August 2004. Over a decade of economic and military warfare against the people of Iraq. Over a year of occupation of Iraq. The Apartheid Wall being built in Palestine. People cut off from their lands, livelihoods and each other. Economic devastation in Iraq and Palestine. Health care and education destroyed in each land. Resource wars over oil, water and land.

The times cry for change. The times cry for peacemakers and justice-seekers. The times cry for action. It is high time that we respond to the call to act. The times cry for us to act as if the lives of the peoples of Iraq and Palestine truly matter.

It is time to challenge our comfortable lives in the United States. To challenge our country’s acts of war and oppression. To resist the machinery of war enveloping our country. To choose the path of nonviolence over continual destruction.

We therefore initiate this campaign of Solidarity, Resistance and Liberation as we demand that our country end its actions of economic and military warfare that result, for so many, in Life Under Occupation.

Our demands include:

• Respect for all worker rights and human rights in Iraq and Palestine.
• An end to the occupations in Iraq and Palestine.
• Self-determination for the peoples of Iraq and Palestine, not a puppet “sovereignty.”
• A dismantling of all walls that separate and tear lives asunder.
• Reconstruction of Iraq and Palestine that benefits and is directed by the people of Iraq and Palestine rather than by the dictates of corporations or foreign countries.
• Reparations to families of Iraqis killed as a result of the US-driven economic and military warfare since 1990.
• Clean up of all cluster-bombs, landmines, depleted uranium and other unexploded weapons, as well as a prohibition on any future use of such weapons.
• Redirect our country’s resources away from war and to uses which affirm life, including universal health care, education, economic development and a justly reformed criminal injustice system.

by Robert Fisk

Margaret? Margaret Hassan kidnapped? She who said to me that soon, very soon, “there will be more than one lost generation” in Iraq?

Is there no end to the kidnappers’ targets? Margaret Hassan was abducted at 7.30 yesterday morning on her way to work running Care International’s Iraq operation. Soon afterwards, Arabic al-Jazeera television showed her sitting in a room looking calm, if concerned. It also showed close-ups of her identification papers and said an unnamed Iraqi group claimed it had kidnapped her.

Margaret was the enemy of United Nations sanctions on Iraq. She is the symbol of all those who believe that Iraq - a real, free, unoccupied Iraq - has a future; and all we can be told is that she, too, has joined the legion of the unpersons, the “disappeared”, the list of those who, because of their language or the colour of their eyes or their nationality, have slipped into Iraq’s dark hole.