> Brit hypocrisy about foreign aid. - MP
>Behind America's War
>
>By John Pilger
>
>
>Since 11 September, the "war on terrorism" has provided a pretext
>for the rich countries, led by the United States, to further their
>dominance over world affairs.
>
>By spreading "fear and respect", as a Washington Post reporter put
>it, America intends to see off challenges to its uncertain ability
>to control and manage the "global economy", the euphemism for the
>progressive seizure of markets and resources by the G8 rich nations.
>
>This, not the hunt for a man in a cave in Afghanistan, is the aim
>behind US Vice-President Dick Cheney's threats to "40 to 50
>countries". It has little to do with terrorism and much to do with
>maintaining the divisions that underpin "globalisation".
>
>Today international trade is worth more than £11.5bn a day. A tiny
>fraction if this, 0.4 per cent, is shared with the poorest
>countries. American and G8 capital controls 70 per cent of world
>markets, and because of the rules demanding the end of tariff
>barriers and subsidies in poor countries while ignoring
>protectionism in the west, the poor countries lose £1.3bn a day in
>trade.
>
>By any measure, this is a war of the rich against the poor. Look at
>the casualty figures. The toll, says the World Resources Institute,
>is more than 13 million children every year, or 12 million under the
>age of five, according to United Nations estimates.
>
>"If 100 million have been killed in the formal wars of the 20th
>century", wrote Michael McKinley, "why are they to be privileged in
>comprehension over the annual [death] toll of children from
>structured adjustment programmes since 1982?"
>
>McKinley's paper, "Triage: a survey of the new inequality as combat
>zone" was presented to a conference in Chicago this year and
>deserves wider reading (he teaches at the Australian National
>University. It vividly describes the acceleration of western
>economic power in the Clinton years, which, since 11 September, has
>passed a threshold of danger for millions of people.
>
>Last month's World Trade Organisation meeting in Doha in the Gulf
>state of Quatar, was disastrous for the majority of humanity. The
>rich nations demanded and got a new "round" of "trade
>liberalisation", which is the power to intervene in the economies of
>poor countries, to demand privatisation and the destruction of
>public services.
>
>Only they are permitted to protect their home industries and
>agriculture; only they have the right to subsidise exports of meat,
>grain and sugar, then to dump them in poor countries at artificially
>low prices, thereby destroying the livelihoods of millions.
>
>In India, says the environmentalist Vandana Shiva, suicides among
>poor farmers are "an epidemic".
>
>Even before the WTO met, the American trade representative Robert
>Zoelliek invoked the "war on terrorism" to warn the developing world
>that no serious opposition to the American trade agenda would be
>tolerated.
>
>He said: "The United States is committed to global leadership of
>openness and understands that the staying power of our new
>coalitionŠ[against terrorism]Šdepends on economic growthŠ" The code
>is that "economic growth" (rich elite, poor majority) equals
>anti-terrorism.
>
>Mark Curtis, a historian and Christian Aid's head of policy, who
>attended Doha, has described "an emerging pattern of threats and
>intimidation of poor countries" that amounted to "economic gunboat
>diplomacy".
>
>He said: "It was utterly outrageous. Wealthy countries exploited
>their power to spin the agenda of big business. The issue of
>multinational corporations as a cause of poverty was not even on the
>agenda; it was like a conference on malaria that does not discuss
>the mosquito."
>
>Delegates from poor countries complained of being threatened with
>the removal of their few precious trade preferences.
>
>"If I speak out too strongly for the rights of my people," says an
>African delegate, "the US will phone my minister. They will say that
>I am embarrassing the United States. My government will not even
>ask, 'What did he say?' They will just send me a ticket tomorrowŠso
>I don't speak for fear of upsetting the master."
>
>A senior US official telephoned the Ugandan government to ask that
>its ambassador to the WTO, Nathan Irumba, be withdrawn. Irumba
>chairs the WTO's committee on trade and development and has been
>critical of the "liberalisation" agenda.
>
>Dr Richard Bernal, a Jamaican delegate at Doha, said his government
>had come under similar pressure. "We feel that this [WTO] meeting
>has no connection with the war on terrorism," he said, "[yet] we are
>made to feel that we are holding up the rescue of the global economy
>if we don't agree to a new round [of liberalisation measures]."
>
>Haiti and the Dominican Republic were threatened that their special
>trade preferences with the United States would be revoked if they
>continued to object to "procurement", the jargon for the effective
>takeover of a government's public spending priorities.
>
>India's minister for commerce and industry, Murasoli Maran, said
>angrily, "The whole process is a mere formality and we are being
>coerced against our willŠthe WTO is not a world government and
>should not attempt to appropriate to itself what legitimately falls
>in the domain of national governments and parliaments."
>
>What the conference showed was that the WTO has become a world
>government, run by the rich (principally Washington). Although it
>has 142 members, only 21 governments in reality draft policy, most
>of which is written by the "quad": the United States, Europe, Canada
>and Japan.
>
>At Doha, the British played a part similar to Tony Blair's promotion
>of the "war on terrorism". The Secretary of State for Trade and
>Industry, Patricia Hewitt, has already said that "since 11
>September, the case is very overwhelming for more trade
>liberalisation". In Doha, the British delegation demonstrated,
>according to Christian Aid, "the gulf between its rhetoric about
>making trade work for the poor" and its real intentions.
>
>This "rhetoric" is the speciality of Clare Short, the International
>Development Secretary, who surpassed herself by announcing £20m as
>"a package of new measures" to help poor countries.
>
>In fact, this was the third time the same money had been announced
>within a year. In December 2000, Short said the government "will
>double its support for trade-strengthening initiatives in developing
>countries from £15m over the past three years to £30m over the next
>three years".
>
>Last March, the same money was announced again. Short, said her
>press department, "will announce that the UK will double its support
>forŠdeveloping countries' trade performanceŠ"
>
>On 7 November, the £20m package was announced all over again.
>Moreover, a third of it in effect is tied to the launch of a new WTO
>"round".
>
>This is typical of the globalisation of poverty, the true name for
>"liberalisation". Indeed, Short's title of International Development
>Secretary is as much an Orwellian mockery as Blair's moralising
>about the bombing. Short is worthy of special mention for the
>important supporting role she has played in the fraudulent war on
>terrorism.
>
>To the naïve, she is still the rough diamond who speaks her mind in
>the headlines: and this is true in one sense. In trying to justify
>her support for the lawless bombing of civilians in Yugoslavia, she
>likened its opponents to Nazi appeasers.
>
>She has since abused relief agency workers in Pakistan, who called
>for a pause in the current bombing as "emotional" and has questioned
>their integrity. She has maintained that relief is "getting through"
>when, in fact, little of it is being distributed to where it is most
>needed.
>
>Around 700 tonnes are being trucked into Afghanistan every day, less
>than half that which the UN says is needed. Six million people
>remain at risk. Nothing is reaching those areas near Jalalabad,
>where Americans are bombing villages, killing hundreds of civilians,
>between 60 and 300 in one night, according to anti-Taliban
>commanders who are beginning to plead with Washington to stop. On
>these killings, as on the killing of civilians in Yugoslavia, the
>outspoken Short is silent.
>
>Her silence, and her support for America's $21bn homicidal campaign
>to subjugate and bribe poor countries into submission, exposes the
>sham of "the global economy as the only way to help the poor", as
>she has said repeatedly.
>
>The militarism that is there for all but the intellectually and
>morally impaired to see is the natural extension of the rapacious
>economic policies that have divided humanity as never before. As
>Thomas Friedman wrote famously in the New York Times, "the hidden
>hand" of the market is US military force.
>
>Little is said these days about the "trickle down" that "creates
>wealth" for the poor, because it is transparently false. Even the
>World Bank, of which Short is a governor, has admitted that the
>poorest countries are worse off, under its tutelage, than ten years
>ago: that the number of poor had increased, that people are dying
>younger.
>
>And these are countries with "structural adjustment programmes" that
>are meant to "create wealth" for the majority. It was all a lie.
>
>Giving evidence before a House of Commons select committee, Clare
>Short described the US as "the only great power [that] almost turns
>its back on the world". Her gall deserves a prize. Britain gives
>just 0.34 per cent of GNP in aid, less than half the minimum laid
>down by the United Nations.
>
>It is time we recognised that the real terrorism is poverty, which
>kills thousands of people every day, and the source of their
>suffering, and that of innocent people in dusty villages, is
>directly related.
>
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