Shannon Ebrahim
US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power should not throw stones when she lives in a glass house. In her usual self-righteous style, Power took to twitter on October 2, calling on Russia to cease attacks on the Syrian opposition and civilians, warning that civilian casualties “will only fuel more extremism”.
A day after her tweet the US willfully bombed a fully functioning MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, packed with 105 trauma patients and 80 international and local staff, causing the biggest loss of life Doctors Without Borders has ever experienced.
Ten patients were killed, including three children, as well as 13 MSF staff. Nurses who rushed back to the intensive care unit said they saw their patients literally burning in their beds. MSF has declared: “We work under the clear presumption that a war crime has been committed.”
There is no way that any reasonable person would buy the argument of US General John Campbell that it was a mistake, seeing as MSF had given the GPS co-ordinates of the hospital to both the coalition and Afghan civilian and military officials on multiple occasions over the past few months, and as recently as September 29.
It was a precise and powerful AC 130 gunship that bombed the hospital. MSF staff heard it circling low above the hospital before it started bombing, not once but repeatedly. Even after frantic calls were made to both Washington and Kabul that the MSF hospital was being bombed, the relentless bombardment continued for a further 30 minutes. It was specifically the main building of the hospital that was repeatedly hit, which housed the ICU, emergency rooms and physio ward.
None of the adjunct buildings were targeted, confirming the precision of the US target.
Afghan civilian casualties are not accidents or mistakes – that is only what the Pentagon would like us to believe. There is always a careful calculation by US commanders and military attorneys to decide on the benefits of an air strike versus the costs in innocent lives. US analysts always evaluate the location and blast radius of the intended weapon before a target can be approved.
Why, the question is being asked, would the US willfully bomb the only functioning trauma hospital in the region? The answer is quite simple – the MSF hospital was not popular among Afghan security forces as the policy of MSF is to treat the wounded on all sides of a conflict, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or affiliation. Obviously the fact that Taliban fighters would not have been turned away provided they left the guns at the door was something the coalition couldn’t swallow. MSF has confirmed that there had been no fighting or armed combatants in the hospital compound prior to the bombing.
When innocent civilians are killed the reaction of the Pentagon is absolutely predictable: First deny that it happened, and then when irrefutable evidence emerges of US culpability, give regrets and promises of an internal military investigation.
This time was no different, except that the US changed its story about what happened four times in four days. The day of the bombing the US said it didn’t know if it had struck a hospital. The next day it said the strikes took place in the vicinity of the hospital. On the third day the story was changed to “Afghans requested the strike on the hospital”. On the fourth day the US Commander admitted that it was US forces that called in the air strike themselves at the request of the Afghans.
According to Dr Joanne Liu, president of MSF International: “Coalition statements imply that Afghan and US forces were working together and decided to raze to the ground a fully functioning hospital, which amounts to an admission of a war crime.” This time there is just no getting around it, the US knowingly bombed a major hospital, fully aware that tens of thousands of civilians in Kunduz would no longer be able to receive free life and limb saving trauma care. The hospital was the only medical facility of its kind in North-eastern Afghanistan which treated 22 000 patients in 2014 alone. Two days before the fatal bombing, the hospital had been overwhelmed with casualties, performing 90 surgeries in two days – the doctors operating for two days without sleep.
There has never been accounting for US war crimes, not even for its bombing of a wedding party in 2008 in Afghanistan, killing 47 family members, or its bombing of a hospital in Falluja in Iraq in 2004, razing it to the ground. MSF is demanding an independent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact Finding Commission, which was established in 1991 by an additional protocol of the Geneva Conventions that govern the rules of war.
Obama may have apologised to MSF on Wednesday, but this time an apology is not enough.