October 07, 2004
Old News
A Letter from Baghdad, Iraq, December 21, 2002
By Damacio Lopez
A Letter from Baghdad, Iraq, December 21, 2002
By Damacio Lopez
Director, International Depleted Uranium Study Team (IDUST)
www.idust.net
Friends, I am writing you from Iraq where I am traveling with 15 members of the "Japanese Citizens' Peace and Research Delegation to Iraq" team. We are sixteen all together: two members of Japanese Parliament, one professor, two journalists, one YWCA, two interpreters, three labor unionists, one college student, one Habakusha (radiation survivor), two anti-nuclear activists, and one U.S. anti-DU activist.
Yesterday we visited the Ameriya shelter in Baghdad where hundreds of civilians, mostly woman and children, were killed during the Gulf War by US bombs. I had previously visited this memorial, with Ramsey Clark and members of the International Action Center of New York, a couple of years ago, but going there with the Japanese gave this visit a unique perspective. During the Gulf War, a tomahawk cruse missile penetrated the three-foot-thick ceiling at the community shelter, opening a big gap. Within 5 minutes a second tomahawk cruse missile entered through the gaping hole in the roof and exploded, creating a fireball that blasted the people into the walls and floor. Today, the imprints of the dead can be seen in what appears as shadows on the walls, imbedded with hair in places. Some of the body parts were expelled through the gaping hole created in the ceiling and landed on the rooftop. The Japanese were moved to total silence and tears as we witnessed the aftermath of something they knew only too well.
Once back in the bus, a smiling young Japanese lady who had lost her grandmother in the Hiroshima Nuclear Blast introduced herself to me. She said, "Hi my name is Seiko." I asked what her name meant; she said "Seiko means saint child named after Jesus Christ because I was born on 24th of December, Christmas Eve". As the bus headed towards the hotel I saw an elderly lady from Syracuse, New York, whom I had met the day before. She is in Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness and she was walking through the busy streets amongst the Iraqi people as though she might be back home.
Later the team visited the Sadam Hospital for Children in Al-Escan, where I met little Omar, a three-year-old child with hydrocephalus. His head was the shape of a large sledgehammer and his face was so distorted; one eye was completely swollen shut and the other was bloodshot and turned-up. His little legs were skin and bones. Omar's mother was wiping blood from his mouth and he looked listless and unresponsive, but as I was leaving he gave out a loud scream, "Mama! Mama!" The Japanese members smiled and folded paper cranes for the dying children, very different than the tears they shed for the dead at the Ameriya Shelter. Tomorrow we leave for Basria and the DMZ, the "highway of death". Damacio
Posted by Hannah at October 7, 2004 11:34 AM