[Fresh Ink] Kafka Has A Rival - John Pilger

[Richard Menec]

Kafka Has A Rival. The British Foreign Office Lectures Us On Human Rights

Dec 02, 2008

By John Pilger

John Pilger's ZSpace Page / ZSpace

Today (December 1), a surreal event will take place in the centre of London. 
The Foreign Office is holding an open day "to highlight the importance of 
Human Rights in our work as part of the 60th anniversary of the Universal 
Declaration of Human Rights". There will be various "stalls" and "panel 
discussions" and Foreign Secretary David Miliband will present a human 
rights prize. Is this a spoof? No. The Foreign Office wants to raise our 
"human rights awareness". Kafka and Heller have many counterfeits.

There will be no stall for the Chagos islanders, the 2,000 British citizens 
expelled from their Indian Ocean homeland, whom Miliband's government has 
fought to prevent from returning to what is now a US military base and 
suspected CIA torture centre. The High Court has repeatedly restored this 
fundamental human right to the islanders, the essence of Magna Carta, 
describing the Foreign Office actions as "outrageous", "repugnant" and 
"illegal". No matter. Miliband's lawyers refused to give up and were rescued 
on 22 October by the transparently political judgements of three law lords.

There will be no stall for the victims of a systemic British policy of 
exporting arms and military equipment to ten out of 14 of Africa's most 
war-bloodied and impoverished countries. In his speech today, with the good 
people of Amnesty and Save the Children in attendance, shamefully, what will 
Miliband say to the sufferers of this British-sponsored violence? Perhaps he 
will make mention, as he often does, of the need for "good governance" in 
faraway places while his own regime suppresses a Serious Fraud Office 
investigation into BAE's £43 arms deals with the corrupt tyranny in Saudi 
Arabia -- with which, noted the Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells in 2007, 
the British had "shared values".

There will be no stall for those Iraqis whose social, cultural and real 
lives have been smashed by an unprovoked invasion based on proven lies. Will 
the foreign secretary apologise for the cluster bombs the British have 
scattered, still blowing legs off children, and the depleted uranium and 
other toxics that have seen cancer consume swathes of southern Iraq? Will he 
speak about the universal human right to knowledge and announce a diversion 
of a fraction of the billions bailing out the City of London to the 
restoration of what was one of the finest school systems in the Middle East, 
obliterated as a consequence of the Anglo-American invasion, along with 
museums and publishing houses and bookstores, and teachers and historians 
and anthropologists and surgeons? Will he announce the dispatch of simple 
painkillers and syringes to hospitals that once had almost everything and 
now have nothing, in a country where British governments, especially his 
own, took the lead in blocking humanitarian aid, including Kim Howells' ban 
on vaccines to protect children from preventable diseases?

There will be no stall for the people of Gaza of whom, says the 
International Red Cross, starvation threatens the majority, mostly children. 
In pursuing a policy of reducing one and a half million people to a 
Hobbesian existence, the Israelis have cut most lifelines. David Miliband 
was in Jerusalem  recently within a short helicopter flight of the captive 
people of Gaza. He did not go and said nothing about their human rights, 
preferring weasel words about a "truce" between tormentor and victims.

There will be no stall for the trade unionists, students, journalists and 
human rights defenders assassinated in Colombia, a country where the 
government's "security forces" are trained by the British and Americans and 
responsible for 90 per cent of torture, says a new study by the British 
human rights group, Justice for Colombia. The Foreign Office says it is 
"improving the human rights record of the military and combating drug 
trafficking". The study finds not a shred of evidence to support this. 
Colombian officers implicated in murder are welcomed to Britain for 
"seminars".

There will be no stall for history, for our memory. Stored in the great 
British libraries and record offices, unclassified official files tell the 
truth about British policy and human rights, from officially condoned 
atrocities in the concentration camps of colonial Kenya and the arming of 
the genocidal General Suharto in Indonesia, to the supply of and biological 
weapons to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. As we hear the moralising drone of 
ex British military "security experts" telling us what to think about 
terrible events in Mumbai, we might recall Britain's historic role as 
midwife to violent extremism in modern Islam, from the rise of the Moslem 
brotherhood in Egypt in the 1950s and the overthrow of Iran's liberal 
democratic government to MI6's arming of the Afghan muhijadeen, the Taliban 
in waiting. The aim was, and remains, the denial of nationalism to peoples 
struggling to be free, especially in the Middle East where oil, says a 
secret Foreign Office document from 1947, is "a vital prize for any power 
interested in world influence and domination". Human rights are almost 
entirely absent from this official memory, unlike fear of being found out. 
The secret expulsion of the Chagos islanders, says a 1964 Foreign Office 
memorandum of guidance, "should be timed to attract the least attention and 
should have some logical cover [so as not to] arouse suspicions as to their 
purpose."

How is this wonderland perpetuated?  The media play its historic role, 
following the line of power, censoring by omission. Roland Challis, who was 
the BBC's south-east Asia correspondent when Suharto was slaughtering 
hundreds of thousands of alleged communists in the 1960s, told me, "It was a 
triumph for western propaganda. My British sources purported not to know 
what was going on, but they knew ... British warships escorted a ship full 
of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so they could take part in 
this terrible holocaust."

Today, public relations propaganda dressed up as scholarship promotes the 
same rapacious British power while seeking to fix the boundaries of public 
discussion. A report was released last week by the Institute for Public 
Policy Research which describes itself as "the UK's leading progressive 
think tank". Having been emptied of its dictionary meaning, the once noble 
term, "progressive", joins "democracy" and "centre-left" as deception.  Lord 
George Robertson, the New Labour warmonger, Trident devotee and ex Nato 
boss, has his moniker at the front, along with Paddy Ashdown, ex viceroy of 
the Balkans. Couched in crisis management cliches, the IPPR report ("Shared 
Destinies") is a "call to action" because "weak, corrupt and failing states 
have become bigger security risks than strong, competitive ones". With 
western state terror unmentionable, the "call" is for Nato in Africa and 
military intervention "if deemed necessary". There is a nod to the 
"perception" that the current Anglo-American "intervention" in Muslim lands 
beckons terrorism in Britain: that which is blindingly obvious to most 
people. In February 2003, almost 80 per cent of Londoners surveyed said they 
believed that a British attack on Iraq "would make a terrorist attack on 
London more likely". This was precisely the warning given Blair by the Joint 
Intelligence Committee. The warning is no less urgent while "we" continue to 
assault other people's countries and allow false champions to steal the 
human rights of us all.

www.johnpilger.com

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From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives URL: 
http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3699

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