Dr. Louise Cainkar grew up in Evergreen Park and calls herself “a nice Catholic girl.” For the past five years she has also been the executive director of the Human Rights Research Foundation and head of the foundation’s Palestine Human Rights Information Center. After the gulf war began, people started calling her office, asking what was really going on in the Middle East. At the end of March she went to Iraq as an observer with the fourth Gulf Peace Team medical-relief convoy, which was working in cooperation with the Jordanian National Red Crescent Society and the Iraqi Red Crescent.
Louise Cainkar: The first thing that I saw at the border was no less than 40 bombed-out cars, trucks, and buses on the side of the road–all over the side of the road, blown up and strafed. These were clearly civilian vehicles. Even shepherds were strafed and their flocks were killed. It was not always pinpoint bombing in that part of Iraq. No doubt most of the people in those vehicles were dead, because they’d been burnt to a crisp. Many Jordanian truck drivers died–the crown prince of Jordan said 40. Many of these people were Iraqi civilians simply trying to flee Iraq. Refugees were attacked on this road. We were continually rerouted because all of the bridges had been knocked out on this road.
When they can get fuel, they boil the water. They’re using these kerosene stoves, and I can tell you that I saw an entire hospital ward of burnt children who tipped over these stoves. Their bodies are burned from head to toe, and they have no way to treat these babies. The normal treatment is to submerge them into some kind of bath and then to put a lotion on them. They don’t have any of this. The burns become infected because they don’t have the antibiotics to stop the infection. They can’t do skin grafts, so these children will just become encased in scar tissue–if they survive.
When we got into Basra itself, you could see tanks facing right into the neighborhoods–they were still on alert because of the rebellion. On the way into Basra we’d been detoured through the desert, and all you could see were bombed-out tanks and bombed-out trucks and skeletons along the way. In Basra conditions are very bad–you see the same things as everywhere else. The main hospital had been hit by a bomb, and the one hospital that was working was filled with babies dying of malnutrition and diarrhea and dehydration.
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LC: Not one bit. Iraqis would tell me that “We’re back in the 17th century. We’re back in the 18th century. We’re back in the Stone Age.” Iraq was a highly developed country–you can see that. The infrastructure was very, very sophisticated, more than I’ve seen in any other Arab country. And all of this was destroyed. So you have a society that functions on the basis of assuming that they have telephones, electricity, running water, drinking water, a working sewage system, good hospitals, medical care, the best surgeons, good roads. But in fact, none of that exists anymore. None of it. There is very little electricity, very little running water. The running water that exists is in isolated areas, and it’s sporadic and poisonous. It cannot be cleaned because the treatment plants were bombed and because the chemicals used to clean it are not allowed to be imported. So raw sewage is being flushed into the rivers, and that same water is coming out of the tap.
Obviously people who live in high rises don’t have elevators. Hospitals are without medicine, without medical equipment, without water. How can surgeons perform an operation when they can’t clean anything? They have little or no electricity for lighting, they have no antibiotics. They have no refrigeration, so they can’t store any blood. They have no blood banks. There are severe fears of cholera, meningitis, typhoid, and hepatitis epidemics. There are no vaccines in Iraq because of sanctions–they’re still not being allowed to bring them in at the level at which they need them.
But I don’t think that they’re going to loosen sanctions until Saddam Hussein is out of power. I can’t see any other reason for this kind of cruelty. They talk about surgical bombing as if only certain buildings were struck. But in fact, the way that surgical bombing was used was so that every single Iraqi would suffer. It’s worse than random bombing. It’s like neurosurgery–they took the brain out of an entire nation. So the functions that the brain is supposed to direct are just collapsing.
