Sir, - According to the UN, the sanctions/embargo against Iraq since 1990 have directly killed two million people, including hundreds of thousands of children. The death toll exceeds that of the Rwandan genocide. Such deliberate mass destruction of human life is utterly immoral.
The embargo's terrible effects were deliberately accelerated by US bombing of Iraq during and after the Gulf War, and made truly horrible by the sudden increase, at the war's end, in strange illnesses that started in southern Iraq and spread north. Why did the diseases suddenly appear? In a report for the UN, the Cork geology consultant Bill Griffin details evidence that during the war US or British forces used biochemical weapons called mycotoxins. The US army demanded this before it would start the ground war. It said it was a means of achieving "very high attrition" and "reducing Iraqi combat effectiveness by at least 50 per cent". This would explain the diseases seen in Iraqi victims and US veterans. Mycotoxins cause destruction of blood-forming tissue, brain haemorrhaging, nervous disorders, coma and death.
For some time the US and Britain alone have kept the embargo in place through their veto on the UN Security Council. This makes them responsible for most of the two million killed. They could have lifted it long ago. The other permanent members, Russia, China and France, have expressed their desire to do so.
What is the Irish Government doing at the UN and elsewhere to end this genocide and this abuse of the UN and the veto? UN members should speak out against this ongoing crime against humanity and against attempts to worsen it by more bombing. An Irish member of UNSCOM resigned in protest at the embargo. The former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds publicly called for its end. The Irish Government should also call for an end to the embargo now and distance Ireland from involvement in this genocide by embargo. - Yours, etc., P. Farrell,
Lucan, Co Dublin.