Excellent, Arthur!
Straight into my archives.
Harry
-------Original Message-------
Date: Friday, January
17, 2003 8:29:03 AM
Subject: [Futurework]
another overview
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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