On September 11 the Secretary General of the Society for Austro-Arab Relations, Fritz Edlinger and I travelled to Iraq. We were accompanied by Jan Wierich and Johannes Bergmann, who have been assisting our project from Switzerland and Germany for months. The trip had become necessary, because it became unpredictable whether and when we would be able to bring our medical relief supplies, within the frame work of  the project “Aladdin’s Magic Lamp”, to Iraq.
Nine months had passed since we had applied to the United Nations Sanctions Committee in New York for permission to bring our humanitarian supplies for.........
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“To kill someone in a deserted forest is an unforgivable crime before the law, but it seems that killing an entire people is a matter of perspective.”This is a sentence, which I found in the annual report of the Caritas Iraq and it summarizes the impressions, which I was able to refresh during more than three weeks in Iraq. The embargo, which was undoubtedly justified in the beginning, has in the meantime destroyed an entire people, corroded its society, “destroyed the souls of the people”, as the Archbishop of Basra expressed......More...

During the fall of last year the disaster relief organization of the German Diacony had offered medications valued at nearly €100,000 for the Mother-Child Hospital in Basra: Chemotherapy and antibiotics, the needs for approximately six months. The political developments of the recent months cast a shadow over everything and thus the shipment of these medications was delayed, as was the ........ More...

Baghdad makes a spooky impression: the usually hopelessly clogged streets of this five to six million person metropolis are empty - as they would be on the morning of a holiday.  Metal shutters are rolled down, the stores are closed, very few people are on the streets.  No one knows how many people have left Baghdad during the last few days; some say millions, others say hundreds of thousands. Whoever could has fled from the threatening war - they’ve gone to relatives in the countryside or to Syria through the only border ......More...

On March 20th, 2003 at 5:30 a.m. the hopes of all those who had been committed to find a peaceful resolution to the problem of Iraq, died. The British-American coalition forces began the bombardment of Baghdad. This was a war of aggression without a mandate from the United Nations – a war in contradiction to all international treaties, contrary to the UN Charter, contrary to the wishes of millions of people on this earth. The population of Iraq experienced their third war in 23 years. Only a few hours before the attacks began, I received a message by e-mail from a friend in Iraq: “We have only one wish, for peace… the people here are waiting for a miracle.”  That wish remained unfulfilled. More...

At the beginning of June 2003 the news from Iraq are not encouraging.The people suffer from the lack of security, the country still has no government and no security forces, which would do its duty. The resistance against the occupying forces is growing, the attacks against the American troops are increasing; almost daily there are assassination attempts against American soldiers, a soldier of the occupying forces dies almost every day. More...

Increasing resistance and daily attacks on American occupying troops, but also terror against civilian institutions, murder of policemen, killings of university professors, armed robbery in the streets, kidnapping and blackmail for ransom, violence against relief organizations – these are daily routine in Iraq in the beginning of November 2003. U.S. Assistant Foreign Secretary Richard Armitage says that Iraq is, at this time, a war zone. On November 8 the International Red Cross closes its offices in Baghdad and Basra. Dipl.Ing. Bashar Hindo and I am reading this news item a day later onboard a plane that takes us to Amman, from where we plan to .... More ...