Americanization
of Globalization: Reflections of a Third World
Intellectual
By Lisette Poole
As long as the West continues
to put profits over people, siphoning precious
resources and trampling the rights and sovereignty
of nations along the way, the world will witness
more resentment, rage, violence and paranoia.
The solution is a burgeoning people-to-people
movement that will lift nations out of misery
into economic self-reliance, peace, cooperating
and regional development, said Abid Hassan Minto,
a noted Third World intellectual.
Minto, 74, who teamed up with former President
of South Africa Nelson Mandela, when they were
respectively elected vice president and president
of the International Lawyers’ Association
(1990-1995), said the world is caught up in a
vicious circle: American hegemony is leading to
militant resistance and has set the Muslim world
on a collision course with the West. Billions
spent on military expansion rightfully belong
to people for the development of schools, hospitals,
roads, bridges etc.
In a wide-ranging, exclusive, interview, he pointed
out rapidly multiplying dangers and offered an
alternative to the current militancy.
“The United States is advancing its corporate
interests all over the world. The grand design
is to maintain itself as the sole, unchallenged,
power in the world,” Minto said. “Over
the past two decades the US went into Latin America,
it went after Venezuela, it toppled governments,
installed its own stooges. What did it want? Resources!
Now it claims it is going after so-called Muslim
fundamentalists. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein
was not a fundamentalist. Yet they sent their
troops, invaded a sovereign nation, and the whole
world knows it is about oil!
“People everywhere must rise up against
corporate globalization that allows development
to occur in one part of the world using the resources
of the rest of the world,” he said during
a visit to the San Francisco Bay area. “The
West has failed to solve problems on the ground,
political ones such as the 50-year old conflicts
in Palestine and Kashmir as well as developmental
problems such as the lack of technology transfer
between the rich and poor nations. The result
is disillusionment and anger.”
“Why is it a surprise that people are challenging
the authority of the US to do what it is doing?”
Minto asked. “At the moment fundamentalists
all over the world are after the US hegemony.
That is their main issue. For sure, one deplores
their methods. But they do have a plausible argument:
their countries, their nations, their people,
are suffering on account of what they see is the
US hegemony around the world. The proof is that
it is mostly the countries that have sided with
the US – Spain and England – that
are the victims of terrorism, not others. The
same is true for Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
“The continuing military and corporate expansion
of the United States invites militancy. And it
so happens at the moment that the militants are
Muslims.”
“What is the solution?” Minto believes
the world community, especially the American people,
must strive to uphold international law and sovereign
equality among nations as well as to promote regional
cooperation for economic development and conflict
resolution. He was essentially referring to the
growing demand for a set of rules and procedures
commonly labeled as the ‘Universal Jurisdiction”
of the International Criminal Court (ICC) which
would criminalize military adventurism by any
state.
He welcomed the political rapprochement between
India and Pakistan as an indication that change
is occurring at the grassroots level, and said
the recent announcement for a gas pipeline from
Iran through Pakistan to India, over the objections
of the US, should be extended to China. “Why
not go all the way. We can increase regional development
while helping avert a showdown between China and
the US over resources,” he said. “It
will lead to peace and stability in the Asian
subcontinent.”
“The establishment of a Palestinian state
and the withdrawal of 150,000 US troops from Iraq
would deflate the raging anger around the Muslim
world and allow the people of Middle East region
also to run their own affairs in peace,”
he said.
“There was a time when the entire Pakistani
nation had one single point of view with regard
to India: India was the enemy. It is five times
larger than Pakistan, it has weapons and we have
to defend ourselves. Security was to be built
and the only way to build it was to support the
armed forces. We were victims of this. The armed
forces were built at the cost of democratic institutions…these
are our experiences of how a state creates a paranoia
mindset for its people.
“Fortunately, people in Pakistan have started
changing their mindsets, as indicated by their
desire to befriend India on all levels. That is
a good sign. That is where we pin our hopes for
a new movement,” he said. “It is already
happening by the force of circumstance. There
is political consciousness. Millions around the
world took to the streets [in 2003] to protest
the US invasion of Iraq.
Terrorism will stop when use of brute force will
be replaced by rules, procedures, negotiations,
mutual-accommodation, and resource-sharing, Minto
said.
He foresees growing movement as part of the World
Social Forum, and recalls the 1960s when the non-aligned
movement championed by India, Egypt and Indonesia,
provided an effective bulwark against neocolonial
onslaught.
“We must find an alternate way. We must
fight poverty and hunger… There are immense
resources available to the developed countries,
technological developments, they have the economies
of the world in their hands, let us now decide
how to use these democratically for the benefit
of the entire humanity, rather than corporations.
Not doing that is neo-colonialism.”
Reflecting on his third visit to the United States,
Minto, a professor of constitutional law in Pakistan,
criticized the US for betraying its ideals of
democracy and asked: “How can governments
around the world implement democratic reforms
when the very notions of free speech and due process
are being denied in America, the role model?
“The world is not receptive to the US image
of democracy, not at all! There is growing disillusionment
with the US. In Pakistan and other countries of
the East and Third World we admire that original
civilization that preached democracy but we are
dismayed with the PATRIOT ACT, torturing of prisoners
at the Guantanamo Bay and Abu-Gharib, and profiling
of religious and ethnic minorities.
“People have come to realize that the democratic
society within the US is also shrinking to suit
the interest of those who constitute the establishment,
including corporate America.
“Voices are being raised against this but
I think that voices have to be raised in a more
organized fashion, not only by the immigrants
or Muslims alone but also by the mainstream.
“The shrinking civic space in the US is
actually demolishing the image of democracy outside
and causing disillusionment of its own people,”
he said. Minto offered to defend Lynne F. Stewart,
the civil rights attorney who faces up to 30 years
in prison on charges of supporting terrorist activity
by smuggling messages from her imprisoned client,
Sheik Abdel Rahman, to his followers. She is to
be sentenced in September.
(Lisette B. Poole, a freelance writer in the San
Francisco Bay area, also lectures at CSUEB, Hayward.
Photos and article are copyrighted)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
