Gulf War Photo Exhibit Comes to Bay Area

By Brian Kluepfel
Special to AsianWeek

The effects of the 1991 Gulf War bombing on the infrastructure of Iraq were plain to see. U.S. and Allied Forces bombs destroyed hundreds of military targets. What has not been publicized as widely, however, is the catastrophic effect — still being felt a decade later — on the people of Iraq due to the munitions scattered on their soil.

Japanese photographer Takashi Morizumi’s touring photo exhibit, Children of the Gulf War, makes it plain that the uranium-based weapons left on the desert scarp to disintegrate will have horrific consequences for generations of Iraqis.

Morizumi has been photographing Iraqi children since 1998, and this particular selection of 50 photographs is part of his book, Children of the Gulf War: A Different Nuclear War. Larry Cafiero, whose wife Kyoko Kawashima helped to coordinate recent exhibits of the photos at the Berkeley Public Library and some Northern California colleges, talked about what they hoped the show would achieve.

“Millions of people are suffering because of the weapons used during the Gulf War,” he said. “We’re trying to get the word out that Iraqis are suffering as a result of U.S. and Allied policies, and we’re trying to get a ban on depleted uranium weapons.”

Cafiero, who is a news desk editor with the Santa Cruz Sentinel, says that American newspapers, radio and television are remiss in telling the whole story. “We don’t really get this perspective from the media,” he said of the exhibit. “A woman told me, ‘I can’t believe this is happening — we never really hear about this.’ Things are not being reported.”

The viewer is led into the exhibit by a happy portrait of smiling Iraqi mothers holding their children in their arms, but there is indeed something wrong with this picture. It’s taken inside a hospital’s leukemia wing, which has been specially constructed to deal with the fallout of the Gulf War. Other images from hospitals dominate the exhibit: a baby’s eye eerily magnified by the oxygen mask over her tiny face, a child’s head swollen monstrously by anencephaly, a boy’s leg blown off by a bomb that remained unexploded — until he went near it.

Even in dire conditions, the people show resilience and hope in some of the images. In a schoolyard in Saddaam City, a gaggle of children excitedly wave and mug for the camera (Morizumi notes in his captions that Iraqi people love to be photographed). Children get on with their soccer match behind a maze of barbed wire.

Overall, it is a portrait of a people who have been abused by both their own government and by outside forces. Opposite the photo of the smiling mothersÇ is a snap of a stillborn child; contrasting with the schoolchildren’s smiling countenances is a picture of the recently-built children’s cemetery. And it’s not only a portrait of human suffering: a photo of a Bedouin shepherd girl notes that animals like sheep are sometimes born five-legged, and with other deformities, and often die quickly and inexplicably.

The exhibit, which is organized with the help of the Japanese organization Inochi, (an international anti-nuke group named for the Japanese word “life force”) will travel to Arizona and Illinois in 2003.

“The Japanese were the first people to have atomic weapons dropped on them,” said Cafiero. “They have a kind of moral imperative to stop nuclear weapons from being used.”

The Children of the Gulf War: A Different Nuclear War exhibit can be seen at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St., Berkeley.