ISTANBUL, 28 June 2005 — The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI), an anti-war grouping of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), intellectuals and writers, yesterday harshly, if symbolically, condemned the United States, Britain and their allies for the occupation of Iraq.
“(We recommend) that there be an exhaustive investigation of those responsible for crimes of aggression and crimes against humanity in Iraq, beginning with American President George W. Bush, (British Prime Minister) Tony Blair and other government officials from the coalition of the willing,” a statement issued after three days of deliberations said.
The verdict, read by a WTI spokesman to cheers and applause from participants, called for an “immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the coalition forces in Iraq.”
“Our aim is to have the US and British forces out of Iraq,” Indian author Arundhati Roy, chair of the tribunal’s “Jury of Conscience,” told a news conference.
But Roy, who won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel “The God of Small Things”, conceded that this “will not happen tomorrow.”
The WTI, founded in 2003 and modeled on the 1960s’ Russell Tribunal — created by British philosopher Bertrand Russell to denounce the war in Vietnam — has held 20 sessions so far in different locations around the world. It comprises about 200 NGOs —including the environmentalist Greenpeace, the anti-globalization ATTAC and Vietnam Veterans Against the War — as well as a number of prominent intellectuals such as linguist Noam Chomsky and international law professor Richard Falk of the United States and Egyptian sociologist Samir Amin.
In violence yesterday, three people were killed and at least 30 wounded when a car bomb exploded near a market in southeastern Baghdad, Interior Ministry and medical sources said. The blast occurred in the capital’s Baghdad Jadida district, an Interior Ministry source said.
Seven Iraqis were also wounded when a rocket slammed into a restaurant in the center of the capital as attacks continued in Baghdad despite a security clampdown, police said. The seven, three waiters and four customers, were wounded when a rocket exploded in Al-Yassir restaurant near a busy taxi and bus terminal off the capital’s central Museum square.
An Iraqi man died and his wife was wounded when two homemade bombs exploded as they drove past a local council hall in northern Baghdad, an Interior Ministry source said.
Late Sunday, three people including a policeman and a nine-year-old boy, were shot dead when insurgents attacked a barbershop in Jadida, an Interior Ministry source said.
Two US crewmen were killed yesterday when an Apache attack helicopter crashed in Baghdad. The two members of the Apache crew were killed when the helicopter came down northwest of Baghdad, a military statement said, without providing information on the cause, which is under investigation.
