[Peace-discuss] great job, USA

[Ricky Baldwin]

Here's just one little example of what all our raining terror from the skies 
accomplished in Afghanistan, besides killing a few thousand civilians.

I'm sure we'll all feel safer after reading this.

Ricky


Return to Afghanistan
At the al-Qa'ida Cemetery, People Kiss
the Earth Above the Honoured Dead
by Robert Fisk
The Independent

They are honoured as saints. Beneath the grey mounds of dust and dried mud 
lie the "martyrs" of al-Qa'ida.

Here, among these 150 graves, lie the three men who held out to the end in 
the Mirweis hospital, shooting at the Americans and their Afghan allies 
until they died amid sewage and their own excrement. Other earth hides the 
bodies of the followers of Osama bin Laden who fought at Kandahar airport in 
the last battle before the fall of the Taliban.

They are Arabs and Pakistanis and Chechens and Kazakhs and Kashmiris and 
all--if you believe the propaganda--are hated and loathed by the native 
Pashtun population of Kandahar.

Not true. For while the US special forces cruise the streets of this 
brooding, hot city in their 4x4s, the people of Kandahar visit this bleak 
graveyard with the reverence of worshippers. They tend the graves in their 
hundreds. On Fridays, they come in their thousands, travelling hundreds of 
miles.

They bring their sick and dying. For word has it that a visit to the 
graveyard of Mr bin Laden's dead will cure disease and pestilence. As if 
kneeling at the graves of saints, old women gently wash the baked-mud 
sepulchres, kissing the dust upon them, looking up in prayer to the spindly

flags which snap in the dust storms. The Kandahar Kubrestan--the place of 
graves--is a political as well as a religious lesson for all who come here.

"Foreigners are advised to stay away from the al-Qa'ida graveyard," a 
Western aid worker announces with ceremony. "You may be in danger there." 
But when I visited the last resting place of Mr bin Laden's men, there was 
only the fine, gritty winds of sand to fear. It crept into my eyes, my nose, 
my mouth, my ears. Many of the men around the graves kept their scarves 
around their faces, dark eyes staring at the foreigner in their midst. The 
local authorities have put two Afghan soldiers on duty to control the 
crowds, but all they do is watch the visitors as they put bowls of salt on 
the graves and take pieces of mud from the graves to touch with their

tongues.

An old man from Helmand was there. He had put stones and salt and mud on the 
tombs--he shook hands with me with salt on his fingers--and he had come 
because he was sick. "I have pain in my knee and I have polio and I heard 
that if I came here I would be cured," he said. "I put salt and grain on the 
graves. Later I collect the grain and eat the salt, and take the mud from 
the grave home." Khurda, the Pashtuns call this, bringing salt to the tombs 
of saints.

A second, older man had travelled from Uruzgan with his mother. "My mother 
had leg and back pains and I brought her to Kandahar so she could see the 
doctors. But when I heard the stories about these martyrs' graves--and that 
they might cure her--I also brought my mother here. She is happier here than 
going to the doctor's." I watched his elderly mother on her knees, scraping

dust from the mud tombs, praying and crying.

The two soldiers at the graveyard appear to have succumbed to the same 
visionary trance as the worshippers. "I've seen for myself people who get 
healed here," a young, unbearded man with a Kalashnikov rifle on his 
shoulder told me with a smile. "It's true. People get well after visiting 
the graves. I've seen deaf men who could hear again and I've seen the dumb

speak. They were cured."

This is not the time--and definitely not the place--to contradict such 
conviction. The sand blasts over this graveyard with a ruthlessness worthy 
of Osama bin Laden. The city cemetery is much larger--there are square miles 
of tribal graveyards within the perimeter. But it is the al-Qa'ida dead who 
attract most mourners. Attracted by what, the foreigner wonders? By the

rumours and legend of healing? By the idea that these men resisted the 
foreigners to the end, preferred to die rather than surrender, that the 
non-Afghan "martyrs" had fought like Afghans?

Perhaps it's as well the American special forces boys don't drop by for a 
visit. They might see something that would--and should--worry them.






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