Any country would have suffered from such a terrible earthquake. Even in Australia people would have died; however, it is unlikely that the death toll would have been anywhere near that of 12 January. Many journalists have implied that Haiti had failed to rise up to the challenge of modernity as, for example, their Dominican neighbours had. This argument tends to make us feel better as it reinforces a common underlying racism as to the impossibility of ‘blacks’ ever being able to free themselves from poverty and civil war.

But as many cases around the world have shown, it is not lack of skills, lack of democratic spirit or any absence of a wish for a just society that has led to many third world countries remaining for decades on the brink of extreme poverty. It is not, as French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in ‘historico-political consideration’ of the ‘African man’, that the Haitians have not ‘entered history enough’, that their ‘mindset does not leave space for human adventure or for the idea of progress’.

Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other third world countries have strived for real emancipatory freedom, starting with freedom from their colonial past and present. If many have failed, their human skills cannot be blamed. Amazing emancipatory movements and leaders have risen throughout the history of such countries. People such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Mkwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba and, more recently, Jean-Bertrand Aristide have all fought and suffered alongside the poor to bring an end to centuries of exploitation. These democratic movements were not marginal, and despite the bloody repression exercised by dictatorial puppets serving powerful Western interests, a vast majority of people supported them. At times, their struggle seemed almost successful, and none more than the Haitian case.

By the end of the 18th century, Haiti was the world’s most profitable colony, generating revenues higher than the thirteen North American colonies put together. After the French Revolution, Haitian slaves organised a revolt and for over a decade fought the French, the British and Spanish, with tens of thousands of European soldiers losing their lives in battle. In 1804, Haiti became the second independent country in the Americas and the site of the first successful slave revolt of all time. Most importantly, Haiti represented the only complete emancipatory revolution. For the first time, human rights were applied to all, without distinction. This victory was a symbolic blow to white supremacy and it was soon clear that Haiti would pay dearly for such a universal claim of equality. So as not to let Haiti become an example, colonial powers made sure the small war-ravaged country would never be seen for what it truly was: a beacon of freedom for all the oppressed peoples of the earth.

Anticipating further assaults from colonial powers, Haiti devoted most of its resources to the building of fortresses, preventing in turn the reconstruction of the country. The nation was further crippled by economic retaliation; it was not until 1825 that France agreed to acknowledge Haiti’s independence and renew commercial ties, but only once Haiti had agreed to reimburse the French for stolen property. The Haitians had stolen slaves; that is, they had stolen themselves—their freedom had become a mere commodity. The bill came to 150 million francs, roughly the annual budget of France at the time. While France agreed to reduce it to 90 million, the interest on the debt and on the loans contracted in Europe used up most of the Haitian budget until the last repayment in 1947. It has been estimated that today the French owe Haiti up to $US21 billion dollars. In the meantime, Haiti was invaded. In 1915, and for over twenty years, the United States installed a deregulated economy and strengthened the power of the military; publicly, they ‘democratised’ the country. Officially, 99.2 per cent of the Haitian population welcomed the occupation; when the United States left, up to 30,000 Haitians had lost their lives.

After the 1937 exit, Haitian army generals staged a series of coups until François Duvalier (‘Papa Doc’) took power and installed an extremely violent, anti-communist regime with the tacit support of the United States. His son took over in 1971, receiving increasingly fervent support from the United States for his deregulation of the economy. ‘Baby Doc’ became yet another caricature of a puppet dictator, accumulating for his country a massive debt whilst amassing an immense personal fortune. The violence of the new regime eventually provoked its fall as the people rose once more to fight for their freedom. Duvalier was forced into exile in 1986, retiring comfortably to the French Riviera.

As the generals were not able to quash the popular movement, elections were organised in 1990. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a priest who had dedicated his life to empowering the poor majority, was elected in the first round by 67 per cent of the vote. In a powerful and symbolic action, his government demobilised the army and conducted a series of progressive reforms. However, only seven months into his presidency, Aristide was ousted by former military generals, supported by the elite and partly financed by the CIA. Protests against the coup were quashed and hundreds, if not thousands, of Aristide’s supporters were hunted down and killed. Yet, the people stood with Aristide and even encouraged the US embargo. George Bush Senior showed his support in favour of the coup when he lifted the embargo (allowing important income to flow into the hands of the rebels) and forcibly sent Haitian refugees back to their country. The Clinton administration eventually reinstated Aristide, only at the price of painful and unjust concessions: amongst others, the coup perpetrators were given amnesties and offered key positions in government. Aristide’s reluctance was described by the United States as intractable and rigid: the elected President began to be portrayed as a proto-dictator.

However, it was clear that Aristide’s popularity could not be diminished; in the 2000 elections, judged legitimate by the United Nations, the priest was re-elected by over 90 per cent of the vote. ‘Proper democracy’ was therefore imposed by international bodies. Notably, the IMF imposed drastic deregulatory measures on Haiti. Aristide had no choice but to accept most, as 70 per cent of his country’s operating budget came from international aid. As the result of decades of deregulation, Haiti was no longer self-sufficient in rice and sugar and imported most of these ‘commodities’ from subsidised US farmers. According to Oxfam, Haiti had become ‘one of the most liberal trade regimes in the world’. Aristide did make some headway despite his powerful adversaries and the health and education systems were improved. In 2003, the United States decided to cut their aid to Haiti after the elite declared Aristide to have become too dictatorial. As the President was forced to make further concessions, the ultra-minority opposition demanded more. Their military wings organised violent attacks which eventually led to a UN ‘intervention’ headed by France and the United States. Aristide was ousted for the second time and exiled against his will. The UN declared that Aristide’s withdrawal would help create ‘a peaceful, democratic and locally owned future’.

Just before the 2008 hurricanes and the earthquake, the situation in Haiti was critical. The IMF reported that 55 per cent of the population lived on 44 US cents a day. One in twenty Haitians was HIV positive. Child mortality was four times higher than in Latin America or the rest of the Caribbean and more than a third of the population did not have access to safe drinking water. The media compounded this gloomy vision of Haiti as a failed country. It exploited our deepest neo-colonialist feelings and our darkest sense of white superiority, which makes us the patronising saviours of a doomed third world. Yet, as history has shown, Haitians fought many times over two centuries for a brighter future, not only for themselves, but for all those who were oppressed. They succeeded many times in overcoming the most inhumane conditions imposed upon them by the most powerful in this world. If help is necessary at this stage, what Haiti truly needs is to be free. As important players in this exploitative system, Haiti’s lack of this basic human right is partly our responsibility. To think that our money will bring anything more than temporary (albeit much needed) relief entirely misses the point.

Author bio: Aurélien Mondon is completing a PhD in Political Science at La Trobe University. His research focuses on populism, racism, nationalism and the idea of equality. He is also part of the Melbourne Free University project, which starts in May 2010. For more information visit <www.melbournefreeuniversity.org>.

But is it correct to say that colonialism, which for centuries brutalised native populations of North and South America, Africa, Asia and even parts of Europe, is completely dead and buried?

In 1969, violating terms established under its UN mandate for administering West Papua, Indonesia conducted an ‘act of free choice’, widely regarded to have been a fraudulent exercise in lieu of a plebiscite. From Indonesia’s 1963 assumption of administrative authority in West Papua, Papuans have suffered rampant brutality at the hands of security forces; they have seen their vast natural resources expropriated, often with devastating environmental consequences, and have suffered displacement and marginalisation as the Indonesian government shipped over a million ‘transmigrants’ to West Papua from the archipelago’s many over-crowded islands.

For three decades this brutal occupation proceeded under the direction of Suharto, one of the 20th century’s most brutal dictators. His 1965–67 ‘transition’ to power, following the ousting of the elected nationalist Sukarno, entailed the murder of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians. In 1975 Suharto’s military invaded East Timor. The twenty-four-year occupation of that tiny half island led to the deaths of an estimated 200,000 Timorese. In addition to this well recognised history, Suharto’s brutality also extended to West Papua, where scores of thousands of Papuans are believe to have fallen victim to his marauding military. Suharto’s tragic legacy in West Papua is not widely appreciated in the international community.

Throughout his long, bloody rule, Suharto was abetted and enabled by the United States and its allies, who saw in Suharto a bastion against the communist ties in Asia. But there was, for the United States, another reason to turn a blind eye to Suharto’s crimes. US firms, notably in the extraction industries, enjoyed easy access to the natural riches of the Indonesian archipelago. Among the largest of these, and one of the earliest to gain access to Suharto’s Indonesia, was PT Freeport McMoran, which in 1967 established what was to become the largest copper and gold mine in the world. It became Indonesia’s largest foreign taxpayer. In addition, it proved to be an easy touch for cash that flowed to the Indonesian military, nominally in payment for security services. Freeport and other US firms which prospered under Suharto’s rule acted in the early 1990s to blunt growing press, public and Congressional concern about the Suharto regime’s excesses. It created the United States Indonesia Society (USINDO), which became a de facto, very well-financed lobby for the regime and its brutal military in Washington.

But notwithstanding its close ties to the Suharto regime and subsequent Indonesian administrations, Freeport has had a rocky relationship with the military and, more recently, with the police. The key irritant in Freeport–security force relations has been money. In 1996 the military secretly organised a violent demonstration at Freeport’s headquarters in Tembagapura and in the support town of Timika. A senior Freeport executive at the time told a US Embassy officer (the author) that the dispute was over whether Freeport would fund the establishment of a battalion base for Kopassus, Indonesia’s infamous ‘special forces’. Following the incidents the funding flowed.

In 2002 a Freeport reduction in funds, paid to the Indonesian military for security services, preceded an attack on Freeport employees travelling on the Tembagapura–Timika road, which then as now was tightly guarded by the military. The one person indicted by a US court for the attack, which took the lives of two Americans and one Indonesian, had long ties to the military. Nevertheless, in what many international observers believe to have been a travesty of justice, the Indonesian court convicted only Papuans whom it alleged had ties to the small and very lightly armed Papuan resistance (OPM). Neither the Indonesian court nor the US Federal Bureau of Investigation were willing to pursue the many leads that pointed to an Indonesian military role. Even the Indonesian police investigation, which indicated both a role and the existence of a motive in the form of Freeport’s reduction of funding for the military, was ignored and the investigation was taken over by the military.

In mid July another spate of violence erupted in the Freeport domain as unidentified gunmen shot and killed an Australian on the tightly guarded Tembagapura–Timika road. Subsequent attacks at or near the same site took the lives of three more in the following days. While senior military personnel, as in 2002, immediately blamed the shootings on the Papuan resistance, the senior police official in West Papua said he saw no evidence of their involvement. As in 2002, information developed by the Indonesian police, including ballistics evidence, pointed to the role of Indonesian security forces. As in 2002, however, the military is now entering the investigation and its role in the investigation may preclude development of evidentiary leads suggesting a military role. Statements by senior Indonesian military officers assigning blame for the shootings to the small Papuan armed resistance, despite a lack of evidence, suggest that, as in the past, a military investigation will be prejudiced.

Again, as in 2002, disputes over money and rivalry among the various security actors at Freeport form the backdrop for understanding the violence. Under current arrangements, Freeport funding for security flows to the military through the police. Various sources indicate the military is not happy with this relationship. Also, over the years, local civilians have worked tailings from the Freeport mining operation to extract remnant gold and copper. Sources in Timika report that the militarised police, ‘BRIMOB’, control this lucrative, illegal trade. Freeport has enlisted the help of both police and military security forces to curb this trade. Finally, Kopassus continue to play a strong role in West Papua. Their brutal treatment of Papuan civilians and impunity were detailed in a June 21 Human Rights Watch report. Sources in West Papua note that there is tension within Kopassus between those who support the former Kopassus commander General Prabowo and those who do not.

A defining characteristic of colonialism is the exploitation and brutalisation of a people by non-native forces in collusion with similarly non-native monied interests. Invariably, this collusion persists with impunity and notwithstanding tortured appeals by the colonised people for redress. In recent years Papuans have directed such appeals to Jakarta and to the international community, pleading for an internationally facilitated dialogue between the Indonesian government and Papuans to address decades of abusive policies and marginalisation targeting Papuans. Only through such a dialogue can the fundamentally colonial relationship between Jakarta and West Papua be addressed.

Just as the reporters in our daily press can’t get their heads around Germaine Greer’s argument that the collapse of culture means the bleakest kind of personal and social devastation, so morally serious discussion of any issue is extremely hard to find in Australian public discourse. John Martin ponders this great lack in the Australian psyche in the first essay in this issue of Arena Magazine in relation to Aboriginal connection to country. The national unwillingness to enter into other worlds, to feel and see them from the inside, has particularly Australian determinants. But history and geography grant us leave of our better senses. Martin says that Australians have no taste for tragedy, which is a shocking indictment.

In fact we settle for received views of the world and accept inferior status, notwithstanding our occasional anti- Americanism and on-tap nationalism. But as an outpost of what Empire exactly are we the wide-eyed underling?

Empires everywhere, it seems, are on the move again. It may not be wise to disavow for much longer knowledge of how that big old world works. Georgia and Iran may be much closer than we think. And it’s probably not a good idea to make slant-eye jokes about our northern neighbour. This is not to even raise the morally serious questions of the fate of peoples beyond our ken, how they perceive the world, or against what claims or threats they pose their own, but merely to suggest that it may also be in our interest to ask such questions.

Of course there is a complication here. There are questions to ask of and about empires other than the one we find ourselves in, as well as such questions about the peoples hidden from view within them (the Chinese, on the one hand, and the colonised peoples of Tibet and Uighur, on the other). Empire by its nature hides difference from the outside world, even if it doesn’t always kill it. In fact some empires have been known to let flourish a great variety of cultures, even for long periods of time, and this has to remain a possible intermediate goal in some situations given geopolitical realpolitik, where the stakes can be very high indeed in ethnic/cultural and humanitarian terms.

A central problem in all this is that the modern colonising attitude, inextricably guided by hubristic notions of progress and supremacist nationalism, underwrites the fate of minorities as primitive peoples who must be advanced. This is the same problem whether you are a supremacist American (Australian), Chinese or Russian. Despite our cultural differences, we all have in common a modernity of assumptions, and it is these, first and foremost, that are dangerous and need first and foremost to be challenged.

Superpower, or imperial, power plays come a close second in terms of danger, and actually come first if we expand our concerns away from oppressed minorities to the flow-on effects for entire regions and globally. Strategic destabilisation has long been an American art form, and it is clear in the cases of both Tibet and Georgia that American hands are not clean. Unless of course, you simply believe in the liberal democratic mission of the United States to bring democracy into dark places; and you have the kind of mind that does not baulk at the colossal dissonance of arguments for sovereignty in some places (Georgia — Bush denounces Russian denial of Georgian sovereignty) and not in others (Iraq — sovereignty is relative).

There is no doubt that Russian Empire is on the move. Who can doubt its own historical inclination to empire, and to brutal repression under Putin (think of Grozny); but who, too, could doubt that American meddling in Georgia and elsewhere within the old Soviet sphere of influence has not pushed Russia into action, as premeditated as it seems likely to have been. With Georgia launching its offensive against South Ossetia while Putin was in Beijing, and a visit by Condoleezza Rice to Tbilisi only days before fighting began, we have to understand that not only friendship between ‘like democracies’ has been a factor in US aid to Tbilisi, but that a set of more broad-ranging plans are also in action. Interestingly, the intervention, and Russian counter, has had fabulous consequences for American influence in Poland and Slovakia, with Poland finally signing up — days after the Russian retort — to have US ‘missile defences’, which is to say forward missile launching pads, erected on its soil. Ostensibly for the protection of Europe against Iranian missiles, the Polish government has now made it conditional that the missiles face Russia — which is what the Russians of course believed their primary purpose to be all along.

Humiliation at the hands of the West is, interestingly, cited as motive for both Chinese and Russian muscle-flexing in the present period. Historical precedents suggest the dangers of national humiliation for international affairs (and minority peoples), but the circumstances today are hardly comparable with anything in the past. How ordinary Chinese people interviewed for Olympics coverage stated again and again that this was China’s chance to overcome a hundred years of humiliation suggests a successful campaign to heighten grossly nationalistic (not patriotic) feeling. There is a population there willing to die for its (media-generated?) imagined community. In the Russian context, the same refrain seems a slim cover for its more immediate need to bolster its borders against an encircling NATO (now with missiles facing Moscow) and to ensure control of the carriage of energy resources, the basis of Russia’s growing hold over Europe and desire to keep links to the Middle East open. (Consult a map to see just how close these protagonists are to vital oil, gas and shipping routes, and the Middle East generally.)

As the empires face off, the primary concern is energy: for access to it for production and more generally ‘growth’; for the power and dollars associated with its sale and transmission; for the commodities to which it is dedicated. Russia is resource rich, and may be even more so as the polar ice thaws; China is a powerhouse of production for an envious world’s insatiable consumption without adequate power sources of its own; American empire is increasingly desperate, a shadow of its former self, but nevertheless with plenty to lose and everything to gain in securing oil through the tutelage of client states, whose people believe they will receive democracy in return for the dangerous game of aligning themselves with Western freedom. It is hard to imagine a more ominous conjunction of competing pretensions and imperatives.

It is not long into the fabled ‘American century’ and it is already collapsing. Guy Rundle argues in this issue of Arena Magazine that American culture has been emptied out into ersatz forms of media-driven community. John Hinkson charts a second stage in America’s sub-prime crisis in the context of the US scramble to secure its economic future. As economic and geopolitical pressures build, the question of what this dangerous situation might all be for hardly emerges. For the American way, some have said, for the moral compass provided by free-acting markets and their agents; but in fact the strongest element in this depressing scenario is a common interest shared by these competing empires.

Which Empire? There are three superstates with (neo-) colonial pretensions, emerging or receding, on the world scene; but in a more general sense, Empire refers to a government of feeling; an exercise of power over actions and desire. Through repression or seduction these superpowers are intent on producing or maintaining a way of life built on unsustainable economic and environmental assumptions, and on universalising cultural mores associated with the spread of a contagious form of hightech capitalism. None of the elements add up, unless, perhaps, you are master of the ultimate chess game. For ordinary people the struggle and strategy will have to take a different form, and surely a rejection of the basic assumptions that give Empire, in the broader sense, legitimacy: a rejection of our collective kowtowing to a mysterious power that explodes the particulars of community and denies more subterranean channels of cultural identity and social meaning.

Alison Caddick