August 9, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
Witness and accompany:
Dr. April Hurley's experience with Iraqi Peace Team
An AWe interview by Stephanie Hiller
[August 9 marks the 100th day after the start of the
war on Iraq. -- Editor]
April Hurley, 48, is a physician at Kaiser Hospital in Santa Rosa, California, and an active member of Not in Our Name Sonoma County (NIONSC). This winter, April decided to join Voices in the Wilderness, an organization originally founded by Kathy Kelly to protest the sanctions. Voices formed an Iraq Peace Team to go to Bagdad to bear witness to the effects of the bombing.
I heard April speak two days after her return from Iraq, and I have gotten to know her through the Women's Peace Group of Sonoma County, of which we are both members. To look at her you would hardly take her for a radical activist. She is a small person with a bright smile and blonde curly hair, and she speaks in a very quiet voice that others pause to listen to. She has conviction, and she is brave.
April and I met for this interview on a cool, bright morning at the Farmer's Market in the little city of Sebastopol where she bought her week's produce -- organic potatoes, organic corn, organic kale, organic peaches -- tucking it all into a cloth bag slung over her shoulder. She refused even the small plastic vegetable bags. "I have a problem with plastic," she said. "I think they're shipping it overseas, not recycling it." After we finished shopping, we chose a bench over in the shade and conducted our interview. Here it is.
Why did you go to Iraq?
I was frustrated with trying to stop the war and the war was being threatened against a people who are virtually indefensible, half of them children under 15, and it was unbelievable that Bush could threaten that country the way he was doing, in terms of bombing. He had done so many things I was sure that it was not a bluff. I was beside myself that I couldn't do anything to stop it and at the same time here were people going to Iraq to be with the people and I felt I had to do that too.
I felt we were doing it through our tax money, and through our inability to stop the machine, and I felt I can't stay here and watch it happen.
What did you feel you would accomplish?
To tell the people that there were many Americans that I represented as well as myself who felt this atrocity was inexcusable and that their being threatened this way was a war crime in itself.
Are you a pacifist?
I can't see a justification for war as we know it today. A century ago, 80 percent of the casualties were soldiers. Now 80 percent or more are civilians -- innocents, not combatants. The question is how can we justify war even if we used to justify war?
Do you think humanity has reached some sort of turning point here?
I saw this presumptive strike as a precedent. Preemptive violence, preemptive invasion, preemptive bombing is a terrible precedent. The whole world was set against it and yet we were going to go through with it.
When did you leave for Iraq? And what were your expectations?
I left on the 6th of March but I didn't get there until the 13th, five days before the bombing started. We were told that there was going to be a nonstop carpet bombing and that people were going to be confined to their homes and in shelters. I'm a physician so I thought I might be able to help dig people out of the rubble and with first aid.
Weren't you risking your life?
I didn't mind. I knew I couldn't stay here so I was willing to face whatever they were facing.
How did you feel about those of us who stayed here?
I used to cry to see your faces in the demonstrations, especially people at risk like in Egypt or the Phillipines, protesting. I saw those people relentlessly screaming and flailing at what was happening and I would just fall apart. So I could compose myself clinically because I am trained for that and I saw some terrible things but I could be composed, but the one thing I couldn't stand to see was people trying to stop the war, knowing how futile it was. [I can hear the tears in her voice as she is speaking.]
Why was it important for people like yourself to be there during the war?
It was incredibly supportive for them to see the outpouring of care and concern. Even if we couldn't help that much. So important for them to tolerate what's happening now, the troops there so disrespectful and arrogant, and know the world gave a damn.
What was it like, to be there?
It was incredibly distressing. It was enraging to see what they were doing -- and deliberately doing -- to take out civilians. The places they chose to bomb, not to mention the misses, so many misses, that got neighborhoods, that got kids. If you went to the hospital you just saw the carnage. They took out the phones right away so there was no way to call ambulances. People were trying to extricate people from the wreckage, they had no training. Some people had to wait all night with injuries, amputations. Almost everyone talked of seeing decaptitations of kids and neighbors. Nobody should have to see that.
Everyone had a story of a personal experience of their home being bombed. Nobody had telephone contact but they had personal experience of direct hits -- everybody! -- and they were just beside themselves trying to understand how this could be happening and there was nothing I could say. Doctors were enraged and losing it professionally, raging at us which they never would have done if it hadn't been so terribly unexplainable, running out of essentials like anesthesia, antibiotics, working around the clock even before the war trying to deliver women's babies. No one could get their medications for high blood pressure or diabetes cause the hospitals were full. Women miscarried, kids were bedwetting, not sleeping, grinding their teeth, stuttering. Some kids weren't talking.
It wasn't the carpet bombing but mostly at night, during the day as well. Buildings would sway, they'd shake and shudder. Windows would bend, they'd rattle, sometimes blow in. Pieces of buildings were falling off so if you were walking under them you could get killed. I was able to sleep but people weren't sleeping. It wears you down. People were trading food for medication, they had no money, they were trying to eke out a living so there were shortages of everything. The markets were still functioning and in fact the markets were getting bombed directly. I have a picture of a pool of blood where someone had placed some flowers. The people would not stop caring for each other. They're incredibly resilient and resigned to being attacked. And they know that the US is interested in their resources but they don't understand why they need to be attacked for the resources.
People who supported the war say that Saddam was in danger of having a chokehold on the world's oil supplies and that would have been very dangerous for him to have that much power. Do you think there is any sense to that argument?
The Iraqi people were never happy with Saddam except that he did build up the economy to a First World economy that was the envy of the Middle East, with medical care, education. A coup was attempted every year, people were risking their lives to take him out. I think it's for them to do it and for us to help them out not devastate the country with sanctions, trash the economy so much people had to hold two jobs, tbey had no time to take him down. The sanctions were so brutal.
Sanctions are used as an alternative to fighting.
But they're wrong! We're doing it now in Burma. The Burmese are not being helped by sanctions. Sanctions almost always strengthen these dictators.
So what can we do with these tyrants?
What did we spend on the war, $100 billion? We're spending $4 billion a day. So if you wanted to be violent and you wanted to do an illegal action and you care about innocents, you could hire assassins. You could hire a million assassins. Much cheaper. So people that are OK with war -- well, think again. Think again. Because we did assassinate his sons. So we don't have an issue with assassinations apparently. It's illegal but that's not a problem, apparently, for us.
What do you hear from Iraq today?
The latest is that our soldiers are torturing people. [Please see report by Canadian journalist Zehira Houfani - Editor]
That we are so tense and so fearful, trying to function, feeling terrorized by the possibility of snipers and hand grenades and car bombings, that we're shooting civilians every day. Our soldiers are dying in greater numbers than we're being told. The wounded are not accounted for. Some are critical. The wounded that go on to die, we're not being told about them. So we're in the dark. It's incredibly different to be here than to be overseas in terms of knowing the truth. I work at Kaiser so I got to see all the old issues of Time and Newsweek, so I could see what you were reading while I was gone, and what you weren't seeing! We were trying to get these pictures out but nobody saw them. Remember that little boy who had the terrible burns, his arms were shriveled up like drumsticks? People here wanted to help him but they didn't show his picture until it was too late. The bombing was over. He survived, but doctors felt he wouldn't want to live like that. He'll have to have about 30 surgeries, he'll get infections five or six times and be close to death. His family was devastated. Sixteen people died in his family.
A mother who delivered her baby, she had no arms, so she couldn't hold her baby.
Whose gonna get prostheses, cosmetic improvements or the counseling they need, physical therapy, new eyes? This is not a culture that's going to be able to help the disabled. We have trouble with it ourselves. They're not going to have an infrastructure to care for these people for years. Somebody's going to have to take care of these people. Probably 20,000 people were killed. That'll never be counted. But the impaired is ten times that.
So you have to consider infrastructure. Even oil money is limited. We're gonna use their oil money to do our thing whatever that is. It's not going to be enough. These people are not going to heal. It's unconscionable.
And it was all predicted. The only thing that wasn't predicted is that nobody left. They didn't have the money and they didn't want to leave their family and never see them again. It's not that we didn't plan for it. It's almost that we did plan for it (she laughs bitterly) because you don't not consider the postwar situation.
There's one more thing I want to say. Our soldiers, our Marines, were heroic, patriotic, strong, good intentioned, compassionate -- and we dishonored them with our policies and now they're scared for their lives and when Iraqi kids start shooting at them then there's no saving the situation. And I believe that things are gonna get that bad, children are going to take up their weapons.
I was really impressed with the Iraqi people, their patience -- they're starving -- they're not resisting the occupation as much as they could. They're trying to cope until they can't cope. Their anger is festering, festering, and it's gonna explode because our policies are so disrespectful, brutal.
Where do we go from here?
We've come to a place where we have to stand in front of guns. If people are willing to die for war, we should be willing to die for peace. It's come to that.
I don't care anymore because that's how I see it. And if I go to prison, I'll go to prison. Wherever the next conflict is, I'm ready to be there.