- 'Massacre in Mazar,' a documentary by Irish director
Jamie Doran, was screened last week before select audiences in Europe.
The film documents events following the November 21, 2001 fall of Konduz,
the Taliban's last stronghold in northern Afghanistan. [See: 'Afghan war
documentary charges US with mass killings']
-
- The film presents powerful testimony from Afghan witnesses
that US troops collaborated in the torture and killings of thousands of
Taliban prisoners near Mazar-i-Sharif. The film, which has prompted demands
for an international commission of inquiry on war crimes in Afghanistan,
received widespread coverage in the European press, with major stories
in the Guardian, Le Monde, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt and other papers.
-
- This major story, however, has received virtually no
coverage in US newspapers or on network or cable television. Aside from
stories on some alternative Internet publications, and a June 16 article
on Salon.com, the story has been essentially blacked out in the US.
-
- A search for news about the documentary in the major
dailiesóincluding the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los
Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe and the Miami Herald
- turned up empty. Web sites for ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News and CNN have likewise
carried nothing on the film.
-
- Repeated telephone calls by the WSWS to these news sources,
inquiring why they have failed to cover the story, went unanswered. How
is possible that not a single major US media outlet chose to cover such
an important news event? There is no innocent or journalistic explanation.
-
- This wholesale political censorship cannot be justified
on the basis that Massacre in Mazar 'or the events it depicts' are not
'newsworthy.' The two screenings of the documentary in Germany prompted
calls by a number of European parliamentary deputies and human rights advocates
for an independent investigation into the atrocities exposed by the film.
Calling for an inquiry, prominent human rights lawyer Andrew McEntee commented
it was 'clear there is prima facie evidence of serious war crimes committed
not just under international law, but also under the laws of the United
States itself.'
-
- The film includes scenes of the aftermath of the massacre
of hundreds of Taliban fighters who were taken prisoner outside Mazar-i-Sharif,
at the Qala-i-Jangi prison, showing captured troops who were apparently
shot with their hands tied. The filmmaker also interviewed eyewitnesses,
who describe the torture and slaughter of 3,000 prisoners, who were allegedly
driven to a desert area and massacred. These witnesses - who were not paid
- have offered to provide testimony before any independent investigation
into the events.
-
- The film footage is so damning that both the Pentagon
and the US State Department were compelled within days to issue statements
denying the allegations of US complicity in the torture and murder of POWs,
which are powerfully pointed to by the film. If the US government is so
concerned over the implications of what the documentary exposes, why has
the US media chosen not to report on it?
-
- Since September 11, this same print and broadcast media
has consistently toed the Bush administrationís propaganda line;
and there has been no shortage of coverage on the Afghan war. The governmentís
flouting of international law and the Geneva Conventions in the treatment
of Afghan war prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba and proposals
for secret military tribunals have gone virtually unchallenged. Assaults
on the democratic rights of both immigrants and citizensóincluding
secret detentions and suppression of protestsóhave been reported
as legitimate aspects of the government's 'war on terrorism.'
-
- One topic that has received short shrift in the American
press is the civilian death toll in the US air raids in Afghanistan, which
human rights advocates estimate at more than 3,500, not including the thousands
facing death from starvation and displacement.
-
- The well-known motto of the New York Times, 'All the
news that's fit to print,' increasingly masks a practice by that newspaper
and all the media of choosing to print only that which fits the war propaganda
needs of the Pentagon and the White House.
-
- The refusal of the press to report on the charges of
US complicity in the torture and mass killings in Afghanistan shown in
Massacre in Mazar - or even to acknowledge the existence of the film -
serves one purpose: to keep the American people in the dark about the Bush
administrationís military actions and human rights violations.
-
- The media's silence makes it complicit in what are horrific
war crimes. It also provides an even more sinister service to the Bush
administration. Filmmaker Jamie Doran decided to release a rough cut of
his documentary before final editing because he feared Afghan forces were
preparing to destroy evidence of the mass killings, scattering the remains
of the victims. Self-censorship by the US media only facilitates such a
grisly cover-up.
-
- Copyright 1998-2002 World Socialist Web Site All rights
reserved
|