Re: Robert Fisk: We are the war criminals now

Magnificient piece!

//CJR

On Thu, 29 Nov 2001, Malcolm Pratt wrote:

>
> 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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