I am passing along to the list the year end review of a leading
journalist/geo-political commentator. I have stripped the name off the
review since it is protected by copyright. The mix of observations brings
some hope and some despair but I thought FWers might like to have yet
another "serving" of views and opinion.
arthur
2002: Year-End Review
The past year has been dominated by a US obsession with Iraq which,
remarkably, only seized the Bush administration three long months after the
terrorist attacks on the United States in September, 2001. In my year-end
survey twelve months ago, just after the US occupation of Afghanistan, I
simply wrote that Middle Eastern Muslims were waiting to learn "which of
their countries the United States would hit next: Iraq, Somalia or Sudan."
Washington was clearly looking for a fresh target, but nobody had a clue
which way it was going to jump.
In that sense, the most important event of 2002 was President George W.
Bush's speech in late January in which he announced that he had uncovered an
'axis of evil', and gave Iraq first place. The subsequent months have been
filled with endless speculation about when and how the US would attack Iraq,
whether it would go to the United Nations first (it did, in September), and
whether it would give the UN arms inspectors time to do their job (which
remains to be seen) -- but it all distracted the US public's attention
through a year of recession and corporate scandals, and gave control of the
Senate back to the Republican Party in the November Congressional elections.
Whatever the original motives for the choice of Iraq, the project now has an
almost unstoppable momentum within the introverted world of Washington
politics, and the Bush administration almost certainly will attack Iraq,
probably in the next few months. But the weird thing about 2002 is that the
international news has been virtually monopolised by a non-event. There has
been no fighting in the Middle East apart from the familiar cycle of
violence between Israelis and Palestinians, and no regimes have toppled.
Indeed, nothing tangible has yet changed in the region, apart from a gradual
increase in the usual pace of US and British bombing in Iraq's 'no-fly
zones'.
The terrorists haven't been very busy either, or at least not the ones who
are the primary concern of the US 'war on terror'. As usual, terrorists
killed thousands of people in places like Colombia and Nepal, in guerilla
wars that barely make it into the mainstream media. Many hundreds died in
terrorist attacks in Israel and Russia, countries fighting wars against
Muslim subject peoples that have managed to hitch their local struggles to
Washington's global crusade. But barely two hundred Westerners were killed
by terrorists in 2002, most of them in one attack in Bali -- and hardly any
of them were Americans. Things may change dramatically once the US attack
on Iraq gets underway, but in 2002 the allegedly "titanic struggle between
good and evil" (in Mr Bush's words) has been a phony war for both sides.
Almost unnoticed amidst all the media hype about coming events, there was
dramatic progress in closing down the real wars that have been ravaging
whole regions and killing huge numbers of people. First came the
27-year-old Angolan civil war, which suddenly ended in April after the rebel
leader Jonas Savimbi, was caught in an ambush and killed. Next, in July,
there was a breakthrough in peace negotiations in Africa's oldest war,
between the Arabised Muslim northerners and southern, mostly Christian
Africans of Sudan.
There is not yet a definitive ceasefire in Sudan, but a war that has killed
two million people over 33 years finally seems to be subsiding. Then, still
in July, a peace agreement in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly
Zaire) ended what has been called 'Africa's First World War'. Most of the
six foreign armies have already gone home, and the fighting that caused over
two million Congolese deaths in four years has subsided to sporadic
outbreaks of banditry.
The miracles then moved east, to the two longest-running wars in Asia. In
September the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam dropped their demand for a
separate state for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, opening the way for
negotiations to end the 19-year war that has devastated the island nation.
In December, Indonesia signed a peace deal with the separatist rebels of
Aceh in northern Sumatra, ending a 26-year war by granting the provincial
governments of the region a 70 percent share in Aceh's oil and gas revenues.
Also in December, the Tutsi-dominated government of Burundi signed a
power-sharing agreement with the largest of the Hutu opposition groups which
offers gives the Central African country its best chance for peace since
1963.
There was bad news, too: a new civil war broke out in once-stable Ivory
Coast in September, and the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, gaining strength by
the month, threatens to produce a new Year Zero in that impoverished and
misgoverned country. But from fifteen wars only five years ago, Africa is
now down to only three or four (depending on whether Sudan is really over),
and Asia is down to just three (in Nepal, Kashmir and the southern
Philippines). Even allowing for one civil war in the Arab world (Algeria)
and one in Latin America (Colombia), the world is a more peaceful place this
month than it has been at any time since September, 1939.
More peaceful, but far from out of the woods. The most terrifying
confrontation of the past year was the summer stand-off between India and
Pakistan, two newly fledged nuclear powers that have fought each other three
times already. If they were to do so again, using their new weapons, the
death toll would exceed the total losses in all the other wars of the past
ten years in a matter of days. New Delhi and Islamabad have stepped back
from the crisis for the moment, but huge armies still face each other across
the border and the Kashmir dispute is a permanent irritant.
Similar anxieties haunted the Korean peninsula, where North Korea's
desperately poor and isolated Communist regime began talking up its nuclear
weapons programme, probably in the hope of shaking some extra aid loose.
Paradoxically, that may have helped Roh Moo-hyun to win the December
presidential election in South Korea on a platform of reconciliation with
the North, which will make for difficult relations between Seoul and
Washington. But in the main, Asia just got on about its business.
After almost a year's hesitation, China's 76-year-old ruler, Jiang Zemin,
decided to hand the presidency on to his designated successor Hu Jintao at
the Party Congress in November, but behind the scenes he remains very much
in control. Earlier in the year, Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir
Mohamad, also 76, told his party congress that he, too, would be retiring
soon (after more than 20 years in power). The main difference was that Dr.
Mahathir may actually mean it. And the release from house arrest in May of
Burma's democratic icon, Aung Sang Suu Kyi, suggested that the military
regime that has devoted the past forty years to plundering the country may
finally be ready to make a deal.
The principal theme in Europe this year was expansion -- of NATO, to take in
most of the former Warsaw Pact countries that escaped from Soviet control in
1989, but above all of the European Union. After months of cliff-hanging
negotiations and a second referendum in Ireland (the Irish had given the
wrong answer the first time), the 15 EU countries showed up at the
Copenhagen summit in December and promised to take in ten new members in
2004 -- Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Hungary, Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus -- followed by Romania and Bulgaria in
2007.
More importantly, they gave Muslim Turkey a promise to review its case for
entry in late 2004, and to open negotiations for Turkish membership soon
afterwards if its human rights performance continued to improve. Given that
Turkey's population will be bigger than any existing member's by 2020, some
EU countries were reluctant to make this promise, but in the end the EU
decided that it was not just a Christian club and the newly elected
Islamic government of Turkey, whose leaders call themselves 'Muslim
Democrats', was given an incentive to keep its promises about preserving a
secular, democratic state. As a bonus, Ankara will push the
Turkish-Cypriots to join with the Greek-Cypriots in a reunited Cyprus before
the island enters the EU in 2004.
For the rest, it was the usual heavy traffic of national elections in a
continent of almost fifty countries, including a bad case of tactical voting
in France that unexpectedly catapulted neo-fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen
into a run-off with President Jacques Chirac in June. (Chirac won by a
margin of four-to-one.) In the Netherlands, right-wing maverick Pym Fortuyn
was assassinated only days before the May election, sweeping his
single-issue anti-immigrant party into the new coalition government on a
massive sympathy vote (but the leaderless party was disintegrating by year's
end). In.Germany, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder narrowly won another
four-year term in September by promising Germans not to take part in Mr
Bush's planned war against Iraq.
The Basque terrorists started bombing again in Spain, but the 'November 17'
urban guerilla group was finally broken in Greece after 23 murders in 27
years. The dust continued to settle in the Balkans, and former Serbian
dictator Slobodan Milosevic spent much of the year before a war crimes
tribunal in the Hague. Most of the continent's larger economies grew very
slowly, but beyond almost universal grumbling about the new currency, the
euro, Europe's discontents remained manageable.
In the Middle East, the steady US march towards war with Iraq terrified most
local governments. The region remained at peace except for the low-level
Israeli-Palestinian violence and the decade-old mutual slaughter between
Islamists and the military-backed regime in Algeria, but not a single Arab
regime was confident that it could contain the potentially huge social and
political upheavals that might be unleashed by an American invasion of Iraq.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, on the other hand, thought it was a
wonderful idea, and warmly urged Washington along.
Africa, though it is gradually emerging from its equivalent to Europe's
Thirty Years' War, continued to labour under almost every other handicap
imaginable. Encroaching famines put the lives of millions at risk both in
southern Africa and far to the north in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Out of 30
million Africans living with HIV/Aids, only thirty thousand have access to
anti-retroviral drugs; the rest are condemned to an early death. In South
Africa, one in nine deaths is due to murder.
Some of the 'big men' who blighted Africa's first post-independence
generation are fading away at last -- Kenya's Daniel arap Moi allowed power
to pass peacefully to the opposition in democratic elections in December --
but others, like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, cling fiercely to office even if
it means the ruin of all their previous achievements. (Unnoticed by most of
the world, Namibia's Sam Nujoma seemed to be setting out down the same path
as 2002 unfolded.) As Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo pointed out in
June, corrupt African leaders have stolen at least $140 billion from their
peoples in the decades since independence, and it's not over yet. But at
least the wars are ending.
In Latin America there are no wars (apart from Colombia) and the poverty
most people experience is not so absolute, but the sense of having been
cheated is even more acute. Even where the neo-liberal promises of rapid
economic growth came true, they meant little improvement in the lives of the
poor or even the middle class; they just made the rich even richer. So
Argentina's economic meltdown in December, 2001, led not only to a
revolving-door presidency (five presidents in two weeks) and popular
revulsion against the whole traditional political class. It was also the
starting gun for a wave of political upheavals that is sweeping South
America.
The first crisis, an unsuccessful US-backed attempt in April to overthrow
the continent's one existing left-wing leader, President Hugo Chavez of
Venezuela, was notable for the speed with which the poorest section of the
population came to his defence despite his failure to improve their economic
plight. That was followed by the imposition of a state of emergency in
Paraguay and widespread looting and bank closures in Uruguay in July, and an
electoral upset in Bolivia in August that gave over a third of the seats to
candidates of Indian descent and brought Evo Morales, leader of the Movement
Towards Socialism, to within a hair's breadth of the presidency.
Then in quick succession came the victory of Workers' Party leader Luiz
Inacio da Silva ('Lula) in the October presidential elections in Brazil;
populist Lucio Gutierrez's capture of the presidency in Ecuador's November
elections, less than two year after he was jailed for leading an attempted
leftist coup; and a renewed confrontation between Hugo Chavez and
Venezuela's right-wing white elite that halted oil exports from one of
America's largest suppliers in December. Almost half of Latin America's
people now live under populist left-wing governments, and Argentina is
likely to swell their ranks after the March elections. While the Bush
administration has been focussing obsessively on the Middle East, it has
lost control of its own back yard.
The United States remains the great conundrum of the planet. Americans have
been so traumatised by a single large terrorist attack on their own soil
that they have effectively handed the country over to an administration with
a radical right-wing agenda for domestic change and foreign expansion,
though fewer than a quarter of them actually voted for it. The question is
whether the American people can recover their balance without having to go
through some painful and expensive, though ultimately instructive
experiences in the Middle East. The answer, at the moment, appears to be
no, so a great deal of the rest of the world's business is being put on
hold.
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