'East Timor...Who?

'Pol Pot killed 1.7 million people. We can't even deal with that. We think, if somebody kills someone, that's murder, you go to prison. You kill ten people, you go to Texas, they hit you with a brick, that's what they do. Somebody who's killed a hundred thousand people, we're almost going, 'Well done, well done. You killed a hundred thousand people? You must get up very early in the morning. I can't even get down the gym.''

Eddie Izzard

Well done, indeed. 

A few weeks ago I was teetering on the brink of upping sticks and exchanging my degree for a job waiting tables on a beach in Magaluf. Which might sound pretty tempting, if you don’t consider that I don’t like beaches (too sandy), clubs (I dance like a tool) and I’m a terrible waitress (I drop things). I felt utterly deflated, and it wasn’t just because I forgot to bring my Toffee Hoops Muller Corner in for lunch (although that was genuinely distressing, tbh). I discovered some pretty unpleasant stuff about our dear, democratic Great Britain and, actually, felt a bit betrayed by what was being done in the name of all British people. 

How many of you could place East Timor on a map? How about the hemisphere? Well, it’s a tiny island a stone’s throw from the northern tip of Australia, and in 1975 the Indonesian government invaded, unprovoked, and proceeded to massacre a third of the population. The Timorese people, having finally declared independence from their Portuguese colonial rulers, were invaded just nine days later by General Suharto of Indonesia, who, according to Noam Chomsky, was unhappy about a small, newly independent democracy setting an example in the largely autocratic South East Asia.

What followed over the next two decades was a bloodbath. 200,000 Timorese died during the occupation, caught up in the crossfire, deliberately targeted, or from starvation and disease. Sound like a tiny number? Well, yes, if you think of the 20 million killed by Stalin or the staggering potential 78 million killed by Mao Zedong. But bear in mind the population of East Timor was only 700,000 at the time of the invasion. Proportionally speaking, it was one of the worst genocides of all time.

This in itself was enough to make me want to crawl into the gap between my sofa cushions and cry. The thing is, the Cambodian genocide got underway in the same year. The eyes of the world were on Pol Pot – as well they should have been; the cruelty of Tuol Sleng and The Killing Fields was evil beyond belief, and the western media, rightly, would not let the world forget it. In the meantime, though, hardly a world away, the Timorese massacre was unfolding and the international community made barely a peep.

Why was this? Did the journalists all get distracted on their way there by the fabulous surf opportunities offered by Oz? Was East Timor just too darn hard to get to?

No. Sadly, the situation in East Timor was not covered as a salient issue in the media because the governments of the US and the UK – the world’s great champions of democracy – were actively funding the Indonesian army. They were handing over (for quite a hefty sum, let’s not forget) the weapons with which Suharto was slaughtering the Timorese in their thousands. Indiscriminate attacks on civilians villages – which happened, according to multiple eyewitnesses – with alarming regularity – were carried out by Hawk ground attack aircraft, supplied by the UK. Such things continued well into the 1990s – the Indonesian government began taking out its own citizens at various peaceful pro-democracy protests in Aceh and Jakarta. UN and UK arms trade documents show hundreds of millions of pounds worth of arms being shipped out to Indonesia during this period. In the latter years of Tony Blair’s administration, he condemned in the strongest terms the Taliban regime and their human rights violations and support of international terrorism: 'No art or culture is permitted,' he bemoans. 'All other faiths, all other interpretations of Islam are ruthlessly suppressed. Those who practice their faith are imprisoned. Women are treated in a way almost too revolting to be credible. First driven out of university; girls not allowed to go to school; no legal rights; unable to go out of doors without a man. Those that disobey are stoned.'

Yes. Condemn the Taliban. They’re awful. Well done, Tony, gold star to you. But don’t sell weapons to an equivalently brutal regime at the same time. Frankly, makes you look a bit of a dick. An undercover journalist posed as an Indonesian general wanting weapons from a UK arms dealer (in Oxford, of all places); the dealer himself was filmed saying words to the effect of, 'Well, I can't just send over the whole tank, but what I can do is send the body and the gun bit separately, along with some nice instructions, and you can set it up yourself, easy peasy. Tony told me that was cool.' 

The governments of the US and UK throughout the invasion and all the way up to Blair defended the UK’s support of the Indonesian regime by invoking Article 51 of the UN Charter: ‘Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations’. Lovely. Just one problem. INDONESIA WAS THE AGGRESSOR. They had no right to self-defence as they had not been attacked. What they did was entirely illegal.

Blair also manifestly failed to mention an equally significant portion of the same document, Article 1.2, which calls for the ‘respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples’. The principles which have been invoked time and time again to justify intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and most recently Libya and Syria, were in this case used to defend the aggressor, and the self-determination principle given to the Libyans and Iraqis (theoretically, if nothing else) was demonstrably denied to the East Timorese.

An ‘illegitimate’ arms sale (I would say ‘illegal’, but as it stands there are painfully few legal instruments regulating the arms trade) essentially means the sale of weapons to any state which might use them for ‘internal repression or external aggression'. Realistically, though, most suppliers only care about the external aggression bit. Do what you like in your own back garden. Hitler, though, killed people next door. Stupid man.

Many companies get round the issue of ethically dubious sales by making and distributing only components. Or dual-use. So, the nuts and bolts that hold together a tank-mounted machine-gun. Yes, definitely dual-use. Could do with some of those to put together my new Ikea bookshelf. I spoke recently to someone who defended Rolls Royce (the UK’s second largest arms exporter) by saying, ‘But they only make aeroplane engines. That’s not really a weapon.’ HOW DO YOU THINK THE PLANE STAYS IN THE AIR? HOW ELSE DOES THE HELICOPTER HOVER OVER VILLAGES SPRAYING THEM WITH BULLETS? Selling a part of the weapon – especially a crucial part, like an engine, or the bullets – is selling the weapon. It is complicity. The people who developed Zyklon-B are not innocent of the deaths in the gas chambers. Without them, they would have just been, um, chambers. And the Nazis might have had to actually put some effort in to get the job done.

Just last year, British Aerospace (or BAe, the UK’s largest arms supplier) shipped a load of weapons to Bahrain, which had just been reported opening fire on unarmed protestors in an effort to quell the pro-democracy movement of the Arab Spring. And we helped them.

There is a huge albatross around the neck of those like Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT), though. There is no political will whatsoever to limit the power of arms manufacturers. And the reason is a good one (although in my opinion, not good enough); BAe employs 98,200 people, and in 2010 brought into the country profits of $34,609,000. Rolls Royce gives 38,900 people jobs, and its exports were worth $16,794,000 the same year. Companies in the US provide hundreds of thousands of jobs. I am not advocating that we ban the trade in weapons tomorrow and start selling flowers and jam jars full of kind thoughts and rainbows. It would be economically and individually disastrous.  BUT in an ideal world, we would begin a shift towards an economy that is not built upon the suffering of others.

Take slavery – at the height of the slave trade, it was a normal, acceptable and even necessary cog in the machinery of Britain’s imperial economy. It created one in every twenty pounds in circulation in the late 18^th/early 19^th centuries. It was not only the slave trade, but the profits from the sugar cane and cotton plantations of the West Indies and America, that poured vast sums into the coffers of Great Britain. Abolition was fought against, tooth and nail, on the grounds that it would destroy the economy and the empire. Yes, abolition put many out of business. Was that enough of a reason to continue to trade in the lives and bodies of other human beings? Of course not. An international awakening forced us into the realisation that such a practice was hideous. It ended. A huge leap forward for equality and humanity.

The arms trade must go the same way. Profits must be subordinate to human lives. End of.

In a (rather lengthy) nutshell, that is why Magaluf was briefly such a tempting option. Because this seems not only an uphill battle, but one already lost. But I know which side I’d rather be on. Hence why I am here and writing this. And not in Magaluf. 

The White Man's Burden or Colonialist Claptrap?: The KONY 2012 Debate

                                              Take up the White Man’s burden—

                                              And reap his old reward:

                                              The blame of those ye better

                                              The hate of those ye guard—

                                              The cry of hosts ye humour

                                              (Ah slowly) to the light:

                                              "Why brought ye us from bondage,

                                              Our loved Egyptian night?”

                                              Take up the White Man’s burden-

                                              Have done with childish days-

                                              The lightly proffered laurel,

                                              The easy, ungrudged praise.

                                              Comes now, to search your manhood

                                              Through all the thankless years,

                                              Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,

                                              The judgment of your peers!

                                                                   From The White Man's Burden, by Rudyard Kipling,

So. Kony. More specifically, KONY 2012. There can be very few members of the species homo sapiens sapiens who have missed the media onslaught over the past few weeks. I imagine even tiny purple men on Pluto: ‘Jeeesss, Jason Russell really didn’t pick the right time to be flail, tackle out, down a busy motorway, did he? FFS. LOL.’

What has the video achieved? Well, it got 70 million hits in 5 days, something of a record even for this era of super-speed communication; it mobilised hundreds of thousands, and, as the film shows, it turned a political no into a yes. Quite a feat in itself. It has made people care about the plight of the so-called ‘invisible children’, and anything which creates a bit of awareness amongst people almost pathologically inward-looking in their priorities is ok in my book. Russell has explicitly admitted the video oversimplifies the matter for emotional effect – mass mobilisation over political clarity was a very deliberate artistic choice, and by all accounts, it worked. A forum now exists for debate over the issue, and with the recent (and first – take your bloody time, ICC) conviction of the DRC’s Thomas Lubanga for exploitation of child soldiers, the topic has never been more salient.‘A simplistic (or simplified) issue,’ said Al Jazeera, ‘made meaningful by so many people believing it.’

Neither is the critique of the charity’s spending ‘only’ 32% of its profit in the affected area a particularly valid one; unfortunately, you’d be pushed to find an NGO in the world spending over 40% on service delivery, and Oxfam’s service expenditure at one point dropped as low as 17% (not that these low figures are a good thing; ideally every penny would be spent on beneficiary aid and empowerment, but I am being realistic, and to use Invisible Children’s statistics as a basis for panning them isn’t entirely fair). 

But – this is a very big but. Huge. A giant, ethical elephantine but.

But – the entire premise of the video and its campaign has been built on the denial of the agency, personality and political significance of the Ugandan people. Calling the abducted children ‘invisible’ has been met with huge resentment and anger by the people affected; in the northern Ugandan city of Lira, a public screening of the film was abandoned because of the fury it provoked – fury from the very people Russell was purporting to help. They weren't invisible, their families were probably pretty aware of the fact their children were being stolen, and to say otherwise is painfully paternalistic. They were enraged that their suffering had been framed through the eyes of one white bloke and his (admittedly very cute) kid. I have it on good authority (a Human Rights Watch reporter who spent time in the area) that these people are amongst the most laid back, calmest and kindest people he’s come across in his travels. And they rioted. It had been recreated as a western issue; the phrase ‘the white man’s burden’ has been bandied about a fair bit over this matter, and this phrase, taken from a (potentially) satirical poem by Kipling (see above), essentially describes it as the duty of the 'civilised' white man to help the poor suffering ‘savages’. There can be few among those entertaining liberal sensibilities who does not cringe at such verse, satirical or not.

Agitating for western military intervention as the ‘only’ recourse to such a problem merely resurrects this heinous notion. Kony makes a conveniently villainous figurehead for a terrible problem; but the problem itself is not solved by his removal. This is the constant battle of the human right defender, the aid worker, the foreign office diplomat; at what point are the facts twisted, even sacrificed, for the greater good? And how can the greater good be determined when the supposed beneficiaries have not even been consulted about what they want and need? Such a top-down approach to aid and policy is in itself just another neo-colonial assumption.

Kampala is the world capital for child prostitution – its human development statistics are amongst the lowest in the world, the education and health care services are in tatters. Monstrous as Kony is, he has not done this singlehandedly. Infrastructural fractures run far higher; and herein lies the film’s other great flaw – the total failure to even mention Yoweri Museveni, who came to power after Idi Amin’s brutal rule, and was hailed as a great hope for the nation. Since then he has failed to make even the slightest dent in Uganda’s crushing poverty, his own armies have committed some fairly hideous sexual crimes in the DRC in particular and have been given total impunity, and he has repeatedly attempted to impose the death penalty on LGBT individuals. I also hear it is now illegal to break wind publicly in Uganda (Quite how one can impose punishments for this I’m not sure. A lot of ‘he who smelt it dealt it’ accusations going on, I imagine).

Yes, justice must be done – but compressing the incredibly complex geopolitical situation in Uganda and the Great Lakes region as a whole into a half-hour racially patronising polemic is not the way to go about it. While social media has shone a much needed light on the issues, it has not done so in a particularly helpful way. Can the outcome justify the means if those means have patronised and belittled an entire people, depicting them as incapable of helping themselves? Some might argue yes, it can. The people of Lira vehemently disagree. They are the ones who have suffered. We owe them a little more sensitivity.

On a slightly less analytical note; if that doesn’t convince you, though, have a peek at this monstrosity. Nothing could be more painfully indicative of a neo-colonial hero complex – although almost more offensive is the High School Musical setting. And the lyrics. And the costumes. Genuinely vomit-inducingly awful. Actually, if you make it to the end I’ll buy you a beer. I really will. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWACLKaOC08

Assad, YouTube and the Banality of Evil

'I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.'
Macbeth, Act 3

If you’ve missed the goings-on in the Middle East recently, you must have been living under a really spectacularly large and sound-proof rock. Assad is pulverising an increasingly back-footed group of freedom fighters into submission, and doesn’t seem to care how many of his people he tramples along with them. Even more disturbing are the recent reports that the regime is now deliberately targeting children for torture and murder. Perhaps to stop them becoming the next generation of dissidents? Who knows. 

So far, so evil. One of the strangest developments in the year-long uprising so far, though, has been the recent exposure of the emails sent between Assad and his wife, Asma. She’s ever so pretty and refined, has graced the cover of Vogue, was described as ‘the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies’, wears Christian Louboutins, and was born in nice, normal, humble Acton. According to Nicolas Sarkozy, such qualities even served to redeem Assad himself from the label of dictator-du-jour: ‘with a wife as modern as his, he can’t be all bad.’ Of course, a few Manolos do not a liberal make, as made apparent by the frankly bizarre interweb exchange between the couple. As Homs, Mrs Assad’s family home, was shelled to rubble, she shopped online for £26,000 worth of Parisian candlesticks.

The emails have also revealed Assad’s Harley Street cardiologist father-in-law’s advice as to how to quash rumours of human rights abuses. This includes accusing the (admittedly overzealously interventionist) UK of trying to ignite a Syrian genocide.

However, such nepotism and corruption is perhaps to be expected from a man whose regime is the product of a forty year dynasty brokered on the blood of dissenting citizens (in the most recent elections, the story goes that Assad’s aide reported to him, ‘Ninety six per cent voted for you, sir! What more could you want!’ to which Assad replied, ‘Their names and addresses.’).

What is perhaps most chilling is the sheer banality of the evil that Assad seemingly represents. He has, from his iTunes account registered in the US to avoid sanctions, downloaded country and western, and LMFAO. As Ben Macintyre of The Times posited this week, ‘the possibility of Syria’s ruthless leader getting down to Sexy and I Know It is the sort of mental image that can topple tyrannies.’ Think of Mao exhorting the Chinese masses to jump aboard the Vengabus. Pol Pot taunting prisoners with Take on Me. Or Milosevic rocking out to the Spice Girls’ Wannabe. Risible. Frightening.

So, it is not just the fact that Assad enjoys a good Lolcatz picture. It is the fact that he enjoys Lolcatz and orders the torture of Syrian civilians. Bond-villain – incomprehensibly evil and vindictive – no longer. He is suddenly more like us – and for that, less so. For me, one of the strangest facts about Hitler was that he adored animals, particularly his own German Shepherd (what else?), Blondi. So gentle, so hideous. Quite the frightening contradiction.

The couple have allowed us a glimpse of their human sides, and that their humanity can co-exist alongside the murderous crackdown in Syria is unsettling, to say the least. The sheer normality has been unveiled. Suddenly, we – the ordinary, boring, largely benevolent population – find ourselves with something in common with the Assads. Apparently the appeal of Biscuit the sleepwalking dog is universal.

And yet. And yet. The common ground we share is nothing to our differences. No longer a cartoon criminal, Assad is re-fashioned into a human being – and one capable, as only a relative few of our species are, of brutal, state-sanctioned mass murder. How much more evil he becomes for the emergence of such a juxtaposition.

Mr and Mrs Assad: mass murderers and YouTube fans. So near to us but, for that, so very, very far.