UK Nobel Laureate Pinter: 5 year Iraq occupation "criminal"

4 million Iraqi excess deaths 1990-2008

Jewish British playwright and Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter in a statement issued to the Brussels Tribunal has stated that the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the Blair and Bush administrations are war criminal.

This is Harold Pinter's statement: "The invasion of Iraq was a criminal act. The occupation of Iraq remains a criminal act. The British government under Blair and the United States administration are war criminals. It's as simple as that." (see: http://www.brusselstribunal.org/Messages190308.htm ).

This message was one of numerous statements from scholars around the world to mark the 5 th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by UK, US and Australia on 20 March, 2003 (see: http://www.brusselstribunal.org/Messages190308.htm ).

The technical justification for Harold Pinter's statement lies in the illegality of invading any country without cause and Security Council approval (see Articles 39-51 of the UN Charter: http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/chapter7.htm ).

This war criminality was compounded in this instance by the utterly false basis for the war - some of the falsehoods were apparent to both insiders and outsiders before the invasion. Thus Australian hero Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wilkie resigned from his distinguished career just before the invasion to protest the false Australian Government claims of Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wilkie ) . Nearly nearly 5 years later several US think tanks have determined that the Bush Administration told 935 lies about Iraq post-9/11 (see: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23098129-401,00.html ).

The war criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq has amounted to an Iraqi Holocaust as shown by the following statistics.

Excess death (avoidable death) is estimated as the difference between actual deaths and deaths expected for a peaceful, decently-run country with the same demographics (for details see "Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950" (G.M. Polya, 2007: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ and http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ).

Excess deaths can be either VIOLENT (from bombs or bullets) or NON-VIOLENT (from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease).

For brutally US-occupied Iraq the base-line comparison for non-violent deaths is conveniently made with its impoverished and peaceful but demographically similar neighbours Iraq and Jordan.

Authoritative estimates of NON-VIOLENT post-invasion excess deaths in Occupied Iraq (March 2003-March 2008 are of 0.77 million (from the latest UN Population Division data: http://esa.un.org/unpp/ ) and of 0.87 million (calculated from United Nations Children's Fund, UNICE, data on post-invasion under-5 year old infant deaths: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/index.html ; for impoverished Third World countries the under-5 infant deaths are about 0.7 of the total excess deaths, as described in the MWC News article "Layperson's Guide to Counting Iraq deaths": http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5872/26/ ).

From various estimates of violent deaths in Iraq the average violence-related death rate can be used to calculated VIOLENT deaths in the 5-year period March 2003-March 2008:

(a) the "media report"-based Iraq Body Count upper estimate of 88,000 (March 2003-January 2008) (see: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ ) translates to 90,000 /5 years (vastly lower than top US medical epidemiologist estimate (c)) .

(b) the WHO-Iraqi Puppet Government estimate of 151,000 (March 2003-June 2006) (see: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2008/pr02/en/index.html ) translates to 201,000/5 years (also vastly lower than top US medical epidemiologist estimate (c)) .

(c) the top US Johns Hopkins University estimate of 600,000 (March 2003-July 2006) (see: http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf ), translates to = 909,000/5 years.

(d) the expert UK ORB polling company estimate of 1,220,000 (March 2003-September 2007) (see: http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78 and http://www.countercurrents.org/polya190907.htm ).translates to 1,360,000 /5 years.

Taking authoritative and mutually consonant estimates (c) and (d) for 5-year violent deaths of 0.91 million and 1.36 million, respectively, and estimates of 5-year non-violent excess deaths of 0.77-0.87 million, we can estimate that post-invasion violent plus non-violent excess deaths in Occupied Iraq will total 1.7-2.2 million as of March 2008. In addition one can estimate 1.7 million Sanctions excess deaths (1990-2003), 1.2 million under-5 infant deaths under Sanctions, 0.2 million Iraqi Gulf War deaths, 0.6 million post-invasion infant deaths (UNICEF) and 4.5 million Iraqi refugees (UNHCR) (see: http://ruddaustraliareportcard.blogspot.com/2008/01/rudd-australia-report-card-1-continued.html ) .

A major cause of the roughly half of the post-invasion non-violent deaths in Occupied Iraq and been the remorseless refusal of the US Coalition countries to provide life-sustaining food and medical requisites as unambiguously demanded by Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in time of War (see: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm ).

This war criminal refusal of the US Coalition Occupiers to supply life-sustaining requisites is documented by the World Health Organization (WHO) which informs us that the "annual total per capita medical expenditure" permitted in Occupied Iraq by the US alliance countries is $135 (2004) as compared to $19 (Occupied Afghanistan), $2,560 (UK), $3,123 (Australia) and $6,096 (the US) (see "United State Terrorism" on MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/17139/42/ ).

Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention (see: http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/genocide/convention.html ) states: "In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

What the World has been seeing for the last 5 years is an Iraqi Holocaust and also an Iraqi Genocide as defined by the UN Genocide Convention.

In his 2005 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech , Harold Pinter, in arguing "that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice" stated: "The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading as a last resort all other justifications having failed to justify themselves as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.
We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.
How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought."

Now several years later we see the full horror emerging in public - as I stated in MY contribution (just after Harold Pinter's) in the Brussels Tribunal 5th Anniversary listing of scholarly views on Iraq (see: http://www.brusselstribunal.org/Messages190308.htm ): "we can estimate that post-invasion violent plus non-violent excess deaths in Occupied Iraq will total 1.7-2.2 million as of March 2008. In addition one can estimate 1.7 million Sanctions excess deaths (1990-2003), 1.2 million under-5 infant deaths under Sanctions, 0.2 million Iraqi Gulf War deaths, 0.6 million post-invasion infant deaths (UNICEF) and 4.5 million Iraqi refugees (UNHCR)."

To re-quote Harold Pinter, "how many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?" FOUR MILLION? More than enough, I would have thought.

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