[News] Afghanistan - Memo to America: Stop Murdering My People
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Wed Apr 21 11:17:30 EDT 2010
Memo to America: Stop Murdering My People
By <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/malalaijoya>Malalai Joya
http://www.zcommunications.org/memo-to-america-stop-murdering-my-people-by-malalai-joya
Source:
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-04-19/memo-to-america-stop-murdering-my-people/>The
Daily Beast
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Amid increasing civilian deaths and resurgent
warlordism, Afghan women's leader Malalai Joya
writes that Hamid Karzai and the U.S. are losing
credibility in Afghanistan day by day.
Almost every day, the NATO occupation of our
country continues to kill innocent people. Each
time, it seems, military officials try to claim
that only insurgents are killed, or they
completely deny and cover up their crimes. The
work of a few courageous journalists is the only
thing that brings some of these atrocities to light.
For instance, it was only after the reporting of
Jerome Starkey of the Times of London that
officials admitted to the brutal Feb. 12 murder
of two pregnant women, a teenage girl, and
several young men in a night raid at a home where
a family was celebrating the birth of a child.
Night raids, air raid mistakes, firing on
civilian buses and cars at checkpointsthe
occupation finds many ways of killing the people
of Afghanistan. The excuses and lies for these
deaths are like salt in our wounds, and it is no
wonder that protests against the U.S. military
are growing. The Afghan people have had enough.
In recent weeks, there has been much talk about
Hamid Karzais threats to join the Taliban and
about his supposed differences with the American
government. But for Afghans, Karzai long ago lost
all credibility. The joke among our people is
that Karzai doesnt do or say anything without
consulting the White House first. No amount of
nationalistic rhetoric or demagoguery on his part will change this perception.
Everyone in Afghanistan knows that Karzai was
placed into power with the backing of the United
States and its allies, and to this day he relies
on their support. His regime would not last a day
without it. And Afghans know too well the reality
of his corrupt government: It has delivered
nothing to the countrys poor other than sorrow
and destitution, while filling the pockets of
drug traffickers, warlords, and its own corrupt officials.
Afghanistan has had puppet leaders before, rulers
who served only the interests of foreign
occupiers, whether British or Soviet. But Karzai
may be the most hated puppet in our history; he
has empowered some of the most brutal internal
enemies of ordinary Afghans, warlords of the
Northern Alliance like Sayyaf, Dr. Abdullah,
Rabbani, Mohaqiq, Ismael Kahn, Dostum and many
others. Even his two vice presidents, Fahim Qasim
and Karim Khalili, are notorious fundamentalist
warlords. The presidents brother in Kandahar,
Ahmed Wali Karzai, is another thug in power whose
links to the drug trade and the CIA have been widely reported.
Karzai made headlines by threatening to join the
Taliban, but the reality is that for more than
eight years he has had no problem working with
fundamentalists who are the ideological brothers
of the anti-women Taliban. In fact, Karzai
himself used to support the Taliban when he was a
minor tribal leader in Kandahar in the 1990s, and
for years he has been negotiating to bring
Taliban leaders into his puppet regime. Some of
them are already serving in his regime, and the
U.S. government has been encouraging these
negotiations by creating the false categories of
"moderate" and "extremist" Taliban.
He has also been reaching out to that most brutal
warlord and criminal, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a
mujahideen leader known for killing civilians and
currently designated a terrorist by the U.S.
government. Karzai recently appointed Abdul Hadi
Arghandewal, an infamous leader of Hekmatyars
party, as his minister in charge of the economy.
These negotiations and flexible alliances by
Karzai and the U.S. government are nothing new.
For three decades, the U.S. has backed these
criminals: Hekmatyar, al Qaeda and other
fundamentalists in the 1980s, the Taliban in the
1990s, and now Karzai and his warlord allies.
Progressive-minded Afghans want to break out of
this circle of warlordism once and for all. It is
ironic that Karzai talks about the possibility
that a national resistance could develop in
Afghanistan. He should know that the prime target
of such a movement will be his own regime and its foreign supporters.
Our people are deeply fed up. They have organized
many anti-U.S. protests in the past months and if
the occupation continues, the resistance will
only grow. More than eight years of occupation
have made life bleak, and we are tired of being
pawns in the U.S. and NATOs game for control of Central Asia.
We can no longer bear the killing of our pregnant
mothers, the killing of our teenagers and young
children, the killing of so many Afghan men and
women. We can no longer bear these accidents
and these apologies for the deaths of the innocent.
We salute the anti-war movements in the NATO
countries. Here, we will struggle to our last
breath to stop this war that is tearing apart our beloved Afghanistan.
Malalai Joya, now 31, was the youngest member of
the Afghan parliament, elected in 2005. In 2007
she was suspended from parliament because of her
consistent criticism of the warlords and other
human-rights abusers in the Karzai regime. Joya
has survived five assassination attempts to date,
and has written her life story in the book
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/143910946X/thedaibea-20/>A
Woman Among Warlords (with Derrick OKeefe,
Scribner, 2009). She writes from Kabul, Afghanistan.
Freedom Archives
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