The Other, Man-made
Tsunami
By John Pilger
10 January, 2005
Znet
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.