As I perused the editorials in the Arab and foreign press last week, I was alarmed by the prevailing sense of disaster and anger. I could not find a single article that made me smile, or at least alleviated the oppressive gloom. Perhaps the topic that drew the attention of most observers and analysts was the economic catastrophe in Russia that forced Boris Yeltsin once again to emerge from hiding to confess to the Russian people and the US (the self-appointed guardian of Russia's future) that his choice of Sergei Kiriyenko as prime minister had been a mistake. For the sake of the Russian nation, he said, he had asked Kiriyenko to resign and brought back Viktor Chernomyrdin as prime minister. In an additional gesture to restore confidence in the government, Yeltsin denied rumours that he was about to resign, saying that he would usher in the new millennium.
These developments, however, amounted to far more than a frail and floundering leader announcing a change in a government that was only 150 days old. To the Russian people, the announcement was another stinging reminder that the humiliating hours spent waiting in line for bread had not been forever relegated to the past by capitalism. The lines are back, but with a capitalist twist. Now, the Russian people are queuing up for hours outside banks in order to withdraw their savings, on the interest of which they had hoped to live out their lives in the capitalist dream. Little had they realised that the capitalist structure could collapse as quickly as its communist predecessor.
In all events, they were not the only ones to have invested their life savings in capitalist institutions. Everywhere around the world people were acting likewise, in what seemed to be a collective affirmation of Fukuyama's assertion that Western capitalism had triumphed in the end. People were so eager to be active partners in the world after "the end of history" that they could not have predicted Fukuyama himself would recant. No sooner had the ripples from the financial crisis in southeast Asia subsided than they collided with the Russian economic collapse, inflating into a tidal wave that threatens to rock the capitalist citadels of London, New York and Paris. News agencies have reported losses of $70 to $80 billion on at least one of the world's major financial markets, and billions more in losses on many domestic markets. After the financial crisis in southeast Asia sent shock waves through Hong Kong and Japan last summer, stunning losses were reported for oil-producing countries in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere. Then, suddenly, torrential rains precipitated floods in the US, Indonesia and China. Alarmingly, every report of material loss noted that these were the biggest disasters in 20, 30 or 100 years.
The Republic of the Congo -- formerly Zaire -- vied with Russia in the headlines and lead stories of the past week. While financial losses in Russia and southeast Asia were punctuated by natural catastrophes on a scale suggesting divine wrath at human folly, news from the Congo featured disaster of a different order. One would have thought that when Laurent Kabila overthrew Mobutu, he would have brought an end to the chaos in central and west Africa. The fall of Mobutu should have ushered in the US's first victory of consequence in Africa over its European competitors. Kabila's alliance with the Tutsis, with Uganda's and Rwanda's support, could have permitted a lengthy period of stability, even if it had to be backed up with force.
Kabila, however, like any leader or political force reconstituted or created by the Americans, refused to yield to the conditions for submission stipulated by the US. He kicked out the UN team charged with investigating the massacres and, transgressing the boundaries set by today's world, he has begun to court Europe, and France in particular, in order to attract them once again to this highly sensitive, wealthy region.
Kabila did not realise that Clinton's visit to Africa signaled the end of the European age and the beginning of the American era on the continent. More significantly, many in Africa have not realised that, when the US appointed Uganda as its High Commissioner for Central Africa, it generated a new situation, and, more specifically, sought to create a new regional balance of power. The mere establishment of the Rwandan-Ugandan alliance based on Tutsi hegemony in Central Africa has opened Zaire to the threat of Ugandan domination. This will extend Ugandan hegemony, creating a strategic belt across the Great Lakes region. Neither Angola nor Namibia, nor Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa, could ignore the proxy roles that have been assumed by certain African nations. Nor could Sudan, also a victim, stand by and watch. We can therefore expect the Congo to become the hub of increased tensions, not least of which will result from the rivalry of its seven neighbours.
Washington, in the meantime, is steeped in a crisis and a half -- the half being the final phases of the Clinton-Lewinsky debacle. The story itself is of little import; rather, its expansion beyond all proportions, and its politicisation, are the real news. Ironically, the American people were against this politicisation; but in such issues, the people count for little. The fact is, too, that most foreign governments also find the politicisation of the issue distasteful and are eager to keep it out of foreign policy considerations. Again, foreign government leaders and officials count for little. What does count is the US's political elite, and the position a person named Bill Clinton happens to occupy.
The question which no one will answer is, why Monica? Why not Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, or Katherine Willey? Monica herself may not be the issue; still, although political leaders may want to draw a line between Clinton and US foreign policy, the people of other countries do not. When your average Egyptian, for example, talks about Monica, his comments on the president's extracurricular activities will lead to a discussion of US policies and Western culture and values.
More than two weeks after the US missile strikes against Sudan and Afghanistan, the media continues to convey, ad nauseam, Albright's statements in which she declared the beginning of World War IV (or is it V?), which is the war against Islamic terrorism. If war is the exchange of bombs, the process of assault and retreat between two hostile parties, then we can be sure to see more bombings of US targets and more missile attacks against Islamic countries. This means that the "war against Islam" announced by Huntington, and advocated by senior US administration officials and the powerful American Jewish lobby, has become a reality. Albright has virtually said so.
It is futile to attempt to defend US policy with the contention that the Americans are fighting against terrorism and that only a minority supports a war on Islam. Terrorist targets are located inside sovereign Islamic nations. To bomb these countries only exacerbates the wrath of their citizens, even if they themselves are opposed to terrorism and the radical Islamists. Not a single news programme contains an item that does not make one's blood boil. The Taliban followers are smashing television sets in a frenzy similar to that of the government of the Imam of Yemen 60 years ago when it destroyed phonographs. What the Taliban movement is doing to the women of Afghanistan is no better.
In Iraq, children are dying due to lack of medicine or lack of money, which is forever being poured into those luxury palaces revealed to the world for the first time by the cameras of the UN inspection team that visited Iraq last spring.
In Pakistan, they have discovered missiles that did not reach their target on their way across the Indian Ocean to Afghanistan. What did explode, however, was popular opinion, which forced the government of Pakistan to introduce constitutional amendments that it could have avoided were it not for the unexploded missiles in Pakistan and the missiles that did go off in Afghanistan.
While developments are afoot in the on-going war between the UN Security Council and Colonel Gaddafi, a contest in which neither side has an honourable record, Iran appears to be preparing for a military showdown with the Taliban, one in which it will support Russia. And once again, the US is using Afghanistan. It used Afghanistan in its war against communism and the Soviet Union and it is using it now in the war Albright declared on "terrorism".
Does this dearth of good news mean that the world is really as bad as it sounds? If you answer no, then in effect you are accusing the media of fabricating this gloom. This, in turn, would imply that the media believe that today's television audience will only stay tuned if they are presented with a daily package of heartrending news. Perhaps this is why the news reports appear so depressingly repetitive.
*The writer is director of the Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.
