Volume 2, No. 11, November 2001

Excerpts from an article by Arundhati Roy printed in Oct. 8, 2001 issue of Outlook

".... For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the US government to persuade the American public that America’s commitment to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it’s an easy notion to peddle. However, if that were true, it’s reasonable to wonder why the symbls of America’s economic and military dominance — the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon — were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government’s record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things — to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dectatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)?...."

".... The world will probably never know what motivated those particular hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings. They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political messages, no organisation has claimed credit for the attacks. All we know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural human instinct for survival or any desire to be remembered. It’s almost as though they could not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their deeds. And what they did has blown a hole in the world as we know it. In the absence of information, politicians, political commentators, writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own interpretations. This speculations, this analysis of the political climate in which the attacks took place, can only be a good thing...."

".... The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Osama bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America’s old wars.

The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel — backed by the US — invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 2,00,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists who the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list. For a country involved in so much warfare and conflict, the American people have been extremely fortunate. The strikes on September 11 were only the second on American soil in over a century. The first was Pearl Harbour. The reprisal for this took a long route, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time the world waits with bated breath for the horros to come...."

".... The Taliban’s response to US demands for the extradition of Osama bin Laden has been uncharacteristically reasonable: Produce the evidence, we’ll hand him over. President Bush’s response is that the demand is "non-negotiable".

(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs — can India put in a side-requert for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the USA? He was Chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary evidence. It’s all in the files. Could we have him, please?)...."

Howdy folks,

You guys must be wondering how all this happened in the most powerful country on this planet, at a time when we’re the Masters of the Universe, and all set to build an impenetrable missile defence shield. To tell the truth. I’m just as flabberghasted as you are. Here I was, doing all the right things: walking out of the UN conference on racism, scuttling the Kyoto environment treaty, arming Sharon to assassinate Palestinians, bribing Serbia to hand over Milosevic, tightening the Nato noose round Russia, bombing Iraq without it being so much as mentioned of TV. In short, I was doing the job an American President is paid to do, letting it be known that we own the world, and then, literally out of the blue, this terrible thing happens.

Wars have never affected our folks at home. We’ve waged war on the natives in god-forsaken places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Serbia, naa our friends have massacred Palestinians, Afghans, Latin Americans, and other foreign types. But believe me, I never reckoned they’ll go this far to take revenge. Sure, TV stations and hospitals have been bombed in Serbia, Palestinians have been murdered in refugee camps, and people are routinely killed in Iraq. But it’s we and our pals who can do these things, not low-tech losers without access to Tomahawk and Cruise missiles. Who could have imagined that these terrorists will just throw their own lives aways! Crazy cowards.

My heart goes out to all those people who lost their loved ones in this tragedy. I guess innocents died in the wars we waged as well. And I’m told innocent folks get killed in Russia, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and such places pretty regularly. But for them it’s, a political problem they have to solve, and resorting to armed force is not the answer. The important thing to remember is that when it happens to others it’s collateral damage, when they do it to us it’s terrorism.

The big difference is that Americans are involved this time, and how can any sane person say that an American life is the same as, say, an Afghan one? I watched a BBC documentary that talked about the bones of the dead of Afghanistan being sold in Pakistan to make chicken feed! The children dig up the skeletons in the graveyards and sell each one for 12 rupees. What that means is that the bones of four Afghan workers are worth only one dollar! and you want to compare them with us?

You’ve got to realise that this threat to us doesn’t come from all those people whom we kicked around. We weren’t attacked by the sons of those people whom our Contra goons murdered in Nicaragua. Nor was it any of the 500,000 children with birth defects in Vietnam after we used chemical weapons there. Nor was it the fathers of the half a million Iraqi kids who died as a result of our sanctions. These losers may hate our guts, but they can’t do a thing.

No, folks, the good news is that these guys who caused all that damage used to be on our side not too far back. They’ve been trained and financed by out boys. Osama bin Laden is out creation. So was Saddam who we funded throughout his war with Iran. It’s pity that they have now become traitors and turned the weapons we supplied agains us. They’ll have to suffer the consequences for that transgression. We’ll bomb Afghanistan back into the Stone age. The problem is, my generals tell me that much of it is already in the Stone Age, thanks to all those bandits we armed and trained. I hear that with the aid agencies pulling out there’ll soon be thousands dying of starvation there. That’s what happens when you harbour terrorists.

Countries that provide safe havens to terrorists must choose which side they are on, We’re laying down the law in these matters, and countries are either for us or against us. It’s pretty simple. All we’re asking them to do is give up the terrorists whom we don’t like — like Osama or the Hezbollah or Hamas, and they can keep their Kashmiri or Chechen terrorists. As for our harbouring Cuban terrorists in Miami, nobody can question that, that’s part of our holy war for capitalism. But we don’t call it a jehad.

Let’s face it folks, this is a time for tough decisions. Sure, innocents may get killed in retaliatory strikes. But recall what Madeleine Albright said when she was told that more Iraqi kids had died due to the economic blockade than in the Hiroshima bombing. She bravely said that the price was worth it. We can rely on our media to drive that point home. It’s their flag-waving duty. It’s also their obligation to make sure there’s no discussion about the reasons for terrorism. The voices of dissent need to be muted, so that we can protect our pluralist society.

As for you guys, remember that there can be no higher calling than fulfilling your patriotic duty as cannon fodder. God bless America.

Excerpts from an article by Praful Bidwai printed in Oct. 12 2001 issue of Hindustan Times

"....Under the present dispensation, we have the most abject surrender to the dictates of machtpolitik — the might of raw military power — to a selective, narrow definition of terrorism, and a myopic ‘hunt-them-down’ militaristic appoach which refuses to recognise the gross iniquities and injustices, the imbalances and asymmetries of power, and the policies of exculusion and dispossession (exemplified most of all in Palestine), that create the terrain on which terrorism thrives.

As the world is bulldozed into a far-from-popular war in favour of which there is no global consensus — witness the demonstrations, and not just by Muslims, in more than 20 countries — no State is even demanding convincing, irrefutable, evidence of Al Qaeda’s direct culpability for September11, or a full, proper international mandate of the use of force. The UN Security Council has been pusillanimously unasseritive and New Delhi shamefully silent on these vital issues. (Indeed, Jaswant Singh has all but issued unsolicited certificates of such proof, so overwhlmed is he at having been made privy to the evidence.)...."

"....Even more worrisome is the reflection of parochialism’s triumph within our own broders. Much of our media has reduced itself to CNN-in-print, covering the war in twice as much detail as Kargil, albeit from a western perspective. Little of the pluralism of this society and diversity of its views on war and peace finds expression in TV programmes ceaselessly devoted to masking the truth about the abuse of power by those who wield too much of it, spreading prejucice about Islam and Muslims, and reducing the complex Kashmir issue, with its rich history of rigged elections, breaches of the Consitution, mindless repression and rising popular alienation, to mere ‘cross-border terrorism’.

Even more deplorable is the downright communal interpretation being put on the phenomenon of terrrorism itself. The Sangh parivar, led by the BJP, is busy tarring all Islam and Muslims with the brush of intolerance, fanaticism and Taliban- or Bin Laden-style terrorism. The banning of SIMI is the worst signal that the government could have sent out in this climate, which demands a spirited, uncompromising defence of pluralist secularism. The charge-sheet against SIMI is singularly ill-conectived, including accusations such as wanting to establish "an Islamic international order" and promoting the will of Allah...."

"....Union Minister of State for Home I.D.Swamy railed (Star TV, Reality Bites, September 25) against SIMI for spreading communal hatred, but shamefully exonerated the Bajrang Dal and the VHP for doing so because they "glorify our ancient past".

That’s exactly the mindest, further warped by McCarthyian paranoia, which led the Delhi police to arrest and harass six activists of the All India People’s Resistance Forum for publishing a pamphlet critical of the ‘anti-terrorist’ war and of America’s past policies. They have been charged with sedition, conspiracy, even fomenting communal hatred. The police told them it is illegal to criticise the US because it is India’s ally. They were twice denied bail by the concerned magistrate.

This is an appalling instance of brute censorship, gaging of dissent, and suppression of fundamental rights, which typifies the worst kind of intolerance. Such an approach cannot make a discriminating moral or legal judgment about what’s a crime and what’s not, leave alone about terrorism, its accomplices, and degrees of responsibility and culpability of each category...."

Excerpts from interviews with Noam Chomsky

".....Also in the 1980s the US fought a major war in Central America, leaving some 200,000 tortured and mutilated corpses, millions of orphans and refugees, and four countries devastated. A prime target of the US attack was the Catholic Church, which had offended the self-described "civilized world" by adopting ‘the preferential option for the poor.’...."

".... The US is, after all, the only country condemned by the World Court for international terrorism — for "the unlawful use of force" for political ends, as the Court put it, ordering the US to terminate these cimes and pay substantial reparations. The US of course dismissed the Court’s judgment with contempt, reacting by escalating the terrorist war against Nicaragua and vetoing a Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law (and voting alone, with Israel, against similar General Assembly resolutions). The terrorist war expanded in accordance with the official policy of attacking "soft targets" — undefended civilian targets — instead of engaging the Nicaraguan army. That was only a small component of Washington’s terrorist wars in Central America in that terrible decade, leaving 200,000 corpses and four countries in ruins. In the same years the US was carrying out large-scale terrorism elsewhere, including the Middle East: to cite one example, the car-bombing in Beirut in 1985 outside a Mosque, timed to kill the maximum number of civilians, with 80 dead and 200 casualities, aimed at a Muslim Sheikh, who escaped. And it supported much worse terror: for example, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that killed some 18,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, not in self-defense, as was conceded at once; and the vicious "iron fist" atrocities of the years that followed, directed against "terrorist villagers," as Israel put it. And the subsequent invasions of 1993 and 1996, both strongly supported by the US (until the international reaction to the Qana massacre in 1996, which caused Clinton to draw back). The post-1982 toll in Lebanon alone is probably another 20,000 civilians. In the 1990s, the US provided 80% of the arms of Turkey’s vicious counterinsurgency campaign against Kurds in its southeast region, killing tens of thousands, driving 2-3 million out of their homes, leaving 3500 villages destroyed (10 times Kosovo under NATO bombs), and with every imaginable atrocity. The arms flow had increased sharply in 1984 as Turkey launched its terrorist attack and began to decline to previous levels only in 1999, when the atrocities had achieved their goal. In 1999, Turkey fell from its position as the leading recipient of US arms (Israel-Egypt aside), replaced by Colombia, the worst human rights violator in the hemisphere in the 1990s and by far the leading recipient of US arms and training, following a consistent pattern. In East Timor, the US (and Britain)continued their support of the Indonesian aggressors, which had already wiped out about 1/3 of the population with their crucial help (France as well). That continued right through the atrocities of 1999, with thousands murdered even before the September assault that drove 85% of the population from their homes and destroyed 70% of the country — while the Clinton administration kept to its position that it is the responsibility of the Indonesians, and we don’t want to take that away from them. It was only after enormous pressure that the Administration informed the Indonesians that the game was over, at which point they immediately withdrew, revealing the latent power that was always there had the US not been committed to support for Indonesian mass murderers. In 1998, in one of the minor episodes of US terrorism, Clinton destroyed half the pharmaceutical supplies in Sudan and the facilities for replenishing them, with a casualty toll that must be enormous, though no one knows, because the US blocked a UN inquiry and Western intellectuals evidently are not concerned about such trivialities: Similar attacks in France, or Israel, or the US would presumably lead to a different reaction, though the comparison is unfair, because these are rich countries with ample supplies that can easily be replenished. I have already mentioned the devastation of Iraqi civilian society, with about 1 million killed, over half of them young children — "a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it," as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright explained on prime time TV a few years ago. This is only a small sample....."

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