A call for global responsibility

Mr. Sarkar's Wild Ride
    By Saurav Sarkar

I've een as fascinated with the recent scandal involving Asit Gosar, PC '00, as the next guy, and so I was infuriated that I couldn't concentrate on the fact that thousands of people were being killed far from Ward Seven, in East Timor. I therefore consider it a stroke of good fortune that international peacekeeping troops have arrived there. I can return to my stupor and laud the developed countries of the world for leaping to the rescue of the East Timorese, as they did for the Kosovars six months ago. Better yet, I can ask why the industrialized world, and specifically the United States, did nothing about this situation in the first place.

I can ask why, after a dictator-driven Indonesia illegally invaded East Timor in 1975, the United States doubled Indonesian military aid and prevented the United Nations from taking effective action. I can ask why it took until Thurs., Sept. 9 of this year for a representative of the U.S. government to say, "Today [the President] cut off all military assistance [to Indonesia]." I can ask why human rights seem to be important only when the humans in question look like Americans, or when there's too much bad publicity to ignore.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that the United States is solely or even primarily responsible for the rights violations in East Timor. What I am suggesting is that former colonial powers and the United States government need to take more responsibility for their complicity in situations like that in East Timor. In other words, I am asking the same old questions because it's the same old story.

Consider the case of South Asia. For over 100 years, Britain stoked ethnic and religious divisions, attempting to maintain its power in that region. When colonial rule ended in 1947, these very same divides resulted in rioting, nationalist tensions, war, and an arms race. Then the United States started providing military aid to its Cold War ally, Pakistan, a constitutionally unstable military oligarchy.

Today, some Americans complain loudly about the overzealous religious nationalism that British policy helped to create and maintain, and frown upon the South Asian nuclear arms race as if it had spontaneously generated. Despite the fact that there were other historical forces at play as well, the United States and Britain clearly bear some responsibility for creating the framework for upcoming disaster.

The conspicious world policy failures of recent times prove that developed countries—with the ability and resources to prevent genocide and widespread famines before they happen—need to make a connection between their own policies and the eventual global horrors that result. Currently, these nations seem to have the attitude that it's alright if four or five billion people live in poverty while a few national elites and the developed world skim a profit off the top.

A country with the economic capacity of the United States should pay its United Nations dues, support debt forgiveness for impoverished countries, regulate the actions of their corporations, promote disarmament and, in general, start living up to some of the high-faluting ideals that its people discuss but its leaders have learned to ignore. Either that, or we should change the inscription on the Statue of Liberty to read "give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, so that we can develop a foreign market."

It's admittedly tiresome to pay constant attention to the various instabilities in the world at a given time, but constant vigilance is the price of living in a system where our comforts are provided for at the expense of other people. If we fail to hold our politicians accountable, our callousness today will only necessitate more peacekeeping operations tomorrow.

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