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On 2 February 2010, the Obama administration launched the first serious attempt at confronting discrimination against gay people in the US military since the Clinton era.
This came in the aftermath of President Obama’s State of the Union address in which he committed to addressing the politically contentious issue of the existing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ (DADT) policy which allows gays to serve as long as their sexuality remains hidden.
“This year,” Obama said, “I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are.” US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen have publicly supported the proposed review of the policy but ultimately the decision will come down to Congress in which a strong body of opposition is apparent particularly among Republicans.
Admiral Mullen told a Senate Armed Services Committee that allowing openly gay people to serve was “the right thing to do”.
He said, “No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.” He told the hearing that the issue “comes down to integrity, theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.”
Admiral Mullen said he believed fellow service members “can and would accommodate such a change” to the law which was passed by Congress in 1993. He added that he had learned never to “underestimate their ability to adapt” and that he himself had been serving alongside gay soldiers since 1968 and believed it was time for a change in policy.
Nearly 11,000 people have been dismissed from the US military over the last decade after outing themselves or being outed.
Mr. Gates said the committee review of the policy would look at whether reform could be carried out with minimum impact at a time when the US was engaged in two wars. He also wanted to review the potential impact on military effectiveness, in particular the cohesion of units. Republican Senator John McCain has expressed opposition to the proposed review and believes it would be “clearly biased” because it presumed the law should be changed. “Has this policy been ideal? No, it has not,” he said. “But it has been effective.”
The year-long review of the possible effects of the policy change is to be carried out by the Pentagon’s highest-ranking lawyer, Jeh Johnson and General Carter Ham, who leads army forces in Europe. General Colin Powell, former US Secretary of State and the first African-American to serve as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff also gave his support to the review of the DADT policy even though he strongly opposed any change in the 1990s. In a statement he said that “attitudes and circumstances have changed” and that he fully supported the new approach presented to the Senate by Mr. Gates and Adm. Mullen.
Under the present policy, soldiers don’t have to answer questions about their sexual orientation and they are not allowed tell others about their sexual orientation. Any soldier found to be homosexual is discharged from the military.
Air force pilot Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbrech is currently in the process of being discharged from the air force. Fehrenbrech has served his country as a pilot for the last 17 years, he flies F-15E jets and has been decorated with nine medals for distinguished service in flight and for heroism the night US forces captured Baghdad International Airport in 2003.
However he says in May 2008 his world ended when he was outed by a third party and reported to his military superiors.
In April 2009 he faced a military discharge board that recommended him for an honourable discharge and came to the conclusion that his continued service was “detrimental to good order, discipline and morale”. He maintains that this law is a violation of his constitutional rights to privacy, due process and equal protection.
He also believes aside from the financial impact of discharging soldiers with critical combat skills, that this practice also has a detrimental effect on national security. He says that he was heartened by Adm. Mullen’s support of the review and believes that it is a small step to real reform of this discriminatory policy.
Lesbian service women are often overlooked by the policy but enforcement of the policy against outed gay men is strict.
Soldier’s views on the issue vary. Some see it as ironic that these soldiers fight and protect the freedoms and civil liberties of so many and yet their own freedoms and civil liberties are violated by this law. Other soldiers still see homosexuality in the service as a very taboo subject and rather than view it as a “don’t ask, don’t tell” matter they view it as a matter about which they “don’t want to know.”
The United States is quite slow in re-examining this policy when compared with Israel, Russia and most European Union countries where gay men and women are allowed to serve in the military. Following the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in Smith and Grady v The United Kingdom ten years ago, the UK changed their laws and allowed gay men and women to serve openly in the armed forces. Fears of a breakdown in discipline proved unfounded.
In Russia, however, given that hundreds of new conscripts are killed each year by hazing and bullying, it would be almost unheard of for a gay man to be open about his sexual orientation.
Although liberals in Washington are a far cry from the close living quarters of an army unit there has to come a point where the US military will at the least entertain the idea of accepting openly gay people in the military. Real progress and real evolving change in this area will make the military stronger in the long-term.
One calls to mind the scene in The West Wing when Admiral Fitzwallace schools a couple of lower ranking service men in the ways of the world. Explaining that he agrees homosexuals serving in the military would pose a threat to unit discipline and cohesion he continues. “I also think the military wasn’t designed to be an instrument of social change.
“The problem with that is that’s what they were saying about me 50 years ago. Blacks shouldn’t serve with whites. It would disrupt the unit. You know what? It did disrupt the unit. The unit got over it. The unit changed. I’m an admiral of the US Navy and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Beat that with a stick.”
In other words, DADT is beyond the realms of credibility. |
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The quake shook buildings and roadways for ten or fifteen seconds, smashing infrastructure and ending lives. An early estimate put the death toll at three hundred. However, roads and homes had been unusually empty due to a baseball match between two local teams, and it was later concluded that the dead numbered sixty-three. While it caused devastating loss of life and left thousands injured and thousands more homeless, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in Northern California did not cripple a nation.
The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for the earthquake which struck twenty-five miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital city, several weeks ago. Though the dead are still being counted, and the deaths are ongoing, their number is being expressed in six digits, not two. The fact that both earthquakes measured 7 on the Richter scale points to a vast gulf, not between the natures of the disasters themselves, but between conditions on the ground. If anything good could come out of such a catastrophe, it would be that the effects of this earthquake might show the world just how dire the situation is in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.
On the 23 January, Haiti’s government, meeting in a run-down police station, officially called off the search for survivors. The previous day, the UN had noted that the emergency phase of the relief operation was over. This earthquake, however, has simply been one extremely low point in a long and ongoing emergency for Haitians. In the words of one survivor, “This country was bad long before this. But now the earthquake has exposed the true face of Haiti.” The staggering statistics for the death and destruction caused by this catastrophe are well-known, but it’s vital to look at the situation in Haiti before the quake as well.
Haiti is a country in which three-quarters of the people are unemployed and 80% live in poverty. It is a haven for sweatshops and cheap labour, and its cities are home to an estimated 225,000 household child slaves. It is home to extremes of inequality as well as poverty, over half of its wealth resting in the hands of a mere 1% of its population. The IMF cancelled 80% of Haiti’s massive foreign debt last year, but only once the government agreed to open up the country’s markets and labour to increased foreign exploitation. Soaring rice prices caused food riots in April 2008, and 2009 saw the staple grow even more expensive. While poor, Haitians used to be able to feed themselves, but the scrapping of tariffs on foreign rice in 1994 drove farmers out of business and into the already packed slums of the cities.
These same cinder block slums collapsed during the earthquake, killing tens of thousands and leaving millions in need of aid and shelter. As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has said, “[Haiti] does not have the resources or the money to respond to an emergency. What capacity it did have was knocked out. This earthquake hit a country that was already barely functional.” The 2010 Haitian earthquake ranks as a more terrible disaster than the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Pakistan earthquake, and the Burmese cyclone, not due to the scale of the disaster itself, but due to where it hit. Port-au-Prince had two fire stations and no quake-proof housing, despite having been devastated by natural disasters in the past, as recently as 2008 and 2004.
While Haiti has seen several governments in the last 20 years who have tried to tackle poverty, none, it seems, could afford stable housing for this disaster zone. These are the consequences of economic inequality and private monopolisation of wealth.
The UN, who had to feed 1 million people before the quake, lost 300 of its staff in the disaster. Oxfam lost 90% of its emergency kit. 48 hours followed in which landlines and mobiles alike were useless. The difficulty in coordinating response was mirrored in the attempts to bring in aid. The port and infrastructure were crippled. The airport’s only runway was bottlenecked, and the road to the Dominican Republic clogged with refugees. Aid agencies found no diesel in the city, and only three days’ worth of petrol.
Another process which slowed relief efforts was the deployment of some 20,000 US troops to Haiti to maintain security and protect aid convoys. Haiti’s government signed over control of Toussaint L’ouverture Airport to Washington, provoking complaints from France, Brazil and Doctors Without Borders (MSF) that in such a congested airport, giving priority to US warplanes over much-needed aid was impeding relief efforts. Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Cuba, meanwhile, have all accused the US of attempting a military occupation. Considering the presence of over 10,000 UN troops, besides Haiti’s own army and police, the need for so many US troops is indeed hard to understand. Furthermore, the years since the Haitians overthrew the second Duvalier dictatorship have been punctuated by US-backed coups against elected leaders, and that is leaving aside Haiti’s more remote history of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation.
The terrible consequences of the earthquake in Haiti cannot be understood in isolation, but only as part of a long and ongoing history of poverty, inequality and exploitation. Neither can the flow of aid and relief money be appreciated out of context. Citigroup have generously donated $250,000; however, they have been even more generous to their top managers, whose bonus pool this year will amount to over $5 billion. The $100 million pledged by the Obama administration only sounds impressive if one forgets that the US spend $165 million in Afghanistan every day. Paul Collier and Jean-Louis Warnholz, two experts on Haiti, have explained that while initial relief and aid following disasters is generally impressive, reconstruction is a more important area that is usually ignored. They argue that a “Marshall-type plan”, involving billions of dollars, is needed to put Haiti back on its feet. However, between wars and bonuses, this is clearly something the developed world can’t afford. |
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In June, groups such as Amnesty International openly condemned authorities in Phnom Penh, when twenty families with HIV were forcibly evicted from their homes in the Borei Keila district of the city. The families were then resettled in an isolated flood-prone area called Tuol Sambo, 25 kilometres outside the capital, creating a de facto AIDS colony. |
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Is the stability and future of liberal democracy a more tenuous and even anomalous situation for a political system than we think? Indeed, if we examine recent trends in global politics, are indications under the surface of processes working against our long-term freedoms? Looking at the particular processes which underline modernisation, particularly the current type of modernity which we are experiencing, people will often declare that democratisation is an element of it. |
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