BRING THOSE RESPONSIBLE TO ACCOUNT
Letter to UN and UK Attorney General
On 7th December 2005 Tony Benn and forty three others, including Rose Gentle, Reg Keys, Harold Pinter, and Michael Mansfield QC, sent a letter to The UN and to the UK Attorney General asking them to investigate breaches of The Nuremberg Charter and Geneva and Hague Conventions during the Iraq War, and to bring those responsible to account.
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REQUEST TO KOFI ANNAN, SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE UNITED NATIONS, AND TO THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED KINGDOM
With Reference to The Iraq War 2003 - 2005
This is a request to Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the UN that he should instigate an investigation into the claims listed in the attachment to this memorandum. It is also jointly addressed to Lord Goldsmith the Attorney General of the UK. The UK is a High Contracting Party and Signatory to The Geneva and Hague Conventions and Protocols and The Nuremberg Charter of 1945, and of The Rome Statute of The International Criminal Court. It is thus appropriate that The Attorney General should investigate what appear to be grave breaches of these Conventions and Protocols, and of UN General Assembly Resolution No 95, before and during the Iraq War 2003 - 2005.
We are concerned that, should these breaches be established, those responsible should be held to account. This is urgent. It appears that many breaches, even now, are continuing to take place.
Submission:
We allege that the breaches committed by the UK Government and the USA in coalition partnership during the period 2002 - 2005 outlined as a selection in summary are as follows:-
- Crimes Against Peace: Planning and Conducting an Aggressive War using deceit, including deliberately falsifying reports to arouse passion in support of this war.
- Failure to ensure public order and safety by disbanding the army and police of Iraq, without properly replacing those functions.
- Extensive destruction of service infrastructure, including drinking water, sewage systems, telephones and electricity supply, with grave consequences to the inhabitants of Iraq, especially in hospitals.
- Deliberate damage to hospitals and medical facilities and personnel including the shooting up of Red Crescent ambulances, and prevention of movement of ambulances.
- Failure to prohibit looting and arson resulting in the despoliation and pillage of museums, libraries, archaeological sites, hospitals, administrative buildings and state records.
- Failure to respect cultural property including the use of the Babylon archaeological site as a military camp.
- Economic exploitation of occupied territories by orders of The Provisional Coalition Administration to the benefit of foreign interests, including the use of Production Sharing Agreements, and IMF rules, even though warnings were made by the Attorney General that these may be construed as contrary to International Law.
- Seizing botanical assets by Provisional Coalition Administration Order 81, which ends the prohibition of private ownership of biological resources, and introduces foreign monopoly rights over seeds.
- Political persecution by initially sacking all Baath Party members, thereby very severely reducing the administrative and professional class who had been obliged to be members.
- Religious persecution: US Defence Secretary memo of 2 December 2002 sanctioned the use of religious humiliation against detainees.
- Use of cable ties as a restraint to detainees' wrists causing injury and unnecessary suffering.
- Use of hooding detainees, wilfully causing mental suffering, especially when used for prolonged periods, or when combined with assault.
- Use of dogs as a means of obtaining information authorised by US Defence Secretary memo of 2 Dec 2002.
- Forcing detainees to stand for many hours as a means of obtaining information authorised by US Defence Secretary memo of 2 December 2002, and practised at Abhu Ghraib and other US prisons.
- Sexual and bodily humiliation of detainees, including rapes, and stripping naked for long periods.
- Aggressive patrolling with indiscriminate mass arrests of males, including 14 year olds, indiscriminate destruction of property, and invasion of women's' quarters contrary to tenets of the Koran.
- Killing and wounding treacherously by indiscriminate shooting at check points, strafing of groups of obvious civilians, and disproportionate use of force in residential areas.
- Degrading treatment of detainees by marking foreheads and bodies with indelible marker pens as a means of identification and control.
- Use of cluster bombs on grounds of military expediency. As well as being munitions causing random unnecessary suffering by steel spicules, incendiary and depleted uranium bomblets, a large number don't explode, effectively becoming land mines.
- Use of depleted uranium shells, on the grounds of military expediency, causing a very long term legacy of radioactive damage to the environment, cancers and birth defects.
- Use of white phosphorous (WP) chemical munitions.
- Collective penalties in Fallujah during the first assault of April 2004 when 1,000 Iraqis including 600 women and children were killed.
- Evacuation of Fallujah, ( a city nearly the size of Cardiff) in preparation for a second disproportionate assault in November 2004, which employed the use of starvation and thirst on an entire population, targeting of hospitals, medical staff and ambulances, indiscriminate shooting of non combatants and destruction of private and state property.
- Failure to keep a proper record of POW names and locations.
- Failure to treat POWs humanely, especially those held in the open in the sun.
- Abolition of Habeas Corpus: holding an estimated 30,000 prisoners without charge or trial over an indefinite period.
- Failure to record Iraqi deaths and injuries with consequent failure to determine proportionality or medical requirements of survivors. Also causing unnecessary suffering to relatives of the deceased.
- Unilaterally holding that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to certain actions, especially to the use of private security contractors, and mercenaries and to the detention of certain types of enemy combatants.
EVIDENCE
Much of the evidence for these actions, which we believe are contrary to International Law, are now in the public domain: for instance: The Secret memo from David Manning to The Prime Minister dated 14 March 2002, The Confidential and Personal memo from The British Ambassador to the USA to the Prime Minister dated 18 March 2002. Clare Short's book "Honourable Deception?" Greg Dyke's "Inside Story", Robert Fisk's " The Great War for Civilisation", President Chirac's interview of 10 March 2003, Hansard, the British Museum sponsored book on the looting of Iraq's National Museum and use of Babylon as a US base, the report on the destruction of "Iraqi Hospitals Ailing Under Occupation" by Dahr Jamail, Lee Gordon's eye witness account in 'Camden New Journal' of the shooting up of ambulances in Fallujah, The Peacerights Report of the Inquiry into the alleged Commission of War Crimes by Coalition Forces in The Iraq War During 2003 ", The Rumsfeld memo of 2 December 2003, gun film footage of the F16 strike against civilians in Fallujah, photographs of mistreatment of POWs at Abhu Ghraib.
More detailed evidence for all these atrocities will be provided by us if so required.
Signed.....................................Tony Benn, 7th December 2005
Letters in identical terms have been signed and approved by those listed above.
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If you agree with the Tony Benn Submission, please visit the Stop The War website (www.stopthewar.co.uk) and add your name to the call.
CALL FOR ACADEMIC AND CULTURAL BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL
Whereas Israel’s colonial oppression of the Palestinian people, which is based on Zionist ideology, comprises the following:
· Denial of its responsibility for the Nakba -- in particular the waves of ethnic cleansing and dispossession that created the Palestinian refugee problem -- and therefore refusal to accept the inalienable rights of the refugees and displaced stipulated in and protected by international law;
· Military occupation and colonization of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza since 1967, in violation of international law and UN resolutions;
· The entrenched system of racial discrimination and segregation against the Palestinian citizens of Israel, which resembles the defunct apartheid system in South Africa;
Since Israeli academic institutions (mostly state controlled) and the vast majority of Israeli intellectuals and academics have either contributed directly to maintaining, defending or otherwise justifying the above forms of oppression, or have been complicit in them through their silence,
Given that all forms of international intervention have until now failed to force Israel to comply with international law or to end its repression of the Palestinians, which has manifested itself in many forms, including siege, indiscriminate killing, wanton destruction and the racist colonial wall,
In view of the fact that people of conscience in the international community of scholars and intellectuals have historically shouldered the moral responsibility to fight injustice, as exemplified in their struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa through diverse forms of boycott,
Recognizing that the growing international boycott movement against Israel has expressed the need for a Palestinian frame of reference outlining guiding principles,
In the spirit of international solidarity, moral consistency and resistance to injustice and oppression,
We, Palestinian academics and intellectuals, call upon our colleagues in the international community to comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel’s occupation, colonization and system of apartheid, by applying the following:
Refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions;
Advocate a comprehensive boycott of Israeli institutions at the national and international levels, including suspension of all forms of funding and subsidies to these institutions;
Promote divestment and disinvestment from Israel by international academic institutions;
Work toward the condemnation of Israeli policies by pressing for resolutions to be adopted by academic, professional and cultural associations and organizations;
Support Palestinian academic and cultural institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts as an explicit or implicit condition for such support.
Contact Us: PACBI, P.O.Box 1701, Ramallah, Palestine
Email: info@boycottisrael.ps
For more information: www.pacbi.org
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