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Signs
of the Times: 2002
The figures highlighted at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg appear
to be like the material for the most horrifying earthquake of all
time. More than 80 percent of the world's wealth and resources are
being controlled, manipulated and extravagantly abused by some 15
percent of the population comprising mainly the rich and ruling
elite under an unseen, but all-powerfu,l world government run by
US-led global corporations. Nearly three billion people - half the
world's population - are known to be surviving on less than two
dollars a day while sections in the rich world are known to be making
profits of two dollars a second.
Even tonight, some 800 million people, mainly in the Third World,
will try to fall asleep without a meal because they are enslaved
in absolute poverty - they don't know whether or where the next
loaf of bread would come from. Prophets like Mahatma Gandhi, virtually
forgotten or sidelined even in his homeland of India amidst the
modern rat race, had often pointed out that the world had enough
to meet the needs of all people but not the greed of some. Not satisfied
with leaving 800 million people in abject poverty and three billion
below the poverty line, a greedy world system is now taking even
what belongs to animals, fish and insects.
According to a warning given at the Earth Summit, as many as 11,000
species, including some mammals, will be extinct within a decade
because a selfish world is gradually plundering their habitat.
Despite all the pledges, aid and structural adjustments of poverty
alleviation, grants and loans, the gap between the poor world and
the rich world is widening. Essentially, the new global bodies like
the World Trade Organisation - which the Third World analysts see
more as a World Economic Terror Organisation - are known to be tearing
down national barriers and threatening the very sovereignty of nations
so that transnational corporations could continue what is widely
seen as corporate gangrape of the Third World's remaining resources.
The poor Third World had been lulled into believing that the political
or military colonialism of the rich West had ended and that the
sun had set on the great empires. What was done then was at least
done openly. Now it continues underground but with more devastating
force through economic neo-colonialism guided by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice
corporation. The Third World is being robbed without even knowing
it is being robbed and no wonder, some strategists of globalised
capitalism refer to Third World leaders and the people as 'useful
idiots'.
In 2001, the Bush administration shook and shocked the world by
pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol which seeks to protect the planet
from the growing threat greenhouse gases - the threat coming mainly
from the US, which is the biggest polluter. This year, the US withdrew
from and threatened to undermine the international criminal court
and unilaterally cancelled the anti-ballistic missile treaties to
propel a huge new arms race. Finally as the year drew to an end,
the US dealt a death blow to hundreds of millions of sick people
in the Third World by refusing to allow a move which would have
enabled poor countries to obtain life-saving drugs at affordable
prices. According to the London Guardian, the US sabotaged this move at the WTO talks in Geneva last week in an operation personally directed by US Vice President Dick Cheney. The Guardian said Mr. Cheney had taken over the operation from the US trade representative apparently under pressure from big US drug companies and lobbies - giving credence to a widely-held belief that the treatment which the Bush empire or Corporate America is proposing might be deadlier than any pandemic the world has faced. Just as the Roman empire rotted from within and the British empire was overthrown by a barefoot prophet of peace, the signs of the rot in the empire of the third millennium also appear to be emerging with the disgraceful and disastrous collapse of big global corporations and the snipers who terrorised Washington for weeks. The
year of Bush and American empire-building by the Texan Caesar began
with the Whatever may
be happening in Afghanistan now, whatever Osama bin Laden, Mullah
Mohammed Omar and others may be planning to do, one of the main
objectives of the Bush administration and the global corporations
is being quietly but efficiently worked out. Seven years
ago, Afghanistan's Taleban regime, blocked a plan by a US-led oil
consortium to build a multi-billion dollar oil and gas pipeline
across Central Asia. Experts have pointed out that a large part
of the yet unexploited oil resources of the world is in Central
Asia. What the Taleban stopped is now being renewed and one of the
biggest ever oil-gas deals between the countries in the region and
global corporations is to be formalised soon. With Afghanistan
temporarily wrapped up to serve the interests of the Bush corporation,
the war of words and the psychological onslaught have switched to
Iraq. If further proof were needed that the United Nations is largely
a tool or puppet of the US, it was provided in the past two months
with even the Security Council being bullied or bulldozed into doing
what the Bush administration wanted it to do. France and
Russia, especially put up stiff resistance, against the Security
Council giving any blank cheque for the US to attack Iraq, disarm
Saddam Hussein and bring about a regime change. Eventually, a compromise
was reached but the US retained the power to interpret what would
constitute a 'material breach' of the UN resolution by Iraq. In this atmosphere,
the UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix went back to Iraq and
in accordance with the UN resolution, the Baghdad regime submitted
a 12,000-page dossier by December 7. What happened to the dossier
was like a diplomatic coup. The US obtained copies of the full dossier
for itself and the other four permanent members of the Security
Council, while the remaining ten-member states, including Syria,
which has a long border with Iraq, got only edited versions. Syria
protested angrily, while US Secretary of State Colin Powel officially
dismissed the Iraqi dossier as recycled rubbish. Britain hit even
harder saying the Iraqi dossier gave the Bush-Blair coalition the
right to attack Iraq even now. Over the past
week, Iraq said it was ready to allow even CIA agents to come there
and look for any weapons of mass destruction, but the US dismissed
this as a publicity stunt though it said it would meet the request
of UN weapons inspectors and provide secret information it had on
biological, chemical or nuclear weapons in Iraq. The US also
demanded that the weapons inspectors should interview Iraqi scientists
and go to the extent of taking some of them out of the country even
against their will for interrogation as part of a more aggressive
game plan. But whatever the inspectors find or do not find, most
military and political analysts believe that the Bush administration
is all set for a full-scale sea, land and air attack on Iraq, possibly
some time in February. One report
from Britain said that unlike the Operation in Afghanistan, the
attack on Iraq is likely to be spearheaded by a massive marine force
with support from troops from Kuwait, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia
and other bases. As award-winning
writer Arundati Roy says, there is growing evidence that the real
religion for the United States and the West is the market. In the
name of this new religion, a crusade has been launched with hallelujahs
and all that, identifying Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the axis
of evil. But many Third World analysts say there is much validity
for the contention that the finger could also be pointed the other
way with the US, Britain and Ariel Sharon's Israel also emerging
as an axis of evil. By the year's
end, an arrogant Bush administration announced that it was going
ahead with the multi-billion dollar missile defence system or star
wars. This would obviously mean that Russia, China, Britain, France,
India, Pakistan and other countries would also follow, triggering
a massive new arms race and booming business for the arms industry
which is based largely in the US. So within the
next few years, the US economy which is now sluggish, if not in
recession, is likely to boom again, mainly from star wars business
- but millions of people in the Third World would have to pay for
it with their lives. Where and what indeed is the axis of evil?
Oppression
continues Before 9/11
and the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Saddam Hussein, the
Bush administration was known to be working on a road map to sort
out the West Asian conflict. But now, the road map is stuck in a
road block while Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pressurised
by the even more hawkish foreign minister Benyamin Netanyahu making
it the most horrible year for the Palestinian people. Again this
year, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was not allowed to go for
a Christmas service in Bethlehem and the little town of biblical
fame lay not in a deep and dreamless sleep but in a nightmare of
outrageous oppression. With the US
likely to be focussing on Iraq for the next few months at least,
the elections to the Palestinian parliament have been put off indefinitely
and the areas in and around the holy cities remain a living hell
for millions of people. Setback
for secularism If that was
bad, worse was to follow. In state elections this month, Mr. Modi
was given a thumping two thirds majority - signalling a potentially
calamitous trend where a secular India may be plunging towards Hindu
fundamentalism. The developments
in neighbouring Pakistan were no less ominous. In the aftermath
of the war in Afghanistan, the pro-American stance of the Musharraf
regime provoked a growing trend towards Islamic militancy or fundamentalism.
Though General
Pervez Musharraf stage managed and manipulated the process to a
large degree, the October elections produced a situation where Islamic
parties won two states and got a controlling stake at the national
level. Across the
ever-explosive Kashmiri border, the faceoff between the South Asian
nuclear neighbours intensified after the attack on the Indian parliament
and which way the equation would play out is as puzzling as the
international jigsaw. Bloody October The US government
and others blamed Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda for the attack and
this month White House sources said they believed a video tape carried
on Al-Jazeera television indicated that the dreaded bin Laden was
still alive and planning another attack. The Bali calamity also
provoked a major row between Malaysia and Australia, after Prime
Minister John Howard claimed the right to launch pre-emptive strikes
on any country where he believed terrorists were operating. In Moscow,
the terrorised Chechen rebels brought their own October revolution
to the Russian capital. The three-day siege of the Moscow theatre
where the rebels held some 800 people hostage ended on a horrifying
note, seldom seen even in any fictional movie. The Russian special
forces allegedly used a mysterious gas to make the rebels unconscious
before killing them: But more than a hundred hostages also died
of suffocation - turning President Vladimir Putin's momentous triumph
into a tragedy. As 2002 ends,
North Korea has emerged somewhere on par with Saddam Hussein's Iraq
as a threat to US interests and global strategy. Last week, South
Korea elected a new President, Roh Moo Hyun, who won on a platform
of forging closer links with the North and distancing his country
from the US. The Bush administration showed a calm face while the
North Korean regime of Kim Jong Il threatened to reactivate its
uranium and plutonium nuclear programmes if the US did not enter
into a non-aggression pact with it. While most
analysts saw North Korea's action as largely an act of brinkmanship
or a strategic move, the tough-talking US Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld put on another show. He told a Washington news conference
this week, the US had the power to fight and win two wars at the
same time - against Iraq and North Korea. But the equation in the Korean peninsula is quite different from Iraq. North Korea has no oil while it is surrounded by nuclear powers Russia and China with Japan across the water. |
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Copyright © 2001 Wijeya Newspapers
Ltd. All rights reserved. |
world
focus on Afghanistan and is ending with the focus on Saddam Hussein's
Iraq where all-out war is becoming increasingly possible, if not
unavoidable. 
