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• Enforced a genocidal policy of sanctions on Iraq, supplemented by the maintenance of intense satellite surveillance and regular bombing attacks that often resulted in civilian deaths. In 1999 more than 1 million Iraqi children under 5 were suffering from chronic malnutrition, and some 4,000-5,000 children were dying per month beyond normal death rates from the combination of malnutrition and disease. Death from disease was greatly increased by the shortage of potable water and medicines that led to a 20-fold increase in malaria (among other ailments). This vicious sanctions system, causing a creeping extermination of a people, caused more than a million excess deaths during Clinton's presidency. • Orchestrated the bombing of Afghanistan and the Sudan. Unknown numbers were killed in Afghanistan (and by the missiles that accidentally landed in Pakistan) when US pilots bombed former CIA training camps allegedly used by fundamentalist forces attacking US targets around the world. In the Sudan, a supposed “terrorist nerve gas plant” was bombed. It was soon revealed to be a pharmaceutical factory and a major source of medical drugs in that poor country. •escalated US military aid to the Columbian government from $89 million in 1997 to $289 million in 1998, while announcing plans to build a joint US-Colombian military base in Colombia. In June 2000, the US Congress passed a $1.3 billion military aid bill. Ninety percent of those funds went to Colombia’s armed forces and police. The bill provided 42 Huey and 18 Blackhawk helicopters, along with Special Forces training for elite combat units. The main objective of the aid package was the “push into the South,” a stronghold of resistance forces, who are fighting for social changes, including land reform and social ownership of the country’s wealth. The Columbian government’s brutal use of force against Columbia’s population is well documented. The government uses paramilitary death squads as a matter of counterinsurgency policy. With US military and CIA support, right-wing paramilitary organizations routinely attack the civilian population in an effort to terrorize the population into not supporting the insurgencies or the popular mass movements. They maintain close links with the Armed Forces, in many cases carrying out orders directly on behalf of the Army and security agencies. The death squads and armed forces combined are responsible for the vast majority of the at least 40,000 Colombians killed in the 1990s. • Supported the merciless NATO bombing of the people of Yugoslavia for 78 days and nights, taking the lives of many hundreds of civilians, and producing one of the greatest ecological catastrophes in history. The NATO-US war against Yugoslavia featured a systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure and civilian facilities. houses, hospitals, schools, churches, trains, factories, power stations, and broadcasting facilities were all bombed. According to Yugoslav authorities, 60 percent of NATO targets were civilian, including 33 hospitals and 344 schools, as well as 144 major industrial plants and a large petrochemical plant whose bombing caused a pollution catastrophe. In addition, an estimated 11 tons of depleted Uranium weaponry was used by NATO forces. • Continued US support of the dictatorship of Indonesia, even as full knowledge surfaced of Indonesian plans to interfere with the referendum for East Timor independence and to eventually take violent revenge for the ensuing defeat. Commended for his humanitarian efforts, Clinton imposed a ban on the sale of small arms to Indonesia, while continuing to supply the regime with F-16 fighter jets. • Provided unstinting support to the Mexican government’s war with the indigenous people of Chiapas, who are desperately trying to hold on to their land rights and culture in the face of free trade policies that call for the end of “subsistence” agriculture, while replacing it with “modernized” high profit export crops, such as rubber and lumber.
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