Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Letter from Ramsey Clark to the UN

On August 27, 1999, the following letter was sent from former
U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark to the ambassador and
foreign minister of each member of the UN Security Council, and
to the UN General Assembly
International Action Center
39 West 14 Street, #206  New York, NY  10011
(212) 633-6646
  fax: 
(212) 633-2889
http://www.iacenter.org
email:  
iace...@iacenter.org
August 27, 1999
Dear Ambassador,
The United Nations, as it now functions, cannot continue to exist as an
institution of honor and hope if it fails to act immediately to lift all
economic sanctions from Iraq and prohibit the United States from
nearly daily murderous aerial assaults on its defenseless people.
The Security Council through nine years of economic sanctions forced
on it by the United States, has caused the greatest human disaster in
this last decade of a century of self inflicted human disasters.  More
than 1,500,000 people have been killed; overwhelmingly infants,
children, elderly persons, pregnant and nursing women, the chronically
ill and emergency medical cases.  The whole population of Iraq has
been afflicted.
Every UN agency dealing with health, food, and children has
confirmed the effect of the sanctions on the people of Iraq and
reported to the UN and the world regularly on this human catastrophe
since 1990.  As of August 1991 UNICEF reported at least 47,500
deaths of children under age 5 as a result of the sanctions. Hundreds
of governmental and private organizations and many more individuals
from all over the world have documented the horror caused by these
sanctions.
Only a person bereft of any concern for truth, without compassion and
possessing a character incapable of shame would claim that Saddam
Hussein, or any other agent, is responsible for what the Security
Council sanctions have wrought.
Even if some intervening causes have contributed to this human
tragedy in Iraq, the UN would be criminally responsible for failing to
rush needed food and medicine to a dying people its acts placed in
harms way.
Anyone who would justify sanctions killing hundreds of people daily
over a period of nine years based on a fear that Iraq might develop
weapons of mass destruction someday is dangerously murderous and
puts the whole world at risk by its cowardice.  The U.S. has initiated
three-fourths of all economic sanctions and blockades since World
War II.  It can claim any country is developing and planning to use
weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq was proven utterly defenseless in 1991 at its time of maximum
military power during the heaviest 42 day aerial bombardment in
history – the equivalent of 7½ Hiroshimas, on its own soil.  It has been
completely defenseless to U.S. air assaults ever since.  It never used
weapons of mass destruction while it was being destroyed.  Any such
uses it might have made in the past were few, minor compared to
casualties in the war they were engaged in and insignificant compared
to the mass destruction of civilian life by other countries, most notably
the U.S.  The U.S. assumes the power to destroy selected sites, or
whole populations by lawlessly arguing it must kill today to avoid
some highly improbable injury at some undetermined distant time in
the future.  The United States itself possesses most, and by far the
most powerful, weapons of mass destruction on earth with
incomparably superior numbers and delivery systems while continuing
to spend more on military might than the rest of the Security Council
combined.  The U.S. used depleted uranium -- 900 tons remains in
Iraq’s environment -- fuel air explosives, cluster bombs and other
prohibited weapons against Iraq and alone in the world has used
atomic bombs against defenseless cities.  It argues for the reign of
brute force and preventive destruction of whole populations.
The enforcement of the Security Council sanctions against Iraq is
genocide:
Genocidemeans any of the following acts committed with
    intent to destroy in whole or in art, a national, ethnical,
    racial or religious group, as such.
(b) Causing serious bodily, or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to
    bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Art.II, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
    Genocide.
Now, in the last year of the millennium, the United Nations has
permitted the United States to wage war at its will abandoning its
mandate to end the scourge of war and failing to do its duty to prevent
war with barely a whimper.
The UN let the U.S. led NATO into committing criminal aerial and
missile assaults on a defenseless Yugoslavia in violation of the UN
Charter, the North Atlantic Treaty and international humanitarian law.
U.S. pilots and aircraft committed 90% of all the aerial assaults on
Yugoslavia.  The consequences are thousands of deaths throughout
Serbia including Kosovo, and in Montenegro.  There were repeated
direct attacks on facilities essential to life throughout the region, on
civilians, civilian facilities and targets containing dangerous forces and
substances, all in violation of the Geneva Conventions.  NATO
leaders have conceded the obvious -- these assaults did not protect a
single life in Kosovo.  Permitting NATO to let this assault be
conducted in its name risks destroying the peace keeping role and
capacity of the United Nations and arraigning the former colonial and
the neo-colonial powers of West Europe and North America against
the rest of the world with no country able to defend itself.
The precedent in Yugoslavia of direct foreign intervention in an internal
conflict subjects every nation with internal disputes to intervention
from abroad.  The U.S. has internal conflicts with its Indigenous
peoples, who have been nearly liquidated as separate cultures; with
Black, Latino, Arab, and Asian people; many alleged terrorist groups;
and others.  Owing to its vast military, police and prison power, the
U.S. does not presently risk attacks by foreign governments, but its
foreign policy creates intense hatred which naturally tends to cause
random violence against it.
The failure of the United Nations to prevent NATO aggression and
itself act to achieve peace in the region undermines the very purpose
for which the UN was created.
Finally, the UN has failed to even admonish the U.S. for its nearly
daily aerial attacks on Iraq beginning last December and continuing
until now.  These attacks have killed hundreds of people.  The
excuses given for the attacks, as with other issues addressed in this
and earlier letters, are both false and pathetic.  The U.S. intrudes in
the air space of Iraq many times every day to harass, entice a reaction
and afflict attrition on Iraq, its defenses and the lives and nerves of its
people.  It claims its aircraft, which are illegally in Iraqi airspace, have
been assaulted whenever it chooses.  Whether true or not, it then
assaults Iraq with multiple sorties killing someone with nearly every
strike.  As with its thousands of attacks on Yugoslavia, the U.S. has
not suffered a single casualty.
The UN is inviting a world ordered by the diplomacy of cruise missiles
and economic strangulation, governance by deadly high tech military
assaults which are indefensible, and foreign imposed hunger and
pestilence.  The Superpower scofflaw responsible for both crimes is
the same deadbeat that refuses to pay its UN dues, directs the
creation of ad hoc UN criminal tribunals not authorized by UN
Charter to pursue its chosen enemies and refuses to participate in an
International Criminal Tribunal created by treaty approved by 120
nations for fear that it might be held accountable under the rule of law.
The sanctions that are killing the people of Iraq and U.S. aerial
assaults must be prohibited immediately and emergency relief and
amends provided to those who have survived.
Sincerely,
Ramsey Clark
International Action Center
39 West 14th Street, Room 296
New York, NY 10011
email: 
iace...@iacenter.org
http://www.iacenter.org
phone: 
212 633-6646
fax:   
212 633-2889

 amends provided to those who have survived.
Le No-Fly Zone possono anche essere tolte.  Basta che poi qualcuno si
prenda la responsabilita' per tutti gli sciiti e i curdi che moriranno.
Le sanzioni invece no. Fino a quando i soldi del petrolio non andranno
davvero ai cittadini.
-Stefano

 Dubito che Ramsey Clark sia un "avvocato" :)
Infatti non lo e'.
Era procuratore generale durante la presidenza
di Lyndon Johnson.
GT
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 di Lyndon Johnson.
Mi scuso. Credevo si parlasse del Generale Wesley Clark, Comandante
Supremo delle Forze Alleate in Europa.
Quindi Ramsey Clark e' solo un ex-procuratore generale degli Stati
Uniti.
Le sue parole dovrebbero avere quindi qualche peso piu' di quelle di
chiunque altro?
-Stefano