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Articles on India, Afghanistan & Israel...... by Saima Alvi 22 July 2002 13:34 UTC |
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1. Militants seek Muslim-free India -------------------------------- *Burhan Wazir reports from Gujarat on an explosion of violence, nationalism and Nazi-style politics and its result: 2,000 killed and 100,000 homeless Observer Worldview Sunday July 21, 2002 The Observer At the elegantly simple home of Mahatma Gandhi in Ahmedabad, the bustling capital of Gujarat state, a museum eulogises his contribution to the founding of India. Gandhi's clothes, books, journals and photographs line the walls. Outside in the freshly watered gardens the mango trees are in full bloom. One journal contains Gandhi's simple denunciation of violence: 'The science of war leads one to dictatorship. The science of non-violence alone can lead one to a pure democracy.' More than 50 years after his death at the hands of a nationalist militant, Gandhi would find India unrecognisable. In the past five months his home state has been stunned by religious violence that shows few signs of fading. India's worst religious violence since the 1947 partition was sparked at the end of February when 57 Hindu pilgrims were killed in the alleged torching of a train carriage by Muslim militants in Godhra. Hindu militants sought a swift revenge. Since then, massacres by Hindu gangs have become commonplace. In five months, more than 2,000 Muslims have been killed and more than 100,000 displaced, congregating in squalid camps around Gujarat. The state is in turmoil. On Friday, only hours after the state's top elected official, Chief Minister Narendra Modi, resigned and dissolved the legislative assembly to seek a fresh mandate, at least two people were killed and eight others injured when police opened fire to disperse rioting mobs. In recent months Mohdi had come under attack for his delayed response to the killings. His resignation was eclipsed, however, on Thursday when 70-year-old Muslim scientist Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, an unrepentant nationalist and the father of India's nuclear missile programme, was elected to the largely ceremonial role of President. The violence has been linked to the rise of extremist Hindu groups such as the Association of National Volunteers, or the RSS - a khaki-clad nationalist paramilitary sect formed in the Twenties - and its offspring, the World Hindu Council, or the VHP. Gujarat is one of the few states in India controlled by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The state has been described as a 'laboratory for Hindu fascism'. Since rising to power in the mid-Nineties, the BJP has aggressively pursued a pro-Hindu agenda. It has also backed the construction of a temple in Ayodhya, where Hindu nationalists destroyed a mosque in 1992. Several members of the present Cabinet, including the Indian Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, were present at the demolition. The RSS and the World Hindu Council, described locally as 'Saffron Warriors', have one clear aim: Hindu expansion by mass conversion. The militants believe that India was once an empire of 75 countries stretching from Cambodia to Iran. They have introduced textbooks that convey former Hindu glories, and they propagate the myth of an India under siege from native Islamic militants. The RSS also lobbies to reintroduce the traditional names of cities like Mumbai, until recently Bombay. 'The situation is getting out of control,' says Arvind Sisodia, vice-president of the VHP in Gujarat. A passionate advocate of the Hindutva or 'global Hindu conscious ness', Sisodia is a middle-class worker at the Life Insurance Corporation of India. 'In Gujarat, the Muslims own all the shops; they are involved in illegal trade,' says Sisodia. 'And Muslim boys steal our Hindu girls and marry them. So the situation is unbearable.' In the days after the first killings in Gujarat, the VHP distributed leaflets asking Hindus to pledge a boycott of Muslims - including refusing to be taught by Muslim teachers and ensuring sisters and daughters did not fall into 'the love-trap of Muslim boys'. 'It is up to all Hindus to make sure that we restore India to dominance,' says Sisodia. 'Hinduism was once the dominant faith. Muslims have to learn to adapt. Otherwise, it will be dangerous for them. We don't want them here.' A few days after the deaths at Godhra, on a humid morning in an inner-city enclave of Ahmedabad, around 20 men marched up to the Indian flag and offered the Nazi salute. This was a training camp, or shakha, run by the RSS. There are about 40,000 camps scattered throughout India and informal ones abroad for expatriates. The men, many of them in their thirties, are middle-class professionals - employees of Ahmedabad's bustling industrial community. India's middle classes are the keenest recruits to the RSS - drawn by fears of Islamic terrorism and of Westernisation amid a crumbling national economy. In a fashionable Ahmedabad gated community lives Vijay Chauthaiwale, a microbiologist. Over lunch, with the World Cup playing on a satellite channel behind him, he explained his attraction to the RSS: 'We are a very modern family,' he said, 'but I feel that the more we move towards the West, the more likely we are to lose our Hindu values. 'Gandhi would not have understood,' he said. 'He was an old-fashioned man with old-fashioned ideas. No one believes those things any more. The world has changed. And for Hindus to survive, we have to protect our culture and our way of life.' For middle-class families such as Chauthaiwale's, the Indian secular experiment has proved disastrous. The country's Muslim population - now 11 per cent - is seen as a primary threat. 'Where do the allegiances of the Muslims lie?' asked Kaushik Mehta, general secretary of the VHP in Gujarat. He pointed to an enclave of Ahmedabad dubbed 'mini-Pakistan' for its madrassahs, or Islamic schools. 'We can't allow such places to exist. They train terrorists. Muslims have to integrate. If they refuse to, we'll be forced to make them. Or they can leave.' For the 100,000 Muslims in squalid camps around Gujarat there is no such escape. In nearby Pakistan, India's Muslims are viewed as traitors who betrayed Pakistan after partition. And now the Muslim camps are being shut down, casting their occupants into the streets and into the hands of Hindu extremists. Most are fearful of returning to their villages. 'They can't go back because they face death threats,' said Father Cedric Prakash, director of Prashant, a human rights group in Ahmedabad. 'The fanatics have all the power.' More violence seems inevitable. At the end of February, Anjum Bana escaped her village in Panderwala with her six-week-old daughter. As Hindu militants torched the village, she hid in the forest. 'There was nothing to eat or drink for three days,' she said. 'I could hear people shouting RSS slogans all around me. And my child was dying. I know I can't go back.' The hawkish former Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narinder Mohdi, however, is unconvinced. In the early days of the rioting, as the body count escalated, Mohdi famously said Gujarat's Hindus had shown 'remarkable restraint'. Shortly before resigning on Friday, he said: 'There is no problem with people returning back home. If they don't want to go, they should be forced back. They have to go back.' In a shabby camp in a graveyard in Ahmedabad, residents have taken to organising a night-time watch. 'They know that once we are on the streets we are vulnerable. I can't understand it. I have lived with Hindu neighbours for 40 years, and there have never been any problems. Now those same neighbours have turned on me. And no one will look after us.' · Burhan Wazir presents 'Unreported World: Saffron Warriors' on Channel 4 on Saturday at 7.40 pm. http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,759129,00.html 2. West pays warlords to stay in line ---------------------------------- *Key Afghan commanders are being bribed with British and US money to ensure their loyalty to the new government Afghanistan - Observer special Jason Burke and Peter Beaumont Sunday July 21, 2002 The Observer Britain and the United States are secretly distributing huge sums of money to persuade Afghan warlords not to rebel against their country's new government. The Observer has learnt that 'bin bags' full of US dollars have been flown into Afghanistan, sometimes on RAF planes, to be given to key regional power brokers who could cause trouble for Prime Minister Hamid Karzai's administration. Gul Agha Sherzai, the governor of the southern province of Kandahar, Hazrat Ali, a commander in the eastern province of Nangahar, and several others have been 'bought off' with millions of dollars in deals brokered by US and British intelligence. Many of the commanders benefiting from the operation have been involved in opium production, drug smuggling on a massive scale and widespread human-rights abuses. Without the hand-outs, Western intelligence agencies fear Afghanistan could collapse into anarchy, allowing Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist group and former Taliban elements to regroup. Foreign Office sources in London confirmed last week they were aware money was being 'circulated' to key Afghan warlords to persuade them to support the government. 'It is certainly true that money has been distributed - it is the way things work in this part of the world - but no British money [is being distributed],' the source said. 'In any case, you do not buy warlords in Afghanistan: you "rent" them for a period. The Russians discovered this to their cost. They would buy off a warlord and after a while he would come back and tell them: "My men won't wear this arrangement any more. You will have to give me more money, or we will have to go back to attacking you".' However, The Observer has been told by reliable sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan that some UK money is being distributed, although most of it is American. Relief workers in Afghanistan have criticised the hand-outs because they come when funds for emergency help and reconstruction projects in the war-damaged country are running low. Cash for roadbuilding, irrigation and power projects is unlikely even to reach Afghanistan before 2003, and only £3 billion of the estimated £10bn needed to rebuild the nation has so far been pledged. Previous attempts to buy the loyalty of warlords have met mixed results. During the battle of Tora Bora in April, local commanders were paid huge sums to send their own troops into the mountainous cave complexes where bin Laden was thought to be hiding. The warlords involved in this operation, including Hazrat Ali, accuse each other of taking bribes from bin Laden to allow him to escape. In Paktia province, the Americans paid Pacha Khan Zardran, a local commander who seized control of the eastern city of Khost last November, an estimated $400,000 to train and equip fighters to patrol the border with Pakistan. Since then, however, the government in Kabul has installed its own governor and forced Khan into the mountains, from where his troops have been shelling civilian areas in a bid to destabilise the new regime. 'You are playing with fire and pandering to the worst elements in Afghan culture and society,' said one Pakistan-based Western diplomat. 'Afghanistan would be better served by expanding peacekeeping forces or more aid for ordinary people.' Many Afghans in Khost blame the rising tension on the US. Paying the warlords for their services has triggered clashes among groups eager to win patronage from the Americans. In some areas commanders have been told they will receive a top-of-the-range $40,000 pick-up truck - a local status symbol - if they can prove they have killed Taliban or al-Qaeda elements. There are believed to be about 300 hardcore al-Qaeda fighters still active, almost all in western Pakistan. Bin Laden, whom most Afghan, Pakistani and Western intelligence sources believe is still alive, is thought to be hiding among the Pashtun tribes along the border. http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,759126,00.html 3. Why Israel's 'seruvniks' say enough is enough --------------------------------------------- The laywer representing Israeli conscripts who refuse to serve beyond the 1967 ceasefire lines explains why a growing number of soldiers are disobeying orders, in order to protect the basic values on which Israel was founded. Observer Worldview Michael Sfard Sunday May 19, 2002 It is said that in the first few years of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, no one seriously thought of holding on to these territories forever. It was at the time widely assumed, that these newly conquered lands were to be handed back to the Arabs as part of a peace agreement. I don't remember those days. I was raised in a different Israel. In my Israel the small fundamentalist group of Jewish settlers has always enjoyed more political power than their relative share in the Israeli population. In my Israel both left-wing and right-wing governments enabled the colonialisation of these occupied Palestinian lands. My Israel paid, and is still paying, a heavy moral price for ruling another nation by the force of the sword. My Israel, built on the founding values of humanism, pluralism and democracy is being lost. Three months ago an unprecedented petition by reserve soldiers was published in the Israeli press. The signatories declared their intention to refuse to serve the Israeli occupation and disobey any order to go, as soldiers, beyond the 1967 ceasefire lines. The number of signatories (known as 'seruvniks' for the Hebrew word 'seruv' - refusal) has increased rapidly from 50 in the first petition to 462 as of today. Though refusal in Israel was not uncommon, the scale of this petition is a novelty. Most of the signatories are hardened combat officers and soldiers, and all of them served many years in the occupied territories. Since the launch of the petition, about forty of those who have endorsed the petition have been sent to military prisons as a result of their refusal. Almost all of the 462 who have signed, among them myself, are between twenty-five and thirty-five years old. None of us can remember a non-occupying Israel. Each and every signatory of the petition has individually reached the decision to spurn the state's demand that they will employ immoral and inhumane means of control over civilian population. And yet, I was amazed to discover how similar our stories are. How identical our personal transitions from being "good" and obedient soldiers to what our Attorney General described as "dangerous outlaws" have been. As the legal adviser to many seruvniks - and someone who was incarcerated for three weeks for refusing to serve in the Hebron area a few years ago - I have had the privilege of escorting many of my fellow signatories from receipt of their call up papers, through the trial and, finally, visiting them in prison. Given their biographies, the act of refusal was by no means a natural decision. Rather, it was rather the product of a personal crisis, born out of moral agonies and a sense of deep concern for our country's future. One might expect to hear horrifying stories of atrocities that the objectors witnessed before making their decision to no longer take part in the system. The truth of the matter is that most of the conscientious objectors reached their decision simply from experiencing "everyday" life in the occupied territories. The occupation corrupted Israeli culture, it eroded our code of ethics, and it even contaminated the Hebrew language. In the name of the fight against the murderous and unforgivable terror that struck Israeli cities and towns, we grew accustomed to manning check-points in which thousands of Palestinians are being detained for hours and humiliated by young soldiers. We grew accustomed to pointing our rifles at children and women. We became tolerant to large-scale demolition of houses ('surface uncovering' in military jargon). Finally, we accepted a state-sponsored policy of assassinations, neatly labelled by Israeli spokesmen as "focused prevention". We learned how to distinguish between roads for settlers (Jews) and roads for 'locals' (Palestinians), and we were asked to implement discriminatory laws for the sake of the illegal settlements that have trapped our country in an endless messianic war. A war which the vast majority of Israelis never wanted. As soldiers who witnessed, first-hand, the corrosive effect of the occupation on ordinary Israelis and Palestinians we could no longer bear its destructive implications for what we were raised to believe were Israeli values - respect for human life and dignity. The occupation chiselled out unequal relations between Palestinians and Israelis. It planted in many a seed of racism against Arabs. Under such circumstances, hundreds of officers and soldiers who were always in the forefront of IDF's most prestigious units, who were used to risking their lives for the security of the State of Israel, began questioning both the morality of our presence in the occupied territories and the myth of its necessity. People who have no legal background grew to acknowledge that the command that sends them beyond the borders of democracy to rule another people inherently produces systematic human rights abuses and is therefore neither democratic nor legal. Entering a village and arresting every male above the age of 14 for up to 18 days, as was done in the recent incursion to the West Bank, is inhuman, even if the mission is to find terrorists. Stopping an ambulance that carries a sick man or a pregnant woman is immoral even if you suspect that it also carries hidden weapons. And that is the tragedy of serving in the occupied territories: one cannot go there without detaining suspected ambulances and treating children in a manner that results in more hatred. The soldiers are placed in an impossible situation, coerced by the occupation's reality to act immorally. As a lawyer I am allowed to visit these prisoners of conscience. Some arrive in prison filled with pride. Others are shocked by their own deed, and try to explain themselves to their families and friends in long telephone conversations. In prison, most of them discover how angry they are. Angry at the settlers that tangled us in a never-ending war. Indignant at the governments of Israel that enabled them to do so. Vexed at the Israeli Defence Force, which arrogantly took for granted that we would carry out any order. The seruvniks come from the backbone of Israeli society. They were always seen by themselves and by others, as Israelis from the mainstream of our civic life. "I took seriously the values I was brought up on in this country", they tell me. We must now ask ourselves whether this was always simply rhetoric, or whether Israel has fundamentally changed. As seruvniks, we have chosen to speak out. To silence our voice would be to marginalise further the basic values upon which our country was founded. · Michael Sfard is a lawyer practising human rights and criminal law in Tel-Aviv. You can read the seruvniks' petition - Courage to refuse - here, and you can write to the author of this piece at legal@seruv.org.il. http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,717558,00.html __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - Feel better, live better http://health.yahoo.com
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