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2001-318

News Briefs

Relief agencies call for pause in bombing in Afghanistan 

     (ENI) A number of prominent religious and secular relief organizations are 
calling for a suspension of the United States-led bombing of Afghanistan so that 
food can be delivered prior to the onset of Afghanistan's harsh winter. 

     In the United States, Oxfam America said it was issuing the call because the 
bombing campaign had made it significantly more difficult for the agency to do 
its work. Truckers and laborers were increasingly unwilling to drive into 
Afghanistan or to work on relief convoys for fear of the bombing, the agency 
said. 

     "It is now evident that we cannot, in reasonable safety, get food to hungry 
Afghan people," Oxfam America President Raymond C. Offenheiser said in a 
statement. "We've reached the point where it is simply unrealistic for us to do 
our job in Afghanistan. We've run out of food, the borders are closed, we can't 
reach our staff and time's running out." 

     The United Nations has estimated that more than seven million Afghans need 
food aid. If the bombing campaign continues and food aid cannot reach those who 
need it, "we fear there will be huge loss of life and unspeakable suffering this 
winter," Offenheiser said.

     Winters in Afghanistan--a nation with mountainous and desert terrain--are 
harsh and usually begin in November, when snow cuts off isolated rural areas, 
making it extremely difficult to deliver food to villages in particular need of 
assistance. 

     Oxfam urged all military forces in Afghanistan--including the Taliban, the 
Northern Alliance (the opposition forces fighting the Taliban) and the United 
States and British-led forces--not to target or impede trucks and vehicles trying 
to carry food into Afghanistan. 

     Church World Service (CWS), the relief and development agency affiliated 
with the National Council of Churches in the USA, also called for a pause in the 
bombing. At the least, the US military "should identify and allow for 'safe 
corridors' for the delivery of humanitarian assistance," CWS said in an advisory 
note for constituents. 

     Even during times of war and conflict, humanitarian agencies have 
traditionally been given access to civilians who require aid, Rick Augsburger, 
director of the Emergency Response Program of CWS, pointed out. 

     Jonathan Frerichs, a spokesman for Lutheran World Relief based in Baltimore, 
Maryland, said that poor security caused by the war had limited the movement of 
aid truck drivers and aid workers. Bombings and seizures of aid storage 
facilities and vehicles had also compounded the problems, and distribution had 
become more difficult. 

     Meanwhile, as people are displaced from their homes, the need for food 
assistance has risen by as much as 50 per cent, Frerichs told ENI, and less than 
half the level of food aid is being shipped in today than was before the current 
crisis. 

     Pax Christi USA, a national Catholic peace movement has appealed to the Bush 
administration to suspend the bombing. "The current conditions for civilians in 
Afghanistan as well as the swelling refugee camps along the Pakistani border 
portend a human disaster of cataclysmic proportions," the organization said in a 
statement. "The US bombing campaign has all but halted relief deliveries. The 
bombing campaigning must be suspended immediately." 

     

Hundreds of Christians take shelter in barracks after riots in Nigeria 

     (ENI) Thousands of Christians in northern Nigeria were displaced from their 
homes and took shelter in police and army barracks following violence between 
Christians and Muslims in Kano City. 

     Officials of the Nigerian Red Cross said that the agency had provided food 
and medical assistance to hundreds of Christians who took refuge in the barracks 
following riots that broke out after demonstrations protesting against the United 
States-led action in Afghanistan. 

     A police spokesperson in Kano, Kabiru Shehu, told ENI that 32 people had 
been killed in the violence that lasted from 12 to 15 October. The police also 
said that 51 people were injured and five churches were burnt down. However, a 
Nigerian Red Cross official in Kano put the death toll at more than 100 and 
Christian leaders in the region said the figure was twice this. 

     Zakka Nyam, Anglican bishop of Kano, told ENI that he had received 
information from Christians working in two of Kano's hospitals that "over 200 
dead bodies were deposited in these two hospitals." He said that this figure had 
been "authenticated by some top police officers who confided in us." 

     The riots broke out after protests on 12 October, during which demonstrators 
burned five US flags and an effigy of US President George W. Bush. Demonstrators 
denounced the US and expressed support for Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime 
in Afghanistan. 

     According to news reports, following the demonstrations youths began setting 
fire to cars and religious buildings, and the violence quickly spread to many 
parts of Kano, particularly those with large non-Muslim populations. 

     A number of Muslims were killed in retaliatory attacks by Christians. The 
police in Kano reported that one mosque was completely destroyed and other, 
smaller places of worship suffered heavy damage. 

     Tension has been increasing in recent months between Christians and Muslims 
in Nigeria. Hundreds of people were said to have died in September after 10 days 
of violence between Christians and Muslims in the central Nigerian city of Jos. 
In all, more than 2000 people are believed to have been killed in ethnic and 
religious violence since the restoration of democracy in Nigeria in 1999. 

     Christian leaders have criticised the government for its apparent inability 
to deal with the violence. Muslim leaders have also been reported as calling for 
restraint. 

     

Tutu warns US that 'retaliation cannot bring security' 

     (allAfrica.com) In a high-profile speech, South Africa's Anglican Archbishop 
Desmond Tutu delivered a powerful call for reconciliation and against revenge and 
retaliation, heard by many in the audience as a thinly-veiled critique of the US 
assault on Afghanistan. 

     Tutu, a veteran leader of the fight against apartheid and most recently the 
head of South Africa's ground-breaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 
delivered the second Oliver Tambo lecture at Georgetown University in Washington, 
DC. Oliver Tambo was the leader of South Africa's African National Congress 
during the anti-apartheid struggle, until his death in 1993. He himself spoke at 
the same venue in 1987, at the height of the battle to persuade the international 
community to impose sanctions on the apartheid government. 

     Tutu said he had been intending to use the opportunity of the speech to call 
on the United States to mount a $2 billion Marshall Plan to help rebuild southern 
Africa, after years of damage by apartheid. The events of September 11, however, 
had changed his mind. 

     The philosophy of "an eye for an eye" could not achieve security, Tutu said. 
"Violent reaction to the suicide bombers... just seems to give rise to further 
suicide bombers." 

     He said he wanted to offer the experience of South Africa's transition from 
apartheid to a non-racial democracy as a potential source of inspiration for 
solving the problems confronting the world today. During the apartheid years, he 
said, most commentators were convinced that South Africa was headed for a 
"bloodbath," in which the country's peoples would take revenge on their 
oppressors. 

     Instead, he said, the world had watched in "wonder and awe," starting in 
February, 1990, when F.W. De Klerk made his "epoch-making move" in April 1994, 
unbanning political parties, through April 1994 when South Africans of all colors 
lined up to vote, and then again, three years later, as the Truth and 
Reconciliation Commission heard the testimony of the evil that was done during 
the apartheid years. 

     Far from the country becoming dangerously unstable as the transition 
progressed, South Africa became a more stable nation despite persistent criminal 
violence, HIV/Aids and other problems. But above all, South Africa's struggle for 
freedom succeeded because "this is a moral universe: right and wrong, good and 
bad matter. There is no way, ultimately, that evil can have the last word... This 
is God's world, and he is in charge, despite all appearances to the contrary," he 
said, drawing ripples of sympathetic laughter from the audience. 

     "All of us have the capacity for the most ghastly evil," he said. The 
Christian church must deal with a past in which people were burnt at the stake, 
when the Crusades in the Middle Ages brought "bloody mayhem" to so many Muslims, 
and the Spanish Inquisition was abroad: more recently, Christians must face up to 
their record during Hitler's fascism, to the atrocities in Northern Ireland in 
the name of religion, and to the genocide in Rwanda. Christianity was a faith, he 
said, of ever new beginnings. 

     Without referring directly to the September 11 attacks, Tutu cautioned his 
audience not to describe those who do great wrong as monsters or devils. A person 
is not a monster, he said. That kind of description removed the responsibility to 
be a human being from those accused. Such language, he said, "creates the reality 
it describes" by polarizing opinion and "boxing people in." 

     He congratulated those American voices who were, at this time, engaging in 
"serious introspection" and taking "the opportunity for a hard look at 
ourselves." That way, he said, lay true greatness. 

     "You are a wonderful people, warm-hearted and generous to a fault. You 
are... the only superpower in the world, your economic and military power are 
undisputed. But that shouldn't be the measure of your greatness. It should be 
because of your moral stature...whether it causes you anguish that unarmed 
civilians are being killed, as at the present time." 

     "Reconciliation, forgiveness, seeing the other, even one's worst enemy, as still 
human --with the possibility of rehabilitation and changing for the better--are the 
only the viable methods," he said.