On January 17, 1998, 7th anniversary of the Gulf War, a conference organized by the Comitato Golfo and Un Ponte per ... was held in Milan with the participation of journalists, politicians and associations, launching the Break the Embargo Campaign. The campaign demands that the Italian government take formal steps to ask for an immediate, unconditional lifting of the embargo by the UN and, in the meantime, that it break the embargo unilaterally, thawing Iraqi assets in Italy and reestablishing normal relations between Italy and Iraq, both economic, cultural, and diplomatic. The following article lays out the motivations for this campaign, about which further information will be given.

After the agreement between the UN and Baghdad, the Communist Refoundation Party and the Greens rightly claimed that now the time had come to lift the embargo. And Manconi took up the subject again with an article, The Embargo is Still On (il manifesto, February 24), demanding that Italy take immediate steps to put an end to the embargo, "if the diplomatic action continues. Actually, though, I see no justification for this limiting clause. The diplomatic initiative is already in danger on account of Clinton’s pugnacious stance. He claims the right to maintain surveillance (just as Prodi wants to do) to ensure that the UN agreement is respected. On what authority? What would we say if China tomorrow should send an army and surround Tel Aviv until Israel withdraws from Lebanon? But even if the diplomatic action should fail and Saddam were to blame, this would not justify the embargo. The sanctions, as Manconi himself recalls, were imposed to make Iraq to respect the sovereignty of Kuwait and then were kept in force, to be revoked only upon the satisfaction of "conditions that were different from those that had legitimated their adoption", i.e. the elimination of the weapons of mass destruction. But once the cause of the sanctions (the invasion of Kuwait) had ceased, they ought to have been lifted in virtue of art. 41 of the UN Charter. To have replaced "certain punishable transgressions with others, failing any discussion of the new cause invoked " was illicit, as had been pointed out already in 1995 in an appeal by the European Association of Jurists chaired by Chemmillier-Gendreau. It was an arbitrary act, so the document read, made worse by the addition of further new conditions later. Therefore, the embargo must be lifted "in any case", independently of whether Saddam is disarmed or not. This is true for another, quite substantial reason, mentioned by the Jurists, namely because "the respect for basic human rights constitutes a general obligation for all states", established by numerous conventions which Italy has signed and is pledged to respect above and beyond the resolutions of the Security Council, even if the latter were (as they are not in the present case) formally legitimate. Any order to commit a crime must be disobeyed. Hence, a problem of responsibility is raised which is often glossed over when one says that Iraqi children are being killed by the embargo. For the embargo is not guilty of murder. The guilty ones are the persons who impose and apply it. Saddam has been defined as "one of the cruelest dictators of the century". Apart from the difficulty of establishing a hierarchy among Saddam, Pinochet, Fujimori or Suharto, whose hand Prodi clasped during his visits of friendship, "crimes" are not committed only by "dictators". Johnson, for instance, was a democratically elected president. But to bomb the Vietnamese with napalm does not seem to me less cruel than to gas the Kurds. And what about killing a million Iraqis with a weapon of mass destruction like the embargo? For the last two years, Prodi, Veltroni and the other members of the government have joined in with the committing of this slaughter. Isn’t this cruelty and a crime? In order to put a halt to it, the Italian government, as we have been demanding for years with the campaign against the sanctions, must at once take adequate steps against the sanctions in the competent international forums, but it must also break the embargo unilaterally.