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Opinion

No Reason

By Douglas Lummis


理由がないだって?!

japaneseblurb.htm

理由がないだって?!

解放された人質たちに政府が怒りを隠せないのは、彼らのイラクでの「人道的な行動」が政府の人道援助の欺まんを明らかにしたからだ。

The Koizumi government is throwing a collective tantrum at the five young people recently taken hostage in Iraq. It wants them to apologize for the inconvenience they caused. (Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi himself said some government officials even missed meals and lost sleep over the matter - the poor things!) It wants them to apologize for going to Iraq at all. More than anything, it is furious that some of them want to go back.

The government is pressuring them to repent and change their ways, and, because that probably won't work, it is also putting pressure on their families. (This is the most traditional Japanese government method of controlling people.) The families have also been getting threatening telephone calls, presumably from members of rightist organizations.

Why is the government throwing this tantrum? Of course, it was very inconvenient to them to have pressure put on them to withdraw the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) from Iraq. But judging from their own statements, they didn't feel pressure at all. The first response to the kidnapping came from Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda: "There is no reason to withdraw the SDF from Iraq." He didn't say, "insufficient reason," he said, "NO reason." Let's take the man at his word: He was telling us that, from the standpoint of the government, the lives of the hostages had no value at all. None.

Why the tantrum then? First of all, they are embarrassed because the hostages were released when their captors were persuaded that, unlike the SDF, they were in Iraq for genuinely humanitarian purposes.

The government is also embarrassed because it was the Japanese peace movement and its allies in Iraq who persuaded the captors of this. After the government announced that it considered the lives of the hostages to be of no value, scores of peace activist groups began flooding Iraq with appeals that these young people, unlike the Japanese government, were not working to support the U.S. invasion, but were seeking to stand on the side of the Iraqi people. The two armed groups holding the hostages were persuaded by this, and gave that as the specific reason for releasing them. I don't know what the government officials were doing while they were missing meals and losing sleep, but whatever it was, it wasn't what got the people released.

Abdel Salem al-Kubaissi, the Iraqi cleric who negotiated the release, said at a press conference that when a Japanese government official offered him "aid money" he took it as an insult: "We have no interest in turning a humanitarian question into a question of economics."

But a deeper reason the government is so angry at these young people is that their genuinely humanitarian action has revealed the emptiness and falsehood of the "humanitarian-aid charade" being carried out in Iraq by the SDF, who, we hear, remain cowering inside their base and never go outside. While the five young people's courage and dedication are a humiliation to the government, they have done much to recover the world's respect for the Japanese people, a respect badly damaged by Koizumi's policies. I ask the prime minister: How can you claim to be a patriot, if you have contempt for your best people?



Shukan ST: May 7, 2004

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