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Former USA Attorney General Ramsey Clark's U.N. Letter on Iraq
Sent to the ambassador and foreign minister of each member of the UN
Security Council and the UN General Assembly.
* * * * *
December 11, 2001
Dear Ambassador:
The Security Council must direct the United States that it may not
attack Iraq and must cease threatening to do so. Nor can it train, aid,
or finance other forces seeking the violent overthrow of the Iraqi
government. Any such acts would violate the obligations of nations under
the Charter of the United Nations and constitute crimes under
international law.
U.S. military and economic assaults on Iraq in the past dozen years are
a continuing crime against peace and humanity. They violate the Genocide
Convention.
The Pentagon admits it conducted 110,000 aerial sorties against a
defenseless Iraq, dropping 88,500 tons of bombs equivalent to 7.5
Hiroshima bombs in 42 days from January 17 to February 28, 1991. The
bombs targeted every type of structure and facility necessary to support
civilian life. Family dwellings, water and food systems and supplies,
industry, commerce, business, education, religion all across Iraq were
the direct object of U.S. bombs punishing a whole population.
More than 150,000 thousands defenseless people died in Iraq as a result
of this military assault, which included thousands of individual war
crimes. From August 6, 1990 to date, the most severe economic sanctions
and forced impoverishment have deliberately inflicted hunger,
malnourishment, sickness and death generously among the people of Iraq,
killing and crippling infants, children, the elderly, pregnant women,
nursing mothers, persons with chronic illnesses, and emergency medical
cases first and most frequently.
More than 1.5 million people have died as a direct result of these
sanctions. More than half have been children under five years of age.
The sanctions, coerced from the Security Council by the U.S., have
violated the Genocide Convention because they have deliberately created
conditions of life intended to destroy the Iraqi population in whole, or
in part, because of the nationality, race, religion and ethnic origin of
its people. The sanctions have had their intended effect.
Every U.N. agency dealing with food, health and children has confirmed
the human horror of the sanctions. They include the FAO, UNICEF, WFP,
WHO. The most courageous and honorable of the U.N. employee's directly
involved with enforcement of the sanctions and inspections under them
have resigned their positions and publicly protested the sanctions and
inspections policies. The food for oil program approved only in late
1996, and used thereafter primarily as a devise for delay, frustration
and accusation, was initiated only when international protest against
the savagery of the sanctions overwhelmed the fear in which Security
Council members held the threat of U.S. reprisal if they did not support
U.S. policies.
The U.S. has bombed Iraq whenever it chose to do so at any time for the
past twelve years. Missiles and bombs have targeted Saddam Hussein for
assassination. Many hundreds have been killed, including as an
illustration of the meaning of such bombing, Leila al Attar, the
internationally famous artist, museum director, wife, mother, human
being. The sound of U.S. jets over Iraq is omnipresent, keeping constant
the terrifying memory of the continuous aerial and missile assault of
February-March 1991 which averaged an aerial sortie every 30 seconds.
In the face of these staggering crimes against Iraq, the U.S. has
conducted a constant campaign of vilification in the international media
it controls. While claims Saddam Hussein is the evil it seeks to
destroy, its broad brush paints all of Iraq as a symbol of evil. The
U.S. propaganda is racist, anti-Muslim, hate engendering and false. The
U.S. has corrupted and seriously compromised the United Nations by
appearing to act in its name, tragically diminishing humanities best
hope for peace, dignity and decent conditions of life for all by its
decade of brutish and criminal assaults on the people of Iraq. Though
coerced, the Security Council is complicit in these crimes against peace
and humanity, war crimes and genocide because it has at the least
allowed its name and moral authority to be usurped by the United States.
The United States time and time again has acted on the advice of Plato's
Athenian Stranger, who fearing the judgment of history remains anonymous
by waging "...war for the sake of peace." Consider how victims of U.S.
wars, surrogate and direct, since World War II have fared: Korea,
Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines,
Liberia, Cuba, Guatemala, Grenada, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Somalia,
Sudan, Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras, Angola, Croatia, Bosnia,
Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iran, Indonesia, Afghanistan. Yet
where is the promised peace?
Consider the havoc direct U.S. military violence has wreaked in the past
decade on the people of Iraq, all the Republics of the former Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia created to make peace possible in the Balkans,
Nicaragua, Haiti, Somalia, Sudan, North Korea, Kosovo, Afghanistan. And
who will be next? The media reports daily on the candidates. Is there
anything Iraq has done in the past decade which threatened peace,
endangered life, or caused violence that could possibly compare with the
violence and calumny the U.S. has visited on Iraq. There is no legal
basis, or moral justification for a U.S. attack on Iraq, or for U.S.
financing and assisting in the overthrow of its government. For the U.S.
to do so is an international crime and prohibited by the Constitution
and laws of the United States. Prevailing power in the U.S. and its
government intends to attack Iraq when the current assault of
Afghanistan has accomplished its purpose to consolidate U.S. domination
over the Middle East, the Gulf region and central Asia.
Act immediately to end the shame of the Security Councils abject failure
to assert the independence and sovereignty of the United Nations under
its Charter and to end this scourge of war. Prohibit the United States
from attacking Iraq.
Sincerely,
Ramsey Clark
Distributed by www.ichee.org <http://www.ichee.org/>
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