SPECIAL FEATURES

 

INDONESIA The agony, the ecstasy

IT WAS A YEAR OF TURMOIL tinged with hope for Indonesia. While suffering the consequences of an ever-deepening economic crisis, the Indonesians did at least get rid of their corrupt and hated dictator of 32 years: President Suharto.

The year began with Suharto, then still in power, getting a $43-billion ‘rescue package’ from the International Monetary Fund in a bid to halt the country’s economic plunge. In exchange he agreed to dismantle the country’s monopolies and family-owned businesses and relax his own iron grip on the economy. Suharto signed, but by March had breached the agreement, arguing that the painful reforms demanded were failing to remedy the situation.

CHRIS STOWERS / PANOS

Tearing down shopfronts - and a 32-year-old dictatorship.

By April the UN Development Programme was estimating that some 7.5 million Indonesians could face food shortages. Frustration among students, workers and the middle classes mounted as Suharto clung on to power. Thousands took to the streets in peaceful protests. But these protests gave way to riots and racist attacks, especially against ethnic Chinese. Hotels, factories and shopping centres were burned and looted, leaving a final death toll of 1,118. Many of the dead were from ethnic minorities.

Finally, President Suharto bowed to the pressure and stood down in May. Students, calling for reform and an end to ‘corruption, collusion and nepotism’, celebrated the change but were doubtful about the replacement, Vice-President Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie.

By June nearly half of the country’s 203-million population was reported to be living beneath the poverty line. Millions of children were being withdrawn from schools. Indonesians – desperate for food, angry at their loss of jobs and frightened at the rocketing inflation – continued to protest.

But there were the odd glimmers of hope that a better human-rights situation might prevail under President Habibie. The position on East Timor softened somewhat and in August Suharto’s son-in-law Lieutenant-General Prabowo Subianto was sacked from the Army in the face of criminal charges relating to the kidnapping and torture of political activists.

Thousands more students took to the streets in September demanding that former President Suharto and his allies stand trial for crimes against the country during his long rule.

In October 8,000 students massed outside Indonesia’s Parliament in the biggest public demonstration since President Habibie came to power, calling for an acceleration in democratic reforms. And Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of the leading light of Indonesia’s 1960s independence struggle, Ahmed Sukarno, said she would be a candidate in what is expected to be Indonesia’s first contested presidential election, promised for 1999.

WEATHER FROM HELL Fire, flood, ice, storm, drought...

THERE WAS REASON ENOUGH TO BE OBSESSED with the weather in 1998. It was diabolical. There were hurricanes in Central America, floods in China, ice-storms in Canada, drought-induced forest fires in Brazil and Indonesia, and even disease epidemics caused by changes in the weather in Kenya and Tanzania.

Some scientists said global warming and deforestation were chiefly to blame. Others held responsible El Niņo, the Pacific current which causes a seesaw in atmospheric pressure.

Central America and the Caribbean saw the worst of it. Hurricane Georges hammered the coastlines of Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic in September, claiming 380 lives in its wake, before sweeping through the Florida Keys and along the US’s Gulf coast. But far more destructive was Hurricane Mitch which rampaged through Honduras and Nicaragua in October, claiming the lives of over 10,000 people, and making millions homeless. The West organized a $200-million emergency aid package. This compared with the $3.5 billion it had arranged a few weeks earlier to rescue a hedge fund tottering on Wall Street. Anti-debt campaigners called for loans to the countries devastated by Hurricane Mitch to be written off and France, Spain and Cuba complied.

Mexico experienced a different set of weather problems when its dry season was unduly prolonged. This caused the worst fires on record which killed 60 people and destroyed at least 240,000 hectares of rainforest. Deforestation had not helped.

Similarly, in Brazil ten million people suffered the effects of drought, made worse by government neglect of irrigation schemes and mismanagement of aid funds. Finally in September ecologists declared a ‘red alert’ as flames devouring farmland in the central Mato Grosso state started heading for the Xingu National Park, where 17 different indigenous groups live. Then the rains came.

The other side of the Pacific had its weather-born crises. In China high rainfall, exacerbated by deforestation and long-term neglect of flood control, saw the worst flooding of the Yangtze River in 40 years. By August, 13 million people had been forced to leave their homes and 250 million were affected.

In Bangladesh, meanwhile, seasonal flooding was far worse than usual, claiming the lives of 1,500 people and leaving thousands more without homes or livelihood. In the capital city, Dhaka, more than half of all buildings were under water. Severe food shortages and water-borne disease contributed significantly to the death toll.

MIDDLE EAST Processing peace... after a fashion

IN FITS AND STARTS THE MIDDLE EAST edged closer to peace, though the way remained full of hazards and pitfalls. Here are a few of the year’s milestones:

March: Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was called upon to abandon his policy of expanding Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory behind the ‘Green Line’, the pre-1967 border. The petition came from 1,500 reserve officers of Israel’s army and police force, including distinguished former generals.

August: The Israeli Government finally accepted a US-brokered deal to withdraw from part of the West Bank. But trouble continued to brew around the issue of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, with settlers determined to stay.

September: After months of deadlock, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat held summit talks at the White House. US President Clinton announced that there had been a ‘significant narrowing of the gap’ between the two leaders and that further meetings had been scheduled.

October: The two leaders signed a ‘land for security’ pact at Wye Plantation, Maryland. under which Israel would agree to withdraw from 13 per cent of the West Bank in exchange for greater protection from terrorism. But postponements and delays caused a rise in tension and several people were killed in eruptions of violence.

November: Israel’s Cabinet unenthusiastically accepted the Wye Accord but set a series of preconditions for putting it into effect. A war of words raged between Arafat and Netanyahu, while Israel’s foreign minister, Ariel Sharon, urged Jewish settlers to grab more West Bank land to keep it out of Palestinian hands. Meanwhile Israel suspended its commitment to give territory back to the Palestinians, saying that Yasser Arafat must first publicly retract a pledge to declare statehood next May.

Any deal the two leaders do eventually achieve is likely to remain hampered by their inability to satisfy opposition within their own camps – some of which is violently extreme.

INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE Tyrants in the dock

THE CAUSE OF JUSTICE took a significant step forward in July when 160 countries voted to set up an International Criminal Court. This would try those accused of crimes against humanity, including genocide, torture and war crimes. Opposition came from the US but its attempts to ensure that no American citizen could be tried before the Court were defeated. The final formulation of the Treaty was weaker than human-rights groups and some countries desired, but it helped create a climate of greater accountability.

During the course of the year there were several other attempts to bring perpetrators to justice.

• At the United Nations’ International Tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, the former Prime Minister of Rwanda, Jean Kambanda, became in May the first person to plead guilty on six counts of genocide and crimes against humanity. The charges related to the 1994 bloodbath in which a million people were killed within three months. In September he was imprisoned for life, becoming the first person to be sentenced under the 1948 Geneva Convention. The judges found that he had ‘personally participated in the genocide’ by distributing arms and presiding over meetings where the massacres were planned. A further 2,000 Rwandan prisoners also confessed to their involvement in the1994 massacre.

• At the first trial for genocide to open at the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague in July, defendant Milan Kovacevic pleaded not guilty to charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity while running three detention centres in the Prijedor district of Bosnia. Several other cases arising from the war in former Yugoslavia were opened during the year. However, the US decision to suspend efforts by its troops in Bosnia to arrest Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, leaders of the Bosnian Serb army during the Bosnian war, was a setback for international justice, undermining the work of the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

• Former dictator of Chile General Augusto Pinochet was arrested during a trip to London in October. The arrest arose from an extradition order from Spain. Pinochet is wanted in connection with the murder and disappearances of over 3,000 civilians, both Chilean and foreign nationals, following Chile’s 1973 military coup. His claim of diplomatic immunity from arrest – as head of state at the time of the killings and as a life-long senator now – was rejected by the British Law Lords.

Whatever the outcome of individual cases, 1998 delivered a strong message to those who abuse their power that even they cannot get away with murder. And for the families of the victims it’s a long overdue recognition of the wrongs they have suffered.

GREAT LAKES The horror, the horror

IT HAS ALL THE HALLMARKS of an international nightmare in the making. Six neighbouring countries have become embroiled in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s civil conflict, which threatens to suck the entire region into all-out war.

Thousands have been massacred and many others abducted, tortured, raped or unlawfully detained. And according to Amnesty International all parties in the conflict are responsible for human-rights violations and waging war against unarmed civilians.

The recent trouble began in August when Rwandan mercenaries and part of the Congolese Army rebelled against President Laurent Kabila, whom they helped bring to power in 1997. Calling themselves the ‘Congolese Movement for Democracy’, the rebels took over large areas of the country before being beaten back.

Then neighbouring countries got involved. Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi showed support for the rebels while Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia sent troops to back Kabila. Chad and, reportedly, Sudan also supported Kabila.

Attempts at a peace summit between African leaders and rebel leaders ended in acrimony because the agreement being proposed had been drawn up predominantly by Kabila’s allies – Angola, Zimbawe and Namibia – with no input from the rebels.

As the fighting continued President Kabila expressly ordered the mass killing of Tutsis in western and eastern Congo. Civilians were instructed to kill those suspected of being sympathetic to the armed opposition, describing the enemy as ‘a virus, a mosquito and filth which must be crushed’. Amnesty International documented reports of mass graves near the capital, Kinshasa, containing as many as 500 bodies.

By September the conflict was threatening to spill over into neighbouring Uganda, where a series of bomb attacks was believed to have been carried out under the orders of Congolese President Kabila as punishment for Uganda’s support of the rebels.

By the year-end, Amnesty International was urging all governments to stop supplying weapons and other types of military, security and police equipment to both sides of the conflict. In December there was a glimmer of hope when, at a summit in Paris, African leaders involved in the war agreed a cease-fire in principle. But rebel leaders later said the accord had no validity and observers remained doubtful and fearful.

DISARMING IRAQ From farce to tragedy

THE GREAT GAME CONTINUED : Saddam Hussein vs The West. Muscles flexed – then relaxed. Then flexed again. But in December it ended in bloodshed with US and British forces bombing Iraq.

The year began with Iraq refusing to allow weapons inspectors to search Saddam Hussein’s presidential palaces and the US responding by proposing an intensive bombing campaign against the country. Russia opposed military action, but failed to influence the hawks. Meanwhile, the UN and other agencies working in Iraq reported that food and medical shortages had led to over a million deaths, giving greater impetus to the humanitarian call for lifting sanctions.

As the US and its allies prepared for what seemed likely to become another Gulf war, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan managed to get an eleventh-hour accord with Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz. The agreement permitted ‘immediate, unrestricted and unconditional access to the Unscom weapons inspectors to all suspect sites in Iraq’. An improved ‘oil-for-food’ deal was also agreed allowing Iraq to sell $5.3 billion worth of oil over the next six months to buy food and other humanitarian supplies in return.

But by June a report by UN weapons inspectors claimed that traces of VX nerve gas had been found on an Iraqi warhead. Then in August Tariq Aziz refused to allow any more UN inspections of suspected weapons sites until sanctions against the country were lifted. Sanctions remained. Denis Halliday, the UN’s oil-for-food co-ordinator for Iraq, resigned, saying that sanctions were a bankrupt concept that hurt the people of Iraq but not its Government.

In November, Iraq went to the brink again, saying that it would refuse to co-operate with the United Nations weapon inspectors even under the threat of military action. Again the US and its allies prepared for air strikes. Again, Saddam Hussein backed down at the last minute and the air strikes were aborted. But in December, the night before President Clinton was to face impeachment proceedings, the US and Britain launched air strikes against sites all over Iraq. This unilateral action, taken without UN approval, was deplored not only by the Arab world but also by other major powers including China, Russia and France.

ONLINE CHRONICLE DESIGNED & MAINTAINED BY SIMON, Simon Loffler.