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Robert Fisk: We are the war criminals now
'Everything we have believed in since the Second World
War goes by the board as we pursue our own exclusive
war'
29 November 2001
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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 Whitehouse. What is so shocking is that
the Blairs, Schrφders, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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