[1639] in peace2
URGENT SATURDAY NOON-2
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Aimee L Smith)
Thu Apr 11 16:26:20 2002
Message-Id: <200204112026.QAA04420@gold.mit.edu>
To: peace-announce@MIT.EDU, anti-hate@MIT.EDU
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 16:26:07 -0400
From: Aimee L Smith <alsmith@MIT.EDU>
Meet in Lobby 10 at 11:40am for those who want to head
over together.
> >DEMAND END TO ISRAELI INVASION OF PALESTINE!
> >Join the Boston Committee for Palestinian Rights at COPLEY SQUARE
> > noon-2 on Saturday, April 13th...
I also want to encourage people to think about who benefits the most
from this conflict and who has the most ability to stop it. While
there is a strong Jewish Lobby in US, there is a much much more strong
informal "lobby" called military and petroleum corporations, and
basically all other large US corporations who have a strategic interest
in controlling the level of access to energy that other industrial
powers have. These corporations are predominantly owned by a small
minority of US society that is predominantly WASP, *not Jewish.* So,
in my view, blaming the Jewish Lobby for our policy on Israel is
like blaming the Cuban Lobby for our policy on Cuba (and not Cuba's
"Economic Nationalism" that "we" need to punish) or that women's
rights organizations got the US to go liberate women from the Taliban
into the hands of the Northern alliance. We can't let them scape-goat
people. Jewish people in this society often do well in gaining positions
of power and making money, but they are still a minority, there is
still anti-Jewish discrimination in various ways in our soicety, *and*
no one seems to notice the even larger numbers of WASPs who seem
to own everything in sight and are far more prevalent in positions
of power - like all but one president, for example. I am not suggesting
we should go around hating WASP's or anything, but I do think it
is *really* important to understand who really is benefiting and
who is really calling the shots so we know who to target and we
know who *not* to target with our demands for peace and safety
for everyone in the region and elsewhere in the world. Divide and
Conquer Rule is a well-established tactic of imperialist powers.
The US Empire is no different. We need to reject these false divisions
and not let people push us into accepting them.
We *will* build peace!
Aimee
PS Find out about Israeli Military censorship of news and other reports:
www.democracynow.org
PPS An article about the US *not* caring about women in Afghanistan.
Free to die
"The US [Govt.] doesn't give a damn for women's rights in Afghanistan"
by CHRISTINE DELPHY
Sociologist, author of L'Ennemi principal. Penser le genre, Syllepse, Paris,
2001
"The American flag flies again over our embassy in Kabul the mothers and
daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes. Today women are
free,"
thundered President George Bush in his State of the Union address on 29
January. So now we
know. The "coalition against terrorism" went to war to liberate Afghan women.
After
the bombing, when Alliance troops entered Kabul, pictures of smiling women
appeared in
the press as though that was what the conflict was all about.
Strange reasoning. The mujahedin now restored to power by the allies are
no better than the Taliban and reporters on the ground can no longer conceal
the
distrust felt by the people of Kabul and Jalalabad, a distrust based on
experience. Between
1992 and 1996 Northern Alliance/United Front troops were responsible for
massacres, for
the gratuitous slaughter of wounded and captured men, for terrorising and
robbing
civilians. Now almost exactly the same thing is happening again. Afghanistan
has returned to
its tribal state and the warlords are threatening another civil war (1).
The United States doesn't give a damn for women's rights in Afghanistan,
Kuwait, Saudi Arabia or anywhere else. On the contrary, it has knowingly and
deliberately sacrificed Afghan women to its own interests. What is the origin
of the mujahedin?
Back in 1978, even before the Soviet invasion, the tribal chiefs and religious
authorities
declared a holy war on Nur Mohammed Taraki's Marxist government, which had
decreed that
girls were to go to school and prohibited the levirat (2) and the sale of
women. Never
were there so many women doctors, teachers and lawyers as there were between
1978 and 1992.
For the mujahedin, women's rights were well
worth fighting against. The Soviet invasion
added a patriotic dimension and the US lent its
support on the principle that its enemy's
enemies were its friends. The Americans knew the
mujahedin wanted to bring women to heel, but
they were willing allies against Moscow and that
was what mattered.
The war continued after the Russians left -
especially the war against the civilian
population. Northern Alliance troops ransacked
their homes and raped their women. Local chiefs
stopped trucks every 50 kilometres and demanded
money, and the corruption and chaos made it
impossible to enforce sharia law. The ground was
well prepared for the arrival of the Taliban,
spiritual heirs to the mujahedin. They were
equally anti-Communist and even more
fundamentalist, and worthy candidates for aid
from the US, which channelled money through
Saudi Arabia into the madrasas (mosque schools)
in Pakistan.
Has the US always fought for women's rights? No.
Has it ever? No. On the contrary, it has
trampled on them. Afghan women were defended by
Marxist governments, and they were the friends
of the US' enemy, so the women had to go to the wall.
After all, human rights cannot be allowed to interfere with the pursuit of
world domination.
Women's rights are like Iraqi babies. Their death is the price paid for US
power. I campaigned
for more than two years against the Taliban's treatment of Afghan women and,
like feminists
everywhere, I hope the present government will guarantee human rights for
women. An improvement
in their status could be one of the unexpected results of this war, a
collateral bonus as it were.
It is to be hoped so, but we must be realistic. Burhanuddin Rabbani,
president of the government now
recognised by the international community, belongs to Jamiat-i-Islami, the
Islamic party that imposed
sharia law in Kabul in 1992, the party whose troops under General Shah Masoud
engaged in an orgy of
rape and murder in 1995.
The provisional government formed after the negotiations in Bonn includes
two women, both exiles, one belonging to the Hizb-i-Wahdat or Islamic Unity
Party
and the other to the Parchami faction of the People's Democratic Party of
Afghanistan.
The Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) accuses both of
being
parties of mercenaries and murderers. RAWA itself has been working with women
refugees
for six years, in particular to promote the education of girls. It opposed the
Taliban
but has nonetheless been loud in its condemnation of the bombing. It has
joined other
organisations in asking for an international force to protect the Afghan
people against the
"criminals of the Northern Alliance" (3).
'The hejab will suffice'
Jamiat-i-Islami has made some concessions under international pressure.
Judge them for yourselves. A week after the capture of Kabul, one of its
spokesmen
announced on BBC World- without going into detail - that the "restrictions" on
women
would be lifted and "the burqa would no longer be compulsory. The hejab would
suffice".
The hejab (or chador) would suffice. Can they be serious?
Even if a greater measure of freedom were to be won, would that make the
war right? When it comes to human rights, the question is whether anything can
be worse
than war. At what point does war become the best option? To say that the war
may be good
for Afghan women is almost to say that it is better for them to die in the
bombing, cold or
starvation than to live under the Taliban. The West has decided that death is
preferable to
slavery - for Afghan women. This would be a truly heroic decision if Western
lives, not
those of Afghan women, were in the balance.
The cynical way in which the "liberation of Afghan women" has been used
as a pretext shows the arrogance of the west in assuming the right to do as it
will with the lives of others. That arrogance informs the Western attitude
towards
Afghan women and the attitude of rulers to their subjects.
Let us propose a simple rule of international, and individual, conduct:
no one shall have the right to take decisions, especially heroic decisions,
when others
have to suffer the consequences. Only those who pay the price of war can say
whether it is
worth it. In this case, those who decided on war are not paying the price and
those who are
paying the price had no part in the decision. At present the women of
Afghanistan are on
the road, living in tents or camps, in their millions. There are a million
more refugees
outside the country than there were before the war and a million displaced
persons in
the country itself (4). Many may die and there is no guarantee that their
sacrifice
will win them any additional rights. Is it, in any case, proper to speak of
sacrifice when
they had no choice?
The allies should, in common decency, stop proclaiming that these women
are being forced to endure all this suffering for their own good, and
pretending
that they are being denied the right to decide their own fate, even the right
to
live, in the name of freedom. But there is reason to fear that this theme is a
real
hit. There is a long list of countries to which the coalition against evil has
vowed
to bring good. And of course, any resemblance to past history (events too
remote to
mention) or colonial wars is pure coincidence.
Wars waged for purposes of control and exploitation will never advance human
rights.
This bombing in the name of civilisation has also consigned to oblivion many
of the principles on which that civilisation prides itself. The allies,
complicit first
in the slaughter of Mazar-i-Sharif and other crimes (5) and now in the US
manoeuvres, have
disregarded the Geneva Conventions. The US is inventing new pseudo -legal
categories,
such as the "unlawful combatants" of Guantanamo Bay, who are not covered by
any form
of law - national or international, common law or the rules of war. The
freedom of the
individual, pride of our democracies, is a dead letter, international law
mortally wounded,
the great body of the United Nations in its death throes. Only genuine and
peaceful
cooperation between nations will advance human rights and that is not on the
agenda. It
is up to us to put it there.
____________________________________________________
(1) At the end of January, forces loyal to the governor of Kandahar, Gul
Agha Sharzai, were preparing to challenge warlord Ismal Khan for control of
Herat, according to the governor's intelligence chief, Haji Gullalai, Globe
and Mail, Toronto, 22 January 2002.
(2) The rule requiring a childless widow to marry her deceased husband's
brother.
(3) See www.rawa.org, 10 December 2001.
(4) See the Human and Civil Rights Organisations' and Medecins sans
frontieres' websites: www.hcr.org and www.msf.org.
(5) Robert Fisk, "We are the war criminals now", The Independent, London,
29 November 2001. See also the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International
websites:
www.hrw.org and www.amnesty.org.
Translated by Barbara Wilson
From: http://MondeDiplo.com/2002/03/12afghanistan
