George Galloway (born 16 August 1954) is a British politician, broadcaster, and writer. Between 1987 and 2015, with a gap in 2010-12, he represented four constituencies as a Member of Parliament, elected as a candidate for the Labour Party and later the Respect Party. After becoming the youngest ever Chairman of the Scottish Labour Party in 1981, he became General Secretary of the London-based charity War on Want in 1983, remaining in the post until elected as MP for Glasgow Hillhead (later Glasgow Kelvin) at the 1987 general election. In 2003, Galloway was expelled from the Labour Party, having been found guilty by the party's national constitutional committee of four of the five charges of bringing the party into disrepute, including having called on Arabs to fight British troops.

In 1998, Galloway founded the Mariam Appeal which was intended, according to its website's welcome page in 1999, "to campaign against sanctions on Iraq which are having disastrous effects on the ordinary people of Iraq". The campaign was named after Mariam Hamza, a child flown by the fund from Iraq to Britain to receive treatment for leukaemia. The intention was to raise awareness of the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of other Iraqi children, due to poor health conditions and lack of suitable medicines and facilities, and to campaign for the lifting of the Iraq sanctions that many maintained were responsible for that situation. In 1999, Galloway was criticised for spending Christmas in Iraq with Tariq Aziz, who was Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister at the time. In a 17 May 2005 hearing of the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Galloway stated that he had many meetings with Aziz, and characterised their relationship as friendly. In all, he has admitted to more than ten meetings with Aziz.  The fund received scrutiny during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, after a complaint that Galloway used some donated money to pay for his travel expenses. He responded by stating that the expenses were incurred in his capacity as the Appeal's chairman. Although the Mariam Appeal was never a registered charity and never intended to be such, it was investigated by the Charity Commission. The report of this year-long inquiry, published in June 2004, found that the Mariam Appeal was undertaking charitable work (and so ought to have registered with them), but did not substantiate allegations that any funds had been misused. It emerged some years later that Galloway had appealed in a letter dated 24 April 2003 to Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, to stop the investigation into the Mariam Appeal. According to a report in The Times, after the letter was released under the Freedom of Information Act, Galloway falsely asserted that the Appeal "received no money from Iraq".  A further Charity Commission Report published on 7 June 2007 found that the Appeal had received funds from Fawaz Zureikat that originated from the Oil For Food programme, and concluded that:  Although Mr Galloway, Mr Halford and Mr Al-Mukhtar have confirmed that they were unaware of the source of Mr Zureikat's donations, the Commission has concluded that the charity trustees should have made further enquiries when accepting such large single and cumulative donations to satisfy themselves as to their origin and legitimacy. The Commission's conclusion is that the charity trustees did not properly discharge their duty of care as trustees to the Appeal in respect of these donations ... The Commission is also concerned, having considered the totality of the evidence before it, that Mr Galloway may also have known of the connection between the Appeal and the Programme.  Galloway, in response, stated: "I've always disputed the Commission's retrospective view that a campaign to win a change in national and international policy - a political campaign - was, in fact, a charity".

Using a quote from the above article, answer the following question: What was the Mariam Appeal?
was intended, according to its website's welcome page in 1999, "to campaign against sanctions on Iraq which are having disastrous effects on the ordinary people of Iraq".