A FAILURE TO LEAD

BY ZUBEIDA JAFFER*

Make your choice.  Either accept the word of Dr Eric Herring of Britain’s Bristol University or Clive Williams,  Australia’s terrorism expert.

Herring told our local radio stations here that there is a ninety percent certainty that the Anthrax scare was being  orchestrated by the terrorists responsible for the bombing of the World Trade Centre.

Australia’s leading terrorism authority, Clive Williams,  said in the Cape Times that it was unlikely the attacks had anything to do with the  terrorism mastermind Osama bin Laden. Williams believes the evidence points to right-wing US militia who would have easy access to the germ.

Depending on what your view is of the present world conflict, you could choose either man’s position.  The problem is that nobody really knows, allowing millions to make arbitrary choices based not on fact but preference.

The rash of anthrax scares in the United Scares has triggered panics and hoaxes around the world, but cases of the disease and of contaminated materials have been confirmed only in the US. 

At least two pranksters have been arrested in South Africa and face charges of intimidation. Neither of the pranksters are of Muslim origin.

It is not hard to understand the panic that people in the United States and Britain feel. Immediately after the attack on the World Trade Centre, US intelligence agencies announced the possibility of bioterrorist attacks. In fact, 28 September was announced to be the date of an attack. How the intelligence agencies knew this soon after the collapse of the towers when they had no prior information about the trade centre attack has yet to be explained.

 While Dr Herring suspects Osama Bin Laden and his network,  he also made the point that anthrax is not as formidable as its made out to be and that anybody who contracts the germ could be treated with antibiotics. The anthrax scare supported those who wanted a reason to make war, he said.

 Having lived through the war during the apartheid years, most of us know about living with fear. We face daily too the crime associated with our transitional period and have had to find the strength to deal with constant threat to our safety and security. Public fear  of real or perceived threats are understandable.

What is hard to understand is the lack of quality political leadership both from the Mr Bush and Mr Blair. Both have made no effort to calm down the anthrax hysteria.

Through many hardships here, our experience has been very different on numerous occasions.

Many of us will remember Easter Sunday of 1993, the day Chris Hani was gunned down. The panic and shock gripped our nation sending us to the edge of the precipice. At stake was a possible complete breakdown of the three-year-long negotiations, the cry of youths to rampage against the white community, the insecurity of the exiled activists who had come home in good faith.

 At that moment in our history, we stood at a point where right-wing extremists had blown the doors of panic  wide open. Fortunately,  the political leadership  moved quickly to close those doors. To the credit of the apartheid government, they stepped aside and allowed the ANC and its leader Nelson Mandela to take charge. Mandela addressed the nation on national television calling for calm and unity amongst all sections of the community. He made it clear that the killers would be charged and brought to trial which they were.

At the same time, Joe Slovo, one of the chief negotiators at Codesa, wrenched an election date from resistant apartheid representatives around the table.

The ANC leadership organised a funeral for Hani with the trappings of state honour allowing grief to be channelled and expressed appropriately. As white doves were released into the sky above the grave site, thousands present and millions more at home wept for the injustice done. The SABC, then still a mouthpiece of the old National Party, had surprisingly agreed that the funeral be televised to the nation. Both the apartheid leaders and the leaders of the liberation movement had placed peace in our country above vengeance. They did what few of us could have imagined possible three years earlier.

While there were those, encouraged by right-wing parties, who dug trenches, hoarded candles and baked beans as we headed towards our first election and the bombs were exploding around us, most South African leaders urged the electorate to remain focussed on the primary aim: bringing a settlement which most did not like but all had to live with to preserve our country.

Considering  George Bush’s history, both familial and at the level of political party, it is not too hard to understand the quality of leadership. But one would have expected more from Britain’s Tony Blair and his Labour Party.

Bush is doing what his father did before him. In 1992, U.S Marines were doing what his father called “God’s work…saving thousands of innocents.” That was “Operation Restore Hope in Somalia,  which like the assault on Iraq the previous year, had UN ‘legality’. According to John Pilger, British award-winning journalist, in his book, Hidden Agendas, the US marines left between 7,000-10,000 people dead in Somalia.

Pilger writes further that this was nothing new to a US administration : “Between 1969 and 1973, American bombers killed three-quarters of a million Cambodian peasants in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese supply bases, many of which did not exist.

“During one six-month period in 1973, B-52 aircraft dropped more bombs on Cambodians, living mostly in straw huts, than were dropped on Japan during all of the Second World War – the equivalent of five Hiroshimas.”

Global leadership in the hands of these two men as they act now cannot but take us in a direction which spells disaster for all of us. The American and British people and all the world deserve better than this.

Recognising the limitations of the leadership of the developed world,  a delegation of six Palestinian and Israeli people were due to meet  Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu this week. They wanted to ask them to support a campaign for  peace and reconciliation in their region.

The six, all bereaved parents, representing an advocacy group of about 400 Israeli and Palestinian parents, had all lost children in the ongoing war.

Their meeting was derailed when Israeli authorities refused permission for the three Palestinians to travel, prompting the Israeli parents to cancel their journey in solidarity.

Efforts such as their’s lie at the heart of trying to solve the present world impasse. They have made the choice to  turn to the developing world for a quality of leadership yet to be displayed in the developed world.

Ends

• Zubeida Jaffer is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Cape Town. All comments can be sent to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .