era
Mail & Guardian reporters
The past took on the future. Like a dying man who knows his time is nearly up, the 20th century picked this moment to have one last flourish – for old time’s sake.
It had some scores to settle, some unfinished business to complete. Next year would be too late: 1999 will be the eve of the millennium, when everyone will be leaning over the precipice, taking a peek at the coming century. From January 1, we’ll all be looking forward.
1998 had to carry the burden, to be the final year with both feet planted in the 20th century – the last gasp of a turbulent era.
So it became the year of memories exhumed, by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and by Britain’s most unwelcome guest, Augusto Pinochet.
It was the year when past bitterness was supposed to be put aside, by the Northern Irish and by Israel and Palestine. But the past would not go quietly. At Omagh and Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, it sent a warning: I am not dead yet.
Old spectres returned. A new form of McCarthyism gripped the United States, as a latter-day witchfinder-general stalked the land, prodding his special prosecutor’s finger into the intimate corners of the life of a US president. If Princess Diana was the woman who dominated 1997, Monica Lewinsky was the face of 1998.
Wherever you turned, 1998 was a crammed, messy 12 months of stocktaking and debt- settling, death throes and farewells. But not entirely.
By year’s end, it became clear that the past would not have the show all to itself: the future made the odd appearance, too. Occasionally, it even took on the past – and won:
l The year’s most enduring saga, involving US President Bill Clinton and Lewinsky, began when 1998 was barely three weeks old.
As befits the modern era, it blurted out on the Internet, courtesy of a cybersleuth by the name of Matt Drudge. Soon television and newspapers caught up, and within a few hours we were looking at a few frames of a slow- motion video clinch that we would see over again all year.
The strange, sad, sometimes hilarious tale of Zippergate captivated the world. There were peak moments: the finger-wagging denial in January, the half-apology in August, the Starr report in September, the four-hour tape of Clinton’s grand jury testimony, the voters’ reprieve in November and the impeachment vote in December. In its key features, Zippergate was a quintessentially 1990s affair. While Watergate arose from the Cold War battle of left versus right, the Zipper was a skirmish between men and women.
l Nowhere was the move from past to future more stark than in Northern Ireland.
The past began the year with the clear advantage. Catholics and Protestants were killing each other at random, plunging Northern Ireland into the worst of the bad old days. When Billy Wright, hard-faced leader of the Loyalist Volunteer Force, was murdered inside the Maze prison, the peace process seemed dead.
But in early January, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Mo Mowlam performed one of the most outstanding acts of political courage of the year: she walked into the Maze jail and held face-to-face talks with the loyalist convicts.
She succeeded and the loyalist armies did not break off their three-year ceasefire. Peace talks continued, but they were constantly rocked by crisis, withdrawal and stalemate.
In April a peace deal was struck, and on May 22, 71% of voters said yes to the deal.
But the past was not done yet. In August it declared itself alive, with a bomb planted in the heart of Omagh. In the worst atrocity of the 30-year history of the conflict, 28 people were killed.
Still, the past did not win. The people of Omagh and beyond turned on the perpetrators, the Real Irish Republican Army, and its apologists. They wanted peace and they would not let these ambassadors of the bloody past wreck it.
l The past appeared to have caught up with foreign affairs official Robert McBride in March when he was arrested and thrown into a Mozambican jail on suspicion of gun-running.
The oh-so-familiar smears soon began: McBride was a buddy of the East Timor dissidents; he was in cahoots with the Irish Republican Army; he was planning a coup against his own government.
The Mail & Guardian preferred to believe McBride’s version: that his arrest was a trap instigated by old- guard members of military intelligence, working with elements of the Mozambican security services.
He languished in jail for six months before being charged with gun-running, espionage and associating with “bad elements”. He was released on bail in September.
In an interview with the M&G on the eve of the year’s end (see page 10), he looked to the future: it would be one of kiss and make up, he said, predicting his suspension by the Department of Foreign Affairs would soon be lifted.
l War – rumours and memories of it – hung over the year. Whether the ongoing bloodshed in Kosovo, the eight-nation rumble in the Congo jungle, the nuclear tit-for-tat between India and Pakistan in May, or the perennial battle of wills between Clinton and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, armed conflict was a constant motif.
Each confrontation was charged with past ones. Kosovo was not just a “rerun” of the war in Bosnia, as many observers saw it, but also the latest spasm in a Balkan saga as old as the millennium. India and Pakistan’s nuclear rivalry did not come out of nowhere: it was the unfinished business of the partition of 1947.
l Likewise, the February and December clashes with Iraq arose, in part, from the incompleteness of the 1991 conflict. Every time Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair talked tough against Saddam, they were reading off the script of Desert Storm.
Officially, the tension centred on the rights of United Nations weapons inspectors to snoop around Saddam’s nuclear, chemical and biological installations, though it may also have been about the limits of superpower influence.
In February, when Clinton and Blair rattled their sabres and then stepped back from the brink at the last minute, the fear seemed serious that Saddam could be brewing vials of evil gases or fluids that could destroy the planet.
In December, when they bombed Iraq for four nights, that fear seemed to count less than Clinton’s fears about being impeached.
l This was the year of global economic meltdown, raising some age-old fears. The crash of the Russian rouble in August followed meltdown in Japan, South Korea and Malaysia. Brazil teetered, and the South African rand started sliding. Then in September, Wall Street recorded its second-largest fall in history.
The double-headed spectre of the 1930s – deflation and depression – seemed to live again. For 25 years the neo- liberal consensus had ruled that inflation and over-heated growth were the enemy; this year we learned that falling prices and slack demand can be just as dangerous.
In September the Group of Seven issued a ground-breaking statement, declaring that lack of growth – not inflation – was the greatest threat facing the world economy.
The result has been a return to economic tools of the past. It may not be quite as veteran left-wing historian Eric Hobsbawm put it in October – “A funny thing happened on the way to the millennium: Karl Marx came back” – but John Maynard Keynes certainly enjoyed a revival.
The citadels of global capitalism turned left, and it was clear some once- discredited ideas were back in fashion. It was suddenly okay to say capital flows have to be regulated and monetary policy should be geared towards expansion.
In a year that the International Monetary Fund deemed “the most severe crisis for 50 years”, economic brains around the world agreed: something had to be done.
l There was a similar feeling about the planet, a sneaky sense that 1998 was payback time for the sins of the past.
There were vast, toxic fires in the Amazon, Indonesia and Russia; floods in China and Bangladesh that killed thousands and left up to 80-million people homeless; and Hurricane Mitch tore through four Central American countries in November with devastating effect.
Global warming made itself felt. This was the warmest year on record, and the 20th century has been the warmest in 1 200 years. Major climate shifts brought severe drought in some countries and major flooding to others.
l Among the happier notes were the bells ringing to signify the wedding of President Nelson Mandela and Graa Machel.
It was a thoroughly modern wedding, although Mandela paid lobola. The bride didn’t wear white and she will keep her own surname. In fact, she has even kept her own seaside home in Mozambique. The two enjoy a commuter marriage – a marriage which is one of matching intellects and must rank among the more illustrious unions on this continent.
l South Africa ended the year with the truth and the past wrapped up in five leather-bound volumes. The fruit of two years of confession, tears, denial and anger, the truth commission’s final report was presented by its chair, Desmond Tutu, to Mandela at the end of October.
It was a crowning moment, marred briefly by the African National Congress’s attempt to stop publication. The ANC tried to scotch the report after a successful attempt by former president FW de Klerk to have his name excised from it.
The search for the truth of the past continues into our future. Individuals like Marius Schoon and Nomonde Calata who lost their loved ones continue to contest applications for amnesty, and the nation remains divided on how to forgive the oppressors, the torturers and the masterminds of an ugly past.
We know now only books can be bound and shelved. The journey toward truth and reconciliation is more difficult. It is one we will still be travelling in the next millennium.
l That some truths are too hard to reconcile was underlined when former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet flew into Heathrow in October to avail himself of London’s private health clinics.
Pinochet had checked into Harley Street before, but this time a resourceful Spanish magistrate was watching. Using the Internet, Baltazar Garzon worked out where Pinochet was being treated and served him with a writ. Chile, which had tried so hard to put aside the years of anguish, was forced to remember them. In Spain and beyond, exiles told of their own torture, of their grief as they saw loved ones “disappear”.
There was much rejoicing when five law lords declared that even a head of state is not immune to the consequences of his actions, and British Home Secretary Jack Straw decided he had to face the law. Pinochet’s past, it seemed, had caught up with him at last.
l Some new demons also raised their heads. After bombs placed at US embassies killed 250 people in Nairobi and 10 in Dar es Salaam in August, the US pointed a finger at Osama bin Laden, renegade Saudi Arabian multimillionaire.
The US retaliated with bombing raids in Sudan and Afghanistan, on camps which it said were part of a terrorist network run by Bin Laden. In the tit- for-tat, a bomb exploded at the Planet Hollywood restaurant in Cape Town, killing three and wounding 27.
These bombings seemed to confirm the coming of a new confrontation. If the 20th century had pitted communism against capitalism, perhaps the next century would see West against East, Christendom against Islam – with Bin Laden the comic-book villain for the new era.
l South Africa’s invasion of Lesotho in September was a blast from the past: our soldiers heading into another country to attendant mayhem and death. Nine South African soldiers were killed, as were an unknown number of Basotho in several days of shooting and looting.
The invasion, or “intervention” as the SABC and the government insisted on calling it, marked a shift in South African foreign policy. It moved from a policy of encouraging the idea of negotiated settlements (as it did in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Northern Ireland) to one of military intervention.
The operation enjoyed only moderate success: a small number of mutinous soldiers turned themselves in. But it catalysed mass destruction of South African businesses by the local population, which was overwhelmingly opposed to the action. The legacy of South Africa’s big-bully tactics lives on in the loss of income and jobs. It will take decades to remake Maseru and other centres in the mountain kingdom.
South Africa has claimed the operation a victory. In December six judges in Lesotho swore in an interim political authority comprising all the major political parties.
l For Africa, it was a year of intense contest between the past and the future. Halfway through 1997, the world applauded as Laurent Kabila’s rise to power in Congo seemed to close Mobutu Sese Seko’s sordid chapter. But by August this year, rebels waging fresh conflict cast the past’s dark shadow over Kabila too.
Within weeks, seven other African countries had become involved in the conflict. Troops from Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Sudan and Chad crossed their borders to join Kabila in the central African meltdown. Rwanda and Uganda backed the rebels, in pursuit of age- old conflicts dating back to the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
African leaders lurched from one halting round of peace talks to the next. But these talks stumbled on vested economic undertones and a failure, until December, to include the rebels in the talks.
l Further up the West African coast, the death of Nigerian military dictator Sani Abacha in June took the edge off memories of the hanging of Ogoni activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa. But the death of jailed president-elect Moshood Abiola in July buried the nation’s immediate hopes for the future.
It is still too early to say whether the election promises of Abacha’s apparently gentler military successor, General Abdusalami Abubakar, are an empty echo of Nigeria’s repetitive past, or the first step to a brighter future.
l In the Horn of Africa, the border conflict between former allies Eritrea and Ethiopia over tiny pieces of land resurrected a nightmare of the past. The promising future of their 1991 joint victory over Mengistu Haile Mariam ended up as just another crumpled and bloody heap in an already overflowing wastebasket.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the Organisation of African Unity promised the sun would smile on Africa’s future, but continued fighting often overshadowed the lofty ambitions of an “African renaissance”.