On 18 January 2012 the Solomon Star reported that RAMSI apologist and the former Solomon Islands Finance Minister and Member of Parliament for West New Georgia and Vona Vona, Peter Boyers, was arrested and charged with criminal trespass and intimidation. What is more interesting are the facts surrounding these charges. According to the Solomon Star, Boyers was engaged in a longstanding dispute with political rival Peter Boso. In an apparent attempt to bring matters to a head Boyers attended the premises of Boso with the express purpose of strangling him. By a stroke of good fortune on the part of Boso, he found himself elsewhere when Boyers attended on his home. Boyers then, apparently for want of a more edifying victim, strangled Boso’s pet dog in lieu of its master, a low act by any standards.
The Greek playwright Euripides said, “You can judge a man by the company he keeps,” an idiom worth remembering, especially if you are an invading and occupying force in the manner of the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomn Islands (“RAMSI”). I’m not sure into what level of Hell Dante would have placed a buffoon who strangles a rivals pet dog in a fit of pique, though I would suspect it to be somewhat near the place reserved for the likes of Brutus, Judas, and Cassius, eternally chewed in Lucifer’s three mouths. I deliberately chose Dante’s Lucifer over Milton’s as my analogy for good reason. Dante’s Lucifer is everything that Milton’s Lucifer is not. Milton’s Lucifer is suave, sophisticated and appealing, though corrupt and evil, while Dante’s Lucifer is a dribbling idiot, corrupt and evil without the finesse of Milton’s; so it is with RAMSI.
Make no mistake, judging by the company RAMSI keeps it is organisationally corrupting to all those whose path it crosses. As with Dante’s Lucifer, RAMSI’s corruption lakes the finesse one would expect from its self-promoting friends and members. Indeed, dribbling idiot is an apt analogy for an organisation that went to great lengths to orchestrate the demise, transference and prosecution of the former Attorney-General of the Solomon Islands Mr Julian Moti QC on trumped-up charges, only to have the High Court of Australia grant Moti a permanent stay of proceedings because of the illegal manner in which RAMSI facilitated Moti’s rendition to Australia. Now there’s a billion dollars of Australian taxpayers money well spent! Yes RAMSI, believe it or not, is a billion dollar fiasco!
As we all know, in life everyone is selling something. Absolute power is what RAMSI is about which coincidently is also the name of a quixotic Eastwood movie, which has as part of its dialogue the following exchange. When E. G. Marshall is negotiating with the hit man, he offers him three million dollars to kill Eastwood, who he believes murdered his wife. Hit man: “You’re a good salesman.” Marshall’s glib response: “Selling sin is easy.” Though not Shakespearean flights of poetry, this exchange offers an insight into power politics in the Pacific.
Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer stated very publically in January 2003 that, “Sending in Australian troops to occupy the Solomon Islands would be folly in the extreme.” Yet, just six months later, Downer in a dramatic U-turn announced Australia’s plans for a military mission, saying that the Solomon Islands civil unrest had “forced” Australia to produce a new Pacific policy involving “nation rebuilding” and “cooperative intervention.” He stressed that the initiative was built on the spirit of the Biketawa Declaration, signed in 2000 by members of the Pacific Islands Forum to address the need for regional cooperation on matters of security.
According to the Pacific Islands Forum website The Biketawa Declaration (2000) outlines guiding principles for good governance and courses of action for a regional response to crises in the region.
The Biketawa Declaration also commits Forum members to some key fundamental values including, among others, a “… belief in the liberty of the individual under the law, in equal rights for all citizens regardless of gender, race, colour, creed or political belief” and to “upholding democratic processes and institutions which reflect national and local circumstances, including the peaceful transfer of power”.
To fully understand the reasons behind Downer’s and Australia’s policy U-turn, it’s worthwhile considering the Solomon Islands civil unrest within the overall context of contemporary global security concerns. The events of September 11 have demonstrated how transnational terrorism and the use of violence to achieve political ends has become de-nationalised, de-territorialised and privatised. Previously confined to specific places or conflicts, terrorism had now become global, with intricate financial and recruitment networks and new choices of weapons and victims. To a xenophobe war monger like former Australian Prime Minister Howard, the fear of Islamic hordes resplendent in Hijab, Qur’an in one hand Kalashnikov in the other, reaching Australian shores must have been palpable.
As Tobias Debiel of the Institut für Politikwissenschaft, University of Duisburg-Essen noted:
“The new terrorists act not only with diabolical precision, but also with camouflage, which makes them very difficult to apprehend using loose-knit actions or conventional means in the area of external or internal security.”
Similarly, Ari Fleischer, a White House spokesman, noted in 2002:
The threats we face are no longer from known enemies, nations that have fleets or missiles or bombers that we can see come to the United States, nations that can be deterred through previous notions such as mutually assured destruction or any other previous defence notions.
The argument that new terrorism knows no geographical, ideological, or moral borders or boundaries, thus making it less feasible to separate external and internal security has given rise to a new polemic on security policy. This new polemic has increased significance in countries that view themselves as potential terrorist targets.
The United States along with the United Kingdom and Australia argue that international law and the United Nations, which were created to resolve conflicts between states, cannot deal adequately with new terrorism. They argue that terrorists could use unstable, ineffective, and “rogue” states to broaden and strengthen their global network. The neo-colonial like strategies they have come up with to deal with new terrorism has engendered the Bush administration’s pre-emptive strike policy, the United Nations sanctioned invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. led invasion of Iraq and the Australian led intervention in the Solomon Islands. The irony of course is that the first black President of the United States using a military machine that is overwhelmingly made up of the disenfranchised of his nation is shouldering the “white man’s burden” in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, one Afro-American soldier during World War II summed up this irony succulently with these words he was reported to have uttered, “Just carve on my tombstone, ‘Here lies a Black man killed fighting a yellow man for the protection of a white man’”.
The words of our Afro-American brother ring as true today as they did when they were first allegedly uttered almost seventy years ago. In fact, they were prescient of a future Australia led by a xenophobic Howard, who in referring to Australia’s role in East Timor, for example, said:
This has done a lot to cement Australia’s place in the region…. We occupy a special place—we are a European Western civilization with strong links with North America, but here we are in Asia…. In foreign policy we spent too much time fretting about whether we were in Asia, part of Asia, or whatever. We should be ourselves in Asia.
Further in relation to the events of September 11, 2001 Howard said:
It stands to reason that if you believed that somebody was going to launch an attack against your country, either of a conventional kind or of a terrorist kind, and you had a capacity to stop it and there was no alternative other than to use that capacity, then of course you would have to use it.
Reading these two statements together, it wouldn’t be an altogether unfair interpretation to view them as an assertion of racial superiority. In short, what Howard is saying is that though Australia is geographically part of Asia. Australians (which I dispute) are European and as such, Australia asserts its right to pre-emptively strike against its yellow and black neighbours if it doesn’t like what they are doing. For Howard, “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet”.
In discussing Australia’s leadership in the Solomon Islands intervention, Howard said, “The Solomons is our patch…. If the Solomons becomes a failed state, it’s a haven potentially for terrorists, drug runners and money launderers… we don’t want that on our door step.” Howard’s words have a hollow ring for me, as one of the issues I have raised time and again on Blak and Black is that of the former Commissioner for ACT Revenue, an Aboriginal Australian who was fitted up and sacked by the white Australian justice system for raising concerns about money laundering in ACT Treasury. Clearly the Solomon Islands intervention wasn’t as much about a “belief in the liberty of the individual under the law, in equal rights for all citizens regardless of gender, race, colour, creed or political belief” as Howard and the Biketawa Declaration would like us to believe; it was about Australia asserting the alleged superiority of white European civilization over black Melanesian civilization. The problem for Moti was that he genuinely believed in a “belief in the liberty of the individual under the law, in equal rights for all citizens regardless of gender, race, colour, creed or political belief” and he paid a heavy price for those beliefs to a white racist Australia.
As with Lucifer, Eve and the apple, while Australia’s words to the people of the Solomons were literally true, they have come to mean something very different from the drivel Howard and Downer gushed forth in 2003. The reality is that the Solomons have exchanged sovereignty not for “the liberty of the individual under the law” but, to further the interests of one man’s neo-colonial ambitions and misplaced sense of the importance of white European civilization over the age old civilizations of the Asia-Pacific region.
What Australia is peddling to the peoples of the Asia-Pacific Region is sin, the sin is racism, which Australia using all the subtleties of an AusStyr rifle, is foisting on the innocents of the region. It’s time for accountability and justice. It’s time for the people of the region to send that dribbling idiot Lucifer back to the frozen wastes of Dante’s Ninth Circle, otherwise known as Canberra!
Remember, until Australia addresses its own issues of racism and corruption it does not deserve a seat on the United Nations Security Council.
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Bakchos Glass another take on the theme of Afro-American soldiers: I’ m just a Negro soldier
Fighting for “democracy!’
A thing I’ve often heard of
But very seldom see…
Yet I must be patriotic
Must not grumble or complain
But must fight for some “four freedoms”
On which I’ll have no claim…
They expect me to be loyal
But in my heart I’m not
For how can a second-class citizen
Be a first-class patriot?
To hell with a war impelled by greed
while the hungry masses cry
But to win complete equality
I’d fight and gladly die”
Paulo Flores Returning to a life of segregation and discrimination at the end of World War II caused the politicisation of many Black Americans. The resultant civil disobedience campaign, e.g. the draft resistors, was one of the catalysts of the 50s and 60s Civil Rights Movement. As America emerged as a world superpower, the rest of the world focused upon her internal political shortcomings and they found ‘the major domestic criticism to be America’s handling of its racial minorities’. As a result of this and the recognition that Black soldiers were needed as part of the military in a country which was often at war, in 1948 Truman ordered full integration of the military.
Paulo Flores and Jenifer Trees America has repeatedly been at war, from the Revolutionary period to the war on terror. As a result of these wars American society has suffered outbreaks of paranoia, racial prejudice and discrimination. Which racial group, ethnic minority or ideological beliefs are discriminated against correlates with who the enemy was at that period, be it Southerners, the Japanese, Germans or communists. But despite this the Black American has suffered continual and unprecedented discrimination regardless of who the enemy was.
While the Afro-American stuff is interesting, they now have a sembelence of justice while Aboriginal Australia has none. In the same year that RAMSI and the AFP went to the Solomons to stop black money laundering (2003) the same AFP fitted up a black Australian in nACT Treasury to stop him exposing white money laundering in Canberra the capital of Australia!!!!
The AFP have no problem about fitting up a black man, especially a black man who speaks out against white corruption. All of the crimes that Howard sent RAMSI to the Solomons to deal with were introduced into the Solomons by white Christian colonists. The crime the former Commissioner for ACT Revenue attempted to expose at ACT Treasury was a white crime not a black crime. Again blacks are forced to suffer for white crime, really this is what the HT Intervention is all about.
The AFP are a racist, corrupt and rogue organisation. If you’re black your worth no more than the dog shit on the sole of their shoes to them. Being black means being black anywhere they operate – it could be Australia, the Solomon’s, PNG, and Timor-Leste it doesn’t matter. To the AFP being black means you have no legal rights or protections. The Pacific would be best served if the AFP and RAMSI were no more!
Writing in 1944 Myrad expressed an expectation that radical changes lay ahead for the Black American. After the conformity of the McCarthy era, protest began to increase rapidly. In the late 50s and 60s many Black protest organisations emerged: The Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). For these groups Black rights combined with an anti-war focus were integral. The emerging youth culture created a new lease of life and injection of idealism into these protests; and with the outbreak of the Vietnam War, they were presented with a fresh focus for even more intense opposition, particularly as the reasons for intervention were not wholly understood.
After the conformity of the Howard/Rudd/Gillard era, we in Australia can only hope that protests leading to real change for the disadvantaged in this country will follow!
The bottom line is that there is never an excuse for one country to invade another. RAMSI is nothing more than the brutal face of foreign aggression, invasion and occupation. The crimes Howard alleges were going on in the Solomons are the same that were going on in ACT Treasury at the same time. Why haven’t RAMSI been deployed to the ACT?
The modern 20th century weapon of neo-imperialism is “dollarism.” The Zionists have mastered the science of dollarism: the ability to come posing as a friend and benefactor, bearing gifts and all other forms of economic aid and offers of technical assistance. Thus, the power and influence of Zionist Israel in many of the newly “independent” African nations has fast-become even more unshakeable than that of the 18th century European colonialists… and this new kind of Zionist colonialism differs only in form and method, but never in motive or objective – Malcolm X
“As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man’s llife will be gone. I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.” -Henry David Thoreau
In keeping with the theme of this post and this rather religiously orientated discussion I will offer the following for consideration. The Bible instructs us to yield not to temptation, and as a Christian we must learn to be obedient to God’s word. He never tells us that temptation will never confront us. He instructs us not to yield to it. This I do realize can be very difficult to overcome but it can be done. How can Howard claim to be a Christian when he, himself is the great tempter?
“Until the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned…
Everything is war. Me say war.
That until the’re no longer 1st class and 2nd class citizens of any nation…
Until the color of a man’s skin is of
no more significa…nce than the color of his eyes, me say war. That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race me say war!”
? Bob Marley
Shit Bro this sounds just like the kind of help the Australian Government offered to it’s indigenous friends in the NT. The whole aim behind the exercise being cultural genocide. Mate with friends like this, well you know the rest!
Uncle Reg Glass the way they have treated us, so called citizens and friends in the NT is digraceful. I guess based on this that the Oz Govt. must really love the West papuan’s given that they are actively promoting genocide by bullet there!