In spite of a public relations drive to prove that the American-installed regime in Kabul is radically different from that of the Taliban, the main changes are a return to a bloody civil war and feudalism and the renewal of the heroin trade. As for the human rights of the long-suffering population, the new government will, like the Taliban, impose sharia Islamic law on its people. Judge Ahamat Ullha Zarif says that public executions and amputations will continue, but there will be one variation: “For example, the Taliban used to hang the victim’s body in public for four days. We will only hang the body for a short time, say 15 minutes.” Judge Zarif made clear that the ultimate penalty would remain in force for adulterers, both male and female. They would still be stoned to death, “but we will use only small stones”.
This is the regime whose leaders have a bodyguard of British soldiers. And still the Americans bomb – while famine sweeps the north and west of Afghanistan in the wake of the American attacks. On February 12, a World Vision Health and Nutrition Team reported from the North West that “numerous groups of women and children are scavenging the valley fields for weeds, roots and grass to eat”.
The French aid agency Medecins sans Frontieres says that more and more people are becoming malnourished. “The food system is not working,” said a nurse, Jenny Andersson. “Although the World Food Programme has been providing food for more than 300,000 people, it simply isn’t reaching the people that need it.”
NONE of these horrors has been addressed by the American or British governments, the principal partners in the Washington-bribed “coalition” claiming responsibility for the Afghanistan disaster, which Jack Straw calls “our vindication”.
It is not surprising that, even as ex-Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic stands trial in The Hague, the Americans are pressing for an end to war crimes trials altogether. This means that the Bush administration is afraid that the process might slip out of its control and become a permanent fixture, encouraging the setting up of an International Criminal Court, which Washington opposes.
It fears that such a body might act truly judicially and order the arrest of “our” war criminals – that is, American and British politicians and officials who have ordered, or aided and abetted the bombing to death of thousands of innocent men, women and children and have run or collaborated in the running of a concentration camp like that in which emaciated men who are held and interrogated in breach of international law.
In his play Ashes To Ashes, Harold Pinter uses the images of Nazism and the Holocaust, while interpreting them as a warning that the totalitarian actions of western politicians seeking dominance over other human beings are no different, in principle and effect, from those of fascists – and terrorists.
The reality behind the Prime Minister’s pretensions as a “war leader” become clearer every day.
Copyright John Pilger ,The Daily Mirror 2002. Reprinted for Fair use only.
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