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The Other Tsunami: Man-Made Catastrophes |
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by John Pilger
Email: mbatko (nospam) lycos.com (verified) |
25 Feb 2005
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Victims of a mammoth natural disaster are worthy victims while victims of man-made imeprial catastrophes are unworthy.. The massive assistance for the tsunami victims offered by common people is a spectacular reemergence of public spirit. |
THE OTHER TSUNAMI
On Man-Made Catastrophes
By John Pilger
[This article published in: Sozialistische Zeitung, 1/1/2005 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.linksnet.de/artikel.php?id=1472. John Pilger is a well-known British journalist who publishes regular articles in the Guardian, the Independent and the Green Left Weekly.]
The western crusaders, the US and Great Britain, offer less assistance to the tsunami victims than the cost of a stealth bomber or a week of the bloody occupation of Iraq. A large part of the coasts of Sri Lanka could be rebuilt with the costs of George Bush’s inauguration party.
Bush and Blair first increased their little “relief” when it was clear that people all over the world spontaneously gave millions and a public relations problem threatened. The current generous contribution of the Blair government amounts to a sixteenth of the 800 million pounds spent for bombing Iraq before the invasion and hardly a twentieth of the gift of a billion pounds to the Indonesian military to purchase Hawk-fighter bombers stylized as a “soft gift.”
On November 24, a month before the tsunami struck, the Blair government supported a weapons fair in Jakarta that according to the Jakarta Post “served the urgent need of the Indonesian armed forces for strengthening their defense capacities.” The Indonesian military responsible for the genocide in East Timor killed over 20,000 civilians and “rebels” in Aceh. Rolls-Royce was the supplier of motors for the Hawk-bombers that terrorized and killed people in Aceh up to the day when the tsunami devastated the province. The tanks and machine guns were supplied by Great Britain.
The Australian government that now boasts of its modest reaction to the catastrophe afflicting its Asian neighbors has secretly trained Indonesian special forces whose atrocities committed in Aceh are well documented. This government stands in the tradition of Australia’s 40-year support of oppression in Indonesia, above all for the dictator Suharto when his troops massacred a third of East Timor’s population.
The government of John Howard infamous on account of the imprisonment of asylum-seeking children currently violates international maritime law by withholding $8 billion of profits from oil- and gas production due East Timor. Without this revenue, East Timor, the poorest country of the world, cannot build any schools, hospitals and streets or offer work to 90% of the unemployed youth.
Hardening, narcissism and the hypocritical propaganda of the rulers of the world and their partners are in full swing. Superlatives about their humanitarian intentions abound while the division of humanity into worthy and unworthy victims dominates the news. Victims of a mammoth natural disaster are worthy victims (how long this will last is uncertain) while victims of the man-made imperial catastrophes are unworthy and often not mentioned at all. Somehow the reporters don’t report about what happened in Aceh with the support of “our government.” This one-sided moral mirror allows us to ignore a destruction and massacre that is also a tsunami.
Take Afghanistan where clean water is unknown and the death of children is on the day’s agenda. At a 2001 conference of the Labor Party, Blair announced his famous crusade for the “new world order” with this promise: “We promise the Afghan people: We will not desert you. We will work with you to find a way out of the poverty that marks your miserable existence.”
The Blair government participated in Afghanistan’s conquest in which 20,000 civilians died. In all the great humanitarian crises of our lifetime, no country has suffered more and none has received as little help. 3% of all the international relief spent in Afghanistan was help for reconstruction, 84% was used for the military “coalition” led by the US and the rest consisted of crumbs for emergency relief. What is often presented as reconstruction is private investment like the $35 million to finance a planned five-star hotel earmarked mainly for foreigners. An advisor of the agricultural ministry in Kabul told me the government received less than 20% of the relief promised Afghanistan. “We don’t have enough money to pay wages or even plan the reconstruction.” That Afghanistan is the most unworthy of all victims is unmentioned. When an American combat helicopter repeatedly bombarded a remote peasants’ village and killed 93 civilians, a Pentagon official announced: “The people are dead because they wanted this.” I was aware of this other tsunami when I reported from Cambodia in 1979. After a decade of American bombing and the atrocities of the Pol-Pot regime, Cambodia was razed to the ground like Aceh today. The people suffered a collective trauma that few could explain. However no effective assistance came from western governments nine months after the collapse of the regime of the Khmer Rouge. Instead a UN embargo supported by the West and China was set up over Cambodia so that all assistance was impossible.
The problem of the Cambodians was that their liberators, the Vietnamese, stood on the wrong side in the Cold War and recently expelled the Americans from their country. This made them unworthy and dispensable victims.
A similar, largely hushed-up siege was imposed on Iraq in the 1990s and intensified during the Anglo-American “liberation.” In September 2004, UNICEF reported that the malnutrition of Iraqi children doubled during the occupation. Infant mortality is as high as in Burundi and higher than Haiti and Uganda. A paralyzing poverty and a chronic shortage in medicines exist. Cases of cancer rapidly increase, especially breast cancer. Radioactive contamination is widespread. More than 700 schools were destroyed by bombs. Of the billions that supposedly were earmarked for the reconstruction of Iraq, $29 million was spent, mostly for mercenaries’ protection. Little of this is worth reporting in the West.
This other tsunami is a worldwide phenomenon. It causes 24,000 deaths every day as a result of poverty, indebtedness and division, the products of a super-cult called neoliberalism. The United Nations recognized this in 1991 when it convened a conference of the richest states in 1991 in Paris with the goal of implementing an “action program” for rescuing the poorest countries of the West. Ten years later none of the obligations made by western governments was actually met.
No government has observed the UN goal of making available a pitiful 0.7% of its national income for assistance. Great Britain spends 0.34% and makes its “Department for International Development” into a bad joke. The US gives 0.15%, the lowest percentage of any industrial country.
Millions of people know their lives have been declared superfluous. The population in the West cannot imagine this. When wages-, food- and fuel-subsidies are abolished under the dictate of the IMF, small farmers and the landless know they face a catastrophe. Cases of suicide among farmers are rampant. Only the rich can protect their local industry and agriculture, says the World Trade Organization. Only they have the right to subsidize meat-, grain- and sugar exports. These exports squandered at artificially low prices in poor countries destroy livelihoods and many lives there.
Indonesia, once described by the World Bank, as a “model student of the global economy,” is a typical example. Many of those killed by the flood catastrophe were already robbed of their property by the policy of the IMF. Indonesia is heavily indebted at $110 billion.
The World Resources Institute says this man-made tsunami causes the death of 13-18 million children every year or the death of 12 million children under 5 according to a report of the UN. “If 100 million people were killed in the wars of the 20th century,: the Australian sociologist Michael McKinley said, “why are they privileged over the children who die every year as a result of the structural adjustment programs?”
That the causative system makes “democracy” into its battle cry is a mockery. More and more people in the world are aware of this. This growing consciousness is more than only a hope. After the crusaders in Washington and London squandered the sympathies of the world for the victims of September 11, 2001 to drive their crusade, a critical insight has developed in the general public to see people like Bush and Blair as liars and their punishable actions as crimes. The massive assistance for the tsunami victims now offered by common people in the West is a sign for a spectacular re-emergence of public spirit, morality and internationalism, attitudes rejected by the governments and middle class media. Tourists returning from the stricken countries tell with great gratitude of the generous assistance. Hearing the poorest of the poor is the antithesis to the “policy” that only cares for the greedy.
“The most spectacular expression of public morality that the world has ever seen.” With these words, the author Arundhati Roy described the indignation over the war all over the world two years ago. A French study estimates that 35 million persons demonstrated on February 15. Never had so many acted. This was only the beginning.
This altruism is more than rhetoric. Human renewal is not a superficial phenomenon but the continuation of a struggle that occasionally may seem frozen like a seed under the snow. Consider Latin America that was long seen in the West as invisible and superfluous. “Latin Americans were taught to be powerless,” Eduardo Galeano wrote recently. “A pedagogy inherited from colonial times was taught by violent soldiers, timorous teachers and weak fatalists anchored the belief in our souls that reality is incomprehensible and that we can only silently swallow the worries brought every day.” Galeano celebrates the rebirth of true democracy in his homeland Uruguay where people have united “against fear,” against privatization and the accompanying indecencies.
In Venezuela, the communal- and parliamentary elections in October brought the ninth democratic victory for the only government of the world that shares its oil wealth with the poorest. In Chile, the last military dictator supported by western governments, above all by the Thatcher government, is legally prosecuted by revived democratic forces.
These forces are part of a movement against inequality, poverty and war that has emerged in the last six years and is more diverse, daring, internationalist and tolerant regarding indwelling differences than anything in my lifetime. This movement is unencumbered by western liberalism that imagines itself as a higher form of life. The most insightful know that western colonialism is only colonialism under another name. The most understanding also know that a whole system of rule and impoverishment can be thwarted like the conquest of Iraq. |
See also:
http://www.mbtranslations.com
http://www.commondreams.org
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