Gideon Polya, “Passive Genocide by Burma Junta & US Alliance. Passive Mass Killing in US Empire & Myanmar”., MWC News, 21 May 2008.
Passive Genocide by Burma Junta & US Alliance. Passive Mass Killing in US Empire & Myanmar
Western Mainstream media, Governments and politicians very properly condemn passive mass murder in cyclone-devastated Burma by the insufficiently responsive Burma military junta – but are highly hypocritical in IGNORING the horrendous passive killing by US Alliance military occupiers in the US Empire from Occupied Haiti to Occupied Afghanistan.
Cyclone Nargis has devastated the Irrawaddy delta of Myanmar (Burma) – it is estimated that 130,000 are dead or missing and that about 2 million urgently require aid (shelter, food, water, medicine and medical attention). UN and Aid organization officials are very properly highly critical of the tardiness of the Burma military junta in relation to permitting foreign aid workers to enter Burma.
Indeed utterly irresponsible Western war-mongers have suggested "war" as a solution to the humanitarian crisis in Burma (e.g. war-mongering suggestions by the war criminal French Government, the war criminal UK Government and former Ministers in the extreme right-wing, war criminal, former Bush-ite Australian Federal Government).
However the patently obvious solutions to the Myanmar military junta intransigence over requisite urgent aid delivery to the Irrawaddy delta involve (a) offers of irresistably massive assistance to be urgently delivered by Myanmar’s ASEAN neighbours (indeed the Burma junta has now agreed to ASEAN-delivered aid), and (b) collective international promise of International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutions and targetted Sanctions for all those substantially involved in ANY major, active or passive human rights abuses.
An important outcome of the ongoing Myanmar tragedy is effective international recognition of the concept of “passive mass murder” (“passive mass killing”, “passive murder”, “passive killing”) – although racist, lying, holocaust-ignoring Mainstream media in the Western Murdochracies do not actually use this terminology (a Google search for use of these phrases in the context of Burma elicited almost no URLs).
At some point “passive mass murder” by unresponsive régimes or foreign occupiers can be seen as “passive genocide” i.e. genocide effected passively by the Ruler by withholding requisite life-sustaining food and medicine. “Genocide” in this context is as defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
“Intent” to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group is very rarely conceded by the mass murderers themselves (they know that mass murder is wrong and severely punishable) but is readily established empirically by evidence of (a) sustained , remorseless, active or passive policy resulting in (b) mass mortality in a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Indeed a Google Search reveals that several commentators (in Alternative media of course) have now actually used the phrase “passive genocide” in relation to the passivity of the Burma junta in the face of the Cyclone Nargis catastrophe. The term “passive genocide” has been employed in relation to other catastrophes involving horrendous non-violent as well as violent deaths, notably the ongoing Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan, Biofuel and Climate Genocides (for details of horrendous past and continuing “active genocide” and “passive genocide” in which my own country, Australia, is complicit together with its Anglo-American allies see MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/22128/42/ ).
It is useful to compare the catastrophic situation in Mynamar (Burma) under the brutal military junta with the situation in Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan under the heel of the US Alliance military.
Thus WHO data ( see: http://www.who.int/en/ ) indicate that "annual total per capita medical expenditure" and "under-5 infant deaths per 1,000 live births" are $38 and 104, respectively in Myanmar (Burma)as compared to $19 and 257, respectively, in Australia-, France-, UK-, US-, and NATO-US Alliance-occupied Afghanistan and $130 and 47 in Occupied Iraq VERSUS $3,123 and 6 (Occupier Australia), $3,040 and 5 (Occupier France), $2,560 and 6 (Occupier UK), and $6,096 and 8 (Occupier USA) (evidence of “passive genocide” and gross violation of the Geneva Convention by the US, UK, NATO and Australia).
In Myanmar 2 million urgently need aid and 130,000 are already dead or missing. According to UNICEF data (see: http://www.unicef.org/index.php ) in Occupied Afghanistan 327,000 infants die each year, corresponding roughly to 327,000/0.7 = 467,000 total annual avoidable Occupied Afghan deaths from deprivation (for impoverished Third World countries, infant deaths/total excess deaths = 0.7; see “Layperson’s guide to counting Iraq deaths” on MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5872/26/ ). A similar calculation from UN data for Occupied Iraq yields an estimate of average annual post-invasion avoidable deaths from deprivation in Occupied Iraq totalling 160,000 per year.
Of course Occupied Afghanistan and Occupied Iraq are also subject to horrendous civilian-targetting violence by the US Alliance military and estimates for Occupied Iraq suggest that annual VIOLENT avoidable deaths in both war zones are roughly the same as annual NON-VIOLENT avoidable deaths (see “Iraq Invasion 5th Anniversary” on MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/21006/42/ ).
Another way of estimating “passive genocide” is by estimating the “annual non-violent avoidable death rate” as a percentage i.e. the number out of every 100 who die avoidably each year: 2.0% (Indigenous Aboriginal Australians in the Northern Territory); 1.8% (Indigenous Aboriginal Australians as a whole); 1.6% (for US Alliance- and Australia-occupied Occupied Afghanistan); 1.0% (non-Arab Africa); 0.7% (Myanmar; 2003); 0.6% (for US Alliance- and Australia-occupied Occupied Iraq); and 0% (for China, Japan, North America, Australasia, Apartheid Israel and Western Europe).
Myanmar has a population of 48 million (2006) and if we assume for the purposes of argument that 100,000 Burmese die as a result of Burma military junta passivity and intransigence then the “annual avoidable death rate” for 2008 will climb to 0.9%, absolutely appalling but still much lower than that for Indigenous Australians or for US Alliance subjects in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories.
The World pressure for Burma junta acceptance of ASEAN-delivered aid to Myanmar has finally succeeded and one desperately hopes that the deaths from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease will now be contained. However the magnitude of the Burma junta’s “passive genocide” in cyclone-devastated Burma must be assessed and the culprits arraigned before the International Criminal Court. The same judicial process must also be applied to the governments involved in the active and passive genocide in Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan.
The Burma tragedy-impelled RECOGNITION by Mainstream media and politicians of the concepts – if not the terminology - of “passive genocide” and “passive mass murder” (“passive mass killing”, “passive murder”, “passive killing”) is a remarkable FIRST STEP to global cessation of these horrendous atrocities and judicial arraignment of the guilty to ensure that this will never happen again to ANY people.