From El Mozote to Iraq: The Victims of War Speak Out 

From El Mozote to Iraq: The Victims of War Speak Out 

By Dan Bacher 

While Representative Doris Matsui and the majority of Democrats in Congress refuse to commit to ending the Iraq War and occupation by voting against additional funding for the war, the killing of Iraqis continues every day.

Matsui has claimed repeatedly that she is against the war, but remains committed to vote for more death and destruction when a supplemental aid bill is brought to the House Floor for a vote this March. She continues to maintain this position in spite of a historic peace-in, now in its ninth week, launched by her constituents to convince her to take the moral high ground and vote to defund George W. Bush’s war.

The U.S. war, based on a lie, has resulted in the deaths of an estimated 690,000-plus Iraqis and tens of thousands wounded or disabled. The war has also produced 2 million refugees and 1.8 million internally displaced people. Polls taken in Iraq indicate that the overwhelming majority want the U.S. to leave.

To dramatize the disconnect between Matsui’s words and the deadly reality on the ground, a veteran, poet, Iraqi American and mother of a soldier addressed how the horror of the Iraq war directly impacts the people of Iraq and their loved ones. It's the first such demonstration of the peace-in that focused primarily on Iraqi casualties.

With giant puppets of mourning women looming behind them and displays of American and Iraqi casualties nearby, Iraqi American Samira Alqazzaz pleaded for Matsui to heed her conscience and vote against additional war funding.

"The American people want the war ended and the Iraqi people want the U.S. military to leave their country," said Alqazzaz. "It is unthinkable that Congress is even considering giving Bush more money for this war."

"I think of Fadila, a widow with four children, whose husband was killed in Baghdad," said Ukiah Poet Laureate David Smith Ferri who met with Iraqi refugees in December 2006.

Ferri quoted Fadila as saying: "My husband is dead because of your government.  You couldn't have made my life any worse."

"I hate this war," said Zohreh Whitaker, a Sacramento mother whose 33-year old son is serving in Iraq. "We have lost nearly 3200 men and women in the U.S. military and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. We must stop the occupation and bring the troops home now." Whitaker is a member of the national organization Military Families Speak Out.

Iraq war veteran Jeremy McLaughlin, who served as a hospital medic in the Navy in 2003, also spoke. McLaughlin is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War that on March 1 sent a letter to Congress stating: "Voting more funds for this war would be abandoning our troops. It would leave them with the possibility of joining the over 3,160 who have died as a result of a war that should never have started, or the tens of thousands who have been wounded physically, psychologically, or both."

“The people who showed up today are those that have skin in the game,” emphasized Karen Bernal of Sacramento for Democracy.  “The war in Iraq is more than talk to them – it hits close to home – in contrast to the overwhelming majority of the Members of Congress.”

She added, “I daresay that if Members of Congress were in the same situation, we wouldn’t need to have our peace in at Rep. Doris Matsui’s office.”

On the same day that the Sacramento Coalition to End the War held their press conference, Rufina Amaya, human rights activist and the lone survivor of El Mozote Massacre in El Salvador, passed away due to heart failure, according to SOA Watch. She was a mother, grandmother, friend and hero to many.

In 1981 the Salvadoran army battalion known as the Atlacatl Battalion, trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, swept through the region of Morazon in a campaign to root out FMLN guerillas and their sympathizers. In a shocking turn of events, nearly one thousand peasants were slaughtered in the village of El Mozote. 

“Rufina's brave testimony of the massacre shed light on the atrocities committed by the Salvadoran military and uncovered the Reagan administration's role in providing training and millions of dollars in military aid to a government with a complete disregard for human rights,” according to SOA Watch.

"God saved me because he needed someone to tell the story of what happened,” said Amaya.

If it hadn’t been for Amaya’s testimony, the story of the massacre would have never had been told to the world. Reagan administration officials insisted at the time that no massacre had occurred – and their refusal to admit the truth and stop funding the wars in Central America resulted in many more massacres of thousands of innocent civilians in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua before peace accords were signed in 1992.

The Atlacatl Battalion continued to commit atrocities in El Salvador, including the murder of six Jesuit priests and two Salvadoran women at the University of Central America on November 16, 1989.

The speakers gathered at the federal building in Sacramento passionately spoke out to end the bloodshed in Iraq, just as  Amaya told her story about the Reagan administration-engineered massacre in El Salvador.
 
Doris Matsui must heed the pleas of the victims of war and publicly commit herself to vote against any additional funding for an illegal war based on a lie, including voting against President Bush's supplemental request for another $100 billion of 2007. The House is expected to vote on the request next week.

Will she vote to end the war now – or will she continue to fund more bloodshed just like the Reagan administration and Congress did during the Salvadoran Civil War?