US-led economic sanctions are putting millions of Iranian lives are at risk by blocking the importing of medicines and hospital equipment, according to country’s top medical charity.
Fatemeh Hashemi, head of the Charity Foundation for Special Diseases, a non-government organisation supporting six million patients in Iran, is warning publicly about deep shortages of medicines for diseases like hemophilia, multiple sclerosis and cancer.
“Those with thalassaemia or in need of dialysis are facing difficulties too,” Hashemi tells The Guardian, “all because of sanctions against banks or problems with transferring foreign currency.”
Although the sanctions don’t target medicine and humanitarian needs, they are “increasingly hitting vulnerable medical patients as deliveries of medicine and raw materials for Iranian pharmaceutical companies are either stopped or delayed,” the Washington Post reported last month.
Hashemi recently wrote to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urging him to intervene for the sake of Iranian patients who, she said, have had “their basic human right” taken away from them because of sanctions.
“The sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran have had significant effects on the general population, including an escalation in inflation, a rise in commodities and energy costs, an increase in the rate of unemployment and a shortage of necessary items, including medicine,” Ban had warned the UN in a report earlier this month.
“The sanctions also appear to be affecting humanitarian operations in the country,” he wrote. “Even companies that have obtained the requisite licence to import food and medicine are facing difficulties in finding third-country banks to process the transactions.”
It’s increasingly obvious that Washington’s aim is to harm the Iranian people in a cruel form of collective punishment for a nuclear weapons program that even US intelligence admits does not exist.
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has admitted they aren’t changing the policies of the regime, but has insisted on their continuance nevertheless. As one of the top supporters of sanctions, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), said, “Critics [of the sanctions] argued that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that.”
It was AIPAC legislation, and AIPAC pressure. It's AIPAC's aim, consistent with that of officials of Occupied Palestine ( http://news.antiwar.com/2012/02/29/israeli-offici… ), to do harm to ordinary Iranians. Washington has no aim, it has a master.
Yes and AIPAC has a master,
it's called the U.S. corporate rich.
Many of whom are AIPAC.
spot on.
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA)
“Critics of the sanctions argued that these measures will hurt
the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that.”
LIGHT
Hurting people, what Empire USA is all about.
As a well respected US philosopher said " It's a price worth paying "
The US Congress kowtows to Netanyahu, a "modern" Nero. The press is subservient. The banksters and other neocons control the economy and therefore the corporations and our foreigns policy. A politician in the USA cannot get or keep his/her job without AIPAC's okay. There is absolutely no reason for the USA (or the EU, under Washington) to sanction Iran or declare war on it. Our own CIA and inspectors say Iran does not have nuclear capability and is not doing what is required to make them.
Israel wants to rule the Middle East (and why would it stop there) and more immediately it wants Lebanon's water according to Paul Craig Roberts, who I would trust any day over any American or Israel "leader". Visit PaulCraigRoberts.org for spot-on analyses.
Since the latest EU sanctions are hitting the rial hard, Israel is without doubt hoping for a revolution in Iran that will finish destroying the country. Israel, "the light among nations" turns out to be enemy #1 of the world at large.
Maybe the only hope for the world to avoid WW3 is for the dollar to lose reserve currency status asap, and for the USA to have to admit bankruptcy, unable to send any more money to Israel.
You are correct about all that you have said China will have to bankrupt america" will they "not when america is China`s bigest consumer.
We need to apply the same sanctions on israel until they give full disclosure of all of their nuclear and bio-chemical weapons systems and require that they sign on to the NPT as Iran did many years ago. Hold them equally accountable for their atrocities against humanity as much as we did the Nazi's at the end of WW2. The Gaza Strip has become the Warsaw Ghetto for the Palestinians. This makes the israeli's no better than Hitler was in 1930's and 40's. The only difference is the amount of time each has had to do their nasty deeds, Hitler did it in about 12 years and israel has taken 60 years and has murdered many generations of the peoples native to that land all done for the sake of a misguided religion that thinks it is a race of people. The Semites were the original occupants of that land, before Moses and the Hebrews ran out of Egypt, they went there and killed all the original Semites and assumed their identities and hid from the Egyptian army there. That little bible story makes the Hebrews the real and only anti Semites on earth. It proves to the whole world that the israeli's are not really Semites. Or the bible is just a fairy tale.