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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. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a discussion list run by Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To be removed/added, email soc-casi-discuss-request@lists.cam.ac.uk, NOT the whole list. Archived at http://linux.clare.cam.ac.uk/~saw27/casi/discuss.html