GAMA: IRAQ: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?

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        GLOBAL ALTERNATIVE MEDIA ASSOCIATION - GAMA - PRESENTS:
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                news provided via our member "infoPool"
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SOURCE: Voices in the Wilderness
HEAD:   Mission Accomplished?


  "To care, you have to know.  To understand, you have to
witness.  To help, you have to feel part of a shared condition."
   Robert Preston, The Guardian (Aug. 31, 1996)


Imagine that you live in a desert climate during one of the
hottest summers on record with mid-August temperatures reaching
130 F for the past several days.  Because the region's electrical
system shuts down at least five times a day, even air-conditioned
buildings are stiflingly hot.  You know that you should drink at
least a gallon of water each day.  Yet even the bottled water
(which costs 500 times the price of gasoline) isn't potable.Your city's  
sewage and sanitation system needs repair, the water
mains are corroded, and the water supply is contaminated.  The
U.S. and the U.N. know that your city desperately needs spare
parts and chlorine to purify your water.  They know that  over
half a million children have died in your country, many from
water borne diseases.  They know, but they apparently don't care.

They maintain the harshest U.N. embargo ever imposed on a
country.

Imagine further that you have several children who are always
hungry, always thirsty.  You give them water, poisoned water, and
your family generally shares a mixture of tomatoes and oil which
you eat with bread twice a day.  The children take turns eating
breakfast, rotating once every three days.  You're horrified at
the prospect of ever hospitalizing one of your children, even
though they frequently suffer serious maladies.  Conditions in
the ill-equipped, understaffed and unsanitary hospitals are
gruesome.  Although the medical personnel are dedicated, they
lack medicines and even the most basic medical supplies.

A Voices in the Wilderness delegation encountered these appalling
conditions during an August 6 - 15, 1996 visit to Iraq.  In an
August 24 letter to the New York Times, delegation member Brad
Lyttle wrote:  "...the current sanctions against Iraq are slowly
destroying an entire generation of Iraqi children, and killing
countless thousands of old, and otherwise weakened people."Lyttle  
concluded that "the sanctions should be lifted at once,
and a massive food and medical relief effort initiated that could
save the children, and old and sick people of Iraq, and give the
Iraqi people some hope for the future."

Several weeks later, the Iraqi government sent troops into
northern Iraq, responding to a Kurdish Democratic Party request
for assistance to defeat rival Peoples Kurdish Union fighters
whom Iran supports.   The U.S. government then opted to "protect
human rights"  through two days of cruise missile attacks on
southern Iraq.

Cruise missile attacks on southern Iraq do nothing to protect
Kurds in northern Iraq.  So-called U.S. intent to defend autonomy
and lives of Kurds is absurd and hypocritical.  By arming Turkey,
which severely oppresses its Kurdish population, we do just as
much to harm and attack Kurds as Saddam Hussein is doing.
It's reasonable to infer that the real purpose of the cruise
missile attacks was to protect Bill Clinton from Bob Dole, and
that the missiles targeted southern Iraq in order to weaken Iraqi
capabilities in the vicinity of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
The major violation of human rights in Iraq stems from the U.S. /
UN imposed sanctions against Iraq which prevent Iraqi people from
meeting their most basic human rights, the rights to food, water
and decent shelter.

Bill and Hilary Clinton point out that it takes a village to
raise a child.  That village needs to have clean water, a
functioning sewage system, effective medical care and adequate
food if its children are to survive and be healthy.  The economic
embargo against Iraq, pushed and enforced by the United States,
deprives millions of Iraqi children, in every village and town,
of these necessities for survival.

                                *  *    *

The Voices in the Wilderness campaign will continue to openly
violate the U.S/UN sanctions by delivering two more shipments of
medical relief supplies to Iraqi hospitals before the end of this
year.    To learn more about the campaign, host a speaker, and/or
contribute toward medical relief supplies and organizing efforts,
please contact:   Voices in the Wilderness, 1460 West Carmen
Avenue, Chicago, IL  60640  312-784-8065  kkelly at igc.apc.org