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Ramsey Clark "The Starvation Weapon
Topic: Ramsey Clark "The Starvation Weapon"
to all concerned peoples by jclancy@xxxxxxxxxxx
It is always an emotional experience to read truth from the
friends of the Earth and all its peoples, from Noam Chomsky,
John Pilger,Ed Galeano and at this moment by Ramsey Clark, a
former US Attorney General and a permanent fighter for social
justice and respect for human rights, both in and out of USA.
From Cuba's "Granma" interview with Ramsey Clark in February 95,
here are his valued opinions-
Q. The US Blockade of Cuba?- "As a lawyer, which I am, and
considering the many new uses of the concept of blockade, I see
the blockade clearly as a crime against humanity, as a weapon of
mass destruction. You know, we talk about nuclear weapons as
being weapons of mass destruction. The blockade is a weapon for
the destruction of the masses, and it attacks those segments of
the society that are the most vulnerable. Inherently, it attacks
infants and children, the chronically ill, the elderly and
emergency medical cases. Like the neutron bomb it takes lives,
it kills people, but it protects property, it doesn't destroy
property. So when you look at the effect of what we generally
call the sanctions on Iraq, you see hundreds of thousands of
deaths caused by those sanctions, far more than all the deaths
caused by the military assault by the US, which included 110,000
aerial strikes in 42 days; one every30 seconds night and day
that dropped 88,500 tons of bombs the equivalent of seven and a
half Hiroshima bombs. But the sanctions have killed more than
four times the number of people than the bombings killed.
In Vietnam, the sanctions since 1975 have done more injury,
caused more death to the people there, than in all the years of
their war against the invading French and the USA. The children
born in Vietnam just in the last five years are estimated to
have been severely underweight in half of the births, and more
than a quarter have been physically or mentally retarded from
malnutrition, the lack of medical supplies and all the rest. So
you can see that the damage to the people of Vietnam is of
enormous magnitude and is a crime against humanity.
The purpose of the blockade against Cuba is to cripple the
country, to prove to the world that the Cuban system failed,
that there's only one system that works and that all this talk
from Cuba about its accomplishments during the Revolution was a
mirage, that it wasn't an accomplishment of the Cuban people or
the system, but simply the product of the Soviet subsidy. So for
instance, your incredible revolution in health, which can offer
hope to the poor throughout the world, the tens of millions of
poor in the United States who have no health care, and whole
countries of people who live short, miserable sick lives. They
want to prove that Cuba really accomplished nothing, that the
system totally failed, and that now they can't even care for
their own sick. So those are my basic feelings about the
blockade and from that you can tell that I think that its of the
greatest importance that the blockade be ended immediately and
prohibited from ever happening again against any people.
During the period after WorldWar 2, when the power of the planet
was divided in the main between the Soviet bloc and the West,
the sanctions could not be a very meaningful weapon, because if
one bloc tried to punish a small country by sanctions or
blockade, the other bloc could move in and bring it into their
influence.But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
blockade became an inexpensive weapon of choice. It can punish,
yet still protect the property there for future exploitation."
Q.,"Cuba has never been at war with the US, like Viet Nam or
Iraq,nor has it ever attacked another country. So why us?" Clark,
"Sanctions are the new weapon of choice and it takes two things to
impose sanctions: it takes wealth, and the military capacity to
enforce it. So now, the US policy suddenly shifts. Many say that
the US doesn't have a foreign policy anymore, with the Clinton
Administration, but they've made very clear what their policy is.
The US Chamber of Commerce reopened its offices in 1993 for the
first time since 1917, so you can imagine how the Americans there
felt. Warren Christopher, the Sec'y of State was there, also Lloyd
Benson, Sec'y of the Treasury. Benson said that economics is the
foreign policy of the United States and Warren Christopher saidthe
foreign policy of the US is economic. So the policy now is to
exploit the rest of the world economic-ally. So we come up with
NAFTA, which forced the Mayan Indians in Chiapas, Mexico, to
either rebel or abandon their Mayan lifestyle and move to the
slums of Oaxaca or Mexico City and beg for food -because on 1
January 1994 they could no longer sell their corn for cash.
Chiapas was the only state in Mexico that exported corn. The
Indians grew that corn."
Q. "In the future what should be changed to make things better
for humankind?" Clark, "The need we all have for the years
ahead is to find ways to share the truth and work together to
prohibit the United States government from any use of its
military technology against any people anywhere, and to reverse
its economic policy, which is designed to enrich the plutocracy,
the rich in the US. Otherwise we will see a growing gap between
the rich and the poor, which has been growing steadily within
both the US and other rich countries against their own poor and
against the poor people of all poor countries, and completely
reverse that US policy to seek to greatly increase the share
available to impoverished peoples. Otherwise we are heading for
a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. The United States is
not a 'democracy'. It is a plutocracy. It is government by
wealth. You can't understand the US unless you understand this.
The plutocracy controls the military and the media and that has
to be changed. We have to liberate the United States from the
control of the plutocracy. We have an enormous number of poor
who must be cared for with a fairer wealth distribution.US
plutocrats must be prevented from devising means like GATT and
NAFTA, which ensure a massive future catastrophe."
(Clinton's avowed policies on re-election were to order 20,000
CIA to support US interests world-wide, never to reduce the
armaments budget, a false promise to give Health Care, and never
to increase taxes on the rich...........jclancy)