[PEN-L:4543] U.S. genocide against Iraq

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From the Detroit Sunday Journal, paper of the striking Detroit newspaper workers
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The Silent War
Sanctions are killing the innocent in Iraq

By Michael Betzold
Journal Staff Writer

A grassroots movement fighting the U.S. government's sanctions against Iraq is struggling with an uphill battle for attention.

Many activists believe their biggest obstacle is a national media obsessed with high-tech war but uninterested in what they call an ongoing genocide.

"The great majority of the American people do not know what is happening in Iraq," said Denis Halliday, a former United Nations official who resigned over the sanctions policy. "They do not see the slow, painful deaths of young children in the arms of their mothers."

Pushed off the front pages, the war against Iraq continues with daily air strikes and the less noticeable but more devastating sanctions regimen. The effects of the sanctions, in place since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, are well-known around the world but little noticed in this country. They include, according to the U.N.'s own reports:

* One million people dead in a country of 22 million.
* A prosperous middle-class society reduced to child mortality rates comparable to those of famine-ravaged Sudan.
* Hundreds of children dying every month from malnutrition, disease and lack of medicine.
* An infrastructure devastated by extensive damage to electric power plants, water and sewage systems, roads, hospitals and schools.

Speaking in Ann Arbor recently with Halliday, Middle East analyst Phyllis Bennis said network news programmers have told her the sanctions are an old story.

"But the 15 children dying today are different from the 15 children who died yesterday and the 15 who will die tomorrow," Bennis said. "That makes it news."

Among the items banned from export to Iraq are all medicines and medical supplies, toys, detergents, dolls, bicycles, eyeglasses, soccer balls and children's clothing.

Most Americans hear about Iraq only when an American president conducts a bombing campaign, as President Bill Clinton did in the middle of the House impeachment debate in December. Since then, the United States has conducted almost daily air strikes over the northern "no-fly zone." These sorties, whose U.N. authorization is questionable, have become so routine that they are also no longer news.

"The public basically doesn't know what's going on," says William Thomson, a University of Michigan-Dearborn psychology professor and member of the group Campaign to End the Sanctions in Iraq. "That's the biggest problem. I can't imagine that the American public would be in favor of the sanctions if they knew what they were really doing."

Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., told an audience of 100 at the University of Michigan: "We don't hear that the sanctions regime is designed to kill children, set up to deny civilians access to basic needs like clean water, food and shelter."

The sanctions were authorized by the United Nations after the Gulf War to deter Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from making and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction -- biological, chemical and nuclear weapons with which he could threaten other nations.

Bennis says, however, that the United Nations has become a "fig leaf" for U.S. policies toward Iraq. While the sanctions resolution specifies steps that Hussein must take, the U.S. government, she says, keeps "moving the goalposts" by putting new conditions on Iraqi compliance. Hussein has little incentive to cooperate, Bennis argues, because there is no assurance that his government could do anything that would stop the blockade.

Critics question the morality of trying to prevent the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction by using sanctions they say are slower but equally deadly weapons of mass destruction.

More than 18 million signatures have been collected in Europe and the Middle East since December 1997 on petitions to "save the children of Iraq and ban economic blockades as weapons of mass destruction." American activists this year are trying to collect 1 million signatures on the same petition.

Halliday formerly headed the U.N.'s humanitarian "food for oil" program for Iraq. In November, he resigned his post, saying the underfunded program was inadequate to counter the food and health crisis caused by the sanctions.

Speaking in Ann Arbor and Detroit, Halliday painted a dramatic firsthand account of the profound changes wrought by what he called a "deliberately inhumane" U.S. policy toward Iraq in the 1990s.
Halliday recalled how every evening as he drove home from his office in Baghdad, small children knocked on his car windows begging for money or food. A few years earlier such behavior could not have been imagined in a culturally strong nation where begging was a crime.

Halliday's portrait of life in today's Iraq is shocking: Electrical production is almost wiped out. Antiquities have been looted. Sewage flows into the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the basements of hospitals. People are dying of diarrhea, dehydration and disease because of the lack of antibiotics. Surgery often is performed without anesthesia. A sharp rise in leukemia, thyroid cancer and birth deformities is linked to the U.S. military's use in the Gulf War of depleted uranium, which has gotten into the water systems and root crops. One quarter of all children are malnourished.

The social structure is collapsing as professionals leave their families and flee abroad. Mothers are selling furniture and heirlooms to feed their children. In a nation with a high rate of literacy, there is a 30 percent school dropout rate and most of the nation's schools need repair. Rampant inflation means a university professor's monthly salary buys a few dozen eggs. Street crime, virtually unheard of until the 1990s, is epidemic.

"What have we done to this extraordinary country?" Halliday asked. "We continue to punish the people of Iraq because we cannot communicate with Saddam Hussein.

"Forty percent of the people of Iraq were not even born when Hussein invaded Kuwait. And the others certainly were not consulted. We have to stop killing the Iraqi people because of the crimes and mistakes of their government leaders."

Bennis and Halliday both point out that Hussein was a favorite client for U.S. arms merchants in the 1980s, when he was America's bulwark against Iran. Bennis says a Maryland company sold Hussein "feed stock" for biological weapons, including anthrax, e coli and botulism bacteria.

Both Halliday and Bennis say one reason the U.S. national media are ignoring the Iraq story has to do with interlocking corporate ownership, citing weapons manufacturer General Electric's control of NBC.

Several efforts are under way locally to push for an end to the sanctions. In January, 38 U.S. representatives signed a letter to Clinton condemning the sanctions. The signers included John Conyers and Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick of Detroit, David Bonior of Mt. Clemens and Lynn Rivers of Ann Arbor.

On Jan. 26, the Student Assembly at the University of Michigan passed a resolution calling for an end to the sanctions.

Thomson, the U-M-Dearborn professor, was arrested in December inside an Ann Arbor post office for passing out leaflets opposing U.S. policy on Iraq. Another U-M professor, Jim Lupton, was arrested for the same act. They were among a group of activists who were trying to mail medical packages to Iraq.

Campaigns against the sanctions are growing, activists say, especially in the religious community. The grassroots agitation is reminiscent of the earlier years of protests against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s.

Because of media attention, Bennis says, any change in government policy will have to come because of pressure from the ground up.

"The media's failure is no excuse," she said. "We cannot continue to stand by and let Iraqi children die in our name."



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How to help

Some national and local contacts to help end the sanctions against Iraq:

* Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice, Middle East Task Force, 730 Tappan, Ann Arbor MI 48104, or Bill Thomson at 734-662-2216 or wthomson@xxxxxxxxxx
*Education for Peace in Iraq Center, 747 10th St. S.E. #2, Washington, D.C. 20003, or EPICenter@xxxxxxxx
* National Gulf War Veterans' Resource Center, 202-628-2700 ext. 162.
*Women Strike for Peace, 110 Maryland Ave. N.E., Suite 102, Washington, D.C. 20002; 202-543-2660.
* International Action Center, 39 W. 14th St. #206, New York, NY 10011, 212-633-6646.