Published on Friday, July 7, 2000 in The Daily Star (Lebanon) |
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| by Michael Jansen |
| Every time Washington suspects that Iraq is making gains in the propaganda war over sanctions, reports emanate from the US capital claiming that Baghdad continues to be a global menace and must be “contained” by the blockade. The latest yarn alleges Iraq is testing short-range missiles. Down around the third or fourth paragraph the writer admits that such missiles do not violate the terms of “the Mother of All UN Resolutions,” which lays down what sort of weaponry Iraq can have: short-range missiles with a range of 150 kilometers are permitted. Some reports infer that Iraq is also redeveloping medium-range missiles in violation of the resolution. But this has been categorically denied by Scott Ritter, the US citizen who formerly served on the UN Special Commission which monitored Iraq’s arms of mass destruction. Ritter, writing in the current issue of Arms Control Today, an independent journal published in Washington, says that Iraq now has no banned arms of any importance. Nevertheless, US and British warplanes continue to bomb Iraqi targets on an every-other-day basis and insist that the punitive sanctions regime must be maintained until Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. This unending belligerency against Iraq has now caused the most respectable of the opposition groups, the Iraqi National Accord, to pull out of the umbrella grouping, the Iraqi National Congress, which is meeting in London this week to work out a new strategy to topple Hussein. One of the reasons given by the Accord for withdrawing from the Congress is its close connection with the US Central Intelligence Agency, Congressional leaders and the Clinton administration. All are viewed by ordinary Iraqis living under sanctions as their inveterate enemy rather than Saddam. The Accord clearly realized that membership in the Council is not only counterproductive but also pointless because it will never be in a position to oust Saddam’s regime. This being the case, Denis Halliday, the former UN humanitarian coordinator in Baghdad who resigned in 1998 to protest against the sanctions, is now offering Washington and London an alternative to their murderous sanctions policy. He is proposing a 13-point plan which includes the resumption of UN monitoring of Iraq’s weapons program; imposition of “smart” sanctions on arms-producing states to prevent Iraq from obtaining prohibited weaponry; an end to the “demonization” of Iraq and its president; dialogue with Baghdad; lifting of economic sanctions; release of oil equipment to repair the country’s severely damaged oil industry; investment in the devastated economy; postponement of reparations payments which consume 30 percent of gross oil revenues; and an end to the daily Anglo-US bombing sorties which Iraq says have killed 300 of its civilians and wounded more. Halliday, who had made a career in the UN and held the rank of assistant secretary-general before he resigned, admitted to this correspondent in an interview that he was not “very happy” with his plan. But he said it had been designed to “help Washington and London to get out of this dreadful mess they have gotten themselves into” by insisting on sanctions until Saddam disappears from the scene. While he agrees that Saddam’s presence at the helm permits Washington and its loyal acolyte, London, to continue the punitive sanctions regime, Halliday thinks there are “a few people” in Washington who want to bring sanctions to an end. These people, he said, have come to realize that the US, and specifically the Clinton administration, could “be blamed for crimes against humanity, including possibly genocide” because of the sanctions. Halliday is not very optimistic about the US changing its policy under either of Clinton’s potential successors, Vice-President Al Gore or Texas Governor George W. Bush, who have shown themselves more hawkish on Iraq than Clinton. “What I’m working on now is trying to get other governments … to put pressure on Washington to change its policy” before Clinton leaves office in January 2001, he said. “In much of the world there is outrage amongst parliamentarians over the continuation of economic sanctions.” He believes that these anti-sanctions parliamentarians could reinforce the position of the 70 “courageous” US congressmen who have taken a stand against the blockade. These lawmakers understand, he said, that the “human calamity” caused by sanctions “isn’t serving the best interests of the US or Europe.” In his opinion, the UN will never again be able to impose the sort of “illegal” sanctions Iraq has endured for the past 10 years. “What is happening in Iraq is a complete breach of international humanitarian law,” he stated. It amounts to “punishing a people in order to get at their ruler.” Indeed, he believes that the sanctions provisions in the UN Charter will have to be “rewritten” so that no other population is ever targeted in the way the people of Iraq have. He defines the Iraqi sanctions as “genocide” because “if you look at the convention on genocide, it requires intent.” To sum up his thinking: since the Security Council, under US/UK pressure, persists with sanctions knowing what impact the embargo is having on the Iraqi populace, one cannot but conclude that the council is responsible for the murder of 7,000 Iraqis a month, 5,000 of them children under the age of five.
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