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Water not war

 

 

Peter Tatchell guardian.co.uk, Thursday January 3 2008

More than 1 billion people on our planet are forced to drink foul,

 

infected water, which has killed at least 22 million people in the last decade.

 

They could all have safe, clean water within 10 years, for just a tiny fraction

 

of the cost of global military spending. Why isn't it happening?

 

Most governments, especially rich white ones, would apparently rather buy

 

weapons to kill other human beings than build water facilities to save the lives

 

of black, brown and yellow poor people.

 

According to the Stockholm international peace research institute, in 2006 total

 

global military expenditure topped $1.2tn; with the US accounting for $528.7bn

 

of this spending and the UK for $59.2bn.

 

At a cost of about 5% of the world's military budgets, over a period of 10 years

 

clean, safe water could be provided to every person on earth. But this won't

 

happen because while the poor are deprived, the rich are depraved.

 

Mega-rich individuals, corporations and nations rule the world. They worship the

 

false idols of celebrity, money, profits, consumerism, speculation and

 

conspicuous consumption. Love, compassion, mercy and human solidarity are

 

largely alien ideals in the ruthless, cut-throat world of free markets and

 

stockmarkets. The super-wealthy know the price of everything and the value of

 

nothing. People are commodities, just like sacks of maize or barrels of oil.

 

Human needs are not important. Money is everything, and since the poor don't

 

have it, they are held in contempt. Hundreds of millions of non-white people are

 

condemned to drink muddy, stinking water. If the have-a-lots care, they don't

 

show it. Their unspoken message seems to be: let them drink shit.

 

While children are dying all over the world every day from contaminated water,

 

the rich world carries on regardless. And we, the people, are to blame. We let

 

the rich get away with their greed. We keep electing governments who, at the

 

drop of a hat, find billions to wage illegal, immoral wars, but who can't bring

 

themselves to even marginally downsize their armaments budget to finance a truly

 

just battle - the battle to give everyone on this planet what we, in Britain and

 

the west, assume is a fundamental right: easy access to drinking water that

 

tastes good and won't harm us.

 

Our government would not tolerate people dying of waterborne diseases in the UK.

 

So why should we tolerate such needless deaths in developing countries? Isn't a

 

human being a human being, whoever they are and wherever they live on this

 

planet? Aren't all people's lives equally precious? Apparently not, otherwise

 

there would be concerted international action to tackle the shame of dirty water

 

and the resultant obscene waste of human life.

 

I recently interviewed Nick Edmans of the charity WaterAid for my online TV

 

series, Talking With Tatchell. He confirmed that in the eighth year of the 21st

 

century, at least 1.1 billion people have no fresh, safe water to drink.

 

Before this day is over, 5,000 children will die from infected water, leaving up

 

to 10,000 parents grieving - tonight, and every night.

 

All in all, around 2.2 million people - 1.8 million of them children - are

 

killed each year by waterborne diseases.

 

A further 2.6 billion people have no secure, hygienic toilet facilities. They

 

use rudimentary holes in the ground which breed disease. The human waste leaches

 

into the soil, often contaminating the groundwater that supplies wells and

 

despoiling rivers where people bathe, wash and fish.

 

This morning I woke up and walked 12 feet to my kitchen tap. I drank a large

 

refreshing glass of pure water. Alas, the easily accessible, clean, safe water

 

that we take for granted in the west is only a distant dream for one-sixth of

 

the world's population, especially in Asia and Africa.

 

Hundreds of millions of poor people have to trek for many miles and hours every

 

day to fetch often foul-smelling, diseased drinking water that can cause deadly

 

dysentery, cholera, typhoid and intestinal worms and parasites.

 

The lack of safe water supplies frequently impacts worst on marginal social

 

groups, such as lower castes and ethnic minorities, who may be denied access to

 

the best water sources and be forced to pay premium prices to private suppliers.

 

Some tourist developments in developing countries, such as big hotels and golf

 

courses, involve the private owners sinking their own bore holes to extract

 

water from below ground. This often results in the depression of the water

 

table, drying up wells and causing water crises in the surrounding villages.

 

Water shortages and a lack of affordability in developing countries have, in

 

some cases, been exacerbated by privatisation, which has usually benefited urban

 

dwellers to the neglect of their rural counterparts, and has usually resulted in

 

private monopolies and price hikes, to the detriment of low income families.

 

With global warming and rising populations, the prospect looms of future

 

disputes - even wars - over shortages of fresh water supplies. A foretaste of

 

such disputes can be seen in the friction between Israel and the Palestine over

 

Tel Aviv's diversion of water from the Jordan river to meet Israeli demand,

 

leaving the West Bank under-supplied.

 

It strikes me as utterly immoral that in the midst of a world of immense wealth

 

and plenty, billions of people have so little - not even the basics of life like

 

safe water to drink.

 

Surely, it is time for a major global effort to redistribute wealth from rich

 

nations to poor ones and to divert investment in weapons and wars to

 

health-sustaining, life-saving development projects such as the universal

 

provision of cheap, accessible, clean water?

 

Safe water is a human right. Give them water, not war.

 

2.

Big guns train their sights on universities

Arms research is a lucrative business, which is why universities are doing so much of it. But is it ethical?

Six weeks ago, with little publicity, the Royal Air Force's first "hunter-killer" unmanned drone took flight in Afghanistan. Although initially to be used for reconnaissance, the drone will soon be armed with Hellfire missiles for ground attacks. It is, appropriately, called the Reaper.

Made in the US, the Reaper is based on the Predator B, the drone used last year by the CIA to target a Pakistani village where it was thought Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy leader of al-Qaida, was in hiding. Instead, more than 20 villagers, including five women and five children, were killed.

British ministers and military chiefs think the drone will be the frontline attack plane in years to come. A UK prototype called Taranis - after the Celtic god of thunder - is already well advanced. And new technologies for future refinements are being researched, with funding from arms companies and the government.

The work, like a surprising number of military-related projects, is being done in UK universities.

Today, two campaign groups are publishing their groundbreaking research on the extent of military involvement in British universities in an attempt to bring transparency, accountability and ethical considerations to the business.

The report, Study War No More, has been produced by Campaign Against Arms Trade and the UK branch of the Fellowship for Reconciliation, a long-established interfaith peace group with headquarters in New York state.

Silencing of dissidents

The research has not been easy. "Corporate interests tend to favour secrecy, a monopoly of intellectual property rights, and the silencing of dissidence," the authors say. This was compounded by the attitudes of many of the 26 universities canvassed; they "were unfamiliar with and had inadequate provisions for Freedom of Information ... A small number appeared to take requests as personal criticisms, rather than legitimate appeals for information." The report recognises that its conclusions are therefore partial and incomplete.

The researchers found that between 2001 and 2006, more than 1,900 military projects, worth at least £725m, were conducted in the 26 universities they examined, 20 of which are in the elite Russell group. The largest number of contracts were placed at Cambridge, Loughborough, Oxford, Southampton and University College London, with a total value of £139m. The biggest was a 22-year, £366m contract at Cranfield University's Defence College of Management and Technology, to provide postgraduate training to the MoD for 4,000 students a year.

Seventy per cent of the projects were sponsored by three industry leaders: BAE Systems, RollsRoyce and the controversially privatised research group QinetiQ. The report says they have "developed a disproportionately powerful say in universities' research agendas".

A third of all projects were jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), one of the UK's seven research councils, with spending of around £35m a year. The report notes that big, costly projects are made viable only by money from the taxpayer, in effect a public subsidy for private industry - and what the report sees as "indicative of the general trend towards commercialisation in higher education".

In a flurry of acronyms beloved by the defence industry, the report identifies a plethora of jointly funded programmes that lock science departments into business. There are the four Defence Technology Centres, with a £90m contribution from the MoD to produce "innovative cutting-edge research for enhanced UK defence capability".

Towers of Excellence, launched in 2002, combines eight commercial and government bodies and nine academic partners for research into guided weapons, sensors, radar and electronic warfare.The Defence and Aerospace Research Partnerships is an £18m programme spread across 20 universities, looking at advanced weapon systems. RollsRoyce supports 20 University Technology Centres embedded in 15 universities (there are four at Sheffield).

Then there is Flaviir, the project developing the advanced drone. The Flapless Aerial Vehicle Integrated Interdisciplinary Research Programme is a £6.2m effort running over five years to 2009. It is unique, says BAE Systems, because it is producing "an entire working system, rather than just looking into individual technologies".

More like it

There will more like it. The company says: "Flaviir is the first of a number of large-scale integrated research programmes to emerge from the BAE Systems university partnership programme and the strategic partnership with EPSRC."

Manchester and Cranfield are looking at aerodynamics; Leicester and Imperial College are concentrating on control systems; Swansea, Nottingham and York have electromagnetics; manufacturing techniques have been given to Liverpool and Warwick; Southampton is building a "concept-design framework" based on numerical simulation; and Cranfield will be putting the whole caboodle together.

The authors say that reliance on military research narrows the scientific agenda at universities. But the incentives are powerful: "Academics are under increasing pressure to attract research funding to their department, which can lead to research ethics being compromised, given the lure of these lucrative military research contracts. The temptation to accept funding from military organisations is made greater because such research often confers prestige on the researcher and the institution as a whole."

What do academics make of all this? The authors received 40 replies to a questionaire, ranging from the supercilious to the concerned.

Regulatory committees, wrote one professor, are "open to ill-informed comment and opinion from the many people who do not, or indeed intellectually cannot, understand the issues. A lot of issues around nuclear power/warfare are in this category; the general public on the whole does not understand the science, nor the risk analysis, nor the impact on society of taking key decisions."

A researcher explained how he got round the "problematic" question of accountability. "I would be a rather poor researcher if I could not not put so much spin around a project as to make it look the very opposite of what it really is."

Others emphasised personal conscience. Acceptable military work could include, for example, research on a vaccine against anthrax.

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