U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar is being urged by three Jewish leaders to tell Iraq that the use of unconventional weapons against civilian populations would represent a “retreat for humanity in history.”
The leaders, presidents of the American Jewish Committee, the Anglo-Jewish Association of Great Britain and the Alliance Israelite Universelle of France, sent the message Monday to Perez de Cuellar to draw his attention to the dangers of Iraq’s chemical and biological arsenal.
“There was a real desire to alert the secretary-general of the real danger to world peace of such a horrific prospect of chemical or biological weapons, and we hope the U.N. will speak and speak out forcefully,” said Sholom Comay, president of AJCommittee.
The message appealed to public opinion, “sometimes muted by pacifist tendencies, to understand the extreme importance of what is at stake.”
The message also conveyed the fear of the “eventual use toward terrorist ends of chemical or bacteriological warfare against the civilian populations of Israel or of Saudi Arabia.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
