Six British soldiers, described by their war criminal Prime Minister, Tony “Blah-Blah” Blair back home in Westminster as being involved in doing an “extraordinary and heroic job”, were killed, as it turned out, by an infuriated mob in southern Iraq last week.
What the initial reports failed to point out (and subsequent reports downplayed) was that 80 Iraqis were killed in the firefight that followed.
Leaders of the invading armies described the deaths of the soldiers as “unprovoked murder”. One would have thought that getting killed in the course of duty was an occupational hazard for people who voluntarily sign up to be soldiers and go to exotic places they know nothing about to kill other people.
The deaths of scores of Iraqi civilians, on the other hand, hardly merited a mention. So much for the humanitarian side of the invasion of Iraq.
Nor did the fact that the whole incident, far from being unprovoked, had actually been instigated by the provocative behaviour of those very same “fair-minded” Tommies, who had shot dead four more Iraqi civilians in the course of a house-to-house search for personal weapons. The tactic seems to have backfired — if you’ll excuse the pun. Elements among the invaded Iraqis objected to the tactics of the invading armies’ house-to-house methods and retaliated in kind.
Does the United Nations complain about these escalating abuses of human rights in Iraq? To his credit, former chief arms inspector Hans Blix has spoken out, in his delicately scathing Swedish way, against the invasion and all that it stands for, pointing out that if the invaders knew exactly where the alleged weapons of mass destruction were, they should have told him in the first place. Failing that, having decided to invade, why didn’t they go straight to the coordinates identified by United States Secretary of State Colin Powell and pick them up?
Apart from Blix, not a peep from the world body. I guess Kofi Annan is too busy worrying about his pension, his perfect, grizzled haircut, and his smiling Swedish wife to risk calling a spade a spade — which is supposed to be his job.
Fall on your sword or quit, Kofi. What possible use are you now? The US and its puppy-dog partners in the United Kingdom have decided that dialogue is infra dig. So get out while you can.
Or is the problem that there are no other jobs that make any sense in this new dispensation, after you have risen to the height of secretary general of the UN, and the UN makes no sense any more? Eish, we sympathise.
It is a little more difficult to sympathise with the position of the inexplicable (and deeply excretable) Bush so-called administration, some of whom (including, apparently, the boss-eyed boss himself) are about to descend on Africa’s shores in the next few days.
Those of you who are old enough will remember that the US president (who is in that powerful position just by the skin of his pants, even more than previous incumbents in the job) was supposed to come and visit Africa at the beginning of this year. He cancelled because his preparations for war in Iraq were of far more consequence to him than the disaster area called Africa.
At the same time, of course, he and his cronies have been gaily constructing military bases on the continent, to protect the burgeoning oil fields off the West African coast that American oil companies are intent on exploiting up and down the joint.
Africa: watch out. The Congo is about to look like a picnic. The Man is here.
It was interesting, in this context, to have a conversation with the French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, while he was on a whirlwind strike into South Africa. What was most pertinent were his off-the-cuff observations on the Americans and the British, and why they are doing what they are doing to the world at this time.
Now, we know from the times of Asterix and Obelix that there is little love lost between the French and the British. The great soldier/statesman Napoleon Bonaparte called the English “a nation of shopkeepers” (which, considering the French penchant for shopkeeping as a way of life, was actually a bit rich). But given the current state of affairs, it is a description that is not entirely irrelevant.
The war against Iraq has caused a rift in the previously solid but uneasy relationship between two former European partners in the colonisation of Africa, and indeed the partition of the world, for economic advantage — an interesting situation for those of us who live on the African continent. Can we trust the old colonisers?
The French foreign minister makes a strong case for a special relationship with Africa, and especially, politically, with South Africa. It turns out that there has been a close connection between the South African and French presidencies over the issues of the Iraq war that the British and the Americans have chosen to ignore, and this dialogue has extended into other important issues — such as the impossible play-out in the Congo, where both French and South African troops are now deployed.
But what is most interesting is to get an inside track on what the world’s great powers, with their all-important access to defining the world, are really about.
The British, true to form, are as perfidious as you would expect them to be. In conference with the French and the Germans (who opposed the war, you will recall) they will say one thing behind closed doors, and do entirely the opposite as soon as they step out to face the cameras (and the Americans). Britain’s potato-faced Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is basically a two-faced coward, and his boss, Blair, is a weakling without any ideas of his own.
Which leaves us with George W Bush. Who is basically more of the above, with knobs on.
Which leaves us with the question: when we receive him (which I guess we can’t avoid now), what are we going to say to him?
Yes, we like you.
No, we don’t like you.
Hmmm, what are you going to say we should say about you?
Ek dink ons is in die kak, basically.
John Matshikiza is a fellow of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
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