* Five Americans give blood to sanctions-hit Iraqis
BAGHDAD, July 28 (Reuters) - Inside a tiny makeshift hospital, five
Americans defied their government on Wednesday to donate blood in a show
of solidarity with Iraqisreeling under blanket United Nations sanctions.
The Chicago-based Voices in the Wilderness group, campaigning to ease the
suffering of Iraqi civilians, started giving blood alongside Iraqis at
the entrance to the Iraqi Red Crescent headquarters in Baghdad.
``This is a token amount of blood, a small amount we are giving but we
are doing it symbolically to show the United States that we must start
preserving life here and not taking life,'' Nicholas Arons, one of the
donors, said.
``We have seen blood being shed by our country here. We are trying to
give blood back as a symbolic expression,'' he added.
Chris Doucot, the leader of the visiting team, called the blood donation
"an act of repentance and of solidarity'' and said it was intended "to
send a message to our government that we want no more bombings and the
sanctions lifted.''
Iraq is under stringent economic sanctions imposed for its 1990 invasion
of Kuwait.
Doucot said his team's visit was in defiance of U.S. law and made him
liable to imprisonment. ``We face 12 years prison and a half million dollar fine to be
here...but God's law says that we must love our brothers and sisters,'' he said.
As she lay on a bed waiting for an Iraqi doctor to put a needle in her
arm, Mary Hannahan criticised Washington for keeping sanctions in place. ``I am tired
of what the U.S. is doing and the U.N. sanctions. I'm just very upset and I am left
overwhelmed by the misery and destruction caused by the sanctions,'' said Hannahan,
a mother of four from Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Voices in the Wilderness, which in the past has delivered medicines and
other goods to Iraq in defiance of sanctions, has now been visiting
hospital malnutrition wards, recently bombed neighbourhoods, and a camp
for internally displaced people.
Asked about what he saw in a recently bombed district in Najaf province,
and whether he backed U.S. Defence Secretary William Cohen's statement
that there was no evidence Iraqi civilians were killed, Doucot said: ``William Cohen is
a liar, we met with a taxi driver who said that he pulled out of his car his three
passengers, all civilians, and they were dead.''
``I met a six-year-old boy who had his arm blown off. I visited a grain
silo that was heavily damaged, all civilian sites, there is nothing
military about it,'' he added.
Cohen said on July 20 there was no evidence that civilians were killed in
a U.S. bombing raid on southern Iraq two days earlier. Iraqi authorities
said 17 people died. Western air strikes on Iraq have become a regular occurrence
since Baghdad decided last year to challenge U.S. and British jets patrolling northern
and southern no-fly zones set up by Western powers after the 1991 Gulf
War.
The zones, which Baghdad does not recognise, were imposed to protect
minority groups from attack by Iraqi forces.
