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September 30, 2002
Theme Song for 21st Century Famines
This article was written during a period of unprecedented coverage of the ongoing famine six African countries -- except most of the coverage implied that the famine was somehow primarily the result of Mugabe's actions in Zimbabwe.
“The situation in Zimbabwe hit you guys hard, I suppose” said my neighbor to the young woman who had just sauntered out of the customs area at the airport. She was from Malawi, he was trying to make small talk about the famine ravaging her country. She was resignedly nodding till he mentioned Zimbabwe.
With a puzzled look, she squinted in his direction: “What?”
As usual, we hear a lot about the side issue and almost nothing about the fundamental questions: hence the puzzling remark.
She probably didn't know that a good chunk of the media coverage in the United States regarding the famine that threatens six Southern African states and 12 million people concentrated on the fact that Zimbabwe’s government is trying to oust couple thousand white farmers from the most of the productive lands, most of which they control as a legacy of the white supremacist colonial rule. The truth is that this is but a side issue; the evictions haven’t helped the harvest; however, the hard reality is that rainfalls are down 75 percent in Zimbabwe. And Zimbabwe is but one country threatened by the famine.
While it is true that this famine, as with most famines, is the result of a combination of bad weather and bad policies, the real tragic story is that both the bad policy and the bad weather were severely exacerbated by the rich world.
That would be us.
It often seems that God perennially deals a bad hand to Africa. Remember Ethiopia in the eighties? The massive famine that came at the end of an almost ten year drought, the images of starving, wide-eyed, swollen-bellied children with the accompanying tune of “We are the World, We Are the Children”?
The song should be remade: “We Own the World, We Ignore the Children.”
It’s turning out that the Africa’s ‘bad luck’ is us.
Some scientists now believe that the Ethiopian drought in the eighties may have been triggered by “tiny particles of sulfur dioxide spewed by factories and power plants thousands of miles away in North America, Europe and Asia.”
In other words, pollution from industrial nations.
The current drought cycle is also quite likely aggravated by global warming and the general change in climate patterns due to human activities. In the report released last year by United Nations Environment Program, “Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” UNEP scientists predicted that, in terms of droughts, southern Africa would be one of the hardest hit areas from global warming and industrial pollution. The report talked of a ‘century of hunger’ and predicted that ‘lack of rain, warmer temperatures and increases in evaporation could reduce yields by a third or more in these areas.’
Africa's share of the global population is 14 percent but it's responsible for only 3.2 percent of global CO2 emission.
It gets worse.
Probably unbeknownst to my neighbor in the airport, Malawi, under the ‘advice’ of IMF, World Bank and other international lenders and donors, was forced to cut fertilizer and maize subsidies to its millions of subsistence farmers. The lack of subsidies made it hard for poor farmers to buy fertilizer and seeds -- and subsistence farmers constitute almost 70 percent of Malawi’s population. Meanwhile, back at the ranch in the rich world, farmers are heavily subsidized. The 2002 Farm Bill in the United States will provide $190 billion in new subsidy money over the next 10 years to US farmers, which constitute only two percent of the population -- and most of that money will go to the wealthy, corporate agribusinesses. European Union too heavily subsidizes its own farmers.
None of that for Malawi.
And, as Challis McDonough of Voice Of America reported, most farmers in Malawi could not borrow the money to buy fertilizer and seed since the interest rate on loans from commercial banks were incredibly high, about 55 percent.
My neighbor in the airport waiting lounge was probably also not aware that just two year ago, Malawi had a bumper crop and wanted to keep a chunk of in its strategic grain reserves to guard against famines.
The insolence.
Countries such as Malawi do not get to make their own policy, with the best interests of their people in mind. This little country with an annual per capita income less than $200 and a life expectancy of 38 (yes, thirty eight, 3-8 as in two times nineteen) already owes $1.5 billion, about 90 percent of its GDP, to various financiers.
Malawi’s President Muluzi gave an interview he gave to BBC on April 9th, 2002. In the interview, Muluzi explained that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank “insisted that, since Malawi had a surplus [of maize] and the (government's) National Food Reserve Agency had this huge loan, they had to sell the maize to repay the commercial banks.” The ‘huge loan’ had been taken to establish the reserve. Its repayment meant that the maize in the reserve was sold off. Why was this done at all, you might ask. I didn’t do the research, I don’t know. However, I do know that a familiar pattern is well established with IMF bail-outs and loans and Heavily Indebted Poor Country initiatives and what not -- quite likely, some bank in New York, Paris, London Zurich or Tokyo made some money from the transaction itself with commission, interest, consulting fees...
So, onward, they starve.
This is the weekend of IMF / World Bank protests in DC. One of the key demands is ‘to cancel all impoverished country debt to the World Bank and IMF.’ IMF and the World Bank as well as most governments of the rich world are opposed to what they call debt forgiveness, mostly claiming that it breeds irresponsibility. They have come up with various schemes that are supposed to provide some debt relief while providing accountability -- most of these schemes have so far required that these countries take on fresh debt.
I, too have a proposal about debt forgiveness: let’s cancel the debt and hope they find it in their hearts to forgive us.
Posted by zeynep at 09:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 11, 2002
Clash Within a Civilization: America’s War Against its Better Self
Speech given on 9/11/02 to an anti-war community forum meeting in Austin, Texas.
When I came to this country a few years ago, I honestly expected it to be a very closed, repressive society. That was my only explanation of why U.S. foreign policy could be as bad as it is. I thought that no democratic, open society could allow its government to be so blindly led by the war machine and the multinational corporations. I honestly expected something like Pinochet’s Chile.
I was very much surprised by what I saw here. Although we are all aware of the ways in which our freedoms are being curtailed, let me say it point blank I believe that this is still, even after a whole year and a half of Ashcroft, one of the most open societies on Earth. I have lived in Europe and I have lived in the Third World. Nothing comes close. I know it’s hard to see if from the inside because we see all the wrongs with this country’s domestic policies; we see the racism, we see the inequality, we see the increasing erosion of civil liberties. Still, the level of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, and the opportunities for social mobility for people, including immigrants such as myself, is unparalleled. I joined the chorus of progressives condemning the calls for racial profiling -- even as all the while I kept thinking to myself how amazing that it was that there was a debate. That it affronted so many people’s sense of decency. In the developed democracies in Europe, it would not be discussed, it would be done. It is done, I know, having lived in Belgium and in Germany as a Turk.
Given the remarkable amount of freedom of speech we still have, the question is why we, as the anti-war, anti-empire, pro-justice, pro-democracy, movement, are not able to reach more of the American public. And we are not reaching many of them. Yes, there is corporate control of the media, but that does not fully explain why we have not been able to overcome the corporate media’s onslaught. We are able to publish newspapers, put up Internet sites, organize mailing lists, organize teach-ins and public meetings without being dragged out of our homes in the middle of the night to be tortured. Believe me, that kind of repression *is* a real disincentive.
So, why don’t people read our newspapers and our websites and join us? We have to think very long and hard about this. We have to be courageous and honest and intelligent and critical. Somehow, the propaganda machine works really well and we have to figure it out and how to fight back, not just in ways that make us feel better but in ways that are effective. Remember, this is not destiny that we try and fail. The propaganda machine in the Soviet Union failed miserably; there is no rule that says state-sponsored propaganda shall carry the day. Clearly, we face a more formidable enemy than that and we must rise to the challenge. And yes, while they are rich and powerful, we have truth, decency and integrity on our side. We should have a better shot at this than we seem to have managed so far.
I think an important part of the problem lies with this dichotomy, this mismatch between relatively decent civil liberties and fairly good domestic policies on the one hand --which have been won after centuries of struggle against slavery, against oppression, against injustice-- and absolutely horrific foreign policy on the other hand. I think most Americans simply don’t believe that their government can be that bad. They know that politicians are corrupt and they know that corporations have too much power, but all in all, they have a good life. They find it hard to believe how horrible the war machine and the multinationals behave in the rest of the world. Nowadays, when I tell my friends in Turkey that the United States is a fairly open society and rather decent in many ways they think that the CIA has recruited me. When I tell Americans that their government displays a callous disregard for human life in its pursuit of greed and domination, they think that I’m some foreign knee-jerk American-hating loony.
Yes, this mismatch is striking and it makes it hard for us to communicate with people who only know one side of the story. Sometimes, I find it challenging to retain both my sanity and my sense of humanity in the face of such blatant, cynical manipulation by the warlords who rule our foreign policy.
This morning, I was listening to the radio. I heard George W. Bush talk about how the on 9/11 people were killed because they were Americans. That much is true but instead of feeling grief, I felt angry because I know that the man who was saying it has instituted a set of policies that kill people because they happen to live in Afghanistan -- even though, as more and more officials now concede, our bombing of that country really didn’t help us in terms of rooting out terror. In fact, as they now admit, it probably made things worse.
I got mad because George W. Bush institutes policies that let millions die of AIDS and other more curable diseases because they are in Africa and because access to cheap drugs might upset the already obscene profits of the pharmaceuticals. While my anger was rising, the coverage shifted to the crash site of United Flight 93 where they were reading the names of the victims. Just as I was thinking how I wished they also read the names of people who died in Afghanistan through bombs, through starvation, through neglect, I heard the name Deora Bodley. It stopped me cold in my anger, I choked up.
I had talked with Deora’s father, Derrill Bodley, a few days after 9/11 while I was working on helping to arrange media visibility for families that had lost members in the attacks but that were speaking out against the then-upcoming war. It was important work but it was horrible. Without having done it, you just can’t imagine how hard it is arranging media interviews for people who had just suffered a devastating loss. Deora was his only child, she was just 20. He said that had no strength left, he was simply devastated. Then, he said, he found Deora’s journals. She had written about peace, about justice, even as a kid. She was one of those people; she volunteered for animal shelters, for the special olympics, and to help kids at a local elementary school. Derrill said that he knew that, for his daughter’s sake, he had to gather his strength and oppose the war. Last February, he traveled to Afghanistan, where he met with family members of people who had lost relatives to the American bombing. One couple had lost a son who was much like Derrill’s daughter. We don’t speak the same language, Derrill says, but I understand and they understand. It’s the same kind of pain, he says. He is a music teacher; he composed a peace for Deora titled “The Steps to Peace” and played it for bereaved families in Afghanistan. Derrill joined peaceful tomorrows -- the website is www.peacefultomorrows.org -- whose members continue to speak out against war.
When people got killed because they were Americans, Derrill Bodley decided to fight against people being killed for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. George W. Bush, on the other hand, thinks 9/11 gives him a pretext to authorize policies that kill other people for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Unfortunately, so far, it has worked. How is it that George W.’s message of divisiveness and callousness rules the day when the light of hope that Derrill kindled in the name of his daughter gets drowned out? We must ask this question. I don’t think the answer is simple or straightforward. We must find a way to stop this cynical manipulation -- we couldn’t for Afghanistan but we must for Iraq.
A couple of weeks ago, I talked with Diane Wilson from Seadrift, Texas. She had just gotten arrested for climbing to a tower inside the Dow Chemical plant and hanging a 10 foot banner that reads “Dow responsible for Bhopal.” She had just ended a thirty day hunger strike to make the same point. You see, Dow Chemicals had bought Union Carbide, whose extreme cost-cutting measures caused the worst industrial accident of all time in Bhopal, India back in 1984, killing up to 20,000 and maiming hundreds of thousands who suffer to this day. Union Carbide has paid less than $500 per victim and Dow says that’s that and let’s move on. Diane said to me that this is what gets her the most -- that Dow Chemical could never get away with doing that little if the victims were Americans. She said to me: “We are all human beings on this one planet. It's outrageous that the lives of people in India are so devalued.” So true, so simple. I must repeat my question; why are we not able to rally people around this simple, obvious point of decency? We must face this question. Tiptoeing around it is not going to help the people of our planet whose voices are not heard. It’s the main reality we must face -- it’s really up to the people in this country to right the wrongs of this country.
Clearly, as Derrick and Diane and countless others showed, including the firefighters who rushed up the stairs of the World Trade Center --while Dick Cheney was hiding in a bunker and George W. Bush was flying out somewhere over in Nebraska-- there is no shortage of decent, courageous people this country.
An example I like to cite about the vast gap between the decency of people versus the success of the propaganda machine is that most Americans believe that we spend too much on foreign aid --they think it’s about 20 percent of the budget. They think it should be about 10 percent. Well, we know it’s less than one percent, much of which goes to a few countries such as Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Columbia and that for poor countries often aid is tied to making them purchase American goods.
Once again, somehow, the propaganda machine has managed to take people’s decent urges --that we should not let our neighbors starve while we remain so rich ourselves-- and totally and completely twisted it with their many, many levels of lies. We must find a way to cut through this web of deceit. It’s hard and challenging work. If we succeed, we will be the first Empire that was brought down and fashioned into a peaceful and equal member of the global community at the hands of its own citizens.
Posted by zeynep at 10:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack