fifteen-day fast outside the U.N. We are urging the UNCC to let compassion for Iraqi civilians guide their deliberations today and tomorrow, during which they’ll determine how much of a 65 billion dollar outstanding debt Iraq should be required to pay for Saddam Hussein’s 1990-91 war against Kuwait.

While here, some of us are preparing for a July 6, 2005 hearing in a D.C. federal court. We are charged with violating U.S. economic sanctions against Iraq. Lawyers will present additional oral argument, requested by the judge, as to whether or not we should pay a $20,000 fine, imposed by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) for bringing medicines to Iraqi children and families.

On May 17, 2005, testifying before the U.S. Senate, you demonstrated that the U.S. OFAC failed to enforce U.S. sanctions against U.S. oil companies accused of violating the economic sanctions against Iraq during the years 2000 – 2002. Using Iraqi internal records, your staff tracked deals made with the Iraqi regime in which oil companies paid illegal surcharges for their transactions, allowing the Iraqi regime to pocket the surcharge “under the table,” beyond U.N. Security Council scrutiny. Your staff estimated that more than half of the money Iraq received in the form of surcharges was paid on oil sold to U.S. companies. Bayoil, headquartered in Houston, became the largest single buyer of Iraqi oil for the U.S. market, bringing in over 200 million barrels to the U.S.

By Kathy Kelly

In Baghdad, under economic sanctions, landing a job in a hotel offered at least a steady pittance of earnings. Some men made ends meet by working two eight hour shifts in different hotels. A dignified, well educated fellow would don a restaurant worker’s uniform in one hotel to serve tables all day and then quickly change into the uniform of a maintenance crew worker at the hotel across the street so that he could spend the next eight hours sweeping up cigarette butts.

But over time, in spite of the glaring disparities between their material well being and ours, durable friendships developed between members of Voices in the Wilderness delegations and the workers at hotels where we stayed. When, on rare occasions, we’d visit their homes, we’d leave wishing we could alleviate the harsh circumstances in which they lived. Especially during rainy, cold or extremely hot seasons, their homes were inadequate shelters. And they would never be able to save any money to get ahead working at the hotels.

Most of the men I knew no longer work at the hotels. Now that Baghdad is the most dangerous city in the world, random groups fire mortars, bombs, and other explosives at hotels. Some men were willing to risk staying on the job but were laid off by managers who, with few guests, couldn’t meet payrolls.

Cynthia Banas, Kathy Kelly, Leisa Faulkner, Rita Jankowsa-Bradley, Jeff Leys

by Kathy Kelly

“Where you stand determines what you see, and how you live.”

That’s how Voices in the Wilderness members began our statement explaining why we’d decided to stay in Baghdad during the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing of Iraq. During the long war of the economic sanctions, we had stood at the bedsides of numerous mothers who held dying infants and looked at us with imploring eyes, asking “Why?” We saw too much of the catastrophic military and economic violence inflicted on ordinary Iraqis to ever consider giving up on efforts to end UN/US economic sanctions. We had returned to our homes haunted by the gasps of children in hospital wards that served as little more than “death rows” for infants, and we had tried to alert people in the U.S. and the U.K., people with some level of control over their governments, about how those governments brutally and lethally punished Iraqi children for political actions they could not control.

Where you stand determines what you see. For the latter half of June, eight of us will do plenty of standing, again in opposition to economic punishment of ordinary Iraqis, with children bearing the hardest punishment. We’re fasting for fifteen days leading up to the June 28-30 UNCC deliberations over whether to saddle the poorest Iraqis with billions of dollars of Saddam Hussein’s debt.

Saad, at a tiny restaurant that serves kebabs and tea on a small side-street in Amman’s city center (photo: Cathy Breen)

by Kathy Kelly
February 25, 2005

Yesterday, sitting in a tiny restaurant that serves kebabs and tea on a small side-street in Amman’s city center, I was suddenly reminded of children playing “Migra!” in a Chicago Hispanic neighborhood. “Migra!” screams one child, and the others squeal and scatter. These children grew up watching “illegal” adults hide from U.S. immigration authorities.

Saad, who serves tea at the restaurant, had spotted a Jordanian police van passing the nearby intersection. The police vans frequently raid shops, restaurants and factories, in search of Iraqis who haven’t been granted temporary residence or who violate the labor laws by working for wages. In no time, my companion and I were alone in the restaurant. Across the way, a barber shop emptied. For about five minutes, the street was deserted, and then, just as suddenly, it came back to life. Observers on another street reported that the police van was already packed. Iraqi men returning to the restaurant chuckled; but the well-practiced routine is no laughing matter. If detained, Jordanian police might deport them to the Iraq side of the Iraq/Jordan border.

By Kathy Kelly

Members of the Nanum Center in South Korea invited me for a visit.

Immediately before, during and after the Shock and Awe campaign, 2003, several waves of South Korean peace activists and human rights activists joined with Iraq Peace Team members. We felt quite fortunate to learn from them and were heartened by their deep desire to prevent further suffering imposed on innocent people. I visited with the people who had joined with the Iraq Peace Team; lovely, eager people, most of them quite young, who want to find nonviolent alternatives to war. I was greatly impressed to know that many of them are aware of the School of the Americas Watch campaign.