Obligatory amnesia and unforgettable images -- for Biswal

My friend Thusha has kindly sent me a fascinating document by Eduardo Galeano. It is called ‘The Right to Rave’, a manifesto and a wish list at the same time.  The list was prefaced.

‘In 1948 and again in 1976, the United Nations proclaimed long lists of human rights, but the immense majority of humanity enjoys only the rights to see, hear and remain silent. Suppose we start by exercising the never-proclaimed right to dream? Suppose we rave a bit? Let's set our sights beyond the abominations of today to divine another possible world.’

There were many ‘articles’ in these ‘rights’ and the following caught my eye: ‘In Argentina, the crazy women of the Plaza de Mayo shall be held up as examples of mental health because they refused to forget in a time of obligatory amnesia.’  The reference was to the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, who stood silently, dentified only by their white kerchiefs, and sometimes by the pictures they held of their missing children.  They authorities, unable to deal with this silent statement of objection (protests were banned at the time), resorted to vilifying them. They were called the Crazy Women of Plaza de Mayo, las locas de Plaza de Mayo. 

I think the reason that I noticed that particular line in Galeanos deft capture of the world’s injustices in this ‘Rave’ was that I had received an email the same day about images that should not be forgotten.  The ‘forgotten images’ included one where US soldiers are shown looking at the body of a dead Vietcong soldier which presumably they had tied to the truck they were traveling on and dragging it along the road.  If reconciliation, redress, punishment and so on are things that have a political afterlife even following military victory/defeat, as the current howls and howlers emanating from certain ill-informed and myopic corners of the international community (read, USA + EU) serve to make us understand, then this photograph should warrant not just investigation and punishment but compensation as well.  It looks like the world is selective when it comes to war crimes, investigation, delivering judgment and dispensing punishment.

It is not even possible to say ‘that’s the past, let’s move on’, for the USA has bombed 18 countries since the second world war ended, maintains a military presence in dozens of countries, has invaded many others and have directly or indirectly caused the death of more than a million people in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 20 years, displaced a similar number and produced more maimed and orphaned persons than any other country in the world during this period.

I had seen that ‘forgotten’ picture before, as I have some of the others that were included in the email.  There are more recent pictures and stories that we are being asked to forget and which people like Ban Ki-moon appear to have forgotten. 

If you go to the following site, you will read about a boy called Anas Hamed and his sister Inas both in the unhappy city called Fallujah who suffer from birth defects courtesy the US-British battles against suspected rebels, the bloodiest so far according to some accounts (http://www.countercurrents.org/rothscum110710.htm).  Fallujah was one of the most peaceful places in Iraq post-invasion.  On April 28, 2003, a crowd of 200 people defied a local curfew and gathered outside a local school to protest the presence of foreign troops in their city.  As things heated up, it is alleged, that US troops were fired upon.  US soldiers ‘returned’ the fire, killing 17 people.

An Italian documentary claims that the US used incendiary MK-77 bombs (similar to napalm) in military action.  The us of such weapons are illegal according to Protocol III of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, to which the USA (surprised?) is not a signatory. The US State Department initially denied using white phosphorus as a munition, but backtracked when it was found that a US Army magazine had run a story detailing its use in Fallujah. 

The infant mortality rate in Fallujah is 80/1000 per year, the birth rate a horrific 136 per 1,000 births.  In the first two months of 2010, as many infants died as in the whole of 2008.  Deformities, genetic mutations etc stand at unacceptable levels.  There’s a peace dividend here, then.  It’s not being reported or acknowledged in the British Parliament, which regularly engages in moral posturing with respect to Sri Lanka’s ‘alleged’ war crimes (unproven and extrapolated from statements from dubious sources).  The British, like the USA justified invasion citing the existence of ‘weapons of mass destruction (WMD)’. The US said ‘regime change’ but the British, constitutionally hampered called it ‘self-defense’.  Cute.  Tell that to Anas and Inas Hamed and thousands of other children who would not say ‘thank you’ to any Brit or Yank today or ever for all the crimes against humanity committed in their very names, for which they had to pay by foregoing normal lives, regular bodies and freedoms that the children of the ‘saviours’ get to enjoy.

There is another image that I want to see. Dr. David Kelly, the UK Government’s Nuclear Science expert sent to Iraq to find WMDs. Before the invasion. He found none and reported this.  His body was found in a walking path near his residence.  Verdict: suicide. Some JMOs protested. They were greeted with silence. I want a picture of the look on his face as he departed this earth.  Freeze it.  I am sure it will be a pin-up item that rebels against ‘obligatory amnesia’ as such decreed by the thugs of this world can use.

[first published in the Daily News, July 13, 2010]

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Stephen Harper and necessary commiseration

Does Canada deserve this embarrassment?

Politicians must continuously shape and reshape word to fit exigency.  They often don’t realize that when the expedient door is opened those outside get to see some of their insides.  Most often there are no half-way measures.  The door has to be fully opened or kept shut. Open it and it’s like dropping your pants.  It’s not always a beautiful sight.  I am thinking of poor Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada. 

Harper is reported to be campaigning aggressively ‘to pressure Sri Lanka on human rights and political reconciliation’.  He’s stated that he will boycott the 2013 Commonwealth Summit in Sri Lanka if Sri Lanka’s government ‘does not show accountability for human rights abuses and take steps to reconcile with the Tamil minority’ and has wanted others to follow suit.  His Foreign Minister, John Baird, has complained (!) that ‘Sri Lanka barred UN investigators, showed a lack of accountability and used heavy-handed tactics since the war’.  He wants to see ‘action’, his spokesman, Chris Day, has said. 

These are times where mouth-shooting is the order of the day.  There is no necessity, especially after George W Bush’s WMD-related lies justifying monumental crimes against the people of Iraq, for anyone to support contention with evidence.  All that is required, Bush and Blair showed (and Obama, Brown, Sarkozy and their minions such as Susan Rice, Robert O Blake and Hillary Clinton as well as ‘tag-alongers’ like Navi Pillai and Louis Arbour have affirmed), is to have big mouths, big bucks and big guns. 

Just to put the record straight, though, let’s state the facts.  Sri Lanka never barred UN investigators.  The issue of accountability is adequately addressed and anyway the parameters of such exercises should not be determined by some meddling and ill-informed foreigner fed by terrorist proxies.  Most importantly, while the international community (with all its many flaws and crimes of myopia and selective vilification) has the moral right to call out nations with respect to rights abuse and other transgressions, such umbrage should be founded on hard evidence and not conjecture.  If this were not the case, the UN would have nothing else to do than investigating each and every member state because some ill-intentioned members level charges, using the correct language of indignation.

As for reconciliation with the Tamil community, let Harper be informed that the Sri Lankan security forces rescued close to 300,000 Tamils held hostage by the LTTE.  Now that’s a big favour (if indeed saving lives of fellow citizens is not responsibility but favour on the part of the state) he would agree. Of some 11,000 LTTE cadres captured or surrendered, more than 8000 have been reintegrated with society, something that Harper might find impossible to imagine if it happened to be Al Qaeda fighters held in torture chambers, sorry ‘detention centres’ by the USA and its NATO allies.  More than 98% of those displaced have been resettled, and not just in landmine-ridden plots of land but areas where important infrastructure has been restored with all complementary facilities to make for normalcy provided.   If he’s upset about ‘political solutions’, then let’s hear the man enumerate the grievances, especially since his heart bleeds so profusely for the Tamils. 

Enough of ‘record’.  Let’s move to pots and kettles and the colour black, and the assessment of blackness in the relevant utensils. 

First the righteousness. Harper outlined Canadian values: ‘freedom, democracy and human rights’.  For good measure, Harper said that those who do not share these values are considered a threat.  Nice words, but when it comes to application, all I know is that a few weeks after Harper said he will have no truck with dictators, he was making deals with a man who carried out a coup.  Makes me wonder what he means by ‘democracy’.

Freedom.  Harper’s government is trying to push through a new set of electronic surveillance laws that will make privacy history in Canada.  Jennifer Stoddart, Privacy Commissioner of Canada sums it all up: ‘Read together, the provisions of [these bills] would substantially diminish the privacy rights of Canadians. They do so by enhancing the capacity of the state to conduct surveillance and access private information while reducing the frequency and vigour of judicial scrutiny. In essence, they make it easier for the state to subject more individuals to surveillance and scrutiny.’

Human rights.  My fellow Yaka has a comment.  Well, more than one.

‘Tell me the basis on which Harper or any Canadian derives claim to discuss human rights with anyone or anything other than their off-pink navels!  Can they tell us how to take the asbestos they exported to us from our roof and out of our lungs, knowing well that it causes the worst and most painful carcinomas?  And how can we resolve his concern for humanity when an original aka aboriginal aka red indian aka first nations aka native person’s average mortality is 27 years?  Yes, now, in 2011.  Where is he speaking from? Windstruck in Prairie Winnipeg? Mounted on a war horse overlooking the Beaufort Sea? Under the Queen of England’s Hanoverian underwear?’ 

I would be less harsh, but we can’t get around the fact that my Yak friend makes: ‘Canada is NOT as it claims a parliamentary democracy but a constitutional monarchy!’  In fact Harper’s proposals have been backed by the UK, Australian and New Zealand.  ‘Who,’ asks me friend, ‘are these countries?’ and proceeds to answer: ‘Constitutional monarchies! Settler states!’  He puts it well, so I will continue with quote: ‘New Zealand? Give me a fokkin break…..let’s speak directly to the Maoris and the originals!’  Canada recently changed her colonial department from Indian Affairs to Aboriginal Affairs.  Now is that ‘reconciliation’ with the ‘originals’, forget minorities in Sri Lanka who have it better than Canadian minorities have and moreover has no evidence to buttress claims to territory? 

Finally, myopia.  If democracy, human rights and freedom is what count and if these things are what help distinguish friends from enemies as per Harper’s conceptualization, should he not immediately break off all diplomatic ties with his neighbor, the United States of America which led NATO’s massive gun-burst on democracy, human right and freedom in Libya (and of course Iraq and Afghanistan before, where their work is yet to end!)?   The attack on Libya, just like the invasion of Iraq was based on well-crafted lies and the process mimic, tragically, the very transgressions (purported of course) that was used to legitimate the invasion.

More myopia and unpardonable religious fanaticism.  Harper claimed ‘Canada is safer than when al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. (the jury is still out on the architects of that attack, just for the record), but that the major threat is still Islamicism.  ‘Islamic radicals’ are the biggest threat, in other words.  I don’t know.  All I know is that if we were to go by the claimed faith of those who have killed, sanctioned killing, applauded killing and are killing as we speak then Harper would have to conclude that the biggest threat to the world’s pace is ‘Chritianism’.  I personally think that it is corporate greed, but if Harper wants to be religious about it, this is where we have to go.  Only shows the man’s really got something twisted and I am not sure my friend was altogether wrong about Hanoverian underwear. 

There are Canadians and Canadians, fortunately.  Lovely people, at least those I know, have dined with, shared stories with.  Both in Canada and Sri Lanka.  I don’t know Bruce Levy, the Canadian High Commissioner in Sri Lanka.  If I do meet him someday (unlikely of course), I will ask him to convey my best wishes to Canadian citizens, especially those whose lands were stolen and now can expect only to live up to the age of 27.  I will ask him to convey my sympathies to Stephen Harper. 

[an edited version of this article appeared in the Daily Mirror, October 6, 2011]

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