Why Mandela is missed: the world’s leadership lag

 

World mourns Nelson Mandela: scene from this week in Pretoria. Photo: Reuters/Yves Herman.

What’s the difference between Rob Ford and Nelson Mandela?

Everything.

And that’s the problem.

 Ford is only this year’s most spectacular example of failure to live up to Mandela’s stellar example of promoting unity, consensus, leadership, honesty, decency, equality and governance in the public interest.

Here’s a shortlist of zeroes on the Mandela scale:

In the U.S., the Tea Party Republicans’ flaws are a titch less conspicuous than Ford’s, but their polarization politics, my-way-or-highway mindset, and poor-bashing policies put them on the bottom rung..

In Italy, former premier Silvio Berlusconi spared the country another few years of braggadocio and bunga-bunga by losing his latest power play when his party split and moved into opposition.He also lost his senate seat.  Bravo!

In Ukraine, President Viktor Yanukovich, whose term has been described as a thugocracy,  reportedly spent more time enriching his family than the country.

In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai went through the motions of cleaning up corruption, but ended up spreading it. This year Afghanistan rated lowest on the Transparency International “corruption perception” scale.

In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe defied all of Mandela’s principles to take the country on a steady plunge into brutality, repression and economic ruin. Worse, the 89-year-old won another (widely disputed) term in office.

In Egypt, Gen. Abdul Fattah al-Sisi vowed to uphold democracy and instead deepened the country's political and religious fault lines by cracking down on anyone who defied his efforts to impose control. No Mandela moments here.

In Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko gets little attention by virtue of obscurity. It’s his only virtue. Since his 1994 election he’s ruled with an iron fist. No wonder he won the satirical 2013 "Ig Nobel Prize" for making it illegal to applaud in public.

But what about the Western leaders who are paying tribute to Mandela this week?

President Barack Obama rates way less than 10/10 for his ever-expanding spy state, failure to close down Gitmo and hyperactive prosecution of whistleblowers -- not to mention running a drone program that delivers a death sentence without trial.

Nor does Prime Minister Stephen Harper rate top marks on the Mandela scale for his divide-and-conquer politics and “top down” democracy. His policies are reshaping the Canada that Mandela respected -- and not in a good way. The Senate? We won’t even go there.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to the Middle East, South Asia and U.S., winning national and international awards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's green, it's made of paper, and it helps cure inflation.

Zimbabwe in more inflationary times. (Reuters/Howard Burditt.)

What price national pride?

For a partial answer to the question, consider the case of Zimbabwe.

Beginning in the late 1990s and for much of the following decade, the southern African republic’s economy declined at a rapid rate. “Collapsed” would not be too strong a term.

To cope with a nearly constant series of financial crises, the country’s central bank got in the habit of printing money faster and faster and in ever larger denominations, money whose value kept shrinking as public confidence in the currency eroded or – what was that word again? Collapsed.

By July 2008, the annual inflation rate had reached a truly dizzying level, estimated at 231 million per cent. Prices for consumer goods changed hourly and doubled almost daily.

But the central bank kept churning out Zimbabwe dollars, emblazoned with ever greater quantities of zeroes. In January 2009, the bank released a 100 trillion-dollar note that was briefly worth about $30 U.S. before it, too, became worthless.

In the end, Finance Minister Tendai Biti – an opposition figure in a patched-together coalition government – took what must have been a deeply painful decision. After all, a country’s currency is about as potent a national symbol as exists, even if its value is sinking through the floor.

But Biti did what he felt he had to do. He withdrew Zimbabwe’s own currency from circulation and replaced it with legal tender of a different colour.

You might be familiar with it. It’s called the U.S. dollar.

Now, five years later, almost all financial transactions in Zimbabwe are conducted in American greenbacks, and inflation has practically disappeared. By 2011, the annual inflation rate had fallen to just 3 per cent, and it continues to hover around that level.

This abrupt monetary transformation – from chaos to stability in one simple step – is known to economists as “dollarization.”

Simply put, it’s the replacement of a discredited national currency with banknotes that bear the markings of a foreign land, preferably one that has a better grip on its money supply.

Zimbabwe is by no means the first country to have gone down this road.

It was more than a century ago, in 1904, that the Central American republic of Panama opted to use U.S. dollars as its currency – or just a year after the country conveniently gained political independence from Colombia, so that the United States could dig a certain canal there. Panama also has a “national” tender of its own – the Balboa – but in practice there is no difference between the two currencies. They trade at par.

Nowadays, at least two other Latin American states, Ecuador and El Salvador, also do business in yanquí dollars.

Meanwhile, a welter of Pacific states have also opted to use greenbacks. They include Palau, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and East Timor, among others.

At least three other Pacific island-nations – Kiribati, Nauru, and Tuvalu – have followed a similar course but with a different geopolitical slant. They also do business in dollars from a foreign land, but in these cases the dollars are Australian, not American.

Other groups of countries – most notably members of the European Union – have opted to replace their old national monetary units with a common currency, in this case the Euro. Several Caribbean islands also use a shared currency, as do more than a dozen countries in central and west Africa, mostly former French colonies.

In most cases, dollarization seems to work pretty well, although it is no panacea for all of a nation’s ills.

Zimbabwe – where presidential and parliamentary elections are being conducted on July 31 – may have slain the dragon of monetary inflation by opting for the U.S. dollar. But many serious political and economic challenges remain, not to mention one or two tricky logistical problems.

For example, U.S. banknotes circulating in Zimbabwe tend to remain in circulation a long time, becoming both very dirty and extremely limp. Worse, there is no easy way to make small change, a difficulty chronicled not long ago in a New York Times report from Harare. Instead of making change with coins – in Zimbabwe, there are no coins – cashiers in supermarkets tend to divvy out candies or matches or single tablets of Aspirin as a rough means of rounding off each transaction.

It isn’t perfect, but it sure beats an annual inflation rate of 231 million per cent.

Oakland Ross is a foreign affairs reporter for the Toronto Star.

Home truths: Canadian diplomacy gets to grips

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande at EU summit in Brussels in May. Bertrand Langlois/Getty Images

 Who says Canada isn’t a world leader in international relations?

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s rating of Russia as a minus one on the G8 scale was refreshing. After all, since Moscow elbowed its way into the hallowed hallways of developed, and supposedly like-minded G7 nations in 1997, nobody had dared to say the unsayable – that it was maybe a titch premature.

As for Iran, leader-elect Hassan Rowhani hadn’t even warmed up the presidential chair before Foreign Minister John Baird was declaring him a “puppet” and the whole election thing a sham. Turns out the Ayatollah Khamenei is still in charge. And – why pussyfoot -- everyone knows it.

So much for Canada’s bland-and-boring image. A new era of exciting bare-knuckle diplomacy, Ottawa-style, is long overdue, and as fresh as a splash of whatever fills Lake Ontario these days.

Take German President Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande.  A match made in the European Union but definitely not in heaven.

Merkel: Ach!  So there you are, you little socialist salamander, ready to hand out more of the taxpayer’s euros to those lazy, quiche-nibbling slackers and running the economy into the ground so decent hard-working Germans can pick up the tab…

Hollande: Enough with your arrogant Teutonic lectures. Je m’en fous. Take some time off, mon ange. Spend a weekend at a spa in Vichy. There’s a special on fiscal relaxation.

The next meeting between President Barack Obama and Afghan leader Hamid Karzai could be more down to earth and candid too.

Karzai: welcome to our country. Not your country. That place next to Pakistan, which we don’t like very much either. And when you reach the door just leave the cheque on the table.

Obama: so you can hand it out to your relatives?  I don’t think so. We’ve spent at least $1 trillion on this country and we want results.  How much more do we have to put out to get freedom and democracy around here? Cough up or we’re putting the Taliban on the payroll.

Why should the southern hemisphere preserve the niceties of old-fashioned diplomacy?  It’s no secret that South African President Jacob Zuma and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe are not best friends, in spite of old freedom-fighting ties.

Zuma: another year, another election fraud. Didn’t I tell you to get those political reforms in order before you ordered the poll? You may have had a lot of surgery, but let’s face it, you’re 89. How long do you expect to go on here?

Mugabe:  as long as the botox holds out, sweetie. And if I were you I wouldn’t go strutting around telling the neighbors what to do. You’re just another white man in a black man’s skin. And frankly, it doesn’t look so good on you. I can give you a number of someone to  fix that.

All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.
- Zhou Enlai.

Olivia Ward has covered conflict, politics and international diplomacy at the UN, the former Soviet Union, Europe, the Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards.

Whistleblowers still battling the odds to do the right thing

They can't help sticking their necks out: giraffes in Tanazania's Lake Manyara National Park. (Photo: Christian Jensen)

“You know how to whistle, don’t you?” says Lauren Bacall’s famous line from To Have and Have Not. “You just put your lips together and blow.”

If only it were that simple.

For whistleblowers, who go up against corporations, governments and organized criminals, it can be the most difficult decision of a lifetime.

John Graham, director of Giraffe Heroes International – a U.S.-based group that celebrates those who stick their necks out for the common good – says that although there are some advances to help whistleblowers, in some cases it’s also getting harder.

“Technology makes it easier, because it’s easier to uncover the nasty stuff that’s going on,” says the retired American diplomat. “The hard part is that in the U.S., for instance, employers are trying to get access to employees' emails.”

And he adds, “the bottom line is it still takes a lot of guts.”

That’s clear from the treatment of U.S. soldier Bradley Manning, who was locked up in conditions human rights advocates have called torture on suspicion of sending classified government emails to WikiLeaks. Or the fate of Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who died in a Moscow jail after blowing the whistle on a huge alleged tax fraud scheme.

Neither is on the giraffe list. But many lower profile giraffes are sticking their necks out every day, and paying a heavy price. Graham himself was put on a no-fly list by the Bush administration after Sept. 11 – and in spite of his diplomatic connections has never been able to find out why, or remove his name.

On the Giraffe Heroes database is an exhaustive list of ordinary people who have sacrificed much to do what they believe is the right thing.

Like Zimbabwean Farai Maguwu, who documented the brutality of President Robert Mugabe’s security forces when they attacked poor “illegal” miners and local civilians in the country's diamond fields. He was imprisoned for six months and is under constant surveillance. But he continues fighting for justice and a fair share of Zimbabwe’s rich resources for all its people.

Or lawyer and environmental activist Meena Raman of Malaysia, who stood in front of tractors to stop dumping of radioactive waste in areas that were home to 10,000 people. She was thrown into jail, but the offending company closed down.

Or Justine Masika Bihamba, whose life has been threatened and family forced to flee the dangerous eastern Democratic Republic of Congo because of her ongoing campaign to seek medical, social and legal help for women who have been savagely raped.

Or Northrup Grumman Corp. comptroller Jean-Francois Truong of Los Angeles, who went up against the aerospace giant in court with allegations of fraud, including huge cost overruns on the B-2 bomber,. He exposed the misuse of public money, embarrassing the company and the government.

These are just a few of dozens of people whose courage earned them a giraffe citation. For readers looking for hope and change, the website should be required reading. It’s a bracing change from the often dismal news of the day.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to the Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards, including the Michener Award for public service journalism.


  

Rape a naked power play in Mugabe's Zimbabwe: report

President Robert Mugabe (4th R) and first lady Grace Mugabe (2nd R) celebrate his 89th birthday  at the State House, February 20, 2013, the eve of his birthday. Zimbabwe is expected to hold a constitutional referendum on March 16, 2013 and elections in July, but no dates have been set. AFP PHOTO / JEKESAI NJIKIZANAJEKESAI NJIKIZANA/AFP/Getty Images

For Sara Andrews, the stories of Zimbabwean women whose children witnessed their rapes were the most disturbing.

“The violence was horrific,” said the New York lawyer, who made four trips to neighboring South Africa to collect evidence of a rape campaign allegedly orchestrated by President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party. “Some of the women were simply numb to the world. How others survived and were able to function at any level was beyond me.”

The fact-finding missions paid off this week as the South African government made a landmark decision to investigate the allegations of sexual violence against Mugabe’s political foes as a crime against humanity. It was the result of a years-long effort by Stephen Lewis and Paula Donovan’s AIDS-Free World and its Zimbabwean partners to bring them to light and their perpetrators to justice.

The group submitted testimony from 84 alleged victims who had fled Zimbabwe, as well as witnesses, doctors and NGOs. They listed with the names of over 200 suspected perpetrators and organizers of the rapes, which allegedly took place during Zimbabwe’s 2008 election campaign.

Andrews, assistant director of the global pro bono initiative New Perimeter, works for the DLA Piper law firm, which donated its services. In spite of experience with human rights cases in Kosovo, South Africa, Mexico and other countries, she was “horrified and outraged” at what she heard from Zimbabwean refugees.

“This was rape as a political weapon,” she said. “I’d read tales of torture and mayhem. But reading something and speaking to someone in front of you who had lived the horror are two different experiences.”

Victims ranged in age from “five-year-old girls to elderly grandmothers.” What they all had in common were links with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change: opposition Mugabe was determined to crush at any cost.

“In many instances five or more men committed the rapes together,” the report said. “Many women were forced to watch their husbands, children and parents killed or tortured before they were raped.” Nine of the women believed they were infected with HIV/AIDS, and 17 later tested positive for HIV. Ten women said they became pregnant after the rapes.

Will the perpetrators be brought to justice? That’s still an open question.

The International Criminal Court can’t prosecute, because Zimbabwe is not a member. And Zimbabwe’s own human rights commission cannot investigate abuses that took place before 2009. If South Africa decides to take the case, it would be the court of last resort for women who have had no hope of justice. Even if South Africa never lays hands on the suspects, their victims would still have their day in the court of public opinion.

“This was the first time that anyone had asked them for their stories,” said Andrews. “Their lives had been ruined. They were living in terrible conditions as refugees. This lets them know that they haven’t suffered in vain.”

Next door, in Zimbabwe, a national referendum is slated for March 15, followed by a new election in which the 89-year-old Mugabe plans to run.  Women, once again, will be running for cover.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights as a correspondent and bureau chief from the former Soviet Union to the Balkan, Northern Ireland, the Middle East and South Asia. She has won both national and international awards, collaborated on two Emmy-winning films and is one of the few journalists to have a war requiem written to her work.