|
Soon after the attacks on September 11th, my local MP wrote:
“…there aren’t any causes which justify killing thousands of innocent civilians. Not world happiness. Not Islam. Not Palestine. Not Christianity. No matter how noble the cause, this type of action pollutes it…. Even if a country has policies with which you disagree, mass murder is the response of a madman…”
What he fails to say is why that applies to a terrorist attack, but not to the military attack on Afghanistan (which he supports). How can ‘defeating terrorism’ be a cause which justifies killing thousands of innocent civilians?
Later he wrote: “…I do know that innocent civilians are killed in any war, but… one has to weigh it up against the prospect of repeated civilian losses [from terrorist attacks] stretching indefinitely into the future.”
So, we will sacrifice Afghan civilians to prevent the possible death of western civillians in possible terrorist attacks (of course, it’s also possible to argue that the ‘war’ could inflame anti-western feeling and make such terrorist attack more, not less, likely). The death of Afghan civilians is ‘a price worth paying’. How arrogant, how racist, that is. Do we think that the deaths of those killed in Afghanistan don’t matter as much to their friends and relatives as the deaths of those killed in New York do to theirs?
How many deaths are we talking about? From reading most of the mainstream western press you would think that collateral damage has been a rare event – a few killed here, a dozen there. In fact, a study by a professor at the University of New Hampshire has found that over 4000 Afghan civilians have been killed by the ‘war’ on Afghanistan. He has gathered information from news agencies and major newspapers, as well as first-hand accounts, and sought cross-corroboration wherever possible [source: “A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting”, Professor M W Herold, Dec 2001]. It seems that American forces, as well as their civilians, have lives of greater value than Afghan civilians – the reliance on air power, including the willingness to bomb military targets in urban areas, inevitably resulting in civilian casualties, reveals a policy where Afghan civilian casualties are substituted for American military casualties.
Four thousand deaths. That is more than the number of people who died in the attack on the World Trade Center (now revised downwards to under 3300).
Why haven’t we been told? Why are most people unaware how many children, brothers, sisters, husbands and wives have been killed by the ‘war’ which they support? There have only been isolated reports of such deaths in our media, making them seem rare events and giving the impression that there are few civilian deaths. Even these reports are often qualified with the by-line that they “cannot be independently verified”. It seems that the only real casualties noted are those connected to a western enterprise or organization (eg people working for the Red Cross), or those “independently verified” by a western individual or organization.
The western media, apparently cowed and obedient to its political masters, must share blame for the continuation of this ‘war’. When the America public saw the results of the Vietnam war – GIs killed and atrocities committed in America’s name – shock and indignation fueled a national movement to end the war. This time, self-censorship has ensured that it is only the military’s story which is heard.
Mark Ramsey. 1 Feb 2002
Professor Herold’s paper can be found online at www.zmag.org/herold.htm
Words of the Pentagon: “We cannot confirm the report...civilian casualties are inevitable...we don’t know if they were our weapons...it was an accident...incorrect coordinates had been entered...they are deliberately putting civilians in our bombing targets...the village was a legitimate military target...it just didn’t happen...we regret any loss of civilian life.”
Words of an Afghan civilian: “We pulled the baby out, the others were buried in the rubble. Children were decapitated. There were bodies with no legs. We could do nothing. We just fled.”
Words of an Afghan refugee: “Now I can show my face whereas under the Taliban I wouldn’t dare walk around like this or I would be beaten. But what is the use of that if every night you go to bed with empty stomachs? We thought after the Taliban that life would be better, but now I don’t even know if we’ll survive.”
|