9-11 (12 page)

In the 1990s, the U.S. provided 80 percent of the arms for Turkey’s counterinsurgency campaign against Kurds in its southeast region, killing tens of thousands, driving 2-3 million out of their homes, leaving 3,500 villages destroyed (7 times Kosovo under NATO bombs), and with every imaginable atrocity. The arms flow had increased sharply in 1984 as Turkey launched its terrorist attack and began to decline to previous levels only in 1999, when the atrocities had achieved their goal. In 1999, Turkey fell from its position as the leading recipient of U.S. arms (Israel-Egypt aside), replaced by
Colombia, the worst human rights violator in the hemisphere in the 1990s and by far the leading recipient of U.S. arms and training, following a consistent pattern.

In East Timor, the U.S. (and Britain) continued their support of the Indonesian aggressors, who had already wiped out about 1/3 of the population with their crucial help. That continued right through the atrocities of 1999, with thousands murdered even before the early September assault that drove 85 percent of the population from their homes and destroyed 70 percent of the country—while the Clinton administration kept to its position that “it is the responsibility of the government of Indonesia, and we don’t want to take that responsibility away from them.”

That was September 8, well after the worst of the September atrocities had been reported. By then Clinton was coming under enormous pressure to do something to mitigate the atrocities, mainly from Australia but also from home. A few days later, the Clinton administration indicated to the Indonesian generals that the game was over. They instantly reversed course. They had been strongly insisting that they would never withdraw from East Timor, and they were in fact setting up defenses in Indonesian West Timor (using British jets, which Britain continued to send) to repel a possible intervention force. When Clinton gave the word, they reversed course 180 degrees and announced that they would withdraw, allowing an Australian-led UN peacekeeping force to enter unopposed by the army. The course of events reveals very graphically the latent power that was always available to Washington, and that could have been used to prevent twenty-five years of
virtual genocide culminating in the new wave of atrocities from early 1999. Instead, successive U.S. administrations, joined by Britain and others in 1978 when atrocities were peaking, preferred to lend crucial support, military and diplomatic, to the killers—to “our kind of guy,” as the Clinton administration described the murderous President Suharto. These facts, clear and dramatic, identify starkly the prime locus of responsibility for these terrible crimes of twenty-five years—in fact, continuing in miserable refugee camps in Indonesian West Timor.

We also learn a lot about Western civilization from the fact that this shameful record is hailed as evidence of our new dedication to “humanitarian intervention,” and a justification for the NATO bombing of Serbia.

I have already mentioned the devastation of Iraqi civilian society, with about 1 million deaths, over half of them young children, according to reports that cannot simply be ignored.

This is only a small sample.

I am, frankly, surprised that the question can even be raised—particularly in France, which has made its own contributions to massive state terror and violence, surely not unfamiliar. [
Editor’s note: Chomsky is being interviewed by French media here, thus the references to France
.]

Are reactions unanimous in the U.S.? Do you share them, partly or completely?

If you mean the reaction of outrage over the horrifying criminal assault, and sympathy for the victims, then the reactions are virtually unanimous everywhere, including
the Muslim countries. Of course every sane person shares them completely, not “partly.” If you are referring to the calls for a murderous assault that will surely kill many innocent people—and, incidentally, answer bin Laden’s most fervent prayers—than there is no such “unanimous reaction,” despite superficial impressions that one might derive from watching TV. As for me, I join a great many others in opposing such actions. A great many.

What majority sentiment is, no one can really say: it is too diffuse and complex. But “unanimous”? Surely not, except with regard to the nature of the crime.

Do you condemn terrorism? How can we decide which act is terrorism and which one is an act of resistance against a tyrant or an occupying force? In which category do you “classify” the recent strike against the U. S.A.?

I understand the term “terrorism” exactly in the sense defined in official U.S. documents: “the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear.” In accord with this—entirely appropriate—definition, the recent attack on the U.S. is certainly an act of terrorism; in fact, a horrifying terrorist crime. There is scarcely any disagreement about this throughout the world, nor should there be.

But alongside the literal meaning of the term, as just quoted from U.S. official documents, there is also a propagandistic usage, which unfortunately is the standard one: the term “terrorism” is used to refer to terrorist acts committed
by enemies against us or our allies. This propagandistic use is virtually universal. Everyone “condemns terrorism” in this sense of the term. Even the Nazis harshly condemned terrorism and carried out what they called “counter-terrorism” against the terrorist partisans.

The United States basically agreed. It organized and conducted similar “counter-terrorism” in Greece and elsewhere in the postwar years. [
Editor’s note: The interviewer here is a Greek journalist, thus Chomsky’s references to Greece
.] Furthermore, U.S. counterinsurgency programs drew quite explicitly from the Nazi model, which was treated with respect: Wehrmacht officers were consulted and their manuals were used in designing postwar counterinsurgency programs worldwide, typically called “counter-terrorism,” matters studied in important work by Michael McClintock, in particular. Given these conventions, even the very same people and actions can quickly shift from “terrorists” to “freedom fighters” and back again. That’s been happening right next door to Greece in recent years.

The KLA-UCK were officially condemned by the U.S. as “terrorists” in 1998, because of their attacks on Serb police and civilians in an effort to elicit a disproportionate and brutal Serbian response, as they openly declared. As late as January 1999, the British—the most hawkish element in NATO on this matter—believed that the KLA-UCK was responsible for more deaths than Serbia, which is hard to believe, but at least tells us something about perceptions at high levels in NATO. If one can trust the voluminous documentation provided by the State Department, NATO, the OSCE, and other Western
sources, nothing materially changed on the ground until the withdrawal of the KVM monitors and the bombing in late March 1999. But policies did change: the U.S. and U.K. decided to launch an attack on Serbia, and the “terrorists” instantly became “freedom fighters.” After the war, the “freedom fighters” and their close associates became “terrorists,” “thugs,” and “murderers” as they carried out what from their point of view are similar actions for similar reasons in Macedonia, a U.S. ally.

Everyone condemns terrorism, but we have to ask what they mean. You can find the answer to your question about my views in many books and articles that I have written about terrorism in the past several decades, though I use the term in the literal sense, and hence condemn all terrorist actions, not only those that are called “terrorist” for propagandistic reasons.

Is Islam dangerous to Western civilization? Does the Western way of life pose a threat to mankind?

The question is too broad and vague for me to answer. It should be clear, however, that the U.S. does not regard Islam as an enemy, or conversely.

As for the “Western way of life,” it includes a great variety of elements, many highly admirable, many adopted with enthusiasm in the Islamic world, many criminal and even a threat to human survival.

As for “Western civilization,” perhaps we can heed the words attributed to Gandhi when asked what he thought about “Western civilization”: he said that it might be a good idea.

7.
Considerable Restraint?

Based on interviews with Michael Albert on September 30, 2001, and Greg Ruggiero on October 5, 2001.

Q: There has been an immense movement of troops and extreme use of military rhetoric, up to comments about terminating governments, etc. Yet, now there appears to be considerable restraint … what happened?

CHOMSKY:
From the first days after the attack, the Bush administration has been warned by NATO leaders, specialists on the region, and presumably its own intelligence agencies (not to speak of many people like you and me) that if they react with a massive assault that kills many innocent people, they will be fulfilling the ardent wishes of bin Laden and others like him. That would be true—perhaps even more so—if they happen to kill bin Laden, still without having provided credible evidence of his involvement in the crimes of September 11. He would then be perceived as a martyr even among the enormous majority of Muslims who deplore those crimes. If he is silenced by imprisonment or death, his voice will continue to resound on tens of thousands of cassettes already circulating
throughout the Muslim world, and in many interviews, including late September. An assault that kills innocent Afghans would be virtually a call for new recruits to the horrendous cause of the bin Laden network and other graduates of the terrorist forces set up by the CIA and its associates 20 years ago to fight a Holy War against the Russians, meanwhile following their own agenda.

The message appears to have finally gotten through to the Bush administration, which has—wisely from their point of view—chosen to follow a different course.

However, “restraint” seems to me a questionable word. On September 16, the
New York Times
reported that “Washington has also demanded [from Pakistan] a cutoff of fuel supplies … and the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan’s civilian population.” Remarkably, that report elicited no detectable reaction in the West, a grim reminder of the nature of the Western civilization that leaders and intellectual elites claim to uphold. In the following days, those demands were implemented. On September 27, the same correspondent reported that officials in Pakistan “said today that they would not relent in their decision to seal off the country’s 1,400-mile border with Afghanistan, a move requested by the Bush administration because, the officials said, they wanted to be sure that none of Mr. bin Laden’s men were hiding among the huge tide of refugees” (John Burns, Islamabad). “The threat of military strikes forced the removal of international aid workers, crippling assistance programs”; refugees reaching Pakistan “after arduous journeys from Afghanistan are describing scenes of desperation and fear at home as the threat of American-led
military attacks turns their long-running misery into a potential catastrophe” (Douglas Frantz,
New York Times
, September 30). “The country was on a lifeline,” one evacuated aid worker reports, “and we just cut the line” (John Sifton,
New York Times Magazine
, September 30).

According to the world’s leading newspaper, then, Washington acted at once to ensure the death and suffering of enormous numbers of Afghans, millions of them already on the brink of starvation. That is the meaning of the words just quoted, and many others like them.

Huge numbers of miserable people have been fleeing to the borders in terror after Washington’s threat to bomb the shreds of existence remaining in Afghanistan and to convert the Northern Alliance into a heavily armed military force. They naturally fear that if these forces are unleashed, now greatly reinforced, they might renew the atrocities that tore the country apart and led much of the population to welcome the Taliban when they drove out the murderous warring factions that Washington and Moscow now hope to exploit for their own purposes.

Their record is atrocious. The executive director of the arms division at Human rights Watch, Joost Hiltermann, a Middle East specialist, describes the period of their rule from 1992 to 1995 as “the worst in Afghanistan’s history.” Human Rights groups report that their warring factions killed tens of thousands of civilians, also committing mass rapes and other atrocities. That continued as they were driven out by the Taliban. To take one case, in 1997 they murdered 3,000 prisoners of war, according to HRW, and they have also carried out massive ethnic cleansing in areas suspected of
Taliban sympathies, leaving a trail of burned-out villages (see, among others, Charles Sennott,
Boston Globe
, October 6).

There is also every reason to suppose that Taliban terror, already awful enough, sharply increased in response to the same expectations that caused the refugee flight.

When they reach the sealed borders, refugees are trapped to die in silence. Only a trickle can escape through remote mountain passes. How many have already succumbed we cannot guess. Within a few weeks the harsh winter will arrive. There are some reporters and aid workers in the refugee camps across the borders. What they describe is horrifying enough, but they know, and we know, that they are seeing the lucky ones, the few who were able to escape—and who express their hopes that “even the cruel Americans must feel some pity for our ruined country” and relent in this silent genocide (
Boston Globe
, September 27,
this page
).

The UN World Food Program was able to truck hundreds of tons of food into Afghanistan in early October, though it estimated that this accounted for only 15 percent of the country’s needs after the withdrawal of the international staff and the three-week break in deliveries following 9-11. However, the WFP announced that it halted all food convoys and all distribution of food by its local staff because of the air strikes of October 7. “The nightmare scenario of up to 1.5 million refugees flooding out of the country moved a step closer to reality” after the attacks, AFP reported, citing aid officials. A WFP director said that after the bombing, the threat of humanitarian catastrophe, already severe, had “increased on a scale of magnitude I don’t even
want to think about.” “We are facing a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions in Afghanistan with 7.5 million short of food and at risk of starvation,” a spokesman for the UNHCR warned. All agencies regard air drops as a last resort, far preferring truck delivery, which they say would be possible to most of the country. The
Financial Times
reported that senior officials of NGOs were “scathing” and “scornful” in their reaction to the much-heralded U.S. air drop, dismissing it as a “propaganda ploy rather than a way to get aid to Afghans who really need help,” a “propaganda tool” that was “exploiting humanitarian aid for cynical propaganda purposes” while the air strikes “had halted the only means of getting large volumes of food to Afghans—overland truck convoys” of the WFP (“UN concern as airstrikes bring relief effort to halt,” “Relief workers hit at linking of food drops with air raids,”
Financial Times
, October 9, citing Oxfam, Doctors without Borders, Christian Aid, Save the Children Fund, and UN officials). Aid agencies were “scathingly critical about the nightly U.S. airdrops.” “They might as well just drop leaflets,” a British aid worker commented, referring to the propaganda messages on the packages. “WFP officials say [air drops] would require workers on the ground to collect the food” and distribute it, and “must be made in daylight” and with adequate forewarning (“Scepticism grows over U.S. food airdrops,”
Financial Times
, October 10).