Doctors Without Borders is demanding an independent international inquiry into a suspected U.S. airstrike Saturday on an Afghan hospital in the city of Kunduz that killed 22 people—12 staff members and 10 patients, including three children. At least three dozen people were injured. The attack continued for 30 minutes after the U.S. and Afghan militaries were informed by telephone that the hospital was being bombed. Bart Janssens, the director of [operations] for Doctors Without Borders, described the attack.
Doctors Without Borders General Director Christopher Stokes said in a statement, quote, “Under the clear presumption that a war crime has been committed, MSF demands that a full and transparent investigation into the event be conducted by an independent international body. Relying only on an internal investigation by a party to the conflict would be wholly insufficient,” he said.
Kunduz has been the scene of fierce fighting since the Taliban seized the northern city in Afghanistan last week. On Sunday, Doctors Without Borders announced it would have to withdraw from Kunduz, where they operated the only free trauma care hospital in northern Afghanistan. Some Afghan officials said the airstrike was justified, claiming Taliban fighters had used the hospital. Doctors Without Borders rejected the claim, saying, quote, “These statements imply that Afghan and U.S. forces working together decided to raze to the ground a fully functioning hospital with more than 180 staff and patients inside because they claim that members of the Taliban were present. This amounts to an admission of a war crime. This utterly contradicts the initial attempts of the U.S. government to minimize the attack as ‘collateral damage.'” The United States acknowledged the hospital may have been, quote, “collateral damage.” The Pentagon promised promised a full investigation into what happened. Defense Secretary Carter said, quote, “We do know that American air assets … were engaged in the Kunduz vicinity, and we do know that the structures that … you see in the news were destroyed. I just can’t tell you what the connection is at this time.”
Dr. Gino Strada talking:
we have received 41 patients that were wounded, all coming from Kunduz. They came by different means, many of them by themselves. Some of them, they were directly transferred by MSF personnel. And for our staff in the surgical center in Kabul was a great workload, because we were already at the hospital capacity, quite fully, saturated with the wounded from the area of Kabul. The number of wounded, of civilian wounded, in Afghanistan has increased and been increasing over the years. At the moment, we are having around 300, 320 war-related patients a month, which means more than 10 per day. Many of them, they come obviously from the Kabul area, but in this moment we have to cope also with this war crime that has been committed in Kunduz.
I am a surgeon, I am not a politician. And what I’ve seen, having spent many, many years, more than seven years in Afghanistan, every time it’s the same story: There’s been a mistake or a collateral damage. Well, I see no difference between the two ideas. The reality is always the same: Civilians are killed, civilians are wounded, voluntarily or by mistake, but there’s the reality of war. In the time we are in Afghanistan, we have been looking after more than 140,000 war wounded, all in Kabul. And Kabul is just one of the three surgical centers we have in Afghanistan, the others being in Helmand province in Lashkar Gah, and in Panjshir. And it’s going on like this since years and years. So, I’m not expecting anything to come out from the investigation. This will not bring back to life those who have been killed, will not care for the wounds.
Dr. Hakim talking:
Afghans have been inured to the many, many years of mistakes that the U.S.-NATO coalition have made in not only bombing, unfortunately, the hospital in Kunduz, but ordinary civilian events, like weddings, that Afghans hold. So I don’t think Afghans are surprised. They are definitely angry.
People in the United States think of the war in Afghanistan as certainly gearing down. That really shows how mainstream media has failed to tell the truth to the world. The war is going on. It is deteriorating. Both the International Red Cross as well as the United Nations have reported an increase in civilian casualties over the past few years. So it is getting worse. It is definitely not scaling down. And I think Americans need to know that their taxpayer money is going to a war that is worsening.
Kathy Kelly talking:
I think the United States military has again shown itself to be the most formidable warlord in the area. What is patently a war crime, the terrible bombing of the hospital in Kunduz, which went on from 2:08 in the morning until 3:15 in the morning, bombings that happened in 15-minute intervals. Eyewitness survivors said it was so terrible to be watching patients burning in their bed. This has now left an entire region without a hospital. And the United States referred to it as “collateral damage.” The United States military made that reference.
And I think it’s important to see this in the context of the healthcare [inaudible] that the United States has provided through USAID. You know, in July, the inspector general for Afghanistan, John Sopko, issued a letter to the head of USAID, saying 80 percent of the hospitals and healthcare facilities that they had listed as getting support from the United States, you couldn’t find the hospitals in Google Earth searches. They said that there was question raised about many of these locations. And so, you’ve got [inaudible] unverifiable locations of healthcare facilities supported by the United States. And then in Kunduz, you’ve got doctors and nurses being in a very terrible situation trying to deliver healthcare.
Dr. Gino Strada talking:
The main issue is to ensure at the moment a sort of fast track, a fast corridor, in order for the patients and wounded—that will be wounded, because fighting is ongoing—in the northern area could reach at least Kabul or an alternative, as far as emergency is concerned, a surgical center in Panjshir, which is probably slightly closer than Kabul to Kunduz. In Afghanistan, the surgical facilities are very, very poor and very few. So, the risk is that the entire areas remain unserved. We will try our best to make sure that ambulance services will be available to guarantee a safe and quick referral of the patients to the surgical facilities.
we are quite proud of Right Livelihood Award, because I think it’s a good recognition for the tremendous work that Emergency has been doing in the past 22 years in favor of the victims of war, particularly in Afghanistan, where we have one of the largest programs with three surgical centers, one maternity center and 54 clinics and first-aid posts scattered throughout the country. It’s an important recognition. We are very happy. We’ll try to have our program in Afghanistan expanding even further.
One of the main questions now is how to ensure the delivery of the humanitarian assistance. What we have seen in the past years is that it’s becoming more and more difficult to guarantee that wounded people or sick people could safely reach hospitals. Whenever there is an ongoing fighting, normally militaries from all parties are preventing the evacuation of the wounded. And this is also, by itself, a war crime, although on a smaller scale. But preventing wounded people from being evacuated and looked after is definitely a crime. And this is done every day. And there’s no investigation ongoing. It’s quietly accepted by everybody that wounded patients have no rights. And we know very well that more than 90 percent of these patients are civilians, are people who have never had a weapon in their hands, who did not take part into the hostilities. And this is the social tragedy of that country.
Kathy Kelly talking:
given that the coordinates of the hospital had been made very clear to the Afghan military, the United States military, in the months leading up to this critical weekend, also this past week, it certainly is clear that the United States knew, had the intelligence, knew that it was bombing a hospital, and decided to go ahead with the attack anyway. The drone flights certainly frighten people, and airstrikes like this frighten people, and they don’t know where to turn for protection, particularly in the rural areas. And, of course, now without a hospital in that region, they won’t know where to turn for any kind of healthcare.
But, you know, the United States is pouring enormous resources into drone surveillance, constant surveillance, that’s supposed to establish patterns of life in Afghanistan. But far better if the United States people would understand the hunger and the lack of healthcare, the disease that plagues people in Afghanistan. And that’s the kind of intelligence, that’s the sort of literacy about the consequences of our wars, which people don’t have.
Dr. Gino Strada talking:
“reason this hospital might have been attacked, if there were Taliban in the hospital”. this could be one of the—I will use the term “excuses,” not “reasons.” We had a similar experience four or five years ago with our hospital in the Helmand province, where we made public that more than 40 percent of the victims that we were treating, war victims, in our hospital were children, and they were all injured by the bombing of the coalition around the villages of the Helmand region. And then, all of a sudden, we found that some of our staff was arrested, that Afghan security forces and U.K. security forces entered our hospital in Helmand, and, surprisingly, they found two or three pistols in the pharmacy store in the hospital. Probably they put them there six hours before. It was another excuse, because nobody once witnessed this, of these continuous and repeated crimes against the Afghan people that is going on since years and years. And so, it’s not surprising that someone might have been disturbed by this situation, and therefore they found an excuse to continue the killing.
I think that everybody who is trying to help the wounded in Afghanistan is facing the same problem. Wounded are not all the same. Someone believes that some of the wounded do not deserve any right because they are their enemies. But doctors have no enemies. We are not involved in Afghan politics. We are not taking sides. We are just trying to look after sick and wounded people. And this creates a lot of difficulties for all the militaries involved in this situation.
There is a solution. Well, I think so. The only solution is to understand that war and violence take you nowhere. We are completely in agreement with a statement from great human beings, such as Albert Einstein, who quoted, you know, that war can only be abolished, cannot be humanized. And that’s the reality. Every time we have to prove that this statement from Einstein was the solution of the problem. We should abandon war. We should try to think and solve our problems in a different way, excluding violence and war. And this is very difficult to accept for someone and has very dramatic consequences also for health personnel who are trying to help in war zones and difficult situations. There is no respect, no more respect for anybody. Doctors, nurses, they are all enemies.
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Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, a campaign to end U.S. military and economic warfare. She just returned from Kabul, Afghanistan, last month. Her recent article is called “#Enough! A Campaign to End War and Focus on Food and Health.”
Dr. Gino Strada, co-founder of Emergency, an Italian NGO that provides free medical care to victims of war. He was just named winner of the Right Livelihood Award.
Dr. Hakim, medical doctor who has provided humanitarian relief in Afghanistan for the last decade. He works with Afghan Peace Volunteers, an inter-ethnic group of young Afghans dedicated to building nonviolent alternatives to war. Dr. Hakim is the 2012 recipient of the International Pfeffer Peace Prize.
— source democracynow.org