[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [SRRTAC-L:7252] Nothing happened (fwd)

[Al Kagan]

>Delivered-To: akagan at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
>Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 18:30:19 -0600 (CST)
>From: Dale Wertz <dwertz at mc.net>
>To: SRRT Action Council <srrtac-l at ala.org>
>Cc: PLGNet-L at listproc.sjsu.edu
>Subject: [SRRTAC-L:7252] Nothing happened (fwd)
>X-Spam-Rating: mail.mc.net 1.6.1.petek 0/1000/N
>Reply-To: srrtac-l at ala.org
>Sender: owner-srrtac-l at ala.org
>Status:  
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 12:22:07 EST
>Reply-To: International_Viewpoint at compuserve.com
>To: FI-press-l at mail.comlink.apc.org
>Subject: [FI-P] Nothing happened
>
>
>A village is destroyed. And America says nothing happened
>
>
>War on terrorism
>
>Richard Lloyd Parry in Kama Ado, Afghanistan
>THE INDEPENDENT
>04 December 2001
>The village where nothing happened is reached by a steep climb at the end of
>a rattling three-hour drive along a stony road. Until nothing happened here,
>early on the morning of Saturday and again the following day, it was a large
>village with a small graveyard, but now that has been reversed. The cemetery
>on the hill contains 40 freshly dug graves, unmarked and identical. And the
>village of Kama Ado has ceased to exist.
>Many of the homes here are just deep conical craters in the earth. The rest
>are cracked open, split like crushed cardboard boxes. At the moment when
>nothing happened, the villagers of Kama Ado were taking their early morning
>meal, before sunrise and the beginning of the Ramadan fast. And there in the
>rubble, dented and ripped, are tokens of the simple daily lives they led.
>A contorted tin kettle, turned almost inside out by the blast; a collection
>of charred cooking pots; and the fragments of an old-fashioned pedal-operated
>sewing machine. A split metal chest contains scraps of children's clothes in
>cheap bright nylon.
>In another room are the only riches that these people had, six dead cows
>lying higgledy-piggledy and distended by decay. And all this is very strange
>because, on Saturday morning ’Äì when American B-52s unloaded dozen of bombs
>that killed 115 men, women and children ’Äì nothing happened.
>We know this because the US Department of Defence told us so. That evening, a
>Pentagon spokesman, questioned about reports of civilian casualties in
>eastern Afghanistan, explained that they were not true, because the US is
>meticulous in selecting only military targets associated with Osama bin
>Laden's al-Qa'ida network. Subsequent Pentagon utterances on the subject have
>wobbled somewhat, but there has been no retraction of that initial decisive
>statement: "It just didn't happen."
>So God knows what kind of a magic looking-glass I stepped through yesterday,
>as I travelled out of the city of Jalalabad along the desert road to Kama
>Ado. From the moment I woke up, I was confronted with the wreckage and
>innocent victims of high-altitude, hi-tech, thousand-pound nothings.
>The day began at the home of Haji Zaman Gamsharik, the pro-Western
>anti-Taliban mujahedin commander who is being discreetly supplied and funded
>by the US government. The previous day I had followed him around Jalalabad's
>mortuary, where seven mutilated corpses were being laid out ’Äì mujahedin
>soldiers of Commander Zaman who had been killed when US bombs hit the
>government office in which they were sleeping. And now, it had happened again.
>There they were in the back of three pick-up trucks ’Äì seven more bloody
>bodies of seven more mujahedin, killed when the guesthouse in which they were
>sleeping in the village of Landi Khiel was hit by bombs at 6.30am yesterday
>morning.
>Commander Zaman is a proud, haughty man who fought in the mountains for years
>against the Soviet Union, but I've never seen him look so vulnerable. "I sent
>them there myself yesterday,'' was all he could say. "I sent them for
>security.''
>But the commander provided us with mujahedin escorts of our own, and we set
>off down the road to Landi Khiel. We found the ruins of the office where the
>first lot of soldiers had died, and the guesthouse where they perished the
>previous morning. And there, in the ruins of a family house, was a small
>fragment of nothing. It was the tail-end of a compact bomb. It bore the words
>"Surface Attack Guided Missile AGM 114", and a serial number: 232687. It was
>half-buried in the remains of the straw roof of a house where three men had
>died: Fazil Karim, his brother Mahmor Ghulab, and his nephew Hasiz Ullah.
>"They were a family, just ordinary people," said Haji Mohammed Nazir, the
>local elder who was accompanying us. "They were not terrorists ’Äì the
>terrorists are in the mountains, over there.''
>So we drove on in the direction of the White Mountains, where hundreds of
>al-Qa'ida members, and perhaps even Osama bin Laden himself, are hiding in
>the Tora Bora cave complex. A B-52 was high in the sky; a billow of black
>smoke was visible, blooming out of the valley. Something, surely, was
>happening over there. And then we reached the ruins of Kama Ado. Among the
>pathetic remains I found only one sinister object ¬‚ an old leather gun
>holster with an ammunition belt. It is conceivable that a handful of
>al-Qa'ida members had been spending the night there, and that US targeters
>learnt of their presence.
>But after 22 years of war, almost every Afghan home contains some military
>relic, and the villagers swore they hadn't seen Arab or Taliban fighters for
>a fortnight. Certainly there could not have been enough terrorists to fill
>the 40 fresh graves. One person told me a few holes contained not intact
>people, but simply body parts.
>We had been warned that white faces would meet an angry reception in the
>village where nothing happened, but I encountered despair and bafflement. I
>had only one moment of real fear, when an American B-52 flew overhead. We
>halted our convoy, clambered out of the cars and trotted into the fields on
>either side. The plane did a slow circle; I was conscious of electronic eyes
>looking down on us, the only traffic on the road. Then, to everyone's relief,
>the bomber veered away.
>Before we left the city, an American colleague in Jalalabad telephoned the
>Pentagon and informed them of our plans to travel to the village where
>nothing happened. I can't help wondering, in these looking-glass times, what
>that B-52 would have done to our convoy if that telephone call had not been
>made. Perhaps nothing would have happened to me too.

-- 


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