The other tsunami
While the sea may have killed tens of thousands, western policies kill
millions every year. Yet even amid disaster, a new politics of community
and morality is emerging. By John Pilger
http://www.newstatesman.com/nscoverstory.htm
The west's crusaders, the United States and Britain, are giving less to
help the tsunami victims than the cost of a Stealth bomber or a week's
bloody occupation of Iraq. The bill for George Bush's coming
inauguration party would rebuild much of the coastline of Sri Lanka.
Bush and Blair increased their first driblets of "aid" only when it
became clear that people all over the world were spontaneously giving
millions and that a public relations problem beckoned. The Blair
government's current "generous" contribution is one-sixteenth of the
£800m it spent on bombing Iraq before the invasion and barely
one-twentieth of a £1bn gift, known as a soft loan, to the Indonesian
military so that it could acquire Hawk fighter-bombers.
On 24 November, one month before the tsunami struck, the Blair
government gave its backing to an arms fair in Jakarta, "designed to
meet an urgent need for the [Indonesian] armed forces to review its
defence capabilities", reported the Jakarta Post. The Indonesian
military, responsible for genocide in East Timor, has killed more than
20,000 civilians and "insurgents" in Aceh. Among the exhibitors at the
arms fair was Rolls-Royce, manufacturer of engines for the Hawks, which,
along with British-supplied Scorpion armoured vehicles, machine-guns and
ammunition, were terrorising and killing people in Aceh up to the day
the tsunami devastated the province.
The Australian government, currently covering itself in glory for its
modest response to the historic disaster befallen its Asian neighbours,
has secretly trained Indonesia's Kopassus special forces, whose
atrocities in Aceh are well documented. This is in keeping with
Australia's 40-year support for oppression in Indonesia, notably its
devotion to the dictator Suharto while his troops slaughtered a third of
the population of East Timor. The government of John Howard - notorious
for its imprisonment of child asylum-seekers - is at present defying
international maritime law by denying East Timor its due of oil and gas
royalties worth some $8bn. Without this revenue, East Timor, the world's
poorest country, cannot build schools, hospitals and roads or provide
work for its young people, 90 per cent of whom are unemployed.
The hypocrisy, narcissism and dissembling propaganda of the rulers of
the world and their sidekicks are in full cry. Superlatives abound as to
their humanitarian intent while the division of humanity into worthy and
unworthy victims dominates the news. The victims of a great natural
disaster are worthy (though for how long is uncertain) while the victims
of man-made imperial disasters are unworthy and very often
unmentionable. Somehow, reporters cannot bring themselves to report what
has been going on in Aceh, supported by "our" government. This one-way
moral mirror allows us to ignore a trail of destruction and carnage that
is another tsunami.
Consider the plight of Afghanistan, where clean water is unknown and
death in childbirth common. At the Labour Party conference in 2001, Tony
Blair announced his famous crusade to "reorder the world" with the
pledge: "To the Afghan people, we make this commitment . . . We will not
walk away . . . we will work with you to make sure [a way is found] out
of the miserable poverty that is your present existence." The Blair
government was on the verge of taking part in the conquest of
Afghanistan, in which as many as 25,000 civilians died. In all the great
humanitarian crises in living memory, no country suffered more and none
has been helped less. Just 3 per cent of all international aid spent in
Afghanistan has been for reconstruction, 84 per cent is for the US-led
military "coalition" and the rest is crumbs for emergency aid. What is
often presented as reconstruction revenue is private investment, such as
the $35m that will finance a proposed five-star hotel, mostly for
foreigners. An adviser to the minister of rural affairs in Kabul told me
his government had received less than 20 per cent of the aid promised to
Afghan-istan. "We don't even have enough money to pay wages, let alone
plan reconstruction," he said.
The reason, unspoken of course, is that Afghans are the unworthiest of
victims. When US helicopter gunships repeatedly machine-gunned a remote
farming village, killing as many as 93 civilians, a Pentagon official
was moved to say, "The people there are dead because we wanted them dead."
I became acutely aware of this other tsunami when I reported from
Cambodia in 1979. Following a decade of American bombing and Pol Pot's
barbarities, Cambodia lay as stricken as Aceh is today. Disease beckoned
famine and people suffered a collective trauma few could explain. Yet
for nine months after the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime, no
effective aid arrived from western governments. Instead, a western- and
Chinese-backed UN embargo was imposed on Cambodia, denying virtually the
entire machinery of recovery and assistance. The problem for the
Cambodians was that their liberators, the Vietnamese, had come from the
wrong side of the cold war, having recently expelled the Americans from
their homeland. That made them unworthy victims, and expendable.
A similar, largely unreported siege was forced on Iraq during the 1990s
and intensified during the Anglo-American "liberation". Last September,
Unicef reported that malnutrition among Iraqi children had doubled under
the occupation. Infant mortality is now at the level of Burundi, higher
than in Haiti and Uganda. There is crippling poverty and a chronic
shortage of medicines. Cases of cancer are rising rapidly, especially
breast cancer; radioactive pollution is widespread. More than 700
schools are bomb-damaged. Of the billions said to have been allocated
for reconstruction in Iraq, just $29m has been spent, most of it on
mercenaries guarding foreigners. Little of this is news in the west.
This other tsunami is worldwide, causing 24,000 deaths every day from
poverty and debt and division that are the products of a supercult
called neoliberalism. This was acknowledged by the United Nations in
1990 when it called a conference in Paris of the richest states with the
aim of implementing a "programme of action" to rescue the world's
poorest nations. A decade later, virtually every commitment made by
western governments had been broken, making Gordon Brown's waffle about
the G8 "sharing Britain's dream" of ending poverty as just that: waffle.
Very few western governments have honoured the United Nations "baseline"
and allotted a miserable 0.7 per cent or more of their national income
to overseas aid. Britain gives just 0.34 per cent, making its
"Department for International Development" a black joke. The US gives
0.14 per cent, the lowest of any industrial state.
Largely unseen and unimagined by westerners, millions of people know
their lives have been declared expendable. When tariffs and food and
fuel subsidies are eliminated under an IMF diktat, small farmers and the
landless know they face disaster, which is why suicides among farmers
are an epidemic. Only the rich, says the World Trade Organisation, are
allowed to protect their home industries and agriculture; only they have
the right to subsidise exports of meat, grain and sugar and dump them in
poor countries at artificially low prices, thereby destroying
livelihoods and lives.
Indonesia, once described by the World Bank as "a model pupil of the
global economy", is a case in point. Many of those washed to their
deaths in Sumatra on Boxing Day were dispossessed by IMF policies.
Indonesia owes an unrepayable debt of $110bn. The World Resources
Institute says the toll of this man-made tsunami reaches 13-18 million
child deaths worldwide every year; or 12 million children under the age
of five, according to a UN Human Development Report. "If 100 million
have been killed in the formal wars of the 20th century," wrote the
Australian social scientist Michael McKinley, "why are they to be
privileged in comprehension over the annual [death] toll of children
from structural adjustment programmes since 1982?"
That the system causing this has democracy as its war cry is a mockery
which people all over the world increasingly understand. It is this
rising awareness, consciousness even, that offers more than hope. Since
the crusaders in Washington and London squandered world sympathy for the
victims of 11 September 2001 in order to accelerate their campaign of
domination, a critical public intelligence has stirred and regards the
likes of Blair and Bush as liars and their culpable actions as crimes.
The current outpouring of help for the tsunami victims among ordinary
people in the west is a spectacular reclaiming of the politics of
community, morality and internationalism denied them by governments and
corporate propaganda. Listening to tourists returning from stricken
countries, consumed with gratitude for the gracious, expansive way some
of the poorest of the poor gave them shelter and cared for them, one
hears the antithesis of "policies" that care only for the avaricious.
"The most spectacular display of public morality the world has ever
seen", was how the writer Arundhati Roy described the anti-war anger
that swept across the world almost two years ago. A French study now
estimates that 35 million people demonstrated on that February day and
says there has never been anything like it; and it was just a beginning.
This is not rhetorical; human renewal is not a phenomenon, rather the
continuation of a struggle that may appear at times to have frozen but
is a seed beneath the snow. Take Latin America, long declared invisible
and expendable in the west. "Latin Americans have been trained in
impotence," wrote Eduardo Galeano the other day. "A pedagogy passed down
from colonial times, taught by violent soldiers, timorous teachers and
frail fatalists, has rooted in our souls the belief that reality is
untouchable and that all we can do is swallow in silence the woes each
day brings." Galeano was celebrating the rebirth of real democracy in
his homeland, Uruguay, where people have voted "against fear", against
privatisation and its attendant indecencies. In Venezuela, municipal and
state elections in October notched up the ninth democratic victory for
the only government in the world sharing its oil wealth with its poorest
people. In Chile, the last of the military fascists supported by western
governments, notably Thatcher, are being pursued by revitalised
democratic forces.
These forces are part of a movement against inequality and poverty and
war that has arisen in the past six years and is more diverse, more
enterprising, more internationalist and more tolerant of difference than
anything in my lifetime. It is a movement unburdened by a western
liberalism that believes it represents a superior form of life; the
wisest know this is colonialism by another name. The wisest also know
that just as the conquest of Iraq is unravelling, so a whole system of
domination and impoverishment can unravel, too.
www.johnpilger.com
--
Jez
'Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable
notion that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often
led to accept, without much questioning, someone else's version of what
that reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be
skeptical of someone else's description of reality.'-
Howard Zinn
NFS Underground2, Americas Army And MOH-PA
yahoo ID: hellward2004
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