by KEN HECHTMAN

Let’s dispose of the human shields story once and for all. “There is a human shields project, okay?” explains Mary Foster, an Iraq Peace Team volunteer for Voices in the Wilderness. “It’s even called ‘We, the People,’ it’s run out of Europe by an American Gulf War I vet and they’re sending 500 people to Iraq. We’re not them. We’ll be observing, talking to people and reporting back.”

In the old days, people like that were called journalists. Foster and her fellow peace correspondents Lisa Ndejuru and Mick Panesar plan to e-mail daily dispatches, available on www.nowar-paix.ca. They can also be heard on CKUT and CBC-Montreal’s New Voices.

In addition to reporting, the three, who left for Iraq last Sunday, will be delivering relief supplies, though only in symbolic quantities. “The Halifax-based Teachers for Peace gave us supplies for 40 classrooms,” Foster says. “We can’t carry that.” Other relief goods include aspirin and vitamins. They plan to buy prescription drugs on the Iraqi black market - cheaper than here, but still too expensive for most Iraqis. She also mentions a small water filter. “That’s exactly why I’m bringing it,” she says, not waiting for the question. “To give you the excuse to talk about water.”

Fair enough. In 1991 the Americans deliberately targeted sewage treatment and water purification plants. Since then, they’ve embargoed chlorine as a dual-use good, necessary for both nerve gas and safe drinking water. According to UNICEF, 70 per cent of the 500,000 deaths of children under five attributed to sanctions are from dysentery caused by bad water and sanitation.

The Peace Team has picked up endorsements from a number of unions on the condition that they meet with their backers’ Iraqi counterparts. One meeting will be with the Iraqi postal workers. “Dave Blakeney, the national rep of Canadian Union of Postal Workers came up with the idea, and I said, ‘Fuck, yeah!’” says Foster. “It breaks the stereotype that all Iraqis are soldiers and nuclear scientists. Like Dave says, ‘What could possibly be more non-threatening than a mailman?’”

Health-care crisis

Meanwhile, Peace Team volunteer and member of relief group Médecins du monde Dr. Amir Khadir returned from Iraq in December and is preparing a report on the Iraqi health-care system’s emergency preparedness in case of war. “They’re on the verge of collapse. They’re not even prepared for the emergency they have now,” says Khadir.

According to Khadir, the government’s health budget is five per cent of what it was before the war, nursing staff is 20 per cent and post-operative care is non-existent.

It didn’t help when the Americans recently added a number of antibiotics and vaccines to the list of banned items. “It was shocking that they said, ‘We have to stop them from protecting their people against anthrax [by importing the antibiotic ciprofloxacin],’” says Khadir. The move also stops the Iraqis from protecting their people against typhoid, salmonella, e. coli and hospital infections: some of the more mundane uses for ciprofloxacin.

In addition to Baghdad, Khadir also visited Mosul in the north and Basra in the south, known as the DU [depleted uranium] corridor left over from Desert Storm. “In Basra, rare cancers that a doctor might have seen twice in a lifetime before the war are appearing monthly,” he says. “Birth defects that you expect to see once in 2.5-million births are appearing by the hundreds. There’s a room in the Al Khansa Pediatric hospital with wall-to-wall photographs, with the babies’ names and dates of birth.”

“Birth defects” is much too sterile and clinical a term to convey the horror that these things emerged, alive in some cases, from the body of a human being. There’s a photoset available at www.web-light.nl/VISIE/extremedeformities.html, but it’s not for the weak of stomach.

Khadir also sounded out his government contacts, always a touchy thing to do in a dictatorship where everyone’s watched. A Republican Guard officer told him they’d fight to the last man. “The army and the civil administration will survive regime change,” says Khadir. “The Guard won’t, and they know it.” A Foreign Ministry official assured him that war would be avoided because the leadership was prepared to make all necessary compromises. “But the necessary compromise is the leadership itself,” Khadir pressed him. “He said, ‘We know that. We understand the gravity of the situation now, the way we didn’t in 1990.’” :