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12:07 a.m. - 2003-03-23
Apart - hate (Apartheid)
I read Exodus, by Leon Uris, when I was ten. While I was reading it, I thought the author had to have a very twisted mind to come up with a story filled with such incredible cruelty. Innocence. As I finished the last page, I flipped back to the first page and read the dedication on it. That was my first inkling that this was based on actual human history.

I spent the next few years reading everything I could on the Jews and their culture as well as on WW II. I wanted to understand how such a thing could happen and what would be so terrible about a group of people that they would "deserve" such treatment. I also studied the history of other groups of people - like the black community - who also seemed singled out for such abuses. Of course, I finally realized, while reading about the life of Mohandas Gandhi, that no one deserves such brutality. I promised myself that if I ever saw such behaviour when I grew up, I would do what I could to stop it through the same principles of non-violence outlined by Thoreau in "Civil Disobedience", and practiced by people such as the Mahatma, Martin Luther King Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama.

As a result, as I've mentioned in earlier posts, I volunteered time with both Amnesty International and the Red Cross Survivors of Torture program. For nearly forty years, Amnesty International has provided a yearly report to the United Nations detailing human rights abuses by any nation where it found evidence of it. These can be accessed at amnesty.org.

Saddam Hussein began his involvement in things like assassination and coup attempts around the time of my birth - I am now a grandmother. He has been the subject of Amnesty International's reports for decades, along with several other lifetime "honorees of human rights violations". He is, without doubt, a vicious and evil being just as are the others featured in those exhaustively researched reports. I never could understand why his regime was propped up by the financial and logistical (the provision of arms) support of Western governments with their full knowledge of his activities. It was clearly evident that the population in his country could not remove him, given that he routinely tortured or slaughtered anyone who might pose any threat to his power - that included his own sons-in-law. He also took the precaution of taking hostages from each of the families of his ruling cabal and his elite red guard, housing them in the palaces he has built, to ensure that there would be no palace coup.

The rationale for the inaction of Western governments "we need him to balance off the powers of some of the other dictators in the region" made no sense to me as an excuse not to use sanctions against him. Although it took a long time, the world trade and social boycott of South Africa, because of their practice of apartheid, demonstrated that non-violent means could be applied by the world community, if the will was there, to end such abuses. The people who have to be admired most in that situation are the family members within that country who also followed non-violent means of protest even while their own children were abducted, tortured, and murdered by South Africa's government. I don't believe I would have that kind of inner strength. The endless regime changes by violent means in other countries where human rights abuses are rampant, have not worked and, as we have seen in the Middle East, only seem to become more entrenched and violent with each shift in rulers. Not surprising since the desire for retribution and revenge grows with the violence.

In Canada, it is estimated that about 70% of the population opposes the war now being fought against Iraq, because it is felt that there is still room for a "South Africa" solution. With patience, even the Berlin Wall finally came down didn't it? Those Canadians speaking for the action seem always to be citing lost trade and profits as their reason for Canada to get involved. Anything to protect the bottom line - didn't we just hear that from companies such as Enron, World.com and Arthur Andersen? Some company's balance sheet should never replace humanity's moral compass. The argument that the US and Britain need to do this to protect themselves flies in the face of the fact that the threat of terrorist attacks within their countrys' borders has never been higher. Whose interests really are being served by this war?

"What you gonna do when the oil goes dry?

Gonna sit right here and watch those Arabs die."

William Burroughs, "Naked Lunch" 1959.

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