Gregory Lightyear (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} lightyear) wrote,@ 2003-03-18 19:15:00 |
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When us left-wingers aren’t busy rolling up and smoking our copies of the High Times, we like to relax with a hot cup of FairTrade coffee in our bio-conscious, locally made ceramic coffee cups, and read our copies of the The Guardian before mulching them and putting them into the compost heap in our backyards’ home recycling area.
Today’s comments section has an article by George Monbiot, entitled “Left behind to starve”, lists some interesting figures on our failure to secure the peace instead of securing the war by securing the poor:
- Bombing the Iraqis will cost an estimated $12 billion a month
- Only $65m has been offered to providing them with food, water, sanitation, shelter, and medical treatment.
- Around 60% of the Iraqi people, today, are entirely dependent on the oil-for-food programme, administered by the Iraqi government, suspended by the UN yesterday due to the US/UK war plans.
Now, I don’t doubt that number being given for aid will improve, but here’s a bit of our track record over the past few years, provided by the same article.
- Of the UN request for $163m for Eritrea, where 70% of the 3.3m people are vulnerable to famine, it has received $4m.
- Burundi received 3% of its UN request, and is now officially the poorest nation on Earth. 1/6 of the inhabitants have been forced out of their homes by conflict and national disaster.
- Liberia, where the western part of the country has been rendered uninhabitable by rebels and a half a million people forced out of their homes, has been given 1.2% of the UN request.
- Sierra Leone, whose refugee camps are being ravaged by lassa fever, 1%.
- Guinea, which has recently taken in 82,000 refugees from Code d’Ivoire where the French are trying desperately to secure a lasting peace, 0.4%.
- Somalia, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, each less than 6%.
But more telling is the conflict zones with which ‘western’ government has been so closely involved in: Palestine has received 2.9% of the required aid, and Afghanistan 8.4%.
Bush and Blair both made hefty promises of not leaving Afghanistan out in the cold; of handing the country back to its people. It quickly found out that it hand handed it back to a different set of warlords, that security in Afghanistan is falling apart, and the UN’s estimates that $10 billion would be needed for reconstruction over the following five years ignored.
The U.S. spent $4.5 billion bombing the country; it offered $300m for reparations and refused to make any future commitment. This year, Bush forgot to produce an aid budget for Afghanistan. Congress, thankfully, forced his hand and provided another $300m.
The afghan government has an annual budget of $460m - half of what the U.S. still spends every month chasing al-Qaida through its mountains. They’re effectively bankrupt. Upon begging George Bush for cash, good old George responded by handing over $50m, $35m of which is required by the U.S. to be spent on the construction of a five-star hotel in Kabul.
Fortunately, we can expect entirely different behavior when the majority of money the U.S. plans on funnelling into helping the Iraqi people will go directly to the corporate coffers of some of the biggest U.S. companies to have backed Bush’s candidacy for president and full of that corporate 'brotherly love’ we’ve all come to expect..
And Palestine? All this talk about helping the Palestinian people, and we can road map the problems all we like, but our funding of those feelings, evidently, should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.
