Power Politics & Population Control
Birth Control programs viewed as means for Global domination Representatives of developing nations who participated in the United Nations world population conference at Cairo were incessantly urged to extend "birth-spacing" services and "family planning" education to all couples of reproductive age. Such activities are fundamental to the orderly development of the Southern hemisphere, conference organizers repeatedly insisted.
But birth control programs and population policies have little relationship to health and development and a great deal to do with global power politics, says a book published by the Washington-based Information Project For Africa. Inc.
The book, Excessive Force: Power. Politics and Population Control." documents the involvement of "secret" branches of the U.S. government in elevating population control to a top priority for the west. And it suggests that, despite agreements from officials of developing nations to comply, population projects are likely to fail in many of the most important countries in the south.
Since the start of the 20th Century, the book explains, birthrates in the industrialized world have fallen to levels that are the lowest anywhere in all history. At the same time. fertility has stayed high in much of the developing world. This. it says. means that "the constituency of the world is likely to change in ways that are difficult to imagine."
In this context, the text asks: "What happens when there are dramatic shifts in the world's ethnic and racial makeup? How will these trends alter the balance of power between North and South? What effect will population change have on the global distribution of wealth, resources, and technology? Who will rule the world our children inherit?"
The publication documents scores of military and CIA reports about the importance of limiting births overseas. A major study commissioned seven years ago by the Pentagon concluded, for example, that the American population control effort should be given the same status in the hierarchy of security planning as the development and procurement of advanced weapons of war. And numerous documents produced by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and cited in the book have made similar statements about the U.S. strategic interest in birth control.
One main theme of the book is the coercive nature of population policy development in aid-receiving countries. Indeed. the tactic of conditioning economic assistance and development loans on family planning efficiency is the outcome of secret assessments made by the CIA, the National Security Council and other branches of government. For instance, the Director of the CIA once recommended to Congress that food aid be withheld from those countries not willing to embark on aggressive birth control programs.
Another factor that reveals the desperation of leaders in Washington and New York is the type of programs that have been in force during the past decade or so. Today's population program, the book reveals, has assumed the character and magnitude of political warfare campaigns of the 1950s, including secret payments to influence leaders in target countries, the infiltration of the news media and universities, and, in some places, the systematic intimidation of opponents.
These observations are particularly relevant in light of the growing resistance to Western- imposed birth control schemes that have been seen in many parts of the Southern hemisphere.
In 1991, for instance, the Brazilian national legislature began a series of inquiries into sterilization campaigns paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The parliamentary investigation was inaugurated in response to a survey by the health ministry that revealed alarmingly high levels of female surgical sterilization in the country, along with public disclosure of a series of confidential memoranda written at the highest levels of the U.S. government while Henry Kissinger headed the National Security Council. These so-called "Kissinger Papers" declassified the year before, revealed that the purpose of the American population program in Brazil was to contain Brazil's growing demographic and political strength and to reserve certain "strategic and critical" minerals for U.S. military and industrial use. A series of depositions taken at the time of the inquiry by legislator Benedita da Silva found that millions of Brazilian women had been sterilized without their knowledge or consent.
Nigeria is another nation that has seen its share of opposition to coercive birth control programs. After a series of newspaper reports in the early 1990s made known a plan by U.S. government contractors to plant fake theological texts in Islamic teaching centers as a means of subverting the intense opposition to population control in the north of the country, denunciations of the population program became regular events in the media. Just prior to the U.N. population conference in Cairo, a major regional conference on "Islam and Family Planning" in Sokoto State was canceled because of strenuous protests on the part of Nigerian religious leaders.
In Bangladesh, the opposition turned violent when a USAID-sponsored "family planning" event was physically attacked by anti-birth control forces. causing numerous injuries. Several days of street demonstrations against the U.N. population conference succeeded in forcing the Prime Minister to cancel her appearance at the event.
In fact, protests took place in many countries during the weeks just before the global population meeting, prompting several heads of state to boycott the proceedings entirely.
But these open displays ol' resentment are not the only problem that Western- funded population planners have encountered in the developing world. Even where political interference has been less obvious, lack of interest in anti-fertility drugs and devices has hampered efforts to reduce family size. In some places (particularly in Asia where some ol the most aggressive population control efforts have been attempted). Western aid donors have encouraged coercive tactics that have produced a backlash from women's rights groups and health advocates. In several countries, for example, monetary payments are offered to sterilization clients, to service providers who compete against each other to convert new birth control users, and even to "recruiters" and "motivators" who literally earn a living persuading impoverished farm workers and the unemployed to trade their fertility for the sterilization bonus.
Thus the book predicts. "the most important global events occurring during the 21st Century will be, at least to a substantial degree, the result of changes in relative demographic strength between different groups." These changes, it continues. are going to "create a "new world' in which major adjustments will have to be made in the allocation of resources among nations and peoples, the value ol goods and labor in various regions. and the distribution ot political power. Moreover, these adjustments will take place in a world in which people ol color have a far greater voice."
In fact. the stakes are so high—"involving nothing less than control over the world's political institutions and access to all its wealth," in the words of the text— that a wave of outright genocide could soon be a real possibility.
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