Wars in Aceh, Iraq prioritized over tsunami relief

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Grossman, Zoltan C. (GROSSMZC@uwec.edu)
Fri, 7 Jan 2005 08:42:40 -0600



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.

http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm

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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

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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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