-Caveat Lector- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 02:32:35 +0200 From: Elana Wesley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [neah] [Fwd: ZNet Commentary / Fisk - Gerassi / Tragic Tears / September 23] Apologies if any of these items have been sent by me previously. Elana -------- Original Message -------- Subject: ZNet Commentary / Fisk - Gerassi / Tragic Tears / September 23 Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 11:25:25 -0400 From: "Michael Albert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Hello, Here are two more powerful essays, from Robert Fisk and John Gerassi. Other materials are on the ZNet Site, of course... Top Page: www.zmag.org/weluser.htm Crisis Page: http://www.zmag.org/reactionscalam.htm Many ZNet interactive facilities are still offline due to reconstruction after the virus fallout -- they should return on Monday and Tuesday, with the exception of forums, which will take somewhat longer. All crisis coverage is in place and easily accessible. ====== How can the US bomb this tragic people? By Robert Fisk 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 - 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. ---- Will Tears Ever Stop? By John Gerassi I can't help crying. As soon as I see a person on TV telling the heart-rendering story of the tragic fate of their loved-one in the World Trade Center disaster, I can't control my tears. But then I wonder why didn't I cry when our troops wiped out some 5,000 poor people in Panama's El Chorillo neighborhood on the excuse of looking for Noriega. Our leaders knew he was hiding elsewhere but we destroyed El Chorillo because the folks living there were nationalists who wanted the U.S. out of Panama completely. Worse still, why didn't I cry when we killed two million Vietnamese, mostly innocent peasants, in a war which its main architect, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, knew we could not win? When I went to give blood the other day, I spotted a Cambodian doing the same, three up in the line, and that reminded me: Why didn't I cry when we helped Pol Pot butcher another million by giving him arms and money, because he was opposed to "our enemy" (who eventually stopped the killing fields)? To stay up but not cry that evening, I decided to go to a movie. I chose Lumumba, at the Film Forum, and again I realized that I hadn't cried when our government arranged for the murder of the Congo's only decent leader, to be replaced by General Mobutu, a greedy, vicious, murdering dictator. Nor did I cry when the CIA arranged for the overthrow of Indonesia's Sukarno, who had fought the Japanese World War II invaders and established a free independent country, and then replaced him by another General, Suharto, who had collaborated with the Japanese and who proceeded to execute at least half a million "Marxists" (in a country where, if folks had ever heard of Marx, it was at best Groucho)? I watched TV again last night and cried again at the picture of that wonderful now-missing father playing with his two-month old child. Yet when I remembered the slaughter of thousands of Salvadorans, so graphically described in the Times by Ray Bonner, or the rape and murder of those American nuns and lay sisters there, all perpetrated by CIA trained and paid agents, I never shed a tear. I even cried when I heard how brave had been Barbara Olson, wife of the Solicitor General, whose political views I detested. But I didn't cry when the US invaded that wonderful tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada and killed innocent citizens who hoped to get a better life by building a tourist airfield, which my government called proof of a Russian base, but then finished building once the island was secure in the US camp again. Why didn't I cry when Ariel Sharon, today Israel's prime minister, planned, then ordered, the massacre of two thousand poor Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, the same Sharon who, with such other Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists become prime ministers as Begin and Shamir, killed the wives and children of British officers by blowing up the King David hotel where they were billeted? I guess one only cries only for one's own. But is that a reason to demand vengeance on anyone who might disagree with us? That's what Americans seem to want. Certainly our government oes, and so too most of our media. Do we really believe that we have a right to exploit the poor folk of the world for our benefit, because we claim we are free and they are not? So now we're going to go to war. We are certainly entitled to go after those who killed so many of our innocent brothers and sisters. And we'll win, of course. Against Bin Laden. Against Taliban. Against Iraq. Against whoever and whatever. In the process we'll kill a few innocent children again. Children who have no clothes for the coming winter. No houses to shelter them. And no schools to learn why they are guilty, at two or four or six years old. Maybe Evangelists Falwell and Robertson will claim their death is good because they weren't Christians, and maybe some State Department spokesperson will tell the world that they were so poor that they're now better off. And then what? Will we now be able to run the world the way we want to? With all the new legislation establishing massive surveillance of you and me, our CEOs will certainly be pleased that the folks demonstrating against globalization will now be cowed for ever. No more riots in Seattle, Quebec or Genoa. Peace at last. Until next time. Who will it be then? A child grown-up who survived our massacre of his innocent parents in El Chorillo? A Nicaraguan girl who learned that her doctor mother and father were murdered by a bunch of gangsters we called democratic contras who read in the CIA handbook that the best way to destroy the only government which was trying to give the country's poor a better lot was to kill its teachers, health personnel, and government farm workers? Or maybe it will be a bitter Chilean who is convinced that his whole family was wiped out on order of Nixon's Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who could never tell the difference between a communist and a democratic socialist or even a nationalist. When will we Americans learn that as long as we keep trying to run the world for the sake of the bottom line, we will suffer someone's revenge? No war will ever stop terrorism as long as we use terror to have our way. So I stopped crying because I stopped watching TV. I went for a walk. Just four houses from mine. There, a crowd had congregated to lay flowers and lit candles in front of our local firehouse. It was closed. It had been closed since Tuesday because the firemen, a wonderful bunch of friendly guys who always greeted neighborhood folks with smiles and good cheer, had rushed so fast to save the victims of the first tower that they perished with them when it collapsed. And I cried again. So I said to myself when I wrote this, don't send it; some of your students, colleagues, neighbors will hate you, maybe even harm you. But then I put on the TV again, and there was Secretary of State Powell telling me that it will be okay to go to war against these children, these poor folks, these US-haters, because we are civilized and they are not. So I decided to risk it. Maybe, reading this, one more person will ask: Why are so many people in the world ready to die to give us a taste of what we give them? ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Get your FREE credit report with a FREE CreditCheck Monitoring Service trial http://us.click.yahoo.com/MDsVHB/bQ8CAA/ySSFAA/XgSolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To post a message, send it to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To receive all messages in one daily email, send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! 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