At the time (April 1995) of providing material for this edition, the full trade embargo on Iraq is still in place. This embargo, maintained nominally as a UN provision following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990, is now being retained largely at the sole insistence of the United States.

The entire Iraqi people, supposedly allowed access to foodstuffs and medical supplies under the terms of UN resolutions, are suffering appalling privations: diseases, many previously eradicated, are spreading through the population, and hundreds of thousands of men, women, children and babies are dying of preventable illnesses or starving to death. Iraqi assets are frozen or sequestered, and there is still a total ban on the sale of Iraqi oil. Despite US propaganda about the humanitarian provisions of Security Council resolution 706 (see Chapter 1), Iraq is being denied the means to relieve the suffering of an increasingly diseased and starving population. Iraqi claims that a million people have so far been killed by the US-protected embargo are largely supported by the independent aid agencies.

This policy of using starvation and disease against a civilian population to achieve political ends — in violation of Geneva Protocol 1, Article 54(3)(b), countless UN Covenants and Declarations, and all natural justice — is sustaining a manifest genocide. All those prepared to defend policies that are impacting with such cruelty on an entire population should reflect on their complicity, major or minor, in the perpetration of a new holocaust.

GEOFF SIMONS