A Woman's Face, and the Shattered Faces of Children 

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL / Free Speech Radio News 12may02

Transcribed by mindfully.org from the CD, Free Speech Radio News: Mumia Abu-Jamal on the War and crackdown on civil liberties, Special KPFA premium - Spring 2002 - Track 5 - 20 Commentaries recorded between Aug 2001 and May 2002 www.kpfa.org 

When one thinks of war, we are conditioned to think of men in fatigues, perhaps in formation, marching, or driving their malevolent machines of death. That is the dominant face of war, to be sure. But is not its only face. If we broaden our perspective of war, and consider the many victims of war, we find a woman's face, and the shattered faces of children. In every major war that has been fought in the last century, the death toll has been highest among the so-called noncombatants -- women and children.

How can it be otherwise in a world of weapons that drop or launch death on such vast scales as was seen in the world wars -- Vietnam, and every Imperial skirmish since? Historian Howard Zinn in his recent Terrorism in War [Seven Stories Press, NY 2002], wrote "it's clear that civilians are being killed in the bombing. I read an account of one attack on the town of Gudara on December 1st. 'The village is no more,' a survivor of the attack said. 'All my family, 12 people were killed. I'm the only one left in this family. I've lost my children, my wife. They are no more.'"[1] Zinn was recounting some of the human costs of the much lauded war in Afghanistan then.

The Mei Li Massacre of Vietnam was extraordinary in the sense that it that it received extraordinary media coverage. There were millions, millions of men, women, and children who perished in the hellish conflagration of the Vietnam/U.S. war. Of the 3 million Vietnamese or bombed, burned, or shot to death during the war, how many were military combatants? A quarter of one million? 500,000? A million? If that is so, and that figure is surely debatable, then the rest, the vast majority were surely noncombatants -- women and their children.

Again Howard Zinn, the eminent historian provides an invaluable perspective -- that of historian, and of participant. As a young man in World War II, he was a bomber pilot. And as such nose about civilian casualties -- the inevitable outcome of modern warfare. He writes, "'[w]e also have to ask another question: is it really an accident when civilians die under our bombs?' Even if you believe the Pentagon's claim, that it's intention is not to kill civilians in, if civilians, in fact become victims again and again, and its predictable that they will, can that be called an accident? If the deaths of civilians are in inevitable in bombing, as Donald Rumsfeld has acknowledged, it is not an accident. The people prosecuting this war are committing murder. They are engaging in terrorism,"[2] he writes.

The average victim in this relentless history of war, death, and loss was not a uniformed, trained, or on ununiformed fighter, but a mother clutching her child, or a child looking at the sky burst into bright, pretty orange colors of destruction. That is the real untold lesson of Hiroshima, of Nagasaki, of Hanoi, of Phnom Penh, of Dresden, of London, of Nanjing, of Birmingham, of Philadelphia, of the ongoing war against women and children.

From death row, this is Mumia Abu Jamal

[1]   Tim Wiener, "US Bombs Hit 3 Towns, Afghans Say," New York Times, 3dec01, B5.

[2]   Jules Crittenden, "'Air Supremacy' Achieved," Boston Herald, 10oct01, 3.