John Pilger: Have we forgotten Afghanistan?

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

An excellent piece which is hard to edit & maintain copyright, but I was stunned by the following, of which I had no idea:

"The last time we met in this chamber," said George Bush in his state of the union speech last year, "the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today, women are free, and are part of Afghanistan's new government. And we welcome the new minister of women's affairs, Dr Sima Samar." A slight, middle-aged woman in a headscarf stood and received the choreographed ovation. A physician who refused to deny treatment to women during the Taliban years, Samar is a true symbol of resistance, whose appropriation by the unctuous Bush was short-lived. In December 2001, Samar attended the Washington-sponsored "peace conference" in Bonn where Karzai was installed as president and three of the most brutal warlords as vice-presidents. (The Uzbek warlord General Rashid Dostum, accused of torturing and slaughtering prisoners, is currently defence minister.) Samar was one of two women in Karzai's cabinet.

No sooner had the applause in Congress died away than Samar was smeared with a false charge of blasphemy and forced out. The warlords, different from the Taliban only in their tribal allegiances and religious pieties, were not tolerating even a gesture of female emancipation.

Today, Samar lives in constant fear for her life. She has two fearsome bodyguards with automatic weapons. One is at her office door, the other at her gate. She travels in a blacked-out van. "For the past 23 years, I was not safe," she told me, "but I was never in hiding or travelling with gunmen, which I must do now... There is no more official law to stop women from going to school and work; there is no law about dress code. But the reality is that even under the Taliban there was not the pressure on women in the rural areas there is now."

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1044925,00.html

For any other Brits reading this -- it's a companion piece for a new Pilger documentary: "Breaking The Silence: Truth And Lies In The War On Terror" which is on ITV, Wednesday night.

[KoKo]

1. Do you have a link to ITV? So we can hear or watch or whatever?

thanks!

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

2. Sadly not Koko01

The best I can offer you is the link to Pilger's web site which has an archive of all his written work:

http://pilger.carlton.com/

& pass on a strong recommendation to get hold of his last book "The New Rulers of the World" as well as the far lesser known "Web of Deceit" by Mark Curtis (a former Foreign Office mandarin whose research Pilger uses frequently).

Pilger's made a two dozen or so films over the past 30 years, so it wouldn't suprise me if some are available online; how to go about finding them is a different matter!

(By the way, I think you were asking about the Liberal Democrats over here the other week -- I don't know if you heard about the by-election on Thursday night, but the Lib Dems won the seat with an almost 30% swing - although the turnout was prety low (around 35% I think). This is creating large ripples through the media over here, with the Tories now charging that the Lib Dems are a left wing party posing as moderates. It's the Lib Dem conference next week so hopefully they'll generate the media and the attention they deserve)

[dudeness]

3. I can highly recommend "web of deceit"

having just completed reading it..an excellent expose of british "foreign policy"..as for pilger IMHO the best investigative journalist alive today..hence his relative obscurity in other than britain and australia.