Amnesty International has waded into the uncomfortable swamp of opinion over the United States’ use of Lajes airbase in the Azores for its ongoing war with Iran.
The NGO has launched a petition, the reasons for which it is carrying on its website, encouraging individuals to send the text of a letter supplied to the prime minister, Luís Montenegro.
With so many voices already querying Portugal’s position – when other countries have come right out and ‘refused’ access for the purposes of waging this war, it needs to be remembered that the government, up until now, has been sticking to its guns, saying that as far as it is concerned nothing happening at Lajes violates international law.
Amnesty International sees the situation very differently. As it explains: “According to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, speaking at a hearing in the Assembly of the Republic, between 15 February and 7 April, Portugal authorised 76 landings of US aircraft at Lajes Air Base and 25 overflights of its territory, since the start of the war between the US and Israel against Iran, on the condition that they were not used to bomb civilian infrastructure.
However, various investigations by Amnesty International indicate that violations of international humanitarian law occurred during this military operation. One example of such violations was the US’s illegal attack on a school in Minab, in the province of Hormozgan, Iran, which killed 168 people, including more than 100 children.”
The proviso that no aircraft landing at Lajes could be seen to go on to ‘directly’ take part in bombardments has always been seen as a convenient line, exceptionally difficult to prove, either way. If a plane refuels at Lajes, stops off somewhere on the journey to the Middle East and then becomes ‘actively involved’ in the war operation, does that somehow ‘absolve’ Portugal of having helped the war effort?
The Portuguese government appears to think that it does. Other entities think otherwise – as do other countries (Spain immediately coming to mind as a European country that balked from the outset to the U.S. use of its air bases for the purposes of the war against Iran – but Italy and France have equally started to stand their ground).
As Amnesty International points out, there is only one way of pursuing this disquiet: lobbying the government to change the status quo.
The text of the letter to send (either by post, or via email) to the prime minister can be found after scrolling down here.
It comes after even government voices have spoken out against the situation in Lajes, and as the current two-week ceasefire in the Middle East is close to reaching its end.
In that context today, Amnesty International has upped the ante, calling for the immediate suspension of “arms transfers to any party involved in the current conflict, including the facilitation of such arms transfers by the U.S. to its ally Israel”.
The NGO has also called on the Portuguese government to “support and vote in favour of suspending the European Union-Israel Association Agreement” and to “publicly denounce violations of international law when they occur, regardless of whether they are committed by an ally such as the U.S.”.
