Woman recounts Iraq war experiences

It is one of Cynthia Banas' worst memories.

Last October, in a hospital in Mosul, Iraq, a doctor -- unable to take the contingent of Voices in the Wilderness volunteers to the pediatric leukemia ward because of a broken elevator -- decided to walk them through the intensive-care ward instead.

"There were four beds," she remembered while recently visiting Rosa House, a Catholic Worker community in Troy. "In the middle of one was a shroud, like a mummy,...little, like a child. The mother was weeping, and the father just stood still.

"The kids back in America were going trick or treating; kids [in Iraq] were dying. It's terrible how human beings can treat other human beings."

Bombs bursting

The 73-year-old Catholic peace activist spent the recent war with Iraq in that nation, waiting out bombings, visiting hospitals, and viewing the effects of U.S. military action and subsequent occupation on Iraqi noncombatants.

"The idea was to go to Iraq to be with the ordinary people -- the people who are not our enemy and never have been," she told The Evangelist.

She will return to Iraq this month to continue her observations.

Utica and Baghdad

Ms. Banas described pre-war Baghdad as a "friendly place" that reminded her of her hometown near Utica, "50 years ago; that's why I liked it so much."

But pre-war Iraq, she said, was also plagued with hardships brought on by 12 years of United Nations sanctions put in place when President Saddam Hussein refused to comply with international law.

"Thousands of children died of preventable diseases," such as cholera, she said, and were injured or killed while playing with unexploded ordnance from bombing raids.

Time of war

When talk of war escalated and bombing became "inevitable," she said that Baghdadis boarded up storefronts, took pictures down from walls, taped windows, dug wells in their back yards and hid in basements. Pregnant women went to hospitals to see if they could have their babies before the war began.

Ms. Banas and her fellow volunteers holed up in a hotel basement during the bombardments.

"It was terrible," she recalled. "There's really no preparation you can make. You heard terrible noises, and [felt] vibrations like an earthquake. You flinched every time you heard a bomb. When you slept, you didn't know if you were going to wake up in the morning."

Post-war Iraq

The general feeling of relief that pervaded Baghdad after the war faded quickly, she said. Delight that the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein had been toppled morphed into frustration and anger as street crime increased and a sense of safety disappeared.

Ms. Banas holds that "the chaos in Iraq is due to the failure of the United States to plan adequately for what would be happening after the military action was done."

She said that some problems Iraqi cities are currently faced with include intermittent electric power, high prices for ordinary goods, no schools, no security and little clean water. Looting was prevalent following the bombing, and crime rings have been kidnapping Iraqi women and demanding ransoms from their families.

Human devastation

When Voices in the Wilderness volunteers were offered the chance to visit a Baghdad hospital, Ms. Banas went. She saw a little girl made a paraplegic by shrapnel, surgeons working without access to anesthetics and patients piled, nearly one on top of another, in corridors.

"The hospitals were frantic," she said. American forces "hit all communications in the city, so there was no way for families to call an ambulance.

"It's obvious that things are not getting better. Hatred is beginning to build up. Iraqis are beginning to say, 'You conquered us, and now you're killing us.'"

Going back

Ms. Banas returned from Iraq in early May, and is scheduled to return soon. Meanwhile, she has been speaking about her experiences for churches, activist groups, veterans' societies, community organizations and Catholic Worker houses across the Northeast.

"At this point, the choice isn't between war and peace; it's between nonviolence and nonexistence," she said. "Jesus came to show us how to act toward each other, and the Holy Spirit enables us to recognize the face of Christ in everybody, including the Iraqi people.

"The saddest tragedy is that the war will never end for them."

(Cynthia Banas first became involved with the peace movement in the 1970s after viewing television reports on the Vietnam War. She joined the Syracuse Peace Council and the Syracuse chapter of Pax Christi, the international Catholic peace fellowship. She participated in fasts, disarmament conferences and vigils in front of the United Nations in New York City.)

(10/2/03) [[In-content Ad]]