|
Letters to the Editor
Terror motive nonexistent
From "Target Afghanistan" to "Showdown Iraq," the world has the idea for U.S. as the captain of the ship trying efforts to conquer every shore they find. The war on Iraq has begun and we are forced to take sides. President George W. Bush, who sounds more and more like John Wayne in one of those black and white movies from the 50s, tells us to either be with America or with the terrorists. Are the battle lines that clear? As far as anyone knows there were no Iraqi hijackers on Sept. 11, and no Iraqi is fighting in any of the jihads we see from Kashmir and Kabul to Bali and Manila. Yet it is Iraq that faces decisive force. From Lincoln's "United We Stand and Divided We Fall" to Bush's "United We Stand and Divided We Fight," it seems that things have definitely changed a lot for the American hemisphere.
I support peace and not war. What has war given to the world so far? Misery, tears for the lost, pain and hunger to the poor and the shelter from thousands so far. Saddam Hussein may be a very bad man, but he has always been a very bad man, so why did he have American support when he was murdering his opponents, using chemical weapons on Kurds and dragging Iran into a war in which more than a million people lost their lives? Did nobody notice then that he was trying to build weapons of mass destruction? Did Saddam Hussein's intentions at that point of time favor America?
The problem with America's new Gulf War is that there are too many questions and too few people asking them. This pre-emptive war will raise profound moral as well as practical problems for America in the future. Meanwhile, we need to do our best to the extent we can, show the government by all possible means that war is not a solution and pray for the hundreds of Marines, Iraqi men, women and children dying out there.
Ehtisham Iqbal
Senior, Computer Science
Kurdish genocide is real
How does one respond to genocide denial? With horror? Because denial is part of the engine driving all genocides? With compassion? Because most people in societies committing genocide are so deeply shaped by their culture they are unaware on some level of their own complicity? Certainly, one should be careful in adjudging that a people are not experiencing human rights abuses or genocide-we would not want to dismiss something that is very real and terrible. Yet, this is often the way of holocausts.
The U.S. was slow to prevent or diminish the Nazi death camps, when it could have done so, and has embraced the fallacious idea that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear strikes were necessary. So I am not surprised when someone from Turkey, a staunch U.S. ally, denies Kurdish genocide in their homeland, as was the case in a recent letter to the Chronicle. This is to be expected. It is part and parcel of the apparatus of genocide. How else, if you really think about it, could one carry out genocide? Genocides, human rights abuses, abysmal differentials of power and resources tend to be carried out by ordinary people, in their everyday lives, in societies much like our own-in a state of denial. As Aime Cesaire said in 1955, genocide is, in fact, intrinsic to the humanist "civilizations" of the West.
On Jan. 29, the St. Cloud community was honored by the deeply moving NOVA keynote of Kani Xulam on the suffering of his people, the Kurds. Kani is a modern-day hero, courageously breaking the silences of Kurdish suffering. Yet everywhere this humble pacifist goes, he is hounded by Turkish nationalists who deny Kurdish suffering and would, if they could, cover up the atrocities documented each year by Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the U.S. State Department, and the EU. Even the New York Times recently mentioned the abuse of Kurds in Turkey in the same breath as the better known abuses of Saddam Hussein. Leyla Zana, a Kurdish feminist elected to Turkey's Parliament, is in her seventh year of a brutal jail sentence simply because she spoke her native Kurdish language, wore Kurdish colors, and spoke of her people's suffering before our Congress.
Turkey receives billions in U.S. military aid, which it then uses against Kurds. This secret surfaced in recent weeks, as the U.S. sought to buy Turkey's war "assistance" for $30 billion. Turkey demanded military entry into Iraq, to "disarm" Kurds there, and to seize Iraq's formerly Kurdish oil fields for itself. U.S. citizens in particular bear a responsibility to study and oppose these atrocities because it is our tax dollars and politicians who underwrite abuses of Kurds in Iraq and Turkey. To truly achieve security in the world, the U.S. must end its support of abusive governments and use its unchecked power to bring resolution to the Palestinian and Kurdish crises. To let our government do otherwise is to remain complicit in the cultural and physical genocides of our times.
Jesse Benjamin
Semya Hakim
Professors, Human Relations and Multicultural Education
|
|
|
|
Privacy Policy Network Advertising Article Syndication
|
|
