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.