The War Against Muslims

Posted on Fri, Apr. 23, 2004

MIDDLE EAST
Muslims suffer the most under radical Islam
BY FRIDA GHITIS
Miami Herald

For hundreds of Muslims families in the Middle East, the events of this week have changed life forever. To the rest of the world, the most recent bombings represented just another horror in an age of carnage. But with scores dead and hundreds injured in blasts throughout the region, thousands of surviving mothers, brothers, sons and daughters' lives will never be the same. And that's just from this week's killings.

Suicide bombings in Southern Iraq, more blasts in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital and a massive terrorist plot involving chemical weapons discovered in Jordan, which authorities said would have killed some 20,000 people -- all point to the greatest fallacy about the current campaign by militant Islamists. The common view holds that this is a war of East vs. West, of militant fundamentalist Islam vs. the United States and its allies. The reality is quite different. Radical Islam is at war against the majority of the world's Muslims, who have no desire to live under the militants' reading of Islamic law.

The Basra massacre was most likely the work of Islamic-inspired fighters. Suicide bombings are the trademark of fundamentalist terrorism. In Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Osama bin Laden, radical Islamism has already left its terrorist signature in previous attacks.
It is Muslims, however, that terrorists are killing in the largest numbers by far. More important, it is Muslims whose governments and societies the militants ultimately want to dominate. Today's Muslim world is the final prize for the winner of the conflict.

Followers of the al Qaeda ideology have already shown what kind of government and what kind of society they pursue. Afghanistan had the dubious distinction of embodying that fundamentalist fantasy under Taliban rule. From Afghanistan we know that the biggest losers from a fundamentalists' victory will be Muslim women. But anyone who does not want to live in a world where religious authorities dictate every aspect of daily life, where thought and expression are strictly controlled and where infractions against ancient religious codes are punished by beheadings or stonings, also stands to lose if Islamists succeed.

The No. 1 enemy of Islamic radicals is modernity. Anything that moves society forward, away from their understanding of what life was like in seventh century Arabia, where Islam was born, is a threat.

That's one reason why Muslims and non-Muslims incorrectly view this as a conflict between East and West. Islamists view the West, led by the United States, as the tip of the modernity spear. They are probably right about that. But most people in the Arab world do not want to live by seventh-century rules. They may not want all that America stands for, but they do want human rights, economic opportunity and progress.
The Muslim majorities -- tragically for them and dangerously for us -- have failed to speak out against this campaign. As the controversial Muslim writer Irshad Manji says, ''the Muslim world has used the West -- the so-called oppressive West -- as a weapon of mass distraction for a long time.'' Muslims, she says, have been successfully intimidated. Voices of dissent have been silenced, and people who ''devour'' the Western lifestyle in private, publicly speak out against America.

In the end, however, they are the ones with the most to lose from their silence. If the fundamentalists win, the consequences for the West will pale in comparison to the suffering that will befall hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims. Even before the war is over, they are already the ones suffering the most painful losses.
Frida Ghitis writes about world affairs. She is the author of The End of Revolution: A Changing World in the Age of Live Television.''
http://www.muslim-refusenik.com/news/miamiherald-04-04-23.html

Genocide Met with the Silence of Hypocrisy

SUDAN
As genocide occurs, we sit on our hands

BY FRIDA GHITIS

Special to the Herald
Published 4/6/2004

Every so often the world takes up the opportunity to place its own hypocrisy on display. This time, the opportunity has emerged in a corner of Sudan, the oil-rich African nation. While ethnic cleansing, massacres and other crimes against humanity steadily grind down the lives of three ethnic Sudanese minorities, the indignation of much of the globe remains reserved for more familiar villains.

The sounds of righteous anger and moral indignation have become the province of governments and mobs alike. In Washington, the White House declares its fine deed of freeing an oppressed people from the clutches of a dictator. In Europe, pacifist protestors wave their sunny rainbow flags proclaiming their love of peace above all. In the Middle East, and in Arab communities here in Europe, mobs of young men electrified with rage set American and Israeli flags on fire in support of their embattled brethren.

And yet, when more than 700,000 Muslims in Western Sudan are pushed away from their homes by other Muslims, when thousands are massacred, when women are raped, children abducted and villages burned, there is a deafening quiet.

The hypocrisy of international reaction to the atrocities in the Sudanese province of Darfur is in particularly sharp focus this week because the world is commemorating the 10th anniversary of the massacres in another African country, Rwanda. Ten years ago the world did less than nothing when some 800,000 Rwandans were hacked to death by Rwandans of a different ethnicity. When the killing started, U.N. peacekeepers fled clearing the way for one of the most efficient slaughters in history. Now newspapers, magazines and television stations flicker across Europe and America with sophisticated analysis and heart-rending images of what happened in Rwanda. We need to understand, of course, so we can prevent it from happening again.

But now that it is happening again, as a U.N. official indicated, few people seem to care.

The killings in Darfur trace the ethnic fault line of a country divided by religion and ethnicity. Sudan, the enormous country just south of Egypt in Northeastern Africa, is made up of Arabs and black Africans. Its people are Christians and Muslims. For decades the Arab-dominated government has fought a devastating war against black Christians in the oil-rich south. That war may soon end, thanks in part to key participation by the United States in negotiating an agreement. This new conflict pits Arab Muslims against African Muslims of the Fur, Messalit and Zaghawa tribes.

A rebel group in Darfur rose up against the government more than a year ago, demanding that the government provide more development help and stop arming local Arabs. The government responded by arming a new militia and setting it free to ravage the region, without regard to whether rebels or civilians became targets. Human-rights organizations charge the government with encouraging, if not directly controlling, the actions of the murderous Janjaweed.

Some observers think the Sudanese government aims to suppress the uprising so rapidly that the international community has little time to organize its response.

The response so far has been utterly toothless.

A U.S. State Department official has condemned the attacks, and U.N. chief Kofi Annan has declared himself ''disturbed'' by the conflict. There is little doubt that what is happening in Darfur meets the legal definition of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide. And yet, not much is being done to stop it. Peace talks in neighboring Chad have not even succeeded in pushing the two sides into the same room.

The paragons of pacifism in Europe and America have staged no protests. Perhaps slaughtering civilians does not offend their sense of morality. Their rainbow flags are apparently reserved to protest American intervention in Iraq. The zealous defenders of Muslims are apparently also too busy worrying about how Israel and the United States behave.

The government in Washington, the defender of Good against Evil, has its hands too full with Iraq and the November election to let the president speak forcefully against the massacres.

John Kerry, the Democratic candidate has no time to worry about genocide when he's occupied driving his own campaign. American silence is echoed in Europe.

Once again, we have found an opportunity to practice hypocrisy, and we have wholeheartedly embraced it.

Frida Ghitis writes about world affairs.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/8364001.htm

Seeking Justice in Cambodia's Killing Fields

San Francisco Chronicle

Cambodia's killing fields hold the key to a horrible truth
Frida Ghitis
Sunday, April 4, 2004

Choeng Ek, Cambodia -- About half an hour south of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, lies a disturbingly peaceful grassy field. The killing field of Choeng Ek is one of the many places where thousands of Cambodians died at the hands of other Cambodians.

Excavated mass graves have yielded a gruesome harvest of human bones, some still covered in ragged clothes.

In the middle of the field, a glass memorial encloses about 8,000 skulls, some visibly shattered in the act of murder. Each skull, one shudders to realize, belonged to a human being, a life extinguished in an orgy of violence during the days of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s.

It is a perilous practice to compare tragedies. But few countries have suffered as much as Cambodia. And yet, 25 years after Vietnamese forces overthrew the Khmer Rouge and its bloodthirsty leader, Pol Pot, there is little understanding of what exactly happened during Cambodia's nightmare.

Until now, there has been no attempt to reach clarity and justice, and no one has come to trial.

So Pheap, who was a boy during the Khmer Rouge regime, shakes his head in disbelief at the political process that has yet to bring justice.
"I don't understand," he says. "Why does it take so long?" Now 35 years old, So Pheap remembers working in the fields with the other children, separated from his parents. Many family members died in circumstances no one can explain.

"Why did they kill so many people?" he wonders, as do millions of Cambodians. The Khmer Rouge experience remains a confusing and painful national scar.

International efforts have focused on bringing genocide trials against top leaders of the Khmer Rouge, the fanatical, paranoid regime that led as many as 2 million Cambodians to their deaths.

The trials, however, will not be enough to cleanse the soul of this nation. Cambodia needs a South Africa-style Truth Commission, one that will bring out the truth and clear the air poisoning relations between victims and victimizers, who live side by side in this impoverished nation.

The Cambodian government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, once a member of the Khmer Rouge, spent years negotiating with the United Nations on rules for a genocide tribunal.

Agreement was reached to try the top leaders still living in freedom, but the tribunal remains in limbo, due to a national political stalemate. Even when the genocide trials get started, only a handful of elderly men will face justice. The trials are important, but they are not enough.

The victims at Choeng Ek came from Phnom Pehn's infamous prison, Toul Sleng, a place where the Khmer Rouge regime brought its enemies, real and imagined, to be tortured, interrogated and then carted off to their deaths.

The Khmer Rouge, led by the Paris-educated Pol Pot, came to power in 1975, in the chaos left in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. The United States had carpet-bombed Cambodia in an effort to cut off enemy supply routes to Vietnam.

After the Americans left, Pol Pot and his followers easily overthrew Lon Nol, the anti-communist dictator Washington had supported. So Pheap still remembers the rejoicing in the streets.

The joy was short-lived. Pol Pot wanted to create a Maoist agrarian utopia. He ordered everyone out of the cities and into the fields.

Phnom Penh, a city crowded with some 2 million people, including many refugees fleeing the civil war, became a ghost town.

Even hospitals were emptied, as the entire population joined a drive to boost rice production. Hundreds of thousands died of overwork, disease and starvation.

Pol Pot's deranged plan was to create a blank slate of a society. To do this, he exterminated all educated people, meaning anyone with at least a seventh-grade education. Ethnic minorities, intellectuals and Buddhist monks were murdered in the name of the revolutionary ideal.
Pol Pot, who died a free man in 1998, was known as Brother No. 1. He was surrounded by a small clique.

But the Khmer Rouge counted thousands of followers. The Toul Sleng prison alone employed more than 1,000 guards, interrogators, torturers and other accessories to murder. Like the top leaders of the Khmer Rouge, almost all remain at large. They have not faced their victims, and they have not told their stories.

Cambodians understand the reality of that time. They know many of those who killed knew that they too would die if they failed to follow orders.
What the country desperately needs -- something that other nations, such as Iraq, will also need -- is a systematic way to get at the truth.

Cambodians should at long last have a chance to tell their heartbreaking story. They should have the opportunity to gain a profound understanding of what happened and why it happened.

Only then can they obtain a believable vow from their leaders not to allow history to be repeated. Only then will they be able to live without the constant fear of revenge and of a return to terror.

Only then will the rest of us hear the truth about how a band of fanatics drove millions to their deaths, while the rest of the world chose to look away.

Frida Ghitis is the author of "The End of Revolution: A Changing World in the Age of Live Television

Thailand Muslim Insurgency

CHICAGO TRIBUNE
4 april 2004

Trouble in paradise: Thailand's Muslim insurgents

On a quiet Saturday morning recently in southern Thailand, an elderly Buddhist monk slowly made his rounds, clad in traditional saffron robes. His feet bare and his shaved head bowed, he collected alms from the faithful. A motorcycle approached.A man on the bike raised his machete and struck, leaving the holy man dead only moments after a 13-year-old novice standing near a Buddhist temple also was hacked to death.

Another Buddhist monk narrowly survived a machete attack that day in the same Thai province of Yala, one of three Muslim majority provinces in overwhelmingly Buddhist Thailand.Who would have it in for Buddhist monks?The three fell victim to a renewed wave of Islamic extremism now boiling in this traditionally peaceful Buddhist land.

Rebels have killed more than 40 people since the beginning of the year. Most of the dead were security forces, government officials, and Buddhist monks. The attacks have shaken up the country, thrown the leadership off balance, and placed the government in a quandary familiar to virtually every country trying to defeat a terrorist threat.In their most daring assault, the one that launched the current wave of violence, the attackers set fire to 21 schools in a single night.

The fires of Jan. 4 worked as a decoy, allowing militants to raid a government armory and steal hundreds of weapons.To the image-conscious government of Thailand, the Muslim rebellion presented a daunting challenge. The government needed to take action without causing a damaging panic and destroy the terrorist network without sparking a recruiting boom for the enemy.

The requirements of security initially seemed to compete with the public-relations demands of the tourist industry. The explosive growth of tourism in Thailand--the top destination in Southeast Asia--brought 10 million visitors last year, along with billions of dollars.Foreign tourists open their wallets for the image of near-ethereal peace in a Buddhist land of gleaming temples, smiling monks, and sandy white beaches--along with less spiritual pursuits.

An armed rebellion by Muslim extremists is not exactly a draw for tourists.

The initial response from the authorities was to downplay the problem, hoping to keep it out of the headlines. The southern provinces, sitting on the border with Malaysia, have long been rife with smuggling, drug trafficking and other shady pursuits. The government tried to blame the violence on banditry and gang rivalries.The Jan. 4 incident, however, showed just how serious the situation was. The rebels now had hundreds of weapons, and the sophistication of the attack proved that this was no common criminal act.

Intelligence officers in the region and in the United States now say the group Jemaah Islamiyah, known to have links with Al Qaeda, is operating in the area.Only a few months earlier, Thai authorities had been shocked to discover that the Asian terrorist mastermind Hambali had coordinated many of his most destructively successful operations, such as the Bali bombing in 2002 and the Jakarta Marriott attack last year, from a base in Thailand. Now they were discovering that extremism had settled in on their side of the Malaysian border.

When it became clear that ignoring the problem would not make it go away, the government launched a closed-fist crackdown in the South, sparking the outrage of law-abiding Muslims, who claimed that the government's actions would effectively drive the population to the side of the extremists.Like other nations facing terrorism, the Thai government is now straining to find that elusive place where just the right amount of force is brought to bear on just the right people, a nearly impossible balancing act.

Immediately after the twin armory and arson attacks, the government declared martial law in the three southern provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat, where the majority of Thailand's 6 million Muslims live. By some counts, more than 10,000 troops marched into the area, stirring the simmering resentment.Authorities began looking into Muslim education in the area, scrutinizing schools for any sign of training militants and focusing on religion at the expense of the required secular education.As the attacks continued, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra declared he was losing patience. "We must be aggressive from now on," he vowed, claiming that the insurgents were trying to start a religious war.Complicating matters is the fact that no one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, and it is not exactly clear what their purpose is.Thailand's Muslim minority has long resented the central government. Separatist movements surfaced in the 1960s and operated into the late 1980s, when the government offered an amnesty to the rebels.Still, the region is plagued by lower incomes and higher crime than the rest of the country, along with social problems typical of low-income border areas.

Many say the violence is a direct result of government neglect. Increasingly, however, it has become clear that the insurgency is the work of Muslim separatists with ties to Al Qaeda, possibly including some who trained in the old terrorist alma mater of Afghanistan.Muslim leaders have condemned the violence. After the machete attacks on the three monks, religious organizations called on authorities to find and punish the killers, describing them as "spreading the disease that poisoned national harmony and peace."But their loudest rebukes these days are reserved for the authorities. At one point, they angrily withdrew their support from government efforts, charging that security forces had crossed the line. Muslim leaders accused soldiers and police officers of repeatedly violating the rights of Thailand's Muslims with their insensitive and intrusive tactics.Authorities have shown some sensitivity to the criticism. Thaksin visited the region and met with local leaders. However, he is not likely to protect human rights if it risks his anti-terrorism campaign. The Thai people, about 90 percent of them Buddhists, have little patience for terrorism, and they like their take-charge prime minister.The Thai leader has demonstrated coldblooded determination in the past; last year he launched a war on drugs that left 2,000 people dead under questionable circumstances.

The government now says it is ready for a carrot-and-stick strategy. Authorities say they will loosen the strict martial law, and the Cabinet has approved a development plan for the region. The $18 million plan calls for infrastructure projects to bring water, roads and electricity. The Thai government, however, is taking no chances with the insurgency.Some of the "development" money is going to training of the police and military forces.
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

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