March 21, 2024
The military ordered hundreds of
thousands of people into a designated “safe” zone. On reaching it, they were
shelled by the army and the air force. The generals said there was another safe
zone; if the people kept moving, respite would be found. It wasn’t. Again they
were attacked. The scene repeated, but now, corralled onto a tiny stretch of
beach and trapped against the ocean, there was no way out.
Government officials said that
they were interested in killing only “terrorists”. But the “terrorists” were
supported by most of the population, whom the authorities in fact considered
collaborators and fair game. So the military prevented humanitarian aid
entering the territory and turned the place into a mass grave through
relentless and indiscriminate shelling and bombing. Then they blamed “the
terrorists” for the carnage.
The rest of the world’s
governments did nothing or assisted in the unfolding genocide.
It could be Gaza. But this was
Sri Lanka just fifteen years ago, when the country’s government waged a
merciless campaign to smash the national liberation movement led by the Tamil
Tigers. Arguably, it provided the template for Israel’s current strategy.
In the first four and a half
months of 2009, the Sri Lankan armed forces killed at least 70,000 of the
island’s Tamil minority, according to a 2012 internal UN report. Local census
records reportedly show more than 146,000 people unaccounted for, presumed
dead. Perhaps 20,000 were slaughtered in the week leading to 18 May, when the
Tigers were militarily defeated.
“We were herded like cattle to
this place”, a survivor recounted when this writer visited the site of the
massacre several years ago.
The parallels between Israel and
Sri Lanka are striking. In some ways, the respective genocides are unique. But
placed in the broader context of 21st century violence, they come across as
almost par for the course.
For example, the “costs of war”
project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, a
research centre in the U.S., estimates that at least 4.5 million people have
been killed in 9/11-related, U.S.-led wars and war zones this century. That
figure doesn’t include the tolls from Sri Lanka, the Congo, Darfur, Ethiopia,
Myanmar, Chechnya, Ukraine and so on.
The UN refugee agency estimates
that more than 100 million people today have been forcibly displaced around the
world because of such conflicts.
Or take the “non-violent” terror
stalking more than 800 million people: starvation. The World Food Programme
estimates that 9 million die every year of hunger and hunger-related diseases.
Another 1 million die because of inadequate water or sanitation, according to
the World Health Organization.
There is simply too much terror
to be tallied: death, displacement, violence, hunger and poverty haunt much of
the planet.
Any horror can to some extent be
explained in its own terms. The genocide of Palestinians, the poverty of
Russia’s workers, the hunger crisis in Sudan, the foul discrimination of
India’s caste system, the oppression of women in Saudi Arabia, the extraordinary
levels of interpersonal violence in the United States, the increasing military
build-up of the major world powers—masses of scholars, activists and
researchers dedicate countless hours trying to explain the particularities of
each, and more.
Sometimes, commonalities are
found. For example, the “settler colonial” narrative has given many supporters
of Indigenous rights a framework with which to make sense of Palestine and to
make links between various other instances of national oppression. (It only
gets one so far of course: most instances of national oppression in the world
have nothing to do with settler colonialism, and most Israelis today cannot
plausibly be designated “settlers”.)
But most of the time, the
specifics of each horror are emphasised, without reference to the fundamental
thing linking horrors around the world: the capitalist economy, which
subordinates human need everywhere to the interests of business owners and the
rulers of states.
The incessant economic and
geopolitical drive to compete for profits, resources, territory and markets
underpins everything. That competition is becoming more cutthroat as increasing
numbers of countries—the rulers of countries, that is—accrue wealth enough to
project power beyond their own borders. At the same time, global economic
growth has slowed, and greater disparities of wealth have emerged between those
at the top and those at the bottom of each country.
A volatile combination of
international aggression and domestic divide and rule and repression is the
result. Global politics has become increasingly zero sum—for anyone to get
ahead, someone else must end up in a ditch.
That’s why genocide both is and
is not a special case. It’s exceptional for the brutality. But it’s also part
of “normal” capitalist terror, which destroys millions of lives every day.
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