Subject: Wars in Aceh, Iraq prioritized over tsunami relief Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 08:42:40 -0600 Message-ID: <B14120EE5C432443B21102F7925DAD02014202B6@COKE.uwec.edu> From: "Grossman, Zoltan C." <GROSSMZC@uwec.edu>
To: portside@lists.portside.org
Subject: Aceh: An Interview with Allan Nairn
(Indonesian military selective with Aceh relief)
Date: Jan 7, 2005 12:32 AM
Aceh pronounced AH-chay
Aceh: An Interview with Allan Nairn
Allan Nairn interviewed by Derrick O'Keefe
Seven Oaks Magazine
January 04, 2005
Derrick O'Keefe: Could you tell us the latest with
respect to the devastation caused by last month's
earthquake and tsunami, specifically in Aceh?
Allan Nairn: Well, the coastal areas of Aceh have been
crushed by the earthquake and the tsunami. Large parts
of Banda Aceh are under water; they've become part of
the sea. The west coast is hardest hit and whole
villages are leveled. But this is not the first
catastrophe to hit Aceh. Previously, it was devastated
by unnecessary and preventable poverty. Aceh is rich in
resources; it's one of the world's main natural gas
producers. It supplies much of the natural gas for
South Korea and Japan, and yet the revenues have gone
to Exxon Mobil and the central government in Jakarta,
with almost nothing left for the poor of Aceh. And as a
result, we've seen malnutrition and undernourishment
levels among the children of Aceh running as high as 40
percent.
O'Keefe: A number of activist groups in the United
States have concerns that the Indonesian government
will hamper disaster relief efforts, and also that they
will exploit the situation to further repress Acehnese
political activists. Do you know of, or see evidence of
this taking place in Aceh?
Nairn: Well, the Indonesian military is doing that as
we speak. They are continuing to attack villages, more
than a dozen villages in East Aceh and North Aceh away
from the coast, even though General Susilo, the
president of Indonesia, announced that they would be
lifting the state of siege. He hasn't actually done it.
And an Indonesian military spokesman came out and said,
ewe will keep attacking until the President tells us to
stop.'
The military is also impeding the flow of aid. They've
commandeered a hanger at the Banda Aceh airport, where
they are taking control of internationally shipped in
supplies. We just got a report this afternoon that the
distribution of supplies is being done in some towns
and villages only to people who hold the ered and
white,' which is a special ID card issued to Acehnese
by the Indonesian police. You have to go to a police
station to get one of these ID cards, and it is only
issued to people who the police certify as not being
opponents of the army, not being critics of the
government. Of course many people are afraid to go and
apply for such a card.
There's been a tremendous outpouring from the public;
all over the world people are giving donations. But
most of these donations are being channeled through the
UN agencies or through the big mainstream charities.
There's a major problem. Those agencies and charities
all have contracts with the Indonesian government,
contracts which oblige them to either channel funds
through the government or work in concert with the
government, which means that government officials and
army officers can steal the aid, and there are already
indications that this is happening. And even that aid
which is not stolen may be used in a way to consolidate
military control over the population.
O'Keefe: What is the background to the political
conflict in Aceh?
Nairn: Really the second wave of devastation to hit
Aceh was the Indonesian military. Aceh is one of the
most repressive places in the world. They have been
under de facto Martial Law for years. Now,
international relief workers and foreign journalists
are pouring in, but, until the tsunami, they were
banned by the Indonesian military. The reason is that
the Acehnese want a free vote; they want a referendum
which would give them the option of choosing
independence from the central government and Indonesia.
In 1999, there was a demonstration in front of the
Grand Mosque in Banda Aceh which drew anywhere from 400
000 to a million people. That's anywhere from 10
percent to a quarter of the entire Acehnese population
of 4 million. In proportional terms, that makes it one
of the largest political demonstrations in recent world
history. The military responded to this demonstration
by crushing the civilian political movement that was
calling for referendum - assassinating, disappearing,
raping activists, and continuing with the massacres
that had already dotted Aceh with mass graves before
the tsunami created new mass graves.
The Indonesian military actually encourages the armed
conflict that is going on between them and the GAM
(Aceh Freedom Movement), which is an armed rebel pro-
independence group. The Indonesian military
occasionally sells weapons to the GAM. The military
likes this war because, one, they can't be defeated
militarily, and two, because it gives them a rationale
for their political existence. The Indonesian military
is one of the most repressive and corrupt in the world
and, after the fall of Suharto, it became extremely
unpopular in Indonesia - there was a strong popular
movement against it. But by prolonging the war in Aceh,
the Indonesian armed forces are able to say to the
public, esee, we're facing an armed rebellion, you need
us to protect you.' And then third, the war in Aceh is
a rich source of corruption for the Indonesian military
officers. They do systematic extortion of business,
small business and the poor, so they want to stay
there. And they crush the civilian movement to avoid a
political contest that they might well lose, and they
encourage a military fight which they can only win.
O'Keefe: It sounds very much as if conditions for the
people of Aceh are as bad today as they were under the
Suharto dictatorship. When did the conflict between the
independence movement of Aceh and the government of
Jakarta begin, and what are its origins?
Nairn: Well, Aceh as a nation predates Indonesia. It
was actually an ancient kingdom that ruled the area
that is now Aceh as well as a lot of what is now
Malaysia. When Indonesia came into being after World
War II, with the uprising against the Dutch
colonialists, Aceh played a leading role in fighting
off the Dutch. And the Acehnese made a bargain with the
other islands that came to form Indonesia that they
would join the new country of Indonesia in exchange for
substantial internal autonomy, and freedom to go their
own way. But very quickly the central government in
Jakarta reneged on that deal, and the Acehnese became
quite unhappy. And then when Suharto and his army
seized power in the 1965-67 period, and staged
massacres all across Indonesia to consolidate their
power, it began a period of military repression of the
pro-independence movement in Aceh. The Acehnese tried
for years the political route, and it didn't work. Then
in the 1970s the GAM, the armed rebel movement, was
formed. But even before they existed the Indonesian
military and police were killing Acehnese civilians.
O'Keefe: What are some of the connections between U.S.
corporate interests and the Indonesian military
repression in Aceh?
Nairn: There's one main connection, and that's Exxon
Mobil. Their natural gas facility dominates the
Acehnese economy, by way of extraction. They also have
Indonesian troops garrisoned on their property. The
Exxon Mobil company pays protection money to the
Indonesian military and the military buries bodies of
its victims on Exxon Mobil lands. The revenues from
Exxon Mobil are a mainstay of the Jakarta central
government. Not much of it finds its way back to Aceh.
O'Keefe: As someone who operates in the United States,
what did you think of the spectacle over the past
couple of days of U.S. military helicopters delivering
aid, in sharp contrast to U.S. military operations over
the past couple of years in Iraq, for instance?
Nairn: It's bitterly ironic. You don't even have to go
as far a field as Iraq to get an illustration of the
role the U.S. has played. The Indonesian military is a
long-time client of the U.S. The U.S. supported the
military as they were bringing Suharto to power, as
they were carrying out a massacre of anywhere from 400
000 to a million Indonesians during 1965-67. The U.S.
gave the green light to the invasion of East Timor by
the Indonesian military, which wiped out a third of the
Timorese population, 200 000 people.
It's only as a result of grassroots lobbying in the
U.S. after the '91 Dili massacre that the U.S. Congress
stepped in and cut off much of the U.S. military aid to
Indonesia. But this was done over the objection of the
U.S. executive, over the objection of the first
President Bush, and then President Clinton, and now the
current President Bush. And there will be a major
battle coming up in the U.S. Congress as Bush tries to
restore the military aid now. But hopefully the public
will bring enough pressure to bear on Congress that
Congress will resist.
But the U.S. has deep complicity in the massacres over
the years in Indonesia, in occupied Timor, currently in
Papua and very recently and currently in Aceh. So it's
bitterly ironic to see U.S. helicopters coming ashore
in the role of deliverers of relief.
O'Keefe: You've mentioned some problems with the
established NGOs working in Indonesia and Aceh. Is
there a way that people can contribute to the relief
effort, and to efforts to raise awareness about the
situation in Aceh more generally?
Nairn: Yes, fortunately there is a way around the
problem of Indonesian military cooptation of the UN and
big mainstream relief channels. And that is to give
directly to the grassroots Acehnese groups, which have
been working for years with people in the refugee camps
and which - even though their people are at risk - can
deliver aid directly to the public because they do not
have these contractual relationships with the
Indonesian government and military. One such group is
the People's Crisis Center (PCC) of Aceh, which for
years has been going into the ere-education camps,'
which are set up by the Indonesian military - farmers
are driven off their land, put into these camps to have
their thoughts cleansed by military propagandists. And
the children in these camps were often going hungry,
not getting clean water, not getting schooling, and
people from the PCC would come in and try to aid the
children and give some education and some subsistence.
And now they're working on disaster relief. Over the
years their organizers were often targeted by the
military, but they've persisted, they've been very
brave.
Now the East Timor Action Network (ETAN) of the United
States is channeling aid to the PCC and similar on-the-
ground Acehnese groups. So if people want to donate,
they can go to the ETAN U.S. website, which is
www.etan.org.
+++++++++++++++++
The victims of the tsunami pay the price of war on Iraq
US and British aid is dwarfed by the billions both
spend on slaughter
George Monbiot
Tuesday January 4, 2005
The Guardian (UK)
There has never been a moment like it on British
television. The Vicar of Dibley, one of our gentler
sitcoms, was bouncing along with its usual bonhomie on
New Year's Day when it suddenly hit us with a scene
from another world. Two young African children were
sobbing and trying to comfort each other after their
mother had died of Aids. How on earth, I wondered,
would the show make us laugh after that? It made no
attempt to do so. One by one the characters, famous for
their parochial boorishness, stood in front of the
camera wearing the white armbands which signalled their
support for the Make Poverty History campaign. You
would have to have been hewn from stone not to cry.
The timing was perfect. In my local Oxfam shop last
week, people were queueing to the door to pledge money
for the tsunami fund. A pub on the other side of town
raised ?1,000 on Saturday night. In the pot on the
counter of the local newsagent's there must be nearly
?100. The woman who runs the bakery told me about the
homeless man she had seen, who emptied his pockets in
the bank, saying "I just want to do my bit", while the
whole queue tried not to cry.
Over the past few months, reviewing the complete lack
of public interest in what is happening in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, and the failure, in the
west, to mobilise effective protests against the
continuing atrocities in Iraq, I had begun to wonder
whether we had lost our ability to stand in other
people's shoes. I have now stopped wondering. The
response to the tsunami shows that, however we might
seek to suppress it, we cannot destroy our capacity for
empathy.
But one obvious question recurs. Why must the relief of
suffering, in this unprecedentedly prosperous world,
rely on the whims of citizens and the appeals of pop
stars and comedians? Why, when extreme poverty could be
made history with a minor redeployment of public
finances, must the poor world still wait for homeless
people in the rich world to empty their pockets?
The obvious answer is that governments have other
priorities. And the one that leaps to mind is war. If
the money they have promised to the victims of the
tsunami still falls far short of the amounts required,
it is partly because the contingency fund upon which
they draw in times of crisis has been spent on blowing
people to bits in Iraq.
The US government has so far pledged $350m to the
victims of the tsunami, and the UK government ?50m
($96m). The US has spent $148 billion on the Iraq war
and the UK ?6bn ($11.5bn). The war has been running for
656 days. This means that the money pledged for the
tsunami disaster by the United States is the equivalent
of one and a half day's spending in Iraq. The money the
UK has given equates to five and a half days of our
involvement in the war.
It looks still worse when you compare the cost of the
war to the total foreign aid budget. The UK has spent
almost twice as much on creating suffering in Iraq as
it spends annually on relieving it elsewhere. The
United States gives just over $16bn in foreign aid:
less than one ninth of the money it has burnt so far in
Iraq.
The figures for war and aid are worth comparing
because, when all the other excuses for the invasion of
Iraq were stripped away, both governments explained
that it was being waged for the good of the Iraqis. Let
us, for a moment, take this claim at face value. Let us
suppose that the invasion and occupation of Iraq had
nothing to do with power, domestic politics or oil, but
were, in fact, components of a monumental aid
programme. And let us, with reckless generosity, assume
that more people in Iraq have gained as a result of
this aid programme than lost.
To justify the war, even under these wildly unsafe
assumptions, George Bush and Tony Blair would have to
show that the money they spent was a cost-efficient
means of relieving human suffering. As it was
sufficient to have made a measurable improvement in the
lives of all the 2.8 billion people living in absolute
poverty, and as there are only 25 million people in
Iraq, this is simply not possible. Even if you ignore
every other issue - such as the trifling matter of mass
killing - the opportunity costs of the Iraq war
categorise it as a humanitarian disaster. Indeed, such
calculations suggest that, on cost grounds alone, a
humanitarian war is a contradiction in terms.
But our leaders appear to have lost the ability to
distinguish between helping people and killing them.
The tone of Blair's New Year message was almost
identical to that of his tear-jerking insistence that
we understand the Iraqi people must be bombed for their
own good. The US marines who have now been dispatched
to Sri Lanka to help the rescue operation were, just a
few weeks ago, murdering the civilians (for this,
remember, is an illegal war), smashing the homes and
evicting the entire population of the Iraqi city of
Falluja.
Even within the official aid budgets the two aims are
confused: $8.9bn of the aid money the US spends is used
for military assistance, anti-drugs operations,
counter-terrorism and the Iraq relief and
reconstruction fund (otherwise known as the Halliburton
benevolent trust). For Bush and Blair, the tsunami
relief operation and the Iraq war are both episodes in
the same narrative of salvation. The civilised world
rides out to rescue foreigners from their darkness.
While they spend the money we gave them to relieve
suffering on slaughtering the poor, the world must rely
for disaster relief on the homeless man emptying his
pockets. If our leaders were as generous in helping
people as they are in killing them, no one would ever
go hungry.
You can join the campaign against global poverty at:
www.makepovertyhistory.org
www.monbiot.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1382857,00.html
+++++++++++++++++++++++
BUSH, THE PENTAGON AND THE TSUNAMI
by Roger Burbach and Paul Cantor*
After Secretary of State Colin Powell surveyed the devastated coast of
Aceh in Indonesia from a military helicopter, he proclaimed at a press
conference that Americans ?care about the dignity of every individual
and the worth of every individual? and have a ?need to respond to the
needs of every individual of whatever faith.?
Most Americans are indeed empathetic and generous to others.
Unfortunately the Bush administration of which Powell is a part does not
represent America. It?s very actions in the aftermath of the quake and
the tsunamis point out it?s hypocrisy as it spins out images for the
global media while maneuvering to protect corporate interests and
project the Pentagon?s power even deeper into the Muslim world.
Consider, for example, that the only place in the Indian Ocean basin
that received full advance warning of the impending tsunamis was the US
military base on the British isle of Diego Garcia. It houses ?Camp
Justice,? one of the secret facilities used to imprison and torture
suspects in the US war on terror. As it battened down the hatches on the
base, the Pentagon made no effort to alert the nations in the region of
the impending doom that was about to strike them.
Consider, too, that with the death toll mounting in the days after the
tsunamis hit, Americans reacted with dismay and embarrassment as
President Bush at first pledged only a meager $35 million in aid to the
region while continuing to do photo ops and chop wood while vacationing
on his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Only after the head of the United
Nation?s emergency relief effort and The New York Times called that
offer stingy and others pointed out that the President planned to spend
more than three times that much on his inaugural events and parties did
he up the ante to $350 million. Japan pledged half a billion. Three
hundred and fifty million is approximately what the US spends in a day
and a half on the war in Iraq.
Now the President is trying to use the tsunami tragedy to bolster his
image in the world. There is no question that US aid workers and
agencies who have converged on countries stricken by the tsunamis are
dedicates to their lifesaving roles. But the President appears to be
less interested in saving lives than on burnishing his image and the
Pentagon?s to divert attention from the criminal activities of his
administration in Iraq and elsewhere.
Hence, we are treated to film coverage of U.S. military helicopters
taking off from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln with food and
medicine for the tsunamis victims. The Abraham Lincoln is the same ship
on which the president, decked out as a fighter pilot, landed on May 1,
2003 to proclaim an end to the hostilities in Iraq. The use of this ship
symbolizes how Bush is adept at saying one thing and doing another and
then using staged events and the media to mislead large numbers of his
constituents about his intentions and actions. He told us and the world,
for example, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when he had
evidence that it did not. Then he said that Saddam Hussein had ties to
Al Qaeda when he knew that was not true. Tens of thousands have died
and are dying as a result.
He said, furthermore, that his mission was to promote democracy and the
rule of law. Yet he broke the law when he invaded Iraq. He said he
wanted to uphold American values and then nominated as his attorney
general the man who called some of the provisions of the Geneva accords
quaint. Now he says his goal in Indonesia is to aid the victims of the
tsunamis. But instead of funneling aid through neutral sources he is now
channeling it in Aceh through the brutal Indonesian military, where an
armed Free Aceh Movement has been fighting for independence since 1976.
The Indonesian military, according to Human Rights Watch, has been
responsible for ?executions, disappearances, torture, and collective
punishment, as well as its efforts to restrict fundamental rights of
expression, assembly, and association.? The military is also protecting
the Exxon-Mobil natural gas facility in Aceh. As Amy Goodman noted on
Democracy Now, ExxonMobile directly pays the Indonesian military
contingents stationed around its natural gas facilities. The Aceh
movement has proclaimed a cease fire since the tsunamis struck, but its
relief workers have already been attacked three times by the Indonesian
military.
Since 9/11, the United States has extended military aid and training to
the Indonesia military (TNI) as part of the US war on terror in the
largest Muslim nation in the world. Powell announced in Indonesia that
the United States is ?increasing the number of helicopters to help the
TNI.? Just as in Iraq there is an imbroglio unfolding between the
Pentagon, petroleum corporations and proxy military forces.
Little wonder, then, that the world needs to be skeptical of President
Bush?s reasons for sending U.S. troops to Indonesia and elsewhere as a
result of the tsunamis.
*Paul Cantor is a professor of economics at Norwalk Community College in
Connecticut. Roger Burbach is co-author with Jim Tarbell of ?Imperial
Overstretch: George W. Bush and the Hubris of Empire.? To order the book
see www.globalalternatives.org
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