The Others (Page 5)

The Independent, December 4: "The village where nothing happened.... The cemetery on the hill contains 40 freshly dug graves, unmarked and identical. And the village of Kama Ado has ceased to exist.... And all this is very strange because, on Saturday morning--when American B-52s unloaded dozens of bombs that killed 115 men, women and children--nothing happened.... We know this because the U.S. Department of Defence told us so.... 'It just didn't happen.'"

The New York Times, December 12, David Rohde, writing from Ghazni, Afghanistan: "Each ward of the Ghazni Hospital features a new calamity. In the first, two 14-year-old boys had lost parts of their hands when they picked up land mines. 'I was playing with a toy and it exploded' said one of them, Muhammad Allah.... a woman named Rose lay on a bed in the corner of the room, grunting with each breath. Her waiflike children slept nearby, whimpering periodically. Early on Sunday morning, shrapnel from an American bomb tore through the woman's abdomen, broke her 4-year-old son's leg and ripped into her 6-year-old daughter's head, doctors here said. A second 6-year-old girl in the room was paralyzed from the waist down. X-rays showed how a tiny shard of metal had neatly severed her spinal cord."

Reported in the Chicago Tribune, December 28, by Paul Salopek, from Madoo, Afghanistan: "'American soldiers came after the bombing and asked if any Al Qaeda had lived here,' said villager Paira Gul. 'Is that an Al Qaeda?' Gul asked, pointing to a child's severed foot he had excavated minutes earlier from a smashed house. 'Tell me' he said, his voice choking with fury, 'is that what an Al Qaeda looks like?'"

Reuters, December 31, from Qalaye Niazi, Afghanistan: "Janat Gul said 24 members of his family were killed in the pre-dawn U.S. bombing raid on Qalaye Niazi, and described himself as the sole survivor.... In the U.S. Major Pete Mitchell--a spokesman for U.S. Central Command--said: 'We are aware of the incident and we are currently investigating.'"

Yes, these reports appeared, but scattered through the months of bombing and on the inside pages, or buried in larger stories and accompanied by solemn government denials. With no access to alternative information, it is not surprising that a majority of Americans have approved of what they have been led to think is a "war on terrorism."

Recall that Americans at first supported the war in Vietnam. But once the statistics of the dead became visible human beings--once they saw not only the body bags of young GIs piling up by the tens of thousands but also the images of the napalmed children, the burning huts, the massacred families at My Lai--shock and indignation fueled a national movement to end the war.

I do believe that if people could see the consequences of the bombing campaign as vividly as we were all confronted with the horrifying photos in the wake of September 11, if they saw on television night after night the blinded and maimed children, the weeping parents of Afghanistan, they might ask: Is this the way to combat terrorism?

Surely it is time, half a century after Hiroshima, to embrace a universal morality, to think of all children, everywhere, as our own.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.