The following statement is being distributed by the Students for Social Equality on the University of Michigan Ann Arbor campus. It is available as a leaflet in pdf format, and we urge our readers and supporters to download and help circulate it throughout the U of M community. We encourage students at other campuses to organize similar protests.

The Students for Social Equality calls upon all members of the University of Michigan community—students, faculty and campus workers—to assemble on the Diag on Monday at noon to demonstrate their opposition to the atrocities now being carried out by the United States government and its armed forces against the people of Iraq.

We, as thinking and feeling human beings, have a responsibility to take a stand against this war, and by so doing demonstrate to the world that the criminal acts now being perpetrated by the United States government against Iraq are widely opposed by American working people and student youth.

We must demand an end to the oppression and killing of Iraqi people, whose resistance to the illegal invasion of their country by the United States is as heroic as it is justified.

We must demand the immediate withdrawal of all American and other occupation forces from Iraq. It is the right of the Iraqi people to work out their own destiny. As the combined struggle of the Shia and Sunni communities against the United States military forces has demonstrated during the past week, the Iraqi masses are united in their opposition to occupation. It is the United States that has encouraged communal strife between the Sunni and Shia, as a means of keeping the Iraqi people divided and incapable of serious resistance.

We must demand that those who planned, organized and launched this war, on the basis of lies, be held responsible and accountable for their crimes, which have cost the lives of nearly 700 American soldiers and countless Iraqis.

Finally, and above all, we must begin to build a genuine mass movement irreconcilably opposed to American imperialism and its bloody agenda of colonialism and world domination. Every member of this community must take careful note of the fact that all sections of the political establishment—Democratic as well as Republican—are unified in their support for the annihilation of the Iraqi resistance. Far from opposing the occupation of Iraq, the Democratic Party leadership is calling on the Bush administration to send more American soldiers to that country.

We are all responsible for what we do, or don’t do. In a period such as this, indifference, inaction and apathy are a form of political and moral complicity in the crimes of American imperialism.

Again, the Students for Social Equality calls on all members of the University of Michigan community to assemble on the Diag on Monday at noon in opposition to the war.