Makoto Oda
in Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos No 8 (October 1986)
One of the four pictures is that of a nuclear holocaust. I don’t have to use many words to express the direct meaning of this picture, what I want to say is that the picture not only shows the present crisis of the world and the threat to the continued existence of mankind, but also the dreadful process toward final destruction such as a build-up of arms, militarisation, undemocratisation of society, the culmination of which could well be termed “nuclear fascism”. And this picture of a nuclear holocaust is not only that of the well-known nuclear mushroom, but also that of a power station in ruins, which recently, to everybody’s horror, became a reality.
The second picture is that of hunger in Africa, Asia and other parts of the Third World. We are now quite familiar with pictures of hungry children in Africa, but here again, the picture in my mind not only clarifies hunger itself but also poverty, inequality between “North” and “South” and between the privileged and the deprived in the “South” itself and the continuation of exploitation in its various forms which has so far created the wealth and power of the privileged in the South, perpetuating the poverty which still prevails in the Third World.
In addition to the two above-mentioned pictures, two more pictures appear before my eyes. Rather than pictures, they are actual scenes. One of the two is the scene of bones and skulls scattered around, those of the victims who were executed during the terrifying rule of the Pol Pot regime of Cambogia, which I came across when I visited Phnom Penh a few years ago and went to the former execution site.
After being in Phnom Penh, I went to Ho Chi Minh (formerly Saigon) and while I was staying there I had the chance to visit the hospital where I saw what the so-called “Agent Orange”, that was used by the U.S. to kill trees and grasses, had done to human bodies. I saw a number of deformed babies being born or forcibly taken away from their mother’s bodies in a small room of the hospital. With bodies that could hardly be called human – so then what were they and what would you call them?
These deformed bodies or human fragments will always stay in my memory. It’s this scene the fourth of the pictures I will always be confronted with.
If the scene of bones and skulls on the ground demonstrate the crude reality still existing in some socialist countries and in some parts of the Third World, a reality starting from repression of freedom and refusal of human rights, extending in some extreme cases to concentration camps and simply slaughter, the scenes of the deformed bodies can be said to be one of the many examples of inhuman acts that people on the other side will commit. In the name of the defence of freedom, believing and claiming that the society in which they live and the country to which they belong, is truly free and democratic, gravely concerned with justice and human rights, not only where they themselves are concerned, but also for many other people in the entire world. What the former reveals before our eyes is the miserable and cruel result of politics that once claimed to be seeding after the liberation of people, while the latter not only shows ignorant arrogance by the people whose self-acclaimed freedom and concern for human rights itself endangers the existence of other people, but also make us realise how dangerous and destructive science and technology can be for humans, always claiming to seek after the progress of civilization.
These two scenes, or pictures of mine are depressing enough, but what is still more depressing is the scene in which refugees coming out of a land of bones and skulls, a land of torment and oppression, are entering a land which is still producing the “Agent Orange” with various justifications, such as freedom and progress, and without seriously thinking of fundamental changes or of the direction of their future, based on total re-examination of what they are doing and what steps they might take.
Such is the world in which we live now; we can try not to see them, and may succeed, but these crude realities clearly shown in the four (or five) pictures or scenes I have just described, remain to exist, facing these crude realities, we easily can imagine it is quite difficult to find what is good and what is bad, what is just and what is unjust. And, at the same time, facing these crude realities, the judgment of justice and injustice is needed now more than any other time in human history.
In order to make right judgments now, one concept of justice itself has to be totally examined and the fundamental principles upon which one can and should judge what is right and what is wrong have to be established. And these tasks should now be done, not in academic and abstract ways, but in one’s own efforts to solve the problems these crude realities are posing in actual scenes.
This is exactly what the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal was established to do, and what the Tribunal is trying its best to do. And of course it will continue to do this, viewing this as a part of the entire efforts of humans of all the world to overcome the problems and contradictions of the world today. Makoto, Oda
in: Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos No 8 (October 1986)