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Author’s Preface
 The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,
- so the ancient Chinese saying [Lao-tze
of China, the “Old Master”, circa 604 – 531 BC, reputed founder of
Taoism.] has
it, - and thus in April 2004, I embark on an attempt to place on paper my
considered thoughts on a life that has involved about two million miles of
air travel to over 70 countries in all Continents (except Antarctica), and
also to the islands of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans. The
fields of service varied from the Caspian Sea in west central Asia, to
Lake Titicaca in the Andes Mountains, and from the palm fringed shores of
the Coral Sea at Papua New Guinea, to the barren islands of Cape Verde in
the Atlantic ocean three hundred miles off the coast of West Africa. I
have argued the case for socially just, sustainable development, at
innumerable meetings, in the ivory towers of the World Bank and ADB, and
in the United Nations Agencies, as well as in the mud huts of African
villages, and in bamboo houses on poles above tidal areas in the
Indo-Pacific.
When I was appointed as an Assistant Professor by the
University of Rhode Island USA, in 1967, (just 12 years after leaving
school on my 15th birthday, and starting work on the family
fishing boat), an Aberdeen TV journalist remarked on his local magazine
programme, - “did he think at 15 years of age when he packed his canvas
baggie and headed for the boat that first day, that it would lead to this”
? Well, I certainly did not. However, I believe my real career in
global fisheries development and management did not blossom till 1973 when
I was sent by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation to the
vast, mystical and populous land of Indonesia to manage one of the UN’s
most ambitious fishery projects. The fisheries work will naturally colour
most of the accounts in this book, as will my Scottish roots and
background, but what I trust readers will find most interesting are the
observations on life and events that occurred during those past sixty
years, and some selected community memories that stretch farther back.
Apart from what I gleaned from history, from the press and
the media, and personal observations on world events, I have always had an
interest in how ordinary people view these matters, and how they make
sense of our amazing participation in the beautiful, perplexing, and
sometimes frightening reality of life. These ordinary persons have been
Scottish and Irish fishermen, housewives, teachers, African peasants,
Russian students, World Bank economists, political prisoners, mission
workers, military personnel, refugees, Arabs and Israelis, Sinhalese and
Tamils, Chinese and Malays, academics and politicians, conformists and
radicals, hippies and drop-outs, religious zealots, agnostics, secular
humanists, musicians, writers and poets. The list of those I have been
privileged to come in contact with, and to learn from, is as broad and as
rich as life’s tapestry itself.
I have tried to reflect their views, concerns and
aspirations honestly and without prejudice. If I give special weight to
some, it is because their contributions have come out of deep suffering, -
out of painful years of affliction or oppression or from the grinding
mills of poverty and hardship. I think of esteemed late friends and
colleagues who were survivors of Passchendaele and Ypres, of wartime
ghettos and concentration camps, of poverty and unemployment during the
depression, of the holocaust, the killing fields, of the refugee camps, of
Robin Island or Muntinlupa prison, or of personal and family struggles
with ill-health and misfortune. As my dear late friend, Peter Buchan, the
fisherman poet, described them, they are, “the folk wi’ the wind in
their face, a’ their mortal days”.
In addition to the world-view of a range of persons across
the globe, I have commented on some of the world’s leaders and major
political events. I went to Africa at the tail end of the era of the
British Empire, and was recruited by the Technical Cooperation Department
of the Colonial Office. On my first African assignment I observed
first-hand the transition from Colonial rule to self-government to full
independence, former Northern Rhodesia becoming the state of Zambia under
President Kaunda. I saw over the border in Southern Rhodesia / Zimbabwe,
the seeds of indifference and inaction on gross inequalities in ownership
of land, being sown by the Smith regime and the UK Government, that would
give rise to the brutality of Mugabe’s later rule.
The early 1960’s period also covered the era of Belgian
withdrawal from the Congo, the Katanga secession under Moise Tshombe, the
death of Dag Hammarskjöld in an apparently engineered plane crash, and the
abominable U.S. choice of Mobutu to lead the new country of Zaire (the
Congo). South Africa continued to be governed by the apartheid
regime of Afrikaans whites, oblivious to basic human justice and to world
opinion.
I was working in the United States when Martin Luther King
and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. That was during the period of
campus protests against the Vietnam war, the rise of the hippy culture,
and the election of Richard Nixon as President. As I was familiar with
the names of all the Nixon Cabinet, I later took a deep interest in the
Watergate affair, watching the hearings on television, reading every book
on the subject, and even staying a night in the Howard Johnson’s motel
(from which the bugging was monitored by the ‘plumbers’ unit)
located across the road from the Watergate complex. Occasional
assignments with the World Bank allowed me to spend time in Washington DC
and to get a flavour of that nation’s capital, and of cultured
international Georgetown, nearby across the Potomac river.
My period of service in Indonesia and the Philippines
allowed me a close glimpse of the strong-man rules of Presidents Soeharto
and Ferdinand Marcos. It also provided a view of the corruption and
nepotism prevalent in much of the developing world. Almost as interesting
as the presidents mentioned, was the behaviour and amassing of wealth by
their wives, Tien Soeharto and Imelda Marcos. I was in the region when
Benigno Aquino was denied election as Governor of Manila (by blatant
manipulation), and when he was murdered on his return to the Philippines,
and when the peaceful ‘people’s revolution’ took place, effectively
removing Marcos from power.
Some years were spent in Rome, Italy, and while enjoying
that experience, I never failed to be fascinated by the political
movements varying all the way from fascism to communism to anarchist
groups, and the Italians’ unfailing capacity to bring a semblance of order
out of the seeming chaos. I happened to be in Rome the day Pope John Paul
ll was shot by Mehmet Ali Agca, and I used to visit a family near the
Adriatic coast where they lived next door to the high security prison
where Agca was incarcerated.
As a young teenager I spent a summer
holiday
in the south of Ireland with a wonderful elderly lady, a niece of the
Irish MP of the early 1900’s, John Redmond. She had taught music to the
family of the Emperor and Empress in the Hoffburg Palace in Vienna
Austria, before the first World War. To a 14 year-old Scottish boy in
1954, Vienna was on the other side of the moon, and I sadly took little
note of her tales and accounts of that period, but to my surprise, in 1986
when on an assignment for the United Nations Industrial Development
Organisation located in Vienna, I was to visit the Hoffburg Palace often
to see a friend who worked there for the Austrian Foreign Ministry.
During the later period of the Vietnam War, and the time of
the horrendous killing fields regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, I was
working in S.E. Asia. I came to know and assist in small ways, some of
the “boat people” who fled Vietnam and spent years in refugee camps in the
Philippines and other parts of the region. Later I spent a memorable year
in Vietnam, working with its fine, serious and industrious people. One of
the friends I had in Hanoi was among the last group of children to escape
from South Vietnam when hostilities ended. He returned 25 years later as
a successful businessman, determined to help his country’s return to
economic prosperity. I was greatly honoured to be asked by FAO and the ADB,
a few years after Pol Pot died, to lead a development project to design,
and later to implement, management of the rich but vulnerable fisheries of
the Great Lake of Tonle Sap, and the Mekong River. It was an enriching
and encouraging experience to see the people of Cambodia rebuild their
land despite its blood-stained past, and conserve its natural resources
for the benefit of the whole nation.
Observations in regions and territories that had been
ravaged by war, and conclusions on the impacts of these conflicts,
confirmed and increased my deep abhorrence of military actions, and my
serious doubts about the wisdom and the true motivation of those who
commit their countries forces to war and bloodshed. In these conclusions
I found to my surprise, I was supported by many former generals and senior
military officers, writers and war correspondents, as well as by the
world’s greatest pacifists. (Practically none of the politicians and
diplomats in the USA and UK who agressively promoted the Iraq war, had
ever served in combat themselves, and none of them or their most ardent
supporters would send their own sons to die in that conflict.) My
anti-war views were naturally shared by civilians who had suffered
terribly, but also by serving soldiers and airmen, many of whom recalled
their active service duties with extreme dislike. I received such
personal accounts from soldiers, sailors and airmen who served in the 1st
and 2nd world wars, (on both sides), and ones who fought in Korea,
Vietnam, Iraq, and other scenes of conflict.
The madness of war and its brutalising effect on combatants
was in stark contrast to the nobility and magnanimity displayed by its
innocent victims. I found similar attitudes among those who endured
oppression or injustice. The courage and integrity of unnamed and
unrecognised heroes and heroines in the wastelands of man’s inhumanity
resembled delicate flowers blooming in the desert. Individuals I knew or
met, who were survivors of the Holocaust, the killing fields, the
apartheid regime, or of one of the numerous brutal dictatorships,
often had a beauty of character, and a serenity of soul, despite all they
endured. It was, as Solzhenitsyn [The
Gulag Archipelago, volume 3, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Harper & Row,
1978]
described the triumph of human spirits against impossible odds, “poetry
under a tombstone, truth under a stone”.
From these and many other experiences in different parts of
the globe, I have compiled a simple patchwork quilt of reflections,
impressions and observations. I dare to hope that readers might find them
entertaining, enlightening or even amusing in parts, and perhaps glean
some encouragement for present times, and hope for the future. |
