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http://www.dawn.com/2001/05/23/int10.htm Bush giving arms lobby what it wants: war By George Monbiot LONDON: George Bush has made no secret of the primary mission of his presidency: to remunerate the companies which supported his bid for power. To the oil industry he has given the Arctic wildlife reserve and the abandonment of US action on climate change. To the tobacco industry he has granted an end to the federal lawsuits on behalf of the victims of smoking. To the mining firms he has pledged to remove the laws restricting arsenic in drinking water. But what do you give to the industry which has everything? Which already receives some $200 billion a year from the US taxpayer? You give US arms companies what they most desire. You give them war. To this end, and in the name of national security, Mr Bush has been seeking to revive the hostility and suspicion which proved so lucrative until the disastrous events of 1989. He hopes to scrap the anti-ballistic missile treaty, destabilizing the world's nuclear equilibrium. He is determined to extend Nato to all of Russia's western borders, causing the moribund but dangerous old bear to feel more threatened than it has done for a decade. Welcome as these incipient crises are, however, the war industry also requires immediate conflict. So the US has been seeking opportunities all over the world. None has so far proved as fruitful as its support for a scheme devised by the government of Colombia. The EU is well aware of these atrocities and of their coordination by President Pastrana's plan. At first sight, it appears to be contesting them. At a meeting on April 30, the EU resolved to spend $290 million on "political support" for the "peace process" in Colombia. The money will be used to establish "peace laboratories", contest human rights violations and "relieve the social impact of conflict". The package looks uncontroversial and it received no significant coverage. But the public statements issued by the EU, the European commission and Chris Patten, the British commissioner who brokered the agreement, contain a number of curious omissions. "Plan Colombia" is mentioned nowhere. Nor is the US government. Nor are the atrocities committed by the army and coordinated by the state. The killings in the country are blamed solely upon paramilitaries and guerillas. Only when you read an account of the same meeting by the Inter-American Development Bank do you stumble across several interesting features missing from the European statements. The first is that the funding package is not a European initiative, but was provided at the request of the Colombian government. The second is that it will be supplemented by extra money from the US. The third is that Marc Grossman, a US under secretary of state, was sitting in the meeting. Trawl the European commission's archive, and you discover a further interesting feature: that the "peace process" to which the EU was referring is none other than Plan Colombia. The new funding represents the plan's "social component", attached to the US invasion in the hope of making it look like something rather different. Spain is prepared to go further still, and help the US to finance the Colombian army. The new EU funding, in other words, provides the political credibility which President Pastrana and the US administration have desperately been seeking ever since they initiated their plan. The EU has helped the two governments to disguise a programme of state terror as humanitarian aid. Mass killings, ecocide and the seizure of resources do not have a financial solution, but a political one. You cannot buy human rights, least of all from a scheme that is responsible for their abuse. The US has chosen to collaborate. At its best, the EU's funding is a waste of money. At its worst, it amounts to complicity in crimes against humanity. -Dawn/The Guardian News Service. |
