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COMMENTARY
June 26, 2002
To Kananaskis
Not rain not sleet not political demonstrations not violence in the Middle East nor even nuclear war between India and Pakistan were going to distract Prime Minister Jean Chretien from making aid to Africa the main item on the agenda for the G8 summit in Kananaskis. The U.S. president was even good enough to humour this ambition by sending his treasury secretary Paul O'Neil on an African scouting trip with the pop singer Bono of U2 as a kind of stage-setter. Any such plan could be dropped Monday when George W. Bush stepped up to the microphones in the White House Rose Garden. When he is flanked by Donald Rumsfeld Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell it is worth adjusting one's headset. Something is going to be said and bets are it won't be about aid to Africa. Mr. Chretien's only real African achievement has been to run interference for the unspeakable regime of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. He spent his international political capital protecting Mr. Mugabe from the full wrath of the Commonwealth (such as it would be) and now it is gone. While for reasons of political correctness the other Western leaders are bound to humour and praise him for his hobbyhorse the less they try to help Africa the better off the continent will be. Mr. Mugabe is one of several power-crazed dictators who is starving his people. As I write he is closing down most of the remaining productive white-owned farms and putting huge numbers of black farmworkers out of their livelihoods in order to turn the land over without compensation to his private army of "war veteran" brownshirt thugs who know nothing about farming whatever. Crops will be left rotting in the fields as before; even the dairy cattle will be barbecued. And he is doing this in the middle of a growing famine he had already created through his previous dispossessions. He has destroyed what was once among the few prosperous countries in Africa. And he is counting on Western leaders like our own Mr. Chretien to organize the aid shipments so Zimbabweans need never learn how to farm again. Indeed the biggest favour we could possibly do for the people of Zimbabwe would be to fire a cruise missile into the State House in Harare while Mr. Mugabe is taking his tea. Since that won't be on the agenda at Kananaskis the next best thing is to stop state aid. Zimbabwe indeed has a huge problem: a megalomaniac tyrant who must be overthrown. There are more than a dozen other sub-Saharan African nations with exactly the same problem. We should send our best wishes to their peoples to get on with it. Meanwhile we can only seriously help the free. All we can do for an imprisoned people is meals-on-wheels. And the serious help we can give is mainly through trade and investment. The only reasonable emergency aid is through private charities (only the religious ones are reliably motivated and possibly not all of those). For anything that comes government-to-government will be quickly institutionalized will be put to the work of propping up some tyranny that is the "root cause" of a people's malnutrition starvation and exposure to terrible disease. * * * * * It would be nice if the Middle East could also be ignored. In a major much anticipated and somewhat delayed speech outlining the new U.S. policy direction on Israel and "Palestine" (the quotes are because no such nation yet exists) President Bush closed the chapter on a decade of the "Oslo peace process" -- a process whose chief accomplishment was to empower under heavy American European and even Israeli subsidy a Palestinian Authority utterly corrupt from top to bottom and dedicated to the annihilation of Israel through terrorist attacks. In retrospect this was the inevitable result of putting Palestinian civil administration into the hands of a Yasser Arafat -- a man whose prestige and thus claim to legitimacy was founded on the airplane hijackings of Black September on the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic games on guerrilla streetfighting in Amman and Beirut. He is a man whose whole career has consisted of stage-managing acts of psychopathic violence for political ends and who has never shown the slightest interest in the economic or social well-being of his people. Mr. Arafat succeeded -- with Western blessings and under United Nations supervision -- in raising a whole generation of Palestinian schoolchildren in the dream of becoming suicide bombers. The situation inherited by Mr. Bush and the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was far far worse than that of the sticks-and-stones "Intifada" of ten years ago before "Oslo". The PA and the associated terror organizations it has imported into the West Bank and Gaza -- Hamas Hezbollah Islami Jihad -- have hugely enlarged the Palestinian struggle. They have made their connexions to the international Islamist terror movement importing weapons and expertise from Iran Iraq Syria Lebanon; illicit money and fanatic religious counsel from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Even Al Qaeda is now involved; has according to some reports set up camps in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon and smuggled agents into Gaza by sea. The prospect of battle on several fronts has been before the Israelis continuously for the last six months as they have watched a build-up of forces including missile batteries under Hezbollah command and Syrian protection on land the last Israeli administration (that of Ehud Barak) abandoned supposedly to win peace in southern Lebanon. There can be no doubt that a permanent withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank would invite a similar build-up there. While Mr. Bush's Rose Garden speech made clear that the U.S. has abandoned Yasser Arafat as a "peace partner" and made the complete reform of the Palestinian Administration a pre-condition for the creation of any future Palestinian state it still fell short of grabbing the ostrich by the toe-claws. There were as ever before carrots but no sticks. This was not of course how the speech sounded to Palestinian and other Arab ears. Even a moderately favourable reviewer in the Egyptian media said it was a speech that would make the Arabs "lose sleep". It offers the Palestinians a reward for good behaviour -- the same that has been offered for three generations. If they will renounce terrorism and promise to live in peace with an Israel whose permanent existence they recognize they will get land a state and massive foreign aid. That's what they've always been promised. But what if they don't accept this? What if as all indications remain the great majority of Palestinians continue to support and indeed freely elect leaders committed to continuing the terrorist struggle until the Jews finally decamp from the last spit of sand on which they can still live within the vast Muslim world? What will the Palestinians then have to lose? Only what they have lost already: any expectation of a peaceful life. While it ill-suits a mere newspaper writer to suggest what the actual penalties should be I must say that I really don't think the Palestinians or the Arabs at large will go for a reward that has long been on offer. They have proved willing to accept the status quo and all the misery that goes with it so long as they may keep their hope alive that some day some how Israel finally may be annihilated. There is no prospect of an "equal and opposite" loss. Notwithstanding President Bush's proposed "roadmap" to peace between Israel and the Arabs -- which will be the actual talk of Kananaskis slightly ahead of trade disputes between the nations represented there -- is a bold move forward. One by one he is discarding lies upon which U.S. policy was built in the past. The "Oslo process" and the thinking behind it had long been discredited. It is marvellous to see at least that imposture finally cut away. But what will replace it is anyone's guess. Plenty to talk about at Kananaskis. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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