We the undersigned call upon the United States government to end all
sanctions against the people of Iraq.
At the end of 1998, the United States once again rained bombs on
the people of Iraq. But even when the bombs stop falling, the U.S. war
against the people of Iraq continues-through the United Nations harsh
sanctions on Iraq, which are the direct result of U.S. policy.
This month, U.S. policy will kill 4,500 Iraqi children under the
age of 5, according to United Nations studies, just as it did last month
and the month before that all the way back to 1991. Since the end of the
Gulf War, more than a million Iraqis have died as a direct result of the UN
sanctions on Iraq.
To oppose the sanctions is not equivalent to supporting the regime of
Saddam Hussein. To oppose the sanctions is to support the Iraqi people.
Saddam Hussein is a murderous dictator, who promotes those who are
loyal to him and kills all those who voice opposition to his regime. But
throughout the 1980s, when it suited U.S. strategic interests in the Middle
East, the U.S. government was more than willing to ignore Saddam Hussein's
brutality. In fact, U.S. and European companies provided Iraq with materials
used to produce Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction." Moreover, the
sanctions have not affected the lifestyle of Saddam Hussein or his inner
circle. Food and medicine are available for those who can afford it. The
sanctions hurt only the Iraqi people.
The sanctions are weapons of mass destruction. When a UN
inspections team visited Iraq to survey the damage from the Gulf War in
March 1991, it concluded that the bombing has reduced Iraq to a
"pre-industrial age." The team said at that time that if the sanctions were
not lifted, the country faced "immediate catastrophe." Yet the sanctions
have continued for the last seven years, preventing Iraq from obtaining the
hard currency to buy basic food stuffs and medicines-or to rebuild its
infrastructure. The oil-for-food deal that allows Iraq to sell $5.2 billion
of its oil every six months has had only marginal effects. The United
Nations takes one-third of all oil revenues for war reparations and its own
expenses. The oil-for-food program does not generate enough money to feed
adequately a population of 22 million. Raising the ceiling would not help.
The refineries were bombed during the war and need to be rebuilt-even now,
Iraq is unable to produce all the oil it is allowed to. In October, Denis
Halliday, the UN coordinator for humanitarian aid to Iraq, resigned in
protest, arguing that the sanctions "are starving to death 6,000 Iraqi
infants every month, ignoring the human rights of ordinary Iraqis and
turning a whole generation against the West."
The sanctions also prevent Iraq from importing many basic
necessities. Most pesticides and fertilizer are banned because of their
potential military use. Raw sewage is pumped continuously into water that
people end up drinking because Iraq's water treatment plants were blown up
by US bombs in 1991-and most have never been repaired. Yet chlorine is
banned under the sanctions because it also could be of military use.
Typhoid, dysentery and cholera have reached epidemic proportions. Farid
Zarif, deputy director of the UN humanitarian aid program in Baghdad,
argued recently, "We are told that pencils are forbidden because carbon
could be extracted from them that might be used to coat airplanes and make
them invisible to radar. I am not a military expert, but I find it very
disturbing that because of this objection, we cannot give pencils to
Iraqi schoolchildren."
For the past several years, individuals and groups have been
delivering medicine and other supplies to Iraq in defiance of the U.S.
blockade. Now, members of one of those groups, Chicago-based Voices in
the Wilderness, have been threatened with massive fines by the federal
government for "exportation of donated goods, including medical supplies
and toys, to Iraq absent specific prior authorization." Our government is
harassing a peace group that takes medicine and toys to dying children: we
owe these courageous activists our support.
This is not foreign policy-it is state-sanctioned mass murder. The
Iraqi people are suffering because of the actions of both the Iraqi and
U.S. governments, but our moral responsibility lies here in the United
States. If we remain silent, we are condoning a genocide that is being
perpetrated in the name of peace in the Middle East, a mass slaughter that
is being perpetrated in our name.
