4 Killing Civilians, Interfering with Humanitarian Aid 26 Oct 2001

[John Fitzgibbon <fitzgij@mail.connect.ie>]

VIDEO: THE HIDDEN WARS OF DESERT STORM IS BEING SHOWN IN TRINITY COLLEGE TONIGHT WEDNESDAY 31ST OCTOBER AT 6 PM  ROOM 3106 ARTS BLOCK.  WORTH SEEING IF U CAN POSSIBLY MAKE IT  John Fitz

<worker-crisis@lists.tao.ca> -To: fitzgij@mail.connect.ie  Fri, 26 Oct 2001 09:53:59 -0500

Hello, all. More and more civilian targets are being hit -- a bus in Kandahar, a Red Cross warehouse in Kabul (for the second time), numerous villages. The U.S. government has also admitted it is using cluster bombs (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1026-01.htm), anti-personnel devices composed of hundreds of "bomblets," which explode and send metal fragments flying out at high velocities, shredding everything in their path. These have already killed several people in the village of Shaker Qala and elsewhere. Roughly 10% of the bomblets fail to explode, lying around as effective land mines (except far more powerful). Their bright yellow covers are attractive to children, with obvious results.

The Pentagon has claimed it has information suggesting the Taliban may try to poison humanitarian aid (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/25/international/asia/25PENT.html), an allegation that has bewildered World Food Program and other UN officials (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/26/international/asia/26TALI.html)  The claim signals a further step in the politicization of humanitarian aid.

The website at http://www.nowarcollective.com has been updated again. Please check it out.  Excerpts from two commentary pieces on the subjects of civilian casualties and politicizing aid follow.

Where the Bodies Are   Geov Parrish

Last week, when President Bush traveled to Shanghai for an APEC meeting, his first venture outside the country since Sep. 11, a few American reporters noted that some Chinese are skeptical of the current U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan because of the "mistaken" U.S. strike of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade two years ago. The U.S. claimed it had relied on outdated information.

But what virtually nobody -- at least in the United States -- has reported is that in the two most publicized instances of civilian death in the two-week-old Afghanistan campaign, the exact same thing appears to have happened. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. As survivors and refugees, and their stories, have begun to trickle into Pakistan, the scope of the civilian destruction the U.S. is creating is only starting to become clear.

In the first abominable incident, four men died when the offices of a United Nations agency, the Afghan Technical Consultants in Kabul, bombed on October 9. The Pentagon has said that the ATC was near a military radio tower, but U.N. officials say the tower was a defunct and abandoned medium and short wave radio station that hadn't been in operation for over a decade. The ATC had even given its address to higher-up U.N. officials to pass on to the U.S. military, so that it would be spared. One of the 
victims, Abdul Saboor, had arrived only two hours before after volunteering to make the perilous trip from Pakistan into Afghanistan on foot to deliver much-needed cash salaries to U.N. employees so that they could eat. The cash was incinerated along with the offices.

The second incident of mistaken identity was far worse. Independent witnesses have now confirmed that in the northern village of Karam, between 100 and 200 people -- mostly women, children, and old people -- were killed when bombers made repeated passes and flattened the village during early evening prayers. This time, the Pentagon said that Karam was once a training camp for Al-Qaeda. In fact, the site was used to train mujahideen during the 1980s and was run by Sadiq Bacha to train members of the Hezb-i-Islami faction, with CIA support. Some of those men later joined the Taliban, but the base was never used by Al-Qaeda. It was closed and abandoned in 1992, before bin Laden moved to Afghanistan. In the 1990s, families moved in and built mud and rock houses on the site. During the winter, nomads also made Karam their temporary home.

Karam is now gone. It's impossible to know how many other villages have shared its fate, since the Taliban have expelled all western reporters and Pakistan has closed its border with Afghanistan, making it hard for reporters to get into the country. Both the U.S. and the Taliban have incentives to understate casualties. Pakistani border guards are beating Afghani refugees with sticks and firing guns at them to keep them from crossing into Pakistan, where their eyewitness accounts may further enrage the Pakistani populace.

But a few are making it in, and the stories are leaking out, mostly in the Islamic press but also in Europe -- but, notably, not in the United States. Here is a small collection of the civilian deaths told to reporters so far. None of these accounts come from Taliban sources; all are from refugees and Western or Pakistani reporters.

In Jalalabad, the Sultanpur Mosque was hit by a bomb during prayers, with 17 people caught inside. Neighbors rushed into the rubble to help pull out the injured, but as the rescue effort got under way, another bomb fell, killing at least 120 people.

In the village of Darunta near Jalalabad, a U.S. bomb fell on another mosque. Two people were killed and dozens--perhaps as many as 150 people--were injured. Many of those injured are languishing without medical care in the Sehat-e-Ama hospital in Jalalabad, which lacks resources to treat the wounded.

(continued at http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11782)

Poisoning the Well: Is the U.S. Attempting to Sabotage Humanitarian Aid to Afghans?

Rahul Mahajan
http://www.counterpunch.org, http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1026-07.htm

The first principle of humanitarian relief is that it be impartial, that aid be given on the basis of need without any consideration of political agendas.

The United States government, the same government that aroused international execration by using Red Cross markings on planes used to smuggle arms to the contras in Nicaragua, has once again made a mockery of that principle with its conduct in Afghanistan.

Its conduct to this point was bad enough  causing the suspension of aid programs for weeks because of threats of bombing; constructing a "humanitarian" reason to bomb (air drops are required to feed people, the planes will be endangered, so we must bomb to suppress air defenses); causing renewed suspension because of the bombing; and the piece de resistance, adding insult to injury by dropping 35000 meals a day to replace programs that had fed millions. That last has been repeatedly criticized by aid organizations as associating humanitarian operations with military assault, thus making aid work far more difficult and dangerous  as a spokesperson for Doctors Without Borders put it, "We do not want to be perceived as a part of the U.S. military campaign."

At a Pentagon news briefing on Wednesday, however, this politicization was taken to new heights with the invocation of unnamed "sources" claiming that "there are reports that the Taliban might poison the food and try to blame the United States," according to Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He went on to warn Afghans receiving aid, "If it comes from Taliban control, they must be careful."

It scarcely needs mentioning that poisoning one's own populace is senseless, and that there is no reason to suppose the Taliban is planning anything of the sort. In fact, it was reported yesterday that officials from the World Food Program expressed "surprise" at the allegations, with one saying "If they're talking about the food we deliver, there's not been a single instance that we know of in which the Taliban have tampered with it. Stolen, yes, but not tampered."

When contacted, Sam Barratt of Oxfam International, currently working out of Peshawar, Pakistan, characterized the Pentagon statement as "deeply unhelpful," adding, "This claim further goes to undermine the position of aid agencies in the country."

It's well known that our government frequently uses "disinformation" in wartime. And we find out long afterward. We know now that the story about Iraqi soldiers throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators was a fabrication created by a Washington PR firm and that the "nurse" testifying about it was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, who wasn't even in the country at the time. We found that out, but not before an Amnesty International report about it was circulated to all the media and 
to all of Congress, playing a major role in building support for the Gulf War.

In order to combat disinformation effectively, however, we will have to learn how to recognize it before the war is over, while it's still relevant to current affairs. And, in fact, we've already seen open evidence of its use in this crisis. Government officials were forced to admit that reports that the terrorists targeted Air Force One were untrue (presumably they were circulated to further anger the American public).

If we do manage to have the courage of our intellectual convictions, the question still remains, "What is our government trying to do?"

A clue may be found in previous statements by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who expressed concern early on that humanitarian operations be conducted ''in a manner that does not allow this food to fall into the hands of the Taliban." Since the Taliban, as the men with guns, will always be fed while there is any food in the country, this seems like a hint that the United States would consider interfering with the supply of humanitarian aid in Taliban-controlled areas, in order to erode public support for the Taliban. Further hints come today, with the second bombing of a Red Cross warehouse complex in Kabul. It was entirely plausible that the first strike was accidental, but the second does make one wonder. Obviously, there is no way to know, but some vigilance is definitely in order.

Such tactics are not at all foreign to the U.S. government. Making the Chilean economy and later the Nicaraguan "scream" was an essential, deliberate part of destabilizing the Allende and Sandinista governments.

UN agencies have warned that 7.5 million people are dependent on aid for their survival through the coming winter. UNICEF has estimated that 100,000 children may die. The U.S. government has continued its protracted bombing campaign in the face of numerous concerted from private aid agencies and from the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right of Access to Food for a bombing halt so that supplies can be trucked in. Simultaneously, the noncombatant toll of the bombings continues to grow  a bus in Kandahar, a hospital in He*rat, numerous private homes, and more.
Notwithstanding its invocation of humanitarian concerns, the U.S. government has shown a criminal indifference to human life. It has sabotaged one of the few truly noble, truly heroic efforts in the modern world  humanitarian aid. It has also severely tainted public discourse, to the point where it is difficult to know what is true and what is not.

Among Afghans and other peoples for whom water is scarce, poisoning a well is the deepest crime, more powerfully symbolic even than taking a human life. The reason is that it takes something vital, something necessary to preserving life, and perverts it into a force of destruction.

That is what our government has now done.
In Solidarity,  Crisis Update



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