- 'Everything we have believed in since the Second World
War goes by the board as we pursue our own exclusive war.'
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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?
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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 White House. What is so shocking is that the Blairs,
Schröders, 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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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- http://argument.independent.co.uk/
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