Forward from:
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A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
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We have been working on a call to action with Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman,
Edward Said, and Howard Zinn. Below is the final draft, which all four of
them have signed off on and given permission to distribute. Please publish,
broadcast, post or forward as widely as possible.
Thanks, Bob Jensen
for the Austin, Texas, Campaign for a Just Peace in the Middle East
[log in to unmask]
(512) 471-1990
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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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The A-Infos News Service
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