Commentary
The Other, Man-made
Tsunami
By John Pilger
ZNet
January 07, 2005
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 £800m 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.
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