Mr. Bush,

We are aware that you are now celebrating the victory you have won against the non-existent troops of the fictive army of a despot of your own fabric.

We do not know what you have been told, but the magnificent army you have dispatched from across the Atlantic Ocean won this victory by burying the exhausted and impoverished people of Iraq under the debris of their destroyed houses. The people of Iraq have been suffering under an embargo for years, their average life span has decreased by three years, their young people and children have fallen ill and weak. Your army won this victory over the bullet- and shrapnel-riddled bodies of women, elderly people, unarmed youngsters and small children, bodies with legs and arms torn apart.

Neither was your personal rival Saddam in sight, nor his guards or his armed forces or his weapons of mass destruction. Your troops are celebrating a victory won by razing down the cities of Mesopotamia. Cities full of historical treasures the value and significance of which are beyond you and your men’s comprehension. They are celebrating and hugging plunder gangs who beat broken Saddam statues with their slippers, loot hospitals and museums, set libraries ablaze. Your Minister of Defence has declared that “looting is freedom”. In doing so, not only has he encouraged looters on your behalf, but he has also confessed to the plunder of Middle Eastern oil by the coercive force represented by yourself.

You have won a much becoming victory, Mr. Bush. But don’t you ever forget that, there exists no faith or ethics, including that of yours, that pardons child-killers. If you really have any faith whatsoever, you should know that you are doomed to remain a sinner to eternity.

The sights of dead children that you have skillfully concealed from your own people will some day condemn you in your own country and in your own home.

If it is not too much of a trouble, please think, Mr. Bush. While you unblinkingly murdered unarmed Iraqis, women and children, the Iraqis did not take the lives of your captured soldiers, whose fear and pain-stricken eyes you ventured to conceal from your own people. You have to acknowledge that those prisoners of war were the pilots who dumped bombs on the people of Iraq and the soldiers who killed their children. At that time, the dead bodies of people blown apart by bombs in the market place had not been buried yet. Your soldiers could easily have been killed in one way or another. Happily, they have all returned home safe and sound.

Has this situation, whatever its reasons, managed to arouse a small sense of embarrassment in you or your men or your generals? We have reason to believe that it has not, Mr. Bush. Just as you felt no shame in refusing to agree to any reduction in the enormous amount of energy consumption per capita in the US, while our planet is being dragged towards irreparable environmental disaster, you felt no shame in this either.

But we know very well that in your countries, in the US and the UK, there are hundreds of thousands of people who feel this shame on your behalf.

As health care workers endowed with the task of protecting and improving life, we, along with the peace-loving world public, are concerned that you, infatuated by the “low costs” of this victory, will drag our planet into new blood-soaked adventures.

You can no longer convince anyone that you will bring democracy to those very countries--whatever their political system may be--whose children you have slaughtered, whose cities you have devastated, whose historical and cultural treasures you have allowed to be ransacked. Therefore you should either be frank and spell out your real intentions or get out of the Middle East and go home.

We are well aware that you will do none of the above, that you will keep telling lies. But whatever the mask you choose to put on, we now know you well and we declare to the world that you and your accomplice Mr. Blair, and you and Mr. Blair's men constitute the largest and gravest threat to the environment, to culture and to human life.

ISTANBUL CHAMBER OF MEDICAL DOCTORS
ISTANBUL CHAMBER OF DENTISTS
ISTANBUL CHAMBER OF PHARMACISTS
ISTANBUL CHAMBER OF VETERINARY MEDICINE
ISTANBUL BRANCHES OF THE TRADE UNION OF HEALTH CARE AND SOCIAL
SERVICE WORKERS

16.04.2003

Mr. Blair,
Prime Minister
London/England

Mr. Blair,

You will appreciate that the role you have currently undertaken in international politics on behalf of the United Kingdom, does not allow us to address you as an independent political personality.

Therefore, we limit ourselves to conveying you a copy of the attached open letter we have addressed to your boss, Mr. Bush, on the issue of the invasion of Iraq wherein you have acted as an accomplice.

ISTANBUL CHAMBER OF DOCTORS OF MEDICINE
ISTANBUL CHAMBER OF DENTISTS
ISTANBUL CHAMBER OF PHARMACISTS
ISTANBUL CHAMBER OF VETERINARY MEDICINE
ISTANBUL BRANCHES OF THE TRADE UNION OF HEALTH CARE AND SOCIAL
SERVICE WORKERS

From Istanbul
16.04.2003
Mr. G. W. Bush
President
The White House
USA

An Open Letter to Bush and Blair
From Professional Bodies and Unions in Turkey

Posted on the Independent Newswire on 16 April 2003.
Ref: www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=312665&group=webcast