ISLAMABAD:
Peace activists from America here on Tuesday unanimously called for launching a global movement to hold governments accountable for the use of drones in warfare and strengthening laws to prevent such attacks.
The 32-member US anti-war activists’ team now visiting Pakistan was speaking at an interactive session at the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS).
“Drone strikes in Pakistan are a clear violation of international laws, human rights and depict an absence of conscience among the leaders in both the US and Pakistan,” they said.
“Once it has become clear that the US and Pakistani establishments were barren of conscience with respect to the loss of lives and civil liberties in Fata, the people will have to stand up to express their concerns in every legitimately possible way,” they said.
While the peace movements in the US have been vocal and bold, it is high time that the people of Pakistan too should raise their voice too, they exhorted. “The people in tribal areas have been left at the mercy of militaries who knew nothing but to bombard. Tribal people do not and did not have any say in whatever has happened or was happening to them, through them or in the name of them.”
“We are against the use of drones for warfare,” Marry Ann Wright, a former US ambassador and a leading member of the delegation, told The Express Tribune.
The delegation arrived in Pakistan last week to visit South Waziristan to meet and talk to the war-hit people on the ground there.
“The US government is violating international laws and all the concepts of conduct of war formed in the wake of the Second World War, even the US constitution and laws itself,” the former army colonel known for her bold stance against the US-led ‘war on terror’, she remarked, describing drone as the “personal execution device” of the US president. She held the US president responsible for the drone strikes he sanctioned every week in any part of the world, she said.
“Our president has chosen the role of chief executioner”, she remarked.
“The legal systems are there, but there are brazen violators of these systems internationally. We are trying to hold governments accountable to international laws”, she remarked.
Participants offered various suggestions for preventing drone strikes including demanding compensation for the victims of drone attacks, continuous presence of the international observers in conflict areas to prevent strikes and using the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) to stand up to the US government.
The peace team head Medea Benjamin said, “When it comes to drones, we are at the very beginning of turning public opinion against them in the US.” She said petitions against the drone attacks are often dismissed by courts because the executive branch says this is a matter of national security.
She said that their group aimed at making all possible efforts to stopping US from illegal use of force. “People in the US and across the globe have to be told that the policy and the steps undertaken by the US and NATO are barbaric, unjust and counter-productive”.
Shahzad Akbar, who works for Reprieve, a London-based human rights organization, said: “If the Pakistan government takes the issue of drones to the international organizations such as UN and the International Court of Justice, we wouldn’t even have to discuss the question of shooting down the drones.”
In his concluding remarks, former secretary foreign affairs Akram Zaki said that the peace mission and its objective should definitely focus drones but in a wider canvas should aim at elimination of the war in Afghanistan. He noted that central vision of US offensive policy, as clearly manifested in drone strikes strategy, was to kill others without risking the lives of their own soldiers.
He said that the Bush era in the US was an era of international illegalities. He also deplored that when drone operations were initiated in Pakistan it was in connivance with the then government and unfortunately the present democratic government was also towing the same line.
The delegation’s trip to Pakistan has been organised by ‘Code Pink: Women for Peace,’ an American anti-war group. The delegation will be in Pakistan until October 10.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 3rd, 2012.
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