John Pilger
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 US President George Bush's coming
inauguration party would rebuild much of the coastline of Sri
Lanka.
Bush and British PM Tony Blair increased their first
driblets of “aid” only when it became clear that
people all over the world were spontaneously giving millions
and a public relations problem beckoned. The Blair
government's current “generous” contribution is one
16th of the £800 million it spent bombing Iraq before the
invasion and barely a 20th of a £1 billion gift, known as
a “soft loan”, to the Indonesian military so that it
could acquire Hawk fighter-bombers.
On November 24, one month before the tsunami struck, the
Blair government gave its backing to an arms fair in Jakarta,
which the Jakarta Post reported was “designed to
meet an urgent need for the [Indonesian] armed forces to
review its defense capabilities”. The Indonesian
military, responsible for genocide in East Timor, has also
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 presently
defying international maritime law by denying East Timor its
due of oil and gas royalties worth some A$8 billion. Without
this revenue, East Timor, the world's poorest country, cannot
build schools, hospitals and roads or provide work for its
young people, 90% of whom are unemployed.
Unworthy victims
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 human-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 British Labour
Party conference in 2001, Tony Blair announced his famous
crusade to “re-order 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 poverty that is your miserable
existence.”
The Blair government had just taken part in the conquest of
Afghanistan, in which as many as 20,000 civilians died. Of all
the great humanitarian crises in living memory, no country
suffered more and none has been helped less. Just 3% of all
international aid spent in Afghanistan has been for
reconstruction, 84% 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 US$35 million that will
finance a proposed five-star hotel, mostly for foreigners. An
adviser to the minister of rural affairs in Kabul told me the
government had received less than 20% of the aid promised to
Afghanistan. “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 US
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 it
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. 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. Cancer cases 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 US$29 million has been spent, most of it on
mercenaries guarding foreigners. Little of this makes news in
the West.
Worldwide tsumani
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 1991 when it called a
conference in Paris of the richest eight states with the aim
of implementing a “program of action” to rescue the
world's poorest nations. A decade later, virtually every
commitment made by Western governments had been broken.
Not one government has honoured the United Nations
“baseline” and allotted a miserable 0.7% of its
national income to overseas aid. Britain gives just 0.34%,
making its “department of international development”
a black joke. The US gives 0.15%, 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
International Monetary Fund 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.
Many of those washed to their deaths in Sumatra on Boxing
Day were dispossessed by IMF policies. Indonesia owes an
unrepayable debt of US$110 billion. The World Resources
Institute says the toll of this human-made tsunami reaches
13-18 million child deaths every year; or 12 million children
under the age of five, according to a UN Development Report.
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
September 11, 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.
Reclaiming community
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 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 unraveling, so a whole system of
domination and impoverishment can unravel, too.
From
Green Left Weekly, January 19, 2005.
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