[Marxism] Statement by Malalai Joya on NATO bombing of civilians in Farah

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

May 14, 2009

MP for Farah Province condemns NATO bombings:
’This massacre offers the world a glimpse at horrors faced by our people’

(Photo attached: Humayun, a resident of Bala Baluk district, who lost 20 
members of his family in the U.S. air strikes on May 5, 2009, was 
present at the May 11 press conference in Kabul.)

By Malalai Joya

As an elected representative for Farah, Afghanistan, I add my voice to 
those condemning the NATO bombing that claimed over 150 civilian lives 
in my province earlier this month. This latest massacre offers the world 
a glimpse of the horrors faced by our people.

However, as I explained at a May 11 press conference in Kabul, the U.S. 
military authorities do not want you to see this reality. As usual, they 
have tried to downplay the number of civilian casualties, but I have 
information that as many as 164 civilians were killed in the bombings. 
One grief stricken man from the village of Geranai explained at the 
press conference that he had lost 20 members of his family in the massacre.

The Afghan government commission, furthermore, appears to have failed to 
list infants under the age of three who were killed. The government 
commission that went to the village after three days -- when all the 
victims had been buried in mass graves by the villagers -- is not 
willing to make their list public. How can the precious lives of Afghans 
be treated with such disrespect?

The news last week is that the U.S. has replaced their top military 
commander in Afghanistan, but I think this is just a trick to deceive 
our people and put off responsibility for their disastrous overall 
strategy in Afghanistan on the shoulders of one person.

The Afghan ambassador in the U.S. said in an interview with Al Jazeera 
that if a ‘proper apology’ is made, then ‘people will understand’ the 
civilian deaths. But the Afghan people do not just want to hear ‘sorry.’ 
We ask for an end to the occupation of Afghanistan and a stop to such 
tragic war crimes.

The demonstrations by students and others against these latest air 
strikes, like last month’s protest by hundreds of Afghan women in Kabul, 
show the world the way forward for real democracy in Afghanistan. In the 
face of harassment and threats, women took to the streets to demand the 
scrapping of the law that would legalize rape within marriage and codify 
the oppression of our country’s Shia women. Just as the U.S. air strikes 
have not brought security to Afghans, nor has the occupation brought 
security to Afghan women. The reality is quite the opposite.

This now infamous law is but the tip of the iceberg of the women’s 
rights catastrophe in our occupied country. The whole system, and 
especially the judiciary, is infected with the virus of fundamentalism 
and so, in Afghanistan, men who commit crimes against women do so with 
impunity. Rates of abduction, gang rape, and domestic violence are as 
high as ever, and so is the number of women’s self-immolations and other 
forms of suicide. Tragically, women would rather set themselves on fire 
than endure the hell of life in our ‘liberated’ country.

The Afghan Constitution does include provisions for women’s rights – I 
was one of many female delegates to the 2003 Loya Jirga who pushed hard 
to include them. But this founding document of the ‘new Afghanistan’ was 
also scarred by the heavy influence of fundamentalists and warlords, 
with whom Karzai and the West have been compromising from the beginning.

In fact, I was not really surprised by this latest law against women. 
When the U.S. and its allies replaced the Taliban with the old notorious 
warlords and fundamentalists of the Northern Alliance, I could see that 
the only change we would see was from the frying pan to the fire.

There have been a whole series of outrageous laws and court decisions in 
recent years. For instance, there was the disgusting law passed on the 
pretext of ‘national reconciliation’ that provided immunity from 
prosecution to warlords and notorious war criminals, many of whom sit in 
the Afghan Parliament. At that time, the world media and governments 
turned a blind eye to it.

My opposition to this law was one of the reasons that I, as an elected 
MP from Farah Province, was expelled from Parliament in May 2007. More 
recently, there was the outrageous 20-year sentence handed down against 
Parvez Kambakhsh, a young man whose only crime was to allegedly 
distribute a dissenting article at his university.

We are told that additional U.S. and NATO troops are coming to 
Afghanistan to help secure the upcoming presidential election. But 
frankly the Afghan people have no hope in this election – we know that 
there can be no true democracy under the guns of warlords, the drug 
trafficking mafia and occupation.

With the exception of Ramazan Bashardost, most of the other candidates 
are the known, discredited faces that have been part and parcel of the 
mafia-like, failed government of Hamid Karzai. We know that one puppet 
can be replaced by another puppet, and that the winner of this election 
will most certainly be selected behind closed doors in the White House 
and the Pentagon.  I must conclude that this presidential election is 
merely a drama to legitimize the future U.S. puppet.

Just like in Iraq, war has not brought liberation to Afghanistan. 
Neither war was really about democracy or justice or uprooting terrorist 
groups; rather they were and are about U.S. strategic interests in the 
region. We Afghans have never liked being pawns in the ‘Great Game’ of 
empire, as the British and the Soviets learned in the past century.

It is a shame that so much of Afghanistan’s reality has been kept veiled 
by a western media consensus in support of the ‘good war.’ Perhaps if 
the citizens of North America had been better informed about my country, 
President Obama would not have dared to send more troops and spend 
taxpayers’ money on a war that is only adding to the suffering of our 
people and pushing the region into deeper conflicts.

A troop ‘surge’ in Afghanistan, and continued air strikes, will do 
nothing to help the liberation of Afghan women. The only thing it will 
do is increase the number of civilian casualties and increase the 
resistance to occupation.

To really help Afghan women, citizens in the U.S. and elsewhere must 
tell their government to stop propping up and covering for a regime of 
warlords and extremists. If these thugs were finally brought to justice, 
Afghan women and men would prove quite capable of helping ourselves.

Malalai Joya was the youngest member of the Afghan Parliament, elected 
in 2005 to represent Farah Province. In May 2007 she  was unjustly 
suspended from Parliament. Her memoir, A Woman Among Warlords: The 
Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice, is 
forthcoming later this year from Scribner.



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