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JUST BOMBING
Strategies
for Enduring Injustice
Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan
This
Friday, 11 January, Pierre Grech Marguerat SJ will be leading a public
discussion in Maltese on the subject, “Just Bombing: Strategies for
Enduring Injustice”. The discussion, which starts at 7.15pm, is being
organised by the Third World Group and will be held at Dar Sarria in
Floriana. The general public is cordially invited to attend and to take
active part in the discussion.
According
to estimates by Marc
Herold, a US economics professor
at the University of New
Hampshire, at least 3,767 civilians were killed by US bombs between
October 7 and December 10 alone. This amounts to an average of 62 innocent
deaths a day - and an even higher figure than the 3,234 now thought to
have been killed in New York and Washington on September 11. His shocking
study is based on corroborated reports from aid agencies, the UN,
eyewitnesses, TV stations, newspapers and news agencies around the world.
The
figure does not include those who died later of bomb injuries, nor those
who have died from cold and hunger because of the interruption of aid
supplies or because they were forced to become refugees by the
bombardment. It does not include military deaths (probably over 10,000),
or those prisoners who were slaughtered in Mazar-i-Sharif, Qala-i-Janghi,
Kandahar airport and elsewhere. And these figures are a month old.
Well-known
novelist Arundhati Roy, writing in The Guardian, argues that nothing
can excuse or justify an act of terrorism, “whether it is committed by
religious fundamentalists, private militia, people's resistance movements
- or whether it's dressed up as a war of retribution by a recognised
government. The bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and
Washington. It is yet another act of terror against the people of the
world.” Each innocent person that is killed, she writes, “must be
added to, not set off against, the grisly toll of civilians who died in
New York and Washington.”
Fr.
Grech Marguerat will be discussing whether the “War on Terror” is an
acceptable, or even vaguely adequate response to the horrible acts of
terrorism committed in the US and elsewhere. Arundhati Roy believes that the
people of the world do not have to choose between the Taliban or their
terrorist networks and the US government. “All
the beauty of human civilisation - our art, our music, our literature -
lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles.”
Recent
events have also shown that language, and consequently freedom of thought,
have fallen prey to the giants’ “War of Terror”. “Terrorism” now
means what the giants want it to mean; “restraint” is “preparing for
war”; “bombs” become “intelligent” when they kill thousands of
civilians without shocking the stock markets; people are “civilized”
when they “snuff terrorists out” by bombing the
Kajakai dam power station, or Kabul's telephone exchange, or when they use
anti-personnel cluster bombs in urban areas.
The
fact is that the world has not yet found an acceptable definition of what
"terrorism" is. One country's terrorist, as events in Chechnya,
Palestine, and India have shown, is too often another¹s freedom fighter.
At the heart of the matter, writes Roy, lies “the world's deep-seated
ambivalence towards violence. Once violence is accepted as a legitimate
political instrument, then the morality and political acceptability of
terrorists (insurgents or freedom fighters) becomes contentious, bumpy
terrain. The US government itself has funded, armed and sheltered plenty
of rebels and insurgents around the world.”
After
all, as the well-known US professor of literature Edward Said has said,
“No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of
innocents, most particularly when only a small group of people are in
charge of such actions and feel themselves to represent the cause without
having a real mandate to do so.”
Fr.
Pierre Grech Marguerat SJ is director of the Centre for Faith and Justice
and the Jesuit Refugee Service (Malta). The Centre deals with issues of
social justice in Malta and in the world in general and publishes the
weekly column "The Mustard Seed" in The Malta
Independent on Sunday. He has travelled widely and has recently
returned from a community development seminar held in Salzburg.
For
more information please refer to the website of the Third World Group at http://webgtd.cjb.net
or write to webgtd@yahoo.com
Adrian Grima
January 9, 2002
Read also
Infinite Injustice and Who are the Terrorists?
by Diomede Amadeo Cassar
Dossier: Civilian Casualties - Full Report
(Marzu 1999)
(Hanut Dinji)
Iktbilna: webgtd@yahoo.com
Kaxxa Postali 289, Il-Belt Valletta. CMR 01 Tel. 244865 (L-Arka)
