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Letter to the Editor, Guyana Chronicle c/o 173, Charlotte
Street October 30, 2001 Dear Sir, In his column on October 28, Rickey Singh congratulated WPA on holding a protest against the war in Afghanistan outside the US embassy. Only one group has been protesting against the war outside the embassy. Our multi-racial group is made up of women who came together as “ Women Opposed to Military Attacks Now” (WOMAN). Some of us are WPA, and when we invited men to join us on the third picket ( we’ve held three so far), two WPA men came. The rest of us belong to other parties, or none. We have been receiving news of anti-war protest in other countries. Many of them are led by women. But a lot of people find it hard to believe that women lead anything, especially when the political parties are not in control. We want to repeat some of the facts we put in the leaflet we hand out and on the placards we hold during the pickets, in order to explain why we are against the war in Afghanistan: (1) It is not a sane response to the terrible events of September 11. “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” (Mahatma Gandi). (2) No people anywhere – either in New York or Kabul (the capital of Afghanistan) should be treated as “collateral damage” ( that’s a term used by US spokesmen all the time; it’s like saying that you really intended to destroy something else but people got in the way). (3) Women and children are the majority of the people killed and wounded in wars and 80 percent of the refugees. (4) We want an end to investments in killing instead of caring. 80 billon US dollars a year would provide for the basic needs of everyone in the world, but even before the war in Afghanistan, 800 hundred billon US dollars a year was going to military budgets worldwide.
Yours sincerely, …………………………….
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