Criminal Complaint against the United States and Others for Crimes against the People of Iraq (1996) and Letter to the Security Council (2001)
Ramsey Clark
DOCUMENT 2
Ramsey Clark’s criminal charges against the US, Britain and leaders of the United Nations supplemented an earlier filing of 19 charges in 1991 pertaining to the Gulf War against Iraq. The charges were presented at the International Court on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the UN Security Council on Iraq, in Madrid, Spain, 16–17 November 1996.
Criminal Complaint against the United States of America and Others for Crimes against the People of Iraq for Causing the Deaths of more than 1,500,000 People Including 750,000 Children under Five and Injury to the Entire Population by Genocidal Sanctions
This Supplemental Complaint charges:
The United States of America, President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Secretary of Defense William Perry, US Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, State Department Spokesman Nicholas Burns, the United Kingdom Prime Minister John Major; aided and abetted by United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali, Rolf Ekeus, Chairman of UN Special Commission on Iraq, and each Member Nation of the Security Council and its UN Ambassador from 1991 to date that failed to act affirmatively to relieve death and suffering caused by United Nations Sanctions against the People of Iraq; and others to be named;
With genocide, crimes against humanity, the use of a weapon of mass destruction and other crimes specified herein.
The criminal acts charged include the deliberate and intentional imposition, maintenance and enforcement of an economic blockade and sanctions against the people of Iraq from August 6, 1990 to this date with full knowledge constantly communicated that the blockade and sanctions were depriving the people of Iraq of essentials to support and protect human life. These essentials include medicines and medical supplies, safe drinking water, adequate food, insecticides, fertilizers, equipment and parts required for agriculture, food processing, storage and distribution, hospital and medical clinic procedures; a multitude of common items such as light bulbs and fluorescent tubes; equipment and parts for the generation and distribution of electricity, telephone and other communications, public transportation and other essential human services. Also denied the people of Iraq is knowledge of the existence of, and procedures and equipment to provide protection from, depleted uranium and dangerous chemical pollution released in the environment of Iraq by defendants. The United States has further subjected Iraq to random missile assaults which have killed civilians.
The direct consequence of such acts and others is direct physical injury to the majority of the population in Iraq, serious permanent injury to a substantial minority of the population and death to more than 1,500,000 people including 750,000 children under five years of age.
The formal criminal charges are:
1. The United States and its officials aided and abetted by others engaged in a continuing pattern of conduct from August 6, 1990 until this date to impose, maintain and enforce extreme economic sanctions and a strict military blockade on the people of Iraq for the purpose of injuring the entire population, killing its weakest members, infants, children, the elderly and the chronically ill, by depriving them of medicines, drinking water, food, and other essentials in order to maintain a large US military presence in the region and dominion and control over its people and resources including oil.
2. The United States, its President Bill Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom and its Prime Minister John Major and other officials have committed a crime against humanity as defined in the Nuremberg Charter against the population of Iraq and engaged in a continuing and massive attack on the entire civilian population in violation of Articles 48, 51, 52, 54 and 55 of Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Convention 1977.
3. The United States, its President Bill Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom and its Prime Minister John Major and other officials have committed genocide as defined in the Convention against Genocide against the population of Iraq including genocide by starvation and sickness through use of sanctions as a weapon of mass destruction and violation of Article 54, Protection of Objects Indispensable to the Civilian Population, of Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Convention 1977.
4. The United States, its President Bill Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom and its Prime Minister John Major and other officials have committed and engaged in a continuing course of conduct to prevent any interference with the long term criminal imposition of sanctions against the people of Iraq in order to support continuing US presence and domination of the region.
5. The United States, its President Bill Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom and its Prime Minister John Major and other officials with US Ambassador Madeleine Albright as a principal agent have obstructed justice and corrupted United Nations functions, most prominently the Security Council, by political, economic and other coercions using systematic threats, manipulations and misinformation to silence protest and prevent votes or other acts to end sanctions against Iraq despite reports over a period of five years by every major UN agency concerned including UNICEF, UN World Food Program, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, which describe the deaths, injuries and suffering directly caused by the sanctions.
6. The United States, its President Bill Clinton and other officials have engaged in a continuing concealment and cover-up of the criminal assaults during January through March 1991 on nuclear reactors, chemical, fertilizer, insecticide plants, oil refineries, oil storage tanks, ammunition depots and bunkers in violation of humanitarian law including Article 56, Protecting Works and Installations Containing Dangerous Forces, exposing the civilian population of Iraq, and military personnel of Iraq, the United States and other countries to radiation and dangerous chemical pollution which continues for the population of Iraq causing deaths, sickness and permanent injuries including chemical and radiation poisoning, cancer, leukemia, tumors and diseased body organs.
7. The United States and its officers have concealed and failed to help protect the population of Iraq from the cover-up of the use by US forces of illegal weapons of a wide variety including rockets and missiles containing depleted uranium which have saturated soil, groundwater and other elements in Iraq and are a constant presence affecting large areas still undefined with deadly radiation causing death, illness and injury which will continue to harm the population with unforeseeable effects for thousands of years.
8. The United States and its officials have endeavored to extort money tribute from Iraq and institutionalize forced payments of money on a permanent basis by demanding [that] more than one half the value of all oil sales taken from Iraq be paid as it directs as the price for reducing the sanctions to permit limited oil sales insufficient to feed the people and care for the sick. This is the functional and moral equivalent of holding a gun to the head of the children of Iraq and demanding of Iraq, pay half your income or we will shoot your children.
9. The United States has violated, and condoned violations of, human rights, civil liberties and the US Bill of Rights in the United States, in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere to achieve its purpose of complete domination of the region.
10. President Clinton, Ambassador Albright, Nicholas Burns and Rolf Ekeus have systematically manipulated, controlled, directed, misinformed, concealed from and restricted press and media coverage about conditions in Iraq, compliance with UN requirements, and the suffering of the people of Iraq to maintain overwhelming and consistent media support for genocide. This has been done in the face of their proclaiming that the deaths of more than half a million children are ‘worth it’ to control the region, that Saddam Hussein is responsible for all injury and could prevent this genocide by not putting ‘his yacht on the Euphrates this winter,’ or by shutting down his ‘palace for the winter and using that money to buy food and medicine’ and by insisting that the sanctions will be maintained until a government acceptable to the US is installed in Iraq.
Ramsey Clark
New York, 14 November 1996
DOCUMENT 3
The following letter was sent by Ramsey Clark to members of the UN Security Council on 28 February 2001.
RE: Security Council Action to End All Sanctions against Iraq and Prohibit US and UK Military Assaults Against Iraq.
Dear Members of the Security Council,
The genocide in Iraq caused by Security Council sanctions forced by the United States and the bombing of Iraq by US aircraft and missiles continues unabated. A nationwide survey by 50 US citizens in Iraq last month, my eleventh trip to Iraq since sanctions were imposed on August 6, 1990, confirmed that deaths caused by sanctions increased for the tenth consecutive year, though the rate of increase has declined. General health conditions continue to deteriorate though available food and medicine has increased slightly, apparently from the cumulative effects of decade long severe shortages.
Other health concerns include increasing cancer rates, greatest among the young, which the people of Iraq and the medical care system believe are caused by depleted uranium from the near one million depleted uranium shells fired into Iraq by the US in the first months of 1991 and the probable use of depleted uranium ammunition since. Among many examples of such concern we encountered was a statement made to me by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Basra, Monsignor Djibrael Kassab, that the small Catholic population within his diocese has recently suffered three infant births with deformities never seen before including the absence of facial features and eyes, which he has reported to the Vatican.
Constant overflights with frequent aerial strikes against Iraq have continued, averaging several attacks a week with deaths and injuries nearly every week.
The Genocidal Effect of Sanctions on Iraq to 20 January 2001
Infant mortality from selected illnesses caused by the UN sanctions against Iraq has increased from a monthly average of slightly less than 600 deaths in 1989 to more than 6700 in 2000, or eleven times. The percentage of total registered births under 2.5 kg in 1990 was 4.5 per cent. In 2000 it was nearly 25 per cent, up five times. For children under five years old the average number of reported cases of kwashiorkor, marasmus and other malnutrition illnesses caused by protein, calorie and/or vitamin deficiences rose from less than 8550 in 1990 to 190,000 in 2000, an increase of more than 22 times.
The sanctions must be completely removed immediately. Every day the sanctions continue adds to the death toll of the worst genocide of the last decade of the most violent century in human history.
The US, realizing that world opinion will no longer tolerate the sanctions, is seeking to take credit for modifying them while its purpose will be to continue to control their implementation and cause their reinstatement for alleged violations by Iraq. Under the ruse of arms inspections and false claims of arms violations, the US has systematically frustrated any easing of sanctions. The US has claimed, and failed to prove, a long series of violations by Iraq, including false claims that Iraq was withholding food and medicine from its own people, when Iraq’s model system of food distribution and rationing has saved its people. I have repeatedly reported these US deceptions to the Security Council since the food for oil program was initiated. Combined with the failure of the Sanctions Committee to approve contracts by Iraq for purchases of urgently needed medicines, food and equipment, the US has succeeded in preventing the easing of sanctions and will continue to do so if they are not completely ended.
Criminal Aerial Assaults on Iraq
The United States has bombed Iraq from aircraft and cruise missiles with impunity since the ceasefire in February 1991. In the week before the inauguration of William J. Clinton as President of the United States on January 20, 1993, President George Bush authorized a fierce campaign of bombing. President Clinton continued the aerial attacks and bombing on January 21, 1993 and throughout his eight years in office. On occasion large numbers of cruise missiles were launched, hitting among many civilian facilities the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad and the home of Iraq’s most famous painter and the Director of its Museum of Modern Art, Leyla al Attar. Out of thousands of unlawful aerial sorties and hundreds of violent attacks on defenseless people in Iraq, including the passengers on a UN helicopter, the US did not suffer a single casualty. Still the US has insisted it must attack and kill Iraqis to protect its aircraft which had no right to fly over Iraq, though no US aircraft have been hit.
US aircraft joined occasionally by UK planes attacking targets in Iraq are engaged in criminal violence and crimes against peace. Those who ordered the flights and attacks, and the pilots who executed the orders committed criminal acts that have caused the deaths of hundreds of people.
The Security Council has condoned these continuing criminal assaults under pressure from the US and, tragically, has approved the genocidal sanctions against Iraq. It has ignored other illegal attacks by the US including the surprise attacks on Tripoli and Benghazi, Libya in April 1986 which killed hundreds of civilians, and the 20 cruise missile assault on the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan in August 1998 which provided half the medicine available to the people of Sudan. Nothing could be more dangerous to world peace.
The new US Administration has continued to make criminal aerial assaults on Iraq and threatened to increase them as an alternative to sanctions which it now suggests have failed.
The Security Council must proclaim the assaults on Iraq to be the crime they clearly are and demand they stop.
Widespread and growing anger at the genocidal sanctions and the criminal assaults against Iraq will turn into rage, violence and war unless they are stopped. The very first purpose of the UN is to prevent this scourge of war.
Sincerely,
Ramsey Clark