TALIBAN FARING BETTER THAN VENEZUELA

What is evil in Afghanistan is also evil in Venezuela, writes

The return of the TALIBAN to power in Afghanistan has aroused a din of demands for the protection of human rights of girls to attend school and women’s rights to work. Forced marriage of infant girls, and women giving their intellectual and artistic talents to the development of their country, people, and the global culture is getting intensive diplomatic support. The Taliban are being pushed back from brutal religious, military and political practices shown in their first regime in the 1990s. The governments and “human rights NGOs” harassing the Taliban include those of NATO. President Biden has bluntly focused on rebuilding the economy, social and cultural condition of his country.

There is a historic lesson backing Biden. In the 1960s President Lyndon Johnson announced a vision for modernising his underdeveloped and politically repressive Southern states. The “brightest and the best’’ staff around the assassinated John F. Kennedy diverted his budgets into funding bombs dropped into swamps and forests of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The poverty, racism and inequality that Johnson wished to end continued to fester.

President Biden has remained silent on Venezuela terrorised by past American administrations. America’s campaigners for human rights in Afghanistan have been loudly silent about their government’s violations of human right to health, education, food and political life by peoples of Venezuela.

Biden is following a long tradition. While the United States supported Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista against Fidel Castro’s guerrilla army, the ruler of Venezuela sent weapons into Cuba’s mountains, the Sieara Maestra, where the guerrillas were based. In 1958 when Richard Nixon’s motorcade rolled on streets of Havana, crowds aroused by radio broadcasts from Castro’s fighters, pelted the visitor with tomatoes and eggs.

Rich Cuban families who fled to the State of Florida, have waited for the fall of Cuba’s communism to regain their lost paradise. They continue to sell their votes to politicians who stoke their dreams. Following close relations between Hugo Chavez (Venezuela’s military paratrooper elected to presidency in 1998), this voting capital has also become invested in hostility to Venezuela.

Hugo Chavez made this voter hostility justifiable. During the Cold War, he aroused wrath in Washington by challenging their strategic doctrine that their Caribbean and South American backyard is forbidden ground to Communist Soviet Union. As Che Guevara, a freshly graduated medical doctor, found out when he travelled by motorcycle from Argentina to Mexico, the “Ugly American’’ was a giant crushing the region’s development and dignity.

American companies, like United Fruit, used slavelabour to grow bananas, pineapples, wheat on vast fertile land and exported the products to benefit America consumers. Politicians who were fired by angry patriotism were being assassinated or overthrown from power. In Brazil thousands of supporters of the country’s Communist Party were massacred by local military officers trained by American military academies. Che Guevara’s shock prepared him for joining Castro’s adventure when they met in Mexico.

Hugo Chavez became the voice of opposition to this historical record. He preached a linkage between ordinary peoples of South America over heads of leaders put in power by American intelligence operatives; corrupt and oppressive land owners, etc. He advocated grand projects which linked all the South American countries, including a common bank which funded development projects in all the countries.

With Venezuela earning vast income from its oil sales, Chavez started giving out funds to support budget expenditures on education, health clinics, roads, electricity plants in nine countries which joined his association for reviving Bolivar’s vision of a union of South Americans. Accordingly they imported oil from Venezuela on a credit payable after 25 years at the very low interest rate of one percent.

Chavez added the novel scheme of flying patients from these countries to be given free high quality medical treatment by Cuba’s best doctors. Cuba was paid for this service in cash and oil. The contrast between this model of conducting a ‘revolution by providing “stomach infrastructure’’, as well as political education, was stark. It is a theme which currently flows with pronouncements by China as her diplomacy competes with that of the United States of America.

While President Biden may be constrained by Cuban exiles in Florida, it is not clear why Civil Society activists in North America and Europe are covering the stain in their conscience by American terrorism against the people of Venezuela. Al Jazeera has highlighted health hazards facing Taliban rule, including salaries of staff in the largest hospital not paid since May 2021; 86 female staff locked out; lack of medicines, broken equipment and over $9 billion of the country’s money frozen in American banks, etc.

It is very important to bring out this truth. What is evil against Afghanistan must also be regarded as evil against Venezuela.

AMERICA’S CAMPAIGNERS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN AFGHANISTAN HAVE BEEN LOUDLY SILENT ABOUT THEIR GOVERNMENT’S VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHT TO HEALTH, EDUCATION, FOOD AND POLITICAL LIFE BY PEOPLES OF VENEZUELA