Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 1998, Pages 24-25

Tri-State Talk: News From Greater New York

International Action Center Launches “Medicine for Iraq” Campaign

By Jane Adas

The International Action Center launched its "Medicine for Iraq" campaign on Jan. 17, the seventh anniversary of the onset of Operation Desert Storm, at the U.N. Church Center in New York. This was one of many nationwide events sponsored by such groups as the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Pax Christi, Voices in the Wilderness and the American Friends Service Committee in an effort to call attention to the consequences for the Iraqi people of seven years of sanctions.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark led a team from the International Action Center to Iraq last November to document the human cost of the sanctions. What they found, as shown in their new documentary, "Genocide by Sanctions," is staggering.

Seven years of sanctions have killed 1.5 million Iraqis, more than half of those children under the age of five. That's not counting the nearly 300,000 Iraqis killed in the 43 days of Operation Desert Storm. The surviving children suffer from malnutrition and water-borne diseases, stunting their physical and mental development.

Twenty-five percent of children no longer attend school in a country that before 1991 had the highest literacy rate in the region. The others lack ordinary materials such as pencils, because graphite is banned under the U.N. sanctions.

Half of the rural population has no access to any dependable water supply; the other half only to contaminated water. In 1991 the U.S.-led coalition forces bombed and re-bombed water treatment plants. Today the materials needed to repair them are banned, as is chlorine for treating the polluted water.

Hospital pharmacies are empty. There is no insulin for diabetics, no narcotics for pain control. Kidney patients have to forego dialysis for lack of plastic tubing. Iraqi doctors lose patients every day whom they could save for dimes with medicines they could manufacture themselves such as rehydration tablets, but they can't obtain the parts to repair the equipment to do so.

Birth defects and cancer rates are up, especially blood-related disorders such as leukemia. Iraqi doctors suspect that this could be a result of the tons of depleted uranium that were dumped on Iraq. Their findings could be relevant for understanding Gulf War Syndrome, but Iraqi scientists and doctors cannot publish, attend conferences, or receive medical journals.

There is a shortage of everything. Most of the factories that were not bombed are shut down because of a total lack of materials.

This desperate situation is ignored by the American media, which remain fixated on the latest crisis between the U.N. inspection teams and Saddam Hussain. But there is a growing awareness in the rest of the world. In Egypt, 18 million signatures were gathered in six months demanding "to save the children of Iraq and ban economic blockades as weapons of mass destruction." The signatures were presented in Cairo on Jan. 13 to representatives of the League of Arab States and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

The American government, in its attempt to ostracize Iraq from the world community, has ended up isolating itself instead through its single-minded insistence on punishing an entire nation through harsh sanctions. Ramsey Clark said that it is of the utmost importance that the American people, therefore, be given the opportunity to make amends for the government's policy.

He and the other speakers—co-chairs of the campaign John Jones and Sara Flounders, Rania Masri of the Iraq Action Coalition, Dierdre Sinnott and Brian Becker—were so persuasive that more than $10,000 was raised on the spot for the "Medicine for Iraq" campaign. More is obviously needed. Tax-deductible donations may be made out to Peoples Rights Fund/Medical Aid Project and sent to International Action Center, 39 West 14th St., #206, N.Y., NY 10011, from whom the video "Genocide by Sanctions" also is available.

International Day of Solidarity With the Palestinian People

The year 1997 held bitter anniversaries for the Palestinian people: a century of organized political Zionism; 80 years since British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote a letter to Lord Rothschild that became known as the Balfour Declaration; 50 years since the newly formed United Nations voted to recommend assigning more than half of Palestine to colonizing immigrants who at that time owned a scant 7 percent of the land; 30 years since Israel occupied the remaining portion as well as Syria's Golan Heights and Egypt's Sinai; and 10 years since the start of the intifada, with the intensification of brutal suppression that was Israel's response.

But 1997 marked another anniversary. Twenty years ago, the General Assembly of the United Nations voted to designate Nov. 29, the date of the partition resolution, as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Ninety-five nations voted in favor of the mandate; 20 against it, including the United States. The mandate has been reaffirmed by vote annually in the General Assembly, with only Israel and the United States consistently voting against it. Indeed, ever since 1980, the negative votes never have exceeded three.

This year's solemn commemoration, which took place on Dec. 1 at United Nations headquarters in New York, was a clear demonstration of the near unanimity that exists among the international community on the issue of a just solution to the question of Palestine and the frustration that the problem has remained unsolved for half a century.

Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the United Nations, the president of the General Assembly, and the president of the Security Council for December personally addressed the assembly. Each of them emphasized the special responsibility the United Nations has toward Palestine and the desire that it play a more effective role in achieving a solution.

The secretary-general stressed the importance of respect for provisions of international law and urged full implementation of agreements already reached, including those of the recent 10th emergency special session of the General Assembly, which includes a recommendation that the high contracting parties to the Geneva Convention convene a conference on measures to enforce its provisions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including Jerusalem.

Dr. Nasser al-Kidwa, the permanent observer for Palestine, read a message from President Yasser Arafat that said the peace process was facing a genuine crisis brought on by Israel's "policy of imposing dictates and faits accomplis and of the arrogance of power."

The Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and other Arabs of the Occupied Territories was created in 1968, but has never received the cooperation of the government of Israel. Its chairman, Herman Leonard de Silva of Sri Lanka, said that human rights have deteriorated since the beginning of the peace process. The total internal closure has had disastrous consequences on the economy as well as on public health. Torture continues, with the interrogators enjoying immunity in the event of the deaths of detainees. House demolitions have increased and new restrictions have been placed on people hoping to gain residency status in Jerusalem. The biggest threat to peace, De Silva said, is the lifting of the settlement freeze and the accelerated building of by-pass roads, which are off limits to Palestinians. A further problem is the leniency of Israeli law toward offenses by settlers.

Ernesto Samper Pizano, president of the Non-Aligned Movement, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe in his capacity as chairman of the Organization of African Unity, and Said El Kamal, the secretary-general of the League of Arab States, sent messages of support for the Palestinians' efforts to establish an independent state.

Ali Alatas of Indonesia, the chairman of the 24th session of the Conference of Islamic Foreign Ministers, asserted that the persistence of the question of Palestine is a searing wound to the United Nations because it means that a cardinal principle enshrined in its charter remains unimplemented. Israel's brazen attempt to alter the demographic composition of the occupied territories is a travesty of the relevant United Nations resolutions and the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Don Betz, chairman of the International Coordinating Committee for Non-Governmental Organizations, addressed the importance of countering misinformation. He said that most people alive today were born after 1947 and have no historical context in which to assess the mass of expertly prepared programming to which they have been exposed. It is therefore important to offer to the attentive public, especially in the United States and Europe, another version of the history they think they know so well—one that takes into account the past 50 years as seen and felt through the eyes and hearts of the Palestinian people.

Messages of solidarity were sent by 20 heads of state, including President Nelson Mandela of South Africa and President Boris Yeltsin of the Russian Federation, as well as by eight heads of governments, more than a dozen foreign ministers, the European Union, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, UNESCO, and several NGOs. The United States, the self-described honest broker in the peace process, was absent and sent no heartening message.

As Farouk Kaddoumi, the head of the Political Department of the PLO, told the General Assembly later that same day, the United States is not an effective performer in the peace process. Although it views the peace process from an Israeli perspective, it arrogates the role of exclusive third-party negotiator.

The United States has the means to be more active, but plays its role on this issue in a shy, hesitant way, Kaddoumi said. In complete contrast to the energy it has expended on micromanaging Iraq's compliance with other U.N. resolutions, and in disregard for the asymmetry of power between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the United States has taken the position that neither it, nor the U.N., nor any other party should have a part in the final status negotiations.

Until something happens to alter this unnatural situation, the will of the international community will continue to be frustrated and such events as the Commemoration of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People will be little more than ceremonial incidents. The individual and collective dreams of Palestinians will continue to be deferred.