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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 4/11, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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As the fifth anniversary of the start of the Gulf war approaches, anti-war activists worldwide have stepped up protests against the punitive United States-United Nations sanctions against Iraq. They have set two meetings in the United States, with prominent speakers scheduled.
A UN Food and Agriculture Organization document reporting that these sanctions have killed 560,000 Iraqi children has mobilized many to increase their efforts. It's the UN itself that imposed the sanctions and that has maintained them-- under heavy pressure from Washington. Yet this is a UN body publishing evidence of how the sanctions punish the Iraqi people.
The groups organizing the protests plan to use this report as the factual basis for a new campaign to end the sanctions.
Prominent world figures, including Ahmed Ben Bella, the first president of Algeria, former Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Clodomiro Almeyda, former deputy president of Chile, issued an international appeal to end the sanctions against Iraq and other countries.
In this appeal, the signers say that "economic sanctions and blockades, as now applied as the weapon of choice by the United States and by the Security Council of the United Nations at the urging of the U.S. and its allies, are a weapon of mass destruction directed at a whole people.
"These blockades have been used only against poor countries, and while the entire people is punished by their economic impact, the greatest harm is overwhelmingly on the poorest and weakest--infants, children, the chronically ill and the elderly."
Other signers include former Malta Prime Minister Karmenu Missud Bonnici, former deputy head of government of Mauritius Sir Gaetan Duval, former deputy head of government of Pakistan Sheikh Mohammad Rashid, former Egyptian Foreign Minister Morad Ghaleb, former Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Miguel D'Escoto, member of British parliament Tony Benn, and human-rights activist Margarita Papandreou.
Some of these people will be taking part in meetings and forums on the sanctions to be held in Madrid, Spain, and London on Jan. 17, in New York Jan. 20, and San Francisco Jan. 21.
The International Action Center initiated the New York and San Francisco meetings. This group organized the International War Crimes Tribunal, held in New York in February 1992, which condemned Washington's actions in the Gulf war against Iraq.
The IAC plans to publish a special-edition book, "The Children Are Dying." It will contain the FAO reports and the international appeal. An IAC letter asks its friends to add their names to those supporting the appeal to end the sanctions.
The New York meeting, set for Borough of Manhattan Community College at 2 p.m. on Jan. 20, will feature Clark, Bonnici, Papandreou and D'Escoto, along with Ben Dupuy of Haiti Progress, Younes Banab, Sara Flounders of the IAC, writer Barbara Namri Aziz and authors of the FAO report.
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