Paper presented by Deirdre Sinnott to the December 10, 1998 conference in Baghdad, Iraq on the 50th Anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

This issue before this conference goes to the essence of one of the most important human rights issues in contemporary times.

It is easy for governments to preach the sanctity of human rights. We know, for instance, that the U.S. government, from the president to the secretary of state, spend an enormous amount of time posturing before the U.S. public about the need to uphold human rights. Moreover, they go all over the world lecturing other countries and other governments about this issue.

Given the U.S. government's actions, not its words but its actions, this rhetoric about human rights would be laughable unless one considers the dimensions of the catastrophe for real human beings that is a result of actual U.S. policy.

There is an old saying, it's become a cliché, that the first casualty in war is the truth. Why? Because the war-makers often have to disguise their intentions, their objectives, and the human suffering that they will oppose_not so much to deceive the "enemy" but to hide the truth from their own people.

There is a war going on today. It's a war by the U.S. against the country of Iraq. It is a war by a government that has a massive nuclear, chemical, and biological arsenal against a Third World country.

The war has had many dimensions. Most dramatic of all was the bombing war carried out during those awful 42 days in January and February, 1991. That war violated international law, it violated the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg Code, and it made a mockery out of the UN Charter.

But the other front in this war is the sanctions war. That's what we should call it_the sanctions war. The war that has taken so many lives here in Iraq. The lives of innocent people. I don't need to recount again the genocidal nature of the sanctions war.

What I want to address is that in this war the U.S. government has been unable, unwilling to tell the truth. It hides from the people in the U.S. its own criminality, its own capability to carry out, in a premeditated war, the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of infants.

Truth is another casualty in the sanctions war. The U.S. government tells its own people that it is Iraq's "intransigence," Iraq's "defiance," Iraq's "noncompliance" that is responsible for the suffering. They rarely allow the true graphic depictions of the sick and suffering Iraqi people to be presented in the mass media in the U.S.

Instead, just a steady stream of vilification, racism, and demonization to create hatred against Iraq. In the U.S.--with its long history of slavery of African people, genocide of Indian people, and colonization in the Third World_the U.S. political and media establishment has perfected the use of chauvinism and racism as a means of deceiving its own population. Otherwise, its population will revolt such an anti-people policy.

Iraq is an embargoed country, there is an economic blockade. But there is an information blockade as well. There is an embargo on the truth. And it's this which is the domestic component of U.S. sanctions policy against Iraq.

We're here to break this information blockade. To learn the truth in Iraq, to document the truth, and to deciminate it when we return to the U.S.

The most important things that this conference can accomplish is to say in one clear, loud voice by the international community that sanctions are not a benign alternative to war-- they are, in fact, the grossest violation of human rights on a mass scale.

This may seem like a small act, but it strikes a blow against the information blockade. It helps us take the next step in our appeal to the most important court, the court of world public opinion.

It is only the mobilization of the people in the U.S. and all continents, forged together into an effective mass movement for human rights, that will be able to tear this sanctions regime down and allow the Iraqi people and their society to return to a degree of normalcy.

Yes to human rights!

Yes to the solidarity of all those fighting for justice!

End the sanctions now!

Back to Iraq Sanctions Challenge December 1998

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