The parallels between Israel and the South Africa of PW Botha grow daily more striking. Since besieged Israeli voters installed militarist Ariel Sharon as leader, security considerations have replaced politics, violence and counter-violence have spiralled out of control, state assassination has been sanctioned, whole communities are punished for individual crimes, voices of reason are systematically undermined and the fires of suicidal radicalism systematically stoked.
Like Botha, Sharon is leading the people he represents and claims to be protecting down a bloody cul-de-sac. After this week’s terrible wave of suicide bombings, the radical Palestinian movement Hamas warned that it had enough would-be martyrs to last 20 years. Each counter-strike by the military further undermines Israel’s security, frustrates the efforts of the United States envoys to the region and renders the entire Western world more vulnerable to terror.
Perhaps the most lunatic aspect of Sharon’s policy if one can dignify knee-jerk reprisals with that term is his campaign against the man who personifies the Palestinian nation, Yasser Arafat. This week Sharon did everything but assassinate the Palestinian leader to force him to crack down on militants. Arafat has declared a state of emergency in the occupied territories and made 120 arrests, but this will make little difference while Palestinian grievances continue to fester. Indeed, such actions simply weaken him and strengthen the hand of hardliners who do not recognise Israel’s right to exist. How Sharon expects the Palestinian Authority to enforce law and order when he is attacking Palestinian security installations and maintaining closures and restricting movement in the occupied territories is unclear.
The reality is that Arafat represents Israel’s major hope for a lasting peace, just as the African National Congress, Botha’s sworn enemy, held the key to peace in South Africa. He clearly wants a settlement indeed, the longer the violence continues, the more precarious his position and the weaker he can only become as a negotiating partner.
In South Africa Botha’s increasing recourse to state coercion veiled an underlying unwillingness to negotiate a transfer of power to the black majority. He harboured delusory hopes that by promoting so-called moderates and destroying ANC-inspired militancy he could restrict concessions to a power-sharing arrangement in which whites remained the dominant partner. Similarly, Sharon’s strident emphasis on security and Arafat’s peace-keeping obligations appear to conceal an unwillingness to negotiate on “final status” issues, most notably the future of Jerusalem. Sooner or later the Israelis will have to accept that an independent state acceptable to Palestinians, and intrinsic to a peaceful settlement, will not happen without concessions on this issue.
Afrikaner leaders understood by the late 1980s that there could be no military solution to South Africa’s violent upheavals, and did the unthinkable they dropped preconditions and started to talk. This is Sharon’s only way out of a descending spiral, not strident security demands, the setting of unreasonable time-frames and revanchism.
Manuel out of his depth
If all around you people are losing their heads and blaming it on you, the temptation is often to find a distraction. With the economy failing to boom, unemployment rising and the rand falling, we assume that is why Finance Minister Trevor Manuel demonstrated his lamentable lack of knowledge about the HIV-Aids epidemic this week when he said that anti-retroviral drugs did not limit the spread of HIV-Aids. This flies in the face of evidence that properly used anti-retrovirals can not only save people’s lives but also limit the spread of the virus by making its carriers less infectious.
Manuel admits that he knows little about anti-retroviral drugs, and it would have been better for his reputation if he had left it at that. However, he then went on to claim that erratic treatment with them will result in “a series of drug-resistant diseases inside your body”. Manuel appears to have confused the virus with opportunistic infections. Inadequate anti-retroviral therapy does lead to drug-resistant HIV but it does not affect the diseases that prey on an immune-compromised person.
Our president complained that reports on the size of the Aids epidemic imply that Africans are disease carrying and promiscuous. Oddly, this belief seems to have infected the ANC. Manuel appears to have fallen prey to it when he said medicines could not change “exceedingly promiscuous” individuals and therefore did not help the epidemic. This concern is repeated in the ANC Today newsletter which says that among the challenges facing the health system are “the sense of ‘complacency’ created by anti-retroviral drugs and then reverting to dangerous sexual practices, increasing the spread of the virus”.
We suggest that Mr Manuel return to his own sphere of expertise, by pondering on what more can be done to a small economy whose currency is not just in freefall, but actively accelerating downwards. Ditto the writers and editors of ANC Today, who have repeatedly rehashed confused and disingenuous arguments as to why the government should not be providing anti-retroviral drugs where possible. Manuel has done us a favour, though, by reinforcing once again that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.