The last century will be recalled by future generations as one of extremes and extremist leadership. With the collapse of totalitarian ideologies and the toppling of despotic states in its closing years, the hope was that a new epoch of responsive government and humanitarian values had dawned.
Ariel Sharon represents an immediate and obvious exception. With the new century only three years old, the Israeli premier has already carved out a place for himself as a stony-faced brute in the 20th-century mould.
That Sharon has been elected and presides over a parliamentary system is quite irrelevant. So, too, was Hendrik Verwoerd, one of history’s most dangerous racial ideologues. It is in Sharon’s treatment of the Palestinians, and mindless response to Palestinian terrorism, that his true character emerges.
Apparently bereft of moral sense or diplomatic vision, he seems genuinely incapable of discoursing in anything but the language of intimidation and violence. His attitude towards the Palestinians, indeed to Arabs in general, appears to be one of the crudest racial contempt. Like South Africa’s PW Botha his sole recipe for combating terrorism is to pulverise what he, his fellow hardliners in the Israeli Cabinet and his generals consider to be terrorists and their support systems. In defence of what he construes as Israel’s security, the ”Butcher of Beirut” has shown himself capable of just about anything.
This week’s Israeli air attack on Syria is a case in point. In responding to the suicide bombing of a Haifa restaurant, which killed 19, Sharon would almost certainly have authorised the assassination of Yasser Arafat, had the Americans not forbidden it. The bombing of what appears to be a largely redundant Palestinian base near Damascus appears to have been an exercise in diversionary kragdadigheid, designed to show that anything the Palestinian bombers can do, he can do better. The most thorough-going violation of Syrian sovereignty in three decades, it risked a major escalation in regional conflict and provoked an immediate international outcry.
Sharon has persistently tried to sell the world the idea that suicide bombings are nothing to do with the suffocated demands of the Palestinian people for land, statehood and freedom from Israeli oppression. What he would like the West, and particularly the United States, to go on believing is that they form part of a worldwide ”clash of civilisations” between the democratic West and Islamic totalitarianism. The widening of countermeasures to a neighbouring Arab state was, in part, intended to deepen this cynical obfuscation.
The hard fact is that until the fundamental grievances of the Palestinians are redressed — and this includes dismantling the Israeli settlements on the West Bank, allowing the return of exiles and confronting the future of Jerusalem — no amount of counter-terror will stop the bombers. The ever-increasing savagery of Israel’s reprisals has done little but add new arms to the terrorist Hydra, as happened in South Africa in the 1980s.
What is truly terrifying about Sharon is not just that he is evil, but that he is running out of options. How will he respond to the next suicide bombing, and the next, and the next … ?
SA business in black and white
As black and white South African business organisations meet at Sun City to launch a unified, representative body, the Black Management Forum (BMF) is bucking the trend by meeting in Cape Town for its annual conference.
This weekend the black National African Federated Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Nafcoc), the Federated African Business and Consumer Services (Fabcos) and the white South African Chamber of Commerce and Afrikaans Handelsinstituut will come together to form the Chamber Association of South Africa (Chamsa). The individual organisations will continue to function independently, with Chamsa acting as an umbrella body.
The Black Business Council and the predominantly white Business South Africa will cease to exist as separate organisations and, after this weekend, will be known as Business Unity of South Africa (Busa).
In some ways, the conferences symbolise the different places South Africa has reached is in its transition to a normal society.
Big black business, at least, is rapidly coming of age. The fight between Johnnic Communications and the Tiso consortium for the media assets of New African Investments Limited (Nail) is proof of that. It’s a pure and simple, down and dirty corporate battle between empowerment companies. It appears that big black business is ready and able to take on, or work with, white business as equals in a unified organisation.
On the other hand, black managers in the business world still need all the support they can get. According to the BMF, by last year only 25% of top managers, 20% of senior managers and 50% of middle managers are black.
Against this backdrop, the continued separation of the BMF can be understood. Black managers need all the support they can get to move through the ranks and make South Africa’s managerial corps demographically representative.