Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-03-01-Speech-4-015"
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"en.20010301.1.4-015"2
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"Mr President, I share the view of Saddam Hussein expressed in this House. The Iraqi Government will have to abide by the rule of international law. So too might I suggest should the United States and Britain.
As an admirer of the ancient civilisation of the Iraqi people, I find it hard to accept that the population has been allowed to suffer so much in the economic interests of others and been attacked both from within and without.
First there was the Iran/Iraq war; a war sponsored by the West in the main. Iraq was given technology and weapons to pursue that war. US President Reagan was famously quoted as saying about Saddam Hussein “he’s a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch”. The technology for chemical weapons flowed to Baghdad. The Western military/industrial complex had a field day and poured its weapons into Baghdad. Kuwait encroached on Iraqi oilfields and the US Ambassador gave the Iraqi Government the impression that the US would not object to an invasion. That was an enormous misinterpretation by the Iraqis and they suffered the consequence.
It was right to impose sanctions in the immediate aftermath of Iraq’s expulsion from Kuwait, but it is certainly not right to continue them in their present form. It is estimated that 1.5 million people have died since the introduction of sanctions. The former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, considered 5,000 children a month as a price worth paying to get rid of Saddam Hussein. He is still there. But all those children who have died are not. What did they know about sanctions?
Sanctions hurt the citizens, as has been said already here. They do not hurt the elite of the state on which the sanctions are imposed. The Islamic world is outraged, and rightly so, at the genocidal policies being pursued in Iraq. They are storing up resentment and even hatred among the people in the Middle East and the Islamic nations throughout the world.
UN sanctions are applied with a ferocity that tears apart the fragile consensus of the region. It also plays into the hands of Saddam Hussein who has remained unchallenged for the past thirty years. He is more popular among the Arab people now than ever before."@en1
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