Author:
Guilherme Statter
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Date Posted: 7/01/05 13:23:12
Acabo de receber este editorial.
Como me parece muito oportuno transcrevo uma parte. Peço desculpa a quem não ler bem Inglês.
Sem mais comentários... Como na "Euronews"...
Wave of shame
John Pilger
Mail and Guardian - South Africa
06 January 2005 04:51
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.
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.
Nota - Este último detalhe, por acaso, até nem é completamente verdade: A Dinamarca e (quase...) Portugal, lá vão cumprindo...
Cordiais saudações,
Guilherme Statter
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