With riveting photos of Iraqi children sprawled across a table, two Voices in the Wilderness representatives spoke to a room full of SIUC faculty and students Tuesday on their eyewitness account of the U.S. policy in Iraq.

Kathy Kelly, a longtime peace and social justice activist from Chicago, helped organize Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign to end the U.N. sanctions against Iraq. She spoke in the Kaskaskia Room of the Student Center Tuesday afternoon during a brown-bag lunch lecture.

In January, the United States responded to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s refusal to allow U.N. weapons inspectors access to presidential palaces suspected of storing weapons of mass destruction by amassing an arsenal of aircraft in the Persian Gulf. President Bill Clinton initiated the build-up with the intent of bombing targeted Iraqi sites if 11th-hour negotiations failed.

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After three hours of negotiations with Hussein Feb. 22, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan announced a deal that allows UNSCOM, the weapons inspection team, to carry out inspections of suspected weapons sites, accompanied by senior diplomats of ambassadorial rank from several countries. Sanctions, however, remain in place against Iraq.

Kelly said that political leaders of this country should stick to their words, not only in our country, but in others we deal with.

“I think we should hold Hillary Clinton accountable for her very fine words of it takes a village to raise a child.’ The village needs water. The village needs food.”

One-third cup of rice and one-fourth cup of lentils on a table illustrated how much food a child in Iraq eats daily. Kelly said that is only half of the problem considering their bad water system.

Mixing the lentils and rice with the water in Iraq is still possibly harming to people because the water, bottled or tap, is contaminated, she said.

Kelly has been to Iraq four times since the beginning of 1996. She was there for the first 15 days of the Gulf War, joining 72 people from 18 countries. She stayed in the region for six months.

For traveling to Iraq in open violation of the sanctions, she and other campaign members have been threatened with 12 years in prison and more than $1 million in fines.

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Kelly said she witnessed many revolting things that are very typical all over Iraq.

“When you go into the house wards, it’s very typical to see one room just stacked with broken incubators, she said. You see X-ray machines that are lined up that are not being used.”

Kelly said she has many memories of children and families dying in her visits to Iraq.

Any child with cancer in Iraq today is literally under a death bed, she said. I certainly don’t want to see dying children as an educational event for U.S. people.

Kelly said UNICEF statistics show that every month 4,500 children under five die as a direct result of these sanctions.

Kelly said children and families often sleep on blood stained mats with no sheets in the most gruesome of conditions.

Doctors have told us we not only reuse the syringes, we sometimes reuse the needles,’ she said. I believe that these sanctions are a crime against humanity. The [United Nations] was founded to eliminate this type of warfare.

She said the media ignores this problem and focuses primarily on Saddam Hussein.

One of the reasons that people aren’t hearing more about this is that there is such a demonization of Saddam Hussein over the years that many people have been numbed of thinking that there is only one person that lives in Iraq after all and that’s Saddam Hussein, Kelly said. There’s a subtle nuance of the fact that 22 million people who happen to live there.

Jim Bremer, a delegation member for the Voices in Wilderness, travels with Kelly and said their rebel-with-a-cause attitude gives him a sense of cherishing his own freedom.

“No government, no policy, no law has the right to tell any of us as citizens that we can’t help others, and that’s a freedom we all have.

Bremer, a part of the 10th delegation to go to Iraq in the last two years, calls the U.S. government’s bluff when it comes to facing legal action against him or the rest of his campaign members.

In the end, I don’t think the U.S. government intends to prosecute us, he said. I don’t think they want our testimony, our words in front of a jury of our peers.

Sean Whitcomb, a sophomore in plant biology from Springfield, is a part of the Student Environmental Center, which was one of the sponsors of the lecture. He said it helped him get closer to his goal of seeing the whole picture.

A lot of the people there knew a lot about the issue already, Whitcomb said. I already had some knowledge, but I definitely wanted to learn more about it. I did want to get the whole picture.

I am getting closer to learning to the whole picture because I came to this lecture.

Bremer said many people in Iraq are resentful of our government.