[News] Pilger: The Other Tsunami

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   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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