Video: The Rights of Pachamama

An emotional and inspiring video that was created as a joint project between five indigenous communities in Peru with the message: ‘We wish from out hearts that these rights we are proposing will be added to and that people across the world recover their harmony with our Mother Earth.’
Via Climate & Capitalism

Indigenous Peoples’ Declaration: “Mother Earth can live without us, but we can’t live without her”

 “The aggression towards Mother Earth and the repeated assaults and violations against our soils, air, forests, rivers, lakes, biodiversity, and the cosmos are assaults against us.”

Indigenous Peoples’ Declaration adopted at the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia

Translation by Ben Powless, who was co-chair of the Indigenous People’s Working Group.

We, the Indigenous Peoples, nations and organizations from all over the world, gathered at the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, from April 19th to 22nd, 2010 in Tiquipaya, Cochabamba, Bolivia, after extensive discussions, express the following:

We Indigenous Peoples are sons and daughters of Mother Earth, or “Pachamama” in Quechua. Mother Earth is a living being in the universe that concentrates energy and life, while giving shelter and life to all without asking anything in return, she is the past, present and future; this is our relationship with Mother Earth. We have lived in coexistence with her for thousands of years, with our wisdom and cosmic spirituality linked to nature. However, the economic models promoted and forced by industrialized countries that promote exploitation and wealth accumulation have radically transformed our relationship with Mother Earth. We must assert that climate change is one of the consequences of this irrational logic of life that we must change.

Waitangi Day discussion: Sina Brown-Davis

Sina Brown-Davis Whenua Fenua Enua Vanua 1) After almost three decades of Treaty of Waitangi settlements, of “biculturalism” and “partnership” between Maori and the Crown, Maori remain at the bottom of all social statistics, such as income, employment and life expectancy. Why is this? And what can be done about it? The settlement regime is a neoliberal extinguishment of land & Treaty rights. Its purpose was twofold, to co-opt & contain & pacify a radical treaty protest/land rights movement within the state’s neoliberal agenda. Secondly, with Maori leadership focused on the settlement of historical grievances with the state, the vast majority of non tribal working class urbanized Maori were easy to be forgotten as the rubbish of structural adjustment. Working class Maori still haven’t recovered from the extremist economic “reforms” of the eighties when an entire generation of Maori & Pacific Island children and youth has suffered under the reforms launched by the Labour government of 1984-90. This is exactly what was intended way back when the treaty settlement process & fiscal envelope were touted and subsequently implemented. Maori have already been kicked in the guts from the recession; disproportionally we have already the highest percentage of recently unemployed. Treaty settlements distracted us from our struggle, when our grassroots whanau were going to the wall. The great majority of our flax roots, our workers, our youth, our gang members and all our whanau at the bottom of the heap struggling to survive. The most dispossessed in Aotearoa will have nothing to loose. The liberation of the great mass of our people will not come with more failed parliamentary reformism. If an economic structural adjustment put & kept our people on the bottom of the heap only a peoples’ structural adjustment (a revolution) will improve the negative social indicators & living standards of Maori. The Maori Party’s cooption within the National government is completely opposed to the interests of the majority of Maori who are working class. It seems foolish to try & enact a pro Maori agenda (albeit a conservative one) within an anti worker & anti environment government. The recent Maori Party endorsement of Nationals ETS [Emissions Trading Scheme], put the interests of the dairy industry and the tribal capitalists of Iwi Corporations, ahead of duty to care for our environment & the survival of Indigenous peoples in the Pacific . What to do? Working class Maori, our beneficiaries, our gang whanau, our youth need to educate themselves about their struggle & organise in their communities & workplaces. We can’t afford to think that any political party will represent our interests. Self Determination can come from below, Tino Rangatiratanga will only be meaningful & lasting if it comes from below. 2) A huge amount of land stolen from Maori is now in private hands, but Treaty settlements only involve Crown land. Despite this, both National and Labour MPs have condemned the on-going occupation of privately owned land by members of Ngati Kahu in Taipa, Northland. What are your views on this protest? Should privately owned land be part of Treaty settlements? The sacred cow, middle-class property rights. Ripe for the picking. Occupations should increase & intensify, not only against privately owned land, but land & resources taken by transnational corporations.

Waitangi Day discussion: Potaua Biasiny-Tule

Potaua Biasiny-Tule Tangatawhenua.com 1) After almost three decades of Treaty of Waitangi settlements, of “biculturalism” and “partnership” between Maori and the Crown, Maori remain at the bottom of all social statistics, such as income, employment and life expectancy. Why is this? And what can be done about it? Why? Because the system of European invasion and colonisation shifted the fundamental way of living for Maori and the continued occupation of Aotearoa by New Zealand means that many Maori will unduly carry the burdens of history at least until the day that some things are made right. Many do see the Settlement process as unfair and my experience within that system says that political expediency, legal over-extension and inter-tribal out-maneuvering errs dangerously on the side of continued grievances but the story must be told, the hurt expressed and some amount of sorrow let out. This is all a part of letting go of the pain and the hurt and then looking back, as a community and as a nation, to assess where things are today. Idiots like Michael Laws aside, there is a genuine want to bring compassion and understanding to the injustices of the past and like those who fell in the World Wars, there is usually a feeling to forgive and in some instance, not to forget. But this shouldn’t stop us from opening the past, today. The Waitangi Tribunal is one of the few places where the many sides do come together to air out our nations dirty laundry – what better place – so that all might help with the clean up. And we must remember – it is not just Maori at the bottom of our society. I have met many Pakeha, Samoan, South African and Indian families who just survive week to week. The cost of things in New Zealand are high, compared to the amount of money many of us earn. One emergency, like a family bout of flu, has the ability to knock everything out – the bills pile up, the red notices arrive, anxiety soars. This is a condition that all live with and everyone should be thinking more about. We are here in this land of plenty, this land of milk and honey, yet poverty still plagues hundreds and thousands of our communities. I don’;t know the answer and look forward to others suggesting what we can do to lift the entire level. As for the the relationship between Maori and the Crown. Many Maori flocked to catch a glimpse of Prince William recently; it seemed ironic that he was here to open the Supreme Court but the Royals still find followers in some Maori households. Hospitality aside, I think it is time for our own statement of autonomy and independence, positioning Aotearoa-New Zealand outside of the Crowns grasp and more responsive to the population who live here. There should be less and less old school, colonial defenses for the NZ Govt to hide behind and more reasons for a local Constitution to determine how we control ourselves and more importantly, how we can control our own Government. It does seem tyrannical to think that successive Governments can ignore their own Commissions and Legal Recommendations. Perhaps the campaign for binding citizens referendum should be picked up again? The Iwi Leaders Forum is attempting to match this National Government, especially on matters pertaining to the ownership of water (here in Rotorua, it is still strange to hear that Te Arawa own the lakes but not the water) but are catching criticism for channeling information arouind the review of the Seabed and Foreshore Act. Wasn’t the SB & FS Hikoi a response by whanau, hapu AND iwi to stop the Government from stealing Maori coastal lands and to ensure legal mechanisms for challenge remained open? I guess this is all a part of the criticism around iwi entities that utilise settlement money’s to control feedback and voice. My 5 cents worth is that Labour were wrong in passing the Act and a full repeal is required - start again rather than trying to fix a shonky ship. The future needs first to agree on language, as this Government/Crown dichotomy is false and perpetuates the framework many of us examine. 2) A huge amount of land stolen from Maori is now in private hands, but Treaty settlements only involve Crown land. Despite this, both National and Labour MPs have condemned the on-going occupation of privately owned land by members of Ngati Kahu in Taipa, Northland. What are your views on this protest? Should privately owned land be part of Treaty settlements? Tautoko. For me, stolen land is stolen land, no matter who lives on there now. This is tough as Maori desperately want to return home, to be reconnected with the land beneath our feet and to feel the sky upon our shoulders. It has been a tough 170 years, and for some, even longer. My people of Tuhoe lament the confiscation of our tribal lands everyday and to us, it does not matter that the Urewera National Park is a national treasure – first and foremost it was our home and was illegally and immorally stolen from our people. We treasure its place as a world heritage site but the world must respect the fact that these lands were dispossessed and it is these lands, not huge sums of money, that must be returned. It might not be comfortable but it is only right. I tautoko Ngati Kahu and all those hapu who are forced to noho whenua in the face of private property issues and historical ignorance. The minute we give up is the second FOR SALE signs go up across all Maori land. Many want us to sell or give up our rights as private property forms the basis of western capitalism. The property crash only highlighted that fact. We have to keep fioghting just to ensure our whanau continue to have a place to stand in this land. My view for Waitangi Day is always mixed – it is a day to celebrate, to openly come together and to show we can live up to the talk of tolerance, inclusiveness and living in this country as one, yet uniquely ourselves. What continues to piss me off is the inability to feel the change that so many of our leaders talk about. I want the past to be addressed and remembered for what it was but also want to imagine what a better tomorrow might look like. As a whanau, we want to be able to find work that is good for us and that we are good at, to earn what our whanau in Oz earn but with all the benefits of staying home in this beautifully clean and fresh land, We want to be able to swim in clean waters, to have access to affordable health care and to be respected when practicing my beliefs (which is about respecting nga atua). I’ve tried to say that this year I will spend more time with my wife and kids and will try to be positive, to keep my head up and remain focused. Sure, it’s a bit ideal but way better than being bitter and spiteful. Besides, we can still smile as we fight the good fight.

Waitangi Day discussion: Hone Harawira

Hone Harawira, Maori Party MP for Tai Tokerau

1) After almost three decades of Treaty of Waitangi settlements, of “biculturalism” and “partnership” between Maori and the Crown, Maori remain at the bottom of all social statistics, such as income, employment and life expectancy. Why is this? And what can be done about it? A few reasons why government(s) continue to triumph in the war against TINO RANGATIRATANGA are (1) they co-opt the phraseology and water it down or (2) they make out like they accept the idea, they include it in their “thinking”, and then they drown it in their bureaucratic cesspit and (3) they co-opt the people. A few reasons why we are losing the battle are (1) because it’s hard to fight a big government when you don’t have genuine unity (2) because Maori have become sooooo educated that we think the pakeha way is the only way and that when the pakeha government says something should be done a certain way we think a victory is when we’ve changed a few of their words and (3) all this IWI business has got too many Maori running around looking after only their own little patch, and forgetting the basic tenet that “no-one is free until everyone is free.” 2) A huge amount of land stolen from Maori is now in private hands, but Treaty settlements only involve Crown land. Despite this, both National and Labour MPs have condemned the on-going occupation of privately owned land by members of Ngati Kahu in Taipa, Northland. What are your views on this protest? Should privately owned land be part of Treaty settlements? I support the protest because justice isn’t served by simply returning one wheel of a stolen car (and to date, settlements are running at about 5% of the value of the claims). Where land was taken improperly and is now in private hands, government(s) should take steps to ensure either that land is returned, or suitable compensation is arranged. See the answers above for why we don’t get justice.

John Pilger: Breaking the great Australian silence

In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia’s human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the “unique features” of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power “which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country”. Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It’s an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from. I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and “uttering unlawful oaths”. In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a “courting day” – a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823. Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother’s eight siblings used the word “stock” a great deal. You either came from “good stock” or “bad stock”. It was unmentionable that we came from bad stock – that we had what was called “the stain”. One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. “Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!” she said. And we did – until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our “bad stock”. There was outrage. “Your son,” my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, “is no better than a damn communist”. She promised never to speak to us again. The Australian silence has unique features. Growing up, I would make illicit trips to La Perouse and stand on the sandhills and look at people who were said to have died off. I would gape at the children of my age, who were said to be dirty, and feckless. At high school, I read a text book by the celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote: “We are civilized today and they are not.” “They”, of course, were the Aboriginal people. My real Australian education began at the end of the 1960s when Charlie Perkins and his mother, Hetti, took me to the Aboriginal compound at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. We had to smash down the gate to get in. The shock at what I saw is unforgettable. The poverty. The sickness. The despair. The quiet anger. I began to recognise and understand the Australian silence.

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“Communitarian socialism will refound Bolivia”

David Choquehuanca, Bolivia's foreign minsiter

from LINKS - International Journal of Socialist Renewal Interview with Bolivia’s foreign minister David Choquehuanca by Patricia Bravo and Cris González, translated from the original article in the March 20, 2009, edition of Punto Final (Chile) by David Montoute.Bolivia’s new “Political Constitution of the State”, approved by referendum on January 25, 2009, by 61.4% of the vote and announced on February 7, is clearly of transcendental importance for the refoundation of Bolivia. The recognition of individual and collective rights, popular participation, the principle of equality and the end of all types of exclusion and discrimination are all present in the new constitutional text. It establishes the creation of “a Unified Social State of Law whose character would be Plurinational Communitarian, free, independent, sovereign, democratic, intercultural, with decentralised autonomous departments, regions, municipalities and indigenous circumscriptions”.

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See also Bolivia's ‘communitarian socialism’

“Communitarian socialism will refound Bolivia”

from LINKS - International Journal of Socialist Renewal Interview with Bolivia’s foreign minister David Choquehuanca by Patricia Bravo and Cris González, translated from the original article in the March 20, 2009, edition of Punto Final (Chile) by David Montoute. Bolivia’s new “Political Constitution of the State”, approved by referendum on January 25, 2009, by 61.4% of the vote and announced on February 7, is clearly of transcendental importance for the refoundation of Bolivia. The recognition of individual and collective rights, popular participation, the principle of equality and the end of all types of exclusion and discrimination are all present in the new constitutional text. It establishes the creation of “a Unified Social State of Law whose character would be Plurinational Communitarian, free, independent, sovereign, democratic, intercultural, with decentralised autonomous departments, regions, municipalities and indigenous circumscriptions”. This triumph of the democratic revolution led by the government of Evo Morales was won by huge mobilisations by the Bolivian people and a clear show of force by the executive to neutralise the oligarchy’s putsch attempts, which were so clearly supported by US imperialism. The same fortitude is now required to achieve the approval of transitional laws and regulations in a Congress with an opposition majority. Without these measures, many changes in the new constitution will remain on paper alone. Or rather, they will oblige the president of the republic to permanently resort to supreme decrees. However, citizens’ rights and legal defence resources automatically came into effect, since they do not require any special laws. Following its constitutional mandate, the Bolivian government sent Congress proposals to modify the previous electoral laws and call general elections on December 6 this year. Bolivians will be able to re-elect the president and vice-president for a new period that will end in 2015. In April next year, there will be another national election for municipal and prefectural (provincial) authorities. The Bolivian electoral calendar also includes a plebiscite in June this year, in the departments of La Paz, Oruro, Potosí, Cochabamba and Chuquisaca, to approve the creation of autonomous local governments. These regions had voted no to autonomy in 2006. And the departments of the “half moon”, which already approved autonomy – Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija – must now adapt their statutes to the constitutional norm. In addition to approving the new constitution, the Bolivian people, via the referendum, also rejected the latifundio, in a country in which 91% of cultivable land is in the hands of latifundistas (large landowners) allied to the political right. Seventy-eight per cent of voters decided that the maximum extension of individually owned land must not exceed 5000 hectares and only 22% chose a limit of 10,000 hectares. It was about these subjects, but also about the democratic revolution’s more long-term projections, that Punto Final spoke with the Bolivia’s foreign minister, David Choquehuanca. Due to his many obligations both within Bolivia and abroad, the interview was carried out in two parts – one a few days before the referendum and another after this. What are your priorities in the process of implementing the new constitution? One of the priorities is that the parliament should work on the law for the election of president and vice-president of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly. Another priority is regulating Bolivians’ right to vote abroad and, obviously, ensuring that Bolivians are aware of the rights established by the new constitution, because many people are unaware of them. We are adapting the structures of the Executive Office in order to achieve the aims of the plurinational state. And as a ministry, we must develop a new foreign service laws that is consistent with the constitution. What obstacles will you face? There are certain powerful groups and individuals who wanted no part of the Constituent Assembly proposed by the new constitution. They did not want a participatory democracy. These are the people who have opposed Bolivia’s Predient Evo Morales since the day he was elected, since the indigenous peoples marched demanding greater participation, and the construction of a new, more inclusive, less discriminatory Bolivia. They will continue to create obstacles. They have organised themselves into political parties and civic committees, and despite the Bolivian people giving a clear message that they don’t want the latifundio, these long-privileged latifundistas are still unable to see it, and are working hard to stop this process from consolidating. But the majority of the people, not just the indigenous campesino movement, has voted against the latifundio, even in [opposition strongholds] Santa Cruz, Beni and Pando. This is a message that they must be able to read. That is, people don’t want the latifundistas to continue running the country. I think that the Bolivian people will overcome these obstacles, just as they did with the mobilisations that facilitated the Constituent Assembly. These groups used young university students in an attempt to sabotage the Constituent Assembly, but the people organised themselves to overcome this. Then there was an attempt to oust our president by calling for the recall referendum. Once again, the people organised and responded with great maturity, ratifying president Morales by more than 67% of the vote. The opposition didn’t accept the text of the new constitution, but the people ratified it by majority vote. Now the opposition is organising again to block the December elections, because it knows that President Morales will win with more than two-thirds of the vote. The Bolivian people are very conscious of the results that they have achieved in only three years. There are various measures we could cite, such as the el bono Juancito Pinto voucher (a monetary incentive to prevent truancy) or the Renta Dignidad (the “dignity pension’’, a monthly stipend to those over 60 years of age, whether they are retired or not). What took 20 years to carry out in providing roads and infrastructure, we have accomplished in just three. The Bolivian people know this, and are informed of the democratic revolution’s accomplishments. The conspiracy to destroy this process will not work. How does the concept of the “plurinational state’’ combine with autonomous authorities and self-government? There has always been self-government, autonomous entities. In some places, there are even organisational forms that have been maintained for 500 years. This process, together with the new constitution, recognises these indigenous forms of organisation. In the framework of a unified plurinational state, it all forms part of a single state entity. It’s like the wilpala (national emblem of the Andean culture which brings together the seven colours of the rainbow, showing the coexistence of all the original peoples). The autonomous entities are represented by the coloured squares, but they are part of something bigger, which is the wilpala. That’s how it is. We are a plurinational state, in which the autonomous entities are important components of each department, but that doesn’t mean that they can administer their natural resources only for that department. Our natural resources are the property of the Bolivian people, of the Bolivian state. It’s the same with national symbols. There are regional symbols which the plurinational state recognises, values and respects. The different languages we speak in the regions are being revalued, respected and promoted. This process consolidates the autonomous entities, whether departmental, municipal or indigenous, but always within the framework of national unity. How would you characterise the “communitarian socialism’’ that the democratic, cultural revolution is attempting to build? We indigenous peoples have taken steps towards the recovery of our values and principles. We are heading towards the pachakuti (rebirth or return to balance, between people and between people and nature) and on this path, as we incorporate our values and principles, we have begun to speak of communitarian socialism. We have adopted various socialist principles. It must not be forgotten that we seek to “live well’’, not only to “live better’’. For capitalism, the most important thing is money, and life is of no interest to it. The basic law of capitalism is the accumulation of profits. This is why we disagree with capitalism. Socialism has shown us another way. In socialism, the most important thing are human beings, and so it seeks the satisfaction of their ever-increasing needs, both materially and spiritually. For us indigenous peoples, the most important thing isn’t money, or even only human beings. The most important thing for us is life. In the first place is Mother Earth – our mother nature – then the plants, animals, stones, stars, rivers, lakes. And finally, there is the human being. We want harmony between humans and nature. We agree with socialism in many ways. We want the fulfillment of people’s basic necessities and well being, but our struggle doesn’t stop there. When we talk of communitarian socialism, we are incorporating the search for a balance within oneself, of ourselves with our environment, with other human beings, with our families and with everything that surrounds us. This is why we speak of tackpacha, which means “everything that exists’’. We also want to gradually incorporate the return to the pacha (earth) and we speak of jacha uru (“the great day’’). When we speak of communitarian socialism, our message is: We want to incorporate the communitarian element, not only for human beings, but for everything. In what way will you implement the Bolivian people’s wish to limit large landholdings to a maximum of 5000 hectares? The people voted overwhelmingly against the latifundio. With the implementation of the new constitution, new acquisitions cannot exceed 5000 hectares, and the pre-existing ones which exceed 5000 must be subject to a review and regulation process. Businesses must be able to show that they fulfill a socio-economic function. Otherwise, the state will confiscate these holdings. According to the relevant sources, in Bolivia there are no businesspeople with more than 15,000 hectares who fulfill a social or economic purpose. After receiving the people’s message, the latifundistas should respect the laws that they themselves have ratified. The National Institute for Agrarian Reform law, which establishes a regulation process, was approved during the administration of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. Its objective was the review of landholdings of 60,000, 70,000 or 80,000 hectares in favour of the big landowners, since the authorities in this case were manipulated by the economic elites. Now this is no longer the case. Also, in the process carried out by the previous government, there was a lot of corruption. Each Our government will carry out a transparent regulation process”. What role have the social organisations such as the United Confederation of Bolivian Campesino Workers (CSUTCB) and the National Federation of Indigenous and Campesina Women “Bartolina Sisa” played in the process that you are leading? We organise ourselves in the communities. In Bolivia there must be around 10,000 communities, and in each community there is a union of campesino workers. Each union has a base which is associated first on a provincial level, and then on a departmental and national level. The national level is the CSUTCB. They are not naturally existing organisations, but organisations that helped allowed us to table our demands and participate in elections. There are various organised sectors with similar structures, such as the teachers, the miners, the indigenous groups, women, factory workers. And we have a mother organisation which is the Central Obrera Boliviana (Workers Centre of Bolivia, COB). These are the people’s organisations. President Evo Morales has called for strengthening them, since they are the agents driving this process of change. In these spaces we discussed Bolivia’s political situation and the policies implemented by the neoliberal parties. It was amongst these organisations that the Instrumento Político por la Soberanía de los Pueblos (Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples, the forerunner of the Movement Towards Socialism – MAS party) was born. It was not the fruit of a meeting between four or five intellectuals. Organisations such as the CSUTCB, the Confederated Union of Land Settlers, the Union of Indigenous Peoples and the National Federation of Indigenous and Campesina Women “Bartolina Sisa” called for a conference on land and territory in 1995. And it was here that the proposal to build our own political instrument was born”. Do you see the seeds of a people’s government in Bolivia? We have always governed ourselves in our communities. This is why we maintain our customs, perform our own music, speak our own indigenous languages, in spite of a 500-year effort to erase these things – our music, our language and our culture. We have upheld our values, economic forms, our own types of communitarian organisation, which are all being reappraised now. This is why we are incorporating into socialism something that has resisted been for 500 years – the communitarian element. We want to build our own socialism. In the communities, we always had our ulacas (assemblies), where debates took place. Those political spaces are being recovered. I don’t know if this can be called “the seeds of a people’s government’’. What existed, what exists, is being reappraised, is beginning to be valued and developed. These are the times we’re in.

John Pilger: Breaking the great Australian silence

In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia’s human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the “unique features” of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power “which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country”. Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It’s an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from. I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and “uttering unlawful oaths”. In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a “courting day” – a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823. Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother’s eight siblings used the word “stock” a great deal. You either came from “good stock” or “bad stock”. It was unmentionable that we came from bad stock – that we had what was called “the stain”. One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. “Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!” she said. And we did – until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our “bad stock”. There was outrage. “Your son,” my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, “is no better than a damn communist”. She promised never to speak to us again. The Australian silence has unique features. Growing up, I would make illicit trips to La Perouse and stand on the sandhills and look at people who were said to have died off. I would gape at the children of my age, who were said to be dirty, and feckless. At high school, I read a text book by the celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote: “We are civilized today and they are not.” “They”, of course, were the Aboriginal people. My real Australian education began at the end of the 1960s when Charlie Perkins and his mother, Hetti, took me to the Aboriginal compound at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. We had to smash down the gate to get in. The shock at what I saw is unforgettable. The poverty. The sickness. The despair. The quiet anger. I began to recognise and understand the Australian silence. Tonight, I would like to talk about this silence: about how it affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country. Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: “It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause.” There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That’s the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name. The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved. No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn’t give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country. Above all, no one said: “Prime Minister, There is no war on terror. It’s a hoax. But there is a war of terror waged by governments, including the Australian government, in our name.” That wedding party, Prime Minister, was blown to bits by one the latest smart weapons, such as the Hellfire bomb that sucks the air out of the lungs. In our name. During the first world war, the British prime minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and they can’t know.” What has changed? Quite a lot actually. As people have become more aware, propaganda has become more sophisticated. One of the founders of modern propaganda was Edward Bernays, an American who believed that people in free societies could be lied to and regimented without them realising. He invented a euphemism for propaganda -- “public relations”, or PR. “What matters,” he said, “is the illusion.” Like Kevin Rudd’s stage-managed press conferences outside his church, what matters is the illusion. The symbols of Anzac are constantly manipulated in this way. Marches. Medals. Flags. The pain of a fallen soldier’s family. Serving in the military, says the prime minister, is Australia’s highest calling. The squalor of war, the killing of civilians has no reference. What matters is the illusion. The aim is to ensure our silent complicity in a war of terror and in a massive increase in Australia’s military arsenal. Long range cruise missiles are to be targeted at our neighbours. The Rudd government and the Pentagon have launched a competition to build military robots which, it is said, will do the “army’s dirty work” in “urban combat zones”. What urban combat zones? What dirty work? Silence. “I confess,” wrote Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, over a century ago, “that countries are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.” We Australians have been in the service of the Great Game for a very long time. Do the young people who wrap themselves in the flag at Gallipoli every April understand that only the lies have changed – that sanctifying blood sacrifice in colonial invasions is meant to prepare us for the next one? When Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s, he described them as a ‘training team’, requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Department of External affairs wrote this secret truth: “Although we have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance was given in response to an invitation by the government of South Vietnam, our offer was in fact made following a request from the United States government.” Two versions. One for us, one for them. Menzies spoke incessantly about “the downward thrust of Chinese communism”. What has changed? Outside the church, Kevin Rudd said we were in Afghanistan to stop another downward thrust. Both were lies. During the Vietnam war, the Department of Foreign Affairs made a rare complaint to Washington. They complained that the British knew more about America’s objectives than its committed Australian ally. An assistant secretary of state replied. “We have to inform the British to keep them on side,” he said. “You are with us, come what may.” How many more wars are we to be suckered into before we break our silence? How many more distractions must we, as a people, endure before we begin the job of righting the wrongs in our own country? “It’s time we sang from the world’s rooftops,” said Kevin Rudd in opposition, “[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world [and] I look forward to working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom...”. Since the second world war, the arsenal of freedom has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements. Millions of people all over the world have been driven out of their homes and subjected to crippling embargos. Bombing is as American as apple pie. In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter asked this question: “Why is the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought of Stalinist Russia well known in the West while American criminal actions never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.” In Australia, we are trained to respect this censorship by omission. An invasion is not an invasion if “we” do it. Terror is not terror if “we” do it. A crime is not a crime if “we” commit it. It didn’t happen. Even while it was happening it didn’t happen. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. In the arsenal of freedom we have two categories of victims. The innocent people killed in the Twin Towers were worthy victims. The innocent people killed by Nato bombers in Afghanistan are unworthy victims. Israelis are worthy. Palestinians are unworthy. It gets complicated. Kurds who rose against Saddam Hussein were worthy. But Kurds who rise against the Turkish regime are unworthy. Turkey is a member of Nato. They’re in the arsenal of freedom. The Rudd government justifies its proposals to spend billions on weapons by referring to what the Pentagon calls an “arc of instability” that stretches across the world. Our enemies are apparently everywhere -- from China to the Horn of Africa. In fact, an arc of instability does indeed stretch across the world and is maintained by the United States. The US Air Force calls this “full spectrum dominance”. More than 800 American bases are ready for war. These bases protect a system that allows one per cent of humanity to control 40 per cent of wealth: a system that bails out just one bank with $180 billion – that’s enough to eliminate malnutrition in the world, and provide education for every child, and water and sanitation for all, and to reverse the spread of malaria. On September 11th, 2001, the United Nations reported that on that day 36,615 children had died from poverty. But that was not news. Journalists and politicians like to say the world changed as a result of the September 11th attacks. In fact, for those countries under attack by the arsenal of freedom, nothing has changed. What has changed is not news. According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a military coup has taken place in the United States, with the Pentagon now ascendant in every aspect of foreign policy. It doesn’t matter who is president – George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush’s wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to “annihilate”. Iran’s crime is its independence. Having thrown out America’s favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn’t occupy anyone else’s land and hasn’t attacked any country -- unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East on America’s behalf. In Australia, we are not told this. It’s taboo. Instead, we dutifully celebrate the illusion of Obama, the global celebrity, the marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein, brand Obama offers the thrill of a new image attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he bombs. This is modern propaganda in action, using a kind of reverse racism – the same way it deploys gender and class as seductive tools. In Barack Obama’s case, what matters is not his race or his fine words, but the power he serves. In an essay for The Monthly entitled Faith in Politics, Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees: “The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst... We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum.” Compare that with Rudd’s words the other day. “I make absolutely no apology whatsoever,” he said, “for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia … a tough line on asylum seekers.” Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term “illegal immigrants” is both false and cowardly. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear – they are legal. And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. How shaming. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this. The people in those leaking boats demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire. But that’s not enough for the Good Samaritan in Canberra, as he plays to the same bigotry which, as he wrote in his essay, “turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe”. Why isn’t this spelt out? Why have weasel words like “border protection” become the currency of a media crusade against fellow human beings we are told to fear, mostly Muslim people? Why have journalists, whose job is to keep the record straight, become complicit in this campaign? After all, Australia has had some of the most outspoken and courageous newspapers in the world. Their editors were agents of people, not power. The Sydney Monitor under Edward Smith Hall exposed the dictatorial rule of Governor Darling and helped bring freedom of speech to the colony. Today, most of the Australian media speaks for power, not people. Turn the pages of the major newspapers; look at the news on TV. Like border protection, we have mind protection. There’s a consensus on what we read, see and hear: on how we should define our politics and view the rest of the world. Invisible boundaries keep out facts and opinion that are unacceptable. This is actually a brilliant system, requiring no instructions, no self-censorship. Journalists know not what to do. Of course, now and then the censorship is direct and crude. SBS has banned its journalists from using the phrase “Palestinian land” to describe illegally occupied Palestine. They must describe these territories as “the subject of negotiation”. That is the equivalent of somebody taking over your home at the point of a gun and the SBS newsreader describing it as “the subject of negotiation”. In no other democratic country is public discussion of the brutal occupation of Palestine as limited as in Australia. Are we aware of the sheer scale of the crime against humanity in Gaza? Twenty-nine members of one family - babies, grannies – are gunned down, blown up, buried alive, their home bulldozed. Read the United Nations report, written by an eminent Jewish judge, Richard Goldstone. Those who speak for the arsenal of freedom are working hard to bury the UN report. For only one nation, Israel, has a “right to exist” in the Middle East: only one nation has a right to attack others. Only one nation has the impunity to run a racist apartheid regime with the approval of the western world, and with the prime minister and the deputy prime minister ofb Australia fawning over its leaders. In Australia, any diversion from this unspoken impunity attracts a campaign of craven personal abuse and intimidation usually associated with dictatorships. But we are not a dictatorship. We are a democracy. Are we? Or are we a murdochracy. Rupert Murdoch set the media war agenda shortly before the invasion of Iraq when he said, “There’s going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better get it done now.” More than a million people have been killed in Iraq as a result of that invasion - “an episode”, according to one study, “more deadly than the Rwandan genocide”. In our name. Are we aware of this in Australia? I once walked along Mutanabi Street in Baghdad. The atmosphere was wonderful. People sat in cafes, reading. Musicians played. Poets recited. Painters painted. This was the cultural heart of Mesopotania, the great civilisation to which we in the West owe a great deal, including the written word. The people I spoke to were both Sunni and Shia, but they called themselves Iraqis. They were cultured and proud. Today, they are fled or dead. Mutanabi Street has been blown to bits. In Baghdad, the great museums and libraries are looted. The universities are sacked. And people who once took coffee with each other, and married each other, have been turned into enemies. “Building democracy”, said Howard and Bush and Blair. One of my favourite Harold Pinter plays is Party Time. It’s set in an apartment in a city like Sydney. A party is in progress. People are drinking good wine and eating canapés. They seem happy. They are chatting and affirming and smiling. They are stylish and very self aware. But something is happening outside in the street, something terrible and oppressive and unjust, for which the people at the party share responsibility. There’s a fleeting sense of discomfort, a silence, before the chatting and laughing resumes. How many of us live in that apartment? Let me put it another way. I know a very fine Israeli journalist called Amira Hass. She went to live in and report from Gaza. I asked her why she did that. She explained how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen when she saw a group of German women looking at the prisoners, just looking, saying nothing, silent. Her mother never forgot what she called this despicable “looking from the side”. I believe that if we apply justice and courage to human affairs, we begin to make sense of our world. Then, and only then, can we make progress. However, if we apply justice in Australia, it’s tricky, isn’t it? Because we are then obliged to break our greatest silence – to no longer “look from the side” in our own country. In the 1960s, when I first went to South Africa to report apartheid, I was welcomed by decent, liberal people whose complicit silence was the underpinning of that tyranny. They told me that Australians and white South Africans had much in common, and they were right. The good people of Johannesburg could live within a few kilometres of a community called Alexandra, which lacked the most basic services, the children stricken with disease. But they looked from the side and did nothing. In Australia, our indifference is different. We have become highly competent at divide and rule: at promoting those black Australians who tell us what we want to hear. At professional conferences their keynote speeches are applauded, especially when they blame their own people and provide the excuses we need. We create boards and commissions on which sit nice, decent liberal people like the prime minister’s wife. And nothing changes. We certainly don’t like comparisons with apartheid South Africa. That breaks the Australian silence. Near the end of apartheid, black South Africans were being jailed at the rate of 851 per 100,000 of population. Today, black Australians are being jailed at a national rate that is more than five times higher. Western Australia jails Aboriginal men at eight times the apartheid figure. In 1983, Eddie Murray was killed in a police cell in Wee Waa in New South Wales by “a person or persons unknown”. That’s how the coroner described it. Eddie was a rising rugby league star. But he was black and had to be cut down to size. Eddie’s parents, Arthur and Leila Murray, launched one of the most tenacious and courageous campaigns for justice I’ve known anywhere. They stood up to authority. They showed grace and patience and knowledge. And they never gave in. When Leila died in 2003, I wrote a tribute for her funeral. I described her as an Australian hero. Arthur is still fighting for justice. He’s in his sixties. He’s a respected elder, a hero. A few months ago, the police in Narrabri offered Arthur a lift home and instead took him for a violent ride in their bullwagon. He ended up in hospital, bruised and battered. That is how Australian heroes are treated. In the same week the police did this - as they do to black Australians, almost every day - Kevin Rudd said that his government, and I quote, “doesn’t have a clear idea of what’s happening on the ground” in Aboriginal Australia. How much information does the prime minister need? How many ideas? How many reports? How many royal commissions? How many inquests? How many funerals? Is he not aware that Australia appears on an international “shame list” for having failed to eradicate trachoma, a preventable disease of poverty that blinds Aboriginal children? In August this year, the United Nations once again distinguished Australia with the kind of shaming once associated with South Africa. We discriminate on the basis of race. That’s it in a nutshell. This time the UN blew a whistle on the so-called “intervention”, which began with the Howard government smearing Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory with allegations of sex slavery and paedophile rings in “unthinkable numbers”, according to the minister for indigenous affairs. In May last year, official figures were released and barely reported. Out of 7433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of four possible cases were identified. So much for the “unthinkable numbers”. Of course, child abuse does exist, in black Australia and white Australia. The difference is that no soldiers invaded the North Shore; no white parents were swept aside; no white welfare has been “quarantined”. What the doctors found they already knew: that Aboriginal children are at risk - from the effects of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world’s richest countries. Billions of dollars have been spent – not on paving roads and building houses, but on a war of legal attrition waged against black communities. I interviewed an Aboriginal leader called Puggy Hunter. He carried a bulging brief case and he sat in the West Australian heat with his head in his hands. I said, “You’re exhausted.” He replied, “Look, I spend most of my life in meetings, fighting lawyers, pleading for our birthright. I’m just tired to death, mate.” He died soon afterwards, in his forties. Kevin Rudd has made a formal apology to the First Australians. He spoke fine words. For many Aboriginal people, who value healing, the apology was very important. However, the Sydney Morning Herald published a remarkably honest editorial. It described the apology as “a piece of political wreckage” that “the Rudd government has moved quickly to clear away... in a way that responds to some of its supporters’ emotional needs”. Since the apology, Aboriginal poverty has got worse. The promised housing programme is a grim joke. No gap has even begun to be bridged. Instead, the federal government has threatened communities in the Northern Territory that if they don’t hand over their precious freehold leases, they will be denied the basic services that we, in white Australia, take for granted. In the 1970s, Aboriginal communities were granted comprehensive land rights in the Northern Territory, and John Howard set about clawing back these rights with bribery and bullying. The Labour government is doing the same. You see, there are deals to be done. The Territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, especially uranium. And Aboriginal land is wanted as a radioactive waste dump. This is very big business, and foreign companies want a piece of the action. It is a continuation of the darkest side of our colonial history: a land grab. Where are the influential voices raised against this? Where are the peak legal bodies? Where are those in the media who tell us endlessly how fair-minded we are? Silence. But let us not listen to their silence. Let us pay tribute to those Australians who are not silent, who don’t look from the side – those like Barbara Shaw and Larissa Behrendt, and the Mutitjulu community leaders and their tenacious lawyer George Newhouse, and Chris Graham, the fearless editor of the National Indigenous Times. And Michael Mansell, Lyle Munro, Gary Foley, Vince Forrester and Pat Dodson, and Arthur Murray. And let us celebrate Australia’s historian of courage and truth, Henry Reynolds, who stood against white supremacists posing as academics and journalists. And the young people who closed down Woomera detention camp, then stood up to the political thugs who took over Sydney during Apec two years ago. And good for Ian Thorpe, the great swimmer, whose voice raised against the intervention has yet to find an echo among the pampered sporting heroes in a country where the gap between white and black sporting facilities and opportunity has closed hardly at all. Silences can be broken, if we will it. In one of the greatest poems of the English language, Percy Shelley wrote this: Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep has fallen on you Ye are many – they are few But we need to make haste. An historic shift is taking place. The major western democracies are moving towards a corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies - socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor - and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food. How do we change this? We start by looking beyond the stereotypes and clichés that are fed to us as news. Tom Paine warned long ago that if we were denied critical knowledge, we should storm what he called the Bastille of words. Tom Paine did not have the internet, but the internet on its own is not enough. We need an Australian glasnost, the Russian word from the Gorbachev era, which broadly means awakening, transparency, diversity, justice, disobedience. It was Edmund Burke who spoke of the press as a Fourth Estate. I propose a people’s Fifth Estate that monitors, deconstructs and counters the official news. In every news room, in every media college, teachers of journalism and journalists themselves need to be challenged about the part they play in the bloodshed, inequity and silence that is so often presented as normal. The public are not the problem. It’s true some people don’t give a damn – but millions do, as I know from the responses to my own films. What people want is to be engaged – a sense that things matter, that nothing is immutable, that unemployment among the young and poverty among the old are both uncivilised and wrong. What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness. This is already happening in countries in Latin America where ordinary people have discovered a confidence in themselves they did not know existed. We should join them before our own freedom of speech is quietly withdrawn and real dissent is outlawed as the powers of the police are expanded. “The struggle of people against power, “wrote Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” In Australia, we have much to be proud of – if only we knew about it and celebrated it. Since Francis McCarty and Mary Palmer landed here, we’ve progressed only because people have spoken out, only because the suffragettes stood up, only because the miners of Broken Hill won the world’s first 35-hour week, only because pensions and a basic wage and child endowment were pioneered in New South Wales. In my lifetime, we have become one of the most culturally diverse places on earth, and it has happened peacefully, by and large. That is a remarkable achievement – until we look for those whose Australian civilisation has seldom been acknowledged, whose genius for survival and generosity and forgiving have rarely been a source of pride. And yet, they remain, as Henry Reynolds wrote, the whispering in our hearts. For they are what is unique about us. I believe the key to our self respect – and our legacy to the next generation – is the inclusion and reparation of the First Australians. In other words, justice. There is no mystery about what has to be done. The first step is a treaty that guarantees universal land rights and a proper share of the resources of this country. Only then can we solve, together, issues of health, poverty, housing, education, employment. Only then can we feel a pride that comes not from flags and war. Only then can we become a truly independent nation able to speak out for sanity and justice in the world, and be heard. From www.johnpilger.com