BY SALIM VALLY
& PATRICK BOND
JOHANNESBURG — United States secretary of state Colin Powell was forced to spend an extra hour hemmed in the University of Witwatersrand campus by demonstrators on June 1, learning why the US is now widely regarded as the world's main rogue state.
Hundreds of Wits students engaged in non-violent civil disobedience and blocked the US delegation's exit. For their trouble, security forces roughed up students David Masondo and Nick Dieltens, who both received nasty facial and head wounds.
Throughout the day, members of Powell's security entourage patrolled the campus, on occasion ripping down posters critical of US foreign policy. A student was also "requested" to cover up his Che Guevara T-shirt because it was deemed "offensive".
This arrogance and coercion seems to have been the trend throughout Powell's tour of Africa. AIDS activists in Kenya say they were prevented by US officials from unfurling a banner that read, "Put lives before profit". Nevertheless, in spite of Powell's militaristic buffer, the message got through. While he may have had a respectful audience in Pretoria, he's more often considered, as a protester's sign proclaimed, "The Butcher of Baghdad".
It was appropriate that the Bush administration's envoy received such an inhospitable welcome.
Powell was personally responsible for an attempted cover-up of the horrific 1968 My Lai massacre of women and children by US forces in Vietnam, he participated in the mid-1980s cover-up of the Iran-contragate arms scandal and covered up and downplayed the "Gulf War syndrome" diseases and violations of the Geneva Convention associated with the mass slaughter of retreating Iraqi troops in the 1991 Gulf War.
Powell's responsibility for human rights violations continue, through:
- Washington's coddling of the apartheid state of Israel, which with US financial and military support is killing hundreds of Palestinians;
- the illegal blockade of Cuba and at least 17 CIA assassination attempts on Cuban President Fidel Castro; and
- a US$1.5-billion escalation of the "drugs war" in Colombia, which in reality is another US counterinsurgency operation in the tradition of US covert wars in Indochina, Central America and Southern Africa.
There is also the Bush administration's disregard for the rest of the planet's citizens that Powell should have to answer for:
- the refusal to honour more than $1 billion in United Nations dues;
- the retreat from international efforts to curb illicit money laundering;
- the rejection of its obligations to stop trashing the environment under the Kyoto Protocol to curb carbon dioxide emissions;
- massive military expenditure in the form of the "Son of Star Wars" missile defence program;
- a new attack by the US Office of the Trade Representative on Brazil's ability to produce anti-retroviral generic drugs to combat HIV/AIDS;
- the refusal by Washington to fund organisations that provide family planning and abortion services in the Third World;
- sabotage of Korean peace talks;
- the nomination of men with appalling human rights records to the United Nations and Organisation of American States;
- the insistence that Third World countries repay illegitimate foreign debt to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF);
- the demand that other countries adopt World Bank and IMF free-market "structural adjustment", which cut the living standards of Africans while promoting transnational corporate and banking interests; and
- the continuation of the extremist trade liberalisation process of the World Trade Organisation, expressed in the African Growth and Opportunity Act, while hypocritically retaining protectionist tariffs at home.
No one should really be surprised at the aggressive record of the Bush regime in these vital areas, though, given its origins in a banana-republic election in Florida. Thanks to Governor Jeb Bush and five white supreme court judges, African-American voters were blatantly disenfranchised in the US presidential election.
Though Powell is black, he serves alongside people who have promoted apartheid and the repression of Africans. Vice-president Dick Cheney, for example, voted in favour of keeping Nelson Mandela in prison and against anti-apartheid sanctions in the US Congress during the 1980s. As the CEO of the oil services company Haliburton during the 1990s, Cheney sustained the Sani Abacha dictatorship in Nigeria.
And while the Middle East, Colombia and Cuba are just three current sites of US aggression, our region knows Washington's history of meddling all too well, including:
- the CIA's decades-long support of the apartheid regime;
- US encouragement of Pretoria's invasion of Angola in 1975;
- US patronage of the Renamo terrorist gangs' war on Mozambique after 1975; and
- Republican US President Ronald Reagan's "constructive engagement" with Pretoria which prolonged apartheid's life during the 1980s.
During his term as US president, Bill Clinton apologised to the people of Central America for The United States' record of malign intervention. Powell should have done the same while he was here.
The critique of US foreign policy may be loudest when students protest, but it behoves the South African Department of Foreign Affairs to consider why Washington's international illegitimacy was confirmed by the US's own peers in the UN. Recently, the US was stripped of its seats on the UN Human Rights Commission and UN international drug monitoring board. Human rights activists across the world are celebrating the growing rejection of the world's most dangerous rogue nation, including its main foreign policy representative, Powell.
[Salim Vally and Patrick Bond are staff members at the University of Witwatersrand and members of the collective that produces the radical magazine Debate: Voices of the South African Left. Bond is the author of a forthcoming book, Against Global Apartheid. This article first appeared in the Mail & Guardian, June 5.]