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The Age of Looting
A friend of mine, Amal Alayan, sent
out an email about "can we do anything about Iraq's looted museum treasures?"
which triggered in my head the following responses, and which i like to share
with you. I wrote:
you (i.e. Amal) are always after some
worthy cause to tackle, where you put your energy. It is beautiful! The world
would have collapsed without people looking for what needs to be done outside
personal or money gain.
Reading your email made my
imagination wonder few centuries back. If you think about it, what
characterized the past 500 years (the age of "progress" and later
"development") was looting. We can even refer to it as "the age of looting and
stealing". It started by stealing and looting three continents, wiping out
almost totally their indigenous populations, and stealing totally their
resources. Stealing resources and land, however, is not effective if not
accompanied by stealing the history and the memory of those whose resources and
lands were stolen. The occasion of stealing both the lands and the histories is
still celebrated in these three continents as acts of independence, democracy
and freedom! In many places, hardly any trace is left of the previous peoples
and civilizations. And where they could not be wiped out totally, physically
and psychologically, they were portrayed as savage and barbaric to justify the
crimes. Within this perspective, showing some lunatics stealing the museum in
Baghdad (probably were even encouraged to do so) is very important for the
invaders. I remember in 1967, the fourth or fifth day of occupation, how some
Israeli soldiers brought some kids and pulled the door open by a military tank
of a watch seller (Jildeh Shop on the main street in Ramallah, across from
where we lived). and took pictures of them "stealing"!!
Stealing resources and histories has
been the dominant pattern since Columbus. Protecting the Oil Ministry while
allowing the looting of the history museum exemplifies, very strikingly, this
pattern: stealing resources and history at the same time, in complementary
fashion!
Stealing land and history was not
enough. People from another continent were stolen and transferred to work as
slaves. In addition, peoples of two continents were colonized and their
resources were stolen. They still are. Trucks daily carrying logs of precious
trees in the Cameroon to be shipped to Europe and the US are one example of
continuing this looting.
The looting went on to take the form
of stealing treasures from other countries with the claim that locals can't
take care of them. Visit the British museum and think of Egypt, for example!
After Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, stealing of treasures from all
kinds of places has never stopped. The case of Jifna, near Ramallah, is just
one example.
In the 20th century, stealing was
extended to reach the future of children. A statement entitled "Fifty Years Are
Enough" issued in 1995 by All Africa Council of Churches (on the occasion of
fifty years for the establishment of the World Bank and IMF). exemplifies this
very well: "Every child in Africa is born with financial burden which a
lifetime's work can not repay. The debt is a new form of slavery as viscous as
the slave trade..". The stealing trend was extended further to reach even
children in the "developed" world. Children in the US are being robbed of their
childhood through being perceived as consumers, mainly of junk everything, but
also through competing for symbols created by institutions and professionals
for the sole benefit of those institutions and professionals. Winning, control,
and greed have no limit and no regard for anyone, even for one's own children.
I think what you are trying to do,
Amal, is noble and needs to be done. What I am trying to say here is try to put
it within the bigger picture of the logic that have been dominating the world
for a long time, and which will continue if we keep tackling the symptoms. The
challenges is: How do we tackle the deeper issues: the dominant logic, values,
and style of living?
For me, a most crucial
question is: where and how do I, in my daily living, embody the logic, values
and style of living that i see as the basis of the catastrophic trends we
witness today? It is self-defeating to criticize the dominant logic in others
and fail to heal from it in my daily dealing with others. A fundamental
challenge today is to relate to others constructively and to keep the dialogue
going with other people, especially with our "enemies", because nothing less
than our humanity and its survival are at stake. This requires living with
logics and values that are different from dominant ones and that are more
respectful of human beings and of nature.
Adopting the logic of control,
winning, greed and moving along one path (claimed to be the universal path for
progress and development) is what we need to heal from. Unplugging ourselves
from the patterns of consumption, mainly of junk (whether it takes the form of
food, entertainment, or education) is crucial in this healing. If we
demonstrate in the streets only against injustice and oppression and war, but
fail to demonstrate how we can live and relate to one another according to
different logics and values, we go on being the carriers of the disease we
claim to be fighting against.
Stealing the memory of peoples is
probably the most serious and also the one that can do something about. The way
Milan Kundera put it, "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of
memory against forgetting". It is crucial in regaining our humanity and
reversing the logic that seems to have programmed the world for destruction.
Thus, what we witnessed in terms of what tanks and warplanes have done is
nothing compared to the harm that is being designed and which is about to be
implemented in the name of development and reconstruction, to be executed
mainly by professionals and institutions in various fields: education, health,
finance and development. It is disgusting to watch professionals and groups
lining up competing over money. Living as parasites on the misery of others is
incomprehensible! To realize what institutions can do in wiping out cultures
and histories, one has just to remember the residential schools, where the
various institutions - political, educational, religious, financial, and the
police/ military (whenever it was necessary) - collaborated in the US, Canada
and Australia in order to wipe out what was left of the cultures, histories and
memories of the indigenous peoples.
If we focus on trying to retrieve the
contents of the museum of history in Baghdad without trying to retrieve our
memory about what has been happening during the past 500 years, we will
continue to witness looting peoples' resources, treasures and memories. To see
the looting in Baghdad but fail to see the looting of five continents (and more
recently the dumping of nuclear and chemical waste in three of them) is
self-defeating. This does not mean doing nothing.
We can differ about what really
happened but we are sure at least about two major and opposing trends in the
world today: the amazing level and sophistication of deception which
institutions have reached and are capable of and, on the other hand, the level
of awareness that peoples around the world have also reached. For millions of
people to go out on the same day into the streets in more than 600 major cities
around the world, not in support of a charismatic leader or an inspiring
ideology but rather to say enough, bas, or basta, to the logic of destruction
that will benefit no one but greedy corporations, marks a new and very hopeful
phase in human history.
Munir Fasheh
Director, Arab Education Forum
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