This article originally appeared
in the Jamaica
Observer.
February 27 2005 is an historic day.
It was the date that the New York Times – in an
editorial entitled “Thousands died in Africa Yesterday” – officially
recognized the Third World. Perhaps I am being unfairly
harsh.
Speaking about the enormous response
to the Tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia, the Times remarked
that in that case, the developed world opened its heart and its
checkbooks. “Yet when it comes to Africa, where hundreds of thousands
of poor men, women and children die needlessly each year from
preventable diseases, or unnatural disasters like civil wars,
much of the developed world seems to have a heart of stone.”
Not every African state was failing,
the Times said, most were not. But it did recognize that
poverty in much of Africa “challenges not only our common humanity
but our security as well." And the paper discusses the need
for financial assistance to Africa and chides the United States
for its failure even to meet its meager promises of help. It
rehearses the arguments about what some in the developed world
call “famine fatigue” and even mentions the fact that compared
with what the West spends on sports and entertainment “meeting
many of Africa’s most urgent needs seems shockingly affordable.
What has been missing is the political will.”
The United
States is at the bottom of the list of developed donor nations,
spending less on aid to poor countries than its citizens spend
on cat food:
The old, dead horses
are ritually and comprehensively flogged – corruption
and ineptitude are rightly condemned, but nowhere is it acknowledged
that
the developed world might have had any part in encouraging,
financing and promoting this corruption and ineptitude.
There is no mention,
for instance, of the part played by the United States, Britain
and Belgium
in the murderous destabilization of the Congo. And most editors
are too young to remember what France did in Guinea when the
people voted in 1958 for independence. The French removed
every filing cabinet, all government records and even the telephone
instruments and exchanges, leaving Guinea bereft of the
apparatus of government. There is, similarly, no memory of
Apartheid.
Meanwhile, Dessalines and Christophe
are, even 200 years after their deaths, excoriated for
animalistic savagery. Their accusers do not – conveniently – remember
the bloodthirsty French barbarism which provoked the Haitian
retaliation.
If anyone wishes to find out what
slavery was like he should read, among other accounts, the
diary of Thomas Thistlewood, a planter in 18th century Jamaica.
(In Miserable Slavery; Douglas Hall, ed.) Thistlewood’s
slaves were always running away, perhaps because he raped
and beat them whenever it took his fancy. When they were recaptured
Thistlewood had them mercilessly thrashed and often tied them
to stakes in the ground. Then, as a sort of grace note, he
would defecate into their forced-open mouths, tying their jaws
shut afterwards so that they had to swallow his vile eructations.
Blacks are continually
being denigrated for blaming so much on the experience of slavery.
Folk memory
tells Jamaicans – who have no poisonous lizards – that
some lizards are poisonous. If they can remember West African
reptiles, why shouldn’t they remember slavery? What is the
origin of the Jamaican proverb “The higher monkey climb, the
more him expose” when there have never been monkeys in Jamaica?
The New York Times editorial
ends:
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].