from the Voices in the Wilderness - United Kingdom
    campaign:

    Over the last ten years hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children have died as result of United Nations imposed economic sanctions. Denied adequate food, clean water and medical facilities, children succumb rapidly to malnutrition and infectious disease.

    "We are in the process of destroying an entire society.
    It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral".
    - Denis Halliday, former UN Humanitarian
    Coordinator for Iraq, October 1998
    "If people could hear and see what is being done in their names in Iraq, they would be outraged. But they don't, so it continues".
    - John Simpson, BBC World Affairs Editor, April 2000



    (wood engraving by Emily Johns)
    (The following is a poem written about the forgotten
    victims of Chernobyl. It also applies to the forgotten
    victims of our duel wars against Iraq - for not only
    do the sanctions kill indiscriminately, but so does
    the radiation left over from our indiscriminate
    bombing of Iraq with depleted uranium munitions.)

    		To Vasily Deomidovich Dubodel, who passed away in August 1988, and to all past and future victims of Chernobyl.

    They didn't register us

    They did not register us
    and our deaths
    were not linked to the accident.
    No processions laid wreaths,
    no brass bands melted with grief.
    They wrote us off as
    lingering stress,
    cunning genetic disorders . . .
    But we are the payment for rapid progress,
    mere victims of someone else's sated afternoons.
    It wouldn't have been so annoying for us to die,
    had we known
    our death would help
    to avoid more fatal mistakes
    and halt replication of reckless deeds!
    But thousands of `competent' functionaries
    count our souls in percentages,
    their own honesty, souls, long gone.
    so we suffocate with despair.
    They wrote us off.
    They keep trying to write off
    our ailing truths
    with their sanctimonious lies.
    But nothing will silence us!
    Even after death,
    from our graves we will appeal to your conscience
    not to transform the Earth
    into a sarcophagus!

    -Lyubov Sirota