One of the world's great women. Plus: Does jewelry fund terror?

Amy Goodman has an outstanding interview with Malalai Joya, an Afghan member of parliament thrown out of that chamber (called the Loya Jirga) in 2003, after she protested the inclusion of warlords and other criminals. Joya, whom we may fairly call Afghanistan's answer to Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi, is the subject of a new documentary called Enemies of Happiness.

Here's what she has to say to Goodman:

And the reason that I stand up against these fundamentalist warlords and I expose their mask, because, unfortunately, they were in power and they control Loya Jirga, and they are those people that after 9/11, they -- mentally they are same like Taliban, but physically they changed. By mask of democracy and support of US and its allies, they come in power.

They were those criminals that from ’92 to ’96, when they were in power, they killed only, in the capital of Afghanistan, 65,000 innocent people, just because of power in the civil war. And also they raped even a seventy-year-old grandmother and also a seven-year-old baby, and many more violence against women. And also they are those criminals that they destroyed completely our country, and they were a puppet of foreign countries.

Joya's website is here:

Joya said the Afghan people had been hopeful the US-led invasion "would bring democracy for them and security for them and many more things like that, but unfortunately we are looking at a worse situation than the Taleban period."

From an interview with PBS:

It seems that the U.S. government and its allies want to rely on them [the warlords] and install them to the most important posts in the executive, legislation and judicial bodies. Today the whole country is in their hands and they can do anything using their power, money and guns. They grab billions of dollars from foreign aid, drugs and precious stones smuggling.

The U.S. wants a group or band in Afghanistan to obey its directions accurately and act according to the U.S. policies, and these fundamentalists' bands of the Northern Alliance have proved throughout their life that they are ready to sacrifice Afghanistan's national interests for their lust for power and money. The U.S. has no interest in the prosperity of our people as long as its regional and strategic interests are met.

(Emphasis added.) Perhaps we should take a side-trip down the gemstone trail...

Few people consider the implications of precious stone smuggling out of Afghanistan; you can read more about it here and here. Emeralds and other gems are smuggled into Pakistan and sold, interestingly enough, to buyers from Poland, which has increasingly close ties to U.S. neocons. In this light, we should take a close look at this important (and overlooked) Washington Post piece from last year, which mentions that in the late 1990s, Osama Bin Laden himself ran a gem smuggling operation to raise money for Al Qaeda.

The implications of this are worth considering. The Russian mob controls much of the world's trade in illicit gems. The most recent edition of Daniel Hopsicker's Welcome to Terrorland includes two new chapters a new chapter entitled "Late-Breaking News: The Russian Mob and 9/11." (You may also want to read this page, which I would classify as "provisionally believable," although the citing of Wayne Madsen necessitates a "consider the source" caveat.)