Distant Voices (68 page)

George Bush denies he is a racist. However, as a candidate for the Senate in 1964 he opposed the Civil Rights Act; and he now wants an entirely new civil rights bill that includes ‘quotas'. He and his White House coterie are working hard to undermine compromise legislation that has won bipartisan support in Congress. At the same time, Bush has nominated for the Supreme Court a black judge, Clarence Thomas, who has made a name by repudiating almost all the traditional
civil rights agenda. His nomination relieves the president of the need to defend his position against charges of racism and makes it likely that, if Congress gives its approval, future Supreme Court decisions will serve to keep blacks in their place. Even the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, so often accused of Uncle-Tomism, regards Bush's man as repugnant.

The effect of Bush's insidious campaign will be to exacerbate some of the worst poverty in the world. In spite of significant black advances, such as the rise of a black middle class, poverty and degradation in black America has to be seen to be believed; and few white Americans, or visitors to America, see it.

Stepping over beggars on Broadway may leave an impression; but that is nothing to compare with a glimpse of what is now called the ‘underclass' in those zones of American cities where the poor blacks and Hispanics are. For students interested in the uncelebrated effects of the doctrine that has brought about ‘the end of history', I recommend a trip to the South Bronx in New York. When I was there twenty years ago a taxi would not take me past a safe point. It was worse than many impoverished Third World cities; certainly it was more menacing and its people more despairing. I had not seen anything like it in the Soviet Union, which is upheld as the vanquished model of all economic iniquity.

Today, the South Bronx is worse. One has only to read the reporting of Camilo José Vergara to understand how steep has been the descent of America's blacks under Reagan and Bush, and how ruthless and sinister are the current measures to keep them down. Almost one American child in four is now born into poverty, and the majority of these are minorities who subsist in human rubbish dumps like the South Bronx. ‘Before the clock strikes midnight,' wrote Paul Savoy in the
Nation
, ‘twenty-seven children in America will have died from poverty, violence and social neglect.'
¹⁸

Twenty years ago black Americans put places like this to the torch. They staged ‘poor people's marches' and they and their white allies assembled in front of the White House to
demand their rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. Since then, their communities are petrified by an almost total absence of opportunity for young unqualified blacks, other than the opportunity of drug addiction and crime. Moreover, drugs have usefully depoliticised and contained the poor, thereby complementing the ethos of a system that at once raises expectations and dashes them.

The ghettos have become America's gulags, which do not exist unless you have to live in them. In 1970, George Wallace, governor of Alabama, was right when he said that ‘you gonna see this whole country Southernised; and when that happens, we gonna seem like a Sunday School down here.'
¹⁹
Reagan ‘Southernised' much of America, and Bush is continuing his work.

In March 1991 a gang of uniformed white Los Angeles policemen viciously beat an unarmed black man as he lay on the ground after they had stopped his car. This was nothing unusual for a police force regarded as brutal by even American standards. But a witness had secretly videotaped the attack, which was shown on national television. The four policemen were eventually charged and tried a year later. When they were acquitted by an all-white jury, south Los Angeles and other ghettos across America rose as one. City blocks were razed; gun battles were fought from street to street, tenement to tenement. Only when the army was called out – its previous assignment was Iraq – was ‘order' restored.

In June 1992 Amnesty International issued a report on America's ‘affront to human rights'. Amnesty's investigation of 40 cases in Los Angeles showed that suspects were shot by the police although they posed no threat, and that officers acted without fear of being disciplined. This represented a national pattern.
²⁰

So will another white American generation now arise with a ‘wakeful conscience'? Or have they been persuaded that only one Berlin Wall was built and one system of apartheid given root? The fire next time will not wait for the answers.

August 1991 to June 1992

THAT OLD FAVOURITE
‘Marxism' is having another run through the gauntlet, followed closely by ‘Marxism-Leninism'. According to Paul Henze, ideologue of the Rand Corporation in Washington, the defeated regime in Ethiopia was not only Marxist-Leninist but ruled with ‘dogmatic rigidity'. Moreover, the Tigrayans, who were among those liberating Addis Ababa last week, are ‘more Marxist than Colonel Mengistu'. Indeed, says Henze, if you include their Eritrean allies, ‘the political contest in Ethiopia was almost exclusively among Marxists'.
²¹

Bad guys, all of them.

Fear not: the victorious Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) leader, Meles Zenawi, has ‘disavowed Marxism-Leninism' and now, Henze assures us, supports democracy and a ‘free' economy. And, although they ‘still have to overcome Marxists in their ranks', the rebels have been ‘developing maturity and statesmanship'. In other words, they know the score. ‘Herman Cohen, the US assistant secretary of state for African affairs', wrote Henze, ‘has made clear to them that Ethiopia will get the international support it needs
only
if they lay the groundwork for a new political system . . .' (My italics.) The implication is: Starve, you Marxist-Leninists; arise, you free-marketeers!

Regardless of whether Colonel Mengistu wished the world to regard him as a Marxist-Leninist, in reality he was no different from the murderous tyrant preferred by Washington and its imperial tribunes, such as the Rand Corporation. Neither was he seen off by recanting ‘Marxists' converted to
the ‘free' economy. It says much about the influence of Western triumphalism these days that the victory of home-grown socialism in Ethiopia is routinely misrepresented by such pejorative shorthand. The political subtlety of the EPRDF is reminiscent of that of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, whose dominant strain was closer to that of radical Christianity than to Marxism.

Whether or not the EPRDF survives in its present form, the winner in Ethiopia is a genuine people's movement that has had almost a generation to evolve and to win not only the hearts and minds but the trust of millions betrayed by consecutive regimes and their foreign patrons.

So Ethiopia has a chance: an odds-against, candle-flicker of a chance of recovering from the historical debilitation that has scared it since the Amhara warlords of nineteenth-century Abyssinia did their deals with the European imperialists. It was entirely appropriate that the British Government should greet the changes in Ethiopia by sending in the SAS to protect the remnants of the family of the deposed emperor, Haile Selassie. His savagery against his people is not forgotten, and his mantle of ‘Lion of Judah' is now deserved by them.

The hope of Ethiopia's revolution is shared by those of us who trekked across the desert to Tigray and Eritrea when these were places of no consequence in the geo-political game. But now some of us feel we should say to these brave and civilised societies: Beware of ‘maturity and statesmanship' and other such code-words; beware when a Bush apparatchik plays a ‘peace-making' role.

The Ethiopians, and especially the Eritreans, need only look back to their recent past for the markers. In 1952, a UN decision, engineered by Washington, federated Eritrea with feudal Ethiopia. The Americans had promoted the federated solution as part of their Cold War policies, and with little regard to the merits of the case, as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made clear when addressing the Security Council. Regardless, he said, ‘of the point of view of justice', the strategic interests of the United States in the Red Sea
basin and considerations of world peace ‘make it necessary that the country [Eritrea] has to be linked with our ally, Ethiopia'.
²²
Haile Selassie had dutifully supplied an Ethiopian brigade to fight in the Korean War, and the Americans supported him as he systematically crushed the Eritreans, subverting their parliament, banning their language, murdering their leading partisans and imprisoning thousands. Washington was rewarded with the Kagnew communication station in the Eritrean capital of Asmara.

The strength of the Eritrean movement, the EPLF, an Eritrean friend once told me, is that, ‘we are ourselves; we have no political debts'. Eritrea's enemies have come at her from over every ideological horizon, from both imperial and ‘revolutionary' Ethiopia, from both the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective clients, Israel and Cuba. The cluster bombs used against Eritrea were made in the United States, supplied by Israel and dropped by Soviet aircraft which were piloted by Ethiopians and occasionally by Cubans.

Since 1961, in spite of a poverty harsh even by the standards of the poor world, the Eritreans have begun to build – in isolation – a self-reliant, humane and literate society. They have achieved this unaided, except for a modicum of Arab cash and a right of way through Sudan. Most of their arms, trucks, machines and tools either have been captured from the Ethiopians or are the products of their own ingenuity.

In northern Eritrea, I walked through a complete industrial town that had been built underground. At the end of the tunnels and mine shafts were factories and foundries, insulated by Ethiopian parachutes and powered by captured Birmingham-made generators. Here the sons and daughters of nomads and farmers had organised their own industrial revolution. In the ‘metal shop', an entire Soviet Mig-21 fighter-bomber, which had crash-landed, almost intact, had been recycled into guns, buckets, ovens, kitchen utensils, ploughs, X-ray equipment. In the ‘electronics plant', copies of Sony radios were produced on an assembly line. In the
‘woodwork factory' school desks were laid out with rows of crutches and artificial limbs.

One of their greatest achievements is the emancipation of women in a conservative society that is devoutly and equally Muslim and Christian. The traditional system of land tenure in Eritrea used to be known as
diesa
, whereby heads of families in the villages had equal rights to the land, which was redistributed every seven years. This had long been corrupted by private landlords. In the sixties, the EPLF abolished large private holdings and reformed the
diesa
system. Women were given the right to own their own plots. Indeed, women previously had neither political nor social rights; female circumcision was universal, as it still is in much of Africa. All of that has been reversed by EPLF legislation: and although traditional attitudes remain, women now are mechanics, teachers and engineers and make up a third of the army.

Here a bleak irony intrudes. ‘We have no use of birth control,' a young woman told me some years ago. ‘We cannot get enough children to replace those who die too soon [from malnourishment-related diseases] or are killed.' Her school was a cave. One notebook and two pencils were shared among a class of fifty; crayons and toys were unknown. The children were taught that if caught in an air-raid in the open they must squat in single file, so only some in the line would be hit.

The price these people have paid for their independence has never been properly reported. Getting there was always a long and dangerous journey; we would travel at night for fear of strafing and on the roads dug by hand that coiled around the mountains into mist. On either side, on spilling terraces, were circles of raised stones; the headlights never lost them and the deeper we went into Eritrea the more commonplace they became. They were the graves of thousands of people killed from the sky and those who died during the great famines. For years only driblets of relief reached here. The British agency War on Want deserves credit for standing by the Eritreans.

The EPRDF Government will depend on goodwill between
the Eritreans and the Tigrayans. The two leaderships have their disagreements. The Tigrayans never wanted to secede; the Eritreans always regarded themselves as an independent nation. There is every indication that they will resolve their differences. ‘One should not abandon democracy to achieve socialism,' Meles Zenawi said last week, ‘because we are convinced that if socialism is not democratic, it's not going to be socialism at all.'
²³

It was significant that he pointedly denied the story put out in London that the Americans had ‘invited' the EPRDF to enter Addis and take power. ‘It was our decision to go in,' he said, ‘and we would have done so with or without the consent of the United States . . . we will not allow any foreign country to invite us into our capital.'
²⁴
We shall see if this spirit is perceived as ‘mature' and ‘statesmanlike' and we shall hope that it is Ethiopia's time to live, at last.

In the meantime the Eritreans have voted to become an independent state. The Ethiopians have accepted this fact, even though it means they have lost their only route to the sea. After more than thirty years of war and of national heroism – there is no other description – the Eritreans have run up their flag and sent their representative to the United Nations. That deserves our celebration.

June 1991 – June 1993

Sydney