Table
of ContentsThe Scoop #5 December 2000
A free newsletter of the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace (CCMEP)
Telephone 303.320.5994 * Email ccmep@hotmail.com
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Table
of Contents
Hons Von Sponeck Speech: Sanctions Must Be Lifted Now, Today, Not Tomorrow
A6 & National Organizing Update
Top 10 Most Censored Stories of the Denver Post & Rocky Mtn News
Children's Million Postcard Campaign
CCMEP's Current Campaigns
Members of CCMEP's working groups are busy with several campaigns.
National Organizing. Leading an effort to make happen a second national organizing conference on Iraq some time next Spring. Wanting to solidify a grass-roots network as well as plan for nationally coordinated actions. This idea has gained plenty of interest: More than 35 groups from around the country are willing to commit to sending representatives and help organize the conference.Outreach. Over 300 people, mostly students, have come out to see the new John Pilger film, Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq. "This film is providing critical awareness for people," says GSIS student Andrea Fuller-Goldsmith, "and that is first and foremost what we¹re trying to do." As a result, the Amnesty International chapter at CU-Boulder is taking on the issue of the U.S. War against Iraq; there are efforts to try to organize a similar group on the Auraria campus. Also leading a petition campaign to get the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News to take an editorial stand against the sanctions and bombings, this committee has created an unprecedented media packet critiquing editorials, stories, and offers sample editorials and stories that should have been covered. "We've all worked really hard to get this done," says Jane Fillmore, "and since the Chicago Tribune and the Seattle Times have come out with editorials against sanctions, I don't see why the Post and News shouldn't too."
Palestine/Israel. With the recent escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, several members of CCMEP felt called to take action. A new working group has been formed to investigate the issue, plan educational and speaking presentations, and take some kind of meaningful action. Keep an eye out for further bulletins.
"Economic Sanctions Must Be Lifted Now, Today, Not Tomorrow!"
When this fateful mistake of August of 1990 was made, through the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, the most compre- hensive sanctions ever imposed on a country were imposed on Iraq. And in the following years until now, until very much now, Iraq has become a sanctions laboratory, testing it's almost like an endurance test of humans, when you look and study the last ten years under sanctions. What to me is so deplorable, the sanctions managers that sit in the Security Council when they create these Resolutions like the most recent one that was passed in December of last year they forget that behind every line and every word of these resolutions are real faces, are people with feelings, with fears and also with hopes. I [was] on Capitol Hill earlier this week and we met with a number of Congressmen and there are seeds of hope, I can report to you. But I want to say here, Congressman Conyers told us about a response by the President of the United States to a letter written by 70 Senators and Congressmen asking for a lifting of sanctions. The Clinton response was, and I say it not in a hostile way, I am not vindictive, Mr. Clinton said: the humanitarian program in Iraq has made a major difference to ordinary Iraqi citizens. The US President is very ill advised in coming to this conclusion. Disinformation, distortion, misinterpretation, where you look you see it on all sides but the finest example of distorted information is a State Department Report of 17 September last year, where every single figure is either not explained and therefore gives the wrong impression or it is the wrong information. The information that the United Nations put together is completely sidelined doesn't exist why don't they come and talk to us? It is correct that the humanitarian program has halted, has slowed the deterioration of the human condition but it has not at all reversed that condition. UNICEF is giving us figures which I hope we will never get used to it should shake us when we read that 56 children under five in 1991 out of a thousand died and that this figure has changed to 131 in 1999. That is a horrendous figure and we should not get laissez-faire about the seriousness of this figure: that if the mortality trends of the 1980s had continued into the 1990s, 500,000 children today would grow into fledgling adults, would have survived but they are no longer among us. Try and make a fire in your kitchen, close the windows and look at the thermometer and see when it rises to 125 degrees Fahrenheit and how you feel: there are between 9 and 22 hours of no electricity. In modern buildings where people live, you can imagine what happens to their food, what happens to their well-being, what kind of diseases can also develop under such conditions. It is appalling that out of $7.1 billion one requires to rehabilitate at minimum level the electricity sector, 1.5% or $112 million is all that has become available most of it because items were held back by the Security Council because there was this fear, paranoiac fear, that it may be used for something else even though we have over 400 observers in Iraq traveling every day the roads can testify that the items go where they belong. That is the politics of the Security Council. Economic sanctions must be lifted now, today not tomorrow. The [British] House of Commons report of your parliament here has come to this conclusion
also. It¹s a blunt instrument. It has not worked. No country (their words) should ever be subjected again to such a treatment. We can do monitoring at
the border but let this, for the civilian side, end so that the country can live again. The Foreign Minister of Canada just said something very interesting and I quote: "It is imperative that sanctions reflect the objectives of the international community and not just the national interests of its most powerful members." I think that was a misprint because I think it shouldn't be "members," it should be member. Tinkering at the edges of sanctions should not be allowed. The Oil-For-Food program has been an inadequate band-aid over a festering wound and there have been no antibiotics. A6 and National Organizing Conference For years the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace has organized locally on what is essentially an international issue. Throughout our history there has always been a push from within our group to do more. To come together with similar groups from around the country and organize on a larger scale. So that the organizing we do can have a greater impact and so CCMEP working locally, in concert with other anti-sanctions groups, can have a greater effect on US policy. It made sense then, with the 10 year anniversary of the sanctions coming in August and the planned convergence in Washington DC of anti-sanctions groups from across the country, that we would use the opportunity to call for a national organizing meeting. The convergence, which took place on the weekend of August 6th, was billed The National Mobilization to End the Sanctions Against Iraq (NMESAI). It was a three-day event that included an all day teach-in with panel discussions, a talk from visiting Member of Parliament George Galloway and a screening of the John Pilger film Paying the Price on the first day. A rally with leaders from the Muslim community, a critical analysis of US foreign policy by Representative Dennis Kucinich and a brief talk by Ralph Nader on the second day. And on the third day a march down Pennsylvania Ave., which culminated in a sit-in in front of the White House where over 100 activists were arrested. The weekend also included - because of the work of some very persistent CCMEPers - a national organizing meeting wherein over 40 anti-sanctions groups discussed building a national anti-sanctions network. The meeting itself was the result of about three months worth of planning on the part of CCMEP¹s National Organizing Committee. The committee did the initial outreach to the NMESAI organizers asking for time during the weekend to have the meeting. When time on the schedule was secured, the committee focused its energies on doing outreach to as many groups as possible, to ensure that the movement was well represented at the meeting. While doing the initial outreach we found that most other grassroots groups we contacted felt a similar need to organize. An email network was established for groups to discuss the particulars of the meeting, and an agenda was decided on collectively by many groups involved on the email network. The meeting in DC was attended by close to sixty people representing about forty groups from all parts of the US. Conversation at the meeting, which was at times heated, focused on how we as a movement can better organize and what major actions we can take to bring the issue of the Iraqi people into the mainstream dialogue. Most groups, especially the smaller grassroots groups who don't have a base in Washington DC, expressed frustration with the lack of effectiveness we currently have. Many of those groups agreed with CCMEP's contention that groups need to organize into a democratic nonhierarchical network if we want everyone to feel invested in the movement. From the beginning CCMEP's National Organizing Committee has had very clear objectives: get the movement talking about why we need a national network, get the movement talking about what a national network should look like, and plan a conference in which every group interested in forming a national network can sit down and put together a plan for a democratic network of groups dedicated to ending the war against the people of Iraq. The meeting in DC got the ball rolling. We saw dozens of groups express a desire to organize nationally. We brainstormed dozens of demonstrations that could be effective if we were better organized. And we started a process of streamlining our communication network so that groups from across the country can better interact with each other. The next step is to set into place some mechanisms for large scale, movement-wide decision making. Our hope from the beginning of this process was that this would happen in a large-scale meeting of anti-sanctions groups. A meeting where representatives from as many anti-sanctions groups as are interested can sit down and hash out a simple and effective way to work together as a network. It looks like early 2001 will see this hope realized as plans are now in motion for the first conference completely dedicated to national organizing. What makes this even more exciting is that this conference may very well be right here in Denver.
News Update 12.6.00
A member of Qatari royalty was hit with sanctions of his own by the U.S. when he donated a 747 jumbo jet to Iraq. Sheik Hamad said, "The present expresses my solidarity with the Iraqi people and President Saddam Hussein..." The State Department will restrict the export and re-export of goods to Sheik Hamad. On the economic front, Iraq and India have reached an agreement for a "wheat-for-oil" deal. Iraq will export a million tons of crude above
the 1.5 million already contracted. India will export more wheat in exchange. The deal will go before the sanctions committee for approval. The Iraqi-Syrian oil pipeline is set to go online. Already 250,000 barrels a day are flowing through the pipeline which hasn't been used since 1982. The U.S. has said it will approve the use of the pipeline for export as long as the revenue goes to the U.N. escrow account in the normal manner.
We Must Keep the Pressure Up
Despite the weakening of the sanctions regime it is now more imperative than ever that we keep up pressure for the full lifting of the sanctions on Iraq. If the U.S. begins to lose in the diplomatic arena it can certainly win in the military. Progress made could easily be reversed by large scale military action by the United States and England; civilian flights would cease, improved infrastructure could be destroyed and Washington could potentially reverse concessions already made. Now is the time for the United States public to put a nail in the sanctions coffin.
#10. U.S. DOES NOT CONDEMN ARMENIAN GENOCIDE,
REWARDS TURKEY. A congressional
resolution condemning Turkey for its 1915 genocide towards Armenia was soundly
defeated by protests from Pres. Clinton and the U.S. State Department. Why? The
U.S. uses Turkey as a base to regularly bomb Iraq. Turkey also invades Iraq,
bombing the Kurds – with U.S. made weapons and full U.S. support. Plus Turkey
was about to cancel a multi-billion purchase of U.S. helicopter gunships (Bell
Helicopter Co.) Source: Washington Post,
10/20/00
#9. FOUR AMERICANS IN IRAQ. During the summer four
Americans spent two months in Iraq
living on the same food rations as Iraqis. “[They] have set up a tent across
from the U.N. compound in Baghdad, saying they won't eat for three days to
protest the effects of 10 years of crippling int’l sanctions on Iraq.” Source: Washington Post, 8/7/00
#8. U.S. BACKS OFF OF IRAQ. “To avoid a confrontation with Baghdad at an inopportune
time, the United States and other permanent members of the Security Council
have persuaded the chairman of a new U.N. arms agency to cancel his planned
announcement that weapons inspectors are ready to return to Iraq.” Source: Washington Post, 8/31/00
#7. FIRST MEMBER OF CONGRESS TRAVELS TO IRAQ.
Rep. Tony Hall (Dayton, Ohio) made an unprecedented 4-day trip to Iraq. “We saw
malnourished kids, we saw children who have leukemia. There is no question
about a drugs shortage in the pharmacy we saw,” said Hall. Source: USA Today, 4/18/00
#6. FORMER AMERICAN UNSCOM INSPECTOR: IRAQ IS
QUALITATIVELY DISARMNED. “On any meaningful benchmark – in terms of
defining Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction on capability; in terms of
assessing whether or not Iraq posed a threat, not only to its immediate
neighbors, but the region and the world as a whole – Iraq had been eliminated
as such a threat.” Source: Cape Cod Times,
3/7/00
#5. U.S. GULF WAR VETS GO TO IRAQ TO REBUILD U.S. BOMBED WATER-TREATMENT FACILITIES. “I was just so outraged that people were dying every day because of these sanctions,” [Persian Gulf Veteran] Riesch said.
“There have been estimates as high as 250 a day dying
because of the sanctions.” Source: The St
Paul Pioneer Press, 9/25/00
#4. NAT’L DEMONSTRATION IN D.C. AUGUST 6TH. “Chanting ‘Stop the sanctions now!’ and carrying loaves of
bread, a few hundred people demonstrated outside the White House yesterday
morning, and 104 were arrested when they sat on the sidewalk and refused to
move.” Source: Washington Post,
8/8/00
#3 U.S. BENEFITS FROM GIANT OIL SCHEME. “Because of the sanctions, Iraq is forced to sell its oil far cheaper than the international market price [resulting in] the theft, every year, of billions of dollars of below-market price petroleum from Iraq under the United Nations.” Source: Covert Action Quarterly, summer, 2000
#2 U.S. STOPS IRAQ
FROM IMPORTING HUMANITARIAN SUPPLIES. “In the draft of a report to be delivered to
the U.N. Security Council this week, Secretary General Kofi Annan chides the
United States and Britain for holding up more than $1.5 billion of humanitarian
supplies for Iraq…” Washington Post,
3/14/00
AND #1 DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENT PROVES U.S. KNEW SUFFERING CAUSED BY BOMBING WATER PLANTS. “The U.S.-led allied forces deliberately destroyed Iraq’s water supply during the Gulf War – flagrantly breaking the Geneva Convention and causing thousands of civilian deaths.” Source: Sunday Herald, 9/17/00.
CHILDREN’S MILLION POSTCARD CAMPAIGN
sample postcards sent in to Kouthar & Marwa
To Whom it May Concern:
To Humanity, To Faith, To all Nations
We are dying...
Is that acceptable to you?
Men, Women, Children
Young and old people are
Dying, suffering, no food,
No medicine, and that all because
One country is governing the world.
Please do something.
Shaymaa Muhammed Said
Fourth Class, Baghdad, Iraq
After visiting Iraq in 1998, two young sisters from California, Kouthar and Marwa Al-Rawi began a campaign to collect one million postcards to President Clinton. They’ve collected just over 100,000 so far. Their request:
“Please write a message or draw a picture on a postcard addressed to "Mr. President." You can even send us your "e-mail postcard." Request the end of the sanctions on the Iraqi people, for the sake of the children. Send to: Kouthar and Marwa Al-Rawi * One-Million Postcards to the President Campaign * P.O. Box 1141 * San Pedro, CA 90733-1141 USA * e-mail: Kouthar & Marwa Al-Rawi
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