In 2000, the United Nations established eight Millennium Development Goals, a series of targets designed to tackle poverty, hunger and the spread of HIV/AIDS. The world’s countries and development agencies agreed to meet these goals by 2015. We’re almost half-way there, and throughout continental Africa, things are no better.

I’ve said it a thousand times on here and in other media. We ignore Africa. We ignore it at our peril, but we ignore it and it is our greatest shame. One man who has not ignored it is Stephen Lewis, United Nations Special Envoy to Africa for HIV and AIDS. Truly one of the greatest and most decent men on the planet — father in law of Naomi Klein and father of Avi Lewis (with whom I spoke last year regard his film The Take, an interview I will post someday soon), former Canadian ambassador to the UN, Canadian of the year and one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, there are few people as qualified to speak on the west’s failings in Africa as he. He has recently published a book, Race Against Time: Searching for Hope in AIDS-ravaged Africa, which examines the complicity of the United Nations and the G8 in Africa’s plight, and surveys the situation from his meetings with Rwandan orphans to his frustrations at the highest levels of global bureaucracy. Promises? The West has those by the sackful. But we’ve been making and breaking them for far too long.

There’s a tendency to think of Africa as hopelessly, endemically sick, moribund almost, and there’s often an assumption that this is purely a legacy of colonialism and everything that’s happened since. This is not an interview focussing on the worst ravages of corruption that tear Africa apart. If you want that, I recommend the first part of Allan Little’s extraordinary Faultlines series for the BBC World Service. Lewis is a man who, despite all he has seen since his early visits in his youth, insists on searching for the hope in the continent.

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In your book you talk of the visits to Africa in your youth, your real romance with the continent. It was a very, very different place then…

I was in Africa in the immediate post-colonial period when there were very high expectations, enormous enthusiasm, great excitement. You break through the basis of slavery and all of the neo-colonial angry, nasty, manipulative, controlling impulses and suddenly you’re out into the light of day with all of the possibilities stretching out before you. The place was alive with music and enthusiasm and hope, and it was pretty depressing to see the decline of the continent over the subsequent number of years.

Simple question, then. What happened?

A combination of things. I think that the colonial powers continued unexpectedly to manipulate Africa from a distance, to use African leaders as their pawns. There’s no questions that Africa got caught in the cold war and sawed off between east and west, as it was availed by the communist bloc on the one hand and the western bloc on the other. I think that the international financial institutions — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund — engaged in an imposition of constraints on the African economies, they imposed conditions, they made it very difficult, particularly in the social sectors. All in all, it was rough for Africa, and as a result, in this manipulative orgy, you had a number of African leaders who themselves became corrupt and totalitarian, and that made things even worse.

So now you have a continent that’s being simultaneously ravaged by AIDS on the one hand and criminal governance on the other. They’re interlinked problems. It seems that you have a continent that is dying.

I don’t agree with the analysis. I don’t think AIDS and criminality are intertwined. I think what is intertwined is AIDS and poverty. Terrible and desperate and almost incomprehensible poverty. The relative aspects of corruption, there are countries which are obviously corrupt, but there are 53 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the great majority of them are increasingly re-elected in democratic traditions and they’re working very, very hard to quell corruption.

My god, I’m on a continent where in the United States, corruption is dealt with before grand juries almost on a daily basis. In my own country of Canada, the last election was fought on an issue of corruption and the government was defeated on an issue of corruption. One shouldn’t be too smug and self-righteous about it. Africa is a continent which is desperately poor, which has a lot of disease, it has incidental conflict, not unlike other continents, but it also has, at the grassroots level, a tremendous resilience and generosity of spirit and sophistication and if Africa had the resources which are constantly promised it and forever betrayed in the delivery, Africa could break the back of the AIDS pandemic and Africa could come out of the economic doldrums.

Continue reading "Stephen Lewis: Beyond AIDS and genocide, the search for hope in Africa" »

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 2:03 PM | Permalink

When Scott Ritter, the United Nation’s Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq, resigned in 1998, minor shockwaves rippled through the international community. A man who had been at the center of much controversy in the country, and whom the Iraqis claimed at the time was behind obstructive and intimidating tactics at the behest of the American government, had resigned in frustration at American interference in the United Nations process, claiming that UNSCOM was being used by the CIA as a front for invasion plans.

In the desert sands of Iraq, Ritter saw corruption on both sides, and an inevitable explosion of that corruption in the future. In the ensuing years, he has published a book, Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein and released a film, In Shifting Sands, which then UN chair of UNSCOM Richard Butler denounced as “propaganda”. He has been one of the most outspoken critics of the war in Iraq, and one of the most uniquely placed, as an American once deeply entrenched in the United Nations, to comment on the fundamental decline of that body in recent years.

His moral standpoint since 1998 is not without controversy, and his Wikipedia entry certainly outlines some mucky conspiracy theories that explain the shift in stance from military hawk to outspoken activist — it is not for this blog to repeat those, but one must always question the motivations for those who speak from positions of authority, even if you agree with what they say. In the context of a 15 minute radio interview, I did not do nearly enough of that here, but Ritter’s fight is generally a brave and respectable one. Ritter has often done a good enough job of answering his critics when called unamerican, as the media and political machines of the state turned against him and worked to discredit his views. In these most interesting times, when dissenting voices are dealt with through fear and paranoia, Ritter has remained steadfast. Sure, he may have sold a few books in doing so, but I have no doubt he was on a decent salary before his decision to resign.
In person, the former Marine is an intimidating presence with a booming voice and a precise, well-worn line in anger. It’s a long way from the deserts of Iraq to a community radio studio on the far side of Australia, but Ritter’s rage has not simmered.

You were a weapons inspector in Iraq for several years, at some point there was a turning point when you decided things weren’t as they ought to be.

It’s not that there was a turning point per se, as a weapons inspector from 1991 to 1998, I was fully cogniscent of not only the difficulty of our task but also the inherent contradiction in the policy of certain nations, namely the United States, when it came to supporting our tasks. Our job was a job of disarmament, getting rid of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in accordance with Security Council mandate.

The United States is a member of the Security Council. They voted in favour of this mandate, and yet the United States had a policy that embraced regime change as opposed to disarmament, so there was always this conflict taking place between the weapons inspection process and the policy of the United States. I rode it out, so to speak, for seven years, in belief that if we could accomplish our mission, we could trump America’s policy imperatives. By 1998, it became obvious that the United States would not allow the weapons inspection process to proceed with its full integrity, void of the corruption of American influence, and so I resigned.

Continue reading "The Anger of a Desert Storm: Scott Ritter and the myth of WMD" »

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 5:18 PM | Permalink