Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 25. August 2005 / Timeline August 25, 2005
Version 3.524. August 2005, 26. August 2005
08/25/2005
America Library Association calls for withdrawal of US troops
from Iraq
By Sandy English,
World Socialist Web Site
- http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/alib-a25_prn.shtml
At its annual conference in Chicago earlier this summer, the
182-member Council of the American Library Association,
representing more than 65,000 librarians, passed a resolution
calling for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.
The resolution stated: “The justifications for the invasion
of Iraq have proven to be completely unfounded and the war already
has taken the lives of more than 100,000 Iraqis and more than 1700
U.S. soldiers and these numbers will continue to mount as long as
the U.S. remains in Iraq, and during the current occupation, many
of Iraq’s cultural treasures, including libraries, archives,
manuscripts, and artifacts, have been destroyed, lost, or stolen,
and as long as U.S. forces remain in Iraq, the inevitable
escalation of fighting threatens further destruction of
Iraq’s cultural heritage....”
Since the April 2003 looting of the Baghdad Museum and the burning
of the Al-Awqaf library with its collection of precious Islamic
manuscripts, American and international scholars, librarians, and
museum professionals have followed with increasing disquiet the
loss of life in Iraq and the systematic destruction of some of the
world’s oldest cultural resources. (It is arguable that
libraries were invented in Iraq 5,000 years ago.) The Middle East
Library Association recently released a report that details the
magnitude of this tragedy.
The ALA has been known in the past for its advocacy of freedom of
expression and its opposition to the government monitoring of
readership in the United States. In 1988, it opposed the Library
Awareness Program in which the FBI lied to librarians and
intimidated them into turning over lists of “sensitive”
books that individuals had borrowed, especially from university
libraries.
Although the ALA has not opposed the entire Patriot Act, it has
lobbied for the deletion of sections 215 and 505, which have
broadened the powers of the state to criminalize the free flow of
information. The ALA has made information available to librarians
who opposed government intrusion into the privacy of library
patrons.
This year’s ALA convention featured an event called
“Intellectual freedom, a casualty of war?” with First
Amendment scholar Geoffrey R. Stone.
The ALA has assisted in providing funds for the rebuilding of Iraqi
libraries. In January 2003 the ALA opposed the limit on the free
exchange of information between Iraqi and US libraries imposed by
government sanctions against Iraq, noting that all other countries
operating under UN sanctions had provided exemptions for
educational materials. An ALA resolution in June 2003 deplored the
consequences of the destruction of Iraqi libraries and museums. As
the brutality and cultural vandalism of the Iraq war has
progressed, the tone of concern by the ALA has become sharper. This
summer’s resolution is one of the first resolutions by a
major professional organization calling for the withdrawal of
American troops form Iraq.
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