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December 10, 2001
John Touchie
Isaac's on
Chomsky
December 9, 2001
Jo Dillon
Journalist:
The CIA Wanted
Me Killed
John Chuckman
High-Tech
Puritanism
December 8, 2001
Laurence Tribe
Military Tribunals
Undermine the Constitution
Patrick
Cockburn
The
End of a Strange War
December 7, 2001
John Troyer
Blacklist Me!
Sen. Edwards
v. Ashcroft
Military
Tribunals
George Naggiar
Occupation
as Terrorism
Hugo von
Sponek
and Denis Halliday
Iraq
the Hostage Nation
David Vest
The Coen
Brothers'
Minstrel Show
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon
or Arafat:
Who's the Terrorist?
December 6, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Hampshire
College the First
to Condemn the War
Robert
Jensen
University
Teaching After
September 11
Jack McCarthy
Does
Tom Friedman Read
the New York Times?
Sam and
Leila Bahour
The
Psychology of a Suicide Attacker
December 5, 2001
Edward Hammond
The Only
Real Way to
Prevent Biowarfare
Harvey
Wasserman
Atomic
Treason in the House
Carl Estabrook
America's
Israel
Don Williams
Questions
Barbara Walters Didn't Ask George Bush
Cockburn/St. Clair
Liberals
Hail War as
Return of Big Government
Robert
Fisk
The
Last Colonial War?
Bahour/Dahan
It's About
the Occupation
December 4, 2001
Dave Marsh
A
Plea for Byron Parker
Rep. Ron Paul
Keep Your
Eye on the Target
Susan
Herman
Ashcroft
and the Patriot Act
Tariq Ali
The Afghan
King and the Nazis
November 30, 2001
Jordan
Green
Disappeared
in the Southland
Willliam Blum
Rebuilding
Afghanistan?
November 29, 2001
Phillip
Cryan
Defining
Terrorism
Robert Fisk
We Are the
War Criminals Now
November 28, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
A
Continuum of Terror
Patrick Cockburn
Tribal
Council:
Don't Blame It All on Taliban
Robert
Fisk
At
Last, The Truth about the Sabra and Chatila Massacres
Harry Browne
The Bill of
Rights:
They Threw It All Away
Sunil
Sharma
Suffer
Palestine's Children
November 27, 2001
Paul Coggins
Kafka and
the Patriot Act
Tariq
Ali
Tigris
and Euprhates
November 26, 2001
Robert Fisk
Blood and
Tears in Kandahar
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Boeing's
Sweet Deal
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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December 10,
2001
"If I Was
an Afghan I Too Might
Have Attacked Robert Fisk"
My Beating
by Refugees is a Symbol
of the Hatred and Fury of This Filthy War
By Robert Fisk
in Kila Abdullah after Afghan border ordeal
The Independent
They started by shaking hands. We said "Salaam
aleikum" -- peace be upon you -- then the first pebbles
flew past my face. A small boy tried to grab my bag. Then another.
Then someone punched me in the back. Then young men broke my
glasses, began smashing stones into my face and head. I couldn't
see for the blood pouring down my forehead and swamping my eyes.
And even then, I understood. I couldn't blame them for what they
were doing. In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah,
close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the
same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.
So why record my few minutes of terror
and self-disgust under assault
near the Afghan border, bleeding and crying like an animal, when
hundreds -- let us be frank and say thousands -- of innocent
civilians are dying under American air strikes in Afghanistan,
when the "War of Civilisation" is burning and maiming
the Pashtuns of Kandahar and destroying their homes because "good"
must triumph over "evil"?
Some of the Afghans in the little village
had been there for years, others had arrived -- desperate and
angry and mourning their slaughtered loved ones -- over the past
two weeks. It was a bad place for a car to break down. A bad
time, just before the Iftar, the end of the daily fast of Ramadan.
But what happened to us was symbolic of the hatred and fury and
hypocrisy of this filthy war, a growing band of destitute Afghan
men, young and old, who saw foreigners -- enemies -- in their
midst and tried to destroy at least one of them.
Many of these Afghans, so we were to
learn, were outraged by what they had seen on television of the
Mazar-i-Sharif massacres, of the prisoners killed with their
hands tied behind their backs. A villager later told one of our
drivers that they had seen the videotape of CIA officers "Mike"
and "Dave" threatening death to a kneeling prisoner
at Mazar. They were uneducated -- I doubt if many could read
-- but you don't have to have a schooling to respond to the death
of loved ones under a B-52's bombs. At one point a screaming
teenager had turned to my driver and asked, in all sincerity:
"Is that Mr Bush?"
It must have been about 4.30pm that we
reached Kila Abdullah, halfway between the Pakistani city of
Quetta and the border town of Chaman; Amanullah, our driver,
Fayyaz Ahmed, our translator, Justin Huggler of The Independent
-- fresh from covering the Mazar massacre -- and myself.
The first we knew that something was
wrong was when the car stopped in the middle of the narrow, crowded
street. A film of white steam was rising from the bonnet of our
jeep, a constant shriek of car horns and buses and trucks and
rickshaws protesting at the road-block we had created. All four
of us got out of the car and pushed it to the side of the road.
I muttered something to Justin about this being "a bad place
to break down". Kila Abdulla was home to thousands of Afghan
refugees, the poor and huddled masses that the war has produced
in Pakistan.
Amanullah went off to find another car
-- there is only one thing worse than a crowd of angry men and
that's a crowd of angry men after dark -- and Justin and I smiled
at the initially friendly crowd that had already gathered round
our steaming vehicle. I shook a lot of hands -- perhaps I should
have thought of Mr Bush -- and uttered a lot of "Salaam
aleikums". I knew what could happen if the smiling stopped.
The crowd grew larger and I suggested
to Justin that we move away from the jeep, walk into the open
road. A child had flicked his finger hard against my wrist and
I persuaded myself that it was an accident, a childish moment
of contempt. Then a pebble whisked past my head and bounced off
Justin's shoulder. Justin turned round. His eyes spoke of concern
and I remember how I breathed in. Please, I thought, it was just
a prank. Then another kid tried to grab my bag. It contained
my passport, credit cards, money, diary, contacts book, mobile
phone. I yanked it back and put the strap round my shoulder.
Justin and I crossed the road and someone punched me in the back.
How do you walk out of a dream when the
characters suddenly turn hostile? I saw one of the men who had
been all smiles when we shook hands. He wasn't smiling now. Some
of the smaller boys were still laughing but their grins were
transforming into something else. The respected foreigner --
the man who had been all "salaam aleikum" a few minutes
ago -- was upset, frightened, on the run. The West was being
brought low. Justin was being pushed around and, in the middle
of the road, we noticed a bus driver waving us to his vehicle.
Fayyaz, still by the car, unable to understand why we had walked
away, could no longer see us. Justin reached the bus and climbed
aboard. As I put my foot on the step three men grabbed the strap
of my bag and wrenched me back on to the road. Justin's hand
shot out. "Hold on," he shouted. I did.
That's when the first mighty crack descended
on my head. I almost fell down under the blow, my ears singing
with the impact. I had expected this, though not so painful or
hard, not so immediate. Its message was awful. Someone hated
me enough to hurt me. There were two more blows, one on the back
of my shoulder, a powerful fist that sent me crashing against
the side of the bus while still clutching Justin's hand. The
passengers were looking out at me and then at Justin. But they
did not move. No one wanted to help.
I cried out "Help me Justin", and Justin -- who was
doing more than any human could do by clinging to my ever loosening
grip asked me -- over the screams of the crowd -- what I wanted
him to do. Then I realised. I could only just hear him. Yes,
they were shouting. Did I catch the word "kaffir" --
infidel? Perhaps I was was wrong. That's when I was dragged away
from Justin.
There were two more cracks on my head,
one on each side and for some odd reason, part of my memory --
some small crack in my brain -- registered a moment at school,
at a primary school called the Cedars in Maidstone more than
50 years ago when a tall boy building sandcastles in the playground
had hit me on the head. I had a memory of the blow smelling,
as if it had affected my nose. The next blow came from a man
I saw carrying a big stone in his right hand. He brought it down
on my forehead with tremendous force and something hot and liquid
splashed down my face and lips and chin. I was kicked. On the
back, on the shins, on my right thigh. Another teenager grabbed
my bag yet again and I was left clinging to the strap, looking
up suddenly and realising there must have been 60 men in front
of me, howling. Oddly, it wasn't fear I felt but a kind of wonderment.
So this is how it happens. I knew that I had to respond. Or,
so I reasoned in my stunned state, I had to die.
The only thing that shocked me was my
own physical sense of collapse, my growing awareness of the liquid
beginning to cover me. I don't think I've ever seen so much blood
before. For a second, I caught a glimpse of something terrible,
a nightmare face -- my own -- reflected in the window of the
bus, streaked in blood, my hands drenched in the stuff like Lady
Macbeth, slopping down my pullover and the collar of my shirt
until my back was wet and my bag dripping with crimson and vague
splashes suddenly appearing on my trousers.
The more I bled, the more the crowd gathered
and beat me with their fists. Pebbles and small stones began
to bounce off my head and shoulders. How long, I remembered thinking,
could this go on? My head was suddenly struck by stones on both
sides at the same time -- not thrown stones but stones in the
palms of men who were using them to try and crack my skull. Then
a fist punched me in the face, splintering my glasses on my nose,
another hand grabbed at the spare pair of spectacles round my
neck and ripped the leather container from the cord.
I guess at this point I should thank
Lebanon. For 25 years, I have covered Lebanon's wars and the
Lebanese used to teach me, over and over again, how to stay alive:
take a decision -- any decision -- but don't do nothing.
So I wrenched the bag back from the hands
of the young man who was holding it. He stepped back. Then I
turned on the man on my right, the one holding the bloody stone
in his hand and I bashed my fist into his mouth. I couldn't see
very much -- my eyes were not only short-sighted without my glasses
but were misting over with a red haze -- but I saw the man sort
of cough and a tooth fall from his lip and then he fell back
on the road. For a second the crowd stopped. Then I went for
the other man, clutching my bag under my arm and banging my fist
into his nose. He roared in anger and it suddenly turned all
red. I missed another man with a punch, hit one more in the face,
and ran.
I was back in the middle of the road
but could not see. I brought my hands to my eyes and they were
full of blood and with my fingers I tried to scrape the gooey
stuff out. It made a kind of sucking sound but I began to see
again and realised that I was crying and weeping and that the
tears were cleaning my eyes of blood. What had I done, I kept
asking myself? I had been punching and attacking Afghan refugees,
the very people I had been writing about for so long, the very
dispossessed, mutilated people whom my own country --among others
-- was killing along, with the Taliban, just across the border.
God spare me, I thought. I think I actually said it. The men
whose families our bombers were killing were now my enemies too.
Then something quite remarkable happened.
A man walked up to me, very calmly, and took me by the arm. I
couldn't see him very well for all the blood that was running
into my eyes but he was dressed in a kind of robe and wore a
turban and had a white-grey beard. And he led me away from the
crowd. I looked over my shoulder. There were now a hundred men
behind me and a few stones skittered along the road, but they
were not aimed at me --presumably to avoid hitting the stranger.
He was like an Old Testament figure or some Bible story, the
Good Samaritan, a Muslim man -- perhaps a mullah in the village
-- who was trying to save my life.
He pushed me into the back of a police
truck. But the policemen didn't move. They were terrified. "Help
me," I kept shouting through the tiny window at the back
of their cab, my hands leaving streams of blood down the glass.
They drove a few metres and stopped until the tall man spoke
to them again. Then they drove another 300 metres.
And there, beside the road, was a Red
Cross-Red Crescent convoy. The crowd was still behind us. But
two of the medical attendants pulled me behind one of their vehicles,
poured water over my hands and face and began pushing bandages
on to my head and face and the back of my head. "Lie down
and we'll cover you with a blanket so they can't see you,"
one of them said. They were both Muslims, Bangladeshis and their
names should be recorded because they were good men and true:
Mohamed Abdul Halim and Sikder Mokaddes Ahmed. I lay on the floor,
groaning, aware that I might live.
Within minutes, Justin arrived. He had
been protected by a massive soldier from the Baluchistan Levies
-- true ghost of the British Empire who, with a single rifle,
kept the crowds away from the car in which Justin was now sitting.
I fumbled with my bag. They never got the bag, I kept saying
to myself, as if my passport and my credit cards were a kind
of Holy Grail. But they had seized my final pair of spare glasses
-- I was blind without all three -- and my mobile telephone was
missing and so was my contacts book, containing 25 years of telephone
numbers throughout the Middle East. What was I supposed to do?
Ask everyone who ever knew me to re-send their telephone numbers?
Goddamit, I said and tried to bang my
fist on my side until I realised it was bleeding from a big gash
on the wrist -- the mark of the tooth I had just knocked out
of a man's jaw, a man who was truly innocent of any crime except
that of being the victim of the world.
I had spent more than two and a half
decades reporting the humiliation and misery of the Muslim world
and now their anger had embraced me too. Or had it? There were
Mohamed and Sikder of the Red Crescent and Fayyaz who came panting
back to the car incandescent at our treatment and Amanullah who
invited us to his home for medical treatment. And there was the
Muslim saint who had taken me by the arm.
And -- I realised -- there were all the
Afghan men and boys who had attacked me who should never have
done so but whose brutality was entirely the product of others,
of us -- of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians
and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then
armed and paid them again for the "War for Civilisation"
just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped
up their families and called them "collateral damage".
So I thought I should write about what
happened to us in this fearful, silly, bloody, tiny incident.
I feared other versions would produce a different narrative,
of how a British journalist was "beaten up by a mob of Afghan
refugees".
And of course, that's the point. The
people who were assaulted were the Afghans, the scars inflicted
by us -- by B-52s, not by them. And I'll say it again. If I was
an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done just what
they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner
I could find.
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