Forward from mart. Please distribute widely. ----- Original Message ----- From: Mrs. Jela Jovanovic To: mart Sent: Monday, March 05, 2001 3:11 PM Subject: Is it Time for Bush to Apologize for America's Arming of the Taliban and KLA? The Committee for National Solidarity Tolstojeva 34, Belgrade, YU Is it Time for Bush to Apologize for America's Arming of the Taliban and KLA? Why the Sudden Concern Over the Destruction of Religious Statues? By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (bannerofliberty.com) March 2, 2001 ``All officials, including the ministry of vice and virtue, have been given the go-ahead to destroy the statues,'' the Taliban's Information Minister Qadratullah Jamal said Thursday. ``The destruction work will be done by any means available to them.'' ``All the statues all over the country will be destroyed,'' he said. The statues mentioned in the article are statues of Buddha. One of them is 175 feet tall and one is 120 feet tall and they date back to the 3rd and 5th century AD. UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura said of the planned destruction, ``In Afghanistan, they are destroying statues that the entire world considers to be masterpieces,'' UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura said. ``This iconoclastic determination shocks me.'' Considering what we have seen in Kosovo from the Kosovo Liberation Army fundamentalist Muslims, who also were armed and supported by the United States, the European Union, NAT O and the United Nations along this line, why would Matsuura be shocked when the Taliban follows the KLA's lead? The Western press has largely ignored the desecration and destruction of Serbian Christian Churches in Kosovo by the KLA. So, the front page reports in the Washington Post and New York Times of the Taliban's desecration and destruction of Buddhist religious statues is a most welcome surprise. The KLA and the Taliban have a lot in common. Both are armed fundamentalist Muslim fanatics determined to destroy the people and the symbols of other religions and both were initially armed and trained by the United States. Both groups were called "freedom fighters" by the West and the weapons they are using to kill, main religious people and destroy religious artifacts are mostly those they have gotten from the United States.. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to give aid to the Communist government, the United States provided Stinger missiles to the "freedom fighters" and taught them how to shoot down Soviet aircraft. By 1999 left over Stinger missiles were being deployed to hijack an Indian Airbus as the Taliban demanded release of some of its terrorists. The Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, dismissed the West's concerns by saying: "We do not understand why everybody is so worried. All we are breaking are stones." A mullah is honored in the Muslim faith as one who is learned in the shari'a, the sacred law of Muslims. At least the Muslims in Afghanistan are being honest about what they are doing by openly admitting why they are killing, maiming and destroying all that stands in their way of a purely Muslim state. In Kosovo over 100 Christian churches and monasteries, some dating back to the 13th and 14th century, have been destroyed by the KLA terrorists we helped arm. However, in both situations, the Western media has shown literally no concern for the suffering of the people involved, much less the threat to religious treasures. In Afghanistan, a once stable nation of 15 million people has been literally destroyed with little mention in the West that six million of its population were driven out as refugees. Cosma Shalizi in his review of "The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982" (University of California Press, 1995), by M. Hassan Kakar, (http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/reviews/kakar-soviet-invasion/) notes: "The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. It was the last hot war it would fight, and one whose failure played a leading role in its loss of the Cold War and disintegration. Afghanistan is infamous today for being in the grip of the most benighted, fanatical and misogynist government in the world. It was not always that way, but has become so through the superpowers' acts of omission and commission --- mostly commission. ... "Here we come to the sowing of the dragon's teeth. US aid to the mujahideen went through the CIA. The CIA passed it on to its counterpart in Pakistan, the ISI (which doubles as the Pakistani secret police). The ISI passed it on to the political parties of exiles in Peshawr, from whom, in turn, it finally made its way, often much-reduced, to commanders inside Afghanistan. The ISI, as a matter of deliberate policy, favored the most extreme Islamist organizations it could lay hands on, plus ethnic separatists --- not because it thought these groups could form a stable government in Afghanistan, but precisely because it hoped they could not. (Recall that the frontier with Afghanistan, including Peshawr, had been disputed since before Pakistan formed in 1947.) The CIA went along, reasoning that the Islamists were the most immovably anti-communist groups available; the fact that they were also the most anti-western does not seem to have entered into their calculations." Well, we are in the midst of still another instance in which we have backed the wrong horse in foreign affairs. What that policy has gotten us, and Afghanistan, was the most oppressive, most evil, the most violent of all the political groups in Afghanistan. And, to think that our only concern in noticing the nation is the destruction of its cultural past by the Taliban, when the people are also being destroyed by the Taliban says something of the values we have after eight years of Bill Clinton. In Kosovo, the KLA has pretty much succeeded in killing or driving out everyone - Serbs, Romas, Jews, and others that are different from the fundamentalist Muslims who control the KLA. And, they have done to the Churches what the Taliban is doing to the Buddhist statues. They have blown them up. I've checked frequently on the Serbian Orthodox website (see: http://www.serbian-church.net/Svetinje/svetinje_e.html) over the past two years. In the beginning, the Church believed the West would care about their buildings being hit by KLA missiles. The West didn't care. Now, they merely catalogue the latest atrocities - the killings, the missile attacks, on the Churches. The media of the West used its power to demonize the Serbs. It merely has ignored the rape of Afghanistan until recently. Both the media and the Western governments seem too arrogant to confess to their mistaken judgments in both situations. In Kosovo, in spite of it being occupied by NATO troops and supposedly being overseen by the United Nations, what exists there, as in Afghanistan, is anarchy. The monks in Decani Monastery were critical of Slobodan Milosevic and believed that co-existence was possible with their KLA neighbors two years ago. Today, their website (http://www.decani.yunet.com/) shows pictures of demolished churches and dead priests. Today's Washington Post quotes "Cultural preservationists" as comparing the "Taliban's actions to those of other intolerant regimes that attempted to obliterate religious cultures, including the Chinese government's demolition of thousands of Buddhist monasteries in Tibet and the destruction of Jewish artifacts under Nazi rule in Germany." In the mostly American Air Force bombing of Yugoslavia for 79 days, over a "genocide" that UN financed forensic experts say never happened in Kosovo, Churches and monasteries, hospitals and schools were bombed. Since NATO troops and the UN have occupied Kosovo, the KLA has continued to systematically blow up churches and statues and to kill or drive out non-Albanians. George W. Bush said during his campaign that we, as a nation, needed to be more "humble." I agreed with him every time he said it. The key to being humble most of the time is repenting of one's wrong-doing. Perhaps the time has come for the new American president to apologize to the surviving Afghan and Serb people for the behavior of a past administration or two. After all, if we can apologize for accidentally blowing up a Japanese fishing boat, we ought to be able to apologize for arming the Taliban and the KLA and bombing Churches, monasteries, cemeteries, hospitals and schools in Yugoslavia, whether by accident or design. To comment: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mrs Jela Jovanovic, art historian Secretary General [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Knowledge is Power! Elimination of the exploitation of man by man http://www.egroups.com/group/pttp/ POWER TO THE PEOPLE! Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Change Delivery Options: http://www.egroups.com/mygroups Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. 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