It must be the new presidential jet that’s doing it. As he started travelling around the globe in his spanking Boeing, Thabo Mbeki was going through another metamorphosis. He has now emerged gleaming from his chrysalis as one of the world’s political collossi. We’ve never doubted his potential, but this has been all so sudden. As they say in showbiz about big-time overnight stars: ‘you can’t book him”.
Consider these two statements from those most dutiful of Mr Mbeki’s bumcreepers, the SABC news department and The Sunday Independent. In the latter’s leading article last weekend the following sentence was published: ‘Yesterday, in recognition of South Africa’s vital role in international affairs, British Prime Minister Tony Blair rushed back from a vital summit with United States President George Bush at Camp David to spend six hours meeting Mbeki at his Chequers country residence.”
You can just hear Blair as he apologises to Bush for his hasty departure. ‘Dreadfully sorry Dubya, I’m going to have to take a rain check on international terrorism, the axis of evil and next month’s Gulf war. That vital world leader, Thabo Mbeki, just opened a tiny crack in his vitally crammed international schedule for me and, as you know, that is something I simply can’t afford to miss. I’ve had to sign over Chequers to him as a mark of the British peoples’ gratitude for his vital intellectual input.”
‘I only hope he’ll find a vital minute or two to come and kick my ass too,” murmurs Bush sorrowfully as he waves goodbye.
The SABC followed up the same evening when one of their pizza-faced English television stringers, the aptly named Alistair Wanklyn, was to offer further proof of Thabo’s elevation to the pantheon. Referring to the talks at Chequers, Wanklyn said: ‘Blair accepted Mbeki’s demand that the United Nations should decide the road ahead for Iraq.”
Bush didn’t have to wait too long for his kick up the ass. It was delivered by Mbeki this week, not only aimed at Bush’s posterior but, for good measure, at the entire US. In a fit of terrifying pique at not getting his way on the Iraq question, Mbeki called on South Africans to join in anti-Iraq-war protest marches to US embassies and consulates. It seems at last he’s realised the futility of quiet diplomacy.
Perhaps Mr Mbeki is developing a nostalgia for those heady days when he held the position of leading protagonist in the HIV/Aids dissident lobby and was building a reputation as a virtuoso player of looney tunes. As we all remember, he took delight in sending a letter to president Bill Clinton in which he defended his quaint views on the causes of the disease. When reproduced in leading American newspapers, the letter gave the impression that in the South African presidency the thinking was not all that wholesome. This latest move should produce a lot of new laughs.
Someone else last week making his contribution to international crisis management was, of course, Mr Nelson Mandela, who in his own terrifying display of pique, lashed out at what he believed to be Bush’s mental inadequacy. To these comments Mandela added the claim that Western nations these days feel they can dictate to the current UN secretary general because he is a black man. When the secretaries general were white, said Mandela, they wouldn’t have dared disobey.
Perhaps the great man has forgotten how it was a UN under the stewardship of mainly non-black secretaries general who kicked up some of the loudest fusses about the apartheid government’s incarceration of himself and other South African black leaders. Boycotts, sanctions, diplomatic pressure, lobbying against the National Party government were hatched and approved under a UN guided by — from 1953 — Norway’s Trygve Lie; Sweden’s Dag Hammerskjöld; Burma’s U Thant; Austria’s Kurt Waldheim, Peru’s Javier Pérez de Cuéllar; Egypt’s Boutros Boutros Ghali.
That Kofi Annan doesn’t cut the cake has less to do with the colour of his skin than his sheer ineffectuality as secretary general. He’s far too taken with murmuring humanist platitudes, with playing the sagacious global oracle when he could be showing some balls. Annan lives in a world of ambrosial political fantasy: ‘When we have both the will and a true desire for global tolerance, to seek solutions to the problems that so grievously beset us now …”
Annan’s UN record prior to the top job was not all that admirable: most specifically, as under-secretary general and, when head of the UN Department of Peace Keeping Operations, in 1994, he failed to pass on alarming intelligence about vast weapons dumps being set up in Rwanda and specifically forbade any reconnaissance or arms inspection by the UN assistance mission. For these derelictions he was later censured by the UN — then hastily promoted to secretary general.
Details on this subject are in a fearless book: A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide by Linda Melvern, published by Zed. Well worth a read.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby