by John Pilger
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 the
ir flag and sent their representative to the United Nations. That deserves our celebration.
June 1991 – June 1993
XI
AUSTRALIA
DOWN AT BONDI
Sydney
BEHIND THE AQUAMARINE perfection of postcard Australia, the volatility never fails to reassure. On my first day back in Sydney, it was typically February: a flaming dawn, hard rain alternating with hot sun, and winds bringing in the sticky salt of the South Pacific. My mother used to stand on her back steps above Joe’s Armenian laundry and watch bush fires licking the horizon, and curse the ash on her washing. February marks the end of a long summer. It is, according to an unreliable source, when most people have their ‘nevers sprike down’.
Zoë, my seven-year-old, and I did what I have done for years on the first day. We headed for Bondi, where I grew up. Hindus making for the Ganges will understand. Under wild skies, the bay was running an even, rolling surf, with the great waves rising like blue-green pyramids. These days the boys and girls on their boards have Vietnamese and Greek names.
On the beach, though, are those who have surfed almost every day for half the century: Cec and Phyllis, in their seventies, who greet me as if a day, not a year, has passed. They were friends of Jack Platt, the Bondi shark catcher, who died last year, remarkably, in his bed. ‘You remember that huge Grey Nurse he caught off the rocks?’ says Phyllis. ‘Well, we’ve got its teeth.’ ‘Looks like rain,’ says Cec, as it lashes down on us.
Zoë is mystified as to why so many Australians speak with ‘accents’. In my lifetime, Australia has changed from a second-hand Britain and Ireland to the world’s second most culturally diverse society (after Israel). The predominant voices now are from Chile, Iran, Lebanon, Vietnam, Turkey and less and less from the ‘Old Dart’ (Britain). The sycophancy to English royalty is confined to municipal politicians and the media; the newspapers wrapped themselves in the Queen, who was here last week, and informed us ‘where to watch Her Majesty’.
If you want to become an Australian citizen – and pride of citizenship has a particular resonance in this immigrant society – you must swear allegiance to the ridiculous Windsors. This helps to explain why a million non-Anglo-Australians have not taken out citizenship. Like many, a friend of mine, an Italian, took the oath in private ‘ . . . because the ceremony is so shaming’.
This will change. Australia’s leading authority on ethnic populations, Dr Charles Price, says that, by the year 2052, Australians will consist of ‘some northern European types with fair hair, some Middle East types, some Asian types, some southern European types [and] a sizeable number of mixtures . . .’ The largest proportion of new immigrants is from Asia; and they are ‘marrying out’.1 What this says is that the Anglo-Irish establishment, which has maintained Australia as an imperial lighthouse, first for Britain and now for the United States, may eventually fade away. The nostalgia that pervades so much of Australian popular culture is part of its farewell.
Yet the promise and excitement that derives from these momentous and admirably peaceful changes has been set back in recent years; so much so, it seems, that even those who used to bear their optimism almost as a deity wonder if the nation will recover. It will, of course; but only after hardship unexpected and unimagined.
In the old mythology, youth and Australia were synonymous. Yet nowhere in the West has youth been so discarded and betrayed. In 1992 one in three young Australians was unemployed, many of them fending for themselves in the inner cities.2 According to OECD figures of the late 1980s, a higher proportion of Australian children are born into poverty than British.3 I ran into a friend the other day who said he had discovered an ‘emergency feeding programme’ at a local primary school. ‘We don’t see it,’ he said, ‘because of this . . .’ He pointed at the sun.
The sun is Australia’s gloss. It has allowed politicians to deny the severity of poverty, in the same way that they have denied the extent of Aboriginal suffering. In the first five years of the Hawke Labor Government, the former trade union boss oversaw, in a predominantly wage-earning society, the transfer of $A30 billion from wages to profits.4 For a country that could boast the most equitable spread of personal income in the world, Australia now has walls separating the rich and poor as high as those in Britain and America.
There are historical reasons for this; the vulnerability of Australia’s wool- and wheat-based prosperity is one; but the policies of a Labor Government have provided the catalyst. And those in the British Labour Party who wish to replace political vision altogether would do well to study the Australian Labor ‘model’. Nine years of Labor in power has yielded Thatcherism without Thatcher; far-right ideology served up as economic necessity and the cult of market forces entrenched: known as ‘economic rationalism’.
Even some of Australia’s traditional conservatives are uneasy. ‘At the beginning of the 1980s,’ wrote Malcolm Fraser, the former conservative prime minister, ‘the top 1 per cent of the population owned as much as the bottom 10 per cent. Now that 1 per cent owns as much as the bottom 20 per cent.’5 Under Labor, the political ground has moved so far to the right that the current opposition derives from the stone-age wing of Australian politics.
Tax avoidance – made legal – became the growth industry under Labor, whose rich ‘mates’ could not believe their luck. In the 1980s, Alan Bond, Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Packer and other ‘mates’ of Bob Hawke’s regime seldom paid corporate tax of more than 13 cents in the dollar, even though the official rate stood at 49 cents.6 Only in Australia could the rich claim tax relief on interest paid on their foreign debts. Only in Australia could ‘Bondy’, owner of gold mines, pay no tax on gold profits. Before they collapsed, Bond’s companies accounted for an incredible 10 per cent of the Australian national debt of more than $A100 billion, which is behind only that of Brazil and Mexico. This has to be paid back by the nation in earned export income. Meanwhile, Bond is serving two and a half years in prison, convicted of dishonestly concealing a $A16 million ‘fee’ in relation to a failed merchant bank in Perth. The bank’s former chairman, Laurie (‘Last Resort’) Connell, is awaiting trial. Like Bondy, Connell is, or was, a close mate of ‘Hawkie’.
Hawkie (a.k.a. ‘The Silver Bodgie’) retired from politics last week, dumped by his party in the manner of Thatcher’s going. Unlike her, he cultivated a populist image. He was the ordinary bloke’s ordinary bloke, who would ‘always stand shoulder to shoulder with my mates’. He didn’t specify which mates. ‘This stuff about the meek inheriting the earth’, he once said, ‘is a lot of bullshit. The weak need the strong to look after’em.’7
The strong are Hawke’s ‘big mates’, who ran ‘the big end of town’. They include Kerry Packer, who owns tracts of Australia, the only national commercial TV network, most of the magazines Australians read, resorts and so on. When Hawke’s Labor Government came to power in 1983, Packer’s wealth was estimated at about $A150 million. He is now a billionaire many times over. Last week Packer’s Channel Nine paid Hawke an undisclosed sum for the exclusive rights to televise the Silver Bodgie’s announcement of his retirement from politics. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation had asked Hawke for his ‘last free interview’ and was told, ‘You’ve had it.’ The ABC responded by playing a Hawke voice over the 1960s song, ‘I’m leaving on a jet plane’, replacing the words with, ‘I’m leaving on a gravy train.’
The former Labor prime minister has been signed up by International Management, which hustles for tennis players and pop stars. Although guaranteed a pension of $A100,000 a year, an office, a car, a chauffeur, free first-class travel, free postage, free telephone and much more, Hawke is demanding large amounts for much of what he does and says as a public person. He is to be paid a reputed $A100,000 for each of a series of interviews with ‘world statesmen’. One of Sydney’s luxury hotels was approached by his agents for a suite of rooms for six months as part of a ‘special deal’. The suite would be gratis and the Silver Bodgie would put in a number of ‘celeb
rity appearances’. The hotel said no.8 Hawke leaves the highest unemployment Australia has known for sixty years. Officially it is almost 11 per cent; unofficially it is more than 15 per cent: something of a record in the capitalist world.9
Such is one of the sources of a cynicism that is like a presence in working-class Australia. Moreover, Hawke’s successor, and one-time heir apparent, Paul Keating, is the architect of the economic disaster that resource-rich, energetic, talented, sunny Australia should never be. One of Keating’s first acts as treasurer was to abolish the Reserve Bank’s authority to monitor money leaving the country. This allowed the ‘big mates’ to avoid tax on a previously unheard-of scale. In 1983, Keating suddenly lifted all banking controls and floated the Australian dollar in a highly unstable speculators’ market. Farmers were forced to pay interest rates of up to 30 per cent; many went bankrupt.
Australia belongs to no trading bloc; it is on its own and, unless it maintains much of the protection claimed as a right by Japan, America and the European Community, it can never ‘compete’ in the ‘free market’. Hawke once described the consequences of Keating’s policies – chaotic by any standards – as an ‘historic transformation’, wrought by the ‘world’s greatest treasurer’. More than one million unemployed Australians would doubtless agree with the former, if not the latter.
The title of Donald Home’s path-breaking book, The Lucky Country, written in the 1960s, is often misunderstood; it was meant to be ironic. Lucky with its climate and beauty and, at times, opportunity, Australia has always been a nation of wage-earners and ‘battlers’. The great depressions of the 1890s and 1930s were felt here more deeply than anywhere; and this is true of many features of the current recession.