Digital Extras

11.6.2001

Search for the truth reveals another reality

BY RANDALL RICHARD
JOURNAL STAFF WRITER

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- An Iraqi television crew grew increasingly agitated as the scene in the crowded lobby of the Al-Rashid Hotel degenerated into a shouting match.

On one side was Iraq's former ambassador to France.

On the other was a man from Syracuse, N.Y., who had come to Baghdad earlier this year with 21 other peace activists to protest economic sanctions against Iraq.

For the television crew -- usually at the mercy of only carefully scripted, government-sanctioned events -- it was a first, and a extraordinary opportunity.

Ostensibly, the crew was there to document the "historic visit" by the activists -- a visit it had been celebrating all week on the nightly news.

Not only had these "distinguished guests" come to Baghdad to protest 10 years of economic sanctions against Iraq, the activisits -- all but one Americans -- did so at the risk of going to jail for defying the U.S. ban on travel to Iraq.

The Iraqi TV crews had been assigned to shadow the Conscience International delegation from Baghdad to Basra during its 10-day visit, and duly record each new sound bite for their viewers.

But now, while covering what -- for this story, at least -- was probably the best sound bite of all, the crew was paralyzed.

The two cameramen, their aging Beta equipment shouldered, aimed and at the ready -- but without the telltale blinking red lights -- searched for an authoritative face in the lobby, apparently for some clue about what to do next.

Dr. Hashami Al Hashami was clearly unable to provide one.

The former ambassador's usually serene countenance, undiplomatically purple with rage and frustration, was too contorted for the cameramen to decipher. Desperate, they turned to a burly soundman for journalistic guidance.

It was only after the soundman shrugged and timidly lifted his boom mike that they finally began filming.

Not surprisingly, the footage never aired on any of Iraq's government-controlled television channels.

Instead, Iraqi viewers were treated to a steady diet of quotes from their Conscience International guests, all designed to assure them that support for the U.S.-led economic embargo was evaporating, not only among Iraq's Arab neighbors and within the European community, but in America as well.

The man who had precipitated this awkward moment of journalistic hesitation was Richard Keough, a man equally at home -- even in Baghdad -- taking on U.S. policy or one of Saddam Hussein's followers.

Whether leaving the priesthood to get married or pouring blood on an Air National Guard runway to protest the Guard's enforcement of "no-fly" zones over Iraq, Keough has never been shy about taking on the establishment.

So it did not surprise any of his friends when he stubbornly refused to yield to his Iraqi hosts, even as Hashami and his underlings made it all too clear they were giving him the runaround.

To Keough's mind, his mission was perfectly reasonable.

He wanted to visit a village near the Iranian border where he believed a bomb was dropped by a pilot from the Syracuse Air National Guard as part of the force patrolling the no-fly zones.

The bomb, Keough had been led to believe, exploded near a gathering of Iraqi civilians, killing 14 and wounding 19 others on April 6 of last year.

The mission Keough had taken upon himself was to go to the village, pray at the gravesites of the dead and ask for forgiveness from their loved ones.

Keough also wanted photographs of each of the 14 victims so he could get them enlarged, make posters of them and use them during a 15-day, water-only fast in front of the main gate at the National Guard air base in Syracuse.

He wanted to remind the pilots in Syracuse that the bombs they drop on Iraqi military targets could go astray and kill innocent civilians. And he wanted to confront taxpayers driving by the base with images showing how their tax dollars were being put to use.

Keough's problem was that he didn't know precisely where the 14 Iraqi civilians had been killed. All he had to go on was a sketchy report by Reuters News Service -- a report based on an official Iraqi government communique.

Although there also had been a reference to the bombing on an Iraqi government Web site, in neither case was the village named.

Assuming that the Iraqis would be happy to identify the village and help him get there, Keough decided at the last minute to join the Conscience International delegation to Baghdad.

In fact, it was the only reason he decided to go.

As far as Keough was concerned, listening to lectures by Iraqi government officials was a waste of time and tended, literally, to put him to sleep.

If you really wanted to know what was going on in Iraq, you needed to talk to the Iraqi people; the further you got from the delegation's Iraqi handlers, he figured, the closer you got to the truth.

It was a sentiment shared by the other delegates as well, but from Keough's perspective, he might as well have stayed home if he didn't at least get to the gravesites of those 14 Iraqi civilians.

One morning, while watching the other members of his delegation boarding a government bus, he confided that he had no intention of joining them for a tour of a bomb shelter that U.S. intelligence experts during the Persian Gulf war identified as a military command post.

It was only after more than 400 women and children were incinerated by a bomb specially designed to penetrate massive underground bunkers before detonating that the Pentagon discovered its mistake.

The wreckage that remains -- with the silhouettes of victims still imprinted on the walls from the heat of the blast -- is now a war monument.

As moving as that experience might be, Keough decided that you don't find out about what's happening in Iraq today by listening to a tour guide's lecture at the scene of a 10-year-old tragedy.

In fact, as a general rule, he had never been impressed with government lectures about anything -- be they American or Iraqi.

"What the hell. All they give you is numbers and numbers and numbers. You're not learning anything. And you can get all that off their Web site anyway," he said.

The only way you really learn, he decided long ago, "is by talking to the people -- one on one. Like in the Scriptures -- the Lord said hear the cry of the poor. If you're going to hear the cry of the poor you've got to be with the poor. You're going to hear it on the street, not on a bus, not in a museum and not in some damn lecture by a government official."

What he wanted, he kept reminding his Iraqi handlers, was, in some small way, to begin a process of reconciliation by saying he was sorry for the bombings that were occurring every day -- more than 10 years after most Americans thought the Gulf war had ended.

But for reasons he could not understand, the Iraqi authorities, including Hashami, not only seemed reluctant to help him, they were frustrating every effort he made to get to the village where the April 6 bombing occurred. In fact, Keough began to suspect the bombing incident might not have happened at all -- that it was simply a fabrication, a propaganda ploy by the Iraqi government to discredit America's enforcement of the no-fly zones that were instituted after the Gulf war.

After Keough complained for several days, insisting that his Iraqi hosts were stonewalling, Hashami's patience wore thin. And when Keough's badgering turned to picketing inside the lobby of the hotel -- with a sign demanding that he be allowed to go to Assan, where he suspected, after some detective work, that the bombing had occurred -- the former diplomat finally exploded.

First of all, Hashami shouted, spinning around as Keough tried to buttonhole him once again as he was leaving the hotel lobby, he didn't know what village the former priest kept going on about. And frankly, as far as he was concerned, one bombed village and one dead civilian was the same as any other, Hashami added to Keough's astonishment.

If you really want to say you are sorry, he told Keough, he would find him someone to say it to, but forget about going to Assan.

"You told me you wanted to see people who are being hit by an American plane. And I answered you. I will arrange to take you to a village that was hit and destroyed. You told me no," the Iraqi official said.

"Honestly and sincerely, for me they are all American planes that are hitting us. I don't know whether they are National Guard, or they are Air Force, or they are Marines. For me, it's the same.

"They are American planes. They have the same orders from the same source. And this one hits this Iraqi village here and this one hits that Iraqi village there.

"The crime is the same! The people are the same! The one who issues the orders is the same!

"So, for the purpose of saying you are sorry, you can do it in Basra. You can do it in Mosul. You can do it in Assan. But Assan is in a military area -- a border zone [with Iran] and we are sorry. We cannot take you there. It's as simple as that."

But Keough wasn't buying it.

Since the day he arrived, he told Hashami, he had been getting the runaround.

"First, you kept asking me. Where is this village? Where is it?

"That's like a guy coming into a store and asking for coffee. You're asking me where the coffee is? You own the store! If you don't know where the coffee is, who does?"

And if it was his safety they were worried about, he told Hashami, they needn't bother.

"Look at me. Look at these gray hairs. I've lived life. If I die, so what? But when kids die, that's important. They have a right to a full life. Don't worry about me. Worry about your children. Worry about Iraq."

Hashami, however, would not relent.

As far as he is concerned, the no-fly zones -- though implemented without United Nations authorization and in clear violation of his country's sovereignty -- is the least of Iraq's problems.

To put the no-fly operations in perspective, Hashami cited the bombing campaign conducted by America and its allies during the Gulf war -- one of the most intensive bombing campaigns in U.S. history.

Despite its intensity -- and the massive damage the bombing caused to the country's infrastructure -- the real threat to Iraq's survival, he insisted, did not occur until war had ended.

With one hundred billion barrels of oil in the ground, Hashami declared, Iraq could easily have rebuilt its infrastructure -- including its electric power grid and its water-filtration plants -- and returned its population to the same level of prosperity it enjoyed before the war.

The Gulf war, he declared, is not responsible for Iraq's suffering -- noting that even throughout the far bloodier eight-year war with Iran, his country was never forced to sacrifice butter for guns.

Not once during the Iran-Iraq war, Hashami said, did his government cut any of its social, educational or health-care programs -- including free and universal health care -- that were the envy of the Arab world.

"Every difficulty that the Iraqi society is facing is because of the sanctions -- not because of the war. The [Gulf] war, in 45 days, was over. Every nation can stand up and reconstruct itself and leave its wars behind.

"It's the sanctions. That's what kills the human being."

Sanctions are what give you hyperinflation and unemployment, Hashami insisted, and it's the sanctions that have made it impossible for his government to continue its social programs.

In fact, if it was not for a government rationing program -- a program that provides basic foodstuffs for every Iraqi man, woman and child for the equivalent of a nickle a month -- the Iraqi people would be dying in even far greater numbers than they are now, he said.

So as a killer of the Iraqi people, Hashami declared, the enforcement of the no-fly zones account for less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the country's casualties since the end of the Gulf war.

The reality, he told Keough, is that about 300 Iraqi civilians have been killed by U.S. warplanes since 1998.

But for each one of those civilians killed during an air attack, he said, there are 30,000 others -- mostly women and children -- who have died as a result of the sanctions, often from water-borne diseases the government can no longer treat or prevent.

The Iraqi people would be better served, he suggested, if the international community was as concerned about the sanctions as Keough and others are about the deaths that occur as a result of the no-fly operations.

"Every difficulty that our society is facing," Hashami said, "is because of the sanctions -- not because of the war."

Prior to the war, Hashami said, Iraq produced 8 million tons of cement annually, enough to meet the country's need for new housing.

Declaring sarcastically that the Pentagon apparently considered those cement factories capable of producing weapons of mass destruction, the former ambassador said every one of them was targeted and destroyed by American bombers during the Gulf war.

Targeting those cement factories was bad enough, he insisted. But using the sanctions over the past 10 years to prevent Iraq from rebuilding them -- or its water-treatment and sewage facilities -- is a crime of even greater magnitude, he said.

America's rationale for preventing his government from buying needed goods from abroad, Hashami said, is that each of those items has a "dual use" -- items such as chlorine could be used either for water treatment or for manufacturing chemical weapons.

Among the items his government has been banned from buying abroad, he said, were 15 bulls.

The bulls were needed, according to Hashami, to restock the country's cattle herds, which had been devastated by a recent outbreak of bovine disease.

Since when, he demanded to know, have bulls been considered weapons of mass destruction?

According to the Americans monitoring Iraqi imports, Hashami said, it was not the bulls that were the problem, it was the vaccine needed to prevent them from coming down with the same disease that had wiped out the herds in the first place.

The vaccine being shipped with the bulls, the Americans worried, might also be used to make biological weapons.

But without the vaccine, said Hashami, it would be useless to bring in the bulls to try to restock the herds.

"Show me something that is not of dual use in the world today.

"Even this pen is of dual use. You can write a poem with it. You can write a love letter with it. And you can write an equation making an atomic bomb with it."

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