投稿者 ドメル将軍 日時 2001 年 12 月 03 日 14:50:59:
UK Journalist Held By Taliban Speaks Against War On Terror Media Workers Against War 11-30-1
Yvonne Ridley opposes the war on 'resilient, generous' Afghans.
Yvonne Ridley is the Express journalist who was famously captured by the Taliban whilst reporting in Afghanistan.
Released after 10 days, Yvonne later discovered that the village she had been staying in before her capture, Kama, had been systematically bombed for three nights running by the US. Yvonne has been speaking out against the war in Afghanistan ever since and here talks to Helen Foot of Media Workers Against the War.
Tell me about the village where you stayed in Afghanistan.
The village is called Kama, and it,s about five miles east of Jalalabad.
It,s half the size of a football pitch.
And you can only get to it by an old dirt track, and then you have to walk about a mile through a field and over a little footbridge to get into the village.
When I was there, there was nothing of any military significance.
There were certainly no Taliban there, otherwise I,d,ve been arrested.
And also an incredibly warm, resilient, generous people who were very willing to share the little bit of food they,d got.
Wonderful people who told me about their hopes and fears for the future.
They were worried about an American strike.
I spent about half a day there and spoke to them and there were some very sad tales;
a young girl who was training to be a doctor and then the Taliban took away her right to education.
There was also an extremely strong woman who said there was no way they were going to tolerate any sort of foreign invasion, and she was obviously talking about the Americans and the Brits.
The only thing with a military application in that village were the pots and pans which the women said they,d use against American soldiers, dare they come into their village.
After you were released by the Taliban and returned home, how did you find out that Kama had been bombed?
About a week after I got home I took a phone call from my guide in Pakistan, and he said:
"Madam, they've bombed your village.,
And I said:"What do you mean?".
He replied:"Kama. Kama has now gone."
I said:"Yes, I know there've been some stray bombs, there've been some accidents."
He said:"But how can you accidentally hit Kama three nights running?"
And of course he was perfectly right.
How can you accidentally hit something that's half the size of a football field three nights running?
I contacted the Pentagon and they recognized me as being the woman who had been held by the Taliban.
One of them suggested that maybe I was 'turning native'...that I had 'Stockholm Syndrome'.
I explained I was upset because of the ordinary Afghans who had nothing whatsoever to do with the Taliban.
I was saying to them:"You've obviously got a policy of targeting innocent civilians."
He replied:"Well, we did have some stray bombs."
I repeated the words of my guide:"Three days running you managed to hit that minute little village.
It doesn't even warrant a mark on the map, its so small."
He just refused to accept that and just said:"It will have been a legitimate target.
You haven't been there for three weeks, a lot could have happened in three weeks."
And I said:"You couldn't even push a bike to that village from this footpath.
It would have no military significance, it's not strategically placed."
They were basically waging terror.
Now I remember that it was at that particular time that the Taliban suddenly decided to let journalists in.
And they took them round the Jalalabad area and showed them the villages that had been hit.
Because the Taliban were saying:
"The Americans are targeting innocent women and children."
I can't speak for other villages, I can only speak for Kama.
Kama had no right to be blitzed.
Was that the turning point for you in terms of opposing the war?
Yes.
I was never for the war anyway, because you can't beat terrorists by dropping cruise missiles on countries.
You strangle terrorism financially, and go for a covert or underground war, which is what we've been doing over the last thirty years, fighting terrorism.
And I have to say, that terrorism has been sponsored by the Americans.
What do you think in general about the media's portrayal of the situation in Afghanistan?
Well, for the first five weeks it was more or less a war without witnesses, so the Taliban and America could get away with murder, without anybody reporting it.
We were relying on Al-Jazeera, an extremely professional outfit, staffed largely by ex-BBC people, not Arab fanatics as has been suggested.
What do you think the challenges are for the anti-war movement now, given the perception of the general public that Afghanistan has now been liberated?
I think it's very very important to keep the momentum going now.
Trafalgar Square was a fantastic, brilliant, event, but it wasn't the culmination of the campaign.
It should be seen as merely the start of a lot more action.
There's a lot of dissent, and once the harsh reality of the war kicks in, people will realise we're talking about millions of people being affected, millions are starving.
And the Americans have made it quite clear that they couldn't give a fig about the plight of the people on the ground.
I think the tide will turn - well the tide has turned already - but we've got to make sure that the momentum increases.
What's your assessment of this so-called 'liberation'?
I think the media - not all, but some elements of the media - fell for the propaganda;
the idea that Kabul had been liberated, that women had been liberated, that they were burning their burkhas.
In fact, the reality was quite different.
When the cameras went away and the journalists went away after the initial euphoria, the burkhas went back on.
A big deal was made about the cinema opening for the very first time, and I was just so sad because I'm thinking, out of this sea of faces there was not one single woman there.
The Northern Alliance are just as bloody and reviled as the Taliban.
They've done horrendous things to each other and I think that the Northern Alliance, not that they would need any great encouragement, but they basically were given the green light when 450 people were slaughtered in that fort.
I'm sure - I hope - that the truth about that episode will eventually emerge.
But the Americans have more or less decided to look the other way and that they're not really interested in taking prisoners.
Well, what does that mean?
America reaps what it sows with its unethical foreign policies.
They've got to look at what's happening in Israel and Palestine.
And it's within their gift to actually do something in the Middle East, but they're not doing it.
http://www.mwaw.org/article.php?sid=529
題名には必ず「阿修羅さんへ」と記述してください。