War by other means
War by other means
A documentary by John Pilger
Soon to be shown on ABC TV
Reviewed by Tamara Desiatov
"War and debt are exactly the same things, and you don't have to occupy the same territory", says writer and director John Pilger of his latest documentary film. This film was shown for the first time in Australia at the Carlton Movie House on October 8.
The film focuses on the foreign debt of the Philippines, which climbed to US$4.5 billion under Ferdinand Marcos before he was overthrown in 1986. While 45 million people in the Philippines live in poverty, 44% of the national budget is going to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; 3% goes to health services and 15% to education.
"In the Philippines", says John Cavanagh, of the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington, "we have calculated that one child dies every hour because debt repayments consume vital sources like health care".
"Never before in history have the poor financed the rich on such a scale, and paid so dearly for their servitude", writes John Pilger in his book Distant Lives. "At the current rates of interest, it is a mathematical impossibility for most countries to pay off their debt." This situation allows the World Bank and IMF to coerce the Third World into "structural adjustment" programs.
"Structural adjustment" in the Philippines meant the establishment of export processing zones for foreign investors built on what was originally rich agricultural land. Another result was the "great scam", the nuclear power plant built under Marcos at Batang Peninsula, adjacent to volcanoes and an earthquake fault.
Smoky Mountain, a rubbish tip in the Philippines, where people live and work 12 hours a day, where most children die before the age of five, where there is already 30% malnutrition and diarrhoea and no running water or sewerage system, provides a "metaphor for the condition of most of humanity, whose accelerating impoverishment in the 1980s is allowed only fleeting consciousness".
At the Australian premier screening of War By Other Means, Pilger described the political stranglehold on the debtors which debt gives to imperialism. Countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Zaire and Turkey were bribed or coerced to do US bidding around the Gulf War, for example.
"The vote of the non-permanent members of the Security Council was crucial; and the bribes and threats were successful. Within a fortnight of the UN vote, Ethiopia and the US signed their first investment deal for years, and talks began with the World Bank and the IMF. Zaire was offered US military aid and debt forgiveness."