Phillip van Niekerk:FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK
I received a phone call on Tuesday night from journalist Carlos Cordosa in Maputo. “How would you like to help stop the Yugoslavian war?” he raved at me. The suggestion: join an international call for the pope to take up residence in Belgrade.
At first I thought he was mad, but on reflection I saw that the idea at least had the merit of being original, a quality notably lacking in the Nato and Slobodan Milosevic options to date. The Catholic countries in Nato, already less gung-ho than their Anglo Saxon allies, would break ranks at the prospect that a stray Cruise missile might take out the holy father. Even the Americans might pause to reconsider.
We’re not alone in feeling there is something obscene in the bombing of Yugoslavia. Not only is it counter-productive, uniting the Serbs behind Milosevic and hastening the ethnic cleansing of the Kosovars, but it has become a threat to world peace.
As journalist Veran Matic, editor-in-chief of Belgrade’s B92 radio station, points out in our paper this week: “Nato’s bombs have blasted the germinating seeds of democracy out of the soil of Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro, and assured that they will not sprout again for a very long time.”
Newspapers and individuals in several countries, including Sweden, Mozambique and Greece, have endorsed an open letter to Pope John Paul II, and we support them. The letter notes that such a gesture (the pope travelling to Belgrade) would prevent the situation degenerating into a conflict as devastating as the genocides and world wars that marked this century.
Of course, the pontiff is not going to be swayed by an article in the Mail & Guardian, even presuming he has ever heard about this tiny newspaper in a far corner of the world. But there’s no harm in making one’s voice heard.
The esteemed editor of the Financial Mail, my good friend Peter Bruce, who is supposed to know more about these matters than us old lefties at the M&G, appears to have bought the line that the government diamond valuator is out of his depth for daring to question De Beers’s valuation of its own gems – a move that has led the diamond giant to freeze its exports. All the fuss is because De Beers effectively sells the gems to itself in the shape of the Central Selling Organisation in London and then tells the valuator what they “paid” themselves for the diamonds. Until now, its word has been uncritically accepted.
The line that De Beers is putting out is that it does not pay export duties on these “sales”. Therefore, undervaluation has no tax implications. Bruce takes it one logical step further, saying understating the value of export gems would increase the tax on sales. Back here in the economically illiterate wastelands of the Media Mill we do not understand how reducing the “value” of a company’s main product can do anything other than decrease its taxable profits.
The government is probing the way one of the bastions of the old South Africa did business – probably at the expense of the fiscus and the local diamond cutting industry. Surely Minister of Minerals and Energy Penuell Maduna and his colleagues should be encouraged, not pooh-poohed, when they challenge the status quo.