USA: BISHOPS BLAME SANCTIONS FOR DEATH OF IRAQI CHILDREN скачать в хорошем качестве

USA: BISHOPS BLAME SANCTIONS FOR DEATH OF IRAQI CHILDREN

(20 Jan 1998) English/Nat Catholic bishops in America say more than a million Iraqi civilians, over half of them children, have died as a result of United Nations imposed sanctions. Thousands more Iraqi children die each month, the bishops say, largely from the lack of food and medicine due to those sanctions. A group of Bishops are in Washington Tuesday, urging the U-S and other U-N members to bring an end to the sanctions. Those sanctions, they argue, are in themselves a weapon of mass destruction and the victims are the Iraqi people, not Saddam Hussein. Leaders of the Catholic coalition say they represent bishops from around the U-S demanding an end to the U-N imposed sanctions. Some 54 bishops have signed a petition as part of a letter to President Clinton saying those sanctions cannot be justified on moral grounds. SOUNDBITE: "I am appalled that the United States takes the lead in the world in imposing these sanctions on the defenceless people who are the ones being killed. I implore the President of this nation and the leaders of the United Nations - especially in the Security Council to end the sanctions, find another way to bring about peace in the Middle East." SUPER CAPTION: Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, Protest leader. Bishop Gumbleton and three other Bishops are currently fasting as part of their protest against the sanctions. The bishops say 60 percent of those million deaths, since the embargo began in August 1990, are children under five years of age. They cite data from the World Health Organisation and the U-N's own relief agency, UNICEF, indicating that more than four-thousand Iraqi children are dying monthly. They say these organizations and other relief groups can verify that food and medical aid is subject to constant delay, and often caught up in the complex process created to implement the food-for-oil deal worked out by the U-N. And they say relief groups can verify that the Iraqis' own distribution of the food aid is very good, contrary to reports from U-S officials that Saddam's regime may not be letting all of the aid get to those who need it most. SOUNDBITE: "The estimate is that between 98 and 99 per cent of what is there is getting to the people. So the starvation, the hunger, the disease that you see is caused is not caused by diversion. What it's caused by is simple lack of medicine and food." SUPER CAPTION: Father G. Simon Harak, Jesuit Priest. Further complicating Iraqi compliance, they say, is the almost total free rein enjoyed by U-N inspectors in their effort to uncover and clear out signs of the Iraqi regime's weapons of mass destruction. A bishop returning from a recent visit to Iraq spoke of reports from a Catholic leader in Baghdad who says U-N teams were taking the cause of compliance to extremes. SOUNDBITE: "He got a call one day because the UNSCOM people were in the convent - rummaging around in the convent. And so he had to go over there and stop them. And not only stop them from rummaging around in the convent, but from digging up the graveyard where the nuns were buried. They had intended to do that so he had to stop them from doing that." SUPER CAPTION: Father G. Simon Harak. The bishops say their protest is also in support of similar protests by the group Voices in the Wilderness. Members of that group have staged hunger strikes in the U-S and Baghdad against the sanctions. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter:   / ap_archive   Facebook:   / aparchives   ​​ Instagram:   / apnews   You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...