from the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers
Dear Mr. Kofi Annan,
Salams from Afghanistan!
The six point peace plan which you have proposed for Syria has a collected calm that is missing in Afghanistan.
We are a grassroots group of ordinary, multi-ethnic Afghans and we’re tired of our world being like it is. We wish for a life of non-violence, the unity of all people, equality, and self-reliance, and we seek non-military solutions for Afghanistan.
But the profoundly greedy and antagonistic governments of today do not practice these values. The ground realities of our daily lives do not match up with any ‘ideal’ that leaders double-speak of, so enough!
We no longer expect anything from any leader except self-interest. We respect them as fellow human beings but we will not submit to their status-quo exploitation of the 99%.
We will not be robbed, then blamed.
We will not be killed, then compensated.
Nowadays, the people of the world are protesting this unequal status quo, because we all wish to live freely, free from the economic and geopolitical wars that cling to us like the stubborn soot of serial arson.
We apologize for ventilating to you, but if you have the chance to visit this ‘terrible war relic of a land’, you will immediately feel in the air the greed and the antagonism that the ‘war against terrorism’ has set alight. We’re not only speaking about the sights, sounds and smells of decay and death. We’re describing the rotting of our souls.
We distrust one another. We’re angry and hurting, and losing hope.
Meanwhile, the leaders strategize and fight behind closed doors, and make a show of negotiating. Their negotiations are ultimately tiring schemes to win through force.
Especially for Afghan mothers, force is the faucet of tears that won’t be turned off.
For U.S. and NATO leaders, we wish we could cup and bring these oceans of tears across the miles to their shores, to reason peaceably with them that however ‘just’, ‘necessary’ and ‘accurate’ they imagine their targeted killings to be, wars do not work, especially not for the people.
Mr Annan, just as you had quickly concluded in Syria, we’ve experienced that further militarization in an already militarized Afghanistan has not only been unhelpful, it has been distastefully unkind.
An ‘Annan Six Point Peace Plan for Afghanistan’ would bear immediate relevance for Afghanistan…