arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

Noam Chomsky kon jammer genoeg niet aanwezig zijn op deze uitreiking. Hij heeft aangeboden om zich te laten vervangen op deze uitreiking door Lode Vanoost, directeur van Oxfam-Wereldwinkels, een van de drie deelorganisaties van Oxfam in België naast Oxfam-Solidariteit en Oxfam-Magasins du Monde.

In een dankwoord ter gelegenheid van dit eredoctoraat zwaait Chomsky de loftrompet van de ngo OXFAM, omwille van hun degelijk werk dat de structuren van de armoede en het geweld in de hedendaagse maatschappij aan de wortel aanpakt. In dit dankwoord klaagt hij nogmaals de volslagen wetteloosheid aan van wat hij de bezetting van Irak noemt. Tevens roept hij de grote financiële instellingen ter verantwoording voor hun aandeel in het veroorzaken van het probleem van de honger in een wereld waar nochtans voldoende voedsel voorradig is.

Armoede, honger en uitbuiting zijn geen excessen maar gevolgen van een economisch bestel dat geen oog heeft voor solidariteit en inspraak. OXFAM kan zich volledig vinden in de analyse van Chomsky en voelt zich zeer vereerd om in zijn naam dit eredoctoraat te mogen ontvangen.

U vindt de volledige tekst van het dankwoord van Noam Chomsky in bijlage en op http://www.oww.be (actualiteit)en http://www.oxfamsol.be .

Stefaan Declercq, Oxfam-Solidariteit
Denis Lambert, Oxfam-Magasins du Monde

In bijlage de tekst van Chomsky

I would like to express my great appreciation to the Free University of Brussels for the honor it is awarding to me today, along with my regrets that a relentless schedule, arranged years in advance, makes it impossible for me to attend. I would also like to thank my friend Lode Vanoost for agreeing to receive the award for me, in my absence.

Mr. Vanoost, as you know, is a director of Oxfam, an organization with which I have had close relations for many years – even indirect personal relations: my daughter is in Mexico City right now, helping to set up a new regional office for Oxfam, having worked with Oxfam in Central America for some years. Only a few moments ago I read a statement by Oxfam America, commenting on the report just released by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, entitled “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003.” The UN study reported that since the mid-1990s, hunger has been rising rapidly worldwide, by an average of 4.5 million a year. Ominously, that has been happening in countries that are hailed for adopting the neoliberal programs demanded by the international economic institutions and the great powers, in particular India, considered a model student. Meanwhile ample food is available worldwide – in India too, where farmers are committing suicide because they cannot survive competition with highly subsidized and protected Western agribusiness. “Bluntly stated,” the UN report declares, “the problem is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will” – political will among the rich and privileged, who could easily act to overcome this global disaster.

The Oxfam statement emphasized that the root of the problem is “structural issues that conspire to keep people from thriving,” an oblique reference to the neoliberal programs that are imposed on the poorer countries in the international economic order designed by concentrated wealth and power. Reinforcing this conclusion, the UN study singled out one country for special commendation, for tackling the structural roots of hunger: poverty, unemployment and land distribution. The country is Brazil, which has just taught an impressive lesson in democracy to the West: under conditions of severe state repression and grotesque concentration of wealth, and in the face of strong opposition by international financial markets, popular forces in Brazil succeeded in electing a president who is truly one of their own, a most impressive figure. They might be able to achieve a great deal if the efforts of Brazilian democracy to confront profound structural problems can escape the stranglehold of the international economic order that has been designed in recent years, which sharply restricts the options for democratic choice. That has been the leading thrust of neoliberal policies, including its core element, elimination of constraints on capital movement and speculation. Seventy years ago, John Maynard Keynes warned that “that nothing less than the democratic experiment in self-government is endangered by the threat of global financial market forces,” for reasons that are well understood. Conditions to bar this attack on democracy and human rights are at the core of the Bretton Woods system of the postwar world, dismantled since the 1970s, with the predicted effects. The same is true of other elements of the neoliberal package, most dramatically privatization of “services,” which narrowly restricts the public arena of democratic choice, rendering democratic forms a sham. Meanwhile other elements of the new international economic order “kick away the ladder” of development, to borrow the terminology of international economists since Friedrich List – the ladder that has been climbed by every currently rich society, but is now to be kicked away so that others will not share those opportunities. All of this should be common knowledge among the powerful and privileged.

The question we should ask ourselves is whether the problem is really “lack of political will.” Or is the problem, rather, that there is ample political will: the will to impose on the world an array of programs that intensify the structural problems that are at the root of grave crimes. Needless deaths from hunger are not the only example. The world rightly mourned the 3000 victims of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States. And a few months ago, at least some people remembered the 3000 people killed in what Latin Americans call “the other 11 September,” in 1973, in Chile – the equivalent of about 60,000 killed in the US, relative to population; that is by the more conservative estimates of the toll of the other 11 September, and we need not review who was implicated directly in that crime. Every day, at least 3000 children die in Africa from easily preventable disease, another crime that could be overcome by aid so slight that it would scarcely be noticed in the wealthy countries, a tiny fraction of what is expended in the occupation of Iraq after an invasion carried out in defiance of world opinion and in brazen contempt of international law and authority. One result of that invasion, it appears, has been to verify the predictions of intelligence agencies and independent authorities that it would lead to an increase in terror and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction world-wide. Meanwhile, the occupying authorities have imposed an economic regime that no sovereign country would ever accept, and that is likely to create structural problems leading to further catastrophe, if history and economic rationality are any guide – while benefiting the rich and powerful who will take control of the economy of a country of enormous resources. All of this is a re-enactment of practices of centuries of imperial domination that should cause shame among the beneficiaries, and at least some efforts to repair the damage instead of intensifying it.

This is only the barest sample of problems of global society that are awesome and immensely threatening, even threatening to survival of the species at a time when the capacity to destroy has passed any remotely tolerable limits -- and is currently being radically extended, even to militarization of space, a “grave threat” to survival, as the UN rightly warned. Oxfam is correct to stress the underlying structural issues, and the UN is correct in focusing attention on political will. These are challenges to those of us who enjoy a legacy of freedom and of unusual privilege, and who are willing to recognize the moral truism that privilege and freedom confer responsibility.

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Perscontact: Lode Vanoost, Oxfam-Wereldwinkels, 0476/40.77.94

Luc Rombaut
Communication Manager
Oxfam Fairtrade cv
Ververijstraat 15
9000 Gent
Tel. 09/218.88.89
Fax. 09/218.88.77
luc.rombaut@oww.be
http://www.oww.be