Press release

IRAQ WAR. UN PONTE PER: 'FOR 20 YEARS WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR WARRANTS FOR BUSH AND BLAIR'

"On 20 March 2003 began the illegal invasion that has built a more insecure and unjust world, replacing diplomacy and international law with the force of arms. It was a war not only against the Iraqi people but also against the peoples of the world and the international public opinion that had mobilised in every corner of the planet to stop the massacre. Not to have listened to what the New York Times called 'the second world power', the anti-war movement, was an act of shortsightedness and arrogance that plunged us into the current chaos, dividing peoples and fuelling the wells of hatred against the West'.

This was stated in a joint statement by Alfio Nicotra and Angelica Romano, national co-presidents of Un Ponte Per, the Italian NGO and pacifist association present in Iraq since 1991.

"In these decades," Nicotra and Romano continue, " Un Ponte Per has witnessed the atrocities inflicted by the war on the Iraqi people, as well as the crimes committed by the previous dictatorship. We have been under the bombs with the victims, we have suffered threats and kidnappings of our co-operators, we have denounced the war crimes with the white phosphorus bombs on Falluja, the summary executions, the destruction of houses and public buildings, the arbitrary arrests and the shame of torture in Abu Graib prison. There is nothing to be proud of about that war, waged on the basis of accusations - the phantom weapons of mass destruction - that were blatantly fabricated and completely false. That is why we have been waiting for 20 years for the International Court in The Hague to put on trial former US President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair who led the invasion of a sovereign country'.

'Today's Iraq with its extraordinary civil society,' Nicotra and Romano continue, 'has grown in spite of the wrong choices imposed at the time by US Governor Paul Bremer, based on the division of Iraq on an ethnic and religious basis, imposing from above a constitution that is not representative of democratic values, of the equality of persons and of human and civil rights.

"The watchwords of the movement of Iraqi girls and boys," the two co-presidents of Un Ponte Per recall, "who from 2019 to 2022 held the country's squares demonstrating against corruption, private and party militias, sectarian divisions and patriarchal society, demanding the removal of US and Iranian troops from Iraqi territory, must be supported by the international community in order to restore the national sovereignty of this country as well.

'The huge resources consumed in military missions, including Italy's,' Nicotra and Romano conclude, 'must be used instead for the civil reconstruction of Iraq and the strengthening of its unity and democracy'.