Sunday, November 05, 2006

Noam Chomsky: The problem lies in the unwillingness to recognize that your own terrorism is terrorism



‘The problem lies in the unwillingness to recognize that your own terrorism is terrorism'
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Saad Sayeed
Excalibur Online, October 25, 2006

Known in academic circles for his contribution to the field of linguistics, MIT professor Noam Chomsky is widely recognized as one of the most influential political dissidents of our time. In this interview, Chomsky talks about the roots of terrorism and the role of the intellectual in society.
"The problem lies in the unwillingness to recognise that your own terrorism is terrorism"
Excalibur (Ex): How important is an understanding of the role of states such as the U.S. and the U.K. when examining the question of terrorism?
Chomsky (Ch): It depends on whether we want to be honest and truthful or whether we want to just serve state power ( . . . ) We should look at all forms of terrorism.
I have been writing on terrorism for 25 years, ever since the Reagan administration came in 1981 and declared that the leading focus of its foreign policy was going to be a war on terror. A war against state directed terrorism which they called the plague of the modern world because of their barbarism and so on. That was the centre of their foreign policy and ever since I have been writing about terrorism.
But what I write causes extreme anger for the very simple reason that I use the U.S. government's official definition of terrorism from the official U.S. code of laws. If you use that definition, it follows very quickly that the U.S. is the leading terrorist state and a major sponsor of terrorism and since that conclusion is unacceptable, it arouses furious anger. But the problem lies in the unwillingness to recognize that your own terrorism is terrorism. This is not just true of the United States, it's true quite generally. Terrorism is something that they do to us. In both cases, it's terrorism and we have to get over that if we're serious about the question.
Ex: In 1979, Russia invades Afghanistan. The U.S. uses the Ziaul Haq regime in Pakistan to fund the rise of militancy. This gives Zia a green light to fund cross-border terrorism in Kashmir. Now we allegedly have some of those elements setting off bombs in Mumbai. Clearly, these groups are no longer controlled by any government.
Ch: The jihadi movements in their modern form go back before Afghanistan. They were formed primarily in Egypt in the 1970s. Those are the roots of the jihadi movement, the intellectual roots and the activist roots and the terrorism too.
But when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the Regan administration saw it as an opportunity to pursue their Cold War aims. So they did with the intense cooperation of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and others ( . . . ) so the Reagan administration organized the most radical Islamic extremists it could find anywhere in the world and brought them to Afghanistan to train them, arm them.
Meanwhile, the U.S. supported Ziaul Haq as he was turning Pakistan into a country full of madrassahs and fundamentalists. The Reagan administration even ( . . . ) kept certifying to Congress that Pakistan was not developing nuclear weapons, which of course they were, so that U.S. aid to Pakistan could continue. The end result of these U.S. programs was to seriously harm Pakistan and also to create the international jihadi movement, of which Osama bin Laden is a product. The jihadi movement then spread ( . . . ) they may not like it much but they created it. And now, as you say, it's in Kashmir.
Kashmir, though, is a much more complex story. There are plenty of problems in Kashmir and they go way back, but the major current conflicts come from the 1980s. In 1986, when India blocked the election, it actually stole the election, and that led to an uprising and terrorist violence and atrocities, including atrocities committed by the Indian army.
Ex: The colonial legacy is generally dismissed by the media. What role does this legacy play in the emergence of home-grown terrorists in countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and Canada as well as to the creation of terrorism as a whole?
Ch: It's not brought up in the West because it's inconvenient to think about your own crimes. Just look at the major conflicts going on around the world today, in Africa, the Middle East, in South Asia, most of them are residues of colonial systems.
Colonial systems imposed and created artificial states that had nothing to do with the needs and concerns and relations of the populations involved. They were created in the interests of colonial powers and as old fashioned colonialism turned into modern neo-colonialism, a lot of these conflicts erupted into violence and those are a lot of the atrocities happening in the world today.
How can anyone say colonialism isn't relevant? Of course it is and it's even more directly relevant.
Take the London bombing in 2005. Blair tried to pretend that it had nothing to do with Britain's participation in the invasion of Iraq. That's completely ridiculous. The British intelligence and the reports of the people connected in the bombing, they said that the British participation in the invasion and resulting horrors in Iraq inflamed them and they wanted to do something in reaction.
Ex: What is the role of the intellectual when dealing with imperialism and are the intellectuals doing they job?
Ch: Unfortunately, intellectuals are doing their historic job. The historic role of intellectuals if you look, unfortunately, as far back as you go has been to support power systems and to justify their atrocities. So the article you read in the National Post for the production of vulgar Stalinist connoisseurs, that's what intellectuals usually do as far back as you go.
If you go back to the Bible, there's a category of people who were called prophets, a translation of an obscure word, they were intellectuals, they were what we would call dissident intellectuals; criticising the evil king, giving geopolitical analysis, calling for the moral treatment of orphans, decent behaviour. They were dissident intellectuals. Were they treated well? They were prisoned and driven into the dessert and so on, they were the fringe. The people who were treated well were the ones who centuries later, like in the gospel, were called false prophets. So it goes through history. The actual role of the intellectual has been supportive of power.
Should they do that? Of course not; they should be searching for truth, they should be honest, they should be supporting freedom and justice and there are some who do it. There is a fringe who do it, but they're not treated well. They are performing the task that intellectuals ought to perform.
Ex: And what keeps you motivated?
Ch: I'll just tell you a brief story. I was in Beirut a couple of months ago giving talks at the American university in the city. After a talk, people come up and they want to talk privately or have books signed.
Here I was giving a talk in a downtown theatre, a large group of people were around and a young woman came up to me, in her mid-'20s, and just said this sentence: "I am Kinda" and practically collapsed. You wouldn't know who Kinda is but that's because we live in societies where the truth is kept hidden. I knew who she was. She had a book of mine open to a page on which I had quoted a letter of hers that she wrote when she was seven years old.
It was right after the U.S. bombing of Libya, her family was then living in Libya, and she wrote a letter which was found by a journalist friend of mine who tried to get it published in the United States but couldn't because no one would publish it. He then gave it to me, I published it. The letter said something like this:
"Dear Mr Reagan, I am seven years old. I want to know why you killed my little sister and my friend and my rag doll. Is it because we are Palestinians? Kinda". That's one of the most moving letters I have ever seen and when she walked up to me and said I am Kinda, and, like I say, actually fell over, not only because of the event but because of what it means.
Here's the United States with no pretext at all, bombing another country, killing and destroying, and nobody wants to know what a little seven-year-old girl wrote about the atrocities. That's the kind of thing that keeps me motivated and ought to keep everybody motivated. And you can multiply that by 10,000.

FW: Bangladesh honors Nobel peace laureate Muhammad Yunus

International Herald Tribune
November 5, 2006

Bangladesh honors Nobel peace laureate Muhammad Yunus

The Associated Press
Bangladesh honored Nobel peace laureate Muhammad Yunus at a ceremony Sunday hosted by the country's president and interim leader Iajuddin Ahmed.

Yunus and his Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel prize on Oct. 13 for their efforts to lift millions out of poverty. Yunus' idea, known as microcredit, has helped hundreds of millions of people worldwide by handing out small loans to start their own businesses.

Ahmed presented Yunus with an inscribed silver plate and a citation at the Bangabhaban, the presidential palace in the capital, Dhaka.

"Yunus and the Grameen Bank founded by him have brought honor to Bangladesh. As Bangladeshis, we are very proud and delighted," Ahmed said.

The televised ceremony was attended by politicians and prominent citizens.

"This honor is not only for me, but for Grameen Bank, its millions of borrowers and young workers, for all Bangladeshis," Yunus said.

Yunus said the microcredit system challenged the conventional banking system, which "only lends to those who already have plenty."

"Grameen showed that it is possible to lend to those who have nothing — about two-thirds of the world's population. We give loans to the poor, to women ... without collateral or legal documents. We showed that an institution can run on trust," Yunus said.

Ahmed said the Nobel prize opened "a new era for Bangladesh."

"In their citation, the Nobel committee said if the majority cannot come out of poverty, peace cannot prevail. His microcredit concept has won worldwide recognition, and will help to establish a poverty-free world, I believe," Ahmed said.

In Bangladesh, the Grameen Bank provides services in more than 70,000 villages and has loaned US$5.72 billion (€4.56 billion) to 6.7 million Bangladeshis — 97 percent of them women — over the past three decades.

Muhammad Yunus: One man’s war on poverty




L I F E S T Y L E
Focus
Sunday November 5, 2006


One man’s war on poverty

An unassuming economics professor JUNE H. L. WONG interviewed more than a decade ago suddenly becomes very famous when he wins the most prestigious prize in the world.

ELEVEN years ago, I was privileged to meet a man whose mission was to wipe out poverty from the face of the earth. It seemed very quixotic but he believed he had a way of doing it: Lending very small amounts of money to the very poor to give them a head start in making a living. He called such lending, micro-credit.

This man was Bangladeshi economics professor-turned-banker Dr Muhammad Yunus. After that meeting, I kept track, in a rather desultory way, of this gentle, unassuming man, as he increasingly won international attention and recognition for his work.


Dr Muhammad Yunus – in his trademark kurta – celebrating news of his Nobel Prize win with daughter Dina in Dhaka on Oct 13. He will use his share of the US$1.4mil (RM5.18mil) award money to set up a company to make low-cost, high-nutrition food and an eye hospital for the poor in Bangladesh.
Finally, on Oct 13, he received the most prestigious recognition of all: The Nobel Peace Prize. I was elated when the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to “award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006, divided into two equal parts, to Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank for their efforts to create economic and social development from below.”

News of the award brought back memories of my meeting with him in Beijing in September 1995, during the United Nations World Conference on Women.

I had never heard of Dr Yunus before but after hearing him speak about his work and seeing how he won over the likes of World Bank officials and then US First Lady Hillary Clinton, who was also at the conference, I was determined to interview him.

We met in the lobby of a Beijing hotel and we spent a good two hours talking about his work.


Grameen Bank borrower, Banesa Khatun – with son Anis Mia (right) and daughter Seema Khatun – says that when the scheme was introduced in her country, Bangladesh, 30 years ago, it helped lift her from among the poorest of the poor to a respectable, independent woman.
When I returned to Malaysia, I wrote my report and published it in The Star on Oct 27, 1995, to mark International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

My story on how Dr Yunus, 65, started is now an old one, repeated in countless interviews around the world since he began drawing international attention. This is what I wrote in 1995:

The son of a jeweller in Chittagong, the south-east port of Bangladesh, Dr Yunus earned his basic degree and Masters from Dhaka University. He then won a Fulbright Scholarship to do his doctorate at Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1965. He stayed on to take up a teaching position in 1969.

Three years later in 1971, after a bloody civil war, Bangladesh became an independent state. The economy was devastated but there was great hope for rebuilding.

Dr Yunus, eager to help, returned home and joined Chittagong University as head of the Economics Department.

“But then there was a terrible famine in 1974 that killed many people. I felt empty teaching my students beautiful and elegant theories that had nothing to do with the lives of the people.

“I decided I wanted to find why out why people couldn’t find enough food to eat and how to resolve their problems,” he said.

It wasn’t hard since his university was surrounded by poor villages. He visited them every day and began to understand the desperate lives of poor peasants.

“I saw how people suffered for a tiny amount of money because they had to borrow from loan sharks.”

Within two weeks, Dr Yunus compiled a list of 42 people from one village who had taken such loans.

“All they needed was US$30 (RM75). My first response was to give the money to them from my own pocket so that they could pay off the moneylender. I made no conditions.”


In the El Salvadorean city of San Marcos, 51-year-old Nolberta Melara saw her life transformed through a US$30 loan from the Support for the Microbusiness Centre, an NGO based on the Grameen Bank. Melara sews aprons and sells them in markets across the country.
But Dr Yunus soon realised that it couldn’t just end there. “I realised they wouldn’t be able to find me in the university if they needed more loans so I approached the campus branch of a local bank and asked the manager to lend money to villagers.

“He thought I was joking because the bank didn’t give one dollar loans and certainly not to poor people.”

And that was the start of Dr Yunus’ one-man crusade to show that banking on the poor could change their lives for the better and at the same time be profitable for financial institutions.

It took him six years to sign up 200,000 borrowers with a repayment rate of 98%. But bankers remained sceptical, saying that his was a small-scale venture that would not survive if it got any bigger.

It was then Dr Yunus decided to set up his own bank, to be called the Grameen Bank (grameen means “rural”), in 1983 with the support of Bangladesh’s central bank.


Egyptian vegetable vendor Hanem Shaban got her first Grameen Bank-type loan of 250 Egyptian pounds (RM159) six years ago and expanded her vegetable stall in Cairo’s popular Imbaba market. She now earns much more money than before.
Today, according to the Grameen Bank website, as of May, it has 6.67 million borrowers, 97 % of whom are women (see ‘Working wonders with women’). With 2,247 branches, it provides services in 72,096 villages, covering more than 86% of the total number of villages in Bangladesh.

Micro financing has also spread beyond Bangladesh to other parts of the world. Locally, Amanah Ikhtiar Malaysia (AIM), set up in 1987, was among the earliest replications of the Grameen model.

(AIM has 69 branches with 157,000 active members nationwide and has provided loans amounting to RM1.7bil, mostly to finance business activities. It received a boost recently when Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Badawi announced an additional allocation of RM100mil to its coffers.)

I was not the only journalist who took delight in Dr Yunus’s Nobel Prize win. NBC news correspondent Mark Potter posted the following in The Daily Nightly, a blog written by MCNBC journos and producers:

“I had to smile this morning when I read that Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize. Yunus ? was the inspiration for a man we featured earlier this year on a Nightly News ‘Making a Difference’ piece from the island of Samoa, in the South Pacific.

“What might appear to be dry economic and social theory on paper is actually deeply moving when you see it in practice and witness the results – as we were lucky enough to do this spring.

“Our story featured Greg Casagrande, who was a hard-charging executive for Ford and Mazda before he gave it all up to chase his dream of eradicating poverty. After studying Yunus’ principles, he used his own money to start up a loan program for women in impoverished Samoa.”

This is but one inspiring example of how the Grameen model has been copied successfully all over the world.

But Grameen is not without critics, as CNews journalist Farid Hossain pointed out.

The criticisms have focused on the bank’s high interest rates, which, at 20%, are significantly higher than the 10%-15% charged by commercial banks.

“While the poor pay 20% interest for their loan, the rich pay much less. It can’t be called social justice,” Farid quoted S.M. Akash, an economics professor at Dhaka University, as saying.

Dr Yunus’ response, according to journalist Alan Jolis whose The Independent on Sunday article appears in grameen-info.org : If anyone can run a bank for the poor and charge less, please go ahead and do so.


Polio victim S. Thilagavathy (with AIM manager Zubairi Mohd Fadzil and her daughter Reena Devi) earned RM50 by offering sewing services. She was able to increase her earnings to RM350 after receiving a loan from AIM in 2000 to buy a sewing machine.
Despite such criticisms, Dr Yunus is considered a national hero in his country even before he won the Nobel Prize. Indeed, unlike many previous Nobel Peace Prize winners, he is seen as a most deserving recipient and a popular choice among ordinary folk.

A person who responded to Potter’s posting in The Daily Nightly wondered why Dr Yunus didn’t win the prize for economics. The Norwegian Nobel Committee answered that question best when it explained its decision:

“Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Micro-credit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights.”

To underscore that statement, it’s worthwhile to quote what Dr Yunus told Jolis: “Poverty covers people in a thick crust and makes the poor appear stupid and without initiative.

“Yet if you give them credit, they will slowly come back to life. Even those who seemingly have no conceptual thought, no ability to think of yesterday or tomorrow, are in fact quite intelligent and expert at the art of survival. Credit is the key that unlocks their humanity.”

In 1995, he told me that his mission was to show that a poverty-free world is possible in our lifetime and his goal was to provide credit to the world’s 100 million poorest families through women by 2005.

According to the 2005 State of Microcredit Summit Campaign Report, as of Dec 31, 2004, some 3,200 micro-credit institutions reported reaching more than 92 million clients. Almost 73% of them were living in dire poverty at the time of their first loan.

That would mean Dr Yunus has reached his goal and he may see his ultimate dream realised.

He said to me: “How wonderful if, one day, our grandchildren must visit a museum to see what poverty was all about.”

I concluded my story then by saying: “Wishful thinking?” I won’t make the same mistake twice.


Kinokuniya Bookstores is offering Dr Muhammad Yunus’ critically acclaimed book, ‘Banker to the Poor: Micro-credit and the Battle Against World Poverty’ (ISBN: 1-586-48198-3) at a 25% discount. However, stocks have run out and the book will only be available at Kinokuniya’s Suria KLCC store after Dec 1. The discount is valid between Dec 1 and Dec 31 (or while stocks last).

FW: Sydney Peace Prize goes to Bangladesh’s Irene Khan


Sydney Peace Prize goes to Bangladesh’s Irene Khan

Neena Bhandari
Wednesday, November 01, 2006 21:37 IST


Khan is the first Asian and first woman to spearhead Amnesty International

SYDNEY: Secretary General of Amnesty International Irene Zubaida Khan has been awarded the 2006 Sydney Peace Prize for “her courageous advocacy of human rights and her skills in identifying violence against women as a massive injustice and therefore a priority in campaigning for peace”.

She said, “I am deeply honoured. Through this award, the Sydney Peace Foundation recognises that there can be no peace without justice and respect for human rights”.

Born in Bangladesh, Khan is the first woman, the first Asian and the first Muslim to guide the world’s largest human rights organisation, bringing a new perspective to it. Deeply concerned about violence against women, she called for better protection of women’s human rights and initiated a process of consultations with women activists to design a global campaign by Amnesty International against violence on women.

On the current debate raging over women’s clothes, Khan said, “Violence against women has less to do with how women dress and far more to do with the inequality of women, the impunity of those who commit gender crimes and the apathy of state and society that condone and encourage attitudes that facilitate gender violence. Women have the right to freedom of expression, and that includes what they choose to wear. Governments have a duty to create a safe environment in which every woman can make that choice without fear of violence or coercion...”

A recipient of several academic awards, including a Ford Foundation Fellowship and the Pilkington Woman of the Year Award 2002, she recognises that at a time when fear and failed leadership threaten peace and human rights, there is a greater than ever need for individual activism.

Delivering the Sydney Peace Prize lecture she said, “Discrimination and racial profiling have become an accepted element of anti-terrorism strategies in many countries, undermining both human rights and trust between communities”

Khan, who studied law at the University of Manchester and Harvard Law School emphasised, “We should avoid simplifying multiple identities of people into a single religious one. When you identify me only by my faith, you exclude all my identity as a woman, a mother, a lawyer, a citizen of Bangladesh, a resident of London, a lover of French cuisine and English theatre. The plurality and not the singularity of our identities is the way in which to overcome fear and create social harmony in a troubled world”.

Each year the Sydney Peace Foundation awards the prize to an individual who has made significant contributions to ‘peace with justice’.

The only other winner from the sub-continent has been novelist and human rights activist Arundhati Roy, who was awarded the prize in 2004 for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.

Source: http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1061529