An Open Letter to the Leader of the Liberal Democrats

Five Years on : Your Rightful Concern for Dharfur : What About Iraq and Palestine?

Felicity Arbuthnot

In your appeal for Dharfur (attached below) you write: 'In Sudan, every one of those 1800 days that has passed has been the same: fear, hunger, and suffering. There are children, now of school age, who have known nothing but the life of a refugee.' You request that Gordon Brown pressure China, in this Olympic year, over its role in Dharfur. Strange that no such request is made that he pressure the United States, murderously backing the Ethiopian troops and as ever, providing lethal weaponry where ever possibility of a lucrative contract floats past. Odd that you are not pressurising Mr Brown for children who have been enduring: 'fear, hunger and suffering', with the UK being co-partner in crime with the United States for seventeen years. The children of Iraq. They were dying at an average of six thousand children a month for many years before the invasion, of 'embargo related causes'. Not Saddam related, EMBARGO related, the United Nation's own words in their Reports. They are now terrified, traumatised and dying for 'liberation' (actually, a war of agression, Nuremberg's 'supreme international crime') in orders of magnitude more. It is five years since the beginning of Dharfur's suffering you rightly point out. It is five years since the further ceaseless, dementia-inducing terror has been unleashed on the people, the children, of Iraq. What of the children of Palestine? Sixty years of their 'fear, hunger and suffering'. The 132nd victim of the current illegal siege of Gaza has just died for want of medicine. A victim too young to even to know he was dying because he was Palestinian - or that he was a Palestinian...

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