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Le Pakistan en a assez des attaques meurtrières de drones américains - Pakistan is fed up of deadly U.S. drone attacks

samedi 23 novembre 2013

C’est une véritable guerre non déclarée que les USA mènent via les drones et qui font de nombreux morts civils.

Des milliers de manifestants ont protesté samedi au Pakistan contre les tirs de drones américains, menaçant de couper les voies de ravitaillement de l’OTAN si les attaques se poursuivaient.

Les manifestants - des militants de droite emmenés par l’ex-star du cricket Imran Khan - ont brûlé des drapeaux américains, a constaté un journaliste de l’AFP à Peshawar où s’est déroulée la manifestation.

Selon la police, les manifestants étaient au nombre d’environ 15.000.

Khan a appelé à un blocus des convois de l’OTAN vers l’Afghanistan afin de faire pression sur Washington.

Après avoir précédemment fixé une date limite au 20 novembre, Khan a déclaré samedi qu’il saisirait la Cour suprême du Pakistan et, si nécessaire, la Cour internationale de justice.

Les transports de l’OTAN ont été suspendus samedi en raison de la manifestation qui a eu lieu sur la route empruntée par les camions de l’Alliance atlantique.

Mais, selon un responsable local, cela devrait avoir peu d’effets, car les convois sont peu nombreux en fin de semaine.

Khan accuse les Etats-Unis d’avoir utilisé un drone pour tuer le chef taliban Hakimullah Mehsud dans une tentative de saboter d’éventuelles discussions de paix avec les talibans.

Le gouvernement pakistanais a affirmé que cette attaque avait annulé les progrès réalisés en vue de mettre fin à la rébellion des talibans qui a fait des milliers de morts.

Jeudi, une nouvelle attaque de drone a tué six personnes dont le chef du réseau taliban afghan Haqqani considéré par les Etats-Unis comme responsable de certaines des attaques les plus meutrières en Afghanistan.

Les attaques de drones sont particulièrement impopulaires au Pakistan et Islamabad les condamne publiquement comme étant une violation de sa souveraineté.

Le Pakistan est une voie d’approvisionnement stratégique pour les forces internationales dirigées par les Etats-Unis en Afghanistan, qui doivent quitter ce pays d’ici à la fin 2014.

US expands its drone war on Pakistan

By Keith Jones

A US drone strike on a seminary in the Hangu district of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province killed at least six people Thursday, including several civilians.

The three-missile attack was only the second-ever US drone strike in Pakistan outside the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The previous such strike occurred in 2008.

Thursday’s attack came just one day after Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s chief foreign policy advisor, Sartaj Aziz, had told a parliamentary committee that Washington had pledged that it would not mount further drone strikes while Islamabad was holding peace negotiations with the Pakistan-based allies of the Afghan Taliban.

Washington has denied Thursday’s strike targeted a seminary and is boasting that it killed two senior leaders of the Haqqani Network—a Taliban ally reportedly responsible for several of the most daring and successful attacks on US and NATO occupation forces in Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials have disputed Washington’s account of what was, by any measure, a major escalation of the US’s patently illegal practice of violating Pakistan’s sovereignty so as to conduct summary executions. They have confirmed that some insurgents died, but report the killing of at least two seminary students, as well as the wounding of others.

“It has been consistently maintained that drone strikes are counterproductive, entail loss of innocent civilian lives and have human rights and humanitarian implications,” said Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry in a statement issued Thursday. “Such strikes also set dangerous precedents in inter-state relations.”

This protest notwithstanding, high-level meetings of US and Pakistani officials—part of the countries’ recently resumed Strategic Dialogue—proceeded Thursday without a hitch. In Islamabad the “Security, Strategic Stability and Nonproliferation Working Group” discussed nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear energy, while in Washington the “Pakistan-US Defence Consultative Group” discussed US and Pakistani military operations to suppress the Afghan Taliban insurgency over the next 13 months as the US reduces its Afghan troop strength to ten thousand or less.

On Friday, Sharif and several of his aides adopted a more strident tone in opposing the US drone-strike campaign, but this was clearly intended as political cover for Islamabad’s continuing close cooperation with Washington.

Opposition to the AfPak War and outrage over the drone strikes—which have killed thousands in FATA over the last five years and wrought untold psychological damage on villagers who experience buzzing drones hovering overhead daily—were a major factor in the rout of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP)-led government in last May’s national election.

Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said the US could not be trusted and suggested it was seeking to derail Islamabad’s efforts to draw the Pakistani Taliban into formal peace negotiations. He added that he could not understand why Aziz would have publicly repeated “such fairy tales” as the US promise that it was suspending drone strikes.

Nisar Ali Khan had himself pledged a governmental review of Pakistan’s relations with the US, in the aftermath of the November 1 US drone strike that killed Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief Hakimullah Mehsud. That strike threw into disarray a months’ long government effort to persuade the Pakistan Taliban to enter talks.

Sharif, for his part, argued in a speech Friday that his government’s opposition to US drone strikes was “genuine.” He denied the government had any “double-standard” in respect to CIA and Pentagon drone strikes. “The government,” said Sharif, “has always taken a forthright and genuine stance in condemning drone attacks. We condemn these acts from the core of our heart.”

As proof, Pakistan’s Prime Minister noted that he had raised the issue with US President Barak Obama when he visited the White House last month.

Shortly after Sharif’s US visit, and in an obvious response to his complaints and to reports from a UN special rapporteur and human rights groups documenting widespread civilian deaths from US drone strikes, the Washington Post published leaked documents showing the Pakistani government and military have colluded in the US drone war from the outset. Not only have Pakistani authorities sanctioned such attacks, they have frequently helped identify targets.

In response to the November 1 drone strike and Obama’s insistence that the US reserves the right to launch drone missile strikes whenever it deems it in the “national interest,” the rightwing Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party called earlier this month for protesters to prevent the US and NATO from using the Khyber Pass as of Saturday, November 23.

Led by former cricket star Imran Khan, the PTI is the third largest party in Pakistan’s parliament and leads the government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Following Thursday’s drone attack, Khan and his PTI denounced the national government for its “muted” response and vowed to use their authority over Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to block what is one of the two US-NATO land supply routes through Pakistan.

“We will announce at the protest on Saturday,” said Khan, “that we will permanently block the supply route until they stop drone attacks. If it’s in our hands, we will block it today. Our powers are that we can tell them that NATO supplies can’t pass through our province.”

A spokesman for the PTI Chief Minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa pointed to the deep popular anger over the US drone strikes : “I don’t understand why a drone at this time,” said Sheraz Paracha. “This will further incite the people here.”

Khan and his PTI were also-rans in Pakistani politics until they began to speak out against US drone strikes little more than two years ago. The PTI’s ability to capitalize on the popular resentment over the drone strikes and Pakistan’s complicity in the AfPak War is entirely bound up with the political prostration of Pakistan’s official “left”—a collection of Stalinist, Pabloite and other pseudo-left groups that have traditionally orbited around the PPP and continued to do so over the last five years as the PPP-led government gave its full support to the US occupation of Afghanistan and imposed IMF austerity.

For the past twelve years Pakistan has provided a lifeline to the US forces occupying Afghanistan. But NATO appears confident that the Sharif government will not allow the PTI to disrupt their supply routes and that Khan, who has himself repeatedly voiced his eagerness to have closer relations with Washington, means to stage little more than a publicity stunt.

“This protest,” said an e-mail issued by the joint command of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force and obtained by Bloomberg News, “will be largely symbolic and likely not last more than one day. It should have minimal to no impact on ISAF’s supply mission.”

Messages

  • Alors que l’administration Obama refuse toujours de rendre publique la justification légale pour les frappes de drones qui ont tué des milliers de civils, des pays non alignés avec Washington développent rapidement leurs propres drones capables de tuer. Dans son nouveau livre Lords of Secrecy, Scott Horton, avocat et éditeur au magazine Harper’s, dénonce le silence maintenu par Washington sur son usage des drones et accuse le président de créer des précédents qui pourraient revenir hanter l’Amérique.

  • Quand Obama fait un discours sur les drones - ce qui est très rare -, c’est comme si les mots qui sortaient de sa bouche étaient écrits par les relations publiques de la CIA. C’est frappant. Plusieurs affirmations faites par Obama au sujet des frappes des drones, notamment sur les victimes civiles, sont douteuses, et certaines ne sont carrément pas vraies.

    Lorsqu’une frappe se produit, le président reçoit l’information que la CIA veut bien communiquer, c’est-à-dire que « la frappe a été un succès, le numéro 3 d’Al-Qaïda est mort », etc. Nous avons tué le numéro 3 d’Al-Qaïda, quoi, 20 fois déjà ? Les gens tués sont toujours de dangereux terroristes, des innocents ne sont jamais, ou rarement, tués... Ensuite, vous entendez des reporters au Pakistan qui montrent que c’est une boulangerie qui a été atteinte, et que des femmes et des enfants sont morts...

    Une source bien placée à la Maison-Blanche m’a dit récemment que, dans le cabinet Obama, le sujet des drones n’est pas discuté ouvertement : seuls des gens des services de renseignement en parlent avec le président. Il n’y a pas de débat. Ce n’est pas comme cela qu’une démocratie est censée fonctionner.

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