Robert Fisk: We are the war criminals now

Here is an article by Robert Fisk on the events at Mazar-i-Sharif, which may 
be of interest to WSN readers.

The Independent 29 November 2001


Robert Fisk: We are the war criminals now

'Everything we have believed in since the Second World War goes by the board 
as we pursue our own exclusive war'

29 November 2001

We are becoming war criminals in Afghanistan. The US Air Force bombs 
Mazar-i-Sharif for the Northern Alliance, and our heroic Afghan allies – who 
slaughtered 50,000 people in Kabul between 1992 and 1996 – move into the 
city and execute up to 300 Taliban fighters. The report is a footnote on the 
television satellite channels, a "nib" in journalistic parlance. Perfectly 
normal, it seems. The Afghans have a "tradition" of revenge. So, with the 
strategic assistance of the USAF, a war crime is committed.

Now we have the Mazar-i-Sharif prison "revolt", in which Taliban inmates 
opened fire on their Alliance jailers. US Special Forces – and, it has 
emerged, British troops – helped the Alliance to overcome the uprising and, 
sure enough, CNN tells us some prisoners were "executed" trying to escape. 
It is an atrocity. British troops are now stained with war crimes. Within 
days, The Independent's Justin Huggler has found more executed Taliban 
members in Kunduz.

The Americans have even less excuse for this massacre. For the US Secretary 
of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, stated quite specifically during the siege of 
the city that US air raids on the Taliban defenders would stop "if the 
Northern Alliance requested it". Leaving aside the revelation that the thugs 
and murderers of the Northern Alliance were now acting as air controllers to 
the USAF in its battle with the thugs and murderers of the Taliban, Mr 
Rumsfeld's incriminating remark places Washington in the witness box of any 
war-crimes trial over Kunduz. The US were acting in full military 
co-operation with the Northern Alliance militia.

Most television journalists, to their shame, have shown little or no 
interest in these disgraceful crimes. Cosying up to the Northern Alliance, 
chatting to the American troops, most have done little more than mention the 
war crimes against prisoners in the midst of their reports. What on earth 
has gone wrong with our moral compass since 11 September?

Perhaps I can suggest an answer. After both the First and Second World Wars, 
we – the "West" – grew a forest of legislation to prevent further war 
crimes. The very first Anglo-French-Russian attempt to formulate such laws 
was provoked by the Armenian Holocaust at the hands of the Turks in 1915; 
The Entente said it would hold personally responsible "all members of the 
(Turkish) Ottoman government and those of their agents who are implicated in 
such massacres". After the Jewish Holocaust and the collapse of Germany in 
1945, article 6 (C) of the Nuremberg Charter and the Preamble of the UN 
Convention on genocide referred to "crimes against humanity". Each new 
post-1945 war produced a raft of legislation and the creation of evermore 
human rights groups to lobby the world on liberal, humanistic Western 
values.

Over the past 50 years, we sat on our moral pedestal and lectured the 
Chinese and the Soviets, the Arabs and the Africans, about human rights. We 
pronounced on the human-rights crimes of Bosnians and Croatians and Serbs. 
We put many of them in the dock, just as we did the Nazis at Nuremberg. 
Thousands of dossiers were produced, describing – in nauseous detail – the 
secret courts and death squads and torture and extra judicial executions 
carried out by rogue states and pathological dictators. Quite right too.

Yet suddenly, after 11 September, we went mad. We bombed Afghan villages 
into rubble, along with their inhabitants – blaming the insane Taliban and 
Osama bin Laden for our slaughter – and now we have allowed our gruesome 
militia allies to execute their prisoners. President George Bush has signed 
into law a set of secret military courts to try and then liquidate anyone 
believed to be a "terrorist murderer" in the eyes of America's awesomely 
inefficient intelligence services. And make no mistake about it, we are 
talking here about legally sanctioned American government death squads. They 
have been created, of course, so that Osama bin Laden and his men should 
they be caught rather than killed, will have no public defence; just a 
pseudo trial and a firing squad.

It's quite clear what has happened. When people with yellow or black or 
brownish skin, with Communist or Islamic or Nationalist credentials, murder 
their prisoners or carpet bomb villages to kill their enemies or set up 
death squad courts, they must be condemned by the United States, the 
European Union, the United Nations and the "civilised" world. We are the 
masters of human rights, the Liberals, the great and good who can preach to 
the impoverished masses. But when our people are murdered – when our 
glittering buildings are destroyed – then we tear up every piece of human 
rights legislation, send off the B-52s in the direction of the impoverished 
masses and set out to murder our enemies.

Winston Churchill took the Bush view of his enemies. In 1945, he preferred 
the straightforward execution of the Nazi leadership. Yet despite the fact 
that Hitler's monsters were responsible for at least 50 million deaths – 
10,000 times greater than the victims of 11 September – the Nazi murderers 
were given a trial at Nuremberg because US President Truman made a 
remarkable decision. "Undiscriminating executions or punishments," he said, 
"without definite findings of guilt fairly arrived at, would not fit easily 
on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride."

No one should be surprised that Mr Bush – a small-time Texas 
Governor-Executioner – should fail to understand the morality of a statesman 
in the Whitehouse. What is so shocking is that the Blairs, Schrφders, 
Chiracs and all the television boys should have remained so gutlessly silent 
in the face of the Afghan executions and East European-style legislation 
sanctified since 11 September.

There are ghostly shadows around to remind us of the consequences of state 
murder. In France, a general goes on trial after admitting to torture and 
murder in the 1954-62 Algerian war, because he referred to his deeds as 
"justifiable acts of duty performed without pleasure or remorse". And in 
Brussels, a judge will decide if the Israeli Prime Minister, Arial Sharon, 
can be prosecuted for his "personal responsibility" for the 1982 massacre in 
Sabra and Chatila.

Yes, I know the Taliban were a cruel bunch of bastards. They committed most 
of their massacres outside Mazar-i-Sharif in the late 1990s. They executed 
women in the Kabul football stadium. And yes, lets remember that 11 
September was a crime against humanity.

But I have a problem with all this. George Bush says that "you are either 
for us or against us" in the war for civilisation against evil. Well, I'm 
sure not for bin Laden. But I'm not for Bush. I'm actively against the 
brutal, cynical, lying "war of civilisation" that he has begun so 
mendaciously in our name and which has now cost as many lives as the World 
Trade Centre mass murder.

At this moment, I can't help remembering my dad. He was old enough to have 
fought in the First World War. In the third Battle of Arras. And as great 
age overwhelmed him near the end of the century, he raged against the waste 
and murder of the 1914-1918 war. When he died in 1992, I inherited the 
campaign medal of which he was once so proud, proof that he had survived a 
war he had come to hate and loathe and despise. On the back, it says: "The 
Great War for Civilisation." Maybe I should send it to George Bush.






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