WATERED-DOWN DEVELOPMENT?
Last year World leaders descended on Johannesburg for the World Summit on Sustainable Development. There, they promised to halve the numbers of those without access to water by 2015. British charity WORLDwrite is protesting that the promises are just watered-down development, that will not help the Third World.
Hidden in the small print, they promise 'access' to water. But access to water is not the same thing as having water piped into your home. WORLDwrite director Ceri Dingle was shocked at the response when she said people deserve piped water, showers and flushing toilets. 'It was amazing, all the aid types started objecting that indoor plumbing was "unsustainable",' she said.
WORLDwrite supporters are organizing a sponsored water-carrying walk - to illustrate what kind of access many poorer regions have - on Saturday, 7 June, starting at 1pm, from Victoria Embankment Gardens (Embankment/Charing Cross tube) to the Oval Cricket Ground. The walk is followed by a summit at 5pm in the Hospitality Suite, Surrey Cricket Ground, Oval tube. See www.worldwrite.org.uk for more details, or ring 020 898 55435
ATROCITY EXHIBITION
The authorities acted quickly to stop photographs of British maltreatment of Iraqi prisoners of war getting into the press. Film handed in for processing at a laboratory at Tamworth showed Iraqi prisoners bound and gagged, suspended from a forklift and forced to pose in degrading sex acts. Gary Bartlam of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers is being questioned - but the Military Police also made sure that they kept all the photos, as well as trying unsuccessfully to silence the staff, demanding that they be sent home.
Vile as the Fusiliers' actions are, it is the authorities' squeamishness that is noteworthy. When Viliame Lomasalato of the Third Fiji Battalion ate a Japanese Prisoner during the Second World War, it did not stop him being awarded the Military Medal. Troops celebrated as heroes in the Falklands killed prisoners of war, and one British soldier killed by Argentineans was found with a bag of severed ears. Today's troops have to cope with the contradictory demands that they subjugate the enemy, and act at the same time to uphold their human rights.
Weapons of self-destruction
On a broader scale, the British government is caught in a similar dilemma. Having laid claim to the very highest principles in prosecuting the war, they are under increasing pressure for manipulating the facts in the case against Saddam's regime. In other times governments and intelligence services have manufactured black propaganda with impunity. But the failure to build a consensus for war before the conflict means that a cynical public magnifies any flaws afterwards. News that even Secretary of State Colin Powell and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw did not believe the argument that Iraq was a direct threat only shows that the Coalition lacked a real belief in its mission in the first place.
EUROPE STANDS FOR NOTHING
The debate over Europe's draft constitution, hosted by France's Valèry Giscard D'Estaing is full of sound and fury, but signifies very little. British rulers, spurred on by a 'Euro-sceptic' press demand the word 'federal' be dropped, and balk at a common defence policy.
On the face of things European enlargement - the reason for the new constitution - indicates a confidently expansionist Europe. But the European Union resisted taking responsibility for their eastern countries for years, despite US pressure. Even now, extending the free market for goods and investment is motivated to west European publics as a means to arrest the flow of migrants, by making countries of origin more attractive. Part of the deal is that migration be barred for an initial period of between two and five years.
At the G8 summit President Bush took every opportunity to indicate his frustration with the 'Old Europe' that tried to shackle US war moves in Iraq: Lots of praise for Poland, but Germany was represented by a visit to Auschwitz. Before the summit, National Security advisor Condoleezza Rice told a German trade delegation 'we're going to work around the chancellor' adding 'it's better to leave him out' - a policy that puts Gerhard Schroeder on the same level as Yasser Arafat (Guardian, 26 May 2003). At the economic level, the debate is that Germany's Social Democratic chancellor wants to rein in public spending, while America's right-wing leaders want Europeans to boost consumption.
The reason that most European publics seem to find the issue of a constitution so mind-numbingly boring is that it operates at a level entirely divorced from them. The difficulty that the defenders of sovereignty face is that the exercise of the democratic will at the national level is for the most part an empty letter. The European Commission has learned over the years to use crises to push forward further integration. (When the European Monetary System collapsed in 1992 many assumed that the project was finished - but before the end of the decade most of western Europe had one currency.) The recent divisions over Iraq only emphasise the need for a common defence policy to the Commission. The forward march of European integration seems dynamic, but it is the vacuum left by the collapse of national politics that is forcing the pace. The preamble of the draft constitution tries to encapsulate Europe's values, but the Union really stands for nothing.
-- James Heartfield