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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