by Cathy Breen

WE HAVE COME SO FAR…are the words on one of the banners we are holding at a 2-week vigil and fast in front of the U.N. headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. The United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) will be meeting here in the end of June to determine how much of a remaining $65 billion in war reparations claims will be imposed against Iraq. We have come to ask the Commission, at what point will innocent Iraqis no longer be penalized for the unjust acts of Saddam Hussein’s regime?

As I was handing out statements with the intentions of our vigil to passersby, he came towards me, and our eyes met in joyful recognition. Raad, our friend and “stargazer,” who looked from his rooftop in Baghdad at the constellations and planets between the bombings. When we left Iraq after the horror of “Shock and Awe,” we took his words with us, “We must continue to celebrate the universe.”

How long has it been since we’ve seen one another, a year and a half perhaps? How much has transpired in that time? Together with two Italian women and another Iraqi woman colleague, Raad had been kidnapped in early September of 2004 in the offices of Bridges to Baghdad. At one point during their 3-week captivity, we had received the news that they had most likely been killed. I remember how we grieved on that day. You can imagine then our relief and jubilation, and that of his family, upon their release.

Cynthia Banas, Kathy Kelly, Leisa Faulkner, Rita Jankowsa-Bradley, Jeff Leys

by Kathy Kelly

“Where you stand determines what you see, and how you live.”

That’s how Voices in the Wilderness members began our statement explaining why we’d decided to stay in Baghdad during the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing of Iraq. During the long war of the economic sanctions, we had stood at the bedsides of numerous mothers who held dying infants and looked at us with imploring eyes, asking “Why?” We saw too much of the catastrophic military and economic violence inflicted on ordinary Iraqis to ever consider giving up on efforts to end UN/US economic sanctions. We had returned to our homes haunted by the gasps of children in hospital wards that served as little more than “death rows” for infants, and we had tried to alert people in the U.S. and the U.K., people with some level of control over their governments, about how those governments brutally and lethally punished Iraqi children for political actions they could not control.

Where you stand determines what you see. For the latter half of June, eight of us will do plenty of standing, again in opposition to economic punishment of ordinary Iraqis, with children bearing the hardest punishment. We’re fasting for fifteen days leading up to the June 28-30 UNCC deliberations over whether to saddle the poorest Iraqis with billions of dollars of Saddam Hussein’s debt.

A Fast for Economic Justice in Iraq

Farah Marie Mokhtareizadeh

By Farah Marie Mokhtareizadeh

GENEVA–As I made my journey from Camden, New Jersey to Geneva I became overwhelmed with curiosity imagining what a country that stayed ambitiously neutral during World War II, and had produced such recognized documents as the Geneva Conventions would be like. Would Geneva be a haven of progressive politics and social radicalism? Or would the shroud of Calvinism and the “protestant work ethic” thwart my romantic sway? Upon arriving I found Geneva to be a beautiful city, confident, elegant and spotless! However, the immense “success” of the banking industry fills the poetic potency of the city with the sterile air of classicism. The revolutionary social writings of one of Switzerland’s most well known philosophers, Jean Jacques Rousseau, appear to have been written upon the banks of the Lake Geneva, and washed away by the ever strengthening tides of globalization. His legacy preoccupies my mind as I amble through avenues full of familiar names: McDonalds, Starbucks, H&M …

by Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 21 (IPS) - International social justice groups are calling on the United Nations to stop paying out millions of dollars in Iraqi oil revenues to Kuwaiti businesses and individuals as war reparations for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of that country 15 years ago.

“The citizens of Iraq should not be held responsible for the actions of Saddam and his regime,” says the U.S.-based group, Voices in the Wilderness.

“The continued claims of war reparations is another form of violence against Iraqis,” adds Jubilee Iraq, a Britain-based charity.

The joint statement by the anti-war U.S. and European groups comes ahead of a U.N. meeting in Geneva next week that will decide which claims for war reparations relating to the occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91 are to be paid by Iraq, and in what amounts.

Please help with media outreach! Help highlight this message of debt cancellation and reconstruction by sending this press release to local media. You can also download the PDF version of this press release for printing and faxing.

Issued by Fast for Economic Justice for Iraq

For Immediate Release June 21, 2005

Contact: Jeff Leys at +41-076-5327845
Kathy Kelly at +41-076-4203126

Geneva, Switzerland–June 21–This week the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development is meeting in Geneva to discuss issues of debt accumulated by countries around the world. The debt crisis in Iraq is a central point of discussion during today’s session.

Eight international social justice activists enter the 5th day without food in Geneva and Amman, Jordan demanding economic justice for Iraq. A central fast demand is that the odious debt incurred by Saddam Hussein’s government be cancelled outright and without any economic conditions attached to the cancellation. Debt claims against Iraq would be submitted to an international arbitration tribunal. This tribunal would determine whether the debt is odious–that is, whether it was incurred by Saddam Hussein’s regime to advance his own interests at the expense of the Iraqi people. All such odious debt would be cancelled.