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 President George W Bush’s coming inauguration party would rebuild much of the coastline of Sri Lanka. Bush and Tony Blair increased their first driblets of ”aid” only when it became clear that people worldwide were giving millions and a public relations problem beckoned.
The Blair government’s ”generous” contribution is one-sixteenth of the £800-million it spent bombing Iraq before the invasion and 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 November 24 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 fair was Rolls Royce, manufacturer of engines for the Hawks, which were terrorising and killing people in Aceh up to the day the tsunami struck.
The Australian government, currently covering itself in glory for its modest response to the disaster, 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 is presently defying international maritime law by denying East Timor its due of oil and gas royalties worth $8-billion. Without this revenue, East Timor, the world’s poorest country, cannot build schools, hospitals and roads or provide work for its young people.
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 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. 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 2001 Labour Party conference 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.”
Blair’s government had just taken part in the conquest of Afghanistan, in which about 20 000 civilians died.
Just 3% of all international aid spent in Afghanistan has been for reconstruction, 84% is for the US-led military ”coalition” and the rest is crumbs for emergency aid. The reason, unspoken, is that Afghans are the unworthiest of victims.
I became acutely aware of this other tsunami when I reported from Cambodia in 1979. Following a decade of US 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 aid arrived from Western governments.
Instead, a Western- and Chinese-backed UN embargo was imposed on Cambodia, denying virtually all 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.
A similar, largely unreported siege was forced on Iraq during the 1990s and intensified during the Anglo-American ”liberation”. Last September the UN Children’s Fund reported malnutrition among Iraqi children had doubled under the occupation. There is crippling poverty and a chronic shortage of medicines. Of the billions allocated for reconstruction, only $29-million has been spent, most of it on mercenaries guarding foreigners.
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 UN 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 poorest nations.
A decade later, virtually every commitment made by Western governments had been broken. Not one government has honoured the UN ”baseline” and allotted a miserable 0,7% of its national income to aid.
Largely unseen by Westerners, millions of people know their lives have been declared expendable. When tariffs and food and fuel subsidies are eliminated under an International Monetary Fund (IMF) diktat, small farmers 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; 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 lives.
Indonesia 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 $110-billion. The World Resources Institute says the toll of this man-made tsunami reaches between 13- and 18-million child deaths every year.
”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 that people worldwide increasingly understand. It is this rising awareness that offers more than hope.
Since the crusaders in Washington and London squandered world sympathy for the victims of September 11 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 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 way the poor gave them shelter, one hears the antithesis of ”policies” that care only for the avaricious.
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 expendable. ”Latin Americans have been trained in impotence,” wrote Eduardo Galeano. ”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 democracy in his homeland, Uruguay, where people have voted ”against fear”, against privatisation. In Venezuela, 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 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. — Â