Jemima blames both US, Pakistan for drone killings

LONDON: Human rights campaigner and socialite Jemima Khan has said that both the Pakistani and the US authorities have serious questions to answer over the assassination of Pakistani civilians through unmanned drones run by the US but with the tacit approval of the Pakistani establishment.
At the London screening of her film on drone strikes inside Pakistan’s tribal areas titled “Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars”, Jemima Khan told The News in an exclusive interview that both the US and Pakistan were involved in the cover-up about the real number of civilians killed during the deadly drone campaign that, according to Jemima and several human rights organisations, have claimed around 3,000 lives, most of them civilians, including children and women.
She said the US claim that no civilians were killed in 2012 were laughable and questioned who were the children, men, women and elderly who have been killed in the drone strikes. She alleged that many of the civilians have not been registered in the data and the official figures available not only ignore the true number of the dead but are “downgraded”.
Referring to the controversial figures of the drone victims issued by the Pakistani government last week, the former wife of cricketer Imran Khan accused the Pakistani government of telling “blatant lies for money” to Pakistani public. “These figures have been downgraded, the conflict with the old figures. The figures produced in the Peshawar High Court by the government said that only two percent of those killed in drone strikes were militants while 98 percent were innocent civilians.”
She said she believed with the view that “war crimes” have been committed in Pakistan’s tribal areas by those involved in the killing of civilians and called for the “accountability of the perpetrators”.
She said that Pakistani governments have a history of lying to cover crimes against their own people who have suffered for no fault of theirs. She said that the WikiLeaks exposed that Pakistani government approved the drone operations but also stated to make fuss before the Pakistani public.
She held President Barack Obama’s policies responsible for the deaths of “178 children” in drone attacks. She said that President Obama has been a disappointment to many of his followers who had thought that he will pursue a different policy when elected but clearly that hasn’t happened. She said the US president has been crying over the “massacre” of children in Syria and elsewhere but has shed “no tears for the Pakistani victims of drones” and there are young people who are a “collateral damage”, “the teens who have no links with terrorist groups”, “completely innocent people going on about their daily lives”.
“President Obama, on the issue of the number of dead during drone strikes, is either lying or ignorant. It’s hugely problematic that a Nobel Peace Prize winning president ordered around 326 drone strikes since inaugurated as the US president. I find it hard to accept that he has been given the peace prize for the nuclear disarmament.”
She said that the drone campaign has traumatised tens of thousands of people living in tribal areas and “these people have been dehumanised, it’s as if they don’t matter as human beings, it’s important to bring out their stories in every possible way”.
She disagreed with the US view that the drone strikes have been successful in terminating some of the most wanted militants. “The problem is we are sold the myths that these drone strikes are precise and aim at targets only and that there is little collateral damage. The evidence shows that this is not true. Innocent people have been killed. Arbitrary assassination can never be accepted. We have to respect the international law and must not break because its consequences in the long run are too serious. Assassination without trial in this age and day is unbelievable.”
Answering a question about the death of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief, Jemima Khan said that his killing in the drone strike will not change anything as “there are 20 other candidates who are ready to step as the head of the Taliban. The US took out Mehsud in a drone strike but that’s only one Taliban leader, what about nearly 3,000 who have been killed? Killing people this way is not the solution.”
She said she was “genuinely opposed to the policy of drone killing because this is a counter-productive policy. You end up creating terrorism and radicalism through unlawful killings. In Fata, a million men are armed. The culture of revenge is common in that culture. Vast swathes of populations there are enraged and radicalised because of the drone strikes. Several militants in the west who got involved in extremist stuff cited drone strikes as the reasons behind drone strikes.
She supported Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief and her former husband’s call for peace talks with the militant groups. “Imran Khan has a point here. He runs Pakistan’s most volatile region. He has a point because the west had waged this war for almost ten years and in the end the UK and the US are talking to the Taliban. The question is why did the west this war resulting into the loss of lives of thousands of people. We are talking to the same people we have been fighting for all these years? Why was this war started if we were going to find a solution through talks in the end?”