Crawling from the Wreckage (33 page)

There is no good answer to this question, but it would obviously help if Australian troops show up to help whenever the United States gets involved in a war anywhere in Asia—and that includes the Middle East. However, this policy is too demeaning to national pride to explain clearly to Australians, so the various Australian military ventures abroad have to be explained in other terms—the “Communist threat” in Vietnam, the “terrorist threat” in Iraq. And the actual troop commitment is kept as small as possible, in order not to rouse public opinion against it.

Australians have fortunately never had the occasion to find out whether volunteering to be America’s “deputy sheriff” in Asia would really produce the desired U.S. response if Australia’s own interests were threatened, but this notion remains at the heart of Australian defence policy.
If the United States invaded Mars, Australia would send a battalion along to guard the supply depot.

Australia is basically a huge island with easily controlled sea frontiers. Canada is a strategic island, in the sense that its frontiers are either with oceans or with the United States. Only South Africa has a direct land frontier with what we used to call the Third World, and it is an enormously attractive destination for impoverished would-be immigrants from the rest of the African continent. Yet it does not really make a serious effort to control its own frontiers.

This may end in tears
.

It was looking ugly there for a few days, with mobs of South Africans in townships around Johannesburg randomly murdering several dozen “foreigners” (migrants from other African countries) and injuring several hundred. But now President Thabo Mbeki has acted decisively: he has announced the establishment of a panel of inquiry into the violence. That should fix it.

Just in case he gets impatient while waiting for the panel’s report, however, I can tell him what it will say—or at least, what it should say. It should say that the root problem is his government’s “non-interventionist” policy on immigration: its refusal to control or even count the number of people arriving in South Africa from other African countries.

The mere fact that the commonly used estimate is “three to five million” illegal immigrants says it all: the authorities really have no idea how many foreigners are in South Africa. Furthermore, the higher estimate is probably closer to the truth, for some four million people have left Zimbabwe alone to seek work abroad, and almost all of them have gone to South Africa.

This “open borders” non-policy has worthy motives. Many of South Africa’s current leaders are men and women who spent decades in exile during the fight against apartheid, and the migrants come mostly from the countries that gave them shelter at that time. How can they turn
away people from those countries—from Zimbabwe, above all—now that the shoe is on the other foot?

Such openness is an honourable sentiment, but more easily experienced if, like South Africa’s current leaders, you lead a secure and comfortable life in one of the nicer northern suburbs of Johannesburg. If you happen to live in Alexandra township (not all that far from those pleasant suburbs) amidst garbage and violence and chronic poverty, and you don’t have a job, it’s a little harder to access such noble emotions—because one-tenth of the people in the country are illegal immigrants, and lots of them do have jobs.

Miserable, underpaid jobs, for the most part, but in a country where the true unemployment rate is somewhere near half there are bound to be a great many people who resent foreigners getting any jobs at all. Especially because there is some truth in the complaint of poor and uneducated South Africans that the illegal immigrants get the unskilled jobs because employers can pay them less and they won’t dare complain.

None of this justifies murder, but it does begin to explain it. Thabo Mbeki was incredibly foolish to assume that he could just let foreigners flood into the country and not expose them to a popular backlash. The South African media are filled with self-flagellating editorials that all basically ask: “What kind of people are we if we can behave like this?” The answer is: not saintly inhabitants of some imagined “rainbow nation” that has risen above the normal human plane, just ordinary people under pressure and behaving badly.

Last week in Italy, other ordinary people threw Molotov cocktails into Gypsy camps and burned them down. Most of those people have jobs, live in comfortable surroundings, and eat quite well, and they
still
behaved badly. There are only about 150,000 Gypsies in Italy, half of whom are distant descendants of people who have been there since the fifteenth century. They are less than a quarter of 1 percent of the population, and yet 68 percent of Italians want them all expelled.

The South African poor have been amazingly patient as year after year has gone by—fourteen years now since the end of apartheid—and little has changed for the better in their lives. The black poor still loyally vote for the African National Congress (
ANC
), but their anger was going to burst out somewhere or other, sooner or later. By holding the door
open to so many illegal immigrants, the government has guaranteed that they would be the primary target.

Maybe this is some Machiavellian plan to divert popular anger from the government itself, but probably not. More likely, it’s just that the leaders don’t see what has been happening to ordinary people. How else could Thabo Mbeki go on defending Robert Mugabe, the destroyer of Zimbabwe, year after year, when Mugabe’s misdeeds were the main reason that this enormous wave of illegal immigrants struck South Africa?

Justice Malala, whose column appears in the
Times
(the online version of South Africa’s
Sunday Times
), nailed it on Monday when he wrote: “[Our] people are behaving like barbarians because the
ANC
has failed—despite numerous warnings—to act on burning issues that are well known for having sparked similar eruptions across the globe …

“The Mbeki government’s refusal to even acknowledge the crisis in Zimbabwe has resulted in as many as 3 million Zimbabweans walking the streets of South Africa …

“Mbeki’s resolute refusal to address the crisis in Zimbabwe—and his friendship with President Robert Mugabe—has brought them here. His block-headedness is directly responsible for the eruption of xenophobia.”

Such plain talk is not “blaming the victim.” It is recognizing realities, which is the first step towards addressing them. And where the despairing poor of South Africa should be addressing their anger is not at helpless Zimbabweans but at their president, who let this human catastrophe happen.

Mbeki finally left power, in the most humiliating of circumstances, in late 2009. The man who took his place, after the 2009 election, was the same man Mbeki had spent the previous few years trying to have jailed on corruption charges: Jacob Zuma. It is not yet clear what he is going to do about South Africa’s borders
.

Canada has only one disputed frontier, in the Arctic. But the dispute is not with the Russians, as Prime Minister Harper likes to pretend; it is with the Americans. Worse yet (for those with dreams of the Canadian North as a new source of wealth) the Northwest Passage will never be a useful commercial route regardless of whether Canada controls it or not
.

Early next week two German-owned container ships will arrive in Rotterdam from Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, having taken only one month to make the voyage. That’s much faster than usual—but then, they didn’t take the usual route down through the South China Sea, past Singapore, round the bottom of India, through the Suez Canal (pay toll here), across the Mediterranean and up the west coast of Europe. They just went around the top of Russia.

It’s the first-ever commercial transit through the Northeast Passage by non-Russian ships, and it shortens the sea trip between East Asia and Europe by almost a third. The melting of the Arctic sea ice made it possible, although for the moment it’s only possible for a couple of months at the end of the summer melt season, when the Arctic Ocean’s ice cover shrinks dramatically. But it is a sign of things to come.

The voyage is more evidence that climate change is well underway and will strike the Arctic region hard. But it also shows that all the recent fuss about the Northwest Passage is irrelevant.

The Northwest Passage, another potential shortcut between Europe and East Asia, goes through the Canadian Arctic archipelago. Although icebreakers have traversed it from time to time, no ordinary commercial ship has ever carried cargo through it. But when the Russians put on their little propaganda show at the North Pole two years ago, the Canadian government had kittens.

In 2007, Artur Chilingarov, a Russian scientist famous for his work in the polar regions and Arctic adviser to then-president Vladimir Putin, took a mini-sub to the North Pole and planted a Russian flag on the seabed. Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, immediately flew to Iqaluit in the high Arctic and responded with a rabble-rousing speech.

“Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty in the Arctic,” he said. “We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake: this government intends to use it.” He then announced a program to build six to eight armed Arctic patrol vessels to assert Canadian control over the Northwest Passage and a deepwater naval base on Baffin Island to support them.

“I don’t know why the Canadians reacted as they did,” Chilingarov told me a few months later in Moscow, and on the face of it, he had a case. After all, Russia has no claims over any land or water that might conceivably belong to Canada, and Canada makes no claim on the North Pole. But Chilingarov actually understood the game that Harper was playing quite well.

Canada’s dispute over sovereignty of the Northwest Passage is actually with the United States, not Russia. The Russians have absolutely no interest in the Northwest Passage, since they have their own rival, the Northeast Passage (which they call the Northern Sea Route). Still, the U.S. has long maintained that the Northwest Passage could be very useful if it were ice-free, so Washington insists that it is an international waterway which Canada has no right to control.

Canada disputes that position, pointing out that all six potential routes for a commercially viable Northwest Passage wind between islands that are close together and indisputably Canadian. But Ottawa has never asserted
military
control over the Northwest Passage until now, because to do so would risk an awkward confrontation with the United States. However, if you can pretend that you are building those warships and that naval base to hold the wicked Russians at bay, not to defy the Americans …

That is Harper’s game, and he now visits the high north every summer to reassert Canada’s sovereignty claims. In the end, however, it will make no difference, as the Northwest Passage will never become a major shipping route. The Northeast Passage is just too much easier.

The problem for Canada is that all the routes for a Northwest Passage involve shallow and/or narrow straits between various islands in the country’s Arctic archipelago, and the prevailing winds and currents in the Arctic Ocean tend to push whatever loose sea ice there is into those straits. It is unlikely that cargo ships that are not double-hulled and strengthened against ice will ever get insurance for the passage at an affordable price.

On the other hand, the Northeast Passage is mostly open water (once the ice retreats from the Russian coast), and there is already a major infrastructure of ports and nuclear-powered ice-breakers in the region. If the distances are roughly comparable, shippers will prefer the Northeast Passage every time—and the distances
are
comparable.

Just look at the Arctic Ocean on a globe, rather than in the familiar flat-Earth Mercator projection. It is instantly obvious that the distance is the same whether shipping between Europe and East Asia crosses the Arctic Ocean by running along the Russia’s Arctic coast (the North east Passage) or weaving between Canada’s Arctic islands (the North west Passage). The same is true for cargo travelling between Europe and the west coast of North America, and the consequence is that the Northwest Passage will never become commercially viable.

By mid-2006, the war in Iraq was rarely front-page news. It was actually the worst time of all for the Iraqis, with the Sunni-Shia civil war killing many thousands each month and creating refugees in the millions, but for most North Americans, it had become just a familiar noise in the background, like bad plumbing. For the families who actually had sons and daughters there it was very different, but they were mostly working-class Americans who were blinded by “patriotism” and unused to protest
.

That’s really why Bush and Blair got away with it, despite some amazing displays of ignorance
.

U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, giving their umpteenth joint press conference at the White House on Thursday, showed the amateurs how to deal with the media. Wry, humble, funny, rueful, always upbeat—they were a polished double act that could have put a positive spin on the Black Death. Iraq has allegedly “turned the corner” again after five months of bitter deadlock. A new government has taken office in Baghdad that only lacks a defence minister and an interior minister, and Bush and Blair were there to sell it as a success.

The press always likes to have its tummy tickled, so all the questions were basically friendly. The answers to the last question, however, were very revealing. A journalist recalled that both men have admitted to missteps and mistakes in Iraq, and asked them which ones they regretted most.

President Bush did public penance for his macho remarks about the emerging Iraq resistance movement—“bring ‘em on”—back in the hyper-confident “Mission Accomplished” days of 2003. It was charming, vintage Bush: “I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner, you know.” And he avowed that “the biggest mistake that’s happened so far, at least from [in terms of] our country’s involvement in Iraq, is Abu Ghraib.”