[Mb-civic] The Other Tsunami - IMPORTANT ARTICLE

[Michael Butler]

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    The Other Tsunami
    By John Pilger 
    The New Statesman

     10 January 2005 Issue
 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.

    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.

  

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