Excuse us for not adding our voice to the outpouring of praise for defunct United States president Ronald Reagan — the Mail & Guardian does not believe in sanitising the malodorous dead. Our only regret is that this smiling ghoul was not gathered to his fathers before the start of his eight-year reign of terror over the Third World.
Reagan’s Hollywood background is central to understanding his hold over the American imagination. A dream-weaver whose rhetoric bore a tenuous relationship to reality, he promised small government while trebling the US deficit and enlarging the state bureaucracy. Despite his pro-life and anti-welfare talk, he took no significant action on either front.
What he offered Americans was a homespun, guy-next-door unflappability that told them they need not doubt themselves.
“Affable but remote, folksy but not human, so completely the actor that his fraudulence was his integrity … Reagan was at his most convincing and disarmingly sincere when spouting transparent balderdash,” runs the Village Voice obituary. In his frank right-wing sympathies and murderous naivety, he created a populist presidential style George W Bush strives to emulate.
The disjunction between appearance and reality was at its most profound in the policy of “Rollback”, which aimed to root out “communism” — defined as anything with Soviet support or an actively pro-poor agenda — wherever it surfaced in the Third World.
While the official purpose was to advance human rights and democracy, the practical outcome was direct or sponsored US terror.
It meant 20Â 000 dead and the mortar-bombing of hospitals by “Contra” rebels in Nicaragua, whom Reagan likened to the US’s founding fathers. It meant support for the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, because their Vietnamese opponents were Soviet-backed. It meant support for a Guatemalan regime that may have killed 100Â 000 Mayan Indians. It meant lionising the megalomaniac Jonas Savimbi, who prolonged a terrible civil war and scattered landmines across vast swathes of Angola.
And as argued in this edition of the M&G, it meant as much support for PW Botha’s government as the US could respectably provide. Reagan was no friend of democracy here.
Such actions are typically defended in broad-brush terms as contributing to the fall of what he called “the evil empire”. The Soviet system disintegrated under the weight of economic failure, internal human rights pressure and nationalist upsurges in Eastern European. The Contra wars in distant Central America played little, if any role.
“Rollback” had some paradoxical spin-offs that have returned to haunt the US. Reagan sent military advisers and sold helicopters to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, as well as backing Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Some see in the decentralised Contra terror bands the blueprint for such organisations as al-Qaeda and Hamas.
But Reagan’s most poisonous legacy was his Hollywood conception of the US as the army of light in a Manichean global struggle with the forces of darkness. Given the perceived stakes, any measure, any ally and any amount of human suffering were justified. For Reagan, as for Bush, the flesh and blood millions of the poor world were a distant abstraction, a mere stage for the holy exercise of American might.
Harassment is no scam
A common reason the crimes of sexual violence, of which sexual harassment is one, are not effectively prosecuted is that victims often suffer a higher burden of proof. While the cautionary rule, which until recently applied in rape cases and which provided that a rape survivor’s testimony should be treated with caution, has been scrapped, the informal stigmas and myths still frustrate effective prosecution. The woman asked for it; she is crying wolf; she is vengeful or manipulative … and so on.
This government has worked hard to destigmatise the victims of sexual violence and ensure a more muscular prosecutorial system. So the decision by Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to exonerate Indonesian ambassador Norman Mashabane, and to defend her decision, is worrying, not least because she claims feminist credentials.
Mashabane was initially found guilty on 21 charges of sexual harassment but cleared on appeal. Last week Dlamini-Zuma told Parliament he was the victim of his victims because he exposed an embassy car scam.
“I find it odd that that there is such urgency to find the ambassador guilty, but so little publicity is given to the vehicle scam syndicate,” she said.
The two cases should be separated — with the sexual harassment charges taking precedence over the scam. Each should be heard on its merits, but by linking them (in itself a complete acceptance of Mashabane’s defence), the Foreign Affairs Ministry has undermined the very serious charge. And it has frustrated efforts by the Department of Labour to make the workplace safer for women — still the largest category of victims of the gropers. Does a different set of laws apply to diplomats?
It is good news that the Commission on Gender Equality is taking up the case. The commission exists to check abuses of power, and it should stay on the case until all the dirty linen is aired. Until then, the matter has the musty air of a cover-up.