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 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.
