| July 25, 2002 | Thursday | Jamadi-ul-Awwal 14,1423 |
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Skeletons in India’s cupboard
De-mining Afghanistan
EVEN though murdering civilians is nothing new for Israel, the Zionist state seems to be setting a new record in bloodletting under Ariel Sharon. Monday night’s attack by an F-16 was not on a military target; it was on a housing complex, resulting in 175 casualties, including women and children. It was a slaughter pure and simple — in keeping with the genocide of Palestinians which is Israel’s official policy. The purported target of attack was Salah Shehada, head of Izz-el-Din al-Qassam brigade, whom Sharon wanted eliminated. Evidently, Israeli intelligence had obtained information about exactly where Shehada was, and the Sharon government chose to strike, knowing full well that an attack on a residential block would result in heavy civilian casualties. The result was a massacre, and the dead included, besides Shehada, his wife, a Hamas fighter, and nine children from neighbouring homes. The incident has not been fully reported by the world media yet. But the massacre is reminiscent of the carnage at Jenin. Lumps of flesh, including those of a woman breast-feeding her two-month old child, were found in the rubble. Yet so indifferent Sharon is to the sanctity of human life that he has called this slaughter a “great success.”
Apart from being a human tragedy, the attack has further reduced the chances of what could have been a move towards talks. Only a day earlier, Hamas had pledged that it would consider ceasing suicide bombings if Israel would vacate West Bank cities. As if in rebuff Sharon chose to strike, thus ruling out the possibility of talks. In fact, immediately afterwards, Hamas swore retaliation. Yasser Arafat called the Israeli attack a crime and wondered how “the world can stand silent” now that he had started “positive initiatives for progress” — a reference to the last meeting between a Palestinian delegation and an Israeli team headed by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.
George Bush did not consider the F-16 attack a crime; he called it “a heavy-handed action.” He did not come on television to condemn the slaughter; instead, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer conveyed President Bush’s mild reaction, saying the president thought Monday’s attack did not contribute to peace. This mealy-mouthed reaction to the massacre of innocent people will merely encourage Sharon in his bellicosity. Talks he does not want, because, if successful, that would ultimately lead to the Oslo process, whose faithful implementation would mean the establishment of a Palestinian state. This is precisely what Sharon does not want. Instead, he felt elated by President Bush’s June 24 speech that attacked Yasser Arafat indirectly and dwelt on the need for reforming the Palestinian Authority as a condition for a “provisional” Palestinian state. There was no criticism at all of Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territory, its violation of all relevant UN resolutions concerning occupied lands and populations, and the continued building of new Jewish settlements and the expansion of the existing ones. Instead, the entire speech was designed to obfuscate the real issue — the right of the Palestinian people to freedom in their own land. This being America’s attitude, one can understand what chances of success Washington’s war on terrorism has. The licence given to Sharon to kill will only produce more terrorists — and not just in Palestine.
NEW DELHI’s stubborn refusal to allow a group of British MPs to visit the troubled held Kashmir and Gujarat states is a tell-tale sign of its desire to keep certain bitter truths under wraps. This follows an earlier Indian refusal to grant permission to a fact-finding mission by Amnesty International wanting to go to Gujarat to investigate the on-going communal violence there. Obviously New Delhi is bent on keeping Gujarat and held Kashmir shut to any impartial probes for fear of the truth being uncovered as a result of such investigations. The proposed visit by the British MPs was planned in the wake of the outrage expressed by sizable sections of the British-Asian electorate over killings of innocent Muslims in Gujarat and gross human rights violations in Kashmir, especially because some of the victims of violence in both the states happened to be British nationals. The AI fact-finding mission to Gujarat was formed because accounts of the carnage given by independent sources were grossly at odds with the official version released to the media by the Indian government.
AI says India’s refusal to grant permission to its mission is an attempt to “cover up the involvement” of the Gujarat state government and police officials in the riots that left over 2,500 people — mostly Muslims — dead and some 100,000 homeless and displaced. To this day, some 27,000 Muslims are condemned to live in relief camps around Ahmedabad, as the state government would not guarantee their safety if they returned home. This is even after the latest forensic evidence released earlier this month ruled out any Muslim hand in the burning of the train full of Hindu activists at Godhra station in Gujarat — the incident which triggered the bloody riots. The rights groups based in India itself have been denied access to the victims of the violence; they have accused the state government of colluding with the extremist Hindu organizations in stoking communal passions against the Muslims.
Sadly, it seems the erstwhile Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s resignation has necessitated that the central government don his mantle to ward off any independent inquiry into the carnage. In held Kashmir also, New Delhi has firmly denied allegations of widespread abuse brought against its paramilitary forces. Thus, the refusal to grant permission to conduct any independent inquiry in both cases only goes to show the world’s largest democracy has quite a few skeletons in its cupboard.
THE death of 13 bus passengers in central Afghanistan in a landmine explosion highlights the constant danger these concealed weapons pose to ordinary Afghans. Wracked by years of civil war, only to be followed by a horrible bombing campaign that lasted several months and caused thousands of civilian deaths, Afghanistan is finally taking some measured steps to get back on its feet. However, the presence of an estimated ten million landmines makes this task difficult, with Afghanistan lacking the means and expertise needed to carry out a reasonably thorough and effective de-mining operation.
Hundreds of people have been killed, and thousands more maimed, by landmines scattered over vast areas in the country. Most of these were laid during the eighties when America and the former USSR were fighting a proxy war in Afghanistan. Children are particularly vulnerable because they often cannot read signs posted to warn people of the presence of mines, and are more likely than adults to be unwary and step on a deadly mine hidden beneath the land surface anywhere. If further loss of life and limb is to be avoided, a sustained de-mining campaign must be launched soon. De-mining agencies, led by the UN, have done quite a lot in clearing the countryside but much more needs to be done, especially at a time when displaced Afghans are returning home and the process of rebuilding and rehabilitation is about to begin.