A Chara, - President Clinton has come to Ireland this week as a friend of the peace process. He has commiserated with the bereaved and injured in Omagh. Yet he is a man with blood on his hands. Only two weeks before his visit to Omagh, he unleashed cruise missiles on a factory in Sudan and on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan. He neither issued warnings, nor has he regretted the civilian casualties.
Cruise missiles have one thing in common with car bombs: they are imprecise in their aim and completely indiscriminate. We know 10 innocent civilians were injured in Sudan; we know nothing of the identity of those killed and injured in Afghanistan, but if we deduce from President Clinton's "economy with the truth" in other matters, and his "mistaken intelligence" in the case of Sudan, there is certainly a question to be put as to whether they were innocent too.
Our Government has reacted in the most craven way to this breach of international law. It has a general understanding of why he did it, but this silence does not mean consent, we are told. It presumed he had good intelligence, but doesn't seem particularly outraged to discover that his intelligence was seriously flawed in the case of Sudan. This "understanding" of terrorism is a new feature of the Irish political scene, and fits ill with the other statements on terrorism made in the past two weeks by Irish politicians.
In the week that David Andrews called the situation in Sudan a "vision from hell", he has nothing to say about the US's contribution to increasing the suffering there. President Clinton is allowed to purvey the lie that this factory produced chemical weapons, a lie that has led to a sharp decrease in donations for Sudan's famine victims, according to David Begg of Concern (Saturday View, August 29th). It seems that Sudan's appeal for an international enquiry into the bombing will not be supported by our Government, although Liz O'Donnell described such an appeal as "legitimate". "It will not get very far," she added, "given the power of the United States on the Security Council". This is diplomatic-speak for: There is no redress against the Biggest Bully; why should we lose brownie points by speaking up?
Since silence does, in legal terms, indicate consent, the Irish Government is saying by its silence that it does in fact support the bombings in Sudan and Afghanistan. We, the undersigned, wish to dissociate ourselves from this silence. - Is mise,
Anne McClusky
Kurdistan Support Group,
Billy Fitzpatrick
Irish CND,
Declan McKenna
Cuba Support Group,
Eanna Dowling
Catalyst Collective,
Jo O'breasail
Comhlamh,
Joe Murray
AfrI,
Mary Kelly
Columbia Radical Action Campaign,
Sadhbh O'Neill
Earthwatch.