IVAW action featured on Afghans For Peace home page
All of us in IVAW want to sincerly thank Afghans For Peace for their powerful statements at the NATO summit action. Together we will build a better world.
See their post about the NATO Summit action here.
Below you will find the full transcripts of Afghans For Peace powerful statements:
SURAIA SAHAR: The Afghan flag remains up to be a symbol of returning Afghanistan’s sovereignty. All we have is this flag but not our sovereign land.
I’d like to direct my message to the NATO representatives here in Chicago today. For what you’ve done to my home country, I’m enraged. For what you’ve done to my people, I’m disgusted. For what you’ve done to these veterans, I’m heart broken.
I come from a family with a military background so I sympathize with their disappointment in being failed by the system. In having their lives, their morals, and their humanity toyed with. Used, and discarded.
To you, they may have been pawns in your war games, but I can see them for who they truly are, through their minds, their hearts, and their souls. The part of them you should have valued more.
Two years ago we didn’t know if we could work with soldiers. Today we’ve talked and we’ve listened. We’ve shared laughter and we’ve shared tears.
A couple of months ago in Toronto. Afghans for Peace organized an emergency vigil for the Panjwai massacre and we had an Afghanistan war veteran speak to a crowd of mostly Afghans in a time where we felt the most sorrow, frustration and hatred toward NATO soldiers. After watching his heartfelt testimony, seeing the shame and sadness in his eyes, and after he pointed to the US consulate and shouted the words, “I don’t work for you anymore”, they instantly forgave and welcomed him. That was a moment of reconciliation and healing in a time of heightened anger and despair.
The fact that these veterans get more support from Afghans like ourselves than from their own commanders, their own government, and even their own president is a cause for shame.
This morning I received a statement from youth inside Afghanistan whose message is directed to all the veterans here and I’m going to read it to you now because its important to bring the voices from the front lines here in Chicago today.
**You are widening our human space.**
We thank our friends Brock McKintosh and Jacob George and all their veteran friends for standing before NATO today, together with Suraia, Samira, Saba and members of Afghans for Peace, as well as 30 million other Afghan citizens who have no freedom to live in their own land. We thank you for handing back your medals. You are severing ties with the machines that have ‘institutionalized’ our warring instincts for their own profit. You are recovering our other human instinct, the instinct to be reconciled with all human beings, even with strangers. You are widening our human space. 2 million Afghans and too many international soldiers have become victims of war in Afghanistan. Even if the U.S./NATO/Taliban/Al Qaeda warriors refuse to end the Afghan war, we know at least that in body at this gathering, and in spirit from afar, war has no further power over us. Like NATO will be eventually, war is gone. From Kabul in Afghanistan, we thank you with love, The Afghan Peace Volunteers
To the veterans who are here today, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for finding the courage to be defiant in the face of injustice, for resisting what you knew was wrong, and for taking those steps in doing what’s right.
Myself and my colleagues in Afghans for Peace are honored to call you our friends in the peace movement, and we will continue to fight alongside you in solidarity for the cause of peace and demanding an end to the illegal occupation and war in Afghanistan in this war of terror. Thank you.
SAMIRA SAYED-RAHMAN: I am absolutely amazed by the amount of people who have come here from Chicago and from all over the world to stand united against the actions of these NATO countries. I myself have come here from Toronto and am truly inspired by the solidarity between not only Afghans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War, but also amongst every single one of us here. I am here representing two identities. First, I am the child of Afghans who have had to flee their motherland to escape the brutalities of a war that was fueled by the same actors destroying the country today. Second, I am a Canadian, who like Americans has seen unemployment skyrocket, healthcare problems, the price of tuition grasping out of our reach, and the livelihoods of the average citizen worsening while our tax dollars are being shipped off in the billions to wage war on a people that have been through too much. The very people who cause us to suffer here are active in oppressing the Afghans, Libyans, Iraqis, Haitians, Palestinians to name but a few. I am paying to help my government here slaughter my own people back home in Afghanistan. Why am I here? I am here to say that I have had an enough, the Afghan people have had enough. They are sick and tired of being nameless faceless beings, sick and tired of being treated as collateral damage, sick and tired of 11 long years of this war with no end in sight. We don’t want another Abdullah whose fingers were chopped off and used as trophies of war, we don’t want another Fatima who has had her face burned by acid for trying to get an education, we don’t want another Najeeb and his entire family being killed in a drone strike, we don’t want another little five old Zainab left to fend for herself as she watches as her mother is raped by forces while her father has barrel of a gun shoved in his mouth, we don’t want our country to burnt to ashes over and over again for NATOs bombs. We don’t want any more. We can’t have anymore. You Western leaders have played enough games with my country. I call upon you, the people here, the people of Chicago, the people of the United States, the people of Canada and the people of the world, it is time we unite and say enough is enough. Obama, Harper, Karzai and NATO leaders we demand the end of the occupation of Afghanistan, we demand the removal of all troops from that land, and we demand an end to the war machine. The Afghan people want food, shelter, healthcare, education, sustainability, peace, the right to live a life free from war and ultimately a future.
SABA MAHER:
To all Dispatchers
Before I offer you my reaction to the midnight raid and slaughter of my brothers and sisters in Afghanistan by a reported all too drunk and “overstressed” soldier,
I ask you
What is good enough for a massacred people?
THEY SAY, let us use pilgrimages to Hajj as a front for reparations
To All Dispatchers, what is good enough for you, your family, or my people?
AFGHAN GOOD ENOUGH
When the OCCUPYING Forces Do Not EVEN KNOW our Afghan NAMES?!
And Name for us
The ONE entitled to decree what is Good Enough for an Afghan
Other than the Afghan
Mr. and Mrs. Dispatcher
Excuse me for my lack of sympathy
But an apology just won’t do
Because…. My fingertips trace rusted circles around nothing endlessly And I wonder where these traces will take me Where will it take me?
I wonder if this is the way it’s supposed to be To trace nothing but blood While wishing away hopelessly
Tell me.
You wanna understand? How a thousand times over isn’t enough? 30 more years of ripping skin Decades of choked pain that drains the color from the flesh that torments the mind and eats through the nerves
Do you wanna understand? How it feels when your mother is raped with bullets and your fathers every cell locked in steel Do you?
How every dream for peace and return is slapped with the reality of a branded burn How every morning prayer is split into seventy-seven consecutive funerals in Meymaneh But not before every corpse is dragged on the back of a pick up truck to the governor of Kandahar Because bunker buster bombs beheaded the yeteem1 in Nangahar Because the drill of rocket attacks launched from Bagram left a permanent drum In Ariana’s 2 bleeding ear…and she can’t fall asleep at night
Without the lull of a Tomcats drone She can’t make it in the day if her cries aren’t met with roadside roar
You wanna know? Huh? Do you? That even the wind has a color in Afghanistan
The color of soot-covered rose The color of soot-covered rose
Because the earth has no stomach to house casualties of war We are not ghosts. Our flesh will return to the earth to remind you of our mortality.
She will spit back every martyred man, woman, and baby To JOIN us in an undying army commanded
To LIVE
SING
RESIST
DANCE
CHANT
BREATH
ATTAN
EXIST
AND
Love YOU
YES We Will LOVE You
EVEN When 1,600-pound bombs are deployed to break our backs
We Will Love You
Even when you insult us by desecrating our dead
We will LOVE
MY Tax dollar funded
Green, Blue, Brown, Hazel Foreign Eyed
OCCUPPYING,
Khakhi Camo INVADING, Extraterritorial, out your element Gung Ho war mongering
Bible Muttering
Afghan Blood on Your Hands
US/NATO led
and Lost soldier
We will Love you
Because LOVE, NOT HATRED, IS THE I-REPRESSIBLE SPRING Which OUTLASTS OCCUPATION
You wanna understand? Go ahead. Raid villages and execute unborn children Smash skulls and drifting doves The wind rippled in blood Ripples in blood
I smell the putrid stench of NATO’s calculated worth When a mother screams to her death before giving birth
Calculate the worth, while her husband convulsively moans as she bleeds Drones drowning dreams
You wanna understand?
Huh? Do you,
Mister and Mrs. Dispatcher?
“We Are….
Living
Breathing
Dead bodies.”
No War Machine’s pre-calculated executions will carpet bomb us into submission
The US and NATO War of Liberation is no more liberated than our dead
No More Liberated than our Last Breath
(Breath)
