by James Parks, Nov 6, 2007

Every day, we see images from the war in Iraq, but seldom do we see what the war has done to the lives of ordinary Iraqis.

Four independent photojournalists who worked extensively in Iraq outside the confines of the U.S. military’s official “embedding” program are delivering the message that the war is taking a terrible toll on the lives of ordinary, noncombatant people and their families.

Through images photographed over several years in Iraq, they show us slices of life as people try to survive amid the daily dangers of a war zone. There are cheerful pictures of dancers at a wedding party, tragic ones of women mourning the deaths of family members killed when an American missile landed on their home and terrifying photos, such as the one depicting a father holding up his hand to get snipers to stop shooting as he runs through the street with his terrified young son.

Kael Alford, one of the photojournalists, says:

We wanted to get the message directly from the people of Iraq, to connect to the grassroots. People in Iraq kept telling me that if the American people see what’s really happening to us, they wouldn’t keep supporting this war. They believe if they could look the Americans eye to eye, things would be different.

They would look around and say to me—and it became a dirty word—”this is freedom?” 

Alford was the main speaker at a reception last night to kick off the five-day exhibition of  “Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq” at the AFL-CIO building in Washington, D.C.

The 60-picture exhibit runs Nov. 4 –8 and is sponsored by the American Public Health Association (APHA) and its Labor and Peace Caucuses and the AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees. A book accompanying the exhibit includes all the images and is available from The Union Shop Online™ .

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker told the nearly 150 people at the reception that if a picture is worth 1,000 words,

these photos are a novel. They require us to see the faces of ordinary people and the effect of the war on them.

The same combination of a lack of planning, cronyism and no-bid contracts that we see [from the Bush administration] in Iraq is the same thing we saw in the horrible tragedy of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

And the results were the same: devastation of peoples’ lives, homes and people feeling they have no way out. This terrible war must end.

APHA President Deborah Klein Walker says the war is destroying the mental and physical health of thousands of soldiers and the Iraqi people. She says:

We need to end this war and invest in our common security here at home.

The exhibit includes facts and statistics about the health of American soldiers. It shows that 34 percent of the active-duty veterans and 16.4 percent of National Guard and reservists returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have been granted disability pay.

Matthew Cary, president of Veterans and Military Families for Progress, who attended the exhibition, says nearly 5,000 veterans of service in Iraq or Afghanistan commit suicide each year, and the total is quickly approaching the record numbers of veterans who killed themselves after the Vietnam War.

On the eve of the exhibit, we learned that another Iraqi trade union leader has been killed, most likely because of his support for unionization.

The International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions reports that Hassan Hamza, president of the Hotel and Tourism Employees Union, part of the Federation of Workers’ Councils and Unions in Iraq, was murdered last month.  He had been receiving death threats from Islamic Sunni extremists in the Baghdad suburb of Hor Rajab. His union confirmed his death on Oct. 25.  For more information on Hamza’s death, click here. 

The AFL-CIO Executive Council earlier this year approved a statement saying that with the war in Iraq turning into a civil war, it’s time for the United States to end its military involvement there. 

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