UN to Caterpillar: Don't sell bulldozers to Israel
Associated Press 
June 16, 2004
The Jerusalem Post
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A UN-appointed expert said Wednesday that he has warned Caterpillar Inc. that Israel's use of bulldozers to destroy West Bank orchards could make the company an accomplice in what he called the violation of basic human rights of the Palestinians. 
Jean Ziegler, the United Nations' special expert on the right to food, said he sent a letter to Caterpillar chief executive James Owen expressing concern about the actions of the Israeli occupation forces in Rafah and in other locations in Gaza and the West Bank. 
Ziegler said his letter was the first under a new resolution passed this year by the 53-nation UN Human Rights Commission extending responsibility for protecting rights beyond governments to non-state actors. 
He wrote Owen under the letterhead of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the overall UN watchdog, and sent his letter on his own as he is entitled to do, a spokesman said. 
The Israelis are using armored bulldozers supplied by your company to destroy agricultural farms, greenhouses, ancient olive groves and agricultural fields planted with crops, the May 28th letter said. 
Ziegler, a Swiss university professor who has previously criticized Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, told The Associated Press that he had yet to receive a response from the company.
No comment was immediately available from Caterpillar headquarters in Peoria, Illinois. 
Allowing the delivery of your D-9 and D-10 Caterpillar bulldozers to the Israeli army through the government of the United States in the certain knowledge that they are being used for such actions might involve complicity or acceptance on the part of your company to actual and potential violations of human rights, including the right to food, Ziegler said in the letter. 
The Israelis have also used the bulldozers to destroy numerous Palestinian homes and sometimes human lives, including that of the American peace activist Rachel Corrie, he said. 
The 23-year-old college student from Olympia, Washington, was in Gaza as a volunteer with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement in March 2003. The group claims that the IDF bulldozer driver saw Corrie and drove over her as she and a small group of ISM activists tried to stop him from razing a home. 
The IDF, however, said that Corrie had died from injuries sustained by debris that fell on top of her as a result of the bulldozer's movements, rather than from direct contact with the bulldozer itself. 
Ziegler, appointed by the UN Human Rights Commission, said after a 10-day visit to Gaza and the West Bank last year that Israel was confiscating fertile Palestinian land for military zones or Jewish settlements. 
Ziegler and other so-called special rapporteurs are assigned by the commission to look for abuses. Each is appointed to concentrate on a specific country or right. They are unsalaried, but their expenses are paid.