White Guys With Guns: Canada’S Military In Afghanistan Pt 2

A journalist from the London Times, accompanying Canadian Forces soldiers for part of Operation Medusa, offers a revealing glimpse of combat in Kandahar province. “Throughout the day soldiers on foot combed the area for rebels. Heavy gates to walled compounds were blown open, a warren of Taleban tunnels and bunkers were destroyed by explosives and grenades were thrown into wells and fired through doors,” writes Tim Albone.[xiv] Similarly, the Toronto Star’s correspondent observed Canadian light armored vehicles (LAVs) driving over dikes and destroying them while another dispatch describes a Canadian soldier “who boasts of driving his LAV through walls and shooting down telephone poles with a 25mm chain gun”.[xv] Assuming these reports are true then here again, Canadian forces may be in breach of the law. Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions (1977) states: “Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.” Unlike the case of the mercenary convention cited above, Canada has ratified the Protocol. (The US, however, has not.) IDPs While more than two million Afghans currently reside in Pakistan and Iran as refugees, often overlooked are the tens of thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the country. The lack of attention which our media gives to this problem is perhaps explained by the fact that Canada has played a big role in producing those IDPs. Indeed, two and a half months after Operation Medusa, reported to be NATO’s largest operation of 2006, Amnesty International was “particularly concerned” that air strikes as part of NATO campaigns had displaced up to 90,000 people. Read full article@ http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=49&ItemID=14051

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