SOME of my fellow Boltonians and I have been campaigning for some little time for the lifting of sanctions against Iraq, where 6000-7000 children are dying per month as a result of them. A humanitarian crisis? One would have thought so. But the Government and the vast majority of MPs are not concerned about the children's suffering but, in their support for sanctions, are determined it should continue

When NATO's illegal attack on Yugoslavia began, Tony Blair and George Robertson, stony-hearted enough where Iraqi children were concerned, claimed that it was justified by humanitarian considerations, though it was obvious that it would make the situation worse for the Kosovars - as it has. There is, I think, a hidden agenda behind the NATO bombing, which uses humanitarian considerations as a front. What makes me think this is that, in the negotiations in France, NATO was determined to insist on the one condition which they knew it would be political suicide for Milosevic to accept: the presence of a large NATO force within Yugoslavia. No attempt was made to explore more acceptable forms of monitoring - an expanded corps of unarmed observers (the existing corps had done some good work) or even a UN force. And yet, at the Rambouillet stage of the negotiations, the Serbs were quite willing to consider autonomy for Kosovo. It looks to me that NATO was determined to go to war.

The whole dirty humbugging business is too depressing and disgusting for words to do justice to it. And, as our children watch the nightly bombardment of a practically defenceless country, they will get the message: violent bullying is the 'in thing'. Hundreds of lessons in good citizenship cannot undo the harm we are doing to them.

Malcolm Pittock

St James Avenue,

Breightmet,

Bolton

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.