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CounterPunch
Weekend
Edition
August 10, 2002
Return to Afghanistan
Explosives that the US Knew Would
Kill Innocents Continue to Take Their Toll
by Robert Fisk
The
Independent
Tamim's family live in Joee Sheer, which means
"stream of milk". But, outside his slum home, a stream
of warm, reeking sewage flows. Never was there more reason to
take off your shoes at a wooden door.
Inside, you climb a narrow staircase
and step into an ante-chamber in which Tamim's mother sits on
the floor. She wears a purple scarf and the skin around her
eyes, after four weeks of crying, has become heavy and blistered.
Tamim is dead; which is why I am sitting in this tiny room
opposite this quiet, solemn woman.
Her son's killer was a small, round,
yellow cylinder buried beneath the ground--a small fragment
of an American cluster bomb--which was infinitely more sophisticated
and more efficiently made than anything in this ramshackle home.
Tamim worked for the Halo Trust, the mine-clearing operation
to which Diana, Princess of Wales, gave so much publicity,
and he was an experienced man, 25 years old, with four years
of de-mining to his name.
"I know what I'm doing," he
used to tell his mother. "It was partly because of our
poverty that he did the work," she says. "I took him
to the Halo office for this job. He got $130 (lbs98) a month.
On the morning of his death, he had been taking a rest in the
minefield. He had some yoghurt and sat in a corner and all of
a sudden it exploded."
This kind of story-telling has a certain
ritual, the circular memory that recasts, again and again, the
moment of terrible truth. "His uncle came home that day--it
was a month ago--and he was crying. He said he had a headache.
Then he said that Tamim had injured himself. The moment he
said 'injured', I knew that it was over. But thank God at least
my son died a dignified death, trying to save other people's
lives. He didn't die robbing or torturing or killing."
The family think they will receive about
lbs12,000 in compensation, not much in comparison to the lbs53,000
that a dead American mine-clearer's family might expect. But
these are Afghan prices for Afghans dying in Afghanistan while
trying to destroy America's weapons.
The mines, of course, come from a host
of countries, some from the old "evil empire", others
from the current "axis of evil" and, needless to say,
many from the "civilised" countries which are fighting
the war of "good against evil": the old Soviet Union,
Iran, Korea, the new Russia, Belgium, Italy, the United States
and Britain.
But Tamim--like so many other Afghans--was
killed by an American cluster bomb, 20 per cent of whose "bomblets"
bury themselves in the ground, turning themselves in a millisecond
into a mine. When the Americans dropped this ordnance on the
Taliban, they must have known this; they must have known that
each of their missions in their "war on terror" would
later cost the lives of countless innocent Afghans.
Sitting on the table of Abdul Latif Matin,
the cluster bomblet looks more like a toy than a killer. It
is round and yellow with a canvas fan on the top. "BOMB.
FRAG BLU 97A/B 809420-30 LOT ATB92G109-001," is printed
on the side. BLU stands for Bomb Live Unit and 202 of these
little murderers are inside each 430kg CBU--Combined Effects
Munition-- dropped by American planes.
Mr Matin is a regional manager for the
UN Mine Clearing and Planning Agency in Kabul which has 15 mine-action
organisations--including Halo--co-ordinating 4,700 staff across
Afghanistan.
Statistics, for Mr Matin, bear no emotions.
His office covers seven provinces around Kabul in which 1.1
million unexploded bombs and mines have already been cleared.
In these de-mining operations, about 100 Afghans have died.
More than 500 have been injured, many of whom return to the
minefields to work once their wounds are healed.
The thousands of other Afghan mine victims
are a kind of limbless army. They queue at the Mirweis hospital
in Kandahar for artificial legs. They watch another small army
of prosthesis specialists carving and shaping the legs and
arms of future victims. They stand in the darkened ruins of
this grim, hot city. But it is the cluster bomb--the newest
and deadliest of Afghanistan's hidden mines--that absorbs the
work of Abdul Latif.
"The coalition forces claimed that
only 5 per cent fail to explode but we think the figure is nearer
to 15 per cent," he says. "Just a few days ago, three
children were wounded. One of them threw this bomblet at another.
She thought it was a toy. The trouble with the BLUs is that
they go underground--they caused our two most recent fatalities
among de-miners.
"I've seen very, very bad tragedies.
I have taken the dead bodies of my own colleagues to their families.
I've had to look at their wives and children. It's totally unfair
and that's why the Afghans themselves have started a campaign
to ban landmines."
If Mr Latif is a bureaucrat, he also
has a strong heart. "We Muslims think that de-mining is
part of our Holy War--it's a 'jihad' against the invisible enemies
of Afghanistan. Yes, of course, we believe if we die de-mining,
we will go to paradise."
Which is hopefully where Tamim now resides.
His solemn mother produces two photographs of him. In the first,
he stands in his de-mining clothes, at home, in front of a net
curtain, bearded and--you only have to look into his eyes--
frightened. In the other photograph, he stands on a mountainside
in dark clothes, every inch an Afghan waiting for martyrdom.
Mr Latif acknowledges that mine producers
have helped his organisation with funds and equipment. But it
is the Afghans themselves who have to do the dirty work. "The
strongest support we need is for these people to stop producing
the mines and cluster bombs," he says.
Just for the record, two American companies
made the vicious little munitions that killed Tamim and his
colleague. One is Olin Ordnance of Downey, California. The other
is Alliant Tech Systems Inc of Hopkins, Minnesota. They were
awarded a contract in 1992 for 9,598 cluster bombs--a total
of almost two million BLUs--to replace the same type of weapons
that were used up in the Gulf War the year before. Cluster bombs
not only kill, it seems. They are also profitable.
Today's Features
Bruce Jackson
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August 10/11,
2002
Walt Brasch
The Bush
2 Legacy...So Far
August 9,
2002
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Corporate
Crime:
More Shareholder Power
Not the Solution
Ansar Ahmed
The Waning
of the
Pax Americana
Alexander
Cockburn
War,
the Military and the Hunt for the "Violence Gene"
August 8,
2002
Ron Jacobs
Iraq:
The Final Storm?
Dave Marsh
Now Ain't
the Time
for Your Tears
Mark Weisbrot
Bush
Administration Tries to Hide Role in Venezuela Coup
Anthony Gancarski
AIPAC,
Congress and Iraq
Robert Fisk
Families
of the
Disappeared Demand Answers
Gary Leupp
Karzai's
Bodyguard
August 7,
2002
Anis Shivani
The First
21st Century
Police State
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Fallon's
Fallen
Is the US Navy Killing
Children in Nevada?
Robert Fisk
For the
Forgotten Afghans,
the UN Offers a Fresh Hell
Dr. Susan
Block
Rigas in
Cuffs
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies of the US Part 5: the Call of Democracy?
August 6,
2002
Philip Farruggio
Signs
of the Elites
Bruce Gagnon
We Must
Come Alive
David Krieger
From
Hiroshima to Hope
Jerre Skog
Global
Reach of Corporate Crime or What the Hell are
They Teaching at Harvard?
Robert Fisk
Return to
Afghanistan:
Collateral Damage
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Fox in the Pension Fund
August 5, 2002
Rahul Mahajan
Iraq
and the New Great Game
Jordy Cummings
The
Last Frontier of
Israel and Palestine
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Saddam's Diary
Mike Leon
US Mute
to Israeli Brutality
Norman Madarasz
Brazil:
the Most Important Election of 2002?
August 4, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
August 3, 2002
David Krieger
Nuclear
Apartheid
Gilad Atzmon
The End
of Innocence
Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
a Critic
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
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