The London Desk
Dissing Mandela
By Charles Glass
Nelson Mandela came to town last week, and New Labor couldn’t find time for a parade. Mandela may not be Mike Tyson, for whom Britain’s ascetic home secretary, Jack Straw, waived restrictions on admitting convicted felons in time for one of the feeblest matches (sic) in boxing history on Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Television. But Mandela is a recognized brand. Prime Minister Tony Blair usually attaches himself to big names. Remember his appearance at Princess Diana’s funeral and his attempts to hijack the Queen Mother’s upcoming 100th birthday? I expect to see him on Coronation Street, the country’s longest-running soap opera. It’s not like Tony to pass up the chance to "get down" with an African folk hero.
Mandela is hard to beat: the years in prison; the suffering to topple a brutal state; the good grace he showed his former persecutors; his emulation of the father of African nationalism, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, in standing down at the end of his term, when he could have served for life. He’s like Pope John Paul II, a man of global stature. No one, apart from Blair’s mentor Bill Clinton, could beat Tony to a photo-op with Mandela or the pope. Or Oasis’ Liam Gallagher.
Something went wrong, however. Mandela made himself persona non grata with the New Hawks of New Labor the way the pope does when he disparages capitalism for its injustice and vulgarity. If the pope visited Britain and launched into one of his anti-capitalist epistles, Blair would ditch him faster than he did his paymaster-general, Geoffrey Robinson, when the press got hold of his financial statements.
Mandela should have read a New Labor script: "Thank you, Brother Blair, for your courageous stand against Apartheid. When the chips were down, you didn’t drink KWV Cabernet with your Boerewurst." They’d have given him an honorary knighthood and sent him home with Downing Street matchbooks. But Mandela blew it. He castigated the guardians of the new world order. In London, Mandela told his biographer, Anthony Sampson, that "I am resentful about the type of things America and Britain are doing. They want now to be the policemen of the world, and I’m sorry that Britain has joined the U.S. in this regard." Wrong, wrong, wrong. If he’d checked with Blair’s crack flack, Alastair Campbell, the New Labor version of Mandela’s pronouncement would have been, "We in Africa are very grateful that our traditional benefactors, the U.S. and British, offer aid to the weak and oppressed. We black folk, like the Arabs and Slavs, rest easy knowing the B-52s are overhead to protect us." Instead, he was ungrateful for Anglo-American largesse: "They [the U.S. and Britain] must persuade countries like China or Russia who threaten to veto their decisions at the UN. They must sit down and talk to them. They can’t just ignore them and start their own actions." Of course, they can and do ignore the UN and start their own actions. Look at Kosovo. Look at the prolonged starvation of Iraq and the American browbeating to keep the UN in line.
Mandela realizes that Tony doesn’t give a damn what he or any other retired Third World head of state thinks about Kosovo, Iraq or anywhere else. When he wants Mandela’s opinion, he’ll ask Bill Clinton to give it to him. Mandela may be 81, but that’s no excuse for Isaiah-like gloom at the Anglo-American Millennium Table. Good thing Mandela went off to Dublin after his speech at the London School of Economics. The Irish, with their neutrality and traditional sympathy for the world’s poor, were more sympathetic. (Ireland, unlike Britain, enforced sanctions against white South Africa while Mandela languished on Robben Island. When I was there in 1992, the Irish gave more per capita to outside charities than any other country in Europe, and donations were not tax-deductible. That may be different today: Ireland is becoming richer than Britain and rising house-prices make people more jealous of their incomes. Woe betide the prosperous.)
Mandela had the effrontery to condemn the American and British bombardment of Iraq. "The message they’re sending is that any country which fears a [UN] veto can take unilateral action," Mandela said. "That means they’re introducing chaos into international affairs: that any country can take a decision which it wants." Blair’s foreign secretary, Robin Cook, has jumped forth to defend British policy in bombing and starving Iraq. He came under attack in a television film by the left-wing Australian journalist, John Pilger. Pilger’s film, Paying the Price, accused Britain of preventing Iraq’s children from receiving vital medicine. Cook vented his spleen on Pilger in The New Statesman, the Labor weekly owned by the former paymaster-general whom Blair pretends not to know, "There is nothing to prevent Iraq from ordering more medicine." Cook is telling the truth. Iraq can order all the medical supplies it likes. Britain, however, will not allow them to be delivered.
Pilger, in his own New Statesman column, responded to Cook’s claim that Iraqi propaganda "fabricates claims of death and destruction." He wrote, "In one five-month period, 41 per cent of all strikes resulted in civilian casualties. The targets included fishermen’s wharves, villages and livestock." He added that the UN humanitarian coordinator had verified the killing by allied bombers of a shepherd and six members of his family, one of many such examples.
Although Pilger demolished Cook’s arguments one by one, Cook is in power, with the U.S. backing him. Pilger is a mere hack. Mandela is a retired senior citizen, and Blair is getting ready to welcome one of his real heroes, the Butcher of Chechnya, Vladimir Putin.
[end]
Carl
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