The Other Tsunami

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  John Pilger

01/06/05 "New Statesman" -- 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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