Letter From Ramsey Clark to the UN Security Council.

[Greater Manchester Coalition Against Sanctions a nd War <mcr_coalition@DELETETHISyahoo.co.uk>]

Dear Friends,   
             here is a letter from Ramsey Clark of the
International Action Centre in the USA to the UN
security Council.

By the way, the next meeting of CASWI is Wednesday the
19th December, 7-30 at the Friends Meeting House,
Mount Street, Manchester. For more info e-mail
MCR_Coalition@yahoo.co.uk or phone 0161 286 7950.

Hussein Al-alak.CASWI

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 1/2 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 fist and most frequently. More than 1
1/2 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
Hussin 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 Domenican 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 scourage of war.
Prohibit the United States from attacking Iraq.

Sincerely,Ramsey Clark

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