The 1998 US Congressional hearings on the proposed Tropical Forest Conservation Act (TFCA) appeared unequivocal about the eligibility criteria for countries expected to stand in line with begging bowl in hand. Possession of at least one tropical forest was, of course, mandatory, as was the conclusion of a Bilateral Investment Treaty with the US. Apart from those two trifles, eligibility seemed weighted in equal measure among four other requirements: have a government that is democratically elected; co-operate on international narcotics control; not support acts of international terrorism; and not violate internationally recognized human rights.
In view of space constraints, we’ll look briefly at the first three, and dwell at some length on ‘human rights’, the fourth of those other TFCA eligibility criteria.
On having a democratically elected government, a pity that GWB’s patently ‘undemocratic’ victory can’t be made an issue here. The king can do no wrong, remember? Put another way, do as I say, not as I do.
As for narcotics control, the US would hate to be reminded of its record in the late ’60s when (along with Saudi Arabia) it funded to the tune of over a billion dollars a mujahedin narco-trafficker, terrorist and extreme Islamic fundamentalist named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan who was running six heroin factories in the town of Koh-i-Soltan. No, this is not, as someone said last year, a figment of this writer’s imagination. It’s all documented in Whiteout: The C.I.A., Drugs and the Press by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, and in The Politics Of Heroin: C.I.A. Complicity In The Global Drug Trade by Alfred W. McCoy. Of course, Hekmatyar was a ‘good’ terrorist; he was, as the saying goes, ‘one of us’. Understandably, the western corporate-controlled media remained largely silent.
No one condones terrorism, but the accepted knee-jerk reaction of expressing justified horror at such acts without seeking to understand what may have led to the crimes is unhelpful and futile. Anyone who ignores the effects worldwide of America’s duplicitous foreign policy, and chooses to believe GWB’s post-9/11 assertion that "America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom`85" can surely sit back and expect even more of the same to home in on that brightest of beacons.
Internationally recognized.
Now for ‘human rights’. The operative words here, in case you hadn’t noticed, are internationally recognized. Christopher Columbus discovered the New World when ‘human rights’ or the idea for setting up that international - and interminable - talkathon called the United Nations, had not yet been, well, ‘discovered’. And Columbus’s discovery in time triggered a bloody gruesome campaign of genocide.
So time now to get truly ‘historical’ (with apologies to Mr. Rohan Pethiy agoda) and go back, not as he did to year 2000, but to 1492, when Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and found something he wasn’t even looking for. The man died in 1506 still believing he had actually reached India. Well, luck certainly was on our side then.
David E. Stannard, in American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World, says:
"Between the time of initial contact with the European invaders and the close of the seventeenth century, most eastern Indian peoples had suffered near-annihilation levels of destruction; typically, as in Virginia and New England, 95 percent or more of their populations had been eradicated. But even then the carnage did not stop. One recent study of population trends in the southeast, for instance, shows that east of the Appalachians in Virginia the native population declined by 93 percent between 1685 and 1790 - that is, after it already had declined by about 95 percent during the preceding century, which itself had followed upon the previous century’s whirlwind of massive destruction `85
"As a result, when the eighteenth century was drawing to its close, less than 5,000 native people remained alive in all of eastern Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Louisiana combined, while in Florida - which alone contained more than 700,000 Indians in 1520 - only 2,000 survivors could be found. Overwhelmingly, these disasters were the result of massively destructive epidemics and genocidal warfare, while a small portion of the loss in numbers derived from forced expulsion from the Indians’ traditional homelands."
Kirkpatrick Sale, in The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, confirms an academic consensus quite sharply at odds with figures conventionally accepted earlier, that the total number of Indians in the New World at the time of the Discovery was between 60 and 120 million people. (That compares to a population for Europe outside Russia of 60 to 70 million.) "Estimates for North America alone similarly range from about 40 to 56 million, the bulk of which - perhaps 25 to 30 million - occupied the area of the Mesoamerican state systems south of the Tropic of Cancer and 8 million more the islands of the West Indies."
Lenore Stiffarm and Phil Lane in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, say:
"By the mid-19th century, US policymakers and military commanders were stating - openly, frequently and in plain English - that their objective was no less than the "complete extermination" of any native people who resisted being dispossessed of their lands, subordinated to federal authority, and assimilated into the colonizing culture.
"A bare sampling of some of the worst must include the 1854 massacre of perhaps 150 Lakotas at Blue River (Nebraska), the 1863 Bear River (Idaho) Massacre of some 500 Western Shoshones, the 1864 Sand Creek (Colorado) Massacre of as many as 250 Cheyennes and Arapahoes, the 1868 massacre of another 300 Cheyennes at the Washita River (Oklahoma), the 1875 massacre of about seventy-five Cheyennes along the Sappa Creek (Kansas), the 1878 massacre of still another 100 Cheyennes at Camp Robinson (Nebraska), and the 1890 massacre of more than 300 Lakotas at Wounded Knee (South Dakota)...".
Another writer, Sherburn F. Cook, has compiled an excruciatingly detailed chronology of the actions of self-organized white ‘militias’ in northern California, mostly along the Mad and Eel Rivers, for the years 1855-65. The standard technique was to surround an Indian village (or ‘rancheria’ as they are called by Californians) in the dead of night, set it ablaze and, if possible, kill everyone inside. "Much of the killing in California and southern Oregon Territory resulted, directly and indirectly, from the discovery of gold in 1849 and the subsequent influx of miners and settlers.... It was not uncommon for small groups or villages to be attacked by immigrants... and virtually wiped out overnight....".
Not surprisingly, Hitler used the treatment of the Native Americans as a model against the Jews. Says John Toland in Adolf Hitler:
"Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicability of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination - by starvation and uneven combat - of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity."
Incidentally, Ward Churchill, in Struggle for the Land: Indigenous Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Expropriation in Contemporary North America, states : "Well before the end of the nineteenth century, the United States stood in default on virtually every treaty agreement it had made with native people." And Indian Treaties, 1778-1883, edited by Charles Joseph Kappler, reproduces the texts of no less than 371 ratified treaties with Indian nations. Uniquely honourable conduct, American style.
Imagine, then, what it was like to learn about The Winning of the West, first published in 1889, by Theodore Roosevelt, a great, good and God-fearing man who became President of the United States in 1901. This is what he had to say about the native Indian people already living in the Americas when the white invaders arrived:
"No other conquering and colonizing nation has ever treated the original savage owners of the soil with such generosity as has the United States.... It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership.... The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman `85 It is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races."
Roosevelt’s despicably inhuman mind-set was alarmingly akin to that of Andrew Jackson who had been US President seventy years earlier. In The Removal of the Cherokee Nation: Manifest Destiny or National Dishonor?, Louis Filler and Allen Guttmann quote Jackson as saying in his ‘Second Annual Message’ to the nation on December 6, 1830 :
"Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country, and philanthropy has been long busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth. To follow to the tomb the last of his race and to tread on the graves of extinct nations excite melancholy reflections. But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another.... Nor is there anything in this which, upon a comprehensive view of the general interests of the human race, is to be regretted....".
There can be little doubt that successive US administrations to this day have never regretted being just as bloody-minded in their quest for domination of the world’s finite and fast-depleting natural resources. Except that now there’s diplomacy to mask the war-mongering. The conquering heroes of old would have us believe they are now driven by a compassionate concern quite different to the generosity Roosevelt claimed the US had shown while exterminating "the original savage owners of the soil."
The TFCA is very much a part of that generosity and is one alternative to the military option now being exercised in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s the velvet glove of conservation concealing the iron fist of a Bilateral Investment Treaty fashioned to achieve, by peaceful means, the identical objectives as in the other option - absolute political and economic subjugation.
With the two main recognized political groupings vying with each other to play the role of quisling – first the UNF and now the UPFA – it’s Sri Lanka’s sovereignty, not just its forests, that will be gone for good.
It’s time our National Youth Orchestra started rehearsing The Stars and Stripes Forever.
