The United States is at this very moment leading the
Western powers in a massive, unprecedented bombing campaign against
Afghanistan. The bombing has been justified by President Bush as a
“war on terror”, aimed at capturing or killing Osama Bin Laden, and
destroying his alleged terrorist network Al-Qaeda, as well as the
Taliban regime alleged to harbour terrorists.
Cruise missiles, bombers and submarines have been
used to attack “a broad range of targets”, supposedly ranging from
Al-Qaeda training camps to Taliban garrisons. However in reality
these targets have included the UN, the Red Cross, residential
areas, hospitals and clinics. But meanwhile President Bush has and
still continues to propagate the myth that this “war on terror” will
not target the Afghan people, but is aimed only at the prime suspect
Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban. Indeed, the President claimed,
America is “the friend of the Afghan people.” This statement brings
to mind the old English saying, “Who needs enemies, with friends
like these?” U.S. bombs have done nothing to curb terrorism, or
bring the perpetrators of the 11th September attacks to justice. In
actual fact, they are using weapons specifically designed to inflict
maximum human injury, causing the killing and maiming of innocent
people.
Bin Laden is the prime suspect alleged to have
masterminded the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on
September 11th. But the U.S. has yet to provide any real evidence
that Bin Laden was really behind these attacks. American and British
legal experts have criticized this lack of evidence. Yet the sheer
lack of proof has not prevented the U.S. from launching a vicious
attack on Afghanistan on the pretext of going after Bin Laden, with
Bush stating that he is happy to have Bin Laden “dead or alive” –
despite the fact that he is as yet only a suspect. The U.S.
government seems unperturbed by the fact that they have been unable
to provide any real justification for their current policy. It thus
seems that genuinely targeting terrorism is not the real purpose of
policy. Indeed, the real nature of this so-called “war on terror” is
not being discussed in the mass media. But hints of the humanitarian
catastrophe unfolding in Afghanistan under U.S. military
intervention, and the hidden agenda behind it, can be found from a
close analysis of press reports, refugee testimony, and other
documentation.
Ironically, in the name of justice and peace,
America’s new “war on terrorism” is raining terror down on the
Afghan people. On Tuesday 6 November a report on CNN mentioned that
a new 15,000 pound bomb is being used by the U.S. in its “war on
terror”. The bomb is so heavy that they can’t just drop it through
the traditional missile chutes that open at the bottom of the
aircraft – they have to use mechanical assistance to shove the bombs
out through the back of a cargo plane. The bombs parachute down and
explode 3 feet off the ground, and are so devastating that their
impact creates a mini earthquake. The British media reported on the
7th that the impact of these bombs is the same as that of a nuclear
weapon, obliterating everything within a 2-3km radius. Every living
creature will be wiped out. Such weapons are obviously designed to
indiscriminately kill as many as possible in the area, to inflict
maximum destruction.
Then there are the cluster bombs. We can get a good
idea of how these work by considering their previous uses. NATO
forces used cluster bombs in their military intervention in Kosovo,
with horrifying effects. Two months after the NATO intervention,
cluster bombs are still killing innocent civilians. According to the
BBC, as many as 20,000 unexploded cluster bombs are estimated to be
in Kosovo. Every single day, to this day, a man, woman or child is
killed or injured in Kosovo alone due to these bombs. But despite
having put them there in the first place, NATO’s “humanitarian
peacekeeping” forces refuse to clear up these weapons, or even help
to clear them. Amnesty International, the world’s leading human
rights body, has condemned the West’s use of cluster bombs and is
calling for them to be banned due to their massive contribution to
needless death and injury. Yet the West is carpet bombing
Afghanistan with cluster bombs, knowing full well that they will
only lead to more death and injury among innocent people, every
single day, long after the bombing campaign is over. And now there
are the Daisy Cutter bombs, the pride of the Pentagon, which
annihilate absolutely everything within a 600m radius.
So just as innocent civilians died in the 11th
September terrorist attacks, unknown numbers of innocent civilians –
men, women and children - are being killed and wounded in America’s
latest assault on Afghanistan. What kind of “war on terror” uses
terrorism as its primary strategy? Clearly, this is no “war on
terror”, but a war of blind revenge with a racist, xenophobic
disregard for the lives of the Afghan people.
In fact, it is a war with a hidden agenda, a war
that had been planned long before the 11th September attacks, a war
which has been designed to secure the strategic and economic
interests of the United States and the other Western powers, in
Central Asia.
Unknown to most, a military strike on Afghanistan
had been planned as early as December last year. Meetings between
American, Russian and Indian government officials took place at the
end of the year 2000 “to discuss what kind of government should
replace the Taliban.” This was reported in a daily American
newspaper by Frederick Starr, Chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus
Institute at Johns Hopkins’s Nitze School of Advanced International
Studies. Starr wrote in Washington Post that: “[T]he United States
has quietly begun to align itself with those in the Russian
government calling for military action against Afghanistan and has
toyed with the idea of a new raid to wipe out Osama bin Laden. Until
it backed off under local pressure, it went so far as to explore
whether a Central Asian country would permit the use of its
territory for such a purpose.”
On the 4th December 2000, Canadian journalist Eric
Margolis similarly reported in the daily newspaper, the Toronto Sun
the existence of extensive military plans to invade Afghanistan,
topple the Taliban regime, and install a government subservient to
Western interests: “The United States and Russia may soon launch a
joint military assault against Islamic militant, Osama Bin Laden,
and against the leadership of Taliban, Afghanistan’s de facto ruling
movement,” reported Margolis. The attack would constitute a joint
U.S.-Russian operation, and would enlist the help of Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan. These plans were also reported in June 1996 (26th) by
the online public affairs news service, Indiareacts.Com. But local
opposition prevented the plans from going ahead at that time. What
the United States, Russia and India needed was a pretext to
implement its plans to invade Afghanistan.
These plans had nothing to do with aiding the Afghan
people, and everything to do with eliminating the current danger to
U.S. interests in the region. As has been noted by the Israeli
scholar Uri Avnery, Bin Laden was considered a threat to U.S.
interests long before the 11th September attacks because of his
staunch opposition to U.S. control of Middle East oil and military
occupation of Saudi Arabia, Palestine and other areas of the Middle
East.
What is further unknown to most, is that America’s
opposition to the Taliban is something new. In fact, it was a
drastic transformation of policy. Throughout most of the 1990s, the
U.S. actually supported the Taliban regime despite its acts of
terrorism and atrocities against its own Afghan people. The same
repressive regime that the West now wants to remove, was in fact
propped up the United States in complete disregard for the regime’s
genocidal atrocities, solely because it served regional American
interests. The United States has for many years now wanted a
subservient puppet-regime in Afghanistan, because the U.S. has been
planning to install pipelines to Caspian oil within the country.
Perhaps one of the clearest indications of U.S. support of the
Taliban is the authoritative testimony of U.S. Congressman Dana
Rohrabacher. Rohrabacher has been involved with Afghanistan since
the early 1980s when he worked in the White House as Special
Assistant to then U.S. President Ronald Reagan. He is now a Senior
Member of the U.S. House International Relations Committee, and has
been involved in U.S. policy toward Afghanistan for some 20 years.
In 1988 he traveled to Afghanistan as a member of the U.S. Congress
with mujahideen fighters and participated in the battle of
Jalalabhad against the Soviets. I will quote his testimony before an
American Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee:
“Having been closely involved in U.S. policy toward
Afghanistan for some twenty years,” he testified, “I have called
into question whether or not this administration has a covert policy
that has empowered the Taliban and enabled this brutal movement to
hold on to power. Even though the President and the Secretary of
State have voiced their disgust at the brutal policies of the
Taliban, especially their repression of women, the actual
implementation of U.S. policy has repeatedly had the opposite
effect… I am making the claim that there is and has been a covert
policy by this administration to support the Taliban movement’s
control of Afghanistan… [T]his amoral or immoral policy is based on
the assumption that the Taliban would bring stability to Afghanistan
and permit the building of oil pipelines from Central Asia through
Afghanistan to Pakistan… I believe the administration has maintained
this covert goal and kept the Congress in the dark about its policy
of supporting the Taliban, the most anti-Western, anti-female,
anti-human rights regime in the world. It doesn’t take a genius to
understand that this policy would outrage the American people,
especially America’s women.” (April 1999)
U.S. support of the Taliban from 1994-1999 to secure
the building of pipelines to Caspial oil through Afghanistan to
Pakistan is well-documented. I documented this using reports in the
American press, human rights reports, and academic studies in a
paper published by the Institute for Afghan Studies in the U.S.
Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, who writes for the prestigious
journal, Far Eastern Economic Review as well as the London newspaper
The Daily Telegraph, has also written extensively on this subject.
Just to hit the point home, I will give you a few quotes from the
American and Western press on the subject. In 1996, CNN reported
that: “United States wants good ties [with the Taliban] but can’t
openly seek them while women are being repressed.” The Wall Street
Journal reported in 1997 that the West’s main interests in
Afghanistan lie in making it “a prime transhipment route for the
export of Central Asia’s vast oil, gas and other natural resources…
Like them or not, the Taliban are the players most capable of
achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history.” The
Journal is referring to the same faction that is responsible for the
severe repression of women; massacres of civilians; ethnic cleansing
and genocide; arbitrary detention; and the growth of widespread
impoverishment and underdevelopment – the same faction which the
U.S. government now loudly condemns, but supported not long ago.
The United States planned to finance the development
of pipelines in the areas falling under the 23 Taliban-controlled
states in Afghanistan. But in August 1999, all this changed. The
Taliban had simply proved incapable of playing a suitably
stabilising role in the region, particularly due its inability to
remain subservient to U.S. orders. The alleged terrorist activities
of Taliban-favourite Osama Bin Laden – e.g. with regards to the
bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania – created an
unbridgeable gap in American-Taliban relations. Furthermore, it soon
became more and more clear that the Taliban regime could not provide
the stability and security required for the oil pipelines to
survive. As Ahmed Rashid points out, stability was not feasible if
established through conquer. This was due to the very nature of the
ongoing conflict, fueled by ethnic and tribal tensions, as well as
by the input of arms and funds from surrounding states Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia, Iran etc. to the various opposing Afghan factions. And
that is why the United States began developing its plans to target
Bin Laden, invade Afghanistan, and remove the Taliban regime. The
establishment of a strong client state in Afghanistan would
strengthen U.S. influence in this crucial region. Previously, it was
hoped that the Taliban – regardless of its domestic record of
terror, genocide and gender-apartheid – would become this strong
client state; yet since that could not be the case, a band of
murderers of the same type as the Taliban can be installed. That is
why the shift in U.S. policy occurred, beginning in 1998, escalating
in 1999, and becoming complete in the year 2000. And that is why by
the end of last year the United States was planning to initiate a
war on Afghanistan to topple the Taliban – because the regime did
not suit its most pressing regional oil and gas interests.
The tragic killing of over 6,000 civilians on the
11th September has been exploited by the U.S. to justify the
implementation of these plans – to justify an anti-humanitarian war
designed to secure U.S. strategic and economic interests. Now the
U.S. is supporting not the Taliban, but the Northern Alliance – a
band of murderers, thugs and rapists of exactly the same kind as the
Taliban, whose human rights abuses against the Afghan people have
been condemned by organizations such as Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch. And there has been talk of overseeing the
installation of a new regime with significant Northern Alliance
input, under the leadership of a former King, Zahir Shah, whose
record of democracy is hardly very meaningful. The Afghan women’s
group RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan,
has recently condemned U.S. support of the Northern Alliance,
describing them as the same bands “ who did show their real criminal
and inhuman nature when they were ruling Afghanistan from 1992 to
1996, The retreat of the terrorist Taliban from Kabul is a positive
development, but entering of the rapist and looter NA in the city is
nothing but a dreadful and shocking news for about 2 million
residents of Kabul whose wounds of the years 1992-96 have not healed
yet… The NA will horribly intensify the ethnic and religious
conflicts and will never refrain to fan the fire of another brutal
and endless civil war in order to retain in power. The terrible news
of looting and inhuman massacre of the captured Taliban or their
foreign accomplices in Mazar-e-Sharif in past few days speaks for
itself.” (13 November) The Village Voice also recently noted (15
November) that a UN spokesperson said officials had received reports
of hundreds of children being massacred by Northern Alliance forces
at one school. This war is therefore certainly not in support of
human rights or democracy. It is in support of genocide and military
dictatorship.
The indiscriminate nature of the bombing campaign
further clarifies that this is less a war on terror, than a war on
the Afghan people. Under U.S. demands and pressure, Afghanistan’s
borders have been closed and truck convoys carrying food aid and
other supplies into the country have been blocked. This severed the
country’s last few sources of limited sustenance. In this way, the
U.S., effectively called for the mass slaughter of millions of
Afghans, most of them already on the brink of starvation thanks to
international sanctions imposed under U.S. pressure. Almost all aid
missions withdrew or were expelled from Afghanistan in anticipation
of the coming bombing campaign, while several million innocent
Afghans fearfully fled to the borders creating a massive refugee
crisis. The refugees have been trapped, deprived of food and water,
and largely destined to die with the international community barely
even batting an eyelid. The famous Indian novelist Arundhati Roy
commented in the daily London newspaper, The Guardian: “Witness the
infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death
while they’re waiting to be killed.”
According to UN estimates, about 7-8 million Afghans
are now at risk of imminent starvation. And the U.S. food air drops
will do absolutely nothing to avert this crisis. Leading British aid
agencies have described these air drops as “virtually useless”, and
many other international aid agencies have condemned them as a mere
propaganda exercise, completely insufficient to prevent the imminent
death of millions of Afghans through starvation. Jim Jennings,
President of Conscience International, has noted that the aid being
dropped is barely enough to feed even a single refugee camp. Mark
Fried, communications and advocacy director of Oxfam in Canada has
pointed out the air drops are sufficient only to feed about “1 per
cent of the people in need”. As far as we, the international
community, are concerned, the other 99 per cent of course can simply
starve to death - but our air drops are still “humanitarian”. Bush
was very proud of this supposedly humanitarian effort in his recent
address to the UN General Assembly. Having set up the conditions for
a genocidal massacre through policies that amount to economic
warfare, our world leaders can nevertheless continue to indulge in
the self-praise of our universal benevolence – a benevolence that is
able to tolerate the murder of up to 8 million people just because
we want the borders closed to continue our crusade for world peace
in the name of the “war on terror”. When 6 million Jews were
murdered in the Nazi Holocaust last century, the world’s belated
response was “Never Again”. But it seems that “Never Again” does not
apply to the “unpeople” of this world. On the pretext of upholding
the inviolable principle of “Never Again”, the Western powers
support the apartheid state of Israel and its illegal occupation,
coupled with systematic destruction, of Palestine. And in other
parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, it seems that the principle
has no application whatsoever. Indeed, considering that the number
of victims of European colonialism and ongoing Western imperialism
in the Third World over the past few centuries runs into the
hundreds of millions as is testified to by authentic historical
data, it seems that the principle upheld by the elite who hold the
reigns of world order is: “Again and Again and Again...”
Recognizing the Holocaust-like proportions of the
impending disaster in Afghanistan as a result of the international
blockade, a United Nations special investigator pleaded for an end
to the bombing in mid-October. Jean Ziegler, Special Rapporteur on
the Right to Food to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights,
stated that: “The bombing has to stop right now. There is a
humanitarian emergency. In winter the lorries cannot go in any more.
Millions of Afghans will be unreachable in winter and winter is
coming very, very soon. We must give the (humanitarian)
organizations a chance to save the millions of people who are
internally displaced (inside Afghanistan).”
Unless the bombing campaign is ended, he urged, aid
will not get through, and over 7 million Afghan lives will be at
risk from imminent starvation. So if this so-called “war on terror”
does not end, then 7-8 million people will die of starvation. Does
the international community want this sort of blood on their hands?
Will the people of the world stand by and watch while 8 million
innocent people are slaughtered by U.S. economic warfare?
Economic warfare is not all the U.S. is doing in
Afghanistan. The U.S. is systematically destroying civilian targets
using weapons specifically designed to cause maximum damage. The
U.S. bombed the offices of a UN mine-clearing agency in Kabul on 9
October. The Pentagon claimed that the ATC was near a military radio
tower, but UN officials pointed out that that the tower was a
defunct medium and short wave radio station that had been abandoned
and out of use for over a decade. Prior to the bombing, the UN
agency had passed on its address to more senior UN officials to
notify the U.S. military of the site so that it would be not be
bombed.
An estimated 100-200 civilians, women, children and
old people, were slaughtered when U.S. bombers made repeated passes
over the northern village of Karam. The entire village was
flattened. The Pentagon claimed that Karam had been a training camp
for Osama Bin Laden’s terrorist network, Al-Qaeda. In fact, the site
had only been used to train mujahideen during the Soviet occupation
in the 1980s, with CIA support. The camp was closed and abandoned in
1992, and since then had been inhabited by families and nomads. Now,
after the U.S. bombing, it doesn’t even exist – and neither do most
of its inhabitants.
On the 16th October, buildings belonging to the
International Committee of the Red Cross were bombed by U.S.
aircraft. Two bombs demolished two buildings in a Red Cross
compound, wounding an employee and destroying humanitarian aid that
would have been distributed to needy Afghan civilians. The Red Cross
bitterly condemned the bombing, asked the U.S. for details of the
operation, and reiterated to them the location of its facilities.
Ten days later, U.S. planes went and bombed the very same compound
again, this time destroying the three remaining buildings containing
more food and blankets. Red Cross workers testify that the plane
which dropped the bombs was flying very low and slow. These
humanitarian buildings are marked out by a huge, highly visible 3 x
3 meter Red Cross on them. This was not a mistake. None of these
bombings of civilian targets could be a mistake. They were clearly
deliberate acts of terrorism, aimed at devastating the lives of the
Afghan people.
Since then, the U.S. bombing campaign has gone on to
destroy civilian areas with escalating ferocity. The American
journalist and peace activist Geov Parrish has recorded a lucid
breakdown of these events, showing that day-in and day-out, the
Afghan people are being subjected to an indiscriminate bombardment
that is wiping out their homes and forcing them to flee for their
lives.
In Jalalabad, the Sultanpur Mosque was hit by a bomb
during prayers, with 17 people caught inside. Neighbours rushed into
the rubble to help pull out the injured, but as the rescue effort
got under way, another bomb fell, killing at least 120 people.
In the village of Darunta near Jalalabad, a U.S.
bomb fell on another mosque. Two people were killed and dozens –
perhaps as many as 150 people - were injured. Many of those injured
are languishing without medical care in the Sehat-e-Ama hospital in
Jalabad, which lacks resources to treat the wounded.
More civilian deaths are being reported in the
villages of Torghar and Farmada, north and west of Jalalabad. At
least 28 civilians had died in Farmada, which has an abandoned Al-Qaeda
training camp nearby.
In Argandab, north of Kandahar, 10 civilians have
died from the bombing and several houses have been destroyed. The
same has happened in Karaga, north of Kabul.
And on and on…. A single typical statement from one
of the refugees, reported by the Institute for Health and Social
Justice in America, is worth quoting here. Rais Mazloomyar
Jabirkhail stated about the U.S. military forces: “They are not God.
They want to pinpoint every target, but they can’t make every
missile go after Osama and terrorist training camps.” Emphasizing
that he is not a supporter of Osama Bin Laden, he asked why, on the
pretext of targeting Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, the U.S. “is destroying
our whole country.” Indiscriminately destroying the entire country –
that is what our “international coalition against terrorism” is
doing in Afghanistan.
We therefore don’t need to refer to Taliban claims
to take seriously the likelihood that the civilian death toll is
already in its thousands. The mere fact that millions of tonnes of
bombs are being dropped on Afghanistan, the systematic destruction
of civilian structures, the testimony from refugees, reports from
Western and Pakistani journalists, suffices to make clear that this
war is deliberately targeting the civilian population. As the
British journalist Robert Fisk observed in London’s daily newspaper
The Independent: “… as the Afghan refugees turn up in their
thousands at the border, it is palpably evident that they are
fleeing not the Taliban but our bombs and missiles…. The refugees
speak vividly of their fear and terror as our bombs fall on their
cities. These people are terrified of our ‘war on terror’, victims
as innocent as those who were slaughtered in the World Trade Centre
on 11 September.”
This war will also clearly not provide security to
the United States, the Western powers, or anyone else for that
matter. On the contrary, it will only fuel the anger and resentment
around the world at the unjust and self-serving nature of U.S.
foreign policy. It is this anger, coupled with a sense of
hopelessness and despair, that motivates people to desperate and
unconscionable measures such as terrorism. The climate of anger
exists not because people are jealous of Western democracy –
democracy which is hardly very meaningful considering that in the
U.S. two thirds of the population choose not to vote at all – but
rather due to the long list of U.S./Western brutalities in Vietnam,
Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, Chile, Libya, Lebanon, Granada, Bosnia,
Chechnya, Somalia, Iraq, Iran and many other parts of the world to
name here only a few. Look at Iraq. We have there the genocidal
murder of nearly 2 million innocent civilians in Iraq under an
illegal sanctions regime which bars the country from receiving
crucial food, medicines, and basic technologies to maintain hygiene
and pursue some sort of development of the rotten infrastructure
that was pummeled into the ground by the Allies during the 1991 Gulf
Massacre, all legitimized by the United Nations. There is the
ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine by the apartheid state of
Israel, which continues with the military and financial support of
the U.S., in violation of what is now hundreds of UN resolutions.
There is the subjugation of Muslims and Arabs by illegitimate
regimes propped up by the U.S. such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan,
and so on. There is the escalation of impoverishment, inequity and
repression under these regimes, which have to clamp down on the
first sign of dissent to consolidate their existence and power – all
with U.S. connivance.
Indeed, in the same vein, we should note that many
members of the so-called international coalition against terrorism
are themselves systematically engaged in acts of terrorism. For
instance, in a November edition of the International Herald Tribune,
one U.S. diplomat described Russian efforts in the new war against
terrorism as possibly exceeding even U.S. efforts. But Russia has
been engaged for several years now in the destruction of Chechnya
and its movement for self-determination from Russian hegemony, a
continuation of the colonial years. As Professor Francis Boyle of
the University of Illinois, the lawyer for the tiny Republic, has
documented in files submitted to the International Court of Justice
in The Hague, what Russia is doing in Chechnya is nothing less than
genocide. One Russian journalist working for Radio Free Europe who
was detained by the army and held in camps alongside Chechen
captives, testified from his inside experience that Russia has even
set up “concentration camps” in the country, and is pursuing the
same policies in Chechnya as Stalin in Hitler last century. The
irony and duplicity of this so-called "war on terror" would be
amusing if it were not so horrifying.
The question we are now left with as we ponder, in
horror, the scale of the Holocaust of starvation and death unfolding
in Afghanistan, is: why? And the answer is simple. The U.S. is
attempting to do everything in its power to smash Afghanistan into
the ground, to make frighteningly clear what happens to those who do
not remain subservient to U.S. designs and interests. The U.S. is
obliterating the country so that it can easily salvage, from the
rubble and rag-tag warlords that remain, a government that will
allow safe passage for the establishment of oil and gas pipelines
through Afghanistan and Pakistan to Central Asia and the Caspian
reserves, from which immense profits can be reaped. The
strangulation and destruction of the Afghan people is a deliberate
strategy in this process. Indeed, this strategy – of targeting
civilians to achieve regional socio-political objectives – was quite
explicitly outlined in a statement by the British Chief of Defence
Staff Admiral Michael Boyce. Referring to the ongoing bombing
campaign, Boyce stated: “The squeeze will carry on until the people
of the country themselves recognize that this is going to go on
until they get the leadership changed.”
The joint American-British strategy thus includes
the punishment of Afghan civilians as an integral objective,
designed to secure the final aim of toppling the Taliban regime.
Such a strategy falls under the FBI’s very own definition of
terrorism, and I quote: “Terrorism is the unlawful use of force or
violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a
government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in
furtherance of political or social objectives.”
President Bush’s “war on terror” therefore does not
exist. This war is a war on innocent people, a terrorist war
designed to secure imperialist interests in controlling the world’s
resources to make more and more profits for the corporate elite.
This is a war on human rights, a war on justice, and a war on
freedom. I will conclude by quoting the statement of two American
citizens, Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez, who lost their son Greg in
the attacks on the World Trade Centre. They said: “We read enough of
the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of
violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents,
friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further
grievances against us. It is not the way to go... not in our son’s
name.”
Mr. Nafeez Ahmed is a
political analyst and human rights activist based in London. He is
Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and a
Researcher at the Islamic Human Rights
Commission.
Source:
by courtesy & ©
200
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Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
by the same author:
