<html>
<body>
<font size=3><br><br>
<br>
The Other Tsunami<br>
By John Pilger<br>
The New Statesman<br><br>
10 January 2005 Issue<br><br>
While the sea may have killed tens of thousands, western
policies<br>
kill millions every year. Yet even amid disaster, a new
politics of<br>
community and morality is emerging.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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?"<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<br><br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<font size=3 color="#FF0000">The Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br>
(415) 863-9977<br>
</font><font size=3><a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/" eudora="autourl">www.freedomarchives.org</a></font></body>
</html>