in the name of Development

Min Kamp

2009-10-04T15:39:00.000-07:00

So far the entries have been few and far between, as well as having lost their post-developmental focus in favour of an emphasis on my own personal impasse. An impasse, which is quite fittingly illustrated by this quote from Karl Ove Knausgårds latest novel (unfortunately, it’s in Norwegian);

’Tankene våre er overflommet av bilder av steder vi aldri har vært på, men likevel kjenner, mennesker vi aldri har truffet, men likevel er fortrolige med, og langt på vei lever vårt liv i forhold til. Følelsen det gir av at verden er liten, tett omsluttet av seg selv, uten åpninger mot noe annet, er nesten incestuøs, og selv om jeg visste at den var dypt usann, siden vi egentlig ikke vet noen ting om noe, kom jeg likevel ikke unna den. Den lengselen jeg alltid kjente, som noen dager var så stor at den nesten ikke lot seg kontrollere, sprang ut fra dette. Det var delvis fra å lindre den at jeg skrev, ved å skrive ville jeg åpne verden, for meg selv, samtidig som det også var det som gjorde at jeg mislyktes. Følelsen av at framtid ikke finnes, at den bare er mer av den samme, betyr at enhver utopi er meningsløs. Litteraturen har alltid vært beslektet med det utopiske, så når det utopiske mister mening, gjør også litterature det. Det jeg kanskje forsøkte på, og som kanskje alle forfattere forsøker på, hva vet jeg, var å bekjempe fiksjon med fiksjon. Det jeg burde gjøre, var å bejae det eksisterende, bejae tingenes tilstand, altså boltre meg i verden istedenfor å lete etter en vei ut av den, for på den måten ville jeg utvilsomt få et bedre liv, men det klarte jeg ikke, det kunne jeg ikke, i meg hadde noe stivnet, en overbevisning stod fast, og selv om den var essensialistisk , dvs. utidsenlig, og i tilegg romantisk, kom jeg ikke forbi den, av den enkle grunn at den ikke bare var tenkt, men også erfart, gjennom disse plutselig tilstandene av klarsyn, som vel alle kjenner, hvor man i noen sekunder ser en helt annen verden enn man bare i øyeblikket tidligere befant seg i, hvor det er som om verden trer fram og en kort stund viser seg, før den faller inn i seg selv igjen og etterlater alt som før…”

- Min Kamp (første bok), pp. 220-221. -

John Pilger - Cambodia`s empty dock

2009-02-26T10:44:00.000-08:00

From the guardian:

At my hotel in Phnom Penh, the women and children sat on one side of the room, palais-style, the men on the other. It was a disco night and a lot of fun; then suddenly people walked to the windows and wept. The DJ had played a song by the much-loved Khmer singer Sin Sisamouth, who had been forced to dig his own grave and to sing the Khmer Rouge anthem before he was beaten to death. I experienced many such reminders.

There was another kind of reminder. In the village of Neak Long I walked with a distraught man through a necklace of bomb craters. His entire family of 13 had been blown to pieces by an American B-52. That had happened almost two years before Pol Pot came to power in 1975. It is estimated more than 600,000 Cambodians were slaughtered that way.

The problem with the UN-backed trial of the remaining Khmer Rouge leaders, which has just begun in Phnom Penh, is that it is dealing only with the killers of Sin Sisamouth and not with the killers of the family in Neak Long, and not with their collaborators. There were three stages ofCambodia's holocaust. Pol Pot's genocide was but one of them, yet only it has a place in the official memory.

It is highly unlikely Pot Pot would have come to power had President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, not attacked neutral Cambodia. In 1973, B-52s dropped more bombs on Cambodia's heartland than were dropped on Japan during the second world war: equivalent to five Hiroshimas. Files reveal that the CIA was in little doubt of the effect. "[The Khmer Rouge] are using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda," reported the director of operations on May 2, 1973. "This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of a number of young men [and] has been effective with refugees."

Prior to the bombing, the Khmer Rouge had been a Maoist cult without a popular base. The bombing delivered a catalyst. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed. Kissinger will not be in the dock in Phnom Penh. He is advising President Obama on geopolitics. Neither will Margaret Thatcher, nor a number of her retired ministers and officials who, in secretly supporting the Khmer Rouge after the Vietnamese had expelled them, contributed directly to the third stage of Cambodia's holocaust.

In 1979, the US and Britain imposed a devastating embargo on stricken Cambodia because its liberators, Vietnam, had come from the wrong side of the cold war. Few Foreign Office campaigns have been as cynical or as brutal. The British demanded that the now defunct Pol Pot regime retain the "right" to represent its victims at the UN and voted with Pol Pot in the agencies of the UN, including the World Health Organisation, thereby preventing it from working in Cambodia. To disguise this outrage, Britain, the US and China, Pol Pot's main backer, invented a "non communist" coalition in exile that was, in fact, dominated by the Khmer Rouge. In Thailand, the CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency formed direct links with the Khmer Rouge.

In 1983, the Thatcher government sent the SAS to train the "coalition" in landmine technology - in a country more seeded with mines than anywhere except Afghanistan. "I confirm," Thatcher wrote to opposition leader Neil Kinnock, "that there is no British government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with Khmer Rouge forces or those allied to them." The lie was breathtaking. In 1991, the Major government was forced to admit to parliament that the SAS had been secretly training the "coalition".

Unless international justice is a farce, those who sided with Pol Pot's mass murderers ought to be summoned to the court in Phnom Penh: at the very least their names read into infamy's register.

My mind is still blank...

2009-02-26T09:45:00.000-08:00

so i will just try and post interesting articles for a while.

This is how I feel

2008-11-10T00:07:00.001-08:00

And probably the reason why this blog is not yet up and running, I am mentally working on it though... In the meanwhile. go watch the Onion!

TRIPS

2008-10-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

Last night I spent a few hours reading Vandana Shiva`s (2001) book “Protect or Plunder? Understanding Intellectual Property Rights.” Shiva is an Indian ecological scientist and activist, and someone I greatly admire. Last year I was even so lucky to hear her speak here in Oslo, the topic was then GMO and her deep resistance. Shiva fights for ecological multitude and for the right of the poor, and in this book she illustrates the inherent unfairness of TRIPS (the agreement on trade related aspects of intellectual property rights) and the consequence it has on people, nature and knowledge.

Officially, the WTO states that ‘intellectual property rights are the rights given to people over the creations of their minds’, this argument rests on an underlying assumption that knowledge can be regarded as a commodity, that it is something that can be sold and bought in the market and that both individuals and corporations can own ideas or inventions. TRIPS is in this way based on a Western understanding of property rights, which again is deeply rooted in classic political economy and goes back to the like of Hobbes, Smith, but also Marx. A second major rationale behind TRIPS is that it is required if we want to ensure innovation and continue to produce bigger and better goods (incl. food and medicine), or in other words: progress will stop. Otherwise? Economic growth will slow down and development will be impossible. Well, according to Shiva, Western economic growth might (rightly) slow down, but development will surely be possible.

Shiva illustrates how TRIPS have given individuals and corporations alike the right to own the very blueprint of life; seeds and genes (yes! even the breast cancer gene) is patented, and she asks how can this be justified? When knowing that another of the commons, namely water, has turned into a lucrative commodity, perhaps one could argue that that the right to property has destroyed the right to life?

Secondly, one can ask if knowledge or ideas can be owned in the first place, do they rather not belong to everyone, as all knowledge is fluid and always relies on previous knowledge? And what about people who are unaware or unable to copyright or seek patents? For individuals and societies in developing countries this is very much the case, century old traditions believed to belong to everyone is suddenly “discovered” or “invented” by big corporations. Shiva calls this bio-piracy:

Multinational corporations are able to make use of this (indigenous) knowledge commercially without any way acknowledging or compensating the indigenous people from whose knowledge and resources the commercial application was developed.

Furthermore, indigenous people are in many cases forced to purchase these “new inventions” for which they no longer have any entitlements. I am in no way capable of re-representing Shiva`s arguments with such enthusiasm and vigour as she herself does, I therefore recommend that you read her work and check out her website: http://www.navdanya.org/. But let us not forget that stories, like the one of the neem tree, do give hope! (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/745028.stm)

In the name of Development

2008-10-19T07:29:00.000-07:00

I am not yet sure what form this blog will take, or which purpose it will serve, but it will be a place for me to put down thoughts, quotes, rants and analysis of Development. I have a master in international development studies, and am highly influenced by so-called post-development theory. Post-development was meant as a critique of the impasse in development studies; an impasse i am still very much lost in: my entries here might therefore at times be conflicting; building on a feeling of hopelessness and despair. Post-development made me loose faith in justice and development, and in many ways I stopped "thinking", so by starting this blog I am hoping that I will regain my thoughts, if not my beliefs. To set the scene i will open with a quote of the foremost post-development writer, Arturo Escobar:

...development can be described as an apparatus (disportif) that links forms of knowledge about the Third World with the deployment of forms of power and intervention, resulting in the mapping and production of Third World societies.