Who will account and pay for the millions killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan?

Now that Osama is dead and Obama’s re-election is in the bag, could we please move on? I hate to rain on the president’s victory parade and dampen the endless celebrations in America but the departure of one long isolated and ailing figure changes nothing.

In the words of Brendan O’Neill of Spiked Online, “all that really happened in Pakistan is that a small group of American soldiers shot and killed an ageing, sickly man in a mansion, who was the nominal head of a small and increasingly fractured terrorist organization.”

Of course, Bin Laden was no saint and may very well have been guilty of the crimes he has been accused of, including the 9/11 outrage. But even Bin Laden, much reviled and hated as he was, deserved a day in the court to explain himself, didn’t he? How do we know for sure he’s the one who ordered the 9/11 attack. Even the FBI admits there’s no proof linking him to 9/11. Where’s the body of evidence?

Besides, even Nazi mass murderers like Hermann Goring, Rudolf Hess and Martin Bormann, responsible for sending millions to their death during the World War II, were penalized only after elaborate, and transparent, trials by a UN war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany. Adolf Otto Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Jewish Holocaust, who was captured much later in 1960 by Israel’s Mossad in Argentina, received a fair trial before being hanged in 1962.

I really hate to bat for someone who in his zeal to avenge the Western crimes against the Arabs and Muslims may have ended up targeting hundreds of innocent people, most of them his fellow believers. But there’s something called the due process. Every criminal and accused — even the terrorists — is innocent until proven guilty.

This is the principle that is at the heart of international justice system and no one is an exception, not even the superpower. Following the release of thousands of incriminating US government cables by the WikiLeaks, Bin Laden had declared: “We are a nation of laws. We don’t let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate.”

But law-abiding nations do not go to war over flimsy excuses or send armed commandos to invade a foreign country and blow up the brains of an unarmed man in front of his 12-year-old daughter and dump his body into the ocean.

In doing so, Uncle Sam has once again acted as the prosecutor, jury, judge and executioner all rolled into one. Not very different from the Texan-style justice celebrated in numerous Hollywood westerns. Might is right. The old jungle law still holds good and the powerful can do whatever they want.

Nearly 2,800 people died in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. Doubtless a heinous atrocity and crime against humanity for which the perpetrators deserve nothing but severest punishment. What about all those innocents though who were killed — and continue to be killed — as a direct consequence of the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? More than a million people have perished in Iraq alone and hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past 10 years. Who will account and pay for them?

Pakistan has been the real victim of America’s decade-long disastrous campaign. Its once healthy economy is bankrupt; its institutions are falling apart and its complex religious and ethnic mosaic of society is unraveling fast. The country has been in a free fall since it was forced to join the US war.

It has lost nearly 40,000 people, including 7,000 military personnel, to this conflict. In fact, as early as 2009, Pakistan’s toll — 12,000 deaths — had exceeded that of Afghanistan. Last year, nearly 10,000 people were killed as a result of US drone strikes and reprisal attacks by militants.

Despite continuing demonstrations and perfunctory protests by politicians, the pilotless drones continue to hit Pakistan almost on a daily basis, feeding the growing groundswell of anger against America. Last year witnessed 111 drone attacks mostly targeting civilians. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says at least 957 victims of drone strikes in 2010 were innocent civilians.

I wonder if the Americans, who burst out on the streets to celebrate the killing of Bin Laden last week, really know what their government has been doing in their name around the world? If yes, do they care? How would they react if some unmanned planes sent by another country were to come raining death and destruction over their cities and towns?

Aijaz Zaka Syed in Arab News. More Here

Killing of Osama: It's a dirty game based on lies, cunningness, hatred and deceit

When I watched the photograph of Obama, Hilary and co, watching the CIA briefing on Operation Geronimo, I was reminded of the movie “Hard Target” (1993).

In that movie a bunch of psychopaths plays the game of head hunters. They feed some malnourished people and make them physically strong. They then organize an event where those folks are to run for their life and in the process those psychopath hunts them down. The psychos then laugh at their laurels each time, till the hero Van Dam, takes those bulls by the horn and give a run for their money.

The killing of Osama Bin Laden looks to me a script of similar to that of “Hard Target.” That bunch of most powerful people on this earth reminded me of those psychopaths of the movie who took sadist pleasure in taking the blood of those running for life, playing the dirty game “This is who we are.”

I am sure, when it might have been announced that “enemy is killed in action” Obama may have done the NBA hero Karim Abdul Jbbar’s act, leaping up few feet from the ground, raising his hand in exclamation shouting “We got him”!

To me, Osama was like, Van Dam who took up the challenge by the scruff and for ten years defied the most powerful nation on the earth equating with the hero of “Hard Target,” eventually to fall to the superior arrow. This however does not mean that arrow has upstaged the shield and the duel has come to rest. It’s an unending fight with no clear cut winner.

It’s a dirty game based on lies, cunningness, hatred and deceit. The most ironical part is there seems to be a conspiracy of silence among the nations of the world and none has the moral courage to say to stop this madness.

There are few exceptions. Former Cuban President Fidel Castro criticized the way the United States carried out the raid against Osama bin Laden. He said the U.S. raid in Pakistan violated that country's laws and offended its dignity.

In India, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and DMK President M. Karunanidhi said the path taken by Osama bin Laden cannot be termed as ‘Islamic terrorism.’ He argued that just because bin Laden took to terrorism to achieve his goal, it cannot be called Islamic terrorism. Anger against any person cannot be justified in the form of terrorism, he wrote.

However, these are fringe voices and by and large the community of nations has condoned the acts of the US and it acts that it has skirted under the war against terror.

It’s only China that criticized the United States for violating' Pakistan's sovereignty by carrying out a military operation to kill Osama bin Laden saying “China holds that the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of any country should be respected.”

There are no two opinions that terrorism in any form has to be opposed tooth and nail but then this does not mean that those who become the cause of terrorism should be condoned.

Syed Ali Mujtaba in Mujtaba's Musings. More Here

Like a teenage girl, Advani scatters “worst”, “most” and “biggest” with little restraint: Aakar Patel

 LK Advani is an extremist. By this I mean he has little sense of proportion. His words occupy the extreme end of language, what is called hyperbole. It is unwise for Indians, reporters especially, to accept what Advani says because he uses the same apocalyptic formulation for everything. Let his own words demonstrate this.

ECONOMY WORST
29 December 2008 (speech to mark the Prem Kumar Dhumal government anniversary): “2008 has ushered in one of the worst economic recessions in recent times”.
24 November 2008 (a press conference in Indore): “Worst victims are the poor”.
22 September 2008 (a speech at the Vijay Sankalp Yatra, Jharkhand): “Worst neglected are the Adivasis”.
22 January 2009 (a chat on Rediff.com): “Aam aadmi experienced the worst kind of price rise in his life”.

TERRORISM WORST

26/11? 9/11? Mumbai train blast?

Advani likes to weigh in strongly on terrorism, his favourite subject. That is fine. But he also feels the urge to both use his extreme vocabulary and assign an order of importance to the attacks. This has created problems in the hierarchy.
3 October 2008 (Lkadvani.in): “India is the worst victim of terrorism in the world”.
12 September 2010 (Lkadvani.in): “9/11 was the worst ever terrorist attack in human history”.
29 December 2008 (BJP.org): “2008 was the worst year in terms of terrorist violence.”
19 May 2003 (The Economic Times): “Suicide bomber has become the worst ever device”.
19 December 2001 (Frontline): “The attack on Parliament is undoubtedly the most audacious, and also the most alarming, act of terrorism in the history of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in India”.
15 July 2006 (PTI): “Mumbai train blast is the worst-ever terror strike that hit India”.
27 November 2008 (The Economic Times): “26/11 is the most ferocious terrorist attack in India since independence”.

INDEPENDENCE WORST
One set piece Advani is comfortable with is describing something as being the worst since independence. Since he is old enough (born 1927), he may possibly be qualified to know.
30 December 2007 (UNI): “Agriculture is facing the worst crisis since independence”.
27 January 2010 (Sify.com): “Rise in prices is the worst since independence”.
27 April 2009 (PTI): “Corruption by UPA is the worst since independence”.

SCAM BIGGEST
Which is India’s worst scandal? Let Advani tell you.

Spectrum? Cash for votes? Wikileaks?

21 November 2008 (IANS): “Cash for votes scam is the worst scandal in the history of independent India”.
18 October 2010 (The Pioneer): “Spectrum scam is the biggest scandal since independence”.
19 March 2011 (The Hindu): “WikiLeaks was the biggest scandal in independent India”.

GOVERNMENT WORST
7 March 2009 (The Indian Express): “UPA government is the worst people have had”.
30 October 2007 (IANS): “UPA is the worst example of a coalition.”
30 September 2008 (a speech at the Vijay Sankalp Yatra, Washim, Maharashtra): “Amarnath pilgrim issue was one of the worst failures of the UPA government”.
17 March 2009 (NDTV): “Manmohan Singh is the weakest prime minister of India”.

Manmohan Singh is Nikkamma No 1

28 September 2008 (The Economic Times): “Manmohan Singh is the most incompetent prime minister of India”.

MISCELLANEOUS WORST

Retired judges are the worst kind of arbitrators

25 November 2005 (The Times of India): “Retired judges are the worst kind of arbitrators”.
11 December 2006 (The Financial Express): “Sachar Committee findings are the worst kind of vote bank politics”.
12 January 2009 (speech on National Youth Day): “Colonialism of the mind is always the worst form of colonialism”.
7 August 2009 (speech at the release of his autobiography): “The joint statement contains two of the worst blunders in India’s diplomatic history”.
6 April 2006 (a speech during the Bharat Suraksha Yatra, Rajkot): “Naxalites are the worst enemies of the poor”.
My Country My Life (his autobiography, Page 3): Partition was “the worst of all tragedies”.

Advani scatters Like a teenage girl

Leaders should be measured. Their opinion must be calibrated, because they bring perspective. Like a teenage girl, however, Advani scatters “worst”, “most” and “biggest” with little restraint. To be fair to Advani, many middle-class Indians talk in this manner. Things are best or worst. But there is a difference between our uncle and his drawing-room certitude about everything and a politician wielding power. In speaking like this, Advani’s purpose is not leadership. In the language of our newspapers, this is “lashing out”.

21 February 2004 (The Indian Express): “Congress would deliver its worst-ever performance and win less than 100 seats”.
He said this before the election, and he was wrong, of course. Might Advani have made our worst prime minister?

 Aakar Patel in Livemint. More Here

Mamata Banerjee's Historic Thunder

Friday afternoon, Mamata Banerjee’s long march to “liberate” Bengal from the world’s longest democratically elected communist rule ended in a green revolution that was reminiscent of the revolutions — velvet, orange, rose, et al — that once felled the Berlin Wall and one communist regime in eastern Europe after another.

The big difference is this: none of those revolutions, except perhaps the one led by Lech Walesa’s Solidarity in Poland, was the making of a single leader the way the one in Calcutta has been Mamata’s very own.

It was in the making for several years, but the way it gathered momentum in the last few weeks was nothing short of a blitzkrieg that knocked the supposedly mighty edifice of the CPM down without the party leaders having a clue to what was about to hit them.

She began her campaign to end the CPM’s rule with the slogan: “Now’s the time” — that became the call to action in Prague’s Velvet Revolution. It proved illusory in 2001 but it has happened now.

But the slogan will take on a completely different meaning now. From now onwards, her years of street fight will be yesterday’s story. Both for Bengal and for Mamata, the story that unfolds from this morning has to be about her vision and work to create a tomorrow. It is not the ordinary change of government that comes and goes with every election, changing little in people’s lives.

For everything that she plans to do, she may have to undo plenty of things. The historic turnabout of the traditionally Leftist Bengal to her side is clear evidence that she has to reverse many of the supposedly irreversible legacies that have led to Bengal’s economic and social decline.

Many of these expectations are about undoing things that made the people so angry with the CPM and so despairing of Bengal under it. Before she does anything to bring industries to Bengal, create jobs or dismantle the unconstitutional and illegal power structures created by the CPM, the people would like her to end the tyrannical “party society” that had its stranglehold on every aspect of the common people’s lives everywhere in Bengal. The breaking of the party society would make the people breathe more freely, especially in the villages.

This party-first culture crippled many things — economy, health services, the police and the administration. But its most damaging assault was on education which, under the long Left rule, became a matter of petty, sectarian politics that turned teachers’ bodies — in schools, colleges and universities — into what Chinese communists call “work units” or “propaganda teams”.

One of the first things she might need to undo is this complete politicisation of education in Bengal.

Ashis Chakrabarti in The Telegraph. More Here

Muslims were behind the triumph of  Mamata Banerjee
Trinamul bags over 90 of the 125 seats with sizeable Muslim electorates 

Of the 125 seats where Muslims have sizeable votes, the Left Front lost 90-odd today — a repeat of the 2009 results when it had trailed in 97 of these Assembly segments.

In 2006, when the Left swept to power with 235 seats in the Assembly, it had won 102 of these 125 seats.

Areas with high minority concentrations in Cooch Behar, South Dinajpur, North Dinajpur and Malda overwhelmingly voted for the Mamata-led alliance, sending the signal that Singur, Sachar and Nandigram were fresh in their minds. Hooghly, Howrah, North and South 24-Parganas and even the Red belt of Burdwan presented a similar picture.

Since 2009, the CPM had tried to woo back its Muslim voters by announcing job reservations and socio-economic programmes under the Multi-Sectoral Development Plan.

“There is no denying that the CPM tried its best to reclaim Muslim votes. But the minorities had a big fear,” Trinamul secretary-general and leader of the Opposition Partha Chatterjee said.

“They realised that the Left’s admission of mistakes was just a ploy to get back their support. The Muslims didn’t forget that the CPM was out to grab their land.”

The minority drift away from the Left had started well before the Lok Sabha elections. A year earlier, in the 2008 rural polls, the front lost more than 50 per cent of the gram panchayat seats and four zilla parishads to the Opposition in the Left’s first electoral setback after Singur and Nandigram.

In the years since Singur erupted, Mamata has done her bit to woo the minorities, who may have been wary of her earlier association with the BJP.

Wearing a burqa and offering namaz on the dharna manch in Singur was part of the attempt.

She also reminded the minorities that she had engaged late Trinamul MP Ajit Panja to fight in court so that the azaan could continue to be broadcast over loudspeakers.

Trinamul workers went around the state telling the minorities that even during her NDA days, Mamata had fought against the anti-terror legislation Pota, which she considered anti-Muslim. Wherever she went across Bengal during the campaign, Mamata would speak of Ram and Rahim or Ishwar and Allah.

After taking over as railway minister, she introduced trains in areas with minority concentrations, allowed candidates to take recruitment tests in Urdu and announced that a station would be named after Bahadur Shah Zafar. All this paid off.

Anindya Sengupta in The Telegraph. More Here
 

இளைஞர் அணி அமைக்கப்படும் : அமீரே ஹல்கா அறிவிப்பு!

தமிழகத்தில் இளைஞர் அணி அமைக்கப்படும் என்று அண்மையில் தமிழகத் தலைவராக நியமிக்கப்பட்டுள்ள ஜனாப் ஏ. ஷப்பீர் அஹ்மத் அறிவித்துள்ளார். ஜமாத்தின் இணையத்தளத்துக்கு அவர் அளித்துள்ள பேட்டியில் அவர் இது தொடர்பாகக் கூறியிருப்பதாவது:

தமிழகத்தில் இளைஞர் அமைப்பு உருவாக்கும் வாய்ப்பும், தேவையும் உள்ளதா?

தமிழகத்தில் இளைஞர்களை சரியான பாதையில் கொண்டு செல்ல வேண்டிய நிலை உள்ளது.  SIO முழுக்க முழுக்க மாணவர்மயமாகி வருவதாலும், கல்வி வளாகங்களை மையமாக வைத்து பணி நடைபெறுவதாலும் இளைஞர்களுக்கான வேலைகள் காலியாக உள்ளது.  

கடந்த மீக்காத்தில் 2 வருடத்திற்கு முன்பே இளைஞர் அமைப்பு உருவாக்குவது குறித்து ஆலோசனைக் கூட்டத்தில் விவாதிக்கப்பட்டது.  இளைஞர் அமைப்பு சிறப்பாக உள்ள மாநிலங்களுக்கு சென்று ஆய்வு செய்ய வேண்டும் என்ற முடிவின் அடிப்படையில் கேரளா சாலிடாரிட்டி, ஆந்திரா MPJ ஆகிய அமைப்புகள் செயல்படும் முறையை ஆய்வு செய்து ஆலோசனைக் கூட்டத்தில் சமர்ப்பிக்கப்பட்டது.  

பிறகு தமிழகத்தில் இருக்கும் வாய்ப்பு குறித்து ஆய்வு செய்யப்பட்டது.  கோவை, வாணியம்பாடி, சென்னை, திருச்சி ஆகிய மாவட்டங்களில் இருக்கும் வாய்ப்பு குறித்து ஆய்வு செய்யப்பட்டு ஆலோசனைக்கூட்டத்தில் சமர்பிக்கப்பட்டது. இத்தனை மிக விரிவான ஆய்வுக்கு பிறகு ஆலோசனைக் கூட்டத்தில் அனைவரிடமும் இளைஞர் அமைப்பு உருவாக்க வேண்டும் என்ற ஒருமித்த சிந்தனை உருவானது.  அப்போது மீக்காத்தின் இறுதி கட்டத்தை அடைந்திருந்ததால் வருகிற மீக்காத்தில் ஆரம்பிக்கலாம் என்ற முடிவு எடுக்கப்பட்டது.  ஆகவே இறைவன் நாடினால் வருகிற புதிய ஆலோசனைக் கூட்டத்தில் முடிவு எடுக்க வாய்ப்புள்ளது.

More Here.