Je Suis Charlie - But I Have Other Names as Well

   

And why insist repeatedly that not only Muslims or Islamists can be bloody?

Must I recall the uprising in Frances colony of Madagascar in 1947, whose people, dreaming of independence, naively hoping for USA-assistance, began their fight, armed mostly with spears? A well-armed French army of 30,000 men adopted a strategy of terror and psychological warfare involving torture, collective punishment, the burning of villages, mass arrests, executions and rape In Mananjary, hundreds were killed, among them 18 women and a group of prisoners thrown alive out of an airplane. An official estimate of the number killed was 89,000, but counting those who fled into the forest and were believed dead it was more likely over 100,000. -

Why must I recall the bloody French war in Indochina soon thereafter? And what about Algeria?

"First, the officer questions the prisoner in the traditional manner, hitting him with fists and kicking him. Then follows torture: hanging..., water torture..., electricity..., burning (using cigarettes, etc.)... Cases of prisoners who were driven insane were frequent... Between interrogation sessions, the suspects are imprisoned without food in cells, some of which were small enough to impede lying down. Some of them were very young teenagers and others old men of 75, 80 years or more.

No, brutality is not somehow restricted to Islam or Muslims. Even my short-term memory and US nationality force me to remember Abu Zubaydah, father of four daughters, arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and in US custody for over twelve years, During that time he was water-boarded 83 times, subjected to forced nudity, sleep deprivation, confinement in small dark boxes, stress positions. After physical assaults he lost his left eye.

In 2006 he was transferred to Guantanamos Camp 7, where conditions were especially miserable. Then in 2007 the Review Tribunal told Zubaydah that he was not significant. They told me 'Sorry, we discover that you are not Number 3, not a partner, not even a fighter.

Gul Rahman was arrested at his doctors home after traveling to Islamabad for a medical checkup. He, too, was subjected to 48 hours of sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower and rough treatment. Gul Rahman died on 20 November 2002, reportedly after being stripped naked from the waist down and shackled to a cold cement wall in the Salt Pit with 36 F/2 C temperatures.

But did that not also apply to Charles Horman, US journalist and film-maker, killed during the USA-backed putsch in Chile in 1973 (and made famous by the film Missing)? Or, on the same occasion, to the wonderful singer-songwriter Victor Jara? What about the Belgian-organized, USA-supported torture and murder of the Congolese poet and political leader, Patrice Lumumba? Or of novelist and film-maker Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria, hanged with the connivance of Shell Oil? Or the Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani, considered one of the greatest modern Arabic authors, whose car was booby trapped by the Mossad in July, 1972?

read more in the aricle by Victor Grossman > 
Je Suis Charlie - But I Have Other Names as Well | Portside