Riding across the West Coast aboard a yellow school bus emblazoned with the plea “Remember Omran,” Jesuit Father Simon Harak is a man on a mission.

His message is simple. Children in Iraq are dying by the thousands because of economic sanctions, and they will continue to die until the sanctions are lifted.

Father Harak likens the sanctions against Iraq to a siege.

“If her children escape the killing by bombing or starvation, a mother has to look at them and decide which one will go to school and which one will walk the streets,” he said during a recent interview with The Herald. “If they pass through that winnowing, they go to school and sit on a stone and look at a single book, if they’re lucky.”

U.S. State Department official Dan Sreebny, however, says that while humanitarian supplies to Iraq are monitored, “there are no sanctions against food or medicine.”

“What the Iraqi government imports is the issue,” stated Sreebny, director of press and public diplomacy in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs during a telephone interview with The Herald.

The United Nations imposed trade sanctions four days after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. Following the Persian Gulf War cease-fire in 1991, the U.N. Security Council’s conditions for lifting the sanctions included the elimination of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Father Harak, a former ethics professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut now working full time with Voices in the Wilderness, a peace group trying to lift sanctions, spoke in Sacramento Oct. 23-25 as part of a West Coast bus tour.

He made presentations at St. Ignatius Parish and Loretto High School in Sacramento and Jesuit High School in Carmichael.

The “Remembering Omran” bus tour, which is collecting donations for medicine and school supplies for Iraq, is named for a 13-year-old shepherd boy killed in May of this year during the U.S. bombing of Iraq.

“We want to remember Omran as an individual but also as a representative of the destruction of so many Iraqi children because of sanctions,” Father Harak said.

Father Harak, who has made three trips to Iraq since 1997, said UNICEF estimates that an average of 5,000 Iraqi children die monthly. He recalled one visit to an Iraqi hospital where he saw a mother praying for her dying baby, holding a vial of medicine in her hands.

“It was clear she had sold everything to buy medicine on the black market,” said Father Harak, who discovered the baby had been placed in an incubator that had no electricity.

“The baby was in a box covered with flies. All I could do was brush the flies away and pray,” he said.

Father Harak said an obstacle to food disbursement is that it has to pass through a 15-member U.N. committee where one member can veto a contract if the item could have military as well as human use.

“They may allow life support machines but veto the computers that run them, allow insulin but veto syringes,” he noted.

He added that U.N. officials, whose job it is to monitor food and medical supplies through the oil for food program, have declared that the distribution of goods within Iraq is being effectively carried out.

“Saddam Hussein (Iraqi leader) has done a lot of terrible things, but you can’t pin this one on him,” Father Harak contended. “Yes, he invaded Iran. Yes, he used biological warfare, but to say he is hoarding—the evidence is to the contrary.”

Sreebny blames Iraqi suffering not on sanctions but on Hussein.

“The Iraqi people are being held hostage by their own government,” he said, pointing to the fact that medical supply programs are operating best in northern Iraq where the Iraqi regime has weaker control.

Sreebny said Hussein refuses to comply with what the United Nations has asked of Iraq—the destruction of all weapons of mass destruction, an accounting of missing prisoners of war and a promise not to purchase weapons—and has refused to let weapons inspectors come in.

Father Harak noted that federal legislation sponsored by Congressmen Tom Campbell of California and John Conyers Jr. of Michigan that would eliminate some bureaucratic red tape keeping food and medicine from Iraq “is an important first step” in alleviating human suffering.

HR 3825, the Humanitarian Experts Leading to Peace Act, provides that agencies would only have to notify government authorities in advance that they were sending supplies to Iraq rather than applying for a license.

Father Harak says the best news is that planes from countries including Jordan, Egypt, Turkey and Iran are flying into the Iraqi capital of Bagdad with humanitarian supplies in defiance of sanctions.

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