Year 1999 laden with political expectations

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "This is not a recession," said Hubert Neiss, International Monetary Fund (IMF) director for the hard-hit Asia- Pacific region, pointing out that the IMF is still predicting 2.25 percent world growth for 1999.

"Even though the world continues to face serious uncertainties, there is reason for hope."

There is always reason for hope -- and there is also usually reason for despair, especially when you are dealing with markets and business cycles. But predicting the future is a good deal easier in non-economic areas, where change is not quite so volatile, so here (with a 30 percent margin of error) is the News of 1999.

U.S. President Bill Clinton will get a speedy trial in the Senate, ending in a vote of censure with substantial bipartisan support, long before the first cherry-blossom risks an appearance in Washington. And that will be that. He will not even be much more of a lame duck than any other American president is in the last two years of his second term.

Russia will also get a new president in 1999, for Boris Yeltsin's health is declining so fast that it is unlikely he can go on meeting even the minimum requirements of the job down to the scheduled presidential election in 2000.

Even amidst huge economic deprivation, the election will not turn violent, for the billionaires who run the country and own the media do not want a revolt. And despite all the power of the oligarchs, the Russians may actually elect somebody capable of taking them on.

South Africa will hold its first post-Mandela election in April, and we already know the new president: Thabo Mbeki -- who has actually been running the country on a day-to-day basis for over a year already.

It is still not certain whether the governing African National Congress and its allies will win the two-thirds majority that is needed to change the constitution, but they probably will not -- which is a very good thing.

Most of South-East and East Asia will be on the mend in 1999, with economies gradually pulling out of the pit they fell into last year.

Indonesia will see more politically motivated violence but it will not be destabilized to the point where democratic elections have to be postponed. By the end of the year, Indonesia will have its first really democratic government since independence.

China, however, faces a high risk of major urban violence as the millions who have lost their jobs and get virtually no help from the state lose their patience as well. The reflexive first response of the authorities will be a ruthless crackdown, but by the end of the year it will precipitate a confrontation in the Communist party between the reformers and the hard-liners. (No predictions on the outcome of that.)

India and Pakistan will probably not fight a nuclear war in the coming year (though the government in India may be tempted to stage a foreign crisis if the ramshackle coalition it leads begins to disintegrate).

Neither Iran nor Turkey will emerge from their long-running, mirror-image political crises: Turkey struggling to come to terms with Islam, and Iran trying to make space for secularism. But Turkey will not go to war with Greece, nor will Iran fight Afghanistan.

Israel will hold an election in the spring -- and nobody knows what will happen next. Right-wing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has brought the peace process with the Palestinians almost to a halt for the past 30 months, could even survive. As in the last election, the anti-peace Palestinian militants of Hamas will work to push Israeli voters in his direction by setting off lots of terrorist bombs in public spaces.

If Netanyahu wins again, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will have little choice but to declare a Palestinian state at the scheduled end of the peace process in May and let the heavens fall. But even if Netanyahu loses, the death of King Hussein of Jordan is going to make the regional situation very tense by the middle of the year.

The situation around Iraq, on the other hand, is now stabilized, with everybody happy at the outcome of the last round of bombing. The arms inspectors of United Nations Special Committee (UNSCOM) will not be allowed back into Iraq, which pleases both Saddam Hussein (since he can get on with developing his chemical and germ warfare weapons) and the United States (since the inspectors were no longer very effective, and gave Saddam a pretext to stage a crisis whenever he wanted).

Since United Nations sanctions against Iraq cannot be lifted without a clean bill of health from UNSCOM, the United States has also headed off that threat to its policy. Expect continued stand-off aerial warfare over Iraq from time to time, but nothing dramatic.

There will be nothing very dramatic in Africa either. The half-dozen existing wars will continue, and the partition of the Congo between east and west will solidify as the Angolan and Zimbabwean troops that were sent to back Laurent Kabila (west Congo) are pulled out to deal with problems at home.

In western Europe, the year will be spent dealing with the huge consequences of the introduction of the euro, and the further changes needed to allow eastern European countries to join the European Union. (The Germans, who take over the European presidency this January, expect to hold three summits instead of the usual one during the next six months, and that's just a start.). Meanwhile, the Kosovo carnage will reignite, and there will be repeated confrontations between NATO and the Serbs.

There will, of course, be the usual quota of typhoons, airline crashes and earthquakes (all of which will be treated by the media as complete surprises). And then, twelve months from now, all our computers will go down with the Y2K bug.