Remember! Remember!

Hussein Al-alak, the Iraq Solidarity Campaign

So have you decided whose side your on, when asked in the article Action for Iraqi children if you are with us or against us? When in knowledge of the fact that 1.5 million children died under the US/UK backed UN Sanctions, the “cabinet of war criminals”, have further destroyed the lives of millions of Iraq’s young, through "the supreme international crime", which was and still remains the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Dare you ask how many children have vanished since that day, when the invasion was launched in 2003, as a consequence of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction. When those now dead British soldiers were mobilised for the American’s false claims about Saddam Hussain working in collaboration with Osama Bin Laden.

Have you ever enquired about what has happened to the estimated 4.5 million orphaned Iraqi children, or the estimated 500,000 homeless orphans, whose only guardians are the watchful eyes of the stars, who look down upon them from a darkened sky.

Are you so frightened of being alone in Britain, that the bogey man under your bed, is no longer the mockery of your own imagination but just one of 513 Iraqi children, who the USA no longer view as being human beings but "imperative threats to security“, that having survived the IRA and the Lockerbie, that the unelected “Prime Minister” Gordon Brown, wants to lock every “suspected terrorist” up for 42 days without charge.

But as the unelected Gordon Brown barricades every Government department behind concrete walls, as a result of Labours fear of the British public, a December 2007 UNICEF report stated that 2.2 million Iraqi children lack adequate nutrition and an estimated 75,000 children are living in tents because of displacement caused by the war.

The UN has also reported that 80% of Iraqi families can't separate sewage water from water used for other household needs and that 70% lack access to potable water but as Britain combats terrorism, the campaign of fear is used solely to distract attention away from the 400,000 Iraqi children who are suffering from "wasting", which is characterized by chronic diarrhoea and high deficiencies of protein.

Are you convinced that your government is right and how does it feel to watch the “Mother of Parliaments” being degenerated beyond recognition, that it no longer represents the interests of either the people of Great Britain or even the façade of the beliefs it claims to uphold.

How does it feel to know, that when your troops came rolling into Iraq and mission was proclaimed “accomplished“, in 2003-4, 22,000 British people over the age of 65 died as a result of the cold and how does it feel to know that the hunt for imaginary weapons and chasing “terror suspects“, has resulted with "2.2 million British pensioners living below the poverty line”.

And with a shocking 3.9 million UK children living in poverty, in the year 2006/07, which is an increase of 100,000 on the previous year and the dismal Labour “forty year low” in the May elections, is it any wonder why any government would want to detain its “terror suspects” and spread its values around the world.

So have you now decided whose side your on? Remember, remember the fifth of November , Gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason, why the gunpowder treason, Should ever be forgot!

Starvation as a Method of Warfare

Hussein Al-Alak,

The London Progressive Journal


In January 2007, the Iraq Solidarity Campaign informed the international community about the damage which the growth of poverty has caused to the children of Iraq, through the much publicised paper "Western Civilisation - The Unspoken Fate of Iraqi Children".



The report, which was published by a wide variety of publications including the Morning Star, URUKNET, the UN Observer, Palestine Chronicle and the Global Research Institute, reported that the increase in poverty since the 2003 invasion has resulted in the growth in the child sex trade, the forced separation of families, an increase in drug and alcohol abuse. Psychiatrists have also highlighted the effect of the ubiquitous violence on the school attendance rates and performance, referred to in the report as "learning impediments".



The report also found that 400,000 of Iraq’s children are also suffering from a condition called “wasting”, which is characterised by chronic diarrhoea and high deficiencies of protein. However, the conduct of the US-backed government of Iraq has sunk to a new low, with news that the regime of Jalal Talabani and Nouri Al-Maliki, who are not satisfied with the murder of one million Iraqis since the occupation began, now plan to starve the rest by eliminating Iraq’s already meagre ration service by June 2008.



The ration system was first established during the 1990s to combat the widespread poverty which had resulted from the UN Sanctions, in a British and American backed blockade which saw the murder of an estimated 1.5 million children due to “embargo related causes”. The 6,000 children lost per month was viewed by America’s Madeline Albright as being a “price worth paying“.



Whilst the country was ruled by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, the United Nations themselves praised Iraq’s ration system as being “the world’s largest and most effective relief effort” and even in the face of invasion, the “tyrannical” Iraqi President “ruthlessly” provided his population with an advanced six months' supply but now the “independent” Iraqi government have decided to end the system, which has saved millions from starvation, on the grounds that the closure is “in line with the obligations it has made to the World Bank“.



Some analysts say that millions of Iraqis will be affected, particularly families with no bread winners, as well as women, the unemployed and children. It is also believed that Iraq is going to lose control of its own inflation and that the people are therefore going to experience a price increase in food, fuel and other daily essentials.

In other words, British and American Troops who are based in Iraq at the “invitation” of the Iraqi Government are going to be made to shoot their bullets at, and kick down the doors of, an increasingly starving population. Is this what being against Saddam or Al-Qaida now means?



The news has come as a shock to both campaigners and Iraqi families, in the face of recent allegations by one Arab newspaper, which recently revealed that Iraqi MP’s were being offered five million dollars each, to vote in favour of the privatisation of Iraq’s nationalised oil. It was further revealed that monies brought in from oil revenues were not even going towards the so-called ”reconstruction” of democratic Iraq.



But campaigners, led by the Iraq Solidarity Campaign (ISC), have sworn that plans to eliminate this essential service will not go unopposed in either the Middle East or the West, and have already begun to mount a challenge to the Iraqi regime and the US/British occupying powers, in a direct challenge which is already gathering momentum.

Within twenty-four hours of launching the campaign, the international petition “Act Against Iraq Poverty”, addressed to the governments of Iraq, Britain and America, has been endorsed by a variety of political parties and personalities. The ISC demand that the ration service be maintained and be developed to provide for the needs of Iraqi families.



Already the petition has been signed by many political organisations including the Communist Party of Britain’s Somerset Branch, RESPECT (renewal), a Liberal Democrat councillor, the Polish Labour Party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, the Australian Socialist Alliance, the US Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Massachusetts Green Party. Even some members of the Democratic and Republican parties in the US have endorsed it.



This is alongside the National Revival and Sovereignty Movement of Russia, the Iraq Solidarity Association in Stockholm, the Uruknet Association in Italy, and the former Scottish MSP Tommy Sheridan’s Socialist Solidarity Party in Scotland.



The breadth of international support from campaigners has also come from as far afield as Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Mexico, Sweden, Thailand, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Sri Lanka, the UK and Venezuela, each with a crystal clear message to the occupying governments and their stooges; “If you don't shoot or torture your victims, you starve them to death. Shame on you!”

One supporter from the United Kingdom wrote, “I add my name to those who urge the UN, the British and Americans, to continue the rationing program in Iraq and stop the abuses aimed at hungry Iraqis!” with Ian Douglas from Cairo asking Bush, Brown, Maliki and Talabani, “What is a government that starves the people?”



Comments to the occupiers from US citizens have also included “Over a million slaughtered, millions of widows and orphans, millions of refugees - and now the dirty occupiers want to snatch the bread from the mouths of the living - stop this genocide of the defenceless Iraqi people.”

As others have stated on the petition, the occupying powers need to pay the Iraqi people reparations for the damages and trauma caused by the illegal invasion in 2003. There have been other demands for an independent commission to be established and see to the perpetrators of the war and invasion be tried as war criminals.



The international campaign against the elimination of the rations has been established against the backdrop of the seriousness that ending the service will cause to the Iraqi people, as one health worker recently told Dahr Jamail of the International Press Service: "I and my wife have five boys and six girls so the ration costs a lot when it has to be bought. I cannot afford food and other expenses like study, clothes and doctors."



But as one woman recently said to Al-Jazeera, "If they reduce the quantity of the ration, we will be displaced [made homeless] as the money to pay bills will have to be used for food. If we are considered a poor family today, tomorrow we will be considered absolutely desperate."



To sign the international petition please follow the link: http://www.petitiononline.com/hattycat/petition.html



Hussein Al-Alak is Chairman of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign.

Regeneration: The Iraq War and "British-Arab" Identity in a Historical Context

By Hussein Al-Alak, International Relations


When considering either the Iraqi or Middle Eastern population within Britain, the first thought that comes to mind is a statement by Leon Trotsky, who once said, “to understand and perceive truly, to feel to the very bottom, the section of time in which we live, one has to know the past of mankind…one has to know the history of mankind, the picturesqueness and the personalities of contemporary life”.

Charlotte Higgins, the arts correspondent for the Guardian newspaper, reported in 2006 that a Roman document dated from around AD400 and called the Notitia Dignitatum, described how a unit of Iraqis were said to have once patrolled the English northern area of what is now called South Shields. Higgins also explained that “While British soldiers battle it out in Iraq, spare a thought for this: troops from Iraq once occupied Britain.”

Historians have claimed that Eastern troops of the Roman Empire also lived and settled around the North East of England, where archers were brought over and settled in close proximity to Hadrian’s Wall, with certain areas being made to undergo a “name change” to suit its Middle Eastern occupiers.

Some Middle Eastern “personalities”, were once described by General George Keppel in 1824, who whilst travelling up the Tigris described a population which “resembled the ancient heroes of Greece and Rome“, with Arab boatmen being so “hardy and muscular-looking” that “any of the boatmen would have made an excellent model for a Hercules; and one in particular, with uncombed hair and a shaggy beard , struck us all with the resemblance he bore to statues of that deity.”

The BBC reported in June 2006 that “In 1916 the Military Cross was awarded to a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers for “conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy’s trenches”. The citation noted that he had braved “rifle and bomb fire” and that “owing to his courage and determination, all the killed and wounded were brought in”.

The “captain” and “hero” in question was the celebrated poet and author Siegfried Sassoon, whose poetry is a celebrated feature of English literature and whose real life experiences, within the trenches of World War One, were immortalised in the fictional novel “The Regeneration Trilogy” by Durham author Pat Barker. It is often forgotten that Siegfried Sassoon’s family were Sephardic Jews, who had flourished originally within Iraq and his grandfather was the first of his family to have arrived in England in 1858 and had come to Britain as a result of the cotton trade.

In his 2004 paper “The Arab Population in the UK,” Dr Ismail al-Jalili explained that about 500,000 Arabs are now resident in the UK but “in the 19th century, Yemeni seamen called Lascars sailed with British ships and many stayed to work in the docks and related industries, or on the burgeoning rail network.

“London’s East End, Tyneside, Liverpool and Cardiff became centres of small Arab communities. By 1948 there were nearly a thousand Arabs in Tyneside, some marrying local women, thus giving birth to the “British-Arab” identity that many native-born British-Arabs, especially those of mixed ancestry, are now establishing.” Dr. Jalili also explained “the traditional trading skills of Syrians and Lebanese brought them to the industrialised ‘Cottonopolis’ – Manchester“.

Albert Hourani, the Arab historian and author of “A History of the Arab Peoples,” was born in Manchester in 1915. His book, published in 1991 has been described by Harvard University Press as being “the definitive story of Arab civilization,” described upon publication as “an instant classic.”

During the 20th Century, my own relatives lived and worked around coalmining in the North East of England, with one part of the family being based around the Ashington Colliery, which was opened in 1867 and closed in 1986.According to the Durham Mining Museum, the Ashington Colliery employed an estimated 2,343 “under ground” workers in 1902,with the number rising to 3,997 in 1914.The number then rose again in 1921 to 4,076.

Like many other trades, the mines were a central feature to many communities across the northern parts of the United Kingdom, where entire generations of men would be born and raised within a mining community and would later follow their fathers, uncles and brothers back down into the pits.

My great-grandfather died of pneumoconiosis in the 1920s, when my grandmother was still a child, a condition brought about by the inhalation of coal dust, as a result of being down the mines. In the early 1990s at my grandmother’s funeral in Manchester, her elderly brother and my great uncle, who later died in 2000, patted me on the head and asked my mother “When will you teach this lad English?”

Protesting that I already spoke English, my relatives from the North East of England began to laugh as it was explained to me that, according to my uncle, who was “born and bred” in Newcastle, “You will only be Englishman when you speak like a Geordie”.

Hussein Al-alak is an Iraqi writer whose articles have been published by the Palestine Chronicle, The UN Observer and the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq. Hussein is the chairman of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign and director of the Middle East Cultural Association.

link: http://www.e-ir.info/?p=305