15 November 2001
Today, more than twenty organisations adopted a South African Programme of Action against the US war in Afghanistan and for global peace and justice the list of these organisations is attached herein.
This Programme of Action will include the following:
The details of this Programme of Action will be released in due course after further consultations. This Programme of Action has also been endorsed in principle by twenty more other organisations which could not attend today's consultative meeting.
Today's meeting also condemned the loss of life, both in the USA on 11 September as well as the lives of the more than 1500 Afghanis (mainly women and children and prisoners of war) killed during the US war in Afghanistan.
The meeting regarded the US war in Afghanistan as a violation of, and disregard for international law and institutions such as the United Nations. With regard to the US war in Afghanistan under the pretext of fighting terrorism, there has been no decision in the United Nations General Assembly, or poplar participation by all the people of the world. There has been no due legal process in terms of international law and credible evidence which has led to the identification of any single country as behind the ghastly terrorist attacks on September 11.
The meeting also extensively discussed the economic basis of the US war in Afghanistan. The meeting received an extensive report on the possibility of the US war being shaped by the recent discovery of massive natural gas and oil resources in Kazakhstan. According to the report, Kazakhstan is a land-locked country and the US and several US oil companies have strategic interests to access these natural resources through a route which includes Afghanistan. The meeting called for a public investigation and discussion of this possibility.
From this report it is clear therefore that the US war in Afghanistan is not so much about bringing to justice the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks but very much about the US's own and narrow economic and imperialist interests.
This, the meeting noted, brings to the fore how we should understand and deal with the problem of terrorism. The meeting analysed and understood terrorism as inclusive of military, economic, social and political terrorism conducted by the US and other Western countries on developing countries in the South. These include the illegal US blockade of Cuba, the continuing military aggression and oppression of Palestine by apartheid Israel and the continuing denial of access to affordable medicines to the majority of the world's citizens because of profit-maximising drug companies.
The meeting also resolved to condemn the one-sided and sensationalist nature of media coverage by South African media of the 11 September attacks and the US war in Afghanistan. Compared to the lack of coverage and criticism of Israeli terrorism in Palestine and that of the US in Cuba, South African media has uncritically discharged blanket coverage of the US war and its propaganda as if South African media was part of the US war machine.
WAY FORWARD
In addition to the National Programme of Action announced above, the meeting also resolved to call:
CONTACT
Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara (surname Jara)
Department of Media, Information and Publicity
South African Communist Party
Tel - 011 339 3621
Cell - 083 651 0271
Email - sacp1@wn.apc.org