[Peace-political] Fwd: Robert Fisk: How can the US bomb this tragic people? (fwd)

[Al Kagan]

>Delivered-To: akagan at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
>From: Tom_Childs at douglas.bc.ca
>Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2001 22:44:38 -0700
>Subject: Robert Fisk: How can the US bomb this tragic people? (fwd)
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>	rpkh2 at pop2.intergate.ca, chris.keene at which.net
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>Powerful piece here from Robert Fisk...Fwd here f.y.i.   Salud, TEC
>   ----- Forwarded message: -----
>>From mail Sat Sep 22 21:18 PDT 2001
>From: "Viviane Lerner" <vlerner at interpac.net>
>To: "Network of East-West Women" <neww at neww.org>
>Cc: "[Global News]" <global.news at topica.com>,
>         "David McReynolds" <DavidMcR at aol.com>, "Rad Times" <resist at best.com>,
>         "WAND" <wand at wand.org>
>Subject: Robert Fisk: How can the US bomb this tragic people?
>
>http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=3D95487
>
>Robert Fisk: How can the US bomb this tragic people?
>23 September 2001
>We are witnessing this weekend one of the most epic events since the
>Second World War, certainly since Vietnam. I am not talking about the
>ruins of the World Trade Centre in New York and the grotesque physical
>scenes which we watched on 11 September, an atrocity which I described
>last week as a crime against humanity (of which more later). No, I am
>referring to the extraordinary, almost unbelievable preparations now
>under way for the most powerful nation ever to have existed on God's
>Earth to bomb the most devastated, ravaged, starvation-haunted and
>tragic country in the world.  Afghanistan, raped and eviscerated by the
>Russian army for 10 years, abandoned by its friends - us, of course -
>once the Russians had fled, is about to be attacked by the surviving
>superpower.
>
>I watch these events with incredulity, not least because I was a
>witness to the Russian invasion and occupation. How they fought for
>us, those Afghans, how they believed our word. How they trusted
>President Carter when he promised the West's support. I even met the
>CIA spook in Peshawar, brandishing the identity papers of a Soviet
>pilot, shot down with one of our missiles - which had been scooped
>from the wreckage of his Mig. "Poor guy," the CIA man said, before
>showing us a movie about GIs zapping the Vietcong in his private
>cinema. And yes, I remember what the Soviet officers told me after
>arresting me at Salang. They were performing their international
>duty in Afghanistan, they told me. They were "punishing the
>terrorists" who wished to overthrow the (communist) Afghan government
>and destroy its people. Sound familiar?
>
>I was working for The Times in 1980, and just south of Kabul I picked
>up a very disturbing story. A group of religious mujahedin fighters
>had attacked a school because the communist regime had forced girls
>to be educated alongside boys. So they had bombed the school, murdered
>the head teacher's wife and cut off her husband's head. It was all
>true. But when The Times ran the story, the Foreign Office complained
>to the foreign desk that my report gave support to the Russians. Of
>course. Because the Afghan fighters were the good guys. Because Osama
>bin Laden was a good guy. Charles Douglas-Home, then editor of The
>Times would always insist that Afghan guerrillas were called "freedom
>fighters" in the headline. There was nothing you couldn't do with words.
>
>And so it is today. President Bush now threatens the obscurantist,
>ignorant, super-conservative Taliban with the same punishment as he
>intends to mete out to bin Laden. Bush originally talked about
>"justice and punishment" and about "bringing to justice" the
>perpetrators of the atrocities. But he's not sending policemen to the
>Middle East; he's sending B-52s. And F-16s and AWACS planes and
>Apache helicopters. We are not going to arrest bin Laden.  We are
>going to destroy him. And that's fine if he's the guilty man. But
>B-52s don't discriminate between men wearing turbans, or between men
>and women or women and children.
>
>I wrote last week about the culture of censorship which is now to
>smother us, and of the personal attacks which any journalist
>questioning the roots of this crisis endures. Last week, in a
>national European newspaper, I got a new and revealing example of
>what this means. I was accused of being anti-American and then
>informed that anti-Americanism was akin to anti-Semitism. You get
>the point, of course. I'm not really sure what anti-Americanism is.
>But criticising the United States is now to be the moral equivalent
>of Jew-hating. It's OK to write headlines about "Islamic terror" or
>my favourite French example "God's madmen", but it's definitely
>out of bounds to ask why the United States is loathed by so many Arab
>Muslims in the Middle East. We can give the murderers a Muslim
>identity: we can finger the Middle East for the crime - but we may
>not suggest any reasons for the crime.
>
>But let's go back to that word justice. Re-watching that pornography
>of mass-murder in New York, there must be many people who share my
>view that this was a crime against humanity. More than 6,000 dead;
>that's a Srebrenica of a slaughter. Even the Serbs spared most of the
>women and children when they killed their menfolk. The dead of
>Srebrenica deserve - and are getting - international justice at the
>Hague. So surely what we need is an International Criminal Court to
>deal with the sorts of killer who devastated New York on 11 September.
>Yet "crime against humanity" is not a phrase we are hearing from the
>Americans. They prefer "terrorist atrocity", which is slightly less
>powerful. Why, I wonder? Because to speak of a terrorist crime
>against humanity would be a tautology. Or because the US is against
>international justice. Or because it specifically opposed the
>creation of an international court on the grounds that its own
>citizens may one day be arraigned in front of it.
>
>The problem is that America wants its own version of justice, a
>concept rooted, it seems, in the Wild West and Hollywood's version
>of the Second World War. President Bush speaks of smoking them out,
>of the old posters that once graced Dodge City: "Wanted, Dead or
>Alive". Tony Blair now tells us that we must stand by America as
>America stood by us in the Second World War. Yes, it's true that
>America helped us liberate Western Europe. But in both world wars,
>the US chose to intervene after only a long and - in the case of
>the Second World War =96 very profitable period of neutrality.
>
>Don't the dead of Manhattan deserve better than this? It's less
>than three years since we launched a 200-Cruise missile attack on
>Iraq for throwing out the UN arms inspectors. Needless to say,
>nothing was achieved. More Iraqis were killed, and the UN
>inspectors never got back, and sanctions continued, and Iraqi
>children continued to die. No policy, no perspective. Action, not
>words.
>
>And that's where we are today. Instead of helping Afghanistan,
>instead of pouring our aid into that country 10 years ago,
>rebuilding its cities and culture and creating a new political
>centre that would go beyond tribalism, we left it to rot. Sarajevo
>would be rebuilt. Not Kabul. Democracy, of a kind, could be set up
>in Bosnia. Not in Afghanistan. Schools could be reopened in Tuzla
>and Travnik. Not in Jaladabad. When the Taliban arrived, stringing
>up every opponent, chopping off the arms of thieves, stoning women
>for adultery, the United States regarded this dreadful outfit as a
>force for stability after the years of anarchy.
>
>Bush's threats have effectively forced the evacuation of every
>Western aid worker. Already, Afghans are dying because of their
>absence. Drought and starvation go on killing millions - I mean
>millions - and between 20 and 25 Afghans are blown up every day by
>the 10 million mines the Russians left behind. Of course, the
>Russians never went back to clear the mines. I suppose those B-52
>bombs will explode a few of them. But that'll be the only
>humanitarian work we're likely to see in the near future.
>
>Look at the most startling image of all this past week. Pakistan
>has closed its border with Afghanistan. So has Iran. The Afghans
>are to stay in their prison. Unless they make it through Pakistan
>and wash up on the beaches of France or the waters of Australia or
>climb through the Channel Tunnel or hijack a plane to Britain to
>face the wrath of our Home Secretary. In which case, they must be
>sent back, returned, refused entry. It's a truly terrible irony
>that the only man we would be interested in receiving from
>Afghanistan is the man we are told is the evil genius behind the
>greatest mass-murder in American history: bin Laden. The others can
>stay at home and die.
>
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-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu