What Else Is Happening?

Thoughts One Month after the Events of 11 September

Ben Wisner

Visiting Research Fellow

Development Studies Institute

London School of Economics

October 17, 2001

Of Remembrance, Memory, and Imagination

Thoughtful and deeply felt remembrance has again taken place of the 5,000 plus lives lost one month ago in the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. This time, unlike the three minutes of silence observed in many parts of the world -- the silence of a held breath, silence of shocked waiting -- there is noise and distraction. The sky over Afghanistan is full of military airplanes and missiles. Simultaneously there are protests in many parts of the world against the bombing -- Pakistan, Indonesia, and Kenya -- and anti-war demonstrations in Western cities, such as the 50,000 who marched last Saturday from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square in London.

The reverberations of 11 September are so loud, in the media and in the streets, that little attention is being paid to the rest of humanity and what else is taking place on planet earth. So, I ask, “What else is happening?”. I do so for two reasons. First, there may be important connections (historical, political, economic, social) between these other events and processes and the terror and “war on terrorism” that so preoccupy policy makers and opinion leaders at the moment.

The second reason is an innocent concern with the rest of humanity that was not killed or injured in the calamity of 11 September, those who did not lose loved ones or colleagues, whose livelihoods and neighborhoods were not disrupted. I say “innocent concern” because in the current hypersensitive climate, I am likely to be misunderstood. Many people, especially in the U.S. see any attempt to understand the causes of these attacks as efforts to excuse or justify the terrorists. Salmon Rushdie recently wrote as a “newest of New Yorkers” and condemned a “bien-pensant anti-American onslaught” which he considers “appalling rubbish.” He writes to remind us that the terrorists are “against … free speech” but doesn’t seem to allow critics of U.S. policy to explain (not excuse) the attack in terms of prior U.S. international actions.[1] New York mayor Rudolf Giuliani reacted in a similar way when a visiting Saudi Prince, in addition to expressing his sympathy with the victims, their families, the city, also suggested in a very mild way that the U.S. should consider a more balanced approach to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.

There is a good deal of writing and talk about “moral equivalency”. A questioner after a roundtable at London School of Economics on the current crisis asked if one could “equate” the deliberate use of civilian airlines as guided missiles to kill thousands of innocent people with the U.S. bombing raids on Taliban targets in Afghanistan. This was in response to the suggestion that bombing in Afghanistan is delaying the last chance efforts by the World Food Programme to get the food necessary for winter to millions of ordinary Afghanis in isolated parts of that country, thus putting millions of innocent people at grave risk.[2]

My answer is that there is no issue of moral equivalency here, simply condemnation of both acts. I am concerned with “what else is happening” in the world because of my adherence to three principles: one moral, one practical, and one historical.

Morally, I assert the equal importance of each and every human life. From a practical point of view, human societies have rightly attended to the needs of survivors. In addition, history tells us that human actions have consequences, just as, in the physical world, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

One basis for these three belief is historical memory, the fact that a 58 year old looking out into a leafy fall afternoon in London can, with the help of archeology and history, tap into perhaps 5,800 years of human experience. A deep act of remembrance for the dead of 11 September includes applying the lessons of such collective human memory. The ability to learn from previous generations may be uniquely human.

Another basis for my beliefs is the faculty of imagination and empathy. It allows an aging, white, middle class, male academic to share the pain, anger, confusion of human beings whose language I do not speak, whose bodies and life circumstances are not like mine (though as I pause to warm a packet of soup for lunch, I remember being invited by a total stranger, an old Muslim man, to break the fast of Ramadan with him on the veranda of his mud walled house in Pemba, a coastal city in Northern Mozambique: both Schiller and Buddha said that love and hunger are universals).

It is thus with no disrespect meant for the five to six thousand who perished on 11 September that some commentators as diverse as Barbara Kingslover, Thich Nhat Hahn, and Ariel Dorfman have seen this as a chance for people in the U.S. finally to see things from the point of view of many people who have lived with terror.

This includes terror past: Pinochet’s dark shadow over a generation in Chile, the lives wiped out by the atom bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and those lived in silent terror of radiation sickness. It includes terror in the present: civilians still hiding and dying in the bush in Congo, caught among warring factions and mercenary armies, civilians in Colombia who live in fear that their next rural bus ride can end in death as victims in the “war on drugs”.

There is a double standard at work. Judging by the amount of media coverage and the vast mobilization of military, diplomatic, and prosecutorial resources, the impression cannot be avoided that these five to six thousand U.S. lives[3] “count” far more than the hundreds of thousands who have been killed in political violence since World War II by the generals and their death squads in Greece, Turkey, Philippines, Indonesia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Argentina, Chile, the “contras” in Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, just to begin a very long list.

One million are displaced and thousands of civilians have died of injuries, hunger and disease in eastern Congo while fleeing the fighting there over the last three years. The break down of order in this part of Africa can be traced directly back to its European colonial history, as can the Hutu- Tutsi antagonism that finally led to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Mr. Blair made brief reference in his speech to the Labor Party Conference to Africa as a “scar on the conscience of the world.” However, the media has provided little follow up.

The drums of war have nearly drowned out news of the ongoing crisis of HIV/AIDS in South Africa, of lawlessness and political violence in Zimbabwe despite the Abuja agreement reached just prior to 11 September, continuing low level warfare in Congo, Sudan, Burundi, and Somalia; the fragile peace in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Where have been the follow-ups on the question of “blood diamonds” that finance civil war in Africa just as the heroin trade funds both Taliban and Northern Alliance? Where have been the follow-ups on allegations of child slavery in the cocoa farms of Ivory Coast? What news has there been of food crisis in Malawi?

More than a million and a half face starvation in Central America, where the impacts of hurricane Mitch in 1998 had not yet been resolved and repaired before drought hit the region.[4] In Gujarat millions seek to reconstruct their lives following the most deadly earthquake in Indian history. Sixty thousand lives lost in the earthquake in Gujarat are not worth ten times MORE attention than the victims of 11 September. Nor are they worth ten times LESS. Moreover the needs of the survivors provide not only the opportunity for acts of compassion, but acts that help to prevent future disasters.

Recovery in Gujarat, if done well, could ensure that fewer lives are lost in the next earthquake, cyclone, drought, or flood. Recovery in Afghanistan, after years of war and now this punishing drought, could hold the key to future stability in the region, and the key to livelihoods and forms of governance that will not only prevent future conflict but make the Afghani people more resilient against future droughts and other natural hazards.

So, What Else Is Happening?

We should be paying attention to a series of large-scale events, but also some smaller incidents that may provide forewarning.

Large Scale Events

The large scale events include on-going wars and conflicts, the ups and downs of critically important recovery processes, economic and political crises that pre-date 11 September, continuing efforts to reform or to put in place institutions capable of coping with immensely complex global risks.

CONFLICTS

These include international and internal conflicts in Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Burundi, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Congo, and Angola. Refugee crisis is Africa remains serious although it has been eclipsed as the largest refugee crisis by the exodus of Afghanis to border areas in Iran, Pakistan, and to some extent the former Soviet Republics to the North.

Conflict also continues in Kashmir, Israel/ Palestine, Philippines, Chechnya, Abkhazia, and Colombia.

One possible consequence of a prolonged military campaign in Afghanistan is that resources, especially logistical means such as heavy cargo planes, will remain tied up and unavailable for support of peace keeping in some of these other conflicts, or that diplomatic energy will not be available in sufficient quantity to assist in resolving others.

RECOVERY

Post conflict recovery, assisted by the UN or other multilateral body, is taking place in Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Guatemala, East Timor, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, parts of Somalia, Eritrea, parts of Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

A partial list of post disaster recovery would include Gujarat and El Salvador (both situations following earthquakes earlier this year) and West Virginia (following repeated floods and landslides during May-July, 2001. I wonder if American Red Cross and FEMA resources have been reallocated from West Virginia to New York and Washington following 11 September? Having been a neglected area that yielded cheap coal and cheap labor for a century, will the miners’ widows left behind in this part of West Virginia be forgotten again? Will southern West Virginia’s most recent disaster be left unhealed in an additional ironic social consequence of the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon?

One clear lesson on post war and post disaster recovery over the past twenty years is that there are no short cuts. Recovery is a very slow process and does not take place according to neat and programmable “phases.” Human and economic development resources had already been massively diverted during the 1990s into relief and recovery. This was a commonly heard complaint of development agencies. Will the “war on terrorism” now make that situation even worse by further diverting the limited resources for recovery?

OTHER NEW HUMANITARIAN CRISES

Since 11 September:[5]

  • North Korea has suffered a prolonged famine over the past six years. The World Food Programme provides assistance to 7.6 million out of a population of 22 million. Eastern provinces of North Korea have just been devastated by the heaviest rains for a century which have wiped out food crops, destroyed roads and bridges.
  • Belize has lost its banana crop (a principle export and key to many livelihoods) as the result of hurricane Iris that also affected Jamaica and northern Guatemala.
  • Flooding in the Mekong river region has affected Cambodia and Vietnam with loss of lives, displacement of tens of thousands, and loss of crops.

POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC CRISES

A worldwide recession is very likely. Political and economic crises were already taking place pre 11 September in Russia and many of the former Soviet/ CIS countries, the Balkans, Argentina, Central America, Philippines, Indonesia, a number of small island states in the Pacific and Caribbean, and throughout much of Africa. Recession in the US and Europe can only exacerbate economic (and political) crisis in these other parts of the world.

In addition, recession will reduce tax revenues. At the same time government spending for the military and security services in many countries (beginning with the U.S. and U.K.) will increase in the climate produced by a “war on terrorism”. In the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, the airlines will be bailed out with huge commitment of public money. Less and less will be available for international development assistance in Latin America and Africa, in small island states, and in some Asian countries, where the effects of world recession will be amplified by weak economies.

Is it not likely that application of so-called structural adjustment programs (SAPs) in scores of countries receiving World Bank and IMF loans in the 1980s fueled the discontent that eventually gave rise to militant fundamentalism of many kinds (e.g. the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, FARC in Colombia, militant Islamic groups in Egypt and Algeria, and Al Qaida)?[6] Will world recession at in 2001-2002 further nourish the seedbed of discontent and discord?

INSTITUTION BUILIDNG

There has been some speculation that the events since 11 September must cause a collapse of U.S. exceptionalism and G.W. Bush’s isolationism and unilateralism. The price for an international coalition in the “war on terrorism” might be that the U.S. reconsider a variety of international initiatives such as the Kyoto treaty on global warming and its unilateral abrogation of the Strategic Arms Agreement.

Whether or not the U.S. “rejoins the fold” on these issues and others (the U.S. and Afghanistan are the only two nations in the world refusing to ratify the Convention to Combat All Forms of Discrimination Against Women), future stability in the world demands that we not lose sight international efforts including (a partial list):

  • Follow up to the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (1990-99)
  • Continuing work by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change and the Kyoto signatories
  • Establishment of an International Criminal Court
  • Efforts to democratize the World Trade Organization and to make it and such international bodies as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund more accountable to ordinary people
  • Continuing efforts to promote the rights of women, rights of children, and rights of ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities

Small Scale Events

Some other discrete events that would have gotten more in depth coverage have been eclipsed by the “war on terrorism.” In the light of the structural collapse of the World Trade Towers, the impossibility of timely escape from these huge structures, these events should have received comment. They point to continually growing technological vulnerability due to the combination of arrogant overconfidence and complexity.

  • The Russian atomic submarine, Kursk, has finally been lifted to the surface, and is on its way to harbor, where an analysis of the causes of its failure will be undertaken. This was the largest and newest of the Russian fleet. It was considered very safe.
  • A Ukrainian surface to air missile appears accidentally to have shot down a civilian airliner bound from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk.
  • At Milan airport a Scandinavian Airlines jet collided with small private plane on the ground, skidding into a baggage warehouse, exploded and burned, killing everyone on both planes. There was fog and the airport’s ground radar was turned off for maintenance.
  • BA and Air France announced that the Concorde, the supersonic airliner that has been grounded for 16 months since a disastrous crash in Paris, would begin to fly the trans Atlantic route again in November.
  • The British government has cleared the Sellafield nuclear facility in Cumbria on the coast of the Irish Sea for the commercial reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel rods from overseas. This will mean more international shipments of plutonium. This is the facility where safety data was falsified, leading to the rejection of a shipment of reprocessed fuel by Japan. Before it’s name change, the plant at this site was called, Windscale, where a near melt down took place even before Three Mile Island in the US, and, Chernobyl finally alerted the world to the hazards of nuclear power. The governments of Eire and Iceland will be objecting to the British decision in court.
  • The US announced that security for its 103 nuclear power stations is probably inadequate to prevent future terrorist attacks.
  • In the midst of a flurry of 2,000 reports and investigations of possible anthrax contamination over the past few days in the US (all but five false alarms or hoaxes), the ability of the US public health system to cope with bio-terrorism has been called into question.

As this array of “smart” technology fails, the so-called “smart” weaponry used by the U.S. military has already managed to kill four UN workers engaged in de-mining in Afghanistan, demolish a food warehouse belonging to the World Food Program and another operated by the International Committee of the Red Cross, destroy a village with the loss of two hundred civilian lives and, with sad echoes of Kosovo, target a civilian truck carrying Afghanis fleeing toward the Pakistan border.