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NEWS & LETTERS, January-February 2005EditorialCapitalism adds to tsunami horrorThe tsunami of Dec. 26 was one of the worst natural calamities to strike humanity. The immediate death toll was well over 220,000 and as many or more may die in an aftermath of hunger, disease from bad water, and lack of medical treatment for survivors with festering wounds. The destruction even reached Africa but was most devastating in the South Asian nations that line the Indian Ocean, especially Indonesia, Thailand, India and Sri Lanka. The tidal wave had a crushing impact on at least five million people's lives. The Acheh province of Indonesia on Sumatra was the closest to the epicenter of the quake and received the severest blow. SAVAGERY OF THE MILITARY Acheh also revealed most sharply how the tsunami's death and destruction was not only born of natural causes but was also the result of the savagery of capitalism, especially as personified by the corrupt Indonesian military, which has kept Acheh under its brutal rule for decades. The people of Acheh have been fighting for centuries against foreign rule--first from the Dutch and Japanese and now the Indonesian military. Since 1976 the Free Acheh Movement (GAM) has been fighting for national self-determination while the Indonesian military has conducted a repressive rule of systematic torture, murder and rape against civilians. As aid for tsunami victims poured in, the military hoarded it in their compounds, selling it to civilians and using the human catastrophe to go after any dissidents who came out of hiding to do humanitarian work. It is a scandal that the Acheh liberation struggle has received little or no support from the Left. As Peter Hudis put it in an immediate appeal for Acheh on our web site: "The irony is that at the very moment when a good number of 'progressives' find a million and one excuses for 'solidarizing' with some of the neo-fascist Islamic fundamentalist militias that are terrorizing Iraqi workers and feminists, all because some of them for now 'oppose the U.S. occupation,' there's dead silence on extending solidarity with common folk who want nothing more than to live in peace." Reports of the tsunami's devastation engendered massive spontaneous expressions of human solidarity from ordinary people all over the world. In Acheh, medical and aid volunteers rushed to the scene but were hamstrung at each step by the 70,000 Indonesian troops running Acheh as their private fiefdom. They are now using the disaster to further solidify their bloody rule. At least in Sri Lanka, where there is also an ongoing fight for national independence among the Tamils, the government there agreed to a truce in order to coordinate aid. As help and money rushed in from around the globe, President Bush made no public statement on the disaster for a full 72 hours. Last year Bush administration operatives openly declared the U.S. government is the maker of global "reality" to which all the world, as extensions of its capitalist empire, must accommodate. The reality, not only of nature, but also of millions of ordinary human beings acting on their concern, expunged that grand illusion. Ordinary people asked why this empire, which sucks vast resources into a militarized science, has no priority for installing a tsunami warning system for poor nations like the one that already exists on the Pacific Rim. Why was it that the U.S. Pacific Warning Center in Hawaii, which measured the strength of the undersea earthquake and gave the U.S. Indian Ocean naval base on Diego Garcia adequate notice of an impending catastrophe, did not even have a mechanism in place to warn the poor nations in the region? The Bush administration's puny initial offering of $35 million in aid shocked Senator Leahy, who made an apt contrast when he said, "We spend $35 million before breakfast in Iraq." To patch up his public relations disaster, Bush sent his emissaries, Secretary of State Colin Powell and his brother Jeb Bush, to the area to place the U.S. at the head of the relief effort and declare that $35 million was just a start. Then, to further save face, "W" Bush asked former Presidents Clinton and George H. W. Bush to head a fundraising drive for tsunami relief. Governments have now pledged substantial amounts for assistance and rebuilding. However the record from past disasters, like the Hurricane Mitch in Honduras, shows that when the headlines are gone only a small fraction of the aid is actually realized. The result is that the poor in the impacted regions are left in the severest destitution for the foreseeable future. After crucial days were lost, President Bush then used the U.S. military to rush aid to Acheh while carefully not stepping on the authority of the Indonesian military. Heart-wrenching scenes of desperate people swarming around helicopters revealed also the effect of having been ignored and isolated for so long. Just as the extent and depth of inhuman conditions were coming to light, the Indonesian military chose to set a March deadline for foreign presence to leave Acheh. What scares them most is the spotlight being shined on their Acheh rule by the thousands of foreign witnesses, journalists and relief organizations, who have been kept out for so long. The mass of unarmed aid workers say they could get help to those who need it throughout Acheh if they weren't hampered by the Indonesian military in the name of protecting them from GAM. They are not afraid of GAM, which has declared a unilateral cease-fire. For GAM, the humanitarian effort is the first priority. BUSH'S WAR CRIMES While U.S. soldiers participating in humanitarian aid declared how much they preferred this assignment, under directives from the Bush administration this same military has just been exposed for systematic and widespread use of torture, prompting Human Rights Watch to call for an independent war crimes investigation. This is the same military that has killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians in the Iraq war and is now flirting with using an El Salvador type neo-fascist "death squad" option in Iraq. There is a further irony that now, just when the Indonesian military has revealed the lower depths of their inhuman barbarity, the Bush administration is using this disaster to push for restarting military aid to Indonesia. Past disasters have had a way of awakening new liberation ideas and struggles. Indeed, the 1883 volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, which also created a deadly tsunami, is credited with sparking the long struggle to expel Dutch colonialism. Perhaps today's human solidarity can be a new beginning in upstaging the prevailing trends of capitalist militarism and fundamentalism. |
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