Realism:Failure of 'Power'

Massacre of more than 5 million Jews through various tactics of torture in the concentration camps, set up by Hitler in Germany before and during the World War11

is still regrettable and condemnable. According to the Jewish sources, in a concentration camp of Poland alone, over 2 million Jews were killed in that connection. However, it was a big human tragedy, popularly known as the Holocaust, conducted by the forces and machinery of state terrorism.

In the aftermath of the September 11 events, we can now witness the beginning of another similar human tragedy in the name of American war on terror, moving the world towards another holocaust, though in some other way.

During the ongoing war on terror, being waged on global and regional level, US military and civil intelligence agencies have been found involved in various abuses such as rape, physical violence and even murder. This pattern of state terrorism is also being adopted by the pro-American states such as Israel, India and some other coalition forces in the occupied territories in one way or the other. Besides all of this, since 9/11, Washington also extended its multiple operations in some Islamic states like Uzbekistan, Philippine and Saudi Arabia, entailing some other countries. Security and intelligence agencies of these small states have also killed or arrested many suspected Muslim radicals with the cooperation of CIA and FBI. In most of these cases, a series of long-planned secret raids are being carried out without any evidence and innocent people are, thus, being persecuted.

Massive use of force by the American-led coalition coupled with special military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has resulted into massive genocide of the Muslims. During the actual invasion, air bombardment and ground shelling by various types of sophisticated war machinery like B-52, F-16 fighters and Apache helicopters have taken tens of thousands of innocent civilians. This pattern still keeps on going intermittently. As a result of these tactics, majority of the innocent men, women and children who have done nothing against the US are being killed and punished.

As regards Afghanistan, after occupying the country, the forces of the Northern Alliance, supported by the US air strikes had executed hundreds of the Taliban who had taken shelter in the Jangi Fort, besieged by the former. Taliban were not given a chance of surrender. In another event, American backed Northern Alliance fighters had brought about the deaths of about seven thousand Taliban who were prisoners and were being moved from Kandhar to Kabul in the tightly-packed containers. These are two worse examples of state terrorism which reminds the atrocities of Hitler on Jews.

So far as other human rights abuses of the US military and civil intelligence agencies are concerned, a scandal of the American abuses of the Iraqi prisoners and detainees in Abu Ghraib prison had shocked the world in May 2004. Even the American daily, ‘The Washington Post’ on 6 May 2004 had published more than hundred pictures of the naked Iraqi prisoners in sexually explicit and degrading poses, forced to wear women’s underwear over their heads, one held on a dog leashed by a female prison guard.

It is also of particular attention that after the occupation of Afghanistan, Washington had also established an infamous Guantanamo Bay prison where were thousands of Muslim prisoners were kept in inhuman conditions—in cages, without any right of access to the court. Nevertheless, this place is not less than the any concentration camp of the past,

constructed by Hitler for Jews.

An American organization, Human Rights First, formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights said in a report, “the United States is holding terrorism suspects in more than two dozens detention centers worldwide and about half of these operate in total secrecy”—and “CIA has an interrogation facility there”. However, all these detention-centers and level of physical torture there are reminder of the concentration camps established by the ‘Hitlerite Germany’.

In this connection, the continued plight of the 1.5 million Palestinians besieged by Israel in Gaza Strip recently is of special consideration. Tel Aviv tightened its closure of the Hamas-controlled territory on January 18 this year—even preventing UN humanitarian supplies from getting in. The main aim behind Israel’s barbaric siege around Gaza is to collectively punish the Palestinian innocent civilians, condemning them to vast devastation, leaving them to imminent death through starvation, without bothering even for the demands of international community. UN Security Council failed to stop or condemn the Israeli new phase of state terrorism on Gazas due to the fear of American veto.On January 23, 2008, after suffering from acute starvation, due to lack of food including everything, about half million Palestinians were forced to pour into Egypt from Gaza Srip through a border wall, blown up by them so as to stock up on food and fuel. Meanwhile, Israeli air strikes continue, targeting the helpless Palestinians. However, this scene reminds the ‘escape of Jews’ from a concentration camp of Sobbibar, erected during Word War 11. In that camp, German Nazis had made the life of Jews so miserable—even culminating to deaths that a number of Jews prepared a plan and succeeded saving their life through the ‘escape’. However, one can note a great resemblance between these two events in one or the other way.

India is also doing the same acts of military terrorism against the Kashmiris in the controlled territories especially since 1989 when intensity came in the ‘war of liberation’. Breaking the legs, burning the houses and other extra judicial killings of the innocent Kashmiri people, perpetrated by the occupying forces and secret agencies of New Delhi

have become a routine matter for.

All the above worst examples prove that even a democratically civilized state as the United States and its allies of war on terror are following the crude methods of the Nazis in a refined form in torturing and eliminating the Muslims. Here, it is made clear that although the Islamic activists are forced to kill the foreigners and occupying forces by ambush attacks and suicide missions, yet deaths of the non-Muslims are not more than four percent as compared to 96 percent of the Muslims.

While acting upon the old formula of ‘divide and rule’ which was employed by the colonial powers on the subjugated nations, the US-led powers have created circumstances of civil war among the Muslims by converting Iraq and Afghanistan including some other pro-American states such as Pakistan, Palestine and Ethiopia into failed states. So they are also directly or indirectly responsible for the death toll of all the Muslims either they are Shias or Sunnis, Uzbeks or Pushtuns, Palestinians or Kashmiris.

As regards the different killing phenomenon of the present ‘different war’ between the sovereign and non-sovereign entities is concerned, exact figures of the Muslim casualties are not provided to the media due to military censorship and secrecy. In this context,

even western media which still repent the Jewish Holocaust remains partial or silence. But some events become test cases to roughly estimate the total figures in this regard. According to a recent survey, conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB), approximately one million Iraqi citizens have died since the US-supported attack in 2003. The survey found that 20% of the Iraqi citizens had had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict.

We can also note similar situation in Afghanistan where 40 to 60 Muslims are being butchered every day through air bombardment or some other strategy of using Muslims for the killing of other Muslims (Divide and Rule).

In the Indian occupied Kashmir, the Indian forces have killed more than 200000 Muslims since 1989. And Israeli security forces and secret agencies have massacred more than 10000 Palestinians so far.

It is notable that that the US President Bush has stated on many occasions that the American war on terror will continue for many years. So if this war keeps on going for more than 20 years, the total figures of deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Kashmir and elsewhere are likely to reach more than five million, making it the ‘Muslim Holocaust’ conducted by modern democracies in the modern era of human rights in wake of the new world trends like denunciation of war as a national policy, economic development, global village—interlinked by media networks and particularly necessity of world peace.

Pakistani writer of international affairs and author of the book: US vs Islamic Militants: Invisible Balance of Power: Dangerous Shift in International Relations.

My own article, published in Al-Aarab Online London on February 21, 2008

Email: sajjad_logic@yahoo.com