SILENT GENOCIDE
By
Robert C. Koehler
Tribune Media
Services
For release
3/25/04
http://www.tmsfeatures.com/tmsfeatures/subcategory.jsp?custid=67&catid=1824
"After the
Americans destroyed our village and killed many of us, we also lost our houses
and have nothing to eat. However, we would have endured these miseries and even
accepted them, if the Americans had not sentenced us all to death."
This will not be easy
to read, especially if you've projected evil out of your own heart, into some
cave in Afghanistan or a spider hole in Iraq, and reduced the age-old question
it inspires to this one: How can we bomb it off the face of the earth?
Before the damage we
inflict grows greater, before history's judgment gets worse, before we
contaminate the whole world - even before we vote in the next election - we must
stop what we're doing. We must stop now.
It's time to listen
for a moment not to defense analysts, briefing officers, pols or pundits, but to
people like Jooma Khan, a grandfather who lives in a village in Laghman
Province, in northeastern Afghanistan, who is quoted above. Surely he deserves
30 seconds of our undivided attention.
"When I saw my
deformed grandson," he told an interviewer in March of 2003, "I
realized that my hopes of the future have vanished for good. (This is) different
from the hopelessness of the Russian barbarism, even though at that time I lost
my older son Shafiqullah. This time, however, I know we are part of the
invisible genocide brought on us by America, a silent death from which I know we
will not escape."
We're waging war-plus
in Afghanistan and Iraq - in effect, nuclear war, with our widespread use of
depleted-uranium-tipped shells and missiles. This is no secret. DU, with its
extraordinary penetrating power and explode-on-impact capability, helps assure
our military dominance everywhere we go. But people like Jooma Khan and his
grandson reap its toxic legacy. So, of course, do our own troops.
Kahn's words are only
a sliver of the damning testimony contained in the documents of the
International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan, a Japanese citizens' initiative
that recently concluded its two-year inquiry into the first phase of the Bush
administration's war on terror. But they say everything that we cannot hear.
If we (ITALICS) could
(END ITALICS) hear Jooma Khan, and others who are sounding the alarm about DU,
such as former Livermore Labs geologist Leuren Moret, who testified at the
tribunal, there would not be mere thousands of people in the streets of American
cities demanding that we stop the war, but hundreds of thousands, or millions -
the sort of numbers that turn out in other parts of the world.
The use of DU
weaponry is not the extent of our criminal irresponsibility in Afghanistan and
Iraq, which led to the tribunal's guilty verdict against George Bush on charges
of war crimes, but it's the most chilling. (You can check out the full report
at, among other places, www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Afghanistan-Criminal-Tribunal10mar04.htm)
As Moret testified,
depleted uranium turns into an infinitesimally fine dust after it explodes;
individual particles are smaller than a virus or bacteria. And, "It is
estimated that one millionth of a gram accumulating in a person's body would be
fatal. There are no known methods of treatment."
And DU dust is
everywhere. A minimum of 500 or 600 tons now litter Afghanistan, and several
times that amount are spread across Iraq. In terms of global atmospheric
pollution, we've already released the equivalent of 400,000 Nagasaki bombs,
Moret said.
The numbers are
overwhelming, but the potential horrors only get worse. DU dust does more than
wreak havoc on the immune systems of those who breathe or touch it; the
substance also alters one's genetic code.
Thus, birth defects
are way up in Afghanistan since the invasion: children "born with no eyes,
no limbs, tumors protruding from their mouths . deformed genitalia,"
according to the tribunal report. This ghastly toll on the unborn - on the
future - has led investigators to coin the term "silent genocide" to
describe the effects of this horrific weapon.
The Pentagon's
response to such charges is denial, denial, denial. And the American media is
its moral co-conspirator.
But blame is beside
the point. Surely even those who still await "conclusive proof" that
DU is the cause, or a factor, in the mystery illnesses and birth defects
emanating from the war zones, can see the logic in halting its use now.
Global terrorism?
Listen to Jooma Khan. Then look in the mirror.