A DROP IN THE OCEAN
“If the money promised to the victims of the
tsunami falls far short of the amounts required,
it is partly because of other priorities,
namely the war on Iraq.” - author and
journalist, George Monbiot.
As our sympathy goes out to the many
thousands of victims of the tsunami disaster
and people across the world dig deep
into their pockets, disgust should be thrown
in the face of governments whose ‘generosity’
is not only dwarfed by the response
of the public, but is even more miserly when
compared to their own arms spending. Consider,
for instance, the cost of one B-2
bomber - a whopping $2 billion. US aid currently
equates to only a day and a half of
the money spent occupying Iraq, which
stands at $148 billion. The UK itself has already
spent £6 billion on massacring the
Iraq people.
The groundswell of empathy from ordinary
people in the face of such tragedy
makes us wonder just how long the war in
Iraq (or any other war) would last if we had
more pictures from the ground of the destruction
of Fallujah, the birth defects
caused by depleted uranium and people
killed and maimed by the aerial bombings.
Meanwhile, corporations have been
busy marketing their own brand of global
compassion. Take Starbucks, who in 2004
had a staggering market value of almost
$15 billion made off the backs of some of
the worlds 25 million grossly underpaid
coffee farmers - including those in Indonesia.
Their donation - a microscopic dent in
profits - is loaded less with generosity than
with cynicism and exploitation.
As for Coca-Cola, the bottled water they
are shipping to the victims in itself leaves a
trail of devastation and destruction. In India,
communities around Coca-Cola bottling
plants are experiencing severe water shortages
and the land has been polluted. The
abundance of pesticides used by Coca-
Cola, which includes DDT, has rendered the
agricultural land infertile, crippling the locals’
means of subsistence.
In the worst-hit province of Aceh, thousands
have been killed in a region which
has already suffered countless deaths and
mass displacements thanks to the Indonesian
military. Aceh is rich in resources - it
supplies much of the natural gas for Japan
and South Korea while Exxon Mobil take its
oil - yet remains in poverty.
Five years ago a million Acehnese (that’s
a quarter of the population!) held a massive
peaceful demonstration calling for a referendum
for a chance to vote on independence
from Indonesia. The military decided to crush
the movement, carrying out assassinations,
‘disappearing’ leaders and raping female activists.
Jafar Siddiq Hamsa, a leading international
spokesman for the Acehnese, returned
home in 2000. He was abducted, and his body
returned wrapped in barbed wire, with multiple
stab wounds and his face sliced off.
Meanwhile Exxon has spent millions over the
past three decades, hiring Indonesian security
forces to protect company facilities in
Aceh in full knowledge that troops were committing
gross violations of human rights
against civilians.
Allan Nairn, a journalist once jailed by
the Indonesian army, spells out the future:
“We should put this in perspective. Now
the world is looking at Aceh for the first
time ever and will probably never again look
at Aceh with this intensity, but as dramatic
as this act of nature is, it’s still far less than
the death toll over just a couple of years
due to hunger and poor nutrition, diarrhoea;
deaths mainly among children who live in
poverty in Aceh. It’s also dwarfed by the
military massacres carried out by the Indonesian
military in various places. They killed
200,000 in Timor. They killed anywhere from
400,000 to a million in Indonesia itself when
they consolidated power in 1965 to 1967.
So, the concern that the world has now for
this disaster is appropriate, but we should
have that concern all the time. When people
are dying, not just from natural tsunamis,
but from military or police bullets, often
paid for by the United States, or dying from
preventable hunger. There are also thousands
of American individuals who could
sit down right now and write a check for $50
million. They could save tens of thousands
of lives, but there’s no social pressure on
them to do that, because we live in a world
where it’s assumed that it’s okay to let people
starve while the dollar that can save them
sits idly in your pocket.”
Or as author Jonathan Schell put it
“Why, we might ask, is there, alongside
armed forces in almost every country, no
established international rescue army – no
well-funded international force fully
equipped with emergency gear ready to give
prompt aid in any large-scale catastrophe?
Initial funding might be $100 billion – a mere
10 percent of the trillion or so the world
spends annually on arms. Why, when human
need is the greatest, should the human
response always be left to improvisation?
There is no reason to think that nature had
any lesson in mind, whether about the
world’s bloated, multiplying nuclear arsenals
or anything else, when it shoved one
tectonic plate beneath another, causing the
earthquake that caused the tsunami. But we
are free to draw a lesson: Leave mass destruction
to nature. Our job should be to
protect and preserve life.”
* Read the interview with Allan Nairn
ww.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/
12/29/161219
*Read George Monbiot’s article on the tsunami
aid pledge and military spending at
www.alternet.org/waroniraq/20885/
tsunami falls far short of the amounts required,
it is partly because of other priorities,
namely the war on Iraq.” - author and
journalist, George Monbiot.
As our sympathy goes out to the many
thousands of victims of the tsunami disaster
and people across the world dig deep
into their pockets, disgust should be thrown
in the face of governments whose ‘generosity’
is not only dwarfed by the response
of the public, but is even more miserly when
compared to their own arms spending. Consider,
for instance, the cost of one B-2
bomber - a whopping $2 billion. US aid currently
equates to only a day and a half of
the money spent occupying Iraq, which
stands at $148 billion. The UK itself has already
spent £6 billion on massacring the
Iraq people.
The groundswell of empathy from ordinary
people in the face of such tragedy
makes us wonder just how long the war in
Iraq (or any other war) would last if we had
more pictures from the ground of the destruction
of Fallujah, the birth defects
caused by depleted uranium and people
killed and maimed by the aerial bombings.
Meanwhile, corporations have been
busy marketing their own brand of global
compassion. Take Starbucks, who in 2004
had a staggering market value of almost
$15 billion made off the backs of some of
the worlds 25 million grossly underpaid
coffee farmers - including those in Indonesia.
Their donation - a microscopic dent in
profits - is loaded less with generosity than
with cynicism and exploitation.
As for Coca-Cola, the bottled water they
are shipping to the victims in itself leaves a
trail of devastation and destruction. In India,
communities around Coca-Cola bottling
plants are experiencing severe water shortages
and the land has been polluted. The
abundance of pesticides used by Coca-
Cola, which includes DDT, has rendered the
agricultural land infertile, crippling the locals’
means of subsistence.
In the worst-hit province of Aceh, thousands
have been killed in a region which
has already suffered countless deaths and
mass displacements thanks to the Indonesian
military. Aceh is rich in resources - it
supplies much of the natural gas for Japan
and South Korea while Exxon Mobil take its
oil - yet remains in poverty.
Five years ago a million Acehnese (that’s
a quarter of the population!) held a massive
peaceful demonstration calling for a referendum
for a chance to vote on independence
from Indonesia. The military decided to crush
the movement, carrying out assassinations,
‘disappearing’ leaders and raping female activists.
Jafar Siddiq Hamsa, a leading international
spokesman for the Acehnese, returned
home in 2000. He was abducted, and his body
returned wrapped in barbed wire, with multiple
stab wounds and his face sliced off.
Meanwhile Exxon has spent millions over the
past three decades, hiring Indonesian security
forces to protect company facilities in
Aceh in full knowledge that troops were committing
gross violations of human rights
against civilians.
Allan Nairn, a journalist once jailed by
the Indonesian army, spells out the future:
“We should put this in perspective. Now
the world is looking at Aceh for the first
time ever and will probably never again look
at Aceh with this intensity, but as dramatic
as this act of nature is, it’s still far less than
the death toll over just a couple of years
due to hunger and poor nutrition, diarrhoea;
deaths mainly among children who live in
poverty in Aceh. It’s also dwarfed by the
military massacres carried out by the Indonesian
military in various places. They killed
200,000 in Timor. They killed anywhere from
400,000 to a million in Indonesia itself when
they consolidated power in 1965 to 1967.
So, the concern that the world has now for
this disaster is appropriate, but we should
have that concern all the time. When people
are dying, not just from natural tsunamis,
but from military or police bullets, often
paid for by the United States, or dying from
preventable hunger. There are also thousands
of American individuals who could
sit down right now and write a check for $50
million. They could save tens of thousands
of lives, but there’s no social pressure on
them to do that, because we live in a world
where it’s assumed that it’s okay to let people
starve while the dollar that can save them
sits idly in your pocket.”
Or as author Jonathan Schell put it
“Why, we might ask, is there, alongside
armed forces in almost every country, no
established international rescue army – no
well-funded international force fully
equipped with emergency gear ready to give
prompt aid in any large-scale catastrophe?
Initial funding might be $100 billion – a mere
10 percent of the trillion or so the world
spends annually on arms. Why, when human
need is the greatest, should the human
response always be left to improvisation?
There is no reason to think that nature had
any lesson in mind, whether about the
world’s bloated, multiplying nuclear arsenals
or anything else, when it shoved one
tectonic plate beneath another, causing the
earthquake that caused the tsunami. But we
are free to draw a lesson: Leave mass destruction
to nature. Our job should be to
protect and preserve life.”
* Read the interview with Allan Nairn
ww.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/
12/29/161219
*Read George Monbiot’s article on the tsunami
aid pledge and military spending at
www.alternet.org/waroniraq/20885/
posted by moodswing at 7:45 pm
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