----- Original Message ----- From: Rick Rozoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2000 5:14 PM Subject: [STOPNATO] Italian mercy flights risks shoot-down to break Iraq embargo STOP NATO: NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.HOME-PAGE.ORG Italian plane flew through Syria, under radar to break Iraq embargo BAGHDAD, April 4 (AFP) - An Italian plane which broke a UN air traffic embargo on "Operation SOS Iraq People" flew through Syrian airspace to reach Baghdad after take-off from Amman, an Italian close to the project said Tuesday. The source, asking not to be named, said the pilot of the twin-engine light aircraft took advantage of "poor communications" with Syrian air traffic control to pursue Monday's journey. It also travelled "for five minutes" through a US- and British-patrolled "no-fly" zone in southern Iraq before landing at Baghdad's Al-Rashid military airport, he said. The plane swooped as low as 100 metres (300 feet) for parts of the journey to avoid detection by radar. The aircraft carried three Italian activists -- businessman Nicola Grauso, EuroMP Vittorio Sgarbi, journalist Massimo Santopaolo -- and French Roman Catholic priest and filmmaker Jean-Marie Benjamin. The pilot, Claudio Castagna, was also Italian. On Tuesday, they visited Baghdad's rundown hospitals and prepared for meeting with Iraqi officials, including Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz. The team was to spend four days in Iraq. Their plane was the first to fly to the Iraqi capital in defiance of the sanctions imposed for the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, although other aircraft have made the trip to deliver aid with UN authorisation. Iraq's own aircraft broke the embargo in 1999, transporting pilgrims to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Pilgrimage flights were this year authorised by the United Nations. The UN embargo "has caused more than 1,500,000 deaths, of which 500,000 were children ... We consider that the massacre of these innocent children is an infanticide," the activists said in a statement. They called for the "immediate and total lifting of the embargo against Iraq and ... rapid and effective aid for the country's reconstruction". A British anti-sanctions campaigner and MP, George Galloway, failed in mid-March to win UN authorisation for a flight from London to deliver medicine to Iraq. He planned to fly 207 people -- including journalists, aid workers, doctors and political activists to Baghdad -- along with the medical supplies worth 237,000 dollars. Most of the aid was delivered overland by truck from Amman instead. Iraq's Health Minister Umid Medhat Mubarak said on Monday at a meeting in Geneva of the UN Human Rights Commission that 80,000 children under the age of five had died in 1999 because of the embargo. The monthly average of deaths in the age group has reached 6,670, compared to only 593 in 1989 before the sanctions, he said. ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ______________________________________________________________________ Start Your Own FREE Email List at http://www.listbot.com
