Johannesburg: Sustaining divisive rhetoric in the name of 'development'
United Nations — The recently concluded Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development highlighted crucial issues facing poor countries and called for solutions to these pressing problems; it also sustained the rhetoric of confrontation and divisiveness which to no small degree is part and parcel of the problem of underdevelopment in the first place.
While the UN Summit had notable visions—the mandates became too broad and the issues become mired in competing agendas. Following the Rio “Earth Summit” of a decade ago, such international confabs assume a life of their own with a spontaneous generation of social, economic, and environmental issues which are added to the wish-list agenda.
Summits like this thus tend to grow from the boundless optimism of solving a particular problem which soon evolves to an unwieldy mandate which attempts to redress the economic, environmental, and health ills of history.
Still according to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, “ The Summit will put us an a path that reduces poverty while protecting the environment, a path that works for all peoples, rich and poor.” Governments and private enterprise slated 300 projects in key areas such as safe and clean drinking water for poor countries.
Yet, I found it richly ironic that while delegates bemoaned the food shortages and famine in Southern Africa the architect of much of this regional problem was sitting smugly in attendance — Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe. To retain political power, “Comrade Bob” transformed a once productive breadbasket into a basket case. Regime land grabs, political thuggery, and racial intimidation rule the day.
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Helen Clarke blamed Mugabe’s farm seizure policies for creating a food crisis in southern Africa; “the disaster has been made much worse by deliberate and cynical government policies.”
Fearing further criticism, Mugabe launched a highly personal pre-emptive attack on British Prime Minister Tony Blair, effectively hijacking the Summit with a “Blame Britain” for Zimbabwe’s ills, according to London’s Daily Telegraph. Blair’s speech supporting his commitment to African development, was upstaged by the dictator’s diatribe.
And when U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had the guts to raise the issue of Mugabe’s misrule, it was Powell who was crudely heckled and jeered on three separate occasions often by fellow Americans from political action fringe groups. Well, well.
Powell announced a massive increase in American development assistance to poor states—he presented a package increasing foreign aid by fifty percent to $15 billion annually. Equally he pressed the Bush Administration’s philosophy of aid connected to ending rife corruption and opening of borders to trade. He added, “ Official development aid alone is not enough.”
In fact while there a general perception that the poor are getting poorer, that not really the case; The Economist advises — What responsible heads of government should say is that the ten years since the Rio Summit have seen lots of progress in enhancing human welfare, especially in the most populous countries of the world, China and India, thanks to those countries decision to liberalize their economies and open their borders to more trade and investment — virtually everything needed to grow and reduce poverty depends chiefly on domestic policies –ask South Korea, China and even India.”
Thus if we view the two most populous places on earth—China and India, we see long overdue and positive social economic changes—despite a communist regime in China and because of a democratic system in India. So there is good news.
The bad news remains that many countries in Africa and the Middle East have been regressing; through acts of God but still as more sadly through acts of political malfeasance by rulers such as Mugabe. The reality remains that a cacophony of confrontation will drone out the reason of reform thus turning such confabs into an inevitable “us and them” showdown.
If we take the discussion back to these issues of Mugabe’s “Blame Britain first,” or of the fond memories of the socialist stagnation in Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, we are setting the socio/economic clock back to an endless political debate. This will help nobody, least of all the poor.
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense
issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
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