This discussion forum took place on Zoom on 19th April. The presentation and discussion is available as a podcast here. Slides and notes from the presentation are below:
“Currently there are 4 Core International Core Crimes, Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes and Crimes of Aggression. Ecocide was first coined by Arthur Galston, scientist, in 1970, to describe the attack not just on humanity, but also the environment itself, during Imperialist wars against liberation. It was popularised by Olof Palme in 1972 at Helsinki.”
“Between 1948 and 1960 Trioxone was sprayed by British Military planes (with the help of Australian, New Zealand and others) in Malaya in the “Malayan Emergency” aka the Anti-British National Liberation War, in their efforts to put down the establishment of a communist state in Malaya. The British Empire relied on the extraction of rubber and tin, using excessive force to repay the Marshall Plan debts by killing left wing activists who retaliated with setting fire to plantations. It was not called a “war” to avoid insurance refusal, who do not pay out in “civil wars”.
Thanks to strict military secrecy and establishment control of the media the only newspaper to report on these crimes was the Daily Worker (later Morning Star). Unnamed Daily Worker reporter, “Blood Stains Malaya Profits: Demonstrators Raid Shareholders,” Daily Worker, June 10, 1952, page 1. Cited in “Headhunters in the Malayan Emergency: The Atrocity and Cover-Up” by Dan Poole, figure 18, page 140.
Photograph published in 10 June 1952 by the British communist newspaper the Daily Worker (later renamed the Morning Star) showing anti-war protestors targetting a Dunlop shareholder meeting. The success of the Empire’s methods in putting the MNLA revolt down led to JFK endorsing the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.
While the US may not have been the “first” to commit ecocide in their military operations, they certainly used this “proxy war” to deliberately and wantonly commit ecocide in pursuit of the support of ‘capitalism’ and the suppression of communism post WW2, facilitating the looting of resources of the “3rd World2 by fomenting and supporting/reimposing colonial Indochina to prevent the advance of communism at the expense of the wishes of the indigenous people for liberation and self-determination, justified by McCarthyism and religious and communal interests.
1 Exterior view of the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, scene of the world’s worst industrial disaster in 1985. Interior shot of the factory before it was stripped of some of its most valuable components and subsequently abandoned to the elements. The factory remains ruined and abandoned and approximately 350 metric tonnes of toxic waste are stored there above ground. Many thousands of tonnes of toxic waste were also buried, in an untreated state, on the site. Rainwater continues to run through this buried waste as well as the remains of the abandoned solar evaporation ponds. This leaches toxic chemicals into the local groundwater aquifer, which serves as the primary water supply for thousands of people.
2 The Discoverer Enterprise and the Q4000 work around the clock burning undesirable gases from the still uncapped Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico. 26 June 2010
3 St.Andrews Old Course, 4th Hole, Ginger Beer – the Green deserts… 38 000 around the world, majority in US and UK.
4 Nigeria – oil spill… since 1958 upwards of 100 million barrels of oil have been spilled in the Niger Delta, only 6% of it on land, so definitely not just the “local people” amounting to a deliberate sabotage of the local polity by Royal Shell and Exon amongst others. Poor maintenance, linkage of small wells, spills, bunkering and corruption leading to little or no regulation. Now, one of the most bio-diverse yet polluted areas of the planet.
Open for discussion using these and any suggestions of examples of ecocide and would it be dealt with by this proposed legislation…
