Published on Friday, September 21, 2001 in the Toronto Star

Published on Friday, September 21, 2001 in the Toronto Star

Afghan People Are Victims, Too

by Laura Bracken Last week, a CNN poll reported that 77 per cent of 684,796 respondents believed the U.S. should bomb Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, if the ruling Taliban did not hand over Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

The deaths of Afghan civilians, victims of Taliban terror, can offer no restitution to the U.S. or its citizens. The Taliban's power in Afghanistan has been exercised by brutal force, not popular rule. Kabul is a capital city occupied by the Taliban, not governed by them.

"I think the majority of (Afghan civilians) would welcome the overthrow of the Taliban," says Canadian journalist Sally Armstrong, who has written extensively about the experiences of women under Taliban rule in Chatelaine and Homemaker's Magazine.

"I am worried to death about the women I have interviewed and come to know in Afghanistan and along the border," said Armstrong two days after the attacks.

Civilians in Afghanistan and the United States of America share a common enemy in bin Laden and Taliban fundamentalism.

Most Afghanis have been living with terrorism at their front doors since 1996 when the Taliban took control of their country.

The Taliban are a ruling militia recognized by only three states — Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Yet Afghanistan is presented as a legitimate target whose civilians could be considered acceptable collateral damage.

"I say, bomb the hell out of them. If there's collateral damage, so be it. They certainly found our civilians to be expendable," claimed U.S. Senator Zell Miller (D-Georgia), days after the terrorist attacks.

Miller fails to note the Taliban demonstrate a disturbing disregard for their own civilians, leading campaigns of terror against Afghan women, ethnic and religious minorities for years.

"The Taliban have used innocent people for all kinds of shields," said Armstrong. "How do you go after a country when you really want its leaders, its rulers and yet how do you separate them out from the innocent people?"

After gaining control of Afghanistan's capital city, Kabul, in 1996, the Taliban imposed strict edicts banishing women from the workforce, closing schools to girls and expelling women from universities. Women in Afghanistan are prohibited from leaving their homes unaccompanied by a close male relative.

The Taliban made it illegal for women and girls to be examined by male physicians and at the same time, prohibited female doctors and nurses from working. (Apparently, there are now a few female doctors allowed to operate in segregated wards.)

Women and men living in Afghanistan have been brutally beaten, publicly flogged, and killed for violating Taliban decrees.

Anne Brodsky is a psychologist who works with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), a human rights organization, dedicated to involving Afghan women in the fight for democracy in Afghanistan.

She visited Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan during July and August, 2001.

"The Taliban aren't a government," said Brodsky. "There are no rules other than sharia (Islamic law), there are no government services, nothing."

Brodsky said refugees describe Afghanistan as a country held captive by foreign fundamentalists and speak of friends and family still there, trapped by violence and terror.

"There are so many stories of massacres and torture, of daughters forced into marriage, kidnapped and raped, of people forced to attend public executions and amputations. Every story I heard was about terrible tragedy and brutality," she said. "This is how the Taliban are treating their people. It is not how a government treats its people."

In January of this year, the Taliban massacred an estimated 300 ethnic minority civilians in Yakawlang, a district in Bamiyan province of Hazarajat (central Afghanistan). The Taliban entered a Hazaras (a Shiite Muslim sect) village at 6 a.m. demanding all boys older than 12 and all men meet in a central location. "The soldiers said they just wanted to talk, they weren't going to hurt anyone," said Brodsky. At 9 a.m., Taliban soldiers rounded up every man in the village at gunpoint. "Five days later they returned the bodies," she said. "They had killed every man and boy in the village."

To exchange an "eye for an eye" with terrorists requires a full understanding of the enemy. The further victimization of civilians terrorized by the Taliban regime may ultimately discredit the U.S. mission for freedom and democracy.

If Afghanistan becomes the first battleground in a war on terrorism, the majority of casualties will not be the Taliban, terrorists or bin Laden supporters. They'll be victims of the same terrorism the U.S. seeks to defeat.

Laura Bracken is a freelance journalist based in Vancouver.

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