Afghan Genocide: An Open Letter

By Dr Gideon Polya

09 July, 2009
Countercurrents.org

An Open Letter sent out to Anti-war groups and Anti-war folks around the world

Dear Sir/Madam,

I applaud your protests over the Bush (now Obama) wars in Occupied Afghanistan and Occupied Iraq.

A 5 decade research career biological scientist, I have been reporting estimates of how many people have died in Occupied Afghanistan since the US-led invasion using UN Population Division data. My recent estimates (2009) are outlined below. For details of methodology see “Obama’s Afghan War”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/29546/42/ .

In Occupied Afghanistan post-invasion non-violent excess deaths (avoidable deaths from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease) total 3 million; post-invasion violent excess deaths (assuming the same ratio of post-invasion violent/non-violent excess deaths as in Occupied Iraq of 1.3) total 4 million; post-invasion violent and non-violent excess deaths total 3-7 million; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths total 2.3 million; post-invasion avoidable under- 5 infant deaths (90% are avoidable) total 2.1 million; 3-4 million refugees have been generated plus a further 2.5 million Pashtun refugees from the NW Province of Pakistan under Obama war policies – an Afghan Holocaust and an Afghan Genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention
(see: http://www.edwebproject.org
/sideshow/genocide/convention.html ).

Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention (see: http://www.edwebproject.org
/sideshow/genocide/convention.html ) states “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Much of this carnage is due to US Alliance violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War which demands that an Occupier must provide life –sustaining food and medical requisites to the conquered population ”to the fullest extent of the means available to it” (see: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm ) – yet the “total annual per capita health expenditure” permitted by the Occupiers in Occupied Afghanistan is merely $29 as compared tot $6,714 in the Occupier country the USA (see WHO: http://www.who.int/countries/en/ ).

The carnage does not stop there – we must also note the 0.7 million global opiate drug-related deaths since 2001 (circa 3,000 in the UK ) due to US Alliance restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan industry from about 6% of world market share in 2001 to about 93% at present (see UN ODC World Drug Report 2007: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/
data-and-analysis/WDR-2007.html ) .

Appallingly, there are only a couple of scholars currently identifying this continuing catastrophe as an Afghan Genocide, notably myself (on the basis of the above data) and top humanitarian US lawyer Professor Ali Khan (on the basis of the US Alliance policy of attempted extermination of an Indigenous religious group, the Taliban) (see: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya080208.htm ).

A final damning statistic: the “annual death rate” is 7% for Occupied Afghanistan under-5 year old infants - as compared to 3% for inmates of the Nazi Buchenwald Concentration Camp and 10% for Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in World War 2 (for which crimes Axis generals were tried and hanged) (see: http://gpolya.newsvine.com/_news/2009/06/08/2907231-obama-
holocaust-denial-in-buchenwald-cairo-speeches-?groupId=1350 ).

Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Please tell everyone you can.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Gideon Polya, Melbourne, Australia

Dr Gideon Polya published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003). He has recently published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://mwcnews.net/Gideon-Polya and http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contribution “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007): http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/
ockham/stories/s1445960.htm ). He has just published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/
bengalfamine_programme.html ). When words fail one can say it in pictures - for images of Gideon Polya’s huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see “Truth , Beauty & Saving the World – Science, Art & Nuclear, Greenhouse & Poverty Threats”: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeacepl
anetmotherchild/truth-beauty-saving-the-world .