Category: War

Down and Out in Shah Mansoor

Refugees await uncertain fate in IDP camps
Refugees await uncertain fate in IDP camps

The tireless and wonderful Kathy Kelly is visiting refugee camps in Pakistan with Dan Pearson. Here is her first dispatch (Mahmood Mamdani recently told me that apparently Arundhati Roy is also in Swat these days):

In Pakistan’s Swabi district, a bumpy road leads to Shah Mansoor, a small village surrounded by farmland. Just outside the village, uniform size tents are set up in hundreds of rows. The sun bores down on the Shah Mansoor camp which has become a temporary home to thousands of displaced Pakistanis from the Swat area. In the stifling heat, the camp’s residents sit idly, day after day, uncertain about their future. They spoke with heated certainty, though, about their grievances.As soon as we stepped out of the car, men and children approached us. They had all arrived from Mingora, the main city of Swat, 15 days prior. One young man, a student, told us that bombing and shelling had increased in their area, but, due to a government imposed curfew, they weren’t allowed to leave their homes. Suddenly, the Pakistani Army warned them to leave within four hours or they would be killed. With the curfew lifted long enough for them to get out of Mingora, they joined a mass exodus of people and walked for three days before reaching this camp.

Continue reading “Down and Out in Shah Mansoor”

You (and I) got Darfur Wrong

Mahmood Mamdani
Mahmood Mamdani

From Open Source with Chris Lydon:

Who can imagine that a Save Darfur coalition vocally including Al Sharpton (”we know when America comes together, we can stop anything in the world”), Mia Farrow, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Elie Wiesel (”Darfur today is the world’s capital of human suffering”), Nat Hentoff, Bob Geldof, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Harold Pinter, Oprah Winfrey, the gold-medal speed skater Joey Cheek, Tony Blair and Dario Fo might be profoundly shallow in its reading of the brutal warfare in Sudan five years ago… and just as wrong-headed in its drum beat for an American intervention?

Mahmood Mamdani can. We are talking here about his book Saviors and Survivors and his argument that the Darfur rescue campaign, which became a sacred cause of our civil religion, was not so much the moral alternative to Iraq, the Bush “war on terror,” and Cheney-think as it was a variation and extension of the same toolkit. I begin with a sort of confession that I may be a sample of Mamdani’s problem — having drenched myself in Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times columns and largely absorbed the common framework that Darfur was about Arabs slaughtering Africans, and that somebody had to something about it.

Continue reading “You (and I) got Darfur Wrong”

In Pakistan, an exodus that is beyond biblical

Saima is one of 37 refugees now sharing the house of a stranger. Their host, Rizwan Ali, 59, says: 'It would be easier to die than to ask displaced people to leave for the camps'
Saima is one of 37 refugees now sharing the house of a stranger. Their host, Rizwan Ali, 59, says: 'It would be easier to die than to ask displaced people to leave for the camps'

‘Locals sell all they have to help millions displaced by battles with the Taliban’, Andrew Buncombe reports. This is in stark contrast to how Punjab and Sindh reacted. Both have restricted entry of refugees into their territory. In the latter MQM organized two strikes, the first one with the support of the ruling PPP, and Pakhtun property was destroyed, two people burnt alive. It is already generating resentment in the NWFP with more and more coming to see this as a war on the Pukhtuns, as Rustum Shah Mohmand argues here. The response of the non-Pakhtun provinces to the refugee crises has done little to disabuse them. Meanwhile this displaced mass of humanity survives on the generosity of the type described in the caption above. I avoid indulging in any type of group chauvinism but for once, I’m proud of my people.

The language was already biblical; now the scale of what is happening matches it. The exodus of people forced from their homes in Pakistan’s Swat Valley and elsewhere in the country’s north-west may be as high as 2.4 million, aid officials say. Around the world, only a handful of war-spoiled countries – Sudan, Iraq, Colombia – have larger numbers of internal refugees. The speed of the displacement at its height – up to 85,000 people a day – was matched only during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. This is now one of the biggest sudden refugee crises the world has ever seen.

Continue reading “In Pakistan, an exodus that is beyond biblical”

Busted, Pentagon

Abu Ghraib (Fernando Botero)
Abu Ghraib (Fernando Botero)

Why The Photos Probably Do Show Detainees Sodomized and Raped. Naomi Wolf explains:

(MIA: I am not quite sure why this is being treated as new information when Seymour Hersh had reported on the videos of Iraqi children being sodomized soldiers five years back, and again three years later in his profile on Gen. Antony Taguba Hersh revealed that there were cases of rape, and that Taguba had seen ‘a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee’. It was likewise revealed in an earlier investigation that an investigator from the mercenary firm Titan Corp., named Adil Nakhla was charged with sodomizing an Iraqi boy).

The Telegraph of London broke the news – because the US press is in a drugged stupor — that the photos Obama is refusing to release of detainee abuse depict, among other sexual tortures, an American soldier raping a female detainee and a male translator raping a male prisoner. The paper claims the photos also show anal rape of prisoners with foreign objects such as wires and lightsticks. Major General Antonio Taguba calls the images `horrific’ and `indecent’ (but absurdly agrees that Obama should not release them – proving once again that the definition of hypocrisy is the assertion that the truth is in poor taste).

Predictably, a few hours later the Pentagon issues a formal denial.

Continue reading “Busted, Pentagon”

‘These colours don’t run’

From Colombian painter Francisco Boteros series depicting US abuse of Iraqi detainees.
From Colombian painter Fernando Botero's series depicting US abuse of Iraqi detainees.

Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram are well known. Less so the police detention centers where the innocents caught in the ‘war on terror’ dragnet were subjected to similar abuses. Inigo Thomas reveals:

In his remarks to the American Enterprise Institute last week, Dick Cheney said that inmates at Guantánamo should remain imprisoned on Cuba because they are too dangerous to be incarcerated in American jails. What about the Americans arrested and jailed under the terms of the war on terror? Should they be incarcerated on Cuba, or does Cheney suppose that Americans are, regardless of what they have done, inherently less dangerous than other people and therefore don’t need to be jailed at Guantánamo?

Nor – surely – can Cheney have forgotten that immediately after 9/11, hundreds of men were rounded up by the FBI and other police forces in the US and imprisoned in high security American jails: 760 in total, 184 of whom were considered especially interesting by the authorities. Just over half of them were interred at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, a former warehouse on the waterfront overlooking the harbour and the Statue of Liberty. The story was covered by the New York Times, but it was treated, mostly, as local news and carried in the ‘New York Region’ section of the paper.

Continue reading “‘These colours don’t run’”

The Darfur Debate


This debate between Mahmood Mamdani and John Prendergast took place on April 14, 2009 at the School of International and Public Affairs and the Institute for African Studies, Columbia University. I recently finished Mamdani’s new book Saviors and Survivors, which I will be reviewing for The Electronic Intifada shortly. The book is a tour de force brimming with political, historical, and anthropological insights. I would highly recommend it to anyone with interest in the subject.

(Also see James North’s review of the debate, and this follow up post.)

Terrorism Reexamined

(New Press, 2008)

C. S. Soong is one of the best radio interviewers, erudite and articulate, and on his show Against the Grain you will always find some of the most stimulating discussions on politics, philosophy, literature and activism.

Terrorists, we are told, threaten our freedom and democracy. What does this kind of rhetoric ignore, and what kind of governmental violence does it justify? Matthew Carr calls attention to a tradition, beginning in the 19th century, of using violence against symbolic targets to achieve a political victory. He also discusses the Mau Mau in Kenya and the counterterrorism initiatives of the Reagan era.

Matthew Carr, The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism The New Press, 2008

The Taliban bogeyman

Swabi, Pakistan: Buner refugees travel by road as they flee fighting (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)
Swabi, Pakistan: Buner refugees travel by road as they flee fighting (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

UNHCR warns that the human exodus from the war-torn Malakand division is turning into the most dramatic displacement since the 1994 crisis in Rwanda. The Guardian reports:

Almost 1.5 million people have registered for assistance since fighting erupted three weeks ago, the UNHCR said, bringing the total number of war displaced in North West Frontier province to more than 2 million, not including 300,000 the provincial government believes have not registered. “It’s been a long time since there has been a displacement this big,” the UNHCR’s spokesman Ron Redmond said in Geneva, trying to recall the last time so many people had been uprooted so quickly. “It could go back to Rwanda.”

Meanwhile, it appears the story has all but disappeared from international media. It had fallen out of the headlines within the first week, now it barely makes the news. The Pakistani english language press (on which most Western ‘experts’ rely) is on most days about as distant from the realities of the North-West frontier as the hacks bloviating in Washington and London. They even have their native Ann Coulter in the execrable Farhat Taj who is given frequent platform to slander anyone who fails to see the virtues of the US regional agenda. In her latest installment she informs readers that there is ‘very little collateral damage’, and that most of the 1,000 dead are ‘confirmed Taliban’. As Gerald Kaufmann would say, these are the words of a Nazi; the woman appears bent on matching the military’s assault on Swat with her own on reality. Continue reading “The Taliban bogeyman”

Reinstatement of military commissions a ‘war crime’

Francis Boyle
Francis Boyle

Obama’s outrageous decision to reinstate military commissions at Guantanamo has come as a hard blow to human rights campaigners in the US. Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois puts the legal implications of the reinstatement of these “kangaroo courts” in stark terms: “The laws of war would permit (Guantanamo detainees) to be prosecuted in either a U.S. Federal District Court organised under Article III of the United States Constitution or in a military court-martial proceeding organised under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. To do otherwise would be a war crime.” William Fischer of IPS reports.

Human rights advocates are furious at President Barack Obama’s decision to prosecute some Guantanamo detainees through the same military commissions he criticised during his campaign as a “flawed” system that “has failed to convict anyone of a terrorist act since the 9/11 attacks”.

The White House said Friday that the commissions would be used to prosecute terrorism suspects who can’t be tried in the civilian criminal justice system, but added that detainees would have expanded legal rights to make the proceedings fairer. The military commission system, rebuked several times by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional, was a centrepiece of the George W. Bush administration’s strategy for fighting “the global war on terror”.

Continue reading “Reinstatement of military commissions a ‘war crime’”

Obama’s Animal Farm: Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice – James Petras

“The Deltas are psychos… You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force…”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980s. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.

The point of the ‘Special Operations’ teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance. The SOT specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US client regimes. The SOT’s ‘counter-terrorism’ is terrorism in reverse, focusing on socio-political groups between US proxies and the armed resistance.

Continue reading “Obama’s Animal Farm: Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice – James Petras”