Reflections on sunday : Third world or south, aren’t we one world?

What’s this “West”? The West, I’m told, means the rich North. The North, I may understand if it means that USA and Canada are north of South America and Europe is north of Africa. But then, the West is west of what? Australia, for instance, is it west? It is a shame that we obediently listen to small individuals, rights groups, humanitarians, media organizations, governments, the litter, just because they are from the West. Yet they have not exactly sorted themselves out. Of course, there are many wonderful Western individuals and organizations, but we should be wary of shadowy ones. Time was when Western governments sought out tyrants, torturers, killers and sundry dictators and corrupt puppets for grooming and unleashing onto the hapless citizens of what they call the ‘Third World’. The killers ranged from Suharto of Indonesia to Manuel Antonio Noriega of Panama. General Weiciech Jeruzelski of Poland to Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. General Sani Abacha of Nigeria to Augusto Pinochet of Chile. Enver Hoxha of Albania to Charles Taylor of Liberia. Indeed, the past gives reason to shudder. For instance, as emperor, Haile Sellasie may have been a better king to the animals of Ethiopia than to his people. In the early 1970s, when massive numbers of Ethiopians were dying of starvation, pictures of Sellasie, the Lion of Judah and God of the Rastafarians, freely circulated of him feeding beef to his lions and dogs. At a time when he had turned Ethiopia into the poorest nation in Africa and driven it back into the dark ages, the Emperor was rewarded with a $2 million yacht by Washington. By the time he was edged off his imperial throne and deposited in a prison-cell, Jean Bedel Bokassa and his wife had become the owners of everything in their country, from uniform making franchises to all the mining concerns and the lives of their people. When he proclaimed himself secretly anointed apostle of God and Emperor of the Empire of Central Africa, the high and mighty of the West were at hand to prostrate and marvel at his imperial throne that had a giant head of an eagle made out of pure gold! When the youthful Joseph Desire Mobutu stepped on the freshly murdered body of Patrice Lumumba to ascend to power in the then Congo-Kinshasa, with the help of the West, no one suspected that he would have sucked his country dry and dead by the time of his hasty flight in the 1990s. At the height of his glory, Maréchal Mobutu Sese Seku Kuku wa Zabanga, etc. could command the West to remove any African leader that he did not fancy, and he was probably the only world leader who could pay his national debt from his own ‘à-bas-cos’ pocket! In his eight-year leadership of buffoonery and mayhem, during which time he continued to receive US, British and Israeli assistance, Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada, VSO, CBE, King of Scotland, etc. made a body count of his friends, the clergy, soldiers and ordinary Ugandans of close to one million. Our own homegrown monster exclusionist, the Rwandan General Habyarimana Juvénal, would have wiped out an entire group of almost three million people in his country if he had had his way. The political and military elites of France had sat with him for long hours to carefully craft an operation that was sure to convince the United Nations and the world that the Batutsi of Rwanda were not human and were therefore deserving of extermination. In all the cases above, the whole Western political machinery had risen to glorify the dictatorships and demonize any individual or group that tried to resist them. Woe unto you if as individuals you got together to try and fight these third world Draculas. Which reminds me of the story of a friend in our army. Fresh from the ‘bush’ (Rwandan war of liberation), he was now attending a course in the USA with select military generals, all fat and weary, from different countries. One time, they were introducing themselves. After the others had recounted the elite military academies they had attended and the military honours and medals they had gathered along the way, our singularly thin and sprightly officer took the floor to explain that he had never had any formal military training. This was greeted with polite chuckles and bored cigar puffs. “In fact,” said the officer, “I was a bandit!” The silence that followed, you could have cut it with a knife, and you could feel the weight of the scare in the hall. The officer went on to explain that in the end their compatriots welcomed them as heroes and their liberators, but still the officers were not assuaged. In fact, a Latin American general shouted: “Bandito!!” and threatened to throw a chair at our hapless officer! Even to a third world officer, whoever fought injustice in any part of the world was a global fugitive and was hunted down! Which goes to show you how the West can make you lose your self-worth. ingina2@yahoo.co.uk