Chomsky vergelijkt Falluja met Srebrenica

[Bart Meerdink]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

De vergelijking van Falluja met Grozny lijkt me het treffendst,
inclusief de relatieve onverschiligheid van de media.

Ik keek nog even naar de wikipedia en bij "Definitions of Terrorism"
viel mijn oog op deze: United States Code of Federal Regulations: "the
unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to
intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any
segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."

Dat komt toch wel erg dicht in de buurt van wat de VS (en de SU
toendertijd, en ook Israel vs. de Palestijnen overigens) uithalen.
Terrorisme staat dan in Irak tegenover terrorisme.

Het wordt toch wel tijd dat Balkenende c.s. wakker worden en zich
distantieren van zulk disproportioneel geweld.

Ik zal niet voor zoete koek slikken wat Chomsky allemaal beweert, maar
het lijkt er toch op dat (voor de zoveelste keer in de geschiedenis
overigens) politici hun macht over militaire geweldsmiddelen volstrekt
en grootschalig misbruiken om het eigen falen te verhullen.

Dit is waarom ik ooit (toen was er nog dienstplicht) dienst geweigerd
heb. Als soldaat ben je het wapen dat andermans misdaden mogelijk, en op
den duur dus onvermijdelijk, maakt.

Een verachtelijk beroep. Dat klinkt hard, maar zolang je geen soldaat
kunt zijn zonder je morele besef ondergeschikt te maken aan dat van een
ander is het helaas niet anders, ondanks dat men in naam heet slechts
het land te verdedigen, en je opdracht niet *altijd* immoreel is. In dat
geval heb je geluk, anders pech, je hebt het zelf niet meer in de hand.

Bart Meerdink

Antid Oto wrote:
>
> http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20041217.htm
>
> ..And in fact, it's not exactly correct that the media
> haven't reported the war crimes. They often report them and
> celebrate  them. So take for example the invasion of
> Fallujah, which is one of the - it's a major war crime, it's
> very similar to the Russian destruction of Grozny 10 years
> earlier, a city of approximately the same size, bombed to
> rubble, people driven out.
>
> Alam: They herded all the males, I think, they didn't let
> them escape the corridor.
>
> Chomsky: Which incidentally is very much like Srebrenica -
> which is universally condemned as genocide -- Srebrenica was
> an enclave, lightly protected by UN forces, which was being
> used as a base for attacking nearby Serb villages. It was
> known that there's going to be retaliation. When there was a
> retaliation, it was vicious. They trucked out all the women
> and children, they kept the men inside, and apparently
> slaughtered them. The estimates are thousands of people
> slaughtered.
>
> Well, with Fallujah, the US didn't truck out the women and
> children, it bombed them out. There was about a month of
> bombing, bombed out of the city, if they could get out
> somehow, a couple hundred thousand people fled, or somehow
> got out, and as you say men were kept in and we don't know
> what happened after that, we don't estimate [the casualties
> for which we are responsible].
>
> But what was dramatic about Fallujah was that it was not
> kept secret. So you could see on the front page of the New
> York Times, a big picture of the first major…step in the
> offensive, namely the capture of the Fallujah general
> hospital. And there's a picture of people lying on the
> ground, soldier guarding them, and then there's a story that
> tells that patients and doctors were taken from - patients
> were taken from their beds, patients and doctors were forced
> to lie on the floor and manacled, under guard, and the
> picture described it.
>
> --> The president of the United States is subject to death
> penalty under US law for that crime - alone. I mean that's a
> grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, Geneva Conventions
> say explicitly and unambiguously that hospitals must be
> protected, hospitals and medical staff and patients must be
> protected by all combatants in any conflict. You couldn't
> have a more grave breach of the Geneva Conventions than that.
>
> There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a
> Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches
> of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty.
> And that doesn't mean the soldier that committed them, that
> means the commanders. They weren't thinking about the United
> States of course, but take it literally, that's what it means.
>
> And then they went onto explain why they carried out this
> war crime in the general hospital. New York Times explained
> calmly that it was done because the US command described the
> Fallujah general hospital as a propaganda outlet for the
> guerrillas because they were reporting casualties. I --
> don't know if the Nazis produced things like that. Of course
> the Times said it was "inflated" casualties - how do we know
> it was inflated?
>
> Alam: We don't even count'em.
>
> Chomsky: Well our Dear Leader said it was inflated, so that
> means that since we're like North Korea, it has to be
> inflated. But suppose it was. I mean the idea of carrying
> out a major war crime, explicit, because the hospital was a
> propaganda weapon by distributing casualty figures, I mean
> you really have to work to find an analog to that.
>
> And then it went on, destroying the whole city. Finally they
> end up saying well the Marines are going to face a serious
> challenge of regaining the confidence of the people of
> Fallujah after having destroyed their city. Yeah, it's going
> to be a pretty serious challenge. It's also described how
> they're going to do it - by instituting a police state.

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