5315 N Clark St,
Box # 634
Chicago, IL
60640
URL: Website
Anti-war and anti-sanctions group founded in 1995
Regularly delivered medical and other supplies to Iraq, in violation of the UN sanctions regime as well as several U.S. laws and presidential executive orders
Voices
in the Wilderness (VW) was founded
in 1995 to protest what it viewed as the unwarranted and immoral economic sanctions which the United
Nations Security Council (with strong U.S. support) had imposed
on Iraq.[1] The organization's name—an
allusion
to the biblical story of the prophet Isaiah crying out for justice in a wilderness
of inequity (Isaiah, 40:3)—was
intended to portray VW
members as modern-day prophets, calling America to its
conscience.
Almost
without exception, the founding members of VW were drawn from what
has been dubbed the "Catholic Ultra-resistance"—radicals sympathetic to the Catholic Worker Movement's
doctrine of nonviolent resistance and the personalities of Dorothy
Day, Thomas Merton, and, especially, the radical priests
Daniel
Berrigan and Philip
Berrigan. The Catholic Worker Movement has always seen U.S.
foreign policies as violent, and therefore morally
unacceptable.
VW's campaign against the UN sanctions mainly took the form of trips to Iraq,
where its members would deliver medical and other "humanitarian" supplies—in
violation not only of the sanctions, but also of several U.S. laws and presidential
executive orders. The
purpose of those restrictions was to prevent Americans from aiding
the Iraqi economy, on the theory that Saddam
Hussein's government, once
weakened, would either comply with UN disarmament requirements or
collapse altogether.
Whenever a VW delegation traveled to
Iraq, its members publicly and defiantly drew attention to the
fact that they were breaking the law. Time and again, they dared the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control to
levy the maximum fines against their organization—knowing
that
harsh punishments would bring valuable publicity to
the cause. But throughout the mid- to late 1990s, the Treasury
Department imposed only small fines on a few VW members who, in turn, invariably refused to pay.
The
quantity of humanitarian aid that VW delivered to Iraq was relatively small—more symbolic than
substantive. The real emphasis was to have the group's members personally
"witness" the detrimental effects of sanctions, by visiting
Iraqi hospitals, schools, and other sites—always in the presence of
official "minders" of the Iraqi regime. After spokesmen for Saddam's government had briefed them about the deadly toll that sanctions were
taking on Iraq's population, VW volunteers returned home to dutifully parrot those accounts to audiences across the United States.
VW
members knew almost nothing about Iraqi history or politics, but this did not concern them
in the least; they saw themselves as people of action, not
reflection. Thus, rather than plumb the broader political and economic issues,
they opted instead to simply demand the complete and unconditional repeal of all sanctions. Indeed, they portrayed the sanctions as the primary
cause of violence in Iraq and thus overlooked (or denied) Saddam's
decades-long legacy of repression and mass murder.
Possessing neither the training nor the inclination to dissect Baathist
propaganda, VW
members:
naively accepted the Iraqi regime's notion that weapons inspections were nothing more than a calculated pretext for
U.S. domination of Iraq and its oil reserves;
imported the
regime's fantasy that the UN weapons inspectors were American
and/or Israeli spies; and
were flattered by opportunities to meet with senior Iraqi officials (including Tariq
Aziz)—and by public expressions of gratitude by
Saddam Hussein himself, for their service.
By contrast, VW delegates had no
interest in meeting with Iraqi dissidents, exiles, and opposition groups, who had
documented Saddam's past aggression, genocide, and flouting of UN
resolutions.
In addition to their underlying ignorance about such matters, however, another factor as well prevented VW members from critically evaluating the merits of Saddam's propaganda: Because
travel to Iraq was central to VW's activities, the organization was
wholly dependent upon the regime's good graces to gain the necessary
travel permits and visas.
If VW members were to be seen by the regime as hostile to its
interests, their access to Iraq would have been swiftly cut off. In short, they
could continue their chosen form of activism only if they
collaborated with Saddam and his cronies. Thus, until
about 2000, VW had a policy that explicitly barred its members from publicly criticizing the Iraqi government.
Like Saddam's regime, VW members were antagonistic toward the UN
Oil-for-Food program (known sometimes as UNSC Resolution 986),
which permitted Iraq to collect a certain amount of oil revenues to
“provide
for the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people."
As VW founding member Chuck Quilty once noted: "The problem [VW]
saw right away was that 986 would be used by the United States to say
that humanitarian problems in Iraq were taken care of and [to] allay
any of those who might be concerned that sanctions were killing
innocent people." VW co-founder Bob
Bossie put it this way: "The biggest problem [VW] face[s],
as I see it, is Resolution 986." Onetime VW member
Charles M. Brown, who later came to view the organization as
irresponsible and duplicitous, has acknowledged:
"To
be perfectly frank, we were less concerned with the suffering of the
Iraqi people than we were in maintaining our moral challenge to U.S.
foreign policy. We did not agitate for an end to sanctions for purely
humanitarian reasons; it was more important to us to maintain our
moral challenge to 'violent' U.S. foreign policy, regardless of what
happened in Iraq. For example, had we been truly interested in
alleviating the suffering in Iraq, we might have considered pushing
for an expanded Oil-for-Food program. Nothing could have interested
us less. Indeed, we even regarded the paltry amounts of aid that we
did bring to Iraq as a logistical hassle. … We were so preoccupied
with our own agenda that we didn't notice or care that the regime
made use of us. When critics asked us whether the group was being
exploited by the Iraqi regime, we obfuscated, and in so doing put
Saddam and his minions on the same level as the U.S. government.”
Also in 2002,
the U.S. Treasury Department levied a $20,000
fine on the organization for having brought medicine to Iraq
without
a permit. Once again, however, VW refused to pay.
After
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, VW condemned the war as the latest in a
long series of “misguided,
ill-conceived, and criminal acts” which America had committed
against the Iraqi people. Thus the
group initiated a War Tax Resistance campaign demanding that the
"[m]onstrous amounts of dollars" spent on the U.S. military
be redirected to projects "which could reinvigorate our ailing
health, housing, and school systems." "The best way to stop
the war machine is to refuse to fund it," said VW.
In
August 2005, U.S. Federal District Judge John Bates ordered
VW to finally pay the $20,000 fine that had been imposed three years earlier. In a defiant
response, the organization said that because “the economic sanctions regime
imposed brutal and lethal punishment on Iraqi people,” it “will
not pay a penny of this fine.”
VW disbanded
in October 2005
and later reconstituted itself as Voices for Freedom and
Nonviolence.
NOTES:
[1]
The sanctions were first imposed on August 6, 1990, in an attempt to
compel Iraq to withdraw its military forces from Kuwait, the nation
it had invaded four days earlier. After the end of the 1991 Gulf War,
those sanctions—which
banned all trade with Saddam Hussein's regime but allowed Iraq to
import food and medicine for humanitarian purposes—were
extended and expanded. Their purpose was now to compel Iraq to
verifiably disarm itself of all weapons of mass destruction.
