Thursday, March 5, 1998
U.N. treatment of Iraq equals genocide
RALLY: Students need to get involved to help stop horrific
truth
By Ahmed Shama
So the bombing didn’t take place in Iraq this time around. Now
we can all rest assured that innocent people won’t be killed,
right? Nothing can be further from the truth. There is an issue far
more pressing, far more torturous and far more inhumane than the
bombing of Iraq. Under the facade of a simple blockade, U.N.
sanctions have managed to kill millions and cripple an entire
population.
"How can sanctions be so deadly?" the innocent bystander may
ask. It doesn’t seem to make sense that placing sanctions on a
country can cause more havoc on a people than bombing. Bombing is
more visible and receives more media attention. When we see a
picture of a building being bombed in Iraq, we imagine how many
people might have been killed or injured in such an attack.
Sanctions, however, do not provide a graphic image or a concrete
idea of how they are affecting the intended target.
Well, since 1991, seven years of sanctions on Iraq – which were
intended to place pressure on Saddam Hussein – have proven to be
deadlier than most wars in the 20th century. Meanwhile, the
tyrannical dictator Saddam Hussein enjoys a complacent life in any
one of his eight palaces in Iraq. The point is clear: the sanctions
against Iraq have completely missed their target.
The statistics are startling. 1.5 million civilians have been
killed since 1991 directly because of U.N. sanctions. 560,000 of
those killed are children. If you can’t picture how much 560,000
lives is, that’s more Iraqi children killed because of U.N.
sanctions than Japanese because of the atomic bombs and Bosnians
because of "ethnic cleansing" combined. And each one of those was a
genocide. Currently, 4,500 children die every month. Do your math,
and that means that one child dies every 10 minutes. What we are
dealing with here is not a conflict between the United States and a
Middle East country. We are dealing with a genocide.
That’s the message that students have been trying to educate the
campus about on Bruin Walk this last week. Unfortunately, some
passersby are not too open to the message. In their rush to class,
they may give only a slight glance, or perhaps even take a flyer,
only to throw it away a few steps later. How could we possibly face
a starving Iraqi child and tell them that we were too busy to care.
We found fickle reasons to justify our ignorance and our
indifference to the issue.
This has to change. There will be a rally/teach-in and a march
today in front of Kerckhoff Hall at 11:30 a.m. to educate the
student body about the topic. If you support the plight of millions
of Iraqi children, or if you simply want to learn more about the
issue, come out and show your support. This is the least that we
can do to show the university – and more importantly to show
ourselves – that there are still many people out there who
care.