World news still marked by random collection of crises

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The daily life of six billion people all over the globe continues to unfold, and most years it is impossible to compress it into a few grand themes. The world news usually seems like a random and disconnected collection of crises because there are 186 countries, and each only gets the world's attention when something very large occurs there. But here, region by region, is what seemed important enough to get even foreigners' attention for a day or two.

Half the world lives in Asia, and that is where the real action was this year. The February, 1998 election in India gave the near-fascist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enough seats to let it form a coalition government and in May it predictably carried out a series of five nuclear weapons tests.

India thus became the first new country since 1964 to join the ranks of the nuclear weapons powers: "We will not hesitate to use the bomb in self-defense," crowed Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.

Two weeks later, inevitably, Pakistan followed suit with six bomb tests of its own. The international boycotts and sanctions that followed hurt Pakistan much more than India because it has a far smaller and weaker economy, but an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan to Pakistan in November effectively signaled the end of sanctions.

The punishment from outside is over; India's and Pakistan's real punishment for going nuclear will come later, from each other.

And North Korea, the other Asian state with an alleged nuclear weapons program, topped off a dreadful year for anti- proliferation by firing a two-stage ballistic missile over Japan in September.

For most of East and Southeast Asia, 1998 was spent struggling with the fallout from the Asian financial crash.

Japan took the entire year trying to find a plausible strategy to beat the domestic recession that has effectively switched off the main motor of Asian trade expansion. With Japanese banks carrying US$567 billion of bad or questionable debts, it will not be easy.

China, afraid that declining growth rates will trigger worker unrest -- "How much social stability can be achieved when there are between 150 million and 160 million jobless workers," asked economist Feng Lanrui in an authoritative recent article -- has shelved its plans for restructuring the economy.

In December, it also began a new crackdown on pro-democracy dissent, but it is unclear whether that will be enough to stave off major trouble.

In the two "tigers" where the crisis began, Thailand and South Korea, the struggle back to prosperity will be long and arduous.

"We are not going to be pushed around by organized labor," said President Kim Dae-jung's spokesman in Seoul in May as hundreds of thousands of workers demonstrated against mass layoffs, but there's a limit to how hard a democracy can push its people.

Thailand's Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai took a softer line, saying that Thais should make do with a "contented economy" rather than the old tiger model. But, at least, these two countries have democratic governments.

Indonesia, the biggest Asian victim of the crisis, is far worse off. It was poorer to start with, its economy fell further (40 percent of its 200 million people are literally eating less), and though the dictator Soeharto fell in May, a peaceful transition to democracy is still in doubt.

Democracy produced a less than glorious result in the Philippines in May, when a seldom-sober populist and ardent admirer of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, called Joseph "Erap" Estrada, was elected president.

It took a worse beating in Malaysia, where former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim went on trial on trumped-up charges of sodomy and corruption (but then Malaysian democracy was never very convincing anyway).

In Myanmar, pro-democracy campaigner and Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi continued her decade-long fight against the brutal and corrupt generals who rule her country.

In Cambodia, almost a year of near civil war between the rival parties was ended by a deal in November that restored a legal government and reopened the door to foreign aid. And the country's awful past receded a little when Pol Pot, who ran the genocide there in 1975-1979, died in April in a jungle camp.

The past completely dominated Bangladesh, which was convulsed by mass demonstrations and strikes that were basically driven by the bitter hostility between a prime minister and a leader of the opposition, both daughters of murdered former national leaders, who seek to impose their own version of the past on the present.

And Asia's one big hot war, on the island of Sri Lanka, entered its umpteenth year with no progress toward weaning the Tamil minority away from its secessionist goal and no progress towards a military victory either.

Out in the sparsely populated continents that wine-sellers in Britain (and in Thailand, too, for that matter) group together as "New World", matters were a bit less exciting.

In Australia, the voters kept the same government in the October election, and rejected populist Pauline Hanson's bid to gain national power on her racist, anti-immigrant platform.

In North America, apart from the endless Clinton melodrama, the closest thing to a domestic political story that would interest foreigners was the re-election of a separatist government in Quebec. But neither Canadians nor anyone else got very excited: It is too old a threat, and it is starting to ring a bit hollow.

Even in South America, events were not up to Asian standards of excitement. Brazil's President Fernando Enrique Cardoso easily won re-election in September, and a total collapse of investor confidence in the Brazilian economy was averted by a large IMF loan in November.

Andres Pastrana won the Colombian presidential election in July and set about seeking peace with the guerrillas who took over almost half the country under his predecessor.

And in October, Peru and Ecuador signed a treaty ending the jungle mini-war along their shared border in the Amazon.

Venezuela provided a little more excitement in December by electing Hugo Chavez to the presidency. "This is the revolution at the end of the century," said the left-wing former soldier (who led an unsuccessful coup in 1992). "We want to take the government out of the hands of the corrupt and put it in the hands of the people."

But most observers expect that the major change will be in who gets to steal the country's still-large oil revenues.

And then there was former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose arrest in London in October raised hopes that ex-tyrants guilty of murder, torture and other terrible crimes cannot escape punishment forever, simply by forcing their own countries to grant them amnesty.

At the end of the year, however, it remained uncertain whether the British government would extradite Pinochet to Spain to face trial, or even how long it would take to decide.

Europe has had a good year, even apart from the introduction of the euro.

Britain has seen an end to the killing in Northern Ireland and progress toward a peace settlement that could last for a generation.

Spain is now in the fourth month of a cease-fire in the similarly afflicted Basque country.

Bullying strongman Vladimir Meciar was peacefully voted out of power in Slovakia in September after nine years in power -- and Helmut Kohl, who was a bit of a bully too (though a completely democratic one), was voted out in Germany in October after 16 years in power.

The German election was part of a broader European shift to the left that also saw Italy gain its first-ever Communist (or to be precise, "post-Communist") prime minister in October, when Massimo d'Alema, leader of the Democrats of the Left, took power at the head of a new coalition. Thirteen out of fifteen European Union countries now have more or less left-wing governments.

Further east, the scene is darker. Serbian forces repeated some of their worst atrocities from the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, but now in Serbia's own province of Kosovo, where two million Albanian-speaking Muslims form 90 percent of the population. From May to September, Serbian troops enjoyed a virtual free-fire zone throughout the province, "dehousing" about a quarter of its people -- and though belated NATO threats of air strikes in September forced a pause, at year's end the cease-fire is breaking down.

The other big news from eastern Europe was the Russian financial crash in July-August, which ended both the current attempt to reform the Russian economy, and President Boris Yeltsin's personal power. Russia is now effectively in default on its foreign debts, with less than $10 billion available next year to cover $17 billion in scheduled repayments -- and the ailing Yeltsin is now effectively sidelined, with little say in the conduct of government.

The immediate beneficiary is Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who got the job after the Communist- and nationalist-dominated parliament rejected Yeltsin's first choice in September. But the real successor is more likely to be either the leftist mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, or right-leaning ex-general Alexander Lebed.

"I'm in no hurry," says Lebed; "I'm only 48." But one of these two men will likely be president of Russia two years from now -- and either might turn out to be an improvement on Yeltsin.

And finally, the bad-news zones: Africa and the Middle East.

In Africa, the problem is quite simple: War.

In the Sudan, a 14-year-old civil war intensified; in Algeria, a terrorist war that has killed 80,000 people in this decade continued unabated despite President Lamine Zeroual's unexpected October decision to quit two years early; in Angola, a 25-year- old war that had died down almost to nothing during years of UN- supervised cease-fire reignited full force this month.

In May, just as a kind of peace was returning to most of war- torn Liberia and Sierra Leone, nearby Guinea-Bissau tumbled into a civil war that made a third of the population refugees. In the same month, the formerly allied revolutionary regimes of Ethiopia and Eritrea stumbled into a border war that still continues in a minor key. And in August, the Congo fell back into war after only 14 months of peace.

This is the big war, with at least six other African countries (Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Chad, Rwanda and Uganda) sending military forces to back either President Laurent Kabila or his challengers in the east of the country. It has already led to the de facto partition of the Congo, and may end up causing the fall of over-extended strongmen like Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe.

Africa, with a tenth of the global population, has well over half of the world's wars -- but then it also has around a third of the world's countries, almost all of them poor. And there is some encouraging news: in Africa's most populous country, Nigeria, the sudden death of the dictator, General Sani Abacha, in June has been followed by an election process that should culminate in restored civilian rule early next year. Meanwhile, the continent's other giant, South Africa, moves smoothly towards its second post-apartheid election next April.