Note: This is a the first of several articles regarding the continuing
sanctions
on the Iraqi people.

A MOM IN IRAQ
-------------

by Krista Clement
Chicago Tribune - February 4, 2000

FARMINGTON, Pa. -- I have just returned from Iraq to my clean, "safe"
and
well-ordered life with my five healthy sons, with clean air to breathe
and
drinkable  water to be had with the simple turn of a tap. Yet life  can
never be
the same.

Many times a day, when I sit down for a meal or see a healthy child, I
have to
fight back tears as memories well up from our tiny glimpse into the
man-made
hell of a land being choked to death by my country, a land where a child
dies
every six minutes as a result of our sanctions.

Still before my eyes is the face of a 6-year-old child suffering from
leukemia.
She is but one of thousands of Iraqi children, each dying a slow and
agonizing
death. And this innocent child, like so many other Iraqi children, does
not even
know she is an Iraqi. Yet she is  being put to death by our sanctions
because
she is an Iraqi.

Beside another bed a mother wept as she watched her little girl slipping
into a
coma. This is the third time she has watched one of her children die,
each
before they reached their 3rd birthday. I could not even begin to
imagine her
agony.

We claim that any weapons of mass destruction Iraq may still have must
be
destroyed. Yet we refuse to end the sanctions--a weapon of mass
destruction that
has killed more than a million people, most of them children.