Better to Hell Than Be Colonized Again, Jakarta, 1945
How is it that the world is the way it is?
How have we arrived at our current state of affairs in terms global geopolitics, economics, culture, and the environment?
Perhaps no other event in the last one thousand years of history holds that answer. That event took place in the year of 1492. The date is October 12th, a Friday. There is even a precise time of 2:00 a.m.; and the place, off the coast of the island of Hispaniola.
This, of course, is the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus. The reason why Columbus was there on that particular early morning was not to make discoveries, though that was in part an outcome, his intent was to find a route to the riches of the east. All that would follow over the centuries from that early morning view of the island of Hispaniola still echoes down to our own time today.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes that the term colonialism is derived from the word colony which has its roots in Greek and Latin. The word describes a farm or ‘landed estate’ but more precisely it was the “term for a public settlement of Roman citizens in a hostile or newly conquered country”. The term “colonialism” is defined by the OED as: “The colonial system or principle. Now frequently used in the derogatory sense of an alleged policy of exploitation of backward or weak peoples by a large power.”
The use of the word “alleged” in the operative definition of the word colonialism is in itself of interest. In the OED “allege” is defined as “(to advance a statement) as being able to prove it; hence to assert without proof; to affirm, predicate” Yet, the “colonial system or principle” is the very quintessence of a system of exploitation. The exploitation is not necessarily restricted to a “backward or weak people” alone, it can be extended to the resources of landscapes; to those things which might derive the greatest wealth in the shortest manner of time. In the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century this was the spice trade, which brings us back to Columbus.
The voyages which Columbus undertook to find a route to the east had two immediate results. First there was the vague notion that where he ended up was not where he wanted to go. There was then no profit to be had in the New World for the time; this would come later with the conquests of Cortez and Pizarro. The second result was far more reaching. His voyages demonstrated the possibility of long distance ocean voyages and this notion set off a competition between Portugal, Spain, England, and the Netherlands for control of the spice trade. To do so required sailing around Africa to India and then beyond to the islands of the Malay Archipelago where pepper, cloves, and nutmeg grew in abundance. One hundred years later the Dutch would raise the cruelty and ruthlessness of the spice trade to a fine art. While the Portuguese, Spanish, and English went about plundering and colonizing Africa and the New World the Dutch were busy with one thing only – profit.
For a small sea-faring nation of the sixteenth-century the Dutch achieved something which no European nation had yet done; secure a monopoly on the spice trade. They ran their nation with a board of directors under the corporate emblem of The Dutch East Indies Company or Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, (VOC), issued the first trading stocks, and established an unrivaled banking system with the profits they made from the spice trade. The return on investment in the spice trade was astonishing; some times as high as 3000% profit on the investment. To accomplish the results of such enormous profit the Dutch were ruthless.
In 1621, under the VOC leadership of Jan Pieterzoon Coen, an army of 1,600 men were landed on the small island of Neira in the remote Banda Island group located in the far eastern Malay Archipelago. The chiefs of Neira were summoned and presented with a treaty they could not read and did not understand. The treaty gave the VOC exclusive rights of trade to the nutmeg which grew on Neira and throughout the island group. For centuries these islands were the source of nutmeg. It grew nowhere else in the world.
The chiefs made their mark and retreated to the forest. The Dutch, being suspicious of their motives, captured and tortured a local Neiran who confessed, under torture, that the chiefs were planning to attack and to remove the Dutch off their island by force. The Dutch response to this was to capture, torture, and execute the chiefs in front of their families and to hunt down and kill the remaining inhabitants of Neira and then raze the nutmeg forests to the ground . In this act the “colonial system or principle” has its first example of ethnic cleansing.
Conrad would later write in Lord Jim of the spice trade: “The seventeenth-century trader went there for pepper, because the passion for pepper seemed to burn like a flame of love in the breast of Dutch and English adventurers about the time of James the First. Where wouldn’t they go for pepper! For a bag of pepper they would cut each others throats without hesitation, and would forswear their souls, of which they were so careful otherwise: the bizarre obstinacy of that desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes; the unknown seas, the loathsome and strange diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence, and despair. It made them great! By heavens! It made them heroic; and it made them pathetic too, in their craving for trade with the inflexible death levying its toll on young and old. It seems impossible to believe that mere greed could hold men to such a steadfastness of purpose…”.
And that is how the pattern is laid down and repeated time after time. One needs only to look at the world, say, in the year 1860. This is colonialism: that the sun never sat on the British Empire was true; that people of color were regarded as inferior was true; that people could be bought and sold was true; that others could be killed “because the only good Indian is a dead Indian” was true; that the aboriginal peoples of Australia could be hunted for sport like animals was true.
And what of the people of Hispaniola? “During his second voyage, Columbus and his men instituted a policy in Hispaniola which has been referred to by numerous historians as genocide. The native Taino people of the island were systematically enslaved and murdered. Hundreds were rounded up and shipped to Europe to be sold; many died en route. For the rest of the population, Columbus demanded that all Taino under his control should bring the Spaniards gold. Those that didn’t were to have their hands cut off. Since there was, in fact, little gold to be had, the Taino fled, and the Spaniards hunted them down and killed them. The Taino tried to mount a resistance, but the Spanish weaponry was superior, and European diseases ravaged their population. In despair, the Taino engaged in mass suicide, even killing their own children to save them from the Spaniards. Within two years, half of what may have been 250,000 Taino were dead. The remainder were taken as slaves and set to work on plantations, where the mortality rate was very high. By 1550, 60 years after Columbus landed, only a few hundred Taino were left on their island. In another hundred years, perhaps only a handful remained.”
Today there are no Taino people at all.
This “colonial system or principle” and its “alleged policy of exploitation of backward or weak peoples by a large power” hides behind the great and small wars of the twentieth-century, it now haunts Iraq, Afghanistan, and the remote mountains of Pakistan. It hides behind the deforestation of the Amazon, Kalimantan, and Papua; the extinction of species; and the melting of the polar ice caps.
The thread which traces back to 1492 is faded and worn thin but it is there and it has all been for a bag a spices.
Has minister Supari been reading history?
CIDRAP reports(9/8/2008):
Supari accuses rich nations of creating viruses for profit
Lisa Schnirring
Sep 8, 2008 (CIDRAP News) – Indonesian health minister Siti Fadilah Supari, who is at the center of an international controversy over sharing of H5N1 avian influenza virus samples, recently claimed that developed countries are creating new viruses as a means of building new markets for vaccines, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report.
In February, Supari published a 182-page book titled Time for the World to Change: God is Behind the Avian Influenza Virus, which alleges that the United States intended to produce a biological weapon with the H5N1 virus and the World Health Organization (WHO) was conspiring to profit from H5N1 vaccines.
At a recent book discussion, Supari told the crowd that wealthy nations are creating “new viruses” that are meant to infect people in poorer nations in order to help drug companies sell more vaccines, according to a Sep 7 AFP report.
“The conspiracy between superpower nations and global organizations isn’t a theory, isn’t rhetoric, but it’s something I’ve experienced myself,” Supari told the crowd, according to AFP.
In early 2007 Indonesia announced that it had stopped sharing H5N1 virus samples with the WHO. The country based its action on what it saw as a lack of access to pandemic vaccines that are produced by pharmaceutical companies in developed nations from the shared samples.
A WHO working group formed to address the concerns of Indonesia and other developing countries has met several times to work out a virus-sharing agreement between global health officials and developing countries, but has made little progress.
In early June Supari said the government would no longer report human H5N1 cases and deaths promptly to the WHO. Media outlets reported that she planned to report cases after they were reported in the news media or only at 6-month intervals.
Meanwhile, Amin Subandrio, a scientist who heads Indonesia’s avian flu committee, said the government is also withholding the H5N1 virus from the country’s own research community, according to the AFP report. “The minister of health is keeping the virus in the laboratories but they are giving no access to Indonesian scientists at the moment,” he said.
Subandrio told AFP that though he supports Indonesia’s concern about developing nations’ lack of access to vaccine supplies and believes changes to the international virus-sharing system are needed, Supari’s stances are risky.
He said there is no evidence to back up Supari’s claim that wealthy nations are conspiring against developing nations to boost profits for pharmaceutical companies. “I really can’t explain it 100 percent, but probably she received the wrong information from the wrong person,” Subandrio told AFP.
Likewise, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono appears to support Supari’s demands regarding the H5N1 virus-sharing issue, but not her conspiracy allegations, according to the AFP report. Dino Patti Djalal, presidential spokesman, told the news service, “In Indonesia, we recognize that there are issues to be resolved in the world health system, but certainly we don’t believe in conspiracy theories.”
In other developments, Supari told Antara, Indonesia’s national news agency, that she hopes that negotiations on a material transfer agreement on the sharing of H5N1 samples can be settled at the WHO’s next working group meeting in November, according to a Sep 5 report from Xinhua, China’s state news agency.
She said the agreement should recognize the country’s property rights to the virus, detail who will use the virus and what will be done with it, and spell out the financial and other benefits of the H5N1 research, Xinhua reported.
The WHO’s H5N1 count for Indonesia is 135 cases and 110 deaths, but media reports have placed the numbers at 137 cases and 112 deaths. …> go to article
Is Supari so far off the mark? Are her statements so wildly off the mark that they need to be condemned? Perhaps. And it is certain Indonesia needs assistance with its ability to address and to develop consistent policy regarding H5N1. But I do see the point she is making, even if rather misguided and bizarre sounding as it is or appears to be.
CIDRAP reports(9/9/2008):
Indonesia confirms 2 H5N1 cases reported earlier
Lisa Schnirring
Sep 9, 2008 (CIDRAP News) – Indonesia’s health ministry reported today that two men have died of H5N1 avian influenza over the past 3 months, marking the government’s first official announcement of human cases since early June, when it said it would provide periodic updates instead of case-by-case notifications.
The update-in Bahasa, the language of Indonesia-appeared on the health ministry’s Web site, Bloomberg News reported. So far, the government has not posted an English version of the update on the main ministry site or that of the country’s avian flu committee.
As recounted by Bloomberg, Indonesia’s description of the two cases generally agreed with earlier media accounts. The health ministry said one of the two men was a 20-year-old who died on July 31, according to Bloomberg. A media report in early August had described him as a 19-year-old from Tangerang, a suburb of Jakarta, who died in late July.
The health ministry said the other man was a 38-year-old truck driver from Banten province who got sick on Jul 4 and was hospitalized in Tangerang 5 days later. The ministry said he died on Jul 10, Bloomberg reported. Media reports in July had described him as a 38-year-old from Belendung, west of Jakarta, who died on Jul 10.
Tests on samples from poultry in the man’s neighborhood were pending, the ministry statement said.
The health ministry also said that laboratory tests by its research center and the Eijkman Institute on samples from five provinces showed no evidence of human-to-human transmission of avian flu, Bloomberg reported.
On Jun 5, Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said the government would announce human H5N1 cases at longer intervals, perhaps as long as 6 months, instead of as they are confirmed. Some health officials have said Indonesia’s delay in reporting cases could hamper global efforts to monitor the risk of a flu pandemic.
Indonesia’s announcement of the two recent deaths, combined with the previous media accounts, puts the country’s H5N1 count at 137 cases and 112 deaths. However, the World Health Organization’s global case count does not yet reflect the two deaths and stands at 135 cases and 110 deaths. ...> go to article
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