At a time when the United States and its allies appear headed for another futile war against the seemingly indestructible Saddam Hussein of Iraq, we welcome the statement by President Nelson Mandela opposing a strike on Iraq.
The US’s justification of its stance is well-rehearsed: Saddam is an untrustworthy dictator with a track record in secretly building weapons of mass destruction who flouts the international order. The United Nations must be upheld. If no concession by Saddam is forthcoming, his malevolent intentions are revealed, and bombing is justified.
Saddam is no democrat and no defender of human rights. But he is being singled out as if he is the only international bad guy, the only Middle Eastern leader to flout UN Security Council resolutions, and as if his is the only country that constructs weapons of mass destruction (the US is itself the world leader in this).
US strategy has created this crisis because it is inherently muddled. The US would dearly love to depose Saddam, but having stopped short of Baghdad seven years ago, has since attempted to use international institutions to hobble him. This is at the root of the dispute.
The punitive purposes for which the UN has been used, the heavy sanctions which have taken their toll on ordinary Iraqis, including hundreds of thousands of children, smack of a vendetta and not an exercise in international diplomacy.
If the US is to conduct its foreign policy through the institutions of the international community, it must expect that there will come a time when its initiatives will be flouted and the credibility of these institutions themselves undermined. We must register our deepest concern at the prospect of another war to defend an obscure principle. Among all the wild talk about Saddam being able to exterminate the world, war is not simply the continuation of diplomacy by other means: the consequences of war in today’s world are too unpredictable.
The biological weapons he is developing are terrifying, but against whom and in what circumstances would he threaten their use? Is bombing realistically going to weaken his capacity to produce them? And, given that nobody knows the location of the chemicals, is half-hearted bombing with no accompanying military action on the ground going to show strength or weakness?
Israel, under Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, will not sit tight as it did in 1991 if Saddam responds to American bombs by attacking Tel Aviv. As a result, the risk of any military intervention escalating into a full-scale Middle Eastern war, possibly involving nuclear weapons, is extremely high.
Even on the US’s terms, is this worth risking for the right to have a majority of Americans on a UN weapons inspection team? We don’t think so.
Playing the game
The Democratic Party is to be congratulated for its recent report on the “new racism” in South African politics, not because we agree with the views contained in it, but because it continues a national debate on the issue. This question was given an edge by Nelson Mandela in his speech to the African National Congress conference in Mafikeng in December. It’s a simple one: what weight do we give to race in the new South Africa? The answers are more complex.
The ANC’s push to transform the racially divided heritage of our society was taken up this week on the sports front. The ANC’s study group on sport accused rugby and cricket selectors of sidelining promising young black players. The chair of the National Assembly’s sport portfolio committee, Lulu Xingwana, described sport as the “last bastion of apartheid” and promised a rigorous examination of how much progress had been made by the various codes in promoting black players.
Sport is crucial to the collective ego, and the public’s powerful identification with national squads demands that the selectors recognise the racial symbolism inherent in their choice of players.
Hansie Cronje takes a strong stand on merit in the selection of teams. But the defeats at the hands of Australia would have been far more tolerable if we had lost with a team which was more racially representative, particularly when he had choices which were fairly marginal anyway.
The issue is not so much which players are available for selection to the national squad, but what development programmes are in place to ensure that the disadvantaged are given an opportunity to realise their full potential and compete for the squad. Then, at least, we could have taken pride in having “played the game” – and have known that, by doing so, we had made an investment in our collective future.
On the other hand, are we really “playing the game” if we exclude aspiring young players merely because of the paleness of their pigmentation? Would not such a regime in fact represent the “last bastion of apartheid” so angrily decried by Xingwana?
These are difficult issues which reverberate in other sectors of our society, from the playing field to the classroom and the workplace. But, tackled by means of calm and reasoned debate, we see no reason why they should spell the end of the rainbow nation.