MDP campaign to bring the perpetrators of sanctions in Iraq to justice

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As Tony Blair has said, just because a country is democratic doesn't mean that human rights abuses do not occur, it just means that when they happen those responsible are punished. What greater human right can there be than the right to life? Yet in Iraq during the late 20th Century a crime against humanity was perpetrated and perpetuated by the West. Over a million died including 500,000 children due to sanctions imposed on this country. We believe that those responsible for the sanctions should be put on trial for committing crimes against humanity. If you wish to support our effort to do this please contact us by email.

Before the first gulf war between Iraq and the US, Iraq had free health care that was the envy of the Middle East.  Yet by 1995 researchers from the Food and Agricultural organisation had found that as many as 567,000 iraqi children had died as a result of the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the UN.  The greatest supporters of these sanctions were the US, apologists like the Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, said that she hoped the sanctions were worth it.  What could she have meant by this?  Clearly this is an admission that the deaths being caused by sanctions were an intended part of US foreign policy, founded on a twisted cost benefit calculus worthy of Nazi Germany or Stalin.  The fact that sanctions were sustained over a period of time when the humanitarian consequences were known and the scale of the death involved makes the instigators of sanctions worthy of being charged with committing crimes against humanity.  They are in the company of Hitler and Stalin for the greatest criminals in modern history.      

UN officials estimate that more than 1 million Iraqis, both adult and children, died as a direct result of sanctions.  The lack of medicine and supplies to rebuild the shattered infrastructure of Iraq in the deadly decade leading up to the millennium lead to these deaths in addition to the collapse in the economy.  Even the UN secretary general admitted that the sanctions (funded primarily by the US) were causing suffering to an entire population.  
In seeking to justify the killing of human beings in Iraq, the US laid the blame for the suffering on Iraq’s government, saying that they would have lifted sanctions if Iraq complied with disarmament of its weapons.  The quick invasion by the US of Iraq in the Second Gulf War shows that Iraq did not have the weapons to pose a threat to anyone.  Thus this claim that Iraq was the cause of the death of its civilians is unwarranted.  In fact this is a similar justification used by terrorists like Osama Bin Laden to legitimise the killing of US civilians.  He claims that because America has killed Muslim civilians then he is justified in killing US citizens.  Clearly killing cannot be justified under any circumstances.  There can be no justification for mass murder.  But those apologists who defend the sanctions on Iraq must realise that they are little better than terrorists. 

While we believe in forgiveness we must also see that this goes hand in hand with justice.  Thus we are calling on the people of the world to ask their governments to bring the perpetrators and perpetuators of the Iraqi sanctions to justice, particularly those in the US government of that time.  They must all be arrested and put on trial in Iraq or an International Criminal Court with sentences that are proportionate to the mass murder of children.  Justice is colour blind. 

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