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Activities on Iraq & Palestine in UK




DAYSCHOOL on the MIDDLE EAST:

IRAQ:  Sanctions Slaughter Continues  

PALESTINE:  50 years since Al-Naqba

List of invited guests

Changes may be made, after consultation, in the composition of the
speakers’ panels.

Panellists for morning+afternoon plenary session
Felicity Arbuthnot, Journalist, frequent visitor to Iraq
Musheir El-Farra  Musheir is Palestinian, recently returned from the
West Bank and Gaza
George Galloway, MP Labour M.P. for Glasgow Kelvin
Sabah Al-Mukhtar  President of Arab Lawyers Assn. In the U.K.
Hugh Stephens  Co-ordinator, Campaign Against Sanctions and War on Iraq
Representative from Sheffield Campaign Against War in the Gulf

Workshop leaders
When Churchill invented Iraq and bombed the Kurds
Chris Williams, Sheffield Campaign Against War in the Gulf
The rôle of the U.S./U.K. in the Iran/Iraq war.
Anne Howie, a brewery worker, member of the T&GWU, member of the
Communist League

The U.S.—Israel military alliance
John Gee, former National Secretary of Palestine Solidarity Campaign,
author of Unequal Conflict – Israel and the Palestinians

The Kurdish national liberation struggle.
To be confirmed
Unresolved issues in the "Peace Process":
Musheir El-Farra
The 1990-91 Gulf War.
Sabah Al-Mukhtar
>From the Holocaust to the creation of Israel.
John Smith, Sheffield Committee Against War in the Gulf
“Ten silent Hiroshimas”—U.N. sanctions on Iraq
Milan Rai, member of Voices in the Wilderness UK delegation to Iraq
August 1998
Oil and Politics in the Middle East
Andy Higinbottom, Chair, International Committee Against Disappearances

Videos to be shown:
An Occupation Set in Stone – 15min video from the Alternative
Information Centre, Jerusalem.
Secret War: Britain’s 1922 bombing campaign in northern Iraq. (Channel 4
documentary)


Sheffield Committee Against War in the Gulf
c/o 6 Bedford Road, Oughtibridge, Sheffield S35 0FB   ?0114 2862336 /
0114 2663597 / 0802193227

Press
Release
10 October 1998

“Childhood cancers have risen six-fold since the Gulf War, a rise which
many experts have associated with the depleted uranium weapons used
primarily by the United States and British forces during the Gulf War. …
The seven-year embargo of Iraq… means that there is a chronic shortage of
pharmaceuticals. Many cancer treatments, in particular, have been vetoed
because they contain minute traces of radiation….  “More than 1,200,000
children are believed to have died since sanctions were first put into
place: the equivalent of ten, silent, Hiroshimas.” —From the Independent
(16 April 1998) 

Day School on Iraq and Palestine : Sanctions Slaughter Continues

October 23 was to have been the day the U.N. Security Council reviewed the
economic sanctions on Iraq. At the behest of Britain and the United
States, review of the sanctions has been indefinitely postponed. On
Saturday 24 October, people in Sheffield will have the opportunity to take
part in their own review of economic sanctions on Iraq – by hearing
first-hand from several recent visitors to that country. 

These include George Galloway, Labour M.P. for Glasgow Kelvin, whose
visits to Iraq and denunciation of the U.N. sanctions regime has
attracted national media attention; Felicity Arbuthnot, a journalist and
frequent visitor to Iraq; and Milan Rai, member of the Voices in the
Wilderness U.K. delegation to Iraq in August of this year.

Workshops will look at such questions as why, following the 1979 Iranian
revolution, Britain and the U.S. supported Iraq’s war of aggression
against Iran; the events in the 1920s, when Churchill invented Iraq,
betrayed the Kurds and sent RAF bombers to quell their rebellion; and what
happened in the so-called 1991 “Gulf War”, forty days and nights in which
U.S.  and British military forces, against little resistance, bombed Iraq
into a pre-industrial age and killed 150,000 people. 

The Dayschool will also consider the tattered “Peace process” between the
P.L.O. and Israel. Musheir El-Farra, a locally-resident Palestinian who
has just returned from one of his frequent trips to the West Bank and
Gaza, will report on the reality on the ground: the slow-motion “ethnic
cleansing” of Jerusalem’s Arab population; continuing settler expansion
and land expropriations; no let-up in Israeli repression; the huge rise in
unemployment; the crisis of legitimacy facing Yassir Arafat’s Palestine
National Authority. 

50 years ago, the British Empire ceded the Palestine Mandate to Zionist
settlers, who expelled all but 133,000 of the 859,000 Palestinians then
living there, and on this basis established the state of Israel. The
Dayschool is also a response to this anniversary, and will look at
Britain’s role in the Holocaust and the dispossession of the Palestinians,
and at the US-Israeli military alliance, founded on the doctrine that only
one Middle Eastern state-—Israel—--is allowed to possess nuclear and other
weapons of mass destruction. 


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