Melville Cooke Collateral damage: destruction or injury beyond that intended or expected, esp. in the vicinity of a military target.
Last week proceedings began against Majors Schmidt and Umbach, who flew F-16 fighter jets in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. Between them they killed four Canadian soldiers and injured eight others in April of 2002, when they dropped a 500-pound bomb on their allies during an exercise.
They reported that they were being fired on and were given clearance to attack, which they duly did, making the mothers and fathers of Sgt. Marc Leger, Cpl. Ainsworth Dyer, Pte. Richard Green and Pte. Nathan Smith very unhappy persons.
If it was any comfort to the Canadians, four American soldiers managed to blow themselves up while destroying unexploded rockets earlier in the same week.
Majors Schmidt and Umbach are facing four counts of manslaughter and eight counts of assault and a similar number of abetting assault and abetting manslaughter respectively.
I guess that means one pressed the button and the other chanted "Die Taliban!!!%#, die". The killing was called a 'friendly fire' incident.
In late June of 2002, at least 20 Afghans were killed when a US plane bombed a wedding party in the southern province of Uruzgan. The report on CNN's web page for July 1, 2002, said that the death toll was between 20 and 30. The Pentagon said an "errant bomb" was dropped after the plane came under fire. Afghan officials (if you can trust them) said members of the wedding party had been firing gunshots in the air just before the slaughter.
How that translates to "anti-aircraft guns, heavy weapons" beats me but then, I was not the one putting my life on the line in a multi-million dollar fighter plane at high altitude against a couple peashooters on the ground. Man, those pilots were brave.
Among the wounded were a six and a seven-year-old girl, who were said to be the only survivors of their family. There has been and will be no probe into the matter. It was called collateral damage.
In one of my other lives I write a column called "Donkey Sey" in THE STAR, which always starts with the Jamaican saying "jackass sey di worl no level". It is very appropriate in this situation.
The reason why there is an enquiry into the killing of four Canadian soldiers and nothing about the killing of up to 5,000 Afghanistan civilians by largest estimate I read during Operation Enduring Freedom is the lives of the Afghans are worth nothing to the US and its allies. Nothing. They are, as the Oxford defines "collateral", "connected but aside from the main subject, course etc.".
(That was a rather good name for the campaign, Enduring Freedom. I really wonder how the Afghans are going to endure the American brand of freedom).
For those who rule the world, the lives of non-white people in general and black people specifically are irritations to be tolerated. If you are non-white and contributing to the great cause of white people's domination of the world you count for something but not as much as the white folk, of course.
That, ultimately, is the difference between "friendly fire" and "collateral damage", the difference between an enquiry at Barksdale Air Force Base and an archived, forgotten page on the Internet.
They do not even warrant a full count of the dead. Consistent with he reports of civilian casualties in Afghanistan were the slugs "unconfirmed reports", "unreliable sources" and "independent confirmation needed". And when they are "confirmed" the dead become statistics, not persons with families, friends, real lives. But there are people like Deborah James, who wrote an article posted on alertnet.org, December 13, 2001.
"There was Rasmir, a 24-year-old Tajik whose 5-year-old child is psychologically damaged from the recent bombing. Rasmir's daughter was at a park in Kabul when American bombs, aimed at the airport, missed their target and killed three of her playmates Rasmir's neighbour's house had been hit by US bombs. All nine members of the family were killed."
Martin Luther King Jnr., in opposing the war in Vietnam, said that the truth in international conflicts is hard to come by, because most nations are deceived about themselves.
The deception goes beyond the reporting of casualties; it also applies to how they are remembered. The Vietnam War Memorial is a centrepiece of American life, but when you see shots of the names being read or family members tracing the names of their loved ones etched on that black wall and crying, remember this. US soldiers left more dead civilians in Vietnam than the number of names inscribed on the memorial. And they raped quite a few women, too. The war on terror has long become war and terror.
And if you really want to be cynical about it, you could say that the people killed in the United States in September of 2001 were "collateral damage" and the buildings were the targets.
Read more for yourself at www.comw.org/pda/ and www.alertnet.org. If you feel the need to punish yourself, you can follow the hearing as well.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
