councilor.org
| Source | Tom Walker |
| Date | 03/02/03/15:59 |
| "April 26, 1937 was market day in the small city of Guernica, located in the Spain?s Basque region. On that terrible day, Hitler's
war planes, supporting General Franco and his troops that were engaged in the Spanish Civil War, bombarded the quiet city. Most men had already left the city to fight at the front, leaving mostly women, children, and the elderly behind. The bombardment lasted for three and a half hours, destroying 70 percent of the city and claiming 1600 lives, one third of the population." ... "THE Pentagon has drawn up a blueprint for a "shock and awe" air assault on Iraq which will concentrate on killing as many of its leaders as possible and cutting the survivors off from contact with their troops in the field. "Military planners believe they can minimise allied casualties by targeting Saddam Hussein, his ministers and the command element of his security services and Republican Guard divisions to stun the mass of the Iraqi army into either surrender or rebellion. "The strategy calls for two days of overwhelming aerial bombardment with up to 900 Tomahawk cruise missiles and pinpoint strikes by stealth bombers against leadership centres in Baghdad and Tikrit. "You will see simultaneous attacks on hundreds if not thousands of key points. No matter how they try to disperse, a large percentage of the Iraqi senior commanders will be dead in the first few hours," Harlan Ullman, a military analyst at Washington's centre for strategic and international studies, said yesterday. "It's all designed to convince the ordinary Iraqi soldier that his personal situation is hopeless and certainly beyond the control of Saddam and his cronies." ... Guernica Reproduction Covered at UN NEW YORK.- The "Guernica" work by Pablo Picasso at the entrance of the Security Council of the United Nations has been covered with a curtain. The reason for covering this work is that this is the place where diplomats make statements to the press and have this work as the background. The Picasso work features the horrors of war. On January 27 a large blue curtain was placed to cover the work. Fred Eckhard, press secretary of the U.N. said: "It is an appropriate background for the cameras." He was questioned as to why the work had been covered. A diplomat stated that it would not be an appropriate background if the ambassador of the United States at the U.N. John Negroponte, or Powell, talk about war surrounded with women, children and animals shouting with horror and showing the suffering of the bombings. This work is a reproduction of the Guernica that was donated by Nelson A. Rockefeller to the U.N. in 1985. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho