[pagan-magik] The Other, Man-made Tsunami

[Ian]

January 07, 2005                                                                
The Other, Man-made Tsunami                                                     
By 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 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 a   
public relations problem beckoned. The Blair government's current "generous"    
contribution is one sixteenth of the ¶œ800m it spent bombing Iraq before the    
invasion and barely one twentieth of a billion pound 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 defense 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 terrorizing 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 8bn dollars. 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 
"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     
three 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 
are crumbs for emergency aid. What is often presented as reconstruction revenue 
is private investment, such as the 35m dollars 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 per cent 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 American 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. 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 29m dollars 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               
neo-liberalism. This was acknowledged by the United Nations in 1991 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  
the waffle of the British Chancellor (Treasurer) Gordon Brown about the Group   
of Eight "sharing Britain's dream" in ending poverty as just that: waffle.      
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   
per cent, making its "department of international development" a black joke.    
The US gives 0.15 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 Organization, are allowed to protect their home      
industries and agriculture; only they have the right to subsidize 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 dollars. The World Resources Institute says the toll of this      
man-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. "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 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 privatization 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 revitalized      
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.                 
                                                                                
 
-- 
Bye now,
        Ian.