arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

Ik haalde het bericht van BBC.com

Monday, 31 December, 2001, 14:48 GMT
US bombing raid 'kills 100 Afghans'

US aircraft are reported to have bombed a village in eastern Afghanistan, killing more than 100 residents.
Villagers told the Reuters news agency that the attack on Niazi Qalaye, 20 kilometres north of Gardez in Paktia province, in the early hours of Sunday morning, involved a B-52 bomber, a fighter plane and two helicopters.
They said up to 107 people had been killed and at least 10 wounded. Many houses are reported to have been destroyed.
There has been no official comment from Washington on the allegation.
An official of the local tribal shura, or council, said US soldiers had been invited to witness the damage caused by the raid.
Reuters has reported that American troops accompanied by Northern Alliance forces were seen heading towards the village.
Peacekeeping accord
Meanwhile, British military officials in the Afghan capital Kabul have initialled an agreement with the interim government on the deployment of a multinational peacekeeping force.
Details of the accord have not been made public.
Reports suggest there was some disagreement over the size of the force and its duties. The British soldiers currently on duty in Kabul are expected to be joined by other national contingents in the coming days.
Reinforcements of about 70 British soldiers moved into Kabul on Monday, bringing the British contingent to about 250 personnel.
Convoy controversy
The US bombing campaign in Afghanistan has continued despite the collapse of the Taleban regime, as the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and the remnants of his al-Qaeda terror group - blamed for the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington - goes on.
The Pentagon believes that remnants of al-Qaeda remain in Paktia province, and there have been several attacks in the area in the last few days.
But a villager in Niazi Qalaye is quoted by Reuters as saying that there are no al-Qaeda or Taleban fighters in the village.
If confirmed, the bombing of the village could prove to be a major embarrassment for the Americans.
Earlier this month, US warplanes attacked a convoy of vehicles in the same province and killed up to 60 people.
Survivors said the convoy was carrying tribal leaders to the capital, Kabul, for the swearing in of Afghanistan's new interim government, but the Americans maintain it was a legitimate "Taleban or al-Qaeda" target.
New Afghan leader Hamid Karzai has said the Americans are welcome to continue military operations in his country until all "terrorist" forces have been defeated.

Ik lees op de site van La Repubblica:
"Un cameraman della Reuters ha visto militari americani accompagnati da forze dell'Alleanza del nord diretti verso il villaggio, al passo Tira.
Il villaggio colpito sorge a quattro chilometri a nord di Gardez, capitale della provincia di Paktia. La zona è stata teatro di intensi bombardamenti perchè sorge tra il confine con il Pakistan e il complesso montagnoso di Tora Bora. Attraverso quest'area sono passati convogli di al Qaeda e di talebani e poco lontano, alcuni giorni fa, un convoglio di capi tribù e comandanti mujaheddin diretti alla cerimonia di insediemnto del premier ad interim Hamid Karzai fu distrutto da un raid americano condotto in base a informazioni sbagliate. Le vittime furono una sessantina. Nel bombardamento su Qalaye Niazi sono stati coinvolti un bombardiere d'alta quota B-52, un cacciabombardiere e due elicotteri. Una decina di case sono state distrutte e tra le vittime sono molte le donne e bambini. Il maggiore Pete Mitchell, portavoce del Comando centrale americano, ha annunciato che un'indagine interna è stata già avviata.
(31 dicembre 2001)"
Vertaald:
Het dorp ligt 4 km ten noorden van Gardez, hoofdstad van de provincie Paktia. De zone is doelwit van intensieve bombardamenten want [ik vertaal letterlijk] ligt tussen de grens met Pakistan en het Tora Bora gebergte [lijkt me inderdaad meer dan genoeg reden om met bommen te strooien][sla een stukje over] Een tiental huizen zijn verwoest en onder de slachtoffers zijn veel vrouwen en kinderen [wellicht al met lange baarden]. De amerikaanse majoor Pete Mitchell heeft een onderzoek aangekondigd [bij een vorige, identieke aangelegenheid was het resultaat dat "er niets gebeurd was"]. Ik doe het artikel uit the Independent hierbij:
A village is destroyed. And America says nothing happened
War on terrorism
Richard Lloyd Parry in Kama Ado, Afghanistan
04 December 2001
The village where nothing happened is reached by a steep climb at the end of a rattling three-hour drive along a stony road. Until nothing happened here, early on the morning of Saturday and again the following day, it was a large village with a small graveyard, but now that has been reversed. The cemetery on the hill contains 40 freshly dug graves, unmarked and identical. And the village of Kama Ado has ceased to exist.

Many of the homes here are just deep conical craters in the earth. The rest are cracked open, split like crushed cardboard boxes. At the moment when nothing happened, the villagers of Kama Ado were taking their early morning meal, before sunrise and the beginning of the Ramadan fast. And there in the rubble, dented and ripped, are tokens of the simple daily lives they led.

A contorted tin kettle, turned almost inside out by the blast; a collection of charred cooking pots; and the fragments of an old-fashioned pedal-operated sewing machine. A split metal chest contains scraps of children's clothes in cheap bright nylon.

In another room are the only riches that these people had, six dead cows lying higgledy-piggledy and distended by decay. And all this is very strange because, on Saturday morning – when American B-52s unloaded dozen of bombs that killed 115 men, women and children – nothing happened.

We know this because the US Department of Defence told us so. That evening, a Pentagon spokesman, questioned about reports of civilian casualties in eastern Afghanistan, explained that they were not true, because the US is meticulous in selecting only military targets associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network. Subsequent Pentagon utterances on the subject have wobbled somewhat, but there has been no retraction of that initial decisive statement: "It just didn't happen."

So God knows what kind of a magic looking-glass I stepped through yesterday, as I travelled out of the city of Jalalabad along the desert road to Kama Ado. From the moment I woke up, I was confronted with the wreckage and innocent victims of high-altitude, hi-tech, thousand-pound nothings.

The day began at the home of Haji Zaman Gamsharik, the pro-Western anti-Taliban mujahedin commander who is being discreetly supplied and funded by the US government. The previous day I had followed him around Jalalabad's mortuary, where seven mutilated corpses were being laid out – mujahedin soldiers of Commander Zaman who had been killed when US bombs hit the government office in which they were sleeping. And now, it had happened again.

There they were in the back of three pick-up trucks – seven more bloody bodies of seven more mujahedin, killed when the guesthouse in which they were sleeping in the village of Landi Khiel was hit by bombs at 6.30am yesterday morning.

Commander Zaman is a proud, haughty man who fought in the mountains for years against the Soviet Union, but I've never seen him look so vulnerable. "I sent them there myself yesterday,'' was all he could say. "I sent them for security.''

But the commander provided us with mujahedin escorts of our own, and we set off down the road to Landi Khiel. We found the ruins of the office where the first lot of soldiers had died, and the guesthouse where they perished the previous morning. And there, in the ruins of a family house, was a small fragment of nothing. It was the tail-end of a compact bomb. It bore the words "Surface Attack Guided Missile AGM 114", and a serial number: 232687. It was half-buried in the remains of the straw roof of a house where three men had died: Fazil Karim, his brother Mahmor Ghulab, and his nephew Hasiz Ullah. "They were a family, just ordinary people," said Haji Mohammed Nazir, the local elder who was accompanying us. "They were not terrorists – the terrorists are in the mountains, over there.''

So we drove on in the direction of the White Mountains, where hundreds of al-Qa'ida members, and perhaps even Osama bin Laden himself, are hiding in the Tora Bora cave complex. A B-52 was high in the sky; a billow of black smoke was visible, blooming out of the valley. Something, surely, was happening over there. And then we reached the ruins of Kama Ado. Among the pathetic remains I found only one sinister object ­ an old leather gun holster with an ammunition belt. It is conceivable that a handful of al-Qa'ida members had been spending the night there, and that US targeters learnt of their presence.

But after 22 years of war, almost every Afghan home contains some military relic, and the villagers swore they hadn't seen Arab or Taliban fighters for a fortnight. Certainly there could not have been enough terrorists to fill the 40 fresh graves. One person told me a few holes contained not intact people, but simply body parts.

We had been warned that white faces would meet an angry reception in the village where nothing happened, but I encountered despair and bafflement. I had only one moment of real fear, when an American B-52 flew overhead. We halted our convoy, clambered out of the cars and trotted into the fields on either side. The plane did a slow circle; I was conscious of electronic eyes looking down on us, the only traffic on the road. Then, to everyone's relief, the bomber veered away.

Before we left the city, an American colleague in Jalalabad telephoned the Pentagon and informed them of our plans to travel to the village where nothing happened. I can't help wondering, in these looking-glass times, what that B-52 would have done to our convoy if that telephone call had not been made. Perhaps nothing would have happened to me too.

NIET ALLE AMERIKANEN ZIJN BEROERD. KIJK op:

http://italia.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=33029&group=webcast [links met video en foto's]

en luister naar "My Country" op de laatste cd van de Amerikaanse rapper Nas