The Peace PeopleMAIREAD Corrigan Maguire yesterday urged Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bill Clinton to stop bombing Iraq and allow the lifting of United Nations sanctions.
The Nobel peace prize winner made her plea in Baghdad where, with the New York-based international peace activist group Fellowship of Reconciliation, she visited schools and hospitals, including a cancer ward to see the effects of the economic sanctions imposed in 1990 to punish Iraq for invading Kuwait.
The United States and Britain oppose the lifting of the sanctions, saying President Saddam Hussein's government remains a threat to his neighbours and to his own people.
Meanwhile, Iraq says, shortages of medicines and nutritious food because of the sanctions have killed tens of thousands of children.
I have seen children dying with their mothers next to them and not being able to do anything, said Ms Corrigan Maguire. They are not soldiers.
Mairead Corrigan Maguire who shared the 1976 Nobel peace prize for her efforts to end the violence in Northern Ireland has long campaigned against using military force against Iraq.
This is genocide. Children are dying slowly and painfully, said another peace prize laureate, Adolfo Perez-Esquivel of Argentina.
US and British warplanes have bombed Iraq regularly since mid-December in retaliation for being challenged by Iraqi air defences. The allied planes patrol Iraqi skies to prevent the Iraqi air force from striking opposition groups. Iraq considers the patrol planes intruders.
Ms Corrigan Maguire said President Clinton should help bring peace in Iraq just as he helped forge the Good Friday peace deal.
We, in Ireland, are grateful for what he has accomplished with the help of Blair and will be more grateful if they work together again to stop sanctions and bombing of Iraq,she said.
Mr Clinton, Mr Blair, Saddam Hussein and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan should get together in order to end this suffering, she said.
Mr Perez-Esquivel said: We call on the president of America, the vice-president and the congressmen to come to Iraq and see the little children; and on Tony Blair, the UK government and Kofi Annan to come and to go to the cancer ward and give us an answer ... What was their crime?
Mr Perez-Esquivel, who opposed a military dictatorship in his native Argentina, won the Nobel prize in 1980.
He was arrested in 1977 and tortured for opposing the Argentine army's 1976 coup. He then spent 14 months in jail and another 14 months under house arrest.
The other activists left Baghdad yesterday.