POLITICS-IRAQ: US Week of Anti-Sanctions Protests

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Apr 26 1999 (IPS) - Students and professors at more than 100 campuses in the United States are protesting this week against nearly nine years of sanctions that have operated against against Iraq.

The students have joined forces with religious leaders and peace groups who believe that the sanctions are hurting Iraqi civilians but accomplishing little else.

The demonstrations include a campaign to mail to Iraq simple medical supplies, like aspirin and bandages, plus pencils, notebooks and bleach – which are in short supply because of the sanctions.

The U.S. Postal Service is banned from delivering such goods to Iraq and the organisers say their action is intended “to highlight the absurdity of the US policy”.

“By joining forces in this week of coordinated action, we aim to speak in a loud voice to policy-makers in Washington to say, ‘Enough of the killing in our name’,” says Will Youmans, a student at the University of Michigan and a national coordinator of the protests.

“We will no longer stand idly by while the United States squeezes the life out of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through the dreadful sanctions policy,” he says.

“The overwhelming suffering of the Iraqi people – particularly the children, who are completely innocent – compels us to seek an end to the Iraqi sanctions,” adds Bishop P. Francis Murphy of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, one of the organisers of the mail drive.

Grassroots opposition to the United Nations sanctions on Iraq has grown in the United States in recent years, particularly since the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimated that some 5,000 Iraqi children die each month from sanctions-related disease and malnutrition.

The groups participating in the week-long protests include students on campuses ranging from the University of California- Berkeley to Harvard University in Massachusetts, as well as religious groups like the Quakers’ American Friends Service Committee and the Catholic-based Pax Christi USA.

This year’s protests come at a time when the United Nations is itself divided about the effectiveness of sanctions, with several nations on the 15-member UN Security Council – including Russia and France – openly questioning the need for the embargo.

The Security Council currently is locked in a tense debate over how to reshape the United Nations’ role in Iraq, ever since US and British air strikes on Iraq last December ended Baghdad’s cooperation with UN weapons inspectors.

According to UN sources, several members of the Council want to see the sanctions ended or eased, as a reward for past Iraqi cooperation with the weapons inspectors. While the United States has resisted any change in the sanctions, Britain has suggested expanding Iraq’s UN exemption to buy humanitarian goods.

Despite the diplomatic haggling about the sanctions, few believe that the embargo – first imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 – will be lifted soon.

For the sanctions to be removed, Iraq must be certified by the United Nations to be free of “weapons of mass destruction”, such as biological, chemical and nuclear arms and long-range missiles. But the UN weapons inspectors have not been allowed back into Iraq since the December attacks, and no certification is likely as long as they remain outside Iraq.

Washington equally is unlikely to adopt any policy to ease the sanctions as long as its nemesis, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, remains in power. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has argued that the sanctions have been “worth it” because they help to keep Hussein “in his box”.

The US argument for maintaining sanctions has been that it is the only incentive for Baghdad to comply with UN demands to scrap its arsenal of prohibited weapons.

Yet Denis Halliday, a former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, argued last year that such a policy had failed, with sanctions killing innocent civilians and embittering most Iraqis, but leaving Hussein’s regime largely unaffected.

In response, the student committee of the Washington-based Iraq Action Coalition is hoping that the week’s campus protests can help to build “an effective force toward ending the US war on the Iraqi people”, argued Rania Masri, a coordinator of the protests and student at North Carolina State University.