BOMBING OF YUGOSLAVIA & IRAQ
The following letter by Ramsey Clark, dated April 5, 1999, to Ambassador William Richardson, United States Mission to the UN, was sent to each member of the Security Council.
I HAVE JUST RETURNED FROM SERBIA where I surveyed civilian damage and saw civilian casualties. The targeting by US and NATO outside of Kosovo was clearly directed at ter-rorizing and crippling civilian society, as was the case with Iraq in 1991 and now. Schools; agricultural equipment; manufacturing; a bridge over the Danube at Novi Sad for local traffic (chosen instead of a rail bridge and international highway bridge); a plant producing materials to restore a historic monastery in Greece; an electrical appliances factory; and a factory producing insulation board for housing with labor from Turkey, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Serbia were among the earlier civilian facilities damaged by the bombing. These targets confirm what the US has now announced--it will strike at food, fuel, and other civilian essentials. The use of hunger as a weapon is, of course, prohibited by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Protocol I Additional of 1977 to the Geneva Convention.
The US and NATO attacks on Yugoslavia are acts of war which violate the UN Charter and the most basic international and humanitarian law. They replace the peacekeeping purposes of the United Nations with the military power of rich, caucasian countries, including virtually all the colonial powers, past and present, which have systematically repressed and exploited poor and underdeveloped countries. The attacks on Serbia outside Kosovo cannot possibly affect the struggle in Kosovo in any significant way for months, or longer.
The US and NATO strategy has radically escalated the conflict in Yugoslavia. The criminal use of air power, while killing many civilians and destroying cities like Pristina, smaller towns, and villages, has dramatically increased the internal conflict without any rational hope of deterring it or plans to aid refugees, an inescapable consequence of the attacks. The US and NATO have bombed Kosovo intensively, accelerating efforts by Serb and ethnic Albanian militaries to kill each other and making perhaps a fifth of the people refugees.
The potential for the conflict to spread to Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, Greece and Turkey is enormous. It could readily come to involve Slavs and Muslims from other regions in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, fighting in the Balkans and on their own soil.
It is absolutely essential to the integrity, the future vitality, and any meaningful role of the UN, which was created to end the scourge of war, that the Security Council and the General Assembly act now to demand that the US and NATO stop their assaults throughout Serbia and that immediate efforts be made by the UN to find pacific solutions to the many conflicts, divisions, and injuries that exist.
US militarism is out of control. It strikes where and when it chooses. The El-Shifa Pharmaceutical Plant destroyed by 21 Tomahawk missiles in August 1998 produced 50 percent of the medicines available to the people of Sudan.
The US-compelled sanctions against Iraq continue to further impoverish a malnourished and sickened population. Several hundred human beings die each day as a direct result of the sanctions. Every UN agency dealing with health, food, water quality, or children confirms that these genocidal sanctions against Iraq have taken more than one and a half million lives and permanently injured several times more. The act of genocide as defined in the Article II of the Convention includes "deliberately inflicting on (a national, ethnical, racial or religious) group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."
The US bombs Iraq constantly, killing and destroying at will. In the first two weeks of March 1999, it attacked northern Iraq with 195 bombing missions and southern Iraq with 511. Hundreds of casualties resulted. The principal targets were chosen to cripple Iraq's ability to transport and sell oil under the UN food-for-oil program in order to further deprive the people of Iraq of needed food and medicines.
On April 2, 1999, the US flew 82 bombing missions against Iraq, hitting a "communication station for the oil industries" and facilities "near a refinery." The US has abandoned the false claim that its attacks are in self defense after conducting thousands of bombing missions without a single injury.
The US assaults both Slavs and Muslims to stimulate them to attack each other and to control both. It is imperative that the Security Council and the General Assembly immediately demand that the US stop all military assaults on Yugoslavia and Iraq and end the sanctions against their people.