[wvns] Kandahar's gatekeeper for the dead
Kandahar's gatekeeper for the dead
GRAEME SMITH
Globe and Mail
September 15, 2007
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070914.wmorgue0915/BNStory/Front/home
Kandahar, Afghanistan — Flies buzz around smears of blood on the metal
shelves in Kandahar's morgue. The smell is overwhelming, a fetid reek
that seeps into the lungs and thickens, leaving a visitor gagging for air.
This is a choke point in the system that collects the human remains
left behind by the rising violence in southern Afghanistan. Foreign
soldiers in flag-draped coffins amount to perhaps 4 per cent of the
4,000 or more people who have died in the war this year. The bulk of
the dead are insurgents and civilians, whose disposal is far less
ceremonial.
Friends and relatives sometimes recover the bodies where they fall and
give them a traditional burial. However, hundreds of others lie
unclaimed and these corpses end up in the callused hands of Mohammed Shah.
The soft-spoken man guesses that he is 35 years old, but he looks
decades older. He worked as a farm labourer until the end of last
year, when the man formerly responsible for the morgue died of old
age. Mr. Shah tells his relatives that he works as a clerk at Mirwais
Hospital; it would be shameful to admit that he spends his days in the
small white trailer where the bodies are kept, hidden in the foliage
behind the hospital.
Racks inside the trailer can hold 20 corpses at a time and they often
fill up during the worst of the fighting and bombings. The air
conditioning cannot keep up with the summer heat, so Mr. Shah works
amid the smell of rot. He complains of headaches.
"Sometimes they deliver the bodies at night, and I don't get any
sleep," he says. "When I sleep, people say I talk in my dreams, I say
very bad words. But I don't remember my dreams, thank God."
Mr. Shah says he has handled more than 500 corpses since he started,
but hospital officials admit that it's impossible to know the real
figures because of shoddy record-keeping. A battered notebook, with
the words "book of corpses" scrawled on the cover, contains a few
details for some of them: name, place of origin, date admitted and a
short description of how the person died.
But hospital staff do not document the majority of cases and they
blame the local police for failing to provide information about the
bodies they drop at the morgue.
"We need a written record," says Sharifa Seddiqi, the hospital
director. "Who is this dead person? A suicide bomber? A political
prisoner? This is the problem. We don't know."
Police are not the only ones who dump bodies on Mr. Shah's doorstep.
People bring the dead in pickup trucks, family sedans and donkey
carts. The hospital's bare wards, lacking equipment and drugs, also
send their share of corpses.
The most common cause of death appears to be gunshot wounds, Mr. Shah
says. Blast injuries are also common, usually a result of Taliban
bombings and sometimes air strikes by foreign troops.
One of the corpses appears to be a Pashtun tribesman with a bushy
black beard, his chest cut open and his eyes missing. Mr. Shah says
the police told him that the man had died while in detention at
Guantanamo, Cuba, but the claim could not be verified and it's unclear
how he received the injuries.
Suicide bombers also end up at the morgue, and Mr. Shah has become an
expert in the ways a bomb belt can rip a person apart. He crouches in
front of a blackened heap of rags and flesh, and points to a bomber's
gaping chest cavity. It was a small bomb, he says; no foreign troops
were injured as the man blew himself up outside a Canadian troop
carrier on the outskirts of the city.
A Taliban statement later identified the man as Jamaluddin, of
Kandahar province, but in the morgue his remains lay unclaimed.
Insurgents are usually reluctant to pick up their comrades' bodies,
but they do sometimes skulk inside the morgue.
The Taliban do not bother Mr. Shah; he was born in the insurgent
heartland of Panjwai district and he occasionally recognizes the dead
fighters or the dangerous men who arrive to collect them.
Those who are not collected get buried in a nearby graveyard. Kabul
authorities have reportedly decreed that suicide bombers will not
receive an Islamic burial, saying they have violated a religious tenet
by killing themselves.
Feelings about the Taliban are not so harsh in Kandahar, however, and
Mr. Shah says he tries to treat every corpse with dignity. The only
ritual denied the bombers is the customary washing of the body. "We
don't wash the suicide bombers," he said. "The body is broken. You
cannot wash it."
The others get heaved onto a tiled table and rubbed clean. Mr. Shah
changes into a black outfit beforehand to avoid staining his clothes.
The process takes an hour if he works alone, or half the time with an
assistant. A woman washes the female bodies.
Mr. Shah wraps the clean bodies in white cloth and ties the bundles in
three places, then lowers them into narrow plywood coffins. Tufts of
raw cotton are packed inside to keep the loads from shifting, the
boxes are shut and gravediggers take them away. They are dropped in
shallow graves near the city's northern slums, under piles of gravel
and dirt.
Afterward, Mr. Shah takes a hot shower, changes into his regular
clothes and goes home. The work is not pleasant, he says, but he can
now afford to supplement his family's diet with occasional meals of meat.
He also seems to feel a quiet pride in his role as the gatekeeper for
the dead. "It's hard work," he says. "But it's necessary."
===
Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan No Coincidence
by Ira Chernus
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/libertyunderground/
NATO bombs killed at least 45 civilians in Afghanistan the other day.
If you get your news from the front pages of the U.S. mainstream
media, you wouldn't know it. The New York Times did run news from
Afghanistan on its front page the next day — a rather ghoulish piece
about Muslims refusing to give Taliban suicide bombers a religious
burial, because suicide bombing is morally reprehensible. And so it is.
But what about pushing a button in an airplane to drop bombs that fall
on people's homes? Not so reprehensible, apparently. The Times buried
its report on the slaughter in Helmand province back on an inside
page, as did the Washington Post. The LA Times relegated to a "World
in Brief" notice.
If you take the time to read those back-page articles, they all tell
you that NATO faces a dilemma: not a moral dilemma — when Westerners
kill Afghans, the moral issue does not seem to arise — but a strategic
dilemma. On the one hand, "our boys" have to kill Taliban. That's a
given. On the other hand, if we kill too many civilians in the
process, we'll alienate the locals and send them over to the Taliban
side. All the mainstream reports agree that the string of recent
bombings, killing sizeable numbers of civilians, is already creating a
growing problem for NATO's effort to win hearts and minds.
So what's a poor NATO commander to do? American General Dan McNeill,
who took control of all NATO forces in Afghanistan this spring, seems
to have an answer: Bombs away, and let hearts and minds fall where
they may. The spike in civilian deaths from NATO bombs is no
coincidence. It reflects a major change in strategy, which has gone
totally unreported in the American media.
The British public knows about it. Journalists Jason Burke and Robert
Fox think it's a story the Brits need to know, because it could well
put the lives of British — as well as American — NATO troops in
greater danger. And it will put British — as well as American — tax
dollars to work paying for more bombs that kill more innocent civilians.
Senior British officers told these journalists that Gen. McNeill, with
too few troops on the ground to hold off the Taliban offensive, plans
to rely on massive aerial bombing to do the job. "Bomber McNeill," the
Brits call him bitterly, because they know that his heavy-handed
strategy will be counter-productive in the long run. "Every civilian
dead means five new Taliban," a British officer recently returned from
southern Afghanistan told Jason Burke. "This could lose the entire
south of the country to the Taliban, alienating them permanently from
the Karzai government and its international supporters," Robert Fox
adds. "In that case, the future of Hamid Karzai and his nemesis in
Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, looks dim."
The British are unhappy because they are losing too — losing control
of the Afghan war effort. Before McNeill took command of NATO forces,
they were headed by a British General, David Richards. He focused more
on economic reconstruction and building good relations with the Afghan
people. But the Americans and Karzai criticized him for being too
soft. Now they've got the tough guy they want in charge.
The British saw it coming long ago. Back in December Robert Fox
reported that Karzai had removed Gen. Richards' local protégé in
Helmand, provincial governor Mohammed Daud. British intelligence
officers and military commanders "blamed pressure from the CIA. … The
Americans knew Daud was a main British ally, yet they deliberately
undermined him and told Karzai to sack him." Gen. Richards had also
come in for American criticism as "too political," Fox added. "The
American supreme commander of NATO, General Jim Jones, has let it be
known, according to sources, that General Richards `would have been
sacked if he had been an American officer.'"
Now he's been sacked. So now our tax dollars, and the Brits', will be
used not to win hearts and minds, but to drop bombs that destroy
hearts and minds and lives.
In the U.S., the mainstream media agree that it's all the fault of
those evil Taliban, who attack NATO forces then scurry for cover
inside local villages. The Taliban actually want to get more civilians
kill, we are told, because it helps turn the locals against NATO and
its puppet government in Kabul. It may be true. There is plenty about
the Taliban that is reprehensible. It would be tragic if they returned
to power.
But "Bomber McNeill" would be the first to tell you that, when you are
at war, you use whatever tactics work best. The Taliban are guerilla
fighters. Of course they live and hide among the people. Do we expect
them to fight only in open fields, far away from villages, where NATO
bombers can pick them off effortlessly?
If we want to keep the Taliban out of power, Gen. Richards' "soft"
strategy is the only one that has a chance. Richards and his
supporters say that his strategy was working, that the Taliban made
few real gains last year. Perhaps the Americans, who call the shots,
are afraid of appearing (or feeling) too "soft." Perhaps they are
impatient.
Or perhaps something else is going on, too. This week Robert Fox
reported that, in addition to stepped up bombing, "there is also to be
a US-led campaign of indiscriminate aerial spraying of poppy fields,
triggered by the UN report that last year's poppy yield was 60 per
cent higher than the year before.." But back in December, when
Mohammed Daud was sacked, he wrote: "Governor Daud was appointed to
replace a man the British accused of involvement in opium trafficking
… Mr. Daud, who had survived several Taliban assassination attempts,
was seen as a key player in Britain's anti-drugs campaign in Helmand."
Will the poppy spraying really be "indiscriminate"? The CIA's
notorious record in poppy-growing regions should make us wonder.
Helmand is Afghanistan's richest opium-producing province. Opium is at
the heart of its economy, and its tangled politics. To get just a
taste of how tangled, check out this long analysis by "Zmarial," a
resident of Helmand — not necessarily a very objective observer, but
an insider who knows how many different interests are playing against,
and with, each other in the province.
Though Daud was supposedly a key player in the British anti-drug
campaign, this writer notes, "poppy production hit a record level in
2006 while Daud was governor of the province and enjoyed the full
support of Britain." What's more, he cites one source claiming that
"260 million dollars have been exchanged as bribery between locals and
governmental officials. This is the figure which is tracked, but the
untracked amount is unclear. The survey shows 58% of people who are
anti-government are so because of domestic corruption." All that money
goes mainly to cover up and protect the opium trade. Can we really
believe that the CIA, so determined to take control from the British
in Helmand, is uninvolved?
It's unlikely that even the best journalist can see the whole picture
in Helmand, much less in all of Afghanistan. It's way too complex. But
NATO bombardiers thousands of feet above the ground certainly don't
know anything about the reality of the towns and villages — and human
lives — they are destroying. They are just following "Bomber
McNeill's" simplistic "good guys" versus "bad guys" script, which the
British find so typically American — with good reason. It's the only
story we are told in our mainstream media.
If we ever have journalists who tell the story in a more complex
realistic way, we'll see that it's the same old story: the more we
take sides in a civil war, the more harm we do, especially when we
rely on massive aerial bombing as our main weapon. A heavy-handed U.S.
intervention in the 1980s helped to create the Taliban. Now another
heavy-handed intervention seems likely to help bring them back to
power — and kill countless civilians along the way. All that (and
perhaps opium too) paid for with our tax dollars.
And as the Afghans bury their dead, the whole story is buried in the
back pages of our newspapers, as if the people our tax dollars killed
just didn't matter very much. While we denounce the immorality of the
Taliban, let's take a moment to look in the mirror.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of
Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The
Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. Email: chernus@colorado.edu
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