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abolition-usa-digest      Friday, January 8 1999      Volume 01 : Number 057




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Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1999 23:08:59 EST
From: [e-mail]
Subject: (abolition-usa) Re: Call to Action on Sanctions

In a message dated 1/8/99 10:38:12 PM Eastern Standard Time,
[e-mail] writes:

<< ate:    1/8/99 10:38:12 PM Eastern Standard Time
 From:    [e-mail] (J Schaffner)
 To:    [e-mail] (CoC - 1)

 (This was forwarded on the ZNET list)
 January 8, 1999

 A CALL TO ACTION ON SANCTIONS
 AND THE U.S. WAR AGAINST THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ

 by Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Edward Said, and Howard Zinn

 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 harsh economic
 sanctions. This is a call to action to end all the war.

 This month U.S. policy will kill 4,500 children under the age of 5 in
 Iraq, according to UN 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, at
 least hundreds of thousands -- maybe more than 1 million -- Iraqis
 have died as a direct result of the UN sanctions on Iraq, which are a
 direct result of U.S. policy.

 This is not foreign policy -- it is sanctioned mass-murder that is
 nearing holocaust proportions. 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.

 The time has come for a call to action to people of conscience. We are
 past the point where silence is passive consent -- when a crime reaches
 these proportions, silence is complicity. There are several tasks ahead
 of us.

 First, we must organize and make this issue a priority, just as
 Americans organized to stop the war in Vietnam, and to protest U.S.
 policies in Central America and South Africa. We need a national
 campaign to lift the sanctions.

 This kind of work has already begun, and those efforts need our help.
 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, Voices in the Wilderness
 in Chicago, 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.

 Such a campaign is not equivalent to support for the regime of Saddam
 Hussein. To oppose the sanctions is to support the Iraqi people. The
 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, to counter the hypocrisy and inhumanity of our leaders.

 Also, there has been a virtual embargo on news of the effects of the
 sanctions in the mainstream media. For the most part, the American
 people do not know what evil is being carried out in our name. We must
 continue to apply pressure on journalists at all levels -- from our
 local papers to the network news -- to cover this tragedy. We should
 overwhelm the major press with letters to the editor and put pressure on
 journalists to cover the story.

 And we must realize this could be a long struggle. Preparations should
 begin for all the possible strategies, including civil disobedience
 once a sufficient number of people are committed. Direct action that
 forces a moral accounting likely is going to be necessary.

 Whatever else we are doing, we should treat this as an emergency and put
 it at the top of our agenda. Existing groups can work on the issue,
 new groups may need to be formed, and national networks need to be
 built. A good central source of information exists on the web at
 http://leb.net/IAC/.

 Without action by us, the horrors will go on, the children will continue
 to die. We must appeal to the natural sympathies of the American people,
 who will respond if they know what is happening. We must therefore bring
 this issue, in every way we can, to national attention. The only way to
 avoid complicity in this crime is to do everything we can, and much more
 than we have been doing, to end the sanctions on Iraq. This issue must
 be discussed in every household and every public forum across the
 country.



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