Not Waving but Drowning

“So, on this page, we’d like to make a first step.

As Comrade Stalin said, one death is a human tragedy, one million is a statistic.

Decimation by AIDS

Last week the UNAIDS program announced that nearly 90 million Africans could be infected by HIV in the next 20 years if more is not done to combat the epidemic.

Already, 25 million Africans have HIV, and in 20 years, the likelihood is that 10% of Africans will have the disease which leads to fatal AIDS. The UN recommends that the world needs to commit $200 billion to prevent the literal decimation of Africa.

One wonders how optimistic the UNAIDS figures are, when it is remembered that in Botswana, one of the richest and most progressive countries on the continent, more than 30% of all adults are already HIV positive. This figure may derive from the fact that Botswana has more sophisticated statistical services than most other African countries where the infection rate is alleged to be lower.

These alarming facts do not make much of a dent in the world’s consciousness. On CNN for instance, much more time has been spent in the last 72 hours on the “All-American comeback” of Martha Stewart than the network has probably spent in a year on the butchery of men, women and children in Haiti.

And the US government and its satraps are much more interested and involved in spreading mischief about Venezuela and Cuba than in doing anything about the rape of democracy a couple of hundred miles from its shores.

But all is well. Two key figures in the Reagan-era dirty war in Central America have been appointed to advise President Bush on National Security and Intelligence. Mr. Elliott Abrams, who narrowly missed jail for his perjury before Congress, is deputy chief of the National Security Council. Mr. John Negroponte, former Ambassador to Honduras and regent of Iraq, is now Director of National Intelligence. Mr. Negroponte’s record in Central America was so awful that his predecessor as Ambassador – a Reagan appointee – opposed his appointment to Iraq because he believed that Negroponte covered up the thousands of murders and other atrocities carried out by the Contras and other US supported forces in Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Despite the fact that the American press has not paid too much attention to the human rights crisis in Haiti the anniversary of the coup has produced a trickle of comment from other parts of the world. Many of them, of course, in their attempt to be “even-handed” speak of non-existent atrocities of the Aristide regime, of official corruption and a host of other sins which were, for whatever reason, not visible before the President was overthrown. Many seem to look forward to what they call “free elections “ – free, that is, of the man most Haitians regard as their leader, and conducted under the guns of the cannibal armies of La Tortue and his depraved associates.

Since these atrocities are carried out under the auspices of the United States, Canada, France and the UN, they cannot, by definition, be atrocities. While the US State Department was condemning other countries for their human rights abuses, the United States was able to congratulate itself on its own rectitude in its annual global human rights report.

The Chinese government disagreed and told the US to mind its own business and to remove the beam from its own eyes before trying to clear the motes from others’.

The New York Times said that the State Department’s report was “… another sad reminder of the heavy price the United States has paid for ignoring fundamental human rights in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo; in the secret cells where the CIA holds its unaccounted-for prisoners; and at home, where President George W. Bush continues to claim the power to hold Americans in jail indefinitely without the right to trial.

“The administration’s refusal to remedy these abuses – or even acknowledge most of them – leaves the 2004 human rights report heavy with irony and saps its authority.”

Unfortunately, the movers and shakers of the US depend for their information on papers like the New York Times and networks like CNN – “the most trusted name in News.” If these media behemoths don’t care, why should the legislators and think tanks? And where would they get to know about them?

Haiti, like the United States, was a founder member of the United Nations. At that time, small and weak countries like Haiti were promised that their interests would be safeguarded by the UN – which would not behave as had the old and discredited League of Nations in relation to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) a decade earlier.

Unfortunately, despite the attempts of the Haitians themselves and the notorious evidence of brazen and systematic abuse of the Haitian people, the United Nations is now represented in Haiti by a mission which has become an accomplice of the cannibal armies and an enabler of their abuses.

At least the League of Nations could not have been similarly accused.

John Maxwell of the University of the West Indies (UWI) is the veteran Jamaican journalist who in 1999 single-handedly thwarted the Jamaican government’s efforts to build houses at Hope, the nation’s oldest and best known botanical gardens. His campaigning earned him first prize in the 2000 Sandals Resort’s annual Environmental Journalism Competition, the region’s richest journalism prize. He is also the author of How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalists and Journalists (Jamaica, 2000). Mr. Maxwell can be reached at [email protected].