-Caveat Lector-
>From USA Today
12/30/98- Updated 04:48 PM ET
The Nation's Homepage
Group faces fine for aiding Iraqis
WASHINGTON - A Chicago-based group of mostly pacifists faces a
$120,000 fine for delivering medical supplies, toys and other goods to
Iraq, but its defiant leaders said Wednesday their violations of a
U.N. trade embargo will continue.
Kathy Kelly, who returned Tuesday night from Baghdad, alleged that the
sanctions are designed to keep Iraqi oil off world markets so Saudi
Arabia and Kuwait can sell more and use the revenue ''to buy our cash
crop: weapons.''
Kelly and other members of ''Voices in the Wilderness'' have taken 19
trips to Iraq in three years despite a warning from the Treasury
Department's Office of Foreign Assets that the penalty for violating
the embargo runs up to 12 years in prison and $1 million in fines.
They were in Baghdad two weeks ago, when the United States and Britain
attacked Iraq with missiles in retaliation for President Saddam
Hussein's refusal to permit U.N. weapons inspectors to look for
suspected chemical and biological arms facilities.
The embargo imposed by the U.N. Security Council eight years ago
prohibits trade with Iraq. The United Nations since has allowed sale
of $5.2 billion in oil every six months, provided the revenue is used
for purchase and supervised distribution of food and medicine. The
Clinton administration has offered to increase the amount of oil Iraq
could sell. Baghdad has rejected the offer.
Under U.S. law, trade with Iraq and travel to the country without U.S.
government permission are illegal.
The fines and prison terms threatened two years ago were not imposed,
and while Kelly's passport was taken from her early this year, a new
one was issued a few months later.
''It's time to break the Iraqi oil embargo,'' Kelly said in an
interview. ''we intend to keep violating the embargo.''
Richard McDowell, a coordinator of the group, described its members as
mostly conscientious objectors who engage in nonviolent resistance to
injustice and in opposition to all weapons of mass destruction.
The campaign against the Iraqi embargo, which Kelly said is the most
extensive ever, is the only one mounted by the group.
In a letter sent Wednesday to the Treasury Department, Kelly said:
''We will not allow the U.S. government, in the name of democracy or
national security, to order us to cooperate with a strategy designed
to starve the people of Iraq, to deprive them of medicine and medical
supplies ... or any of the essentials necessary to sustain daily
life.''
Other humanitarian relief groups have applied for and received
licenses to send supplies to Iraq, an official at the Office of
Foreign Assets Control said recently.
But Kelly has said her ''shoestring organization'' run out of her
apartment has neither the time nor the desire to obtain a license.
By The Associated Press
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