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We want you out!

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

End the Endless Wars!

photo by Dandelion Salad

Sent to DS from Hakim in Afghanistan.

ourjourneytosmile | December 14, 2010

We want you out

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ourjourneytosmile.com – Global Day of Listening to Afghans

Global Day of Listening to Afghans

19th December 2010

Why not listen?

Why not love?

To share the pain of Afghans and people in conflict all over the world, please join us in Afghanistan by taking a few minutes on the 18th & 19th of December 2010 to Skype call us or call us directly, from wherever you are.

Email youthpeacevolunteers@gmail.com

1. To arrange a call on the 18th & 19th of December 2010

OR

2. To support our Open letter from Afghan Youth to our World Leaders,

by emailing “YES, Why not listen?”

Please call us…tell us when your heart has pain.

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We Want You Out

An Open Letter

by Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers and Afghans for Peace

To all the leaders of our world,
the leaders of the US-led coalition,
the Afghan government,
the ‘Taliban/Al-Qaeda’
and regional countries,

We are intolerably angry.

All our senses are hurting.

Our women, our men and yes shame on you, our children are grieving.

Your Afghan civilian-military strategy is a murderous stench we smell, see, hear and breathe.

President Obama, and all the elite players and people of the world, why?

America’s 250-million-dollar annual communications budget just to scream propaganda on this war of perceptions, with its nauseating rhetoric mimicked by Osama and other warlords, is powerless before the silent wailing of every anaemic mother.

We will no longer be passive prey to your disrespectful systems of oligarchic, plutocratic war against the people.

Your systems feed the rich and powerful. They are glaringly un-equal, they do not listen, do not think and worst, they do not care.

We choose not to gluttonize with you. We choose not to be trained by you. We choose not to be pawned by you.

We henceforth refuse every weapon you kill us with, every dollar you bait us with and every lie you manipulate us with.

We are not beasts.

We are Afghans, Americans, Europeans, Asians and global citizens.

Yes, you have the false, self-appointed power to arrest us over expressing the public opinion of ordinary folk, students, farmers, shepherds, labourers, teachers, doctors….., people who now have nowhere to turn and nowhere to hide. (Open Letter to our World Leaders)

This world public opinion against the Afghan war has been clearly expressed and is larger than any number of Wikileaks you seek to suppress. So, come arrest us all as we civilly disobey you. Come arrest us all. ( See excerpt below from Wikipedia’s ‘International public opinion on the war in Afghanistan’ )

Yes, you have the army, police and apparatchik to smother us and to bribe those who are Pavlov-reflexed to money, but you cannot stop us from restoring our voice.

We refuse to prostitute our hearts and minds.

We refuse you.

Not you the human person, but you the greedy system of self-interested power.

Again and again here in Afghanistan, we have seen a hope for non-violence light up; every day we see a yearning for humane relationships, and because of this, love is how we now firmly take our stand.

We will listen to the People on December 19th, on the Global Day of Listening to Afghans and we invite every one of you to pick up your phone to call us, to share one another’s pain, and to call our world to urgent reconciliation. We invite the world public opinion to overwhelm us! (email youthpeacevolunteers@gmail.com to arrange a call).

We wish to invite all the people of the world because when the powers are not listening to the people, listening becomes an act of love, it becomes a solidarity of non-violent resistance.

How can we do any less?

14-year-old Abdulai’s father was killed by the ‘Taliban’ and so, like every other human being, he copes with sorrow, hate, fear and anger.

But, he wakes up to the chronic war days in his land sensing that ‘something is very wrong with the world I’m caught up in’, ‘these elders of the world are not getting it…..’.

How does trillion-deficit killing, followed by the strategy of escalated killing and yet another review for more killing, work?

How does it make anyone safer?

How does it solve the incorruptible corruption, unequalled inequality and inviolate violence we face daily?

Your policies, skewed-ly ‘diagnosed’ and ‘reviewed’ in a cold clinical manner divorced from reality, have been deaf to the concerns and needs of the people, thus we endeavour to have a People’s Afghanistan December Review, because that’s what ordinary people can do.

We would try not to ‘throw’ our shoes at you. We would try to recognize the better side of all human beings and thus continue to serve our commoner’s tea and bread to one and all. But we do ask, plead and demand that you stop your unsustainable, superpower militarism.

We want peace.

We want you out.

With singular sincerity,

Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers
and
Afghans for Peace

Voices for Creative Nonviolence representatives in Kabul are privileged to be meeting with representatives of the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, (AYPV), a group of teenagers based in Bamiyan, Afghanistan who campaign to promote nonviolence.  As the Obama administration releases its December Review of U.S. war in Afghanistan, the AYPV, along with Afghans for Peace, have issued a review of their experiences.  To express support for their letter, follow this link:  http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41415.html

see

Nowhere to Turn and Nowhere to Hide