Hypocrites in the West telling us lies

8 Nov, 2001 11:03 AM6 mins to read

ROBERT FISK laments a war in which the world's poorest country is being battered by the richest.

PESHAWAR - "Air campaign"? "Coalition forces"? "War on terror"? How much longer must we go on enduring these lies?

There is no "campaign" - merely an air bombardment of the poorest and most broken country in the world by the world's richest and most sophisticated nation.

No MiGs have taken to the skies to do battle with the American B-52s or F-18s. The only ammunition soaring into the air over Kabul comes from Russian anti-aircraft guns manufactured around 1943.

Coalition? Hands up who's seen the Luftwaffe in the skies over Kandahar, or the Italian Air Force or the French Air Force over Herat. Or even the Pakistani Air Force. The Americans are bombing Afghanistan with a few British missiles thrown in. "Coalition" indeed.

Then there's the "war on terror". When are we moving on to bomb the Jaffna Peninsula? Or Chechnya, which we have already left in Vladimir Putin's bloody hands?

I even seem to recall a huge terrorist car bomb that exploded in Beirut in 1985, targeting Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the spiritual inspiration to the Hizbollah - who now appears to be back on Washington's hit list - and which missed him but slaughtered 85 innocent Lebanese civilians.

Years later, Carl Bernstein revealed in his book Veil that the CIA was behind the bomb after the Saudis agreed to finance the operation. So will US President George W. Bush be hunting down the CIA murderers involved? The hell he will.

So why on earth are all my chums on CNN and Sky and the BBC rabbiting on about the "air campaign", "coalition forces" and the "war on terror"? Do they think their viewers believe this twaddle?

Certainly Muslims don't. In fact, you don't have to spend long in Pakistan to realise that the Pakistani press gives an infinitely more truthful and balanced account of the "war" - publishing work by local intellectuals, historians and opposition writers along with Taleban comments and pro-Government statements as well as syndicated Western analyses - than the New York Times; and all this, remember, in a military dictatorship.

You only have to spend a few weeks in the Middle East and the subcontinent to realise why Tony Blair's interviews on al-Jazeera and Larry King Live don't amount to a hill of beans.

The Beirut daily As-Safir ran a widely praised editorial asking why an Arab who wanted to express the anger and humiliation of millions of other Arabs was forced to do so from a cave in a non-Arab country.

The implication, of course, was that this - rather than the crimes against humanity on September 11 - was the reason for America's determination to liquidate Osama bin Laden.

Far more persuasive has been a series of articles in the Pakistani press on the outrageous treatment of Muslims arrested in the US in the aftermath of the September atrocities.

One such article should suffice. Headlined "Hate crime victim's diary", in the News of Lahore, it outlined the suffering of Hasnain Javed, who was arrested in Alabama on September 19 with an expired visa. In prison in Mississippi, he was beaten up by a prisoner who also broke his tooth. Then, long after he had sounded the warden's alarm bell, more men beat him against a wall with the words: "Hey bin Laden, this is the first round. There are going to be 10 rounds like this."

There are dozens of other such stories in the Pakistani press and most of them appear to be true.

Again, Muslims have been outraged by the hypocrisy of the West's supposed "respect" for Islam. We are not, so we have informed the world, going to suspend military operations in Afghanistan during the holy fasting month of Ramadan. After all, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq conflict continued during Ramadan. So have Arab-Israeli conflicts. True enough. But why, then, did we make such a show of suspending bombing on the first Friday of the bombardment last month out of our "respect" for Islam?

Because we were more respectful then than now? Or because - the Taleban remaining unbroken - we've decided to forget about all that "respect"?

There is another disturbing argument I hear in Pakistan. If, as Bush claims, the attacks on New York and Washington were an assault on "civilisation", why shouldn't Muslims regard an attack on Afghanistan as a war on Islam?

The Pakistanis swiftly spotted the hypocrisy of the Australians. While itching to get into the fight against bin Laden, they have sent armed troops to force destitute Afghan refugees out of their territorial waters. The Aussies want to bomb Afghanistan - but they don't want to save the Afghans. Pakistan, it should be added, hosts 2.5 million Afghan refugees. Needless to say, this discrepancy doesn't get much of an airing on our satellite channels. Indeed, I have never heard so much fury directed at journalists as I have in Pakistan these past few weeks. Nor am I surprised.

There were the disgraceful words of Walter Isaacson, the chairman of CNN, to his staff. Showing the misery of Afghanistan ran the risk of promoting enemy propaganda, he said.

"It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan ... we must talk about how the Taleban are using civilian shields and how the Taleban have harboured the terrorists responsible for killing up to 5000 innocent people."

These words will do more to damage the supposed impartiality of CNN than anything on the air in recent years. Perverse? Why perverse? Why are Afghan casualties so far down Isaacson's compassion list? Or is he just following the lead set down for him a few days earlier by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who portentously announced to the Washington press corps that in times like these "people have to watch what they say and watch what they do".

Needless to say, CNN has caved in to the US Government's demand not to broadcast bin Laden's words in toto lest they contain "coded messages". But the coded messages go out on television every hour. They are "air campaign", "coalition forces" and "war on terror".

- INDEPENDENT

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