Poverty's Superstar
Mother Teresa's death was somewhat overshadowed by that of Diana Windsor a few days before. But it was still an event for media-orchestrated mourning on the passing of a living saint. B. Skanthakumar Any speculation that her Order of Nuns would, with Mother Teresa now gone, finally join the present century (even in its twilight days) is unfounded. The new Mother Superior, Sister Nirmala, promises
"The poor must bear poverty in the right way." she told journalists. should accept poverty with the stoicism displayed by the nuns of the Missionaries of Charity; they should not moan and groan but be content with whatever little the Lord has given them."
The Indian Government insisted on a state funeral with full military honours usually reserved for the head of state, and her body was displayed for public viewing
Mother Teresa loved the poor. She loved them so much she never asked how they become poor nor challenged the causes of their poverty. She dedicated her life to relieving, but never eradicating, their condition. But at least she was doing
Mother Teresa cared for the dying and destitute in her clinics. She never asked whether they ought to have been in a hospital instead, receiving surgical or medical treatment. The curable and the incurable were all the same to her and only the fortunate received pain-killers. But at least she was doing something. Forgive the rich, they know not what
Mother Teresa had great compassion. In 1984 in Bhopal, the leak of MIC gas at the Union Carbide plant caused 2,500 deaths. Tens of thousands were blinded and hundreds of thousands became afflicted with respiratory ailments. The 'angel of mercy' was soon on the scene (she enjoyed free air and rail travel within India). Her first words to the survivors and their families were "Forgive, Forgive, Forgive" But at least she was doing something.
Mother Teresa was above politics. She was so apolitical she never inquired about source of a donation, or the means by which she received it. She never suspected the character of the individuals and regimes who flew her around the world in their private jets, feted her in their palaces and decorated her with their awards. The
Duvaliers in Haiti, Robert Maxwell in Britain, the Hoxha regime in Albania were all beneficiaries of her benedictions. But at least she was doing something.
Mother Teresa loved sinners. She loved them so much that when a crook named Charles Keating was brought before a court on charges of defrauding U.S. small investors in the savings and loans scandals of the 1980s, she sent a personal plea for clemency to the trial judge. Keating had donated over a million U.S. dollars to her Order and loaned her his jet on occasion. But at least she was doing
Why was this Christian missionary tolerated and even encouraged by the central government in predominantly Hindu India? And by successive West Bengal governments (her headquarters were in Calcutta) dominated by the Communist Party of India (Marxist)?
The answer is simple. She confirmed their perception that nothing could be done to remove the scourge of poverty, the epidemic of disease and malnutrition, the malady of hopelessness and helplessness. Only the symptoms could be managed
For the Indian elite, all this is the fault of the poor themselves. Bad karma - actions in their past lives - contributed to their fate in the present one. This Hindu doctrine, which induces fatalism and apathy among its adherents, conveniently obscures the failure of this rotten system to improve the life-chances of the majority.
This Hindu fatalism fitted well with Teresa's own Catholic fundamentalist world view, a philosophy resonating with medieval notions exalting suffering and pain as redeeming past sins and leading to the tortuous path to Heaven where true reward would follow. This is instead of looking to create a better society in this life and on this earth. Reactionary themes
But why was Mother Teresa propelled into superstardom outside India? In his superb polemic The Missionary Position (Verso: London 1995), Christopher Hitchens argues that the rich world likes to believe that "someone, somewhere is doing something for the Third World. (T)he great white hope meets the great black hole; the mission to the heathen blends with the comforting myth of Florence Nightingale."
Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden" spoke about the civilising responsibility' of colonialism to its "new caught, sullen peoples/ Half- devil and Half-child." Missionaries like Mother Teresa followed the flag and were intimately bound up in that enterprise.
Mother Teresa went even further. She founded her own multinational, the Missionaries of Charity, operating more than 500 institutions in over one hundred countries and with 4,000 nuns and 40,000 lay workers. In doing so, she was as Hitchens notes, serving the "sponsor and the donor, and not the needs of the downtrodden. Helpless infants, abandoned derelicts, lepers and the terminally ill are the raw material for demonstrations of compassion."
The Vatican quickly recognised the value of the publicity she generated for her work and herself. The present Pope John Paul II, saw her as an ambassador for his own fundamentalist views on reproductive
In 1979 when Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, she used that platform to announce that abortion is the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace."
For a saint like Teresa, the tragedy of 250,000 women world-wide dying each year from unsafe and unsupervised backabortions, and the denial of the right of women to control their own bodies pale in significance to the devil's work: contraception and abortion.
In 1971 the Pakistani army embarked on the mass rape of Bangladeshi women during the war of liberation. Many became pregnant. Mother Teresa admonished those women not to choose to abort the foetus. This would be an evil "equal to or worse" than the rape itself, she said.
Meanwhile her San Francisco franchise for gay men with AIDS mirrors the spartan monastic regime of her outlets elsewhere. with Christian teaching substituting for painkillers. She herself called
AIDS "just retribution for improper sexual conduct," according to Hitchens. A view which is not dissimilar to the Vatican's own sophisticated thinking on the matter.
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Her much praised homes in India are run with 19th century ideas and instruments. Prayer and Christian comfort are available in generous doses. Even where medication, hospitalisation and surgical intervention would be more appropriate and save more lives. Behind the hypocrisy, scandal
Proper health care easily could have been afforded with the hundreds of millions of dollars that she received, and which collect interest in bank accounts or are spent on sacramental ornaments instead.
The financial dealings of the Order are Cambodia's crisis
The uneasy Coalition government, in power in Cambodia since the UN-run elections in 1993, was severely shaken when intense fighting broke out in the capital, Phnom Penh on 5 July. In the wake of the fighting, between troops loyal to each of the two prime ministers, widespread looting destroyed machinery and equipment in the airport and many hospitals, businesses and factories Though the situation has now normalised, the government estimates that 40,000 people have lost their jobs in manufacturing and tourism.
Second Prime Minister Hun Sen, from the Cambodian Peoples Party, said that the fighting was a response to moves by Prince Ranariddh to increase his military forces in the capital, and his secret negotiations with the Khmer Rouge. The CPP had been able to take decisive action due to deep splits within the royalist bloc. Both sides accuse the other of manoeuvres to undermine the national elections set for 28 May 1998.
Former first Prime Minister, Prince Ranariddh, remains outside the country. Royalist Secretary of State for the Interior, Ho Sok and other political opponents of second Prime Minister Hun Sen were killed during the week of fighting; others are in hiding.
Military operations by forces supporting Ranariddh, in conjunction with remaining Khmer Rouge forces, have largely been contained by the Cambodian Armed Forces. 25,000 Cambodians fled to Thailand to escape the fighting
Responding to calls by Ranariddh, the I US has ensured that Cambodia's seat in the UN remains vacant. Membership of ASEAN has also been delayed. Cambodia relies on international aid of approximately US$460 million per year, about half its national budget. Aid from Germany, USA and the World Bank/IMF has been suspended. Larger donors, such as Japan (which provides over $100 million), France and Australia are maintaining their aid, and retiring Australian Ambassador Tony Kevin has spoken out in support of Hun Sen.
The National Assembly re-convened on 28 July, with 97 of the 120 members 34 International Viewpoint #294 veiled in secrecy and its income and expenditure neither accountable to the residents of her homes nor its staff and members.
A former lay volunteer at one of her
Bombay homes said that in his many years of experience working for Mother
Teresa's organisation and observing its standard of care for the sick, "there are cases where there are only two possible descriptions: criminal neglect and criminal assault."
Mother Teresa herself died in a private hospital, with a personal physician and a team of specialists by her bedside and elected in 1993, including 40 of the 58 FUNCINPEC members and 6 of the 10 Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party members. 15 representatives are in exile. Most FUNCINPEC parliamentarians voted to elect Foreign Minister Ung Huot as party leader and first Prime Minister, replacing Ranariddh, widely regarded as incompetent. Ung Huot is an Australian citizen, politically close to that country's conservative government.
Although protesting his son's ouster, and publicly repeating his request to abdicate, King Sihanouk has returned to Cambodia.
All opposition newspapers disappeared after the fighting on 5 July, but after pleas by Hun Sen, ten resumed publica tion. Prayuth (The Fight) was suspended for 30 days under the 1996 Press Law, for exaggerating the government casualties.
Civil war may break out, before or after the elections. While many may be alarmed at Hun Sen's sometimes brutal exercise of power, very few Cambodians hope that the Ranariddh and Khmer Rouge forces will keep fighting.
For the international labour movement the key question is to what extent workers rights can be advanced under the constraints of this reshaped coalition government.
The Free Trade Union of Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTUWKC, which emerged atter garment factory strikes in December), is no longer active; their president Ou Mary has fled the country, and her chief supporter, Khmer Nation Party leader Sam Rainsy, also fears to return to Cambodia.
On the other hand, legal recognition has been accorded to to 18 factory unions, 11 with the Cambodian Union Federation, supported by the Sar Kheng wing of the CP, 5 garment and cement factory unions with the Cambodian Federation of Trade Unions, supported since the 80s by Hun Sen and other CPP politicians, and 2 are independent unions that have received support from the Asia-America Free Labour Institute The Cambodian Labour Organisation, an NGO with links to the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party is also functioning, though party leader Son Sann has left the country. [KD] * round-the-clock care. Indeed, whenever she fell ill on one of her excursions abroad she was immediately booked into a private hospital. The best and most expensive care was off limits to the poor in her care. But it did no harm to Teresa's soul.
Mother Teresa symbolised the odious belief that the poor are objects for our charity and not subjects tor their own liberation. She never asked why people are poor and oppressed, because she believed it to be inevitable.
She accepted it as part of the natural order and encouraged others to do the same. But she was doing something. *