Mr. Maurice Iwu’s inability to deliver the governor’s mansion in Abia and Lagos states to the PDP should not be seen as indicators of proper conduct. After all, Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo, who Mr. Iwu believes he serves was quite interested in capturing both governorship positions in his do-or-die resolve. In Abia state his lackey, Mr. Onyema Ugochukwu was well-positioned for the trophy. Lagos itself was Mr. Obasanjo’s last appearance to campaign before he retired to his farm in close-by Ota to await the outcome of the charade that he choreographed.
Mr. Obasanjo was simply out-rigged in Abia by Mr. Orji Uzo Kalu. Mr. Kalu has used the outcome of Mr. Iwu’s charade to prove again that he could successfully stand up to Mr. Obsasanjo’s bullying. If you recall, Mr. Kalu has been unrelenting in his open castigation of Mr. Obasanjo. He even called his bluff over all. When Obasanjo sent Mr. Ribadu after Kalu and his mother, the latter successfully used his own thugs to fight the EFCC thugs off. Not only that he contested as a presidential candidate, he is still walking about unmolested by Mr. Ribadu and his thugs.
Mr. Obasanjo may also have been out-rigged in Lagos by Mr. Bola Ahmed Tinubu who delivered the governorship to his new party the AC. But when you find that Mr. Obasanjo’s PDP was prevented from laying hands on any of the state and National Assembly seats in Lagos, you’d perhaps attribute that to Tinubu’s access to funds beyond his state’s allocation from Obasanjo’s central government. He put those funds to good use, which is why he was able to out-rig the PDP in Lagos too.
The lessons in Abia and Lagos do not portend good at all for the evolution of democratic governance in Nigeria. However, they are proof that even dictators too can be out-done in their own games.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Food For Thought
Former CIA director, George J. Tenet disclosed yesterday that US president George W. Bush is not adequately informed by public servants whose job positions and job details obligate them to. That disclosure in itself is quite damning. The US, in deed, the world has been paying dearly for that failure on the part of the public servants who surround Bush. The big puzzle in this disclosure is: Is this state of affairs not the concomitant outcome of a situation when a position of authority and power is occupied by an individual who lacks the sharp mind necessary for asking specific questions and insisting on hard facts as answers?
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Another Scary “Slam Dunk” from Mr. Tenet
Al-Qaeda has responded to the U.S. intelligence focus on young Arab men as potential risks, he says, by recruiting "jihadists with different backgrounds. I am convinced the next major attack against the United States may well be conducted by people with Asian or African faces, not the ones that many Americans are alert to."--The Washington Post, Saturday April 28, 2007.
The excerpt above is from a Washington Post story on former CIA director, George J. Tenet who is once again in the news because of his book, At the Center of the Storm, slated for release Monday, April 30 by HarperCollins. One of Mr. Tenet’s preoccupations in his book as well as all the promotional interviews—including the one he gave to CBS’s 60 Minutes, which will air tomorrow evening—is the imminence of future acts of terror here in the US by al-Qaeda.
That, in itself is not scary. Al-Qaeda founder, Osama Bin Laden who is presumed to still be alive hasn’t for even once indicated in any of the video and other messages that he has released on the World Wide Web or through Al Jazeera television that his terror organization was going to back down on their terror campaign. The scare in Mr. Tenet’s assertion is encapsulated in the fact that the US intelligence establishment has rendered itself incapable of countering the menace that al-Qaeda represents. It has done that by allowing the typical American bias for cultures and things unfamiliar to color its perceptions and judgments.
Listen to Mr. Tenet again: “I am convinced the next major attack against the United States may well be conducted by people with Asian or African faces, not the ones that many Americans are alert to”! When you see that this rock-solid conviction is based solely on al-Qaeda’s shift to recruit “jihadists with different backgrounds” in response to US intelligence “focus on young Arab men as potential risks” one cannot but marvel. If this man, Mr. Tenet is incapable of realizing that al-Qaeda’s recruitment of jihadists hasn’t been restricted to Arabs, Asians, and Africans, there is indeed serious cause for worry.
Ever since the September 11, 2001 attacks on America, and the declaration of the war on terrorism the same year by the Bush White House, people of all races have been implicated in al-Qaeda’s or related cause. These include American citizens who were born and raised here on American soil. Recall John Walker Lindh who was captured in Afghanistan fighting in the ranks of the Taliban? Another, Ryan Anderson, a member of the National Guard in Washington State was caught in a sting in 2004. There’s yet another! He’s name is Adam Gadahn, born in the state of Oregon, 28 years ago and he converted to Islam when he was seventeen years old. Known in al-Qaeda as Azzam al-Amriki (Azzam the American), this person who holds membership in al-Qaeda’s media committee is a senior cadre. He is said to be hiding with Bin Laden and others in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region. He has been implicated in five different videos addressed specifically to the US—see The New Yorker magazine, January 22, 2007.
Do you now see the scare in Mr. Tenet, the man who is reputed as one of the actors who made US president George W. Bush affirm his determination to invade Iraq with his “slam dunk” statement? The Washington Post said that in his book, Mr. Tenet confessed that “he and others sometimes failed to give Bush the information he needed”. His take in the excerpt above indicates that the inability to deal with integrity is not the only lapse he has. He’s obviously a xenophobe. If people like him remain in America’s intelligence and policy making establishments, then Asians and Africans will be unduly profiled in the endless war on terror. But the sad thing about that is that it will leave American still vulnerable if terrorists acquire Caucasian physique.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Mr. George J. Tenet
The story in The New York Times today, April 27, 2007 that former CIA director, Mr. George J. Tenet has used his book billed to be published Monday by HarperCollins to accuse particularly Vice President Dick Cheney—and others in the Bush White House—of rushing America to war in Iraq without a “serious debate” is hardly news. That fact is well known here and abroad. Mr. Cheney himself has neither denied nor apologized for his role in the rush to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussien. Mr. Tenet’s accusation is yet another confirmatory pointer to the credibility problem that every one of all the powerful players in the Bush White who are associated with the invasion of Iraq will carry for the rest of their lives.
This 549-page book, that he entitled: At the Center of the Storm, which the Times described as: “By turns accusatory, defensive, and modestly self-critical” may not be sufficient to put out Mr. Tenet apart from the others who were in the center of what is seen by many people as a wrong war. He is insisting that his “slam dunk” “remark about the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction” was put out of context by a White House that was already braced itself up to invade Iraq when he made it.
If Mr. Tenet has been listening attentively to stories of Mr. Paul D. Wolfowitz’s travails at the World Bank he will no doubt take time off to ponder that his own future in any public service capacity may not be starkly different. After his retirement from the CIA, Mr. Tenet got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he says in the book that he was “not at all sure I wanted to accept” from Mr. Bush, and he has now got $4 million dollars advance for his book from HarperCollins. Meanwhile the war in Iraq rages on.
This 549-page book, that he entitled: At the Center of the Storm, which the Times described as: “By turns accusatory, defensive, and modestly self-critical” may not be sufficient to put out Mr. Tenet apart from the others who were in the center of what is seen by many people as a wrong war. He is insisting that his “slam dunk” “remark about the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction” was put out of context by a White House that was already braced itself up to invade Iraq when he made it.
If Mr. Tenet has been listening attentively to stories of Mr. Paul D. Wolfowitz’s travails at the World Bank he will no doubt take time off to ponder that his own future in any public service capacity may not be starkly different. After his retirement from the CIA, Mr. Tenet got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he says in the book that he was “not at all sure I wanted to accept” from Mr. Bush, and he has now got $4 million dollars advance for his book from HarperCollins. Meanwhile the war in Iraq rages on.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Gyrating on His Daddy’s Empty Grave
I have never met Ken Wiwa, the son of the late Ken Saro-Wiwa in person. But I sensed something awkward about him a few years ago when I read his memoir, In the Shadow of A Saint: A Son’s Journey to Understand His Father’s Legacy. That awkward thing was the feeling that in spite of the book he still seemed clueless about that legacy, which his father who was hanged November 10, 1995 by the then Nigerian dictator, Sani Abacha on trumped-up charges created through his activist quest for justice for his nationality, the Ogoni and left behind.
The late Saro-Wiwa was a genuine activist who came through the ranks and kept growing all the way in his quest for justice and equal treatment for his Ogoni nationality. Up until his life was snuffed out in the noose that fateful day, he didn’t recant his conviction that the Nigerian supra-national state as it’s currently structured cannot deliver justice, fair play, talk less of economic, social and political development to the nationalities that were made to constitute it.
In the review piece that I wrote on the young Ken Wiwa’s book for an irregular column that I used to write in TheNews magazine, Lagos, I still recall mentioning that the young Wiwa appeared in the book to be on a celebrity chasing mission as opposed to a quest to understand his late activist father’s legacy.
Well, I confirmed that feeling as fact Monday this week after I read a story in the New York Times on Mr. Musa Yar’Adua, who as Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo’s hand-picked successor as the president of Nigeria emerged the “winner” of what has been roundly condemned by local and international observers as the worst election that they have seen in their lives. My jaw dropped when a read a quote by Mr. Ken Wiwa, who was described as Mr. Yar’Ardua’s spokesman in which he brushed aside complaints about the unparalleled fraud, violence, etc. that characterized the exercise as baseless: “The elections are over. We’re now faced with moving Nigeria forward”, he was quoted to have said.
It’s been awhile since it was announced that the young Ken Wiwa had been appointed an adviser by Mr. Obasanjo. Some people, including me thought at the time that the young man would be hesitant to let Mr. Obasanjo who has refused to even oblige him the demand to exhume his late father’s bones from the mass grave where he was dumped with the other eight Ogoni activists after they were hanged by Abacha and his regime for proper burial, to placate him with a sweet appointment. To the fact that the grave where he performed funeral rites on for his late father is still hollow. One didn’t have the least suspicion that he accepted the appointment quite alright and was only kept waiting in the flanks for this moment when he’d be used to play a normalization role for Mr. Obasanjo. Come to think of it, young Ken Wiwa will do so in what will obviously become a regime that lacks legitimacy, and is headed by one of those his late father fought till death for inflicting environmental degradation and poverty on the Ogoni even as they siphon away enormous oil wealth from under their homestead, farmlands, creeks, and waterways.
If young Ken Wiwa’s new role is his way of continuing the quest for self-definition that he mentioned somewhere in his book as a pre-occupation that has always tugged his conscience, well, he certainly has betrayed his late father’s activist challenge to the forces that despoil the Ogoni environment and keep them poor! Guilt should tug at that conscience of his too. Even in the mass grave where his bones lay, Ken Saro-Wiwa will find space to roil in discomfort over his son’s choice to gyrate atop the empty grave that his son is satisfied with as his father's final resting place. The consolation in this, is that the late activist's bones are safely elsewhere.
The late Saro-Wiwa was a genuine activist who came through the ranks and kept growing all the way in his quest for justice and equal treatment for his Ogoni nationality. Up until his life was snuffed out in the noose that fateful day, he didn’t recant his conviction that the Nigerian supra-national state as it’s currently structured cannot deliver justice, fair play, talk less of economic, social and political development to the nationalities that were made to constitute it.
In the review piece that I wrote on the young Ken Wiwa’s book for an irregular column that I used to write in TheNews magazine, Lagos, I still recall mentioning that the young Wiwa appeared in the book to be on a celebrity chasing mission as opposed to a quest to understand his late activist father’s legacy.
Well, I confirmed that feeling as fact Monday this week after I read a story in the New York Times on Mr. Musa Yar’Adua, who as Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo’s hand-picked successor as the president of Nigeria emerged the “winner” of what has been roundly condemned by local and international observers as the worst election that they have seen in their lives. My jaw dropped when a read a quote by Mr. Ken Wiwa, who was described as Mr. Yar’Ardua’s spokesman in which he brushed aside complaints about the unparalleled fraud, violence, etc. that characterized the exercise as baseless: “The elections are over. We’re now faced with moving Nigeria forward”, he was quoted to have said.
It’s been awhile since it was announced that the young Ken Wiwa had been appointed an adviser by Mr. Obasanjo. Some people, including me thought at the time that the young man would be hesitant to let Mr. Obasanjo who has refused to even oblige him the demand to exhume his late father’s bones from the mass grave where he was dumped with the other eight Ogoni activists after they were hanged by Abacha and his regime for proper burial, to placate him with a sweet appointment. To the fact that the grave where he performed funeral rites on for his late father is still hollow. One didn’t have the least suspicion that he accepted the appointment quite alright and was only kept waiting in the flanks for this moment when he’d be used to play a normalization role for Mr. Obasanjo. Come to think of it, young Ken Wiwa will do so in what will obviously become a regime that lacks legitimacy, and is headed by one of those his late father fought till death for inflicting environmental degradation and poverty on the Ogoni even as they siphon away enormous oil wealth from under their homestead, farmlands, creeks, and waterways.
If young Ken Wiwa’s new role is his way of continuing the quest for self-definition that he mentioned somewhere in his book as a pre-occupation that has always tugged his conscience, well, he certainly has betrayed his late father’s activist challenge to the forces that despoil the Ogoni environment and keep them poor! Guilt should tug at that conscience of his too. Even in the mass grave where his bones lay, Ken Saro-Wiwa will find space to roil in discomfort over his son’s choice to gyrate atop the empty grave that his son is satisfied with as his father's final resting place. The consolation in this, is that the late activist's bones are safely elsewhere.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
The Monkey's Fateful Day in the Marketplace
“One day be one day when monkey go go market i no go return” (It will be on a fateful day that the monkey will not return from a trip to the marketplace) is common pidgin English wise crack amongst Nigerians. The shame that Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo made of what should have been general elections that were meant to usher in a successor government to the one he currently heads has sufficiently qualified him as the proverbial monkey mentioned above. His brazen violation of all decency in his style of governance during the past eight years has brought him to the proverbial day when he wouldn’t return from the marketplace. The elections that he manipulated so assiduously from the outset have produced a “win” for his PDP. But it has rightly been roundly condemned by all local and international observers. The condemnation has been so extensive that three days after Mr. Umar Yar’Adua who he hand-picked to run on the PDP platform was declared the winner by the largely discredited INEC, not even a single message of congratulation has come his way from any world leader.
Mr. Obasanjo is the deep-dyed dictator who has straddled and frustrated genuine socio-political evolution amongst the peoples of Nigeria in the periods 1976-1979 and 1999-2007. But he has no doubt out-played his hands this time. The feeble excuses he has been making about the inherent imperfections in elections conducted on Nigerian-type societies haven’t gotten any traction at all. The swift manner with which the National Assembly jettisoned the emergency rule extension that he imposed a few days ago on Ekiti state is clear signal that his return from the marketplace is not imminent. He should indeed be sent back to his Temperance Farms at Ota from there. The Senate’s prompt vote of confidence on its President Kenechukwu Nnamani who Mr. Obasanjo sent his upstart Information Minister, Mr. Frank Nweke to vilify for his condemnation of the flawed electoral exercise, is another pointer to the fact of his long day in the marketplace. There’s no doubt that Mr. Nweke’s act was meant to intimidate the National Assembly.
The National Assembly must not hesitate to accord Mr. Obasanjo an underserved reprieve at all. Mr. Obasanjo’s extended stay in the marketplace is indicative of his exhausted arrogance and bluster. This is the time to embark on a comprehensive legislative effort to ensure that Mr. Yar’Adua’s illegitimate victory is not actualized. That effort could begin with an immediate scrutiny of the flawed elections to find the proper way to invalidate them. If that proper way will lead to fresh elections, they must be organized by a restructured INEC without Mr. Maurice Iwu, who has established his bone fide as Mr. Obasanjo’s baggage man. That proper way must also include the ouster of Mr. Ribadu from the EFCC or any public establishment that he may have been sent to by Mr. Obasanjo.
Those will not be all. There’s everything wrong with Nigeria as it is presently structured. The unresolved question of state building in what exists as Nigeria must be tabled and resolved once and for all by the nationalities. The logic must be to ensure that Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo is that last dictator that walks Nigeria’s political landscape.
Mr. Obasanjo is the deep-dyed dictator who has straddled and frustrated genuine socio-political evolution amongst the peoples of Nigeria in the periods 1976-1979 and 1999-2007. But he has no doubt out-played his hands this time. The feeble excuses he has been making about the inherent imperfections in elections conducted on Nigerian-type societies haven’t gotten any traction at all. The swift manner with which the National Assembly jettisoned the emergency rule extension that he imposed a few days ago on Ekiti state is clear signal that his return from the marketplace is not imminent. He should indeed be sent back to his Temperance Farms at Ota from there. The Senate’s prompt vote of confidence on its President Kenechukwu Nnamani who Mr. Obasanjo sent his upstart Information Minister, Mr. Frank Nweke to vilify for his condemnation of the flawed electoral exercise, is another pointer to the fact of his long day in the marketplace. There’s no doubt that Mr. Nweke’s act was meant to intimidate the National Assembly.
The National Assembly must not hesitate to accord Mr. Obasanjo an underserved reprieve at all. Mr. Obasanjo’s extended stay in the marketplace is indicative of his exhausted arrogance and bluster. This is the time to embark on a comprehensive legislative effort to ensure that Mr. Yar’Adua’s illegitimate victory is not actualized. That effort could begin with an immediate scrutiny of the flawed elections to find the proper way to invalidate them. If that proper way will lead to fresh elections, they must be organized by a restructured INEC without Mr. Maurice Iwu, who has established his bone fide as Mr. Obasanjo’s baggage man. That proper way must also include the ouster of Mr. Ribadu from the EFCC or any public establishment that he may have been sent to by Mr. Obasanjo.
Those will not be all. There’s everything wrong with Nigeria as it is presently structured. The unresolved question of state building in what exists as Nigeria must be tabled and resolved once and for all by the nationalities. The logic must be to ensure that Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo is that last dictator that walks Nigeria’s political landscape.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Guest Post From Naomi Wolf
When I embarked on this project a few weeks ago, it never occurred to me that there would be cause for me to vacate a day's space for a guest. But so far, my experience indicates that the blog is just like any other medium of mass communication: the dynamism of society dictates what gets posted on it. So, I'm constrained to lend my space today to an American citizen, Ms. Naomi Wolf to republish her seminal piece on the Bush administration. The piece which was first carried by the Manchester Guardian today April 24, 2007 deserves extensive play. The piece doesn't necessarily reflect the views of IkengaComments. However, we belong to the school of thought whose adherents believe that George W. Bush and his presidency represent unique phenomena. They are unfolding before everyone's eyes. Would there come a day when Americans would ask: How did all that happen?
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all. Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.
They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise. Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place. At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately. But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution. Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched. In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny. In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone. Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.
6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list. In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list". "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee. "I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution." "That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest. Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list. It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933. Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro-bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job. Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already. The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration. Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.) We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction. Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that. Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone. That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs". What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise. What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now. "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all. Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.
They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise. Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place. At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately. But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution. Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched. In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny. In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone. Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.
6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list. In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list". "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee. "I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution." "That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest. Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list. It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933. Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro-bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job. Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already. The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration. Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.) We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction. Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that. Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone. That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs". What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise. What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now. "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
Monday, April 23, 2007
A Wall in Baghdad
Early in the year it was the announcement of “a surge” of troops to pacify Baghdad. The announced “surge” began quite promptly, and is continuing. But there has been no respite in the deadly violence that unfolds almost daily claiming untoward number of lives in the Iraqi capital ever since US occupation of the country began. Then Saturday came news that as part of its pacification efforts in Baghdad, the US military had started to erect a wall in the middle of the city that will block a Sunni neighborhood from other parts of the city. Although the Bush White insists otherwise, the construction of the wall that takes place only under the cover of darkness is yet another symbolic manifestation of the continuing failure of US occupation of Iraq.
This obvious is beside the other facts about this wall in Baghdad. From the sharp reaction of the Iraqi Prime Minister, Mr. Nuri Kamal al-Maliki who spoke against the wall from a safe distance in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, it does seem like either the decision to build the wall was a unilateral undertaking by the US occupation forces or it was endorsed by Mr. al-Maliki who acted like a puppet and summoned the courage to change his mind when the wall drew opposition from his Shiite benefactors. According to reports, Mr. al-Maliki who spoke in a press conference that he held with Arab League secretary general, Mr. Amr Moussa said: “I oppose the building of the wall, and its construction will stop.” He also insisted that: “There are other methods to protect neighborhoods.”
It is an interesting paradox that the US that stood opposed to the Berlin Wall built by the East Germans with obvious support of the Kremlin during the Cold War would find logic in building a similar edifice somewhere else this time. It will be recalled that for the duration of the Cold War, the US was unequivocal in calling for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. During his tenure as president, Mr. Ronald Reagan made one of his monumental anti-Soviet speeches in West Berlin in what was then West Germany. In that speech he issued his now famous proclamation in which he called on then Soviet leader, “Mr. Gorbachev [to] tear down this wall!”
The Baghdad wall drew instant opposition from all round Iraqi stakeholders not only because of its physical barrier presence but also because of its symbolism as an edifice that demarcates the city by sects. Mr. Moktada al-Sadr’s Movement called it “the first step toward (sic) dividing the regions into cantons and blockading people there”. “Today”, he said, it happens in Adhamiya. Tomorrow it will happen in Sadr City.” He was referring to Mr. al-Sadr’s stronghold in a part of Baghdad. The Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party charged that the wall “will enhance sectarian feelings”, in addition to harming the areas concerned “economically and socially”. In what seems to depict their obvious embarrassment over the idea of building the wall, a spokesman for the US military called it a temporary measure.
When will US President George W. Bush who Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said this morning is in “a state of denial over Iraq” get to grips with reality? Reid who also indicated that “the new Congress will show him the way” to a better Iraq policy have a lot on his hands in that regard.
This obvious is beside the other facts about this wall in Baghdad. From the sharp reaction of the Iraqi Prime Minister, Mr. Nuri Kamal al-Maliki who spoke against the wall from a safe distance in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, it does seem like either the decision to build the wall was a unilateral undertaking by the US occupation forces or it was endorsed by Mr. al-Maliki who acted like a puppet and summoned the courage to change his mind when the wall drew opposition from his Shiite benefactors. According to reports, Mr. al-Maliki who spoke in a press conference that he held with Arab League secretary general, Mr. Amr Moussa said: “I oppose the building of the wall, and its construction will stop.” He also insisted that: “There are other methods to protect neighborhoods.”
It is an interesting paradox that the US that stood opposed to the Berlin Wall built by the East Germans with obvious support of the Kremlin during the Cold War would find logic in building a similar edifice somewhere else this time. It will be recalled that for the duration of the Cold War, the US was unequivocal in calling for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. During his tenure as president, Mr. Ronald Reagan made one of his monumental anti-Soviet speeches in West Berlin in what was then West Germany. In that speech he issued his now famous proclamation in which he called on then Soviet leader, “Mr. Gorbachev [to] tear down this wall!”
The Baghdad wall drew instant opposition from all round Iraqi stakeholders not only because of its physical barrier presence but also because of its symbolism as an edifice that demarcates the city by sects. Mr. Moktada al-Sadr’s Movement called it “the first step toward (sic) dividing the regions into cantons and blockading people there”. “Today”, he said, it happens in Adhamiya. Tomorrow it will happen in Sadr City.” He was referring to Mr. al-Sadr’s stronghold in a part of Baghdad. The Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party charged that the wall “will enhance sectarian feelings”, in addition to harming the areas concerned “economically and socially”. In what seems to depict their obvious embarrassment over the idea of building the wall, a spokesman for the US military called it a temporary measure.
When will US President George W. Bush who Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said this morning is in “a state of denial over Iraq” get to grips with reality? Reid who also indicated that “the new Congress will show him the way” to a better Iraq policy have a lot on his hands in that regard.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
SHAME!
Democracy is about process. Wherever and whenever that process is abused, violated, altered, or not instituted at all, democracy is harmed. Honest watchers of what has been going on in Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo’s Nigeria will attest that it has been devoid of a process in the true sense of the word. It’s sad that one man alone has spear-headed what has amounted to a free for all violation of what ought to be the electoral process all in the bid to satisfy his bloated ego. Compare what has been underway in Obasanjo’s Nigeria in the name of elections with what has been going on in France and reach your own conclusion. Mr. Obasanjo is obviously satisfied that the script he authored has produced the drama he envisaged. But what he produced is indeed a shameful drama, which is why this medium tells him, SHAME!
Saturday, April 21, 2007
It’s Time to Go, Mr. Wolfowitz
We have ardently followed Mr. Paul D. Wolfowitz’s embattled career at the World Bank. Although his appointment by US President George W. Bush provoked a comparison with the appointment of Robert McNamara by President Lyndon Johnson some years ago in many quarters, many of the Bank’s 7,000 employees in Washington, DC saw it differently from the very outset. One of them who I know disclosed to me during a conversation in the first few months of his presence at the Bank that some of her colleagues had indicated that they would leave specifically because of him. In fact, thereafter, she subsequently confirmed that some of those colleagues including her, did take leave of the Bank.
There is no kidding around the fact that Mr. Wolfowitz is not well like at the Bank by many of its employees in Washington, DC. They simply are averse to what can succinctly be called his ideologically-steeped politics. Mr. Wolfowitz is seen as the manifest presence of George Bush’s worldview at the Bank, and Bank employees don’t seem comfortable with the thought of their president using the powerful trappings of his office to implement that worldview in the name of the Bank. Mr. Wolfowitz played directly into the hands of the employees’ aversion for him by his conduct as soon as he assumed his new job.
Ever since the saga over his role in the transfer of his girlfriend to a position in the US State Department with an unusual pay increase and future promotion broke out, Bank employees have been steadfast in their insistence that his continued presence as president would negatively impact the Bank’s mandate. Just this Wednesday, one of his two deputies, Mr. Graeme Wheeler, told him to his face to resign. There is no doubt at all that Mr. Wheeler speaks for majority of the senior managers and sundry Bank staff. Last week, Mr. Wolfowitz was even booed off the podium by 200 Bank employees when he tried to reason with them in the atrium.
The 24-member executive board is immersed in the bureaucratic wrangle over whether or not he should stay. What is currently underway now seems to be a test of will between that governing body and the Bush White House, which sustains its support for Mr. Wolfowitz. What remains clear here is that but for the big clout that the US wields in the board, Mr. Wolfowitz could have been a goner. In other words, notwithstanding his determination to retain his job, he doesn’t have a viable future at the Bank as president any more. It’s therefore time for him to resign and seek professional fulfillment elsewhere.
There is no kidding around the fact that Mr. Wolfowitz is not well like at the Bank by many of its employees in Washington, DC. They simply are averse to what can succinctly be called his ideologically-steeped politics. Mr. Wolfowitz is seen as the manifest presence of George Bush’s worldview at the Bank, and Bank employees don’t seem comfortable with the thought of their president using the powerful trappings of his office to implement that worldview in the name of the Bank. Mr. Wolfowitz played directly into the hands of the employees’ aversion for him by his conduct as soon as he assumed his new job.
Ever since the saga over his role in the transfer of his girlfriend to a position in the US State Department with an unusual pay increase and future promotion broke out, Bank employees have been steadfast in their insistence that his continued presence as president would negatively impact the Bank’s mandate. Just this Wednesday, one of his two deputies, Mr. Graeme Wheeler, told him to his face to resign. There is no doubt at all that Mr. Wheeler speaks for majority of the senior managers and sundry Bank staff. Last week, Mr. Wolfowitz was even booed off the podium by 200 Bank employees when he tried to reason with them in the atrium.
The 24-member executive board is immersed in the bureaucratic wrangle over whether or not he should stay. What is currently underway now seems to be a test of will between that governing body and the Bush White House, which sustains its support for Mr. Wolfowitz. What remains clear here is that but for the big clout that the US wields in the board, Mr. Wolfowitz could have been a goner. In other words, notwithstanding his determination to retain his job, he doesn’t have a viable future at the Bank as president any more. It’s therefore time for him to resign and seek professional fulfillment elsewhere.
Friday, April 20, 2007
The Danger Ahead in Iraq for the US
America’s defeat in the Vietnam War was cause for profound soul searching in the Pentagon particularly. One of the outcomes of that soul searching was the appointment of the Gates Commission by the Congress to review and recommend an alternative military manpower policy. The thinking in some quarters at the time was that the public oversight that resulted from the draft that furnished the military with which that conflict was prosecuted represented a burden that made it a more difficult war for the US. That was in the sense that American society’s high sensitivity to the high casualty rate in the war eroded public support for the Nixon White House and tied is hands extensively. The Commission’s recommendations for a new military manpower policy well steeped in tenets of the marketplace was meant to by-pass a repeat of such scenario and make things not so difficult for America’s military establishment and its commander-in-chief in future conflicts. When the policy was adopted by the Congress, its outcome is the current all-volunteer force, AVF.
But the paradox of the AFV is that it violated one of the central tenets of raising military manpower by the state since the French Revolution, by detaching national defense from society. The AVF solved what was considered as the problem of public oversight of war prosecution and squarely made it the responsibility of the Pentagon. No one has cared to examine the down side of such a military establishment. For one, it makes military adventures possible and even easy. The mounting casualty rate in Iraq is hardly evident.
Perhaps the invasion and occupation of Iraq might excite such examination. That aside, there is another serious issue inherent in America’s presence in Iraq, which hasn’t attracted the right attention that it deserves. Any serious analyst of military events would discern from the several errors chalked by the White House and the Pentagon under then Defense Secretary, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, on Iraq that planning for the invasion and occupation of Iraq was probably done only on the best case scenario, i.e. successful invasion and occupation. There certainly was no contingency plan for possible withdrawal in the event that the invasion or the occupation failed.
Even in dreamland, only few people will imagine that a mega power like the US will insert its enormous military machine in a region so far away from the continental US without a contingency plan for its withdrawal. But this is the considered concern in some quarters. To pile on the machine already in Iraq is certainly the easy part. The bad news is that the White House’s antecedence of pig-headedness since the war makes it absolutely impossible for anyone to embark on such a plan during the life of the Bush administration without running the risk of hashing frenzy for the media. Such frenzy is the least of the dangers that lay ahead.
Given the continuing deterioration of its military fortunes in Iraq, can the US still afford an expeditious withdrawal of its military machine from Iraq? Withdrawal from Iraq, which will certainly become expedient in a matter of time runs the risky of being hasty because of the likelihood that the withdrawing forces, will face sustained harassment as they withdraw. Many types of equipment might be abandoned, and they will fall into the hands of the pursuers. In deed, the over-looked aspects of this conflict of choice will continue to plague it for as long as it lasts.
But the paradox of the AFV is that it violated one of the central tenets of raising military manpower by the state since the French Revolution, by detaching national defense from society. The AVF solved what was considered as the problem of public oversight of war prosecution and squarely made it the responsibility of the Pentagon. No one has cared to examine the down side of such a military establishment. For one, it makes military adventures possible and even easy. The mounting casualty rate in Iraq is hardly evident.
Perhaps the invasion and occupation of Iraq might excite such examination. That aside, there is another serious issue inherent in America’s presence in Iraq, which hasn’t attracted the right attention that it deserves. Any serious analyst of military events would discern from the several errors chalked by the White House and the Pentagon under then Defense Secretary, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, on Iraq that planning for the invasion and occupation of Iraq was probably done only on the best case scenario, i.e. successful invasion and occupation. There certainly was no contingency plan for possible withdrawal in the event that the invasion or the occupation failed.
Even in dreamland, only few people will imagine that a mega power like the US will insert its enormous military machine in a region so far away from the continental US without a contingency plan for its withdrawal. But this is the considered concern in some quarters. To pile on the machine already in Iraq is certainly the easy part. The bad news is that the White House’s antecedence of pig-headedness since the war makes it absolutely impossible for anyone to embark on such a plan during the life of the Bush administration without running the risk of hashing frenzy for the media. Such frenzy is the least of the dangers that lay ahead.
Given the continuing deterioration of its military fortunes in Iraq, can the US still afford an expeditious withdrawal of its military machine from Iraq? Withdrawal from Iraq, which will certainly become expedient in a matter of time runs the risky of being hasty because of the likelihood that the withdrawing forces, will face sustained harassment as they withdraw. Many types of equipment might be abandoned, and they will fall into the hands of the pursuers. In deed, the over-looked aspects of this conflict of choice will continue to plague it for as long as it lasts.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Mr. Andrew Young
Here in America, the attitudes of the descendants of African immigrants who were brought to these parts of what used to be called the New World in significant numbers during the trans-Atlantic slave trade towards members of their race who were born in Africa, the mother continent is laced with deep-seated ambivalence. If there are exceptions to this point of view, it’s rather few and apart. The said attitudes derive in the main from several factors. One of such factors includes absolute ignorance or insufficient knowledge of the history of the slave trade, which was conducted primarily as an economic enterprise. The other of such factors is of course the centuries of conditioning that they have gone through in a social milieu that operates as the quintessence of what the late Frantz Fanon aptly diagnosed as maniacal. Such conditioning is riddled with all the harsh treatments and experiences that have come their way through members of the dominant Caucasian race who used to enslave their forebears. But unfortunately, much of their worldview seems to radiate through that conditioning.
Many African Americans hold the view that every African born on the continent is guilty of the slave trade. Continental-born Africans are often times embarrassed by this view which is often emotional whenever it is openly expressed by African Americans. There is no shortage of stories told by continental-born Africans about some of the sour encounters that ensue between them and African Americans whom they believe should rather close ranks with them. There are continental born Africans university professors who say that African American undergraduates are more likely to disrespect them in the classrooms. Some African physicians who practice here lament that they are more likely to receive bogus malpractice law suits from their African American patients. African Americans who have never left the precincts of the inners cities in the US where they were born and raised would quickly proclaim that they wouldn’t wish to be born anywhere on the continent.
Beyond these, some prominent African Americans have shown no qualms to play roles that condone the unconscionable pattern of leadership that devastate African societies in every sense of the word and make Africa the laughing stock of the world. With the exception of South Africa where they played heroic roles during the anti-apartheid struggle, the story is staunchly pathetic. Take the case of Nigeria as a typical case in point. Over the years, Nigeria’s ruthless military dictators depended on African American lobbyists to launder the sordid image of their regimes for mouth-watering amounts of cash.
The charade that Nigeria’s incumbent leader, Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo currently over sees in the name of government hasn’t been an exception. This time, the launderer- beneficiary is civil rights great, Mr. Andrew Young. But he dismisses complaints about his dealings with and benefits from Mr. Obasanjo as grumblings from the latter’s political opponents. But honest persons who have visited Nigeria since Mr. Obasanjo’s second ascension to power as a civilian in 1999 concluded unequivocally that the place is tethering on the brink of implosion primarily because of misrule. The evident economic hardship that pervades the lives of all but a few Nigerians can be literally grasped with the hand. Every manner of physical infrastructure—roads, electricity supply, portable water supply, hospitals, schools, etc. have decayed beyond description. The educational system, which used to be the pride of everyone, is now spoken about in the past tense. No reasonable person would even talk about the health care system at all.
Yet, Mr. Andrew Young makes bold to praise Obasanjo who has presided over this rot in the last eight years, and has vowed his determination to preside over it by proxy for some time more, in superlative terms. He went as far as announcing the other time that he would sponsor Mr. Obasanjo for the Nobel Peace Prize. Well, as someone asked the other day: Does he know his way to where the Nobel Committee meets in Stockholm? Mr. Young does that all in the name of making money that flows from various lucrative deals from Obasanjo’s Nigeria to him on the aegis of his Atlanta-based lobby firm, GoodWorks International.
He is proud to invoke his civil rights record here in America in his own self defense. But if Mr. Young is truthful to himself, he will concede that his civil rights record have absolutely nothing to do with why he is cushioning Mr. Obasanjo’s misrule in Nigeria. How much of those records would he really translate to concrete knowledge of Nigeria? Mr. Young doesn’t know it, which is why one must make haste to educate him that there is absolutely nothing that can qualify as a given about the contraption that exists as state in Nigeria. Most of the nationalities that were made to constitute Nigeria regard it as illegitimate. On that incontrovertible fact lays the poor political performance bordering on the absolute that the Nigerian state accumulates over the years. For Mr. Young’s civil rights records to become relevant in Nigeria, he ought to bring it to bear on support for agitation by Nigeria’s nationalities for national reformation. One is talking about the sort that will engender the restructure of post-colonial Nigeria into a true federation to pave way the reverse of the rot that Obasanjo presides over currently.
Activists in Nigeria have accused Mr. Young of playing Obasanjo’s garbage rot for money. But he denies it. When Mr. Young proclaims: “For 40 years of my life, I was on the outside seeking change, I realized that I could be more effective being on the inside implementing it”, one is hard pressed to ask him why he must abandon his failures here in America and turn to Africa. The terrain here in the Black community is littered with social pathology in countless varieties that are indicative of the failures Mr. Young alludes to in his 40 years as a civil rights activist. But we know that he’s talking about making money for himself through Mr. Obasanjo. Perhaps Mr. Young is the physician
Many African Americans hold the view that every African born on the continent is guilty of the slave trade. Continental-born Africans are often times embarrassed by this view which is often emotional whenever it is openly expressed by African Americans. There is no shortage of stories told by continental-born Africans about some of the sour encounters that ensue between them and African Americans whom they believe should rather close ranks with them. There are continental born Africans university professors who say that African American undergraduates are more likely to disrespect them in the classrooms. Some African physicians who practice here lament that they are more likely to receive bogus malpractice law suits from their African American patients. African Americans who have never left the precincts of the inners cities in the US where they were born and raised would quickly proclaim that they wouldn’t wish to be born anywhere on the continent.
Beyond these, some prominent African Americans have shown no qualms to play roles that condone the unconscionable pattern of leadership that devastate African societies in every sense of the word and make Africa the laughing stock of the world. With the exception of South Africa where they played heroic roles during the anti-apartheid struggle, the story is staunchly pathetic. Take the case of Nigeria as a typical case in point. Over the years, Nigeria’s ruthless military dictators depended on African American lobbyists to launder the sordid image of their regimes for mouth-watering amounts of cash.
The charade that Nigeria’s incumbent leader, Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo currently over sees in the name of government hasn’t been an exception. This time, the launderer- beneficiary is civil rights great, Mr. Andrew Young. But he dismisses complaints about his dealings with and benefits from Mr. Obasanjo as grumblings from the latter’s political opponents. But honest persons who have visited Nigeria since Mr. Obasanjo’s second ascension to power as a civilian in 1999 concluded unequivocally that the place is tethering on the brink of implosion primarily because of misrule. The evident economic hardship that pervades the lives of all but a few Nigerians can be literally grasped with the hand. Every manner of physical infrastructure—roads, electricity supply, portable water supply, hospitals, schools, etc. have decayed beyond description. The educational system, which used to be the pride of everyone, is now spoken about in the past tense. No reasonable person would even talk about the health care system at all.
Yet, Mr. Andrew Young makes bold to praise Obasanjo who has presided over this rot in the last eight years, and has vowed his determination to preside over it by proxy for some time more, in superlative terms. He went as far as announcing the other time that he would sponsor Mr. Obasanjo for the Nobel Peace Prize. Well, as someone asked the other day: Does he know his way to where the Nobel Committee meets in Stockholm? Mr. Young does that all in the name of making money that flows from various lucrative deals from Obasanjo’s Nigeria to him on the aegis of his Atlanta-based lobby firm, GoodWorks International.
He is proud to invoke his civil rights record here in America in his own self defense. But if Mr. Young is truthful to himself, he will concede that his civil rights record have absolutely nothing to do with why he is cushioning Mr. Obasanjo’s misrule in Nigeria. How much of those records would he really translate to concrete knowledge of Nigeria? Mr. Young doesn’t know it, which is why one must make haste to educate him that there is absolutely nothing that can qualify as a given about the contraption that exists as state in Nigeria. Most of the nationalities that were made to constitute Nigeria regard it as illegitimate. On that incontrovertible fact lays the poor political performance bordering on the absolute that the Nigerian state accumulates over the years. For Mr. Young’s civil rights records to become relevant in Nigeria, he ought to bring it to bear on support for agitation by Nigeria’s nationalities for national reformation. One is talking about the sort that will engender the restructure of post-colonial Nigeria into a true federation to pave way the reverse of the rot that Obasanjo presides over currently.
Activists in Nigeria have accused Mr. Young of playing Obasanjo’s garbage rot for money. But he denies it. When Mr. Young proclaims: “For 40 years of my life, I was on the outside seeking change, I realized that I could be more effective being on the inside implementing it”, one is hard pressed to ask him why he must abandon his failures here in America and turn to Africa. The terrain here in the Black community is littered with social pathology in countless varieties that are indicative of the failures Mr. Young alludes to in his 40 years as a civil rights activist. But we know that he’s talking about making money for himself through Mr. Obasanjo. Perhaps Mr. Young is the physician
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
The Eagle is Perched on the Vintage Once Again
A few months ago when Chief Anthony Enahoro who as a young man made what was then considered quite a radical and move the motion for Nigeria’s independence from Britain in the federal parliament, announced that his political party, the National Reformation Party, NRP would not participate in the general elections slated for this month, not many of the other political parties found the need to lend their support to him and the NRP. When Chief Enahoro made that announcement, he was unequivocal that every indication is that Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo and his PDP are highly determined to remain in power. He called the country’s attention to Mr. Obasanjo’s misuse of the EFCC and the INEC in their bid to accomplish that.
What happened Saturday, April 14 in the elections for state governors and legislatures have largely vindicated Chief Enahoro and the NRP. Saturday’s exercise finally gave the leaders of all the political parties except the PDP cause to strongly proclaim their lack of faith in the INEC in the conduct of the presidential and National Assembly polls this Saturday. As the party leaders wrangle amongst themselves on how best to proceed, they must be reminded that once again, the most reasonable option available now for them is to embark on a process that will achieve the reconstitution of the INEC, and make it capable of conducting free and fair elections. The present INEC is highly contaminated by Mr. Obasanjo. How the parties will accomplish this is something that will require commitment and selflessness on their part. But if they summon the courage and dedication to embark on that process, one way will be to trigger the relevant sections of the flawed military imposed 1999 Constitution to devolve power in the interim to the Senate President and have him over-see an impartial transition process within six months. Such transition process must address all the thorny issues that lie at the heart of state building amongst the nationalities that were made to constitute Nigeria. There’s already a blue print that will guide that process. It was produced by the Pronational Conference Organizations, PRONACO, which was co-chaired by Chief Enahoro and Wole Soyinka. PRONACO, which was constituted of several organizations and stakeholders were able to produce a comprehensive document that details the way forward for the peoples that constitute Nigeria. The choice before the nationalities today is clear: Do they want to sustain the sterile status quo, or do they want to dig themselves out of it? Once again, Mr. Obasanjo has offered the nationalities another opportunity to sort their affairs out. The eagle has perched on the vintage canopy once again. But will the hunter take an accurate aim?
What happened Saturday, April 14 in the elections for state governors and legislatures have largely vindicated Chief Enahoro and the NRP. Saturday’s exercise finally gave the leaders of all the political parties except the PDP cause to strongly proclaim their lack of faith in the INEC in the conduct of the presidential and National Assembly polls this Saturday. As the party leaders wrangle amongst themselves on how best to proceed, they must be reminded that once again, the most reasonable option available now for them is to embark on a process that will achieve the reconstitution of the INEC, and make it capable of conducting free and fair elections. The present INEC is highly contaminated by Mr. Obasanjo. How the parties will accomplish this is something that will require commitment and selflessness on their part. But if they summon the courage and dedication to embark on that process, one way will be to trigger the relevant sections of the flawed military imposed 1999 Constitution to devolve power in the interim to the Senate President and have him over-see an impartial transition process within six months. Such transition process must address all the thorny issues that lie at the heart of state building amongst the nationalities that were made to constitute Nigeria. There’s already a blue print that will guide that process. It was produced by the Pronational Conference Organizations, PRONACO, which was co-chaired by Chief Enahoro and Wole Soyinka. PRONACO, which was constituted of several organizations and stakeholders were able to produce a comprehensive document that details the way forward for the peoples that constitute Nigeria. The choice before the nationalities today is clear: Do they want to sustain the sterile status quo, or do they want to dig themselves out of it? Once again, Mr. Obasanjo has offered the nationalities another opportunity to sort their affairs out. The eagle has perched on the vintage canopy once again. But will the hunter take an accurate aim?
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
There, and Here
It was a lunatic, who after his thatched hut that he torched was totally consumed by the resultant inferno looked around from a distance and gleefully announced to onlookers: “Finally, light has been made to prevail”. Time and again the world is treated to such acts by the countless lunatics that dot most parts of the African continent. In the last eight years it has been Nigeria’s Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo’s turn to set the country that he presides over as president ablaze. What started as a normal four year presidential term in May 1999 was gradually turned into a torching exercise by this individual who suddenly proclaimed his self-conviction that he is a messiah from God to deliver the nationalities that British colonialism cobbled together into an artificial supra-national state early in the last century. In the period since be began his second term in 2003, Mr. Obasanjo stopped at nothing to extend himself in power. When his blatant machinations to alter the constitution failed in the National Assembly last year, he began to use state agencies including the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, which is mandated by law to conduct elections as an impartial umpire, to erect road block after road block all in the bid to undermine the process.
The difficulty that he encountered from a cross section of the land in his determination to extend himself in power does not derive from his self-anointment as much as it does from the dismal record of lack of any tangible achievement that he chalked in the eight years that he has been in power. Last Saturday witnessed the start of that inferno he brought to bear on the land. The first in the line up of elections that he recklessly dubbed a “do–or-die” affair for him and his party the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, translated to exactly that. At least, 22 people were officially reported dead in the course of one day. The world has been made to witness the most violently rigged electoral exercise in recent time. But like the proverbial lunatic, Mr. Obasanjo has simply pronounced his satisfaction with the conduct and outcome of that clearly flawed exercise.
Not withstanding Mr. Obasanjo's delusion that by burning down the hut called Nigeria he would pave the way for what he alone consider as better visibility, healthy-minded onlookers believe otherwise. We’ll see what will become of him this time when the inferno he started dies down completely.
Then, the shooting incident yesterday at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia that left a reported total of 33 faculty and students dead. People have been scratching their head asking countless questions as they deal with what has been described as the worst campus shooting incident in US history. What went wrong with the shooter who has been described as a student in that institution? How was he able to wreck this magnitude of havoc in two episodes that were interspersed by a couple of hours? Should American society not afford to deal with this sort of horror? More questions than answers, one would say. This is certainly yet another incident strong enough to compel America to embark on an extensive soul searching. The time to begin is now.
The difficulty that he encountered from a cross section of the land in his determination to extend himself in power does not derive from his self-anointment as much as it does from the dismal record of lack of any tangible achievement that he chalked in the eight years that he has been in power. Last Saturday witnessed the start of that inferno he brought to bear on the land. The first in the line up of elections that he recklessly dubbed a “do–or-die” affair for him and his party the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, translated to exactly that. At least, 22 people were officially reported dead in the course of one day. The world has been made to witness the most violently rigged electoral exercise in recent time. But like the proverbial lunatic, Mr. Obasanjo has simply pronounced his satisfaction with the conduct and outcome of that clearly flawed exercise.
Not withstanding Mr. Obasanjo's delusion that by burning down the hut called Nigeria he would pave the way for what he alone consider as better visibility, healthy-minded onlookers believe otherwise. We’ll see what will become of him this time when the inferno he started dies down completely.
Then, the shooting incident yesterday at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia that left a reported total of 33 faculty and students dead. People have been scratching their head asking countless questions as they deal with what has been described as the worst campus shooting incident in US history. What went wrong with the shooter who has been described as a student in that institution? How was he able to wreck this magnitude of havoc in two episodes that were interspersed by a couple of hours? Should American society not afford to deal with this sort of horror? More questions than answers, one would say. This is certainly yet another incident strong enough to compel America to embark on an extensive soul searching. The time to begin is now.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Africa Comes to His Rescue
Irrespective of the outcome of the scandal that World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz got himself into over his role in the saga that developed around his girlfriend, Ms. Shaha Riza, the episode became one of those rare moments in international affairs when a US power broker found relevance for Africans whose support he needs to save the day for him. At a time when development and finance ministers from different countries who attended the just concluded annual meeting of the Bank in Washington, DC found cause to express “great concern” in regard to the impact of the saga on the Bank’s ability to continue to fulfill its mandate, some key West European ministers haven’t hidden their desire to have Mr. Wolfowitz resign. Some of the ministers have made quite critical comments about him and his credibility in the course of expressing that desire.
UK’s Hillary Benn opined that, “this whole business has damaged the bank and should not have happened”, while her Germany counterpart, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul insisted that Mr. Wolfowitz should decide “whether he still has the credibility to represent the position of the World Bank.
There’s no gain saying that the behind the scene lobbying that Mr. Wolfowitz was reported to have undertaken last weekend to convince the ministers to extend support to him in his quest to retain his job as Bank president was not selective. But it seems that he achieved success in that regard mostly from African ministers. One of them, Ms. Antoinette Sayeh, a former Bank employee who is now Liberia’s finance minister boldly praised him for his “visionary leadership”. Ms. Sayeh went as far as proclaiming that “he has certainly championed Africa’s cause in the two years of his leadership”. N’Gandu Magande, her counterpart from Zambia thinks that “he has made us believe in ourselves”. Their support for him tallies with the one from South Africa’s Trevor Manual earlier in the weekend.
These African ministers who stepped forward to assert their views and support for Mr. Wolfowitz deserve to be commended. They have certainly gone against the grain of orthodoxy here. Rather than flow with the tide of events in support of the position held by their West European counterparts, they found the courage to express an independent position. One hopes that Mr. Wolfowitz will remember them in the future for throwing him such vital life lines of support.
UK’s Hillary Benn opined that, “this whole business has damaged the bank and should not have happened”, while her Germany counterpart, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul insisted that Mr. Wolfowitz should decide “whether he still has the credibility to represent the position of the World Bank.
There’s no gain saying that the behind the scene lobbying that Mr. Wolfowitz was reported to have undertaken last weekend to convince the ministers to extend support to him in his quest to retain his job as Bank president was not selective. But it seems that he achieved success in that regard mostly from African ministers. One of them, Ms. Antoinette Sayeh, a former Bank employee who is now Liberia’s finance minister boldly praised him for his “visionary leadership”. Ms. Sayeh went as far as proclaiming that “he has certainly championed Africa’s cause in the two years of his leadership”. N’Gandu Magande, her counterpart from Zambia thinks that “he has made us believe in ourselves”. Their support for him tallies with the one from South Africa’s Trevor Manual earlier in the weekend.
These African ministers who stepped forward to assert their views and support for Mr. Wolfowitz deserve to be commended. They have certainly gone against the grain of orthodoxy here. Rather than flow with the tide of events in support of the position held by their West European counterparts, they found the courage to express an independent position. One hopes that Mr. Wolfowitz will remember them in the future for throwing him such vital life lines of support.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
China’s Burgeoning Foreign Exchange Reserves
News reports this past weekend have it that China’s record as the country that owns the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves has not diminished at all. In the first quarter of 2007, it added a record $135.7bn to bring its total foreign exchange reserves to $1,202bn. This impressive increase beats the total of $247.3bn for the whole of last year. China’s economy continues to attract considerable foreign investment: A significant chunk of this new increase came from foreign direct investment, FDI to a total of $15bn and a trade surplus of $46.4bn. Analysts point out that as much as $25bn has found its way into China in this year alone. Also macro economic moves by the Peoples Bank of China, PBoC in its capacity as the country’s central bank have made and will continue to make this increase possible into the future. Such moves include arrangements with the country’s commercial banks that encouraged currency swaps aimed at retaining funds onshore. There are views also that calibrated gain in value by China’s currency; the renminbi could be attracting what The Financial Times calls “hot money” into China.
The announcement last year by China that it’d establish a new outfit to take charge of investing its expanding foreign reserves is where the rubber meets the tarmac for political economists who believe that how that new state investor goes about its responsibility would have far reaching political implications amongst others for many in the non-European world. If for instance, that outfit favors the practice of buying government bonds in the US, one implication will be that China will become a staunch behind the scene US well wisher. China would not want to be part of moves that would adversely impact the viability of the US economy, as it would not want to run the risk of not cashing the bonds that it holds when they mature. The other implication is that China’s role as a supporter of repressive regimes in the non-European world would be enhanced. China’s investment presence in parts of Africa and Asia where there are abusive regimes is already a fact. The expansion of that presence will bring a new dimension to the support that repressive regimes in the world receive from Western and North American corporations.
There is therefore no doubt that China’s growing economic presence in the world will certainly complicate the existing crisis in the capitalist world economy.
The announcement last year by China that it’d establish a new outfit to take charge of investing its expanding foreign reserves is where the rubber meets the tarmac for political economists who believe that how that new state investor goes about its responsibility would have far reaching political implications amongst others for many in the non-European world. If for instance, that outfit favors the practice of buying government bonds in the US, one implication will be that China will become a staunch behind the scene US well wisher. China would not want to be part of moves that would adversely impact the viability of the US economy, as it would not want to run the risk of not cashing the bonds that it holds when they mature. The other implication is that China’s role as a supporter of repressive regimes in the non-European world would be enhanced. China’s investment presence in parts of Africa and Asia where there are abusive regimes is already a fact. The expansion of that presence will bring a new dimension to the support that repressive regimes in the world receive from Western and North American corporations.
There is therefore no doubt that China’s growing economic presence in the world will certainly complicate the existing crisis in the capitalist world economy.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Paul D. Wolfowitz’s Continuing Embattlement at the World Bank
When embattled World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz pleaded with his critics at the Bank and others who are opposed to his continued leadership in the statement that he released Thursday, to separate his present job from his previous position as Assistant Secretary of Defense and a major architect of the invasion of Iraq, he was probably either mindless of or had forgotten that he has already established a track record since his arrival in 2005 to head the apex financial institution sufficient and clear to give his audience enough cause to believe otherwise.
Many in the Bank as well as beyond argue that what is being portrayed as his self-proclaimed penchant for wedging an anti-corruption campaign of sorts in poor countries of the world on the Bank’s auspices since he arrived there has not extended to Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, three countries that are in the center of the Bush White House’s global strategic interests in its "War on Terrorism" global campaign. His quick suspension of Bank program in Uzbekistan right after the latter refused to authorize landing rights to US military aircraft is said to be yet another dot in the said pattern. Many in the Bank and amongst its shareholders are convinced that he was nominated to use the Bank to implement the same Bush White House agenda which is in the center of US prickly relationships with the UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA over the invasion of Iraq. Bush’s decision to send Mr. John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN, who is openly contemptuous of the world body is another fact being cited by many to buttress the argument that Wolfowitz’s presence at the Bank will only further the Bush agenda. It will be recalled that IAEA director Mr. Mohamed ElBaradei, became a target for removal from his job by the Bush White House over his agency’s report in 2003 that the claim that Saddam Hussien had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program was not supported by hard fact on the ground in Iraq. The Nobel Peace Prize that he jointly won with the IAEA is seen as a clear rebuke of the Bush White House for its over zeal by one of Europe's principal institutions.
Reports claim that even some members of the Bank’s 24-member board of directors have voiced their claim that Mr. Wolfowitz carried the Bush White House secretive style of doing business over to his new job as Bank president.
The revelation from documents released Friday that Mr. Wolfowitz's role in the Riza saga had been high handed, and unilateral even though he cast it after the fact as being otherwise in addition to enjoying the Bank’s blessing, haven’t helped matters at all for him talk less of smoothing ruffled feathers at the Bank and amongst some donor countries.
Many in Europe, including The Financial Times insist that Mr. Wolfowitz’s continued presence at the Bank as president will undermine its credibility and efficiency. But as the Bank’s annual meeting continues this weekend in Washington, DC, there doesn’t seem to be that kind of oceanic pressure from all quarters strong enough to orchestrate his ouster. Some stakeholders, most of whom are known friends of Wolfowitz have tepidly spoken out in his support. They include South Africa’s finance minister, Trevor Manuel who was disparaged by award-winning journalist John Pilger in his recent book Freedom Next as a recovering progressive activist. Excerpts from the book whose author was banned from South Africa by the apartheid regime, which is highly critical of post-apartheid economic policy in South Africa as having not changed from what it used to be during apartheid was published last summer in The Sunday Independent, published in Durban. Manuel was praised by Wolfowitz as a great leader during his recent visit to that country.
Many in the Bank as well as beyond argue that what is being portrayed as his self-proclaimed penchant for wedging an anti-corruption campaign of sorts in poor countries of the world on the Bank’s auspices since he arrived there has not extended to Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, three countries that are in the center of the Bush White House’s global strategic interests in its "War on Terrorism" global campaign. His quick suspension of Bank program in Uzbekistan right after the latter refused to authorize landing rights to US military aircraft is said to be yet another dot in the said pattern. Many in the Bank and amongst its shareholders are convinced that he was nominated to use the Bank to implement the same Bush White House agenda which is in the center of US prickly relationships with the UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA over the invasion of Iraq. Bush’s decision to send Mr. John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN, who is openly contemptuous of the world body is another fact being cited by many to buttress the argument that Wolfowitz’s presence at the Bank will only further the Bush agenda. It will be recalled that IAEA director Mr. Mohamed ElBaradei, became a target for removal from his job by the Bush White House over his agency’s report in 2003 that the claim that Saddam Hussien had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program was not supported by hard fact on the ground in Iraq. The Nobel Peace Prize that he jointly won with the IAEA is seen as a clear rebuke of the Bush White House for its over zeal by one of Europe's principal institutions.
Reports claim that even some members of the Bank’s 24-member board of directors have voiced their claim that Mr. Wolfowitz carried the Bush White House secretive style of doing business over to his new job as Bank president.
The revelation from documents released Friday that Mr. Wolfowitz's role in the Riza saga had been high handed, and unilateral even though he cast it after the fact as being otherwise in addition to enjoying the Bank’s blessing, haven’t helped matters at all for him talk less of smoothing ruffled feathers at the Bank and amongst some donor countries.
Many in Europe, including The Financial Times insist that Mr. Wolfowitz’s continued presence at the Bank as president will undermine its credibility and efficiency. But as the Bank’s annual meeting continues this weekend in Washington, DC, there doesn’t seem to be that kind of oceanic pressure from all quarters strong enough to orchestrate his ouster. Some stakeholders, most of whom are known friends of Wolfowitz have tepidly spoken out in his support. They include South Africa’s finance minister, Trevor Manuel who was disparaged by award-winning journalist John Pilger in his recent book Freedom Next as a recovering progressive activist. Excerpts from the book whose author was banned from South Africa by the apartheid regime, which is highly critical of post-apartheid economic policy in South Africa as having not changed from what it used to be during apartheid was published last summer in The Sunday Independent, published in Durban. Manuel was praised by Wolfowitz as a great leader during his recent visit to that country.
Friday, April 13, 2007
“Lingering Shockwaves of 9/11 on America and the World”
It doesn’t seem like the rest of the world is about to stand down on its suspicion and mistrust of the Bush White House. For many, that mistrust stemmed from the Bush administration's preference for muscular conduct of foreign policy that culminated in what a good proportion of people still regard as the unwarranted invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq. The refusal or the inability of Mr. Bush, his administration, the present and former central players therein to realize that as a fact is complicating their inability to engage the rest of the world with credibility. The continuing rocky tenure of Mr. Paul Wolfowitz as World Bank president ever since he was nominated by Mr. Bush is a clearly a good pointer in that regard.
From the very outset when he arrived at his World Bank post, Mr. Wolfowitz who as the deputy Secretary of Defense was one of the architects and ardent proponents of the invasion of Iraq has been literally without sleep. Stories began to appear in major newspapers from the outset detailing the uneasy and suspicion of his intentions at the Bank by many of its employees. Two of his former aides at the Pentagon who he brought along with him are said to throw their weight around the place in ways that have stirred resentment in Bank employees. He has been accused of making unilateral decisions to disrupt loans to certain countries on the grounds that their governments are corrupt.
But the matter that became a serious bone of contention is his involvement in the transfer of his girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza to a position from the Bank to the US State Department with a salary increase that placed her on an annual non-taxable salary of $132,000 to $193,590, $10,000 more than US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. At first Mr. Wolfowitz simply dismissed the allegation of impropriety with claims that he had nothing to do with the decision on Ms. Riza’s transfer and salary, and that the appropriate office of the Bank was consulted and approved of it.
Only yesterday just as the Bank’s 24-member executive board was in session in Washington, DC preparing for the annual meeting scheduled for this weekend, Mr. Wolfowitz emerged with an apology for his role in the saga of Ms. Riza’s transfer and salary. His statement read inter alia: “I made a mistake, for which I am sorry”. He expressed his willingness to abide by whatever decision that would emanate from the board by way of sanction. His biggest challenge appears to come from the Bank’s staff association which insists that he has out-lived his usefulness, because he “destroyed the staff’s trust in his leadership” and “compromised the integrity and effectiveness” of the Bank through his unethical involvement in the Ms Riza saga. The staff association was responsible for pushing for the investigation that revealed that he was short on the details of his role in the Ms. Riza saga. His attempt yesterday to address about 200 Bank staffers ended unexpectedly when they started chanting for him to “Resign, Resign”. The board itself has promptly indicated that it will move expeditiously to resolve the fate of Mr. Wolfowitz at the Bank. It doesn’t seem like he’d be forced to resign, though.
He certainly refused to realize that the Bank was an arena quite different from the Pentagon. That may have blinded him on the need to curb the impunity with which he engaged the world from the Pentagon. He must have sensed that his past and role at the Pentagon may be part of his undoing at the Bank when he said: “For those people who disagree with the things that they associate with me in my previous job, I’m not in my previous job”. Calls have come from The Financial Times for his resignation. If he retains his job, his effectiveness at the Bank will depend considerably on his willingness to dissociate himself from the grand and reckless agenda that many in the world associate with the Bush White House, and to instruct those aides he brought with him from the Pentagon to modify their arrogance accordingly.
From the very outset when he arrived at his World Bank post, Mr. Wolfowitz who as the deputy Secretary of Defense was one of the architects and ardent proponents of the invasion of Iraq has been literally without sleep. Stories began to appear in major newspapers from the outset detailing the uneasy and suspicion of his intentions at the Bank by many of its employees. Two of his former aides at the Pentagon who he brought along with him are said to throw their weight around the place in ways that have stirred resentment in Bank employees. He has been accused of making unilateral decisions to disrupt loans to certain countries on the grounds that their governments are corrupt.
But the matter that became a serious bone of contention is his involvement in the transfer of his girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza to a position from the Bank to the US State Department with a salary increase that placed her on an annual non-taxable salary of $132,000 to $193,590, $10,000 more than US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. At first Mr. Wolfowitz simply dismissed the allegation of impropriety with claims that he had nothing to do with the decision on Ms. Riza’s transfer and salary, and that the appropriate office of the Bank was consulted and approved of it.
Only yesterday just as the Bank’s 24-member executive board was in session in Washington, DC preparing for the annual meeting scheduled for this weekend, Mr. Wolfowitz emerged with an apology for his role in the saga of Ms. Riza’s transfer and salary. His statement read inter alia: “I made a mistake, for which I am sorry”. He expressed his willingness to abide by whatever decision that would emanate from the board by way of sanction. His biggest challenge appears to come from the Bank’s staff association which insists that he has out-lived his usefulness, because he “destroyed the staff’s trust in his leadership” and “compromised the integrity and effectiveness” of the Bank through his unethical involvement in the Ms Riza saga. The staff association was responsible for pushing for the investigation that revealed that he was short on the details of his role in the Ms. Riza saga. His attempt yesterday to address about 200 Bank staffers ended unexpectedly when they started chanting for him to “Resign, Resign”. The board itself has promptly indicated that it will move expeditiously to resolve the fate of Mr. Wolfowitz at the Bank. It doesn’t seem like he’d be forced to resign, though.
He certainly refused to realize that the Bank was an arena quite different from the Pentagon. That may have blinded him on the need to curb the impunity with which he engaged the world from the Pentagon. He must have sensed that his past and role at the Pentagon may be part of his undoing at the Bank when he said: “For those people who disagree with the things that they associate with me in my previous job, I’m not in my previous job”. Calls have come from The Financial Times for his resignation. If he retains his job, his effectiveness at the Bank will depend considerably on his willingness to dissociate himself from the grand and reckless agenda that many in the world associate with the Bush White House, and to instruct those aides he brought with him from the Pentagon to modify their arrogance accordingly.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
The Anger that Emasculates Black America?
Sections of society in the US, particularly the Black community and various mass media outlets have been consumed by what amounts to reckless and racially-inspired expressions made by shock jock broadcaster Don Imus, who is Caucasian on his morning show, Imus in the Morning on Good Friday morning about Rutgers University’s female basketball team, the Scarlet Knights. He apparently singled out the eight black members of the ten-person team and called them “nappy-headed hos” in remarks he made on the air chatting with his producer, Mr. Bernard McGuire.
Almost immediately, those remarks drew sharp angry responses from elements in the Black Civil Rights establishment including the Revs. Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson. Mr. Imus’ moment of contrition began almost right away with an appearance on the Rev. Sharpton’s own radio show early in the next week where the latter made it clear that the former’s apologies were insufficient. By Tuesday many in the Black community including some Black leaders who the New York Times reported as saying that “Mr. Imus has not understood the depth of the hurt his remarks caused” were not only expressing their anger openly and extensively, but were also calling for NBC, Mr. Imus’ employers to fire him for cause. The two week suspension without pay slammed on Mr. Imus by the NBC, which simulcasts his show, and CBS Radio, his primary employers could hardly assuage the anger caused by his remarks in the Black community. Rev. Sharpton who promptly insisted during an appearance on the Today Show on NBC that Imus’ suspension “is too little, too late, further called it “not really enough”.
At the news conference called by Rutgers University, the head coach, Ms. C. Vivian Stringer tearfully observed: “It’s not about them as black or nappy-headed. It’s about us as a people. When there is not enough equality for all, or when there has been denied equality for one, there has been denied equality for all”. Members of the team, who took Mr. Imus’ offer to meet and apologize, have equally expressed their outrage at his remarks.
All that anger seems to be having the desired effects for those who continue to express it: As at today, MSNBC, the cable affiliate of NBC has dropped its simulcast of Imus in the Morning, and seven advertisers have pulled their business altogether from it. Who knows what will be by the time the team gets off the Oprah Winfrey Show to which it has been invited.
If one were to go by conventional wisdom, the one would discern that the quick backlash from the reaction of prominent figures and others in the Civil Rights establishment to this ugly incident particularly amongst Caucasians would add to feelings of animosity directed at the Black community by Caucasians many of whom routinely regard Blacks as too angry. In fact, such miscast of Blacks in this regard remains a major obstacle in age-old attempts by the former to seek remedies for centuries of mistreatment they rightly feel that they have been subjected to in American society.
Without minimizing the ugliness of Mr. Imus’ remarks, some people who talked to IkengaComments expressed the view that this kind of anger expressed in the Black community, underscores the miscast of Blacks by their fellow citizens who are Caucasians. People who hold that view insist that it doesn’t do much good for Blacks. Those who hold this view argue that while such dragged out anger benefits the Civil Rights establishment, which one individual characterized as ‘shake-down-the-tree experts’, it alienates many Caucasians who could be their allies, and even tends to distract the Black community from engaging to solve some of the harsh pathologies—single parenthood, crime and prison, extensive high school drop-out rates, etc.—that plague its members.
One person pointed out the case of the Duke University lacrosse players who were alleged to have kidnapped and gang-raped a Black female stripper March 13, 2006 to buttress his argument. That incident which attracted similar expression of anger in the Black community and in the Civil Rights establishment subsequently fell to pieces when their accuser kept weaving inconsistent tales. All charges in the case were dropped only yesterday by North Carolina attorney general, Roy A. Cooper during a news conference where he said: “We believe that these cases were the result of a tragic rush to accuse and failure to verify serious allegations”.
A few years ago too, there was the Tawana Brawley incident in New York that featured the Rev. Sharpton’s prominent role. Tawana Brawley who was a teenager at the time in 1989 had alleged that she was kidnapped and sexually assaulted by Caucasian NYPD officers. At the end, a government report revealed that the teenager’s story was invented. So did Les Payne, a Black journalist with Newsday. But that was after the Black community roiled itself extensively in anger.
Anger, particularly on the excessive side is often counter productive. How different could it have been for everyone involved to have settled with Mr. Imus’ apologies, while members of the team use the opportunity of the meeting he invited them to get to him to pledge some serious contribution to and involvement in a course that targets one of the terrible pathologies plaguing the Black community for solution? Although some would consider that akin to accepting blood money from Mr. Imus, how would the destruction of his career help solve a single pathology in the Black community? There’s certainly wisdom in an Igbo proverb, which says that: uka di ire bu ndetu onu—a serious discourse doesn’t need to be belabored!
Postscript: Finally, Mr. Don Imus was fired this afternoon from his radio show by CBS. In his announcement of the firing, CBS President and CEO, Leslie Moonves said: "There has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society. That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision"
Almost immediately, those remarks drew sharp angry responses from elements in the Black Civil Rights establishment including the Revs. Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson. Mr. Imus’ moment of contrition began almost right away with an appearance on the Rev. Sharpton’s own radio show early in the next week where the latter made it clear that the former’s apologies were insufficient. By Tuesday many in the Black community including some Black leaders who the New York Times reported as saying that “Mr. Imus has not understood the depth of the hurt his remarks caused” were not only expressing their anger openly and extensively, but were also calling for NBC, Mr. Imus’ employers to fire him for cause. The two week suspension without pay slammed on Mr. Imus by the NBC, which simulcasts his show, and CBS Radio, his primary employers could hardly assuage the anger caused by his remarks in the Black community. Rev. Sharpton who promptly insisted during an appearance on the Today Show on NBC that Imus’ suspension “is too little, too late, further called it “not really enough”.
At the news conference called by Rutgers University, the head coach, Ms. C. Vivian Stringer tearfully observed: “It’s not about them as black or nappy-headed. It’s about us as a people. When there is not enough equality for all, or when there has been denied equality for one, there has been denied equality for all”. Members of the team, who took Mr. Imus’ offer to meet and apologize, have equally expressed their outrage at his remarks.
All that anger seems to be having the desired effects for those who continue to express it: As at today, MSNBC, the cable affiliate of NBC has dropped its simulcast of Imus in the Morning, and seven advertisers have pulled their business altogether from it. Who knows what will be by the time the team gets off the Oprah Winfrey Show to which it has been invited.
If one were to go by conventional wisdom, the one would discern that the quick backlash from the reaction of prominent figures and others in the Civil Rights establishment to this ugly incident particularly amongst Caucasians would add to feelings of animosity directed at the Black community by Caucasians many of whom routinely regard Blacks as too angry. In fact, such miscast of Blacks in this regard remains a major obstacle in age-old attempts by the former to seek remedies for centuries of mistreatment they rightly feel that they have been subjected to in American society.
Without minimizing the ugliness of Mr. Imus’ remarks, some people who talked to IkengaComments expressed the view that this kind of anger expressed in the Black community, underscores the miscast of Blacks by their fellow citizens who are Caucasians. People who hold that view insist that it doesn’t do much good for Blacks. Those who hold this view argue that while such dragged out anger benefits the Civil Rights establishment, which one individual characterized as ‘shake-down-the-tree experts’, it alienates many Caucasians who could be their allies, and even tends to distract the Black community from engaging to solve some of the harsh pathologies—single parenthood, crime and prison, extensive high school drop-out rates, etc.—that plague its members.
One person pointed out the case of the Duke University lacrosse players who were alleged to have kidnapped and gang-raped a Black female stripper March 13, 2006 to buttress his argument. That incident which attracted similar expression of anger in the Black community and in the Civil Rights establishment subsequently fell to pieces when their accuser kept weaving inconsistent tales. All charges in the case were dropped only yesterday by North Carolina attorney general, Roy A. Cooper during a news conference where he said: “We believe that these cases were the result of a tragic rush to accuse and failure to verify serious allegations”.
A few years ago too, there was the Tawana Brawley incident in New York that featured the Rev. Sharpton’s prominent role. Tawana Brawley who was a teenager at the time in 1989 had alleged that she was kidnapped and sexually assaulted by Caucasian NYPD officers. At the end, a government report revealed that the teenager’s story was invented. So did Les Payne, a Black journalist with Newsday. But that was after the Black community roiled itself extensively in anger.
Anger, particularly on the excessive side is often counter productive. How different could it have been for everyone involved to have settled with Mr. Imus’ apologies, while members of the team use the opportunity of the meeting he invited them to get to him to pledge some serious contribution to and involvement in a course that targets one of the terrible pathologies plaguing the Black community for solution? Although some would consider that akin to accepting blood money from Mr. Imus, how would the destruction of his career help solve a single pathology in the Black community? There’s certainly wisdom in an Igbo proverb, which says that: uka di ire bu ndetu onu—a serious discourse doesn’t need to be belabored!
Postscript: Finally, Mr. Don Imus was fired this afternoon from his radio show by CBS. In his announcement of the firing, CBS President and CEO, Leslie Moonves said: "There has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society. That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision"
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Need for Soft Landing in Zimbabwe
The crisis in Zimbabwe that stems principally from the continuing fight between the government of Mr. Robert Mugabe and its opponents is getting out of hand, and increasingly so by the day. The recent brutalization of members of the opposition by the Police and other security outfits is not only disheartening. It’s also tragic, and doesn’t bode well at all for society and people in Zimbabwe in both the short and the long runs. The same is true of the recent announcement by the US State Department that it’s actively involved in funding the opposition to Mr. Mugabe’s openly brutal regime.
Unsophisticated assessments would wonder why I would lump both acts—the brutalization of members of the opposition and US State Department's open disclosure of support—to the same trajectory of events and argue that they don’t bode well in the over all for Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans. They belong together because they might back fire and earn Mr. Mugabe more time in power. Anything capable of dragging out the crisis in Zimbabwe in any shape or form is counter-productive for Zimbabwe and its peoples. The battered and brutalized face of MDC faction leader, Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai is a sad metaphor of sorts, with sour implications for anyone who is genuinely concerned about the continuing deterioration of society in Zimbabwe as the crisis sustains. One of those implications is that the MDC factions are riddled with weaknesses so rife that they are incapable of delivering Zimbabwe from the brutal rule that Mr. Mugabe’s government represents. Any anti-systemic entity which is incapable of protecting itself—particularly its leaders—from such brutal man-handling cannot be worth its salt. This immediate point will be mute if in this case the beatings received by Mr. Tsvangirai and his colleagues were deliberately courted to sensitize the world to Mr. Mugabe’s immense capacity for brutality. Even if that were the case, courting world sympathy that way could portray the MDC as an entity being run by individuals who have a cargo cult mentality. A weak MDC will drag out the crisis, while cargo cult mentality is certainly not the mindset needed to repair the damage already done on society by Mr. Mugabe’s regime when it finally ends.
IkengaComments is privy to the boiling anger in opponents of the Mugabe regime. Many of them have proclaimed their readiness for armed struggle. An objective assessment of the hard realities in Zimbabwe points to one harsh truth—chances of initiating armed struggle in Zimbabwe today are next to nil. Furthermore, if armed struggle is initiated, its chances of success are equally nil. The end of minority rule there in Zimbabwe, dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, the end of civil wars in Mozambique and Angola amounted to an era shift that completely voids the possibility of a successful armed struggle project anywhere in that sub-region. If former freedom fighters who are currently in charge of state affairs in most parts of the sub-region have found it difficult to warm up to the idea of supporting the MDC all this while, it will be unrealistic to presume that they will support armed struggle. For one, they all still consider Mr. Mugabe one of their own. The MDC’s continuing weakness derives from some of these variables!
The announcement by the US State will only give Mr. Mugabe more ammunition as he continues to demonize the MDC as agents of the US and the West. He’s after all a seasoned activist. Anyone who refuses to appreciate that a seasoned activist like Mr. Mugabe has all that it takes to play the current situation in Zimbabwe for his own extended survival is being unrealistic. He’s not unaware that he’s incapable of turning society around in Zimbabwe having plunged it this far into decay. He’ll diligently strive to drag out the crisis and make it survive him. He’s in good health no doubt, which indicates that Zimbabwe might go through at least five more years of decay! Mr. Mugabe’s horizontal departure from Zimbabwe’s public sphere would necessarily mean that the other goons who currently assist him now in the regime will not roll over and give up the day after. Look at Guinea after Sekou Toure!
Assuming that the MDC acquires the superior capability over night to out-do the violence that Mr. Mugabe is unleashing at them currently, and ousts him, what is the guarantee that Mr. Tsvangirai and others wouldn’t loose their heads over their new found capacity to wield actionable violence? The dangers exist for that in a future Zimbabwe under the control of an opposition that achieves change violently. Look at what Mr. Meles Zenawi transformed himself into in Ethiopia. The story of the man in Eritrea, Mr. Isaias Afewerki, who fought in the same trenches with Mr. Zenawi to oust Mengistu Haile Mariam from power in Addis in the early 1990s, is not a better copy.
The need for soft landing in the crisis becomes increasingly acute by the day. By that I mean a process that will put Zimbabwe back on the part of sanity without any of the actors in the current dispensation being subjected to prosecution by the victors. South Africa and the other stakeholders in the sub-region must sell a project that has something for Mr. Mugabe by way of immunity from prosecution to both the MDC and the former. It’s sad that Zimbabwe’s White community doesn’t seem to be interested in an amicable resolution of the crisis. Most of them including the farmers prefer to pack their bags and go elsewhere. Ian Smith, the Prime Minister in the White-only minority regime left to live for good in South Africa. He could still be part of the process that will bring about the soft landing from where he is currently though.
Unsophisticated assessments would wonder why I would lump both acts—the brutalization of members of the opposition and US State Department's open disclosure of support—to the same trajectory of events and argue that they don’t bode well in the over all for Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans. They belong together because they might back fire and earn Mr. Mugabe more time in power. Anything capable of dragging out the crisis in Zimbabwe in any shape or form is counter-productive for Zimbabwe and its peoples. The battered and brutalized face of MDC faction leader, Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai is a sad metaphor of sorts, with sour implications for anyone who is genuinely concerned about the continuing deterioration of society in Zimbabwe as the crisis sustains. One of those implications is that the MDC factions are riddled with weaknesses so rife that they are incapable of delivering Zimbabwe from the brutal rule that Mr. Mugabe’s government represents. Any anti-systemic entity which is incapable of protecting itself—particularly its leaders—from such brutal man-handling cannot be worth its salt. This immediate point will be mute if in this case the beatings received by Mr. Tsvangirai and his colleagues were deliberately courted to sensitize the world to Mr. Mugabe’s immense capacity for brutality. Even if that were the case, courting world sympathy that way could portray the MDC as an entity being run by individuals who have a cargo cult mentality. A weak MDC will drag out the crisis, while cargo cult mentality is certainly not the mindset needed to repair the damage already done on society by Mr. Mugabe’s regime when it finally ends.
IkengaComments is privy to the boiling anger in opponents of the Mugabe regime. Many of them have proclaimed their readiness for armed struggle. An objective assessment of the hard realities in Zimbabwe points to one harsh truth—chances of initiating armed struggle in Zimbabwe today are next to nil. Furthermore, if armed struggle is initiated, its chances of success are equally nil. The end of minority rule there in Zimbabwe, dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, the end of civil wars in Mozambique and Angola amounted to an era shift that completely voids the possibility of a successful armed struggle project anywhere in that sub-region. If former freedom fighters who are currently in charge of state affairs in most parts of the sub-region have found it difficult to warm up to the idea of supporting the MDC all this while, it will be unrealistic to presume that they will support armed struggle. For one, they all still consider Mr. Mugabe one of their own. The MDC’s continuing weakness derives from some of these variables!
The announcement by the US State will only give Mr. Mugabe more ammunition as he continues to demonize the MDC as agents of the US and the West. He’s after all a seasoned activist. Anyone who refuses to appreciate that a seasoned activist like Mr. Mugabe has all that it takes to play the current situation in Zimbabwe for his own extended survival is being unrealistic. He’s not unaware that he’s incapable of turning society around in Zimbabwe having plunged it this far into decay. He’ll diligently strive to drag out the crisis and make it survive him. He’s in good health no doubt, which indicates that Zimbabwe might go through at least five more years of decay! Mr. Mugabe’s horizontal departure from Zimbabwe’s public sphere would necessarily mean that the other goons who currently assist him now in the regime will not roll over and give up the day after. Look at Guinea after Sekou Toure!
Assuming that the MDC acquires the superior capability over night to out-do the violence that Mr. Mugabe is unleashing at them currently, and ousts him, what is the guarantee that Mr. Tsvangirai and others wouldn’t loose their heads over their new found capacity to wield actionable violence? The dangers exist for that in a future Zimbabwe under the control of an opposition that achieves change violently. Look at what Mr. Meles Zenawi transformed himself into in Ethiopia. The story of the man in Eritrea, Mr. Isaias Afewerki, who fought in the same trenches with Mr. Zenawi to oust Mengistu Haile Mariam from power in Addis in the early 1990s, is not a better copy.
The need for soft landing in the crisis becomes increasingly acute by the day. By that I mean a process that will put Zimbabwe back on the part of sanity without any of the actors in the current dispensation being subjected to prosecution by the victors. South Africa and the other stakeholders in the sub-region must sell a project that has something for Mr. Mugabe by way of immunity from prosecution to both the MDC and the former. It’s sad that Zimbabwe’s White community doesn’t seem to be interested in an amicable resolution of the crisis. Most of them including the farmers prefer to pack their bags and go elsewhere. Ian Smith, the Prime Minister in the White-only minority regime left to live for good in South Africa. He could still be part of the process that will bring about the soft landing from where he is currently though.
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