I believe Desmond Tutu to be a decent person. Unfortunately, having a good heart isn’t enough to prevent somebody from supporting terrible things. As Malcolm X put it, “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” To the newspapers Malcom X mentioned, we should add NGOs who are embedded in the western establishment.
In 1987, Desmond Tutu was asked what Ronald Reagan should do about apartheid South Africa. Tutu’s response was “Do what you are doing in Nicaragua.” I recall seeing Tutu saying this during televised discussions at the time; otherwise I’d assume his position had been badly distorted. Unfortunately, it was not.
Did Tutu really want the US government to organize and fund terrorists to kill tens of thousands of innocent people in South Africa? Of course not, but that is exactly what the Reagan government was doing in Nicaragua. There is no way any decent person who was aware of the facts could say to the Reagan administration “Do what you are doing in Nicaragua.”
Reagan’s terrorism against Nicaragua killed 30,000 people and was so flagrant that in 1986, a year before Tutu’s comment, the World Court ruled that the CIA’s mining of Nicaragua’s harbors was an unlawful use of force – a legalistic way of saying international terrorism. The court weaseled out of concluding exactly the same thing about US support for atrocities perpetrated by the Contras. The court ruled that the USA’s material support for the Contras was also illegal (unlawful interference in the internal affairs of another state) but not an unlawful use of force by the USA because, the judges argued, it was not clear enough that the Contras were completely controlled by the US government. Laying mines in Nicaragua’s territorial waters, however, was too obvious an act of direct US government criminality for the court to minimize. The Reaganites laughed off the court’s ruling, including its order that the US pay Nicaragua reparations.
During the 1980s, Tutu had obviously swallowed a line on Nicaragua fed to him by very misinformed or malicious people, or, what amounts to the same thing, formed a view based on what he gleaned from the western media’s coverage.
Decades later, he has done the same thing regarding Venezuela.
In an op-ed in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Tutu equated Leopoldo Lopez, a jailed Venezuelan opposition leader, to Martin Luther King and the Venezuelan government under Nicoalas Maduro to apartheid South Africa. Tutu said that Maduro’s government acted with “impunity” against “non-violent protests” thanks to the “deafening silence and inaction of its neighbors”.
Tutu’s remarks are colossally ignorant. Leopoldo Lopez participated in a briefly successful US-backed coup against the Venezuelan government in 2002. He never served any time in jail for his role in it. Lopez led the kidnaping of a government minister while the coup was successful. Comparing Lopez to Martin Luther King, who did not perpetrate coups or kidnap anyone, is totally absurd. The “non-violent” protests Tutu refers to left several police officers dead. Motorists were also killed in what amounted to death traps erected in the streets by protesters. Some government supporters who attempted to clear away the death traps were murdered by snipers. Roughly half the 43 deaths Tutu refers to in his op-ed strongly implicate violent protesters. Venezuela’s regional neighbors, in particular the Union of South American Countries (UNASUR) have not been “silent and inactive”. They have, for excellent reasons, simply rejected the version of events that Tutu has accepted – a version that renders the victims of opposition violence completely invisible.
A few days after Tutu’s op-ed appeared in El Pais, Venezuelan campesino leader Roberto Carrera was shot dead. Wealthy anti-government landowners opposed to land reform are the main suspects in the assassination of hundreds of rural activists like Carrera since 2001. These deaths have been blacked out by the international media.
Lucas Koener, commenting on Tutu’s op-ed, reminds us that it wasn’t just Venezuela’s Latin American neighbors who rejected Obama’s insanely belligerent executive order that said Venezuela posed an “extraordinary threat” to the “national security” of the USA. It was also rejected by the Non-Aligned Movement and the G77 plus China.
Latin America is not nearly as vulnerable to US aggression today as it was in the days of Reagan’s terrorist campaign against Nicaragua. However, US backed coups in 2002 (Venezuela), 2004 (Haiti) and 2009 (Honduras) illustrate that US imperialism has hardly become a paper tiger. To sneer, as Tutu did in his op-ed, at the concept of “national sovereignty” betrays an inexcusable disregard for the main protection weak states have against the strong – the ones who actually carry out the largest scale violations of human rights.
And why, in 2013, would Desmond Tutu have teamed up with a reprehensible NGO like UN Watch to attack Cuba? UN Watch (and their “proud partners” the American Jewish Congress) said the Gaza flotilla activists who were murdered by Israeli commandos in 2010 were part of a “terror flotilla”.
The petition Tutu signed, which was presented to the UN Human Rights Council by UN Watch, called for an international investigation of the death of a Cuban dissident, Oswaldo Paya, who died in a car crash. The petition claimed the death was “suspicious” based on the claims of a right wing Spanish politician who drove the car involved in the accident. Imagine what kind of investigation a group like UN Watch would consider “independent”.
The basis for declaring Paya’s death is to be “suspicious” appears extremely thin. If Desmond Tutu investigated the case thoroughly and concluded otherwise then why would he not raise the issue independently rather than stand with vulgar apologists for Israeli apartheid? Before criticizing any government he should do his homework, but it is striking that he was so reckless with Cuba. Has Tutu already forgotten the major contributions Cuba made to ending apartheid in South Africa?
Hopefully, Desmond Tutu will start researching much more thoroughly before commenting on Latin America.
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3 Comments
In spite of a couple typos (and this is always a frustration!), what Joe has added is so critically important and it is what can make so important trying to understand not just “issues” but events that have great impact on the people involved.
I meet people frequently who mix up, for example, Nicaragua with other Central American countries and draw conclusions and carry around beliefs that are not based on fact, or otherwise misunderstand or don’t know something about another country and yet take the word of another, even well-known person who is equally not informed on something vitally important.
Modern communication is important to all of this, it can inform and profoundly and quickly misinform. It makes responsibility for writing and having opinions more challenging.
Often in the even recent past, we knew little about other countries until some writer wrote a powerful tome about it years later (still often the case). Today we hear about things this week and the filters that intervene in what we read, perceive, believe, and sometimes act upon have great consequences.
A friend of mine, Jeb Sprague, after seeing the piece, pointed out some other stuff to me that I didn’t know but should have. Tutu totally swallowed and propagated the US government line on Haiti after the 2004 coup that US troops perpetrated.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/03_march/03/tutu.shtml
From the BBC article:
Archbishop Desmond Tutu today urged the South African Government to think twice before accepting ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide if he claimed political asylum there.
Talking to the BBC World Service The World Today programme, Archbishop Tutu said: “I would have hoped that he had gone anywhere but South Africa.
“But if it is a case of us preventing him from being killed I suppose that it is okay, but if there are charges that he should face, I think he should face those charges, if there is a guarantee that he would have safe passage and a proper trial. It’s unlikely.
“However each of us has the capacity to become a saint, even the worst dictator.”
****
Aristide was the democratically elected president of Haiti who had just overthrown by US troops. There were no “charges”against Aristide, Another example of appalling ignorance from Tutu.
Then Tutu visited Haiti while it was under the Latortue dictatorship!
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/port-au-prince-haiti-haitian-interim-president-boniface-news-photo/56831767
This article and situation brings up a subject I have thought about for a long time. I have spent many years attempting to understand Latin America. My undergraduate work was in the area and then I have spent much of a lifetime continuing my reading, studies, conversations, and have been lived and taught in Latin America for many years.
You’d think I knew something, and yet, the more I know, often the more difficult it is to know enough details and to understand all that needs to be understood. It is an immense task. It really does humble me. I might add that I speak Spanish, too, and this does make a difference.
So easy to have opinions, to make statements, to speak with even a modicum of knowledge and sound knowledgeable. What a trap and here even Desmond Tutu as stepped into it, and not just once. This must be remembered.