A few weeks ago Havaar launched our campaign calling on major bank CEOs to allow financial transactions for purchases of medicine and medical supplies for Iranians.
We feel very encouraged and empowered by the responses we have received from some of the people who signed the petition:
Sanctions, “smart” or comprehensive, are a form of warfare and a blunt weapon of aggression on the most vulnerable citizens, including infants, children and the aged. When the Health Sector is endangered as in Iran today, loss of life results – demonstrating how Sanctions constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Sanctions do not destroy governments, they destroy the basic human rights of human beings.
United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq from 1 September 1997 until 1998.
Campaigners dedicated to ending economic sanctions against Iraq learned from Iraqi mothers and children about how lethally punitive economic sanctions could be. The pediatrics wards of Iraqi hospitals were like death rows for infants. Now, ordinary Iranians with minimal capacity to control their government are nevertheless being punished by economic sanctions which forbid them access to life saving medicines. The Havaar campaign needs and deserves support from civil society around the world.
Co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and a co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign to end economic sanctions against Iraq.
The U.S.-imposed sanctions regime has inflicted great suffering upon the Iranian people. As people of conscience, have to speak out and act decisively to end the sanctions and to ensure that Iranians have adequate access to life saving medicine and other necessities.
President, National Lawyers Guild.
We cannot condone the use of sanctions that are causing untold suffering to the Iranian people, as they deprive them of the most basic necessities in life, and are directed against a country that does not pose a danger to the United States. it is important then that we support the campaign HAVAAR is organizing.
Professor emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University, where she was a social science professor.
Other prominent signers include Anthony Alessandrini, Tariq Ali, Stanley Aronowitz, Medea Benjamin, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Arun Gupta, Chris Hedges, Zachary Lockman, David McReynolds, Molly Nolan, Vijay Prashad, Chris Toensing, Adaner Usmani and Julia Wrigley.