Dutch politician criticises government lies

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The following article appeared in Share International magazine. I find it interesting that a career politician sees through many of the lies which lead to war.

Interesting quotes from Jan pronk are:

"A country may be a so-called democracy but there is a power elite that can bend the facts to its will and purpose..."

"those in power have a big advantage and if they happen to be up to no good, they also have access to the military machine."

"there definitely is a process of manipulation going on, and of deliberately keeping people ignorant…. "

"“How can we trust a Prime Minister who lies about something as fundamental as the reasons for going to war?”



The impact of social injustice
Excerpts from an interview with Jan Pronk
by Eva Beaujon

Jan Pronk has had a distinguished career, both as a prominent European politician and as a senior United Nations official. He has played an important role in promoting sustainable economic and environmental development and served as the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002. In the 1980s he was Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations. He has also served as the treasurer of the Brandt Commission.
He served three terms as Dutch Minister of Development Co-operation and one term as Minister for the Environment: Prime Minister Wim Kok described him as the “minister for the national conscience”.
From mid 2004 until the end of 2006 Pronk lived in Khartoum, as the Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations in Sudan, where he led the UN peace keeping operation (UNMIS).
Jan Pronk was interviewed for Share International by Eva Beaujon.

Share International: Reports are showing that the Millennium Development Goals may not be reached by 2015. You have stated that it is precisely the success of globalization that is one of the major causes of increasing inequality between rich and poor, and the increase in the number of poor.

Jan Pronk: Increasing inequality is a fact. There are numerous indicators for this. The main problem is that globalization has gone in a direction where everything revolves around facilitating the world market. This has resulted in some profiting from that globalization, while others are disadvantaged. Inequality is growing as globalization speeds up, with some people getting richer more quickly, while others are getting poorer at a faster pace. People are increasingly marginalized. They are the very poor, the people who are continuously driven from their land to vulnerable areas, which are hardly viable ecologically, because less and less water is available due to climate change. In our own society, ‘illegal’ immigrants are not welcomed. As the scarcity of water, energy and fertile land grows, the struggle for access to those scarce resources increases, and those with a head start will appropriate the resources and keep others out – another cause of the rising inequality.
It is no longer a question of the very rich against the very poor, as was the case in the earlier stages of the capitalist process. A ‘democratization’ of capitalism has taken place so that we now have a ‘top layer’ plus the world’s broad ‘middle class’. The very wealthy and ordinary middle class are doing well. Most inhabitants of Western countries, with a few exceptions, belong to that group, so there is also a measure of responsibility for the ordinary citizen of the West who profits from that process. No one is guilty, but everyone is responsible.
What we also see is that Western social democratic parties, including my own (Dutch) Labour Party, are no longer dedicated to the welfare of the weakest members of society as they were in the past when their focus was to help the working class. The Labour Party has ‘developed’ along with the erstwhile working class, which has now become part of the middle class. They have forgotten the poor, the illegal immigrants in our countries and the poor in the rest of the world. They have also softened their previously critical attitude towards capitalism, while capitalism itself has grown in strength through globalization.

SI: The growing gap is not only taking place between countries, but within those countries – Western and developing countries alike. You were involved in trying to help resolve the conflict in Darfur. How does this gap affect a country like Sudan?

JP: Globalization has made it easy to invest around the globe: the new expanded middle class trades within its ranks throughout the world. Countries are internally divided; just as there is a wealthy class in Khartoum, in China and India, for example, there are also hundreds of millions of people in those countries who are left far behind. The Developing World is replicating what the industrialized world did to them – the wealthy of the developing world are now discriminating against their own poor compatriots.

The government of Sudan does not spend one dinar on providing safe drinking water or education for Southern Sudan or Darfur, causing a further increase in inequality. Khartoum is booming: there is oil, a lot of investment and expanding industrialization. Politically it is a dictatorial system, where potential revolt by the poor is suppressed by force. The worldwide middle classhas the means and the power and it decides how much of the national budget goes to education or healthcare, for instance, and they tend to want it to be used mostly for their benefit.

SI: One of the greatest challenges of this century is the climate. The world is warming up faster than was anticipated. We know what needs be done but implementation is very slow.

JP: Western countries are responsible for most of the CO2 in the atmosphere today, which is the cause of the rise in temperatures we are experiencing. Western countries were slow to start taking measures to combat climate change. It is important that we reach the targets agreed on in 2001 for the year 2012, otherwise, we lose credibility in our talks about the next phase with countries like China and India, that did not have to participate in the first phase. These and other countries are becoming large polluters and therefore need to participate in the next phase, but they will only do so if Western countries honour the promises they made for 2012. [The date set by the Kyoto protocol for the developed countries to have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions below the individual levels specified.]…

Jan Pronk explained that there are more situations in the world where an opponent cannot be defeated because he has his roots in the population.
He continues: You have Hamas, for instance, and Hezbollah and in Somalia, the Islamic Courts. Some groups commit human rights violations, but that is largely due to the conflict becoming increasingly violent. Ignoring them will make them more violent, making it harder to talk to them. And it will become harder to justify it to your own population, because of the violations of human rights they are committing.

Secondly, because these groups are not succeeding politically, the population in these countries turns away from them and chooses more radical, extreme positions: from PLO to Hamas, from Hamas to a more violent wing of Hamas, and from Hamas to Islamic Jihad. You get increasingly farther away from your objective – lasting peace. By excluding your opponent – you turned him into an opponent yourself – you are contributing to the continuation of the conflict and more victims. At some point, you will have to invite that opponent to the table.
I am all for peace troops and peace interventions for the protection of civilians, but it must be with the approval of the entire Security Council or with the approval of all parties concerned. Unilateral intervention, as happened in Iraq, only leads to more violence and war. Intervention disguised as peacekeeping, like in Afghanistan, is to the detriment of all in Afghanistan.

SI: What about the risk of these and other conflicts spreading?

JP: This happens because people elsewhere give explicit support to one side in the conflict, because they don’t trust the international community, the US and the UN. Some factions use that distrust as a pretext not to have to solve their own conflict.

Another factor is that a number of conflicts are inherently ‘trans-national’, that is to say, they are not contained within national borders; they are ethnic, tribal, political, cultural or religious in origin. The conflict directly impacts communities in other parts of the world, thereby extending even further. This explains why terrorist activities move to other parts of the globe.

Before the Iraq invasion, Jan Pronk spoke out and demonstrated against this war many times and warned that it would be a catastrophe. He believes it is essential that there be a parliamentary inquiry into the reasons the Dutch government chose to take part in the coalition. In an interview in a Dutch newspaper in September 2007 he said: “How can we trust a Prime Minister who lies about something as fundamental as the reasons for going to war?” and “The inquiry is not just for the purpose of looking back. I am worried about the threat of a war with Iran. And what will the Netherlands do then?”

SI: How could this have happened so easily?

JP: A country may be a so-called democracy but there is a power elite that can bend the facts to its will and purpose, can manipulate information and can present its own goals in a perfectly acceptable guise. You are selling something to your own population. That was very clearly the case with Iraq. Later, the same lies were sold to the international community. The invasion of Iraq was based on lies, American official lies. You ask how this could happen. Maybe there were certain vested interests in the US that did not want to correctly inform the President and vice-President. But as President and vice-President, you are also responsible for not being well informed – that is how democracy works. Other countries that support America, and continue accepting the same arguments and peddling them to their own people, share the responsibility for a breach of the international legal order.

Mr Pronk went on to outline what could be done to counter such situations.

JP: Strengthening the democratic process is of the utmost importance. You do it by aiming for as much openness, opposition and counter-intelligence as possible. Individual citizens must constantly be alert. You need a free press. There have to be political parties that can take over; that means leadership that leaves after a few years, so that you get another government. Let us hope it happens in the US. It was somewhat the case in England. The problem is that it doesn’t automatically mean that there will be new and different policies. In the Netherlands, for example, a new government did not mean that an investigation into the war in Iraq was allowed to take place.

It goes on and on: governments have a lot of power to manipulate people’s opinions, through the media and information processes. That worries me. There is more and more money for these purposes.
On the other hand, fortunately, you have the globalization of information through the internet as well as the increasing general level of education. Nevertheless, those in power have a big advantage and if they happen to be up to no good, they also have access to the military machine.

SI: Does the media play a part in keeping the lie going, especially if they are very commercialized?

PR: Yes, and in the US the media are totally commercialised. You have certain independent public media which are interesting, like C-SPAN, but there aren’t many of them and viewer numbers are small. It is a very dangerous development when the general means of conveying cultureare dominated by one value system. Naturally, it virtually guarantees the chances of the lies remaining intact.

Let’s consider education. Changes in the education system in recent decades in most Western countries have led to education for the job market. Courses are shorter, and more job-oriented, including at university level and a lot of education is financed by business. So, yet another means of conveying culture becomes vulnerable and is under threat. Of course, people can found other universities and students can protest. All that is possible, because there is freedom, but it happens infrequently and on a small scale. Alternatively, it can lead to a sudden uprising. That is the case when people don’t feel respected by society. Take, for example, groups on the margins of society economically, like the people in the banlieus (suburbs of social housing) in France. What you get is a violent uprising coming from another value system and not being understood by the ruling middle class who subsequently suppress such uprising with force.

I don’t want to paint too black and white a picture, but there definitely is a process of manipulation going on, and of deliberately keeping people ignorant…. [End of excerpt]

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