Yesterday’s announcement by the Obama administration that it is resuming military ties with the mass-murdering war criminals of Indonesia’s special forces ought to give us pause. Because the new relationship with Kopassus, the Indonesian thugs, has little or nothing to do with concrete U.S. interests in Indonesia – do we have any, anyway? – and everything to do with building a Great Wall around China.
But it would be nice had the article also acknowledged America’s important role in enablihing the Kopassus to commit their crimes. It was in an earlier struggle against supposed communism that several million people got murdered for being communist, or socialist, or just leftist or in the way. It’s was the US who armed the killers and led the killing and who supported the Indonesian military as they committed one warcrime after another, from the invasion of East Timor to the counterinsurgency in Papua New Guinea. In short, while this article does criticise current policy, by its silence on the history of American support for Indonesia, it helps whitewash this history, making the US seem more innocent in this than it really is. All that remains for a reader not familiar with this history is a vague awareness that this Indonesian unit is bad and Obama in the wrong for wanting to support it, but unaware that the very crimes for which Kopassus was responsible were instigated on behalf of America and that America has supported it throughout these crimes.
Haiti has been punished for its founding sin over the centuries. But it’s not the earthquake or any other natural disaster that’s the punishment, nor is what ever diseased idea of devil worship this old asshole has dreamt up that’s the sin. The real sin for which Haiti has been punished ever since it was founded, was the simple fact that it was the Black slaves who won their independence for themselves, forming an intolerable beacon of freedom and independence:
By late 1803, to the universal astonishment of contemporary observers, the armies led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and Dessalines had broken the chain of colonial slavery at ‘what had been, in 1789, its strongest link’. [7] Renamed Haiti, the new country celebrated its independence in January 1804. I have argued elsewhere that there have been few other events in modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant order: the mere existence of an independent Haiti was a reproach to the slave-trading nations of Europe, a dangerous example to the slave-owning us, and an inspiration for successive African and Latin American liberation movements. [8] Much of Haiti’s subsequent history has been shaped by efforts, both internal and external, to stifle the consequences of this event and to preserve the essential legacy of slavery and colonialism—that spectacularly unjust distribution of labour, wealth and power which has characterized the whole of the island’s post-Columbian history.
Since its independence Haiti has been kept poor through domestic repression supported by foreign interference, which started with having had to pay France restitutionj (!) for the loss of its slave colony, through US supported dictatorship after dictatorship up until the present day, with the UN “peace force” stationed in Haiti since 2004 after the wrong man had been president for too long:
The Security Council resolution that mandated the invading Franco-American troops as a un Multinational Interim Force on 29 February 2004 called for a follow-up un Stabilization Force to take over three months later. In March, Kofi Annan duly sent his Special Advisor, John Reginald Dumas, and Hocine Medili, to assess the situation on the ground. The ‘Report of the Secretary-General on Haiti’, published in April, took the obfuscatory euphemism of un discourse to new levels. ‘It is unfortunate that, in its bicentennial year, Haiti had to call again on the international community to help it overcome a serious political and security situation’, wrote Annan. The circumstances of the elected President’s overthrow were decorously skirted, the Secretary-General merely noting that: ‘Early on February 29, Mr Aristide left the country’. The toppling of the constitutional government was deemed to offer Haitians the opportunity of ‘a peaceful, democratic and locally-owned future’. [58]
It’s this history of domestic and foreign exploitation and repression that has not only kept Haiti poor, but has so ill prepared it for this earthquake. It costs money to make a city earthquake proof and that money had been stolen from the Haitians years ago. The tens of thousands or more of deaths are the result. But at least both the presidential palace and the UN mission were hit as well.
Never forget that sports odds makers were laying 2:1 odds that either Israel or the US would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities by March 2007. Since leaving office, former vice-president Dick Cheney has acknowledged that he was pushing heavily for a military attack against Iran during the time of the Bush administration. And the level of rhetoric coming from Israel concerning its plans to launch a pre-emptive military strike against Iran have been alarming.
Obama may have been elected with the electorate hoping for a more sane foreign policy and he’s certainly more diplomatic and less likely to pursue stupid policies just to show who’s boss, but that doesn’t mean America’s foreign policy goals have changed. Though there have been some well publicised attempts at reconcillation with Iran, underlying it have been the constant demands for Iran to give up its nuclear programme, to stop working on nuclear weapons, despite the lack of evidence for this. Though of a much lower intensity than the similar propaganda campaign and pressure tactics we saw in 2002/03 in the runup to the War on Iraq. Are we’re seeing the same thing happening to its neighbour?
Well, the news today has been led by Iran. At the Pittsburgh G20 summit, we’ve had Irish-American leader Fionnbarra “Barack†O’Bama, with Brown on one side of him and Sarko on the other, indulging in some serious sabre-rattling. Taken alongside Netanyahu’s apocalyptic tubthumping at the UN, it’s all horribly reminiscent of the runup to the Iraq war, and I’m just waiting for the sexed-up dossier proving that not only has Iran nukes, but it could launch them at Britain in 45 minutes. A few thoughts occur. One is to wonder if the Russians have ratted out the Iranians as a quid pro quo for not having a deployment of US missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. Another is to wonder how this is going down with those two well-known allies of democracy, the pro-Iranian government of Iraq and the pro-Iranian government of Afghanistan. Finally, it strikes me that this is probably not a good time for Ahmadinejad to start winding the Jews up with his hilarious stand-up routine on the Holocaust.
