Anniversary of Second U.S. Iraq War
March 20, 2003
From the Party Pres
Inspections as Hooliganism
After a visit to Iraq conducted from January 3-8 a group of NGO representatives and former UN officials issued a report on their findings during their visit. The excerpt on weapons inspections reads as follows:
“Dr. Sami Al-Araji, a nuclear engineer and Director General of Planning at the Ministry of Industry, is facilitating the work of the UNMOVIC inspectors. Everywhere we went there was a remarkable willingness to co-operate with the inspections, but patience is being tested. During our visit there was a routine inspection near the University of Baghdad where there are 6 science centres. The inspectors wanted to investigate one of these, but froze the entire complex meaning that nearly 3,000 people could not move for six hours, even though their place of work was not under inspection. This meant that toddlers were left uncollected at nursery schools. Not even the Iraqi Ambassador to the UN, there for a visit, was allowed to leave. A professor of microbiology at the University of Baghdad told us that during 1991-98 inspectors re-examined the university every three weeks, searching minutely. ‘They enter exam halls where students are doing their finals and search under their chairs.’
“Iraqi people thought the inspections would last 2-3 years, and then they could go back to normal life. The inspections are now into their 12th year, are more intense than ever, and there is no end in sight. We visited the al-Dawrah Foot and Mouth Vaccine Institute which was high on the list in the UK Government dossier (published September 2002) of biological weapons sites. Since 1994 the site has been inspected 60 times, it has been closed since 1995, when all the equipment was destroyed or removed and there were cameras everywhere connected to the former UNSCOM Monitoring Centre in Baghdad. The place was wrecked.”
It was submitted by the following list of people:
Margarita Papandreou, former First Lady of Greece; Scilla Elworthy, Director, Oxford Research Group; UK Denis Halliday, former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN and UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq; Christian Harleman, the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, Sweden; Jan Oberg, Director, the Transnational Foundation, Sweden; Zeynep Oral, Winpeace and Peace Initiative, Turkey; Omaima Rawas, peace activist and Vice President of the Syrian Arabic League, Syria; Fotini Sianou, President, Women’s Committee, European Trade Union Confederation – Member of Board, Research Center for Gender Equality (KETHI).
On January 4, speaking to these Europeans Iraqi Deputy-Prime Minister Tareq Aziz accused the U.S. of using inspections to justify aggression. “When they continue their preparations for the war of aggression, what does that mean? It doesn’t mean that they are genuinely afraid of an imaginary Iraqi threat. It means that they have an imperialist design,” Aziz said. “America has been using all pretexts about the so-called weapons of mass destruction to tell the American people and other people, specially in Europe, that Iraq constitutes a threat. But Iraq has never constituted a threat to Europe or to the United States in all its history,” Aziz said. He said Iraq has allowed the UN arms inspectors to “visit whatever sites they want to visit” and they have so far found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But the United States “didn’t say ‘let us wait for a while for the result of the inspection and then let’s decide what to do’,” Aziz said.
“We are in the middle of a major psychological operation against Saddam Hussein,” Charles Heyman, editor of
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