News Release

*Haiti * Corporatizing Iraq * Sharon’s Wall

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EUGENIA CHARLES-MATHURIN
MALINDA MILES
Co-Director of Haiti Reborn/Quixote Center, Charles-Mathurin said today: “The United States has helped create this opposition to destabilize and undermine Haiti’s nascent democracy…. The U.S. is the only party which can bring to the negotiation table these groups which include members of the CIA-linked FRAPH death squads and the former brutal army of Haiti, FAD’H, which killed over 5,000 people from 1991-1994…. President Aristide, the constitutional president, has pledged that he would step down from power when his term comes to a close. In accordance with the Haitian Constitution, he cannot run again. His commitments have been met with escalating violence by opposition members.” Malinda Miles, also co-director of Haiti Reborn, is currently in Haiti.

RANIA MASRI
Director of the Southern Peace Research and Education Center, Masri has written extensively on Iraq. She said today: “Mass privatization — without any economic transition, without consultation with the Iraqis, and with only historical examples of failure — is being imposed on the Iraqi people, at the barrel of a gun. Iraqi resources are open for sale to foreign control, as per [the occupation authority’s] Order 39…. The Ministry of Health has been deemed the first ministry to raise its own finances.”
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ANDREA BUFFA
Buffa, peace campaign coordinator at Global Exchange, has recently returned from Iraq. She said today: “On February 24, twenty U.S. cities will protest at Halliburton and Bechtel…. While these companies, which have very close ties to the Bush administration, are raking in billions of dollars in Iraq reconstruction contracts, Iraq’s infrastructure is still not functioning. The schools and hospitals are in disrepair, the phones don’t work, electricity is intermittent, and the water isn’t safe to drink.”
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MARK LANCE
Lance, a professor at Georgetown University, has been in the West Bank with a delegation of university faculty and has written about the wall that Israel is building in the West Bank. The International Court of Justice at The Hague is beginning hearings today on the wall. Lance said: “The barrier Israel is erecting in the West Bank is the final stage of a process of colonization that will make permanent an apartheid structure. The portions of the barrier already constructed do not follow the legal Israeli border, but go many kilometers into Palestinian territory, dividing farmers from their land and cutting Palestinians off from essential water sources. If the barrier is completed as planned, Palestinians will be caged in divided regions totaling less than half the West Bank, leaving them with less than 10 percent of historic Palestine. This entire project is a clear and massive violation of international law which is wreaking havoc on the lives of Palestinians living within its confines.” [See an op-ed in today’s New York Times, “A Wall as a Weapon” by Noam Chomsky: www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/02/22/4898202.] More Information

CATHERINE COOK
Senior analyst with the Middle East Research and Information Project, Cook said today: “Since 1946, the ICJ has issued only 24 advisory opinions. While these opinions are non-binding, they can be important in influencing other states’ policies. The Court’s 1971 opinion that South Africa’s presence in Namibia was illegal contributed to the imposition of international sanctions on Apartheid South Africa….”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167