ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE - NI 342 - Chronicle 2001: December

New Internationalist 342Jan / Feb 2002

Another world is possible / CHRONICLE 2001

.WITH A SPECIAL FOCUS ON THE MAJORITY WORLD

JAN | FEB | MAR | APR | MAY | JUN | JUL | AUG | SEP | OCT | NOV | DEC
Click a month above to read an alternative view of the key events of that month.

INDIA/PAKISTAN 14 people are killed and more than 30 injured when five unidentified gunmen carry out a suicide attack on the Parliament building in Delhi. The Indian Government blames Pakistan-based Kashmir militants. The threat of war looms between the two nuclear powers as troops amass on both sides of the border.

US The White House releases videotape footage of bin Laden that appears to confirm his involvement in the 11 September attacks. Muslim sceptics question the tape’s authenticity.

SOUTH AFRICA In a victory for AIDS activists the High Court in Pretoria rules that pregnant women be given an AIDS drug that helps prevent the transmission of the virus to babies. The German company making the drug offers to supply it free for five years. Although one in nine South Africans is HIV-positive, President Thabo Mbeki vows to appeal against the court ruling.

AFGHANISTAN The cave complex of Tora Bora falls to allied forces but there is still no sign of Osama bin Laden. An interim government headed by Hamid Karzai and representing various ethnic groups is sworn in on 22 December. The de facto cabinet includes two women in ministerial positions. US warplanes accidentally bomb a convoy of delegates, killing 65. Tension mounts as the US kill a further 100 civilians. A British-led peacekeeping force is finally agreed.

AUSTRALIA Refugees riot in an isolated detention centre in Woomera. Human-rights group Amnesty International calls for an inquiry into Australia’s immigration policy, which detains asylum-seekers – including women and children – for up to five years.

Bushfires rage through New South Wales making thousands homeless.

ISRAEL/PALESTINE 25 people are killed in a series of suicide bombings by Islamic militants. Israeli leader Ariel Sharon severs links with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli planes attack his headquarters.

FIJI The country is reinstated as a full member of the Commonwealth following a return to democratic rule in August elections which returned Laiserie Qarase as Prime Minister.

WORLD The UN accuses British and US soldiers of human rights abuses after the massacre of 400 Taliban fighters at Mazar-i-Sharif during the Allied forces’ war against terrorism.

US President Bush announces the US’s retreat from the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty that limited US and Russian nuclear arms, saying the Cold War is ‘long gone’. Russian chief Vladimir Putin describes the move as ‘a mistake’ but tells Russia he does not think it will threaten national security.

PHILIPPINES More than 160 people are killed in fighting between the army and Muslim rebels from the Moro National Liberation Front on the island of Mindanao. The rebels parade 110 hostages in the city of Zamboanga before releasing them.

BRITAIN Richard Reid, a Briton with suspected al-Qaeda links, is arrested after allegedly trying to ignite a shoe packed with explosives on board a Paris-Miami flight.

SRI LANKA The United National Front party overthrows the People’s Alliance in a general election. A political watchdog calls for the annulment of the result – 60 people died in the election campaign and tens of thousands of Tamils were excluded from voting.

ARGENTINA The country’s economic crisis, caused by a massive $132 billion foreign debt, IMF austerity measures, political corruption and economic mishandling, sparks mass riots claiming 27 lives. President Fernando de la Rua’s government resigns; three more leaders are appointed and resign in rapid succession.

TANZANIA British defence contractor BAE Systems gains an export licence to build a state of the art $40 million military radar system for one of the world’s poorest countries.

ZIMBABWE President Mugabe forces legislation through parliament that criminalizes free speech. Four more pro-democracy activists are killed, bringing the number of deaths from politically motivated violence to 110 since last year’s elections.

YEMEN A village suspected of harbouring al-Qaeda militants is attacked, the Yemeni Government claims by its own forces. Other sources suggest US bombers were involved.

SENEGAL ‘Poet president’ and founding father of independent Senegal, Leopold Sedar Senghor, dies aged 95.

WORLD The G7’s two-year-old promise to cancel $100 billion of debt owed by 52 countries is declared a ‘cruel joke’ by the Jubilee Debt Campaign. To date, only $18 billion has been cancelled to only four countries – Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique and Bolivia.

For all that the War on Terrorism was billed as an entirely new kind of war, ageing B52 bombers from the war in Vietnam, ‘special forces’ on horseback and bloodletting in caves gave the killing a familiar ring. Quite how the people of Afghanistan, their country already in ruins and infested with land mines, came to find themselves once again the target of a ‘big power’ assault must have remained a mystery to most of them.

Even before the bombs began to fall in early October, between five and seven million Afghanis were close to starvation. UN and other aid agencies complained repeatedly that both the Taliban and the threat of war were severely impeding their attempts to avert a major humanitarian catastrophe. The absence of hard information from inside the country, on either the plight of the Afghani people or the conduct of the war, compounded the difficulty of informing public opinion elsewhere in the world.

The justification for the bombing rested on a series of ‘best-guesses’ in Washington: first, that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda group were directly responsible for the events on 11 September; second, that both were being ‘sheltered’ by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan; third, that the rest of the world could be bribed or browbeaten into accepting a de facto but undeclared war on the people of Afghanistan. The fact that both the Taliban and bin Laden had originally been creatures of the US, when Afghanistan had been occupied by the Soviet Union, did not suggest a constructive outcome. If anything, by circumventing the UN entirely and – for the first time in its history – invoking the NATO clause that makes an attack on one member an attack on all, the US relied more heavily than ever on crude military and economic power.

After weeks of ‘precision’ and then ‘carpet’ bombing without apparent result, the sudden collapse of the Taliban in November produced an outburst of self-congratulation among the ‘hawks’. However, it also resulted in the unscripted capture of Kabul by the Northern Alliance, whose squabbling, corrupt warlords had, ten years earlier, opened the door to the Taliban. Northern Alliance warlords are also key players in the opium trade. It soon became apparent that many Taliban fighters, following Afghani tradition, had not ‘collapsed’ but switched sides. Fears that the Northern Alliance would revert to type and indulge in revenge killings, particularly of foreign Taliban fighters, were subsiding when there was a massacre of several hundred prisoners in the Qala-i-Jhangi fort near Mazar-i-Sharif. The Taliban stronghold of Kandahar fell shortly afterwards.

In Bonn, Germany, a conference hastily assembled by the UN established a ‘broad-based’ interim government for Afghanistan, headed by Hamid Karzai. By the end of the year, the main aim of the war – to capture Bin Laden and destroy the al-Qaeda network – had not been achieved. But in Washington, plans were already being laid to extend the ‘War on Terrorism’ to Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan.