punditman says...
First, before I rant: to donate to the Myanmar (Burma) cyclone relief effort or to the victims of the China earthquake, there are many options available online including
Oxfam,
Save the Children, The Humanitarian Coalition,
Doctors Without Borders, and
World Vision.I urge you all to give.
Natural Disasters, Rhetoric and Politics According to numerous reports, Burma’s military junta continues to insist on being the sole distributor of aid in the cyclone-ravaged country. They persist in restricting movement of foreign aid workers, while pilfering aid for themselves and their supporters or selling it to those who need it most. This of course, is contemptible.
Not surprisingly, President Bush, First Lady Laura Bush, various allies and much of the Western media immediately climbed all over the Burmese junta for their tepid and tainted response to Cyclone Nargis.
Mrs. Bush, (who has suddenly found her
US foreign policy towards Burma chops rather late in the game), is a vocal critic of Burma's generals. Straight away, she accused the military junta of failing to give people adequate warning about the approaching cyclone. According to the
Washington Post, this did not sit well with exiled Burmese political analyst Aung Naing Oo, who called her verbal scolding “totally and utterly inappropriate. She is trying to score political points out of people’s disaster.”
The article also quoted Thant Myint-U, a former United Nations official and Burmese historian: “the problem is that everything, including aid, has been politicized, with suspicions on all sides.”
It is hard to see how the US lambasting the Burmese military junta will accomplish anything of value—other than make an already paranoid regime even more mistrustful. Such chastising rhetoric does nothing to alleviate the suffering of the people and therefore should be understood within the greater political and strategic context in which it occurs.
Just prior to the cyclone, the Bush administration strengthened its trade and investment ban against Burma, along with the freezing of assets, only slightly easing restrictions on financial aid. The West, led by the United States wants to counter China's influence, which has close ties with the military regime and sees the country as a critical point of access into the Indian Ocean.
Interestingly, the sanctions have not affected US oil giant, Chevron, of San Ramon, California. Through its subsidiary Unocal, the company has multibillion-dollar investments in Burma and has been flagged by human rights groups as being complicit in abuses in Burma in order to protect its pipeline routes. Also of note is Presidential nominee John McCain's initial choice to manage the Republican convention this summer: lobbyist and PR guy, Doug Goodyear, who as CEO of the firm DCI Group, represented Burma's repressive regime in 2002 by attempting to polish up their ah…image. Oops,
time to resign!Those Republicans: such inconvenient connections.
Speaking on May 12, after the first American military aid flight to Burma, President Bush denounced the Burmese junta for failing to act more quickly to accept international help, saying "either they are isolated or callous.”
"It's been days and no telling how many people have lost their lives as a result of the slow response," he said.
He's right, but he's also the proverbial pot calling the kettle black. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the US Department of Homeland Security
refused aid from Canada of all places. Slow response, indeed. So says the hypocrite-in-chief, who, when not pursuing wars of aggression or plotting new international crimes, occasionally transforms, as if by magic, into champion humanitarian--a fantastical veneer so tarnished by objective reality that only the severely indoctrinated can fathom the transcendence.
The hurricane Katrina/Rita comparison is instructive. According to an article that appeared last year in the
New York Sun entitled,
U.S. Refused Most Offers of Aid for Hurricane Katrina, the US declined 54 of 77 recorded aid offers from three of its staunchest allies: Canada, Britain, and Israel.
In another instance, according to the Sun...
State Department officials anguished over whether to tell Italy that its shipments of medicine, gauze, and other medical supplies spoiled in the elements for weeks after Katrina's landfall on August 29, 2005, and were destroyed. "Tell them we blew it," one disgusted official wrote. But she hedged: "The flip side is just to dispose of it and not come clean. I could be persuaded."
U.S. officials also turned down many offers of help from allied troops and search-and-rescue teams to save people from rooftops. Melanie Sloan of the public interest group,
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which called for an investigation into the foreign aid offers said, "It's clear that they're trying to hide their ineptitude, incompetence, and malfeasance."
The US has offered a measly $3.5 million in relief aid to Burma. For a reality check, the Iraq War costs an astounding $341.4 million per day. That's over 2 billion a week. The contrast is beyond obscene; it is more in the realm of a great cosmic injustice.
The Bush administration also favours regime change for Burma. And who doesn't? But theirs should be viewed as part of a permanent cyclone of corporatism intended to sweep up every hamlet on the planet, commodifying everything in its wake. The affects--a downward spiral of wages and the expansion of a global reserve labour force--are mostly hidden from view under the pretext of "democratization."
Obviously, the military regime in Burma deserves condemnation for its horrendous human rights record and its ruthless indifference to the plight of its people. But when the rebuke comes from the Bush administration, it rings rather hollow. Why would the Burmese regime respond positively to scolding verbiage from those who want to defeat them?
Is it beyond the pale to compare their reaction to how Bush dealt with the storm of criticism that occurred when storms Katrina and Rita ravished New Orleans and Texas? Let's see: is there any evidence that Bush felt ashamed at his administration's slow and lame reaction? Did the hue and cry of the people cause him to rectify his incompetence and neglect? Ask the victims who are still suffering from
a lack of any coherent plan to rebuild their infrastructure—and their lives. It appears he behaved as he always does: without shame.
Perhaps I am off base to draw a comparison between how a dictatorship and how the so-called "world's greatest democracy" each reacted to their own natural catastrophes. But democracies aren't supposed to launch wars of conquest or destroy people by putting their names on bogus lists. They are not supposed to arrest citizens without charges and without access to legal assistance. They are not supposed to scrap habeas corpus
and they are not supposed to condone torture and official lying. And they are not supposed to disgrace themselves in times of national emergency. That's what tyrannies do.
Then again, maybe I have a point.
