Southland Muslims Seek to Ease U.S.-Led Embargo on Iraq

When Imam Moustafa Al-Qazwini celebrates the end of the Muslim holy season of Ramadan on Wednesday, he will redouble the prayers he has said every day for the last 10 years.

The Pomona cleric, the scion of a prominent religious family who left Iraq two decades ago, will ask God to bestow mercy on the Iraqi people suffering under the impact of American-led sanctions against the nation. As he does every Eid al-Fitr--the end of Ramadan, regarded as the season’s most spiritually powerful night--he will take up a collection for the Iraqi people.

Ten years after the United Nations Security Council imposed broad economic and military sanctions on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait, such efforts are being joined by members of other religious groups with petitions, protests and prayer meetings.

In San Pedro, two schoolgirls have started a postcard campaign urging an end to sanctions that has netted more than 100,000 signatures--including that of Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. Faith-based organizations are stepping up a national campaign of civil disobedience to ship supplies to Iraq without the required U.S. government permission; sanctions are crumbling as well among U.S. allies, who have begun challenging them with dozens of unauthorized flights into the nation.

“Iraq has been forgotten, but the agony of the people continues,” said Al-Qazwini, who raised $8,000 from his family and friends at his Costa Mesa mosque during the last Muslim holy season but is concerned this year that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has pushed the issue from the forefront of public attention.

Religious leaders are under no illusion that their grass-roots efforts will touch the hearts or change the minds of U.S. policymakers. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright vigorously defended the sanctions earlier this year, saying that lifting them would give Iraqi President Saddam Hussein the money to rebuild his weapons of mass destruction. She also said that the Iraqi people’s plight should be blamed on Hussein, not the sanctions, because his regime was not allowing full distribution of food and supplies approved for import under the U.N. sanctions program.

In remarks last week, Secretary of State-elect Colin Powell pledged to re-energize the sanctions. Nonetheless, faith leaders are vowing to escalate their efforts against them.

“We will intensify our opposition to this morally bankrupt policy,” said the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., emeritus pastor of Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, who visited Iraq in March. “I am simply shamed that my government is . . . making the innocent suffer. There must be a better way to demonstrate opposition to Saddam Hussein than killing children.”

Exactly how much the sanctions have contributed to disease, malnutrition and death in Iraq is disputed. In the last decade, experts agree, infant mortality and malnutrition rates have increased; electrical production and access to clean water have been significantly reduced. But there is no clear consensus on why or whose fault it is, according to sanctions expert David Cortright of the Fourth Freedom Forum research group in Indiana.

Opponents of sanctions frequently cite UNICEF reports that say the measures are contributing to the deaths of 4,000 children a month who are deprived of adequate nutrition and medicine.

Beyond the human toll, activists say, the pressures of war and sanctions are causing the disintegration of a 6,000-year-old civilization, the cradle of ancient Mesopotamia, fabled site of the Garden of Eden, home of Abraham and birthplace of everything from agriculture to legal codes.

In more modern times, experts say, Hussein’s harshly repressive regime nonetheless parlayed its oil revenues into a society with national health care, six-hour workdays, free and compulsory education, a bustling middle class and an active feminist movement.

Today, visitors to Iraq come back overwhelmed by the degree of misery, depression and death. They report scenes of begging children, widespread joblessness, and families hawking everything they can to survive--from treasured libraries to personal photo albums.

In an interfaith visit to Iraq this year, Los Angeles social studies teacher Linda Tubach says she was shocked by the number of children she saw in hospitals dying of such preventable maladies as diarrhea, and the desperate mothers who besieged her, asking her to “make it stop.”

At schools Tubach visited, 85 children were crammed into single classrooms with no books, desks or even pencils.

“It was heartbreaking,” said Tubach, whose interest in the Mideast was sparked in 1989, when she joined a teachers’ delegation to the Palestinian territories. “I’ve never seen anything like it, and I hope I never will.”

Faith leaders acknowledge that they walk a moral tightrope, trying to balance the need to contain a dangerous regime with outrage over measures they believe are devastating the innocent.

The issue has split the peace camp over whether all sanctions should be lifted or just economic ones. It is also forcing a deep rethinking about sanctions: Peace activists have traditionally embraced them as an alternative to war but now “are connecting with the fact that sanctions themselves can be an act of violence,” according to Sonia Tuma of the American Friends Service Committee in Pasadena.

“It’s a moral dilemma when you face a regime such as the one you have in Iraq, but it’s clear that sanctions as currently constructed are morally unacceptable,” said Gerard Powers of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The bishops have showered more attention on the Iraq sanctions than any other foreign policy issue, taking it up three years in a row at their annual conference, according to Powers. The National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, representing 60 million American Protestants, has actively engaged in advocacy against the sanctions and emergency relief to the needy there, including sending sheets for 27,000 hospital beds.

Heads of the Catholic and Protestant organizations were among 24 Christian leaders to sign a letter to President Clinton last year urging an end to economic sanctions--although many support continued political and military ones.

The movement is spreading beyond the faith community. Earlier this month, United Teachers-Los Angeles, the teachers union, passed a resolution condemning the sanctions as genocide. Before that, Local 535 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents Southland nurses and social workers, also called for an end to sanctions. In Congress, 70 members recently signed a resolution against sanctions.

Aiming to push the issue beyond petitions and prayers, the Quakers and another faith-based group, Fellowship of Reconciliation, have launched a “campaign of conscience” to dispatch four water purifiers to Iraq without the required U.S. permission. In the homes of many of the Southland’s tens of thousands of Iraqi Americans, people tick off the names of dead or ill loved ones, convinced they were, directly or indirectly, victims of the sanctions.

Radiya Al-Marayati, who immigrated to the United States in 1967 with her family, remembers her niece, beautiful Asmaah, who wrote poetry and aspired to become a teacher. She died of kidney failure in 1994 at the age of 17.

There was her brother, Kathum Jawad, a kind-hearted attorney who visited the sick and elderly as a hobby. He died of leukemia in 1994 at the age of 50. There was her father, Hajji Jawad, who died shortly thereafter of liver failure. Al-Marayati believes he actually died of a broken heart: The sanctions had forced him to close his family’s prosperous candy factory, sending their luxurious standard of living into a deep dive. He had begun to frequently weep over the death of his eldest son and his nation’s dark future, she said.

In Pomona, Moustafa Al-Qazwini has lost two more relatives in the last month to what he believes were premature deaths from diabetes and heart disease. “Every time we call, there is news of death,” he said.