Death etc. by Harold Pinter

Author:Harold Pinter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PRIME MINISTER

Dear Prime Minister,

We have been reminded often over the last few weeks of Saddam Hussein’s appalling record in the field of human rights. It is indeed appalling: brutal, pathological. But I thought you might be interested to scrutinize the record of your ally, the United States, in a somewhat wider context. I am not at all certain that your advisors will have kept you fully informed.

The United States has supported, subsidized, and, in a number of cases, engendered every right-wing military dictatorship in the world since 1945. I refer to Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile, Greece, Uruguay, the Philippines, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, and El Salvador, for example. Hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered by these regimes, but the money, the resources, the equipment (all kinds), the advice, the moral support, as it were, has come from successive U.S. administrations.

The deaths really do mount up: 170,000 in Guatemala, 200,000 in East Timor, 80,000 in El Salvador, 30,000 in Nicaragua, 500,000 in Indonesia—and that’s just to be going on with. They are, every single one of them, attributable to your ally’s foreign policy.

The devastation the United States inflicted upon Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the use of napalm and Agent Orange, and the employment of new bombs which sprayed darts inside people’s bodies and finally wrenched their guts out was a remorseless, savage, systematic course of destruction, which, however, failed to destroy the spirit of the Vietnamese people. When the United States was defeated, it at once set out to starve the country by way of trade embargo.

The United States invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1990, and destabilized and brought down the democratically elected governments of Guatemala, Chile, Greece, and Haiti—all acts entirely outside the parameters of international law.

It has given and still gives total support to the Turkish government’s campaign of genocide against the Kurdish people. It describes the Kurdish resistance forces in Turkey as “terrorists” whereas it referred to its own vicious Contra force in Nicaragua as “freedom fighters.” Its “covert” action against Nicaragua was declared by the International Court of Justice in The Hague to be in clear breach of international law.

Over the last five years the UN has passed five resolutions with overwhelming majorities demanding that the United States stop its embargo on Cuba. The United States has ignored all of them. All UN resolutions criticizing Israel have been ignored, not only by Israel but also by the United States, which turns a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear capability and shrugs off Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.

The United States possesses of course quite a handy nuclear capability itself. I would say it outstrips Saddam’s ability to kill “every man, woman, and child on earth” by quite a few miles. If that wasn’t enough, it also has substantial chemical arsenals and has recently rejected two UN inspectors, one Cuban and one Iranian. It also reserves the right to deny access to certain “national security” zones. They

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