Betwewen Iraq and a Hard Place
Shaykhs and Ideologues
Letter from Kuwait
What About the Incubators?
It feels oddly like being at a wake in a funeral home. Our Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation members speak very quietly with one another as we wait for a hospital official to brief us about conditions at the al-Mansour Children's wing of the Saddam City Medical Center. Dr. Mekki, the director, is away, so a hospital official went in search of a senior doctor to speak with us. I open my diary and it dawns on me that at this time four years ago, in March 1996, our first Voices in the Wilderness delegation visited Iraq.
Americans Against the Sanctions
As US policy supporting the continuation of sanctions on Iraq becomes ever more isolated abroad, domestic criticism of sanctions also mounts. Opponents of sanctions gained new visibility in February 1998 at Ohio State University, when pointed questions from the audience disrupted the Clinton administration's carefully staged "town meeting." (See Sam Husseini's "Short-Circuiting the Media/Policy Machine," Middle East Report 208, Fall 1998.) Activists now speak of an anti-sanctions movement drawn primarily from faith-based and peace groups.
Elusive Justice
Saddam Hussein's regime has long been one of the world's worst human rights violators. But the international community largely ignored Iraq's record of human rights abuse — brutal repression of internal dissent, atrocities during the eight-year war with Iran — until after Hussein crossed the red line by sending his forces into Kuwait. Even since 1990, evidence of human rights violations has been marshaled solely to score political points or justify military action, and not to hold a vicious regime accountable for its crimes.
A Shaky De Facto Kurdistan
Surrounded by four states that do not wish it well, officially embargoed, still divided by internal conflicts, Iraqi Kurdistan hasn't had it this good for years. Paradoxically, Kurds in northern Iraq are hoping everything stays exactly the way it is.
"If the government comes back we lose everything," says 35-year old farmer Chasim Abdullah Azi. Azi leans his wooden-stock Kalashnikov in the corner of his hut, taking off his shoes for tea. He needs the gun to protect the sheep, he says. "My kids are small so they don't know."
The Politics of Consensus in the Gulf
The Public Health Impact of Sanctions
Throughout the 1990s, social conditions in Iraq have deteriorated to levels last experienced three and four decades ago. This decline is associated with a dramatic reduction of the gross national product from around $3,500 to under $700 per capita, but changes in the GNP do not tell the entire story. [1] While Iraq's social indicators, including child mortality, today are certainly not the lowest in the world, the extent and rate of decline there is unprecedented in the modern world.
Depleted Uranium Haunts Kosovo and Iraq
Iraq and Kosovo may be thousands of miles apart, but they share the dubious distinction of contamination with radioactive residue from depleted uranium (DU) bullets used in American air strikes. After several years of silence, US officials finally admitted that 340 tons of DU were fired during the Gulf war. In Kosovo, American delays in providing details of quantities and target points have frustrated international efforts to assess health risks.
Daghara Dispatch
In 1996, five years after the Gulf war, my anthropologist husband Robert Fernea and I returned to Daghara, a predominantly Shi'i Muslim provincial town on a tributary of the Euphrates in south central Iraq. We had lived there for two years before the Iraqi revolution of 1958 against British colonial rule.
Sanctioning Iraq
“And They Called It Peace”
Stifling Democracy Within Palestinian Unions
In well-furbished offices overlooking downtown Nablus, Shahir Sa'd, General Secretary of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) sells his vision of the post-Oslo labor movement. "With the return of the Palestinian Authority (PA) we could concentrate on workers' issues, rather than struggling with national ones and we could merge the unions under one banner, and we have done that, consolidating 187 unions into 12."
From the Editor (Summer 2000)
In the spring of 1995, a special issue of Middle East Report offered a damning assessment of US and Allied policy toward Iraq since the Gulf war: Economic sanctions imposed to topple the Iraqi government were punishing the Iraqi people instead. Over five years later, little and much has changed. UNICEF studies have established beyond any doubt that US-led economic sanctions are wrecking Iraq's public health, education system and infrastructure. Hospitals beg for blood bags and basic sanitation supplies. Schools starve for paper and pencils, let alone computers.
Lebanon: An Occupation Ends
“They Dignified Our University”
Lebanon’s Most Dangerous Summer
Destroying Houses and Lives
Editor’s Picks (Spring 2000)
Abdella Doumato, Eleanor. Getting God's Ear: Women, Islam and Healing in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
Adelkhah, Fariba. Being Modern in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
Alcalay, Ammiel. Memories of Our Future (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1999).
Amery, Hussein A. and Aaron T. Wolf. Water in the Middle East: A Geography of Peace (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).
