BLATHER: SANCTIONS KILL PEOPLE
The US has a favourite tool for bullying non-compliant nations: sanctions. Sanctions inflict considerable suffering, even death, on ordinary people in targeted nations. Yet those defiant nations persist and resist.
A recent opinion piece in the Washington Post proposing a new oil-for-food scheme, this time in Venezuela, surprisingly acknowledges that sanctions "can also end up harming the people that they intend to protect."
Okay, first off, we know there is no intention of "protecting" civilians in any of the countless countries targeted by Western sanctions. Do Western talking heads really think we've forgotten the half-a-million dead Iraqi children, thanks to US sanctions?
Yet, ask a Western leader about crippling sanctions placed on nations which don't bow to Imperial demands and you'll be met with some nonsensical explanation that sanctions only target 'regimes' and 'terrorists,' not the people.
I've lived in, spent considerable time in, or visited areas under sanctions and siege, and I've seen first hand how sanctions are a form of terrorism, choking civilians, depriving them of basic and urgent medical care, food, employment, and travel entitlements that many of us in Western nations take for granted.
When I was in Syria last October, a man told me his wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer, but because of the sanctions he couldn't get her the conventional treatments most in the West would avail of.
In 2016, in Aleppo, before it was liberated of al-Qaeda and co, Dr. Nabil Antaki told me how -because of the sanctions- it had taken him well over a year to get a simple part for his gastroenterology practise.
In 2015, visiting Damascus' University Hospital, where bed after bed was occupied by a child maimed by terrorists' shelling (from Ghouta), a nurse told me:
"We have so many difficulties to ensure that we have antibiotics, specialized medicines, maintenance of the equipment" Because of the sanctions, many parts are not available, we have difficulties obtaining them."
Visiting a prosthetic limbs factory in Damascus in 2016, I was told that, due to the sanctions, smart technology and 3D scanners -used to determine the exact location where a limb should be fixed- were not available. Considering the over eight years of war and terrorism in Syria, there are untold numbers of civilians and soldiers in need of this technology to simply get a prosthetic limb fixed so they can get on with their lives. But no, America's concern for the Syrian people means that this, too, is near impossible.
In 2018, Syria's minister of health told me Syria had formerly been dubbed by the World Health Organization a "pioneer state" in providing health care.
"Syria had 60 pharmaceutical factories and was exporting medicine to 58 countries. Now, 16 of these factories are out of service. Terrorists partially or fully destroyed 46 hospitals and 620 medical centres."
I asked the minister about the complex in Barzeh, targeted with missile strikes by the US and allies in April 2018. Turns out it was part of the Ministry of Health, and manufactured cancer treatment medications, as well as antidotes for snake or scorpion bites/stings, the antidote also serving as a basic material in the manufacture of many medicines.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
3
2
