Poor old John Howard. Things really never seem to go quite right for the
Prime Minister of Oz. After working like a dingo to sell his electorate on
the rightness of joining the IMF-sponsored jillion dollar bailout of
Indonesia, the PM ends up with egg on his face. Why? It turns out that
Indonesia 'secretly' seconded a Malaysian motion to keep Australia out of
the Asia Europe Meeting (ASEM) at least until the early part of the next
decade. Talk about ingratitude! Howard revealed that Canberra has sent two
protests to Jakarta but that the outrageous snub will not affect Australia's
participation in the bail-out package. What a nice guy. Yeah, right.
Personally, I laughed till my sides hurt.
Don't get me wrong on the subject of aid. When a country is in dire
straits I believe it is incumbent on richer nations to help them out. But
when those recipient countries are governed by -- for the sake of using a
generic term -- meglomaniac dictators, then there has to be some
quid-pro-quo. If you'll excuse the pun, there's no such thing as a free
lunch. Pictures of starving kids from North Korea really wrench at the heart
-- but Pyongyang negotiators attending aid talks in Beijing looked the
picture of health. No hunger there folks, no sir. The well-fed government
officials dug in their heels and demanded help and offered nothing in
return. I am not ashamed to admit my first reaction was to simply say "screw
them" and leave it at that. But that wouldn't be right.
Okay, so we are humanitarian people, right? We can't ignore the starving
millions, right? So what's the answer? Neutralise air-defence with cruise
missiles, have special forces take out key military and government
installations, and roll the aid across the border -- guarded by armoured
troops on the ground and an air-umbrella of formidable proportions. Er,
well, that would be a nice notion -- except that no "humanitarian" government
has the balls to do it.
Of course, when little or ineffective opposition is expected we can and
have witnessed prime-time attention grabbing adventures such as Operation
Hope in Somalia. But we all saw how that ended. Military arrogance combined
with futile efforts at capturing or negotiating with leaders of the factions
responsible for the problem in the first place resulted in a disaster. I'll
never forget daily reports from military officials in Mogadishu on the
efforts to capture Mohammed Aideed -- and of the fatally botched attempts to
do so. But unarmed reporters from the news networks managed to have the
creep on our late-editions almost every day!
One of the most astonishing and thought provoking scenes I have ever
seen on my nightly news was of UN peacekeepers using their bayonets to rip
their pretty blue berets to shreds. They'd just been airlifted out of
Rwanda, even as reports of the massacres were coming in thick and fast. They
were disgusted and so was I. The massacres continue.
So what's the problem? Politics. Vested interests will always get in the
way of determined action any day of the week. I was always taught that if a
job is worth doing, it is worth doing well. This message seems to have been
missed by "humanitarian" governments and the United Nations when it comes to
helping those who cannot help themselves. When the going gets tough,
politicians order the tough get on the first plane out.
And that's why I am a self confessed cynic and closet conspiracy
theorist. A lone and rather low-level British Member of Parliament takes the
initiative to save the life of one Iraqi child -- while the great and good
allow thousands of others to die.
Sometimes, doing the right thing is not easy, I know that and can
sympathise with the agonies of responsibility suffered by the decision
makers. That is, I would sympathise when they do the right thing. If I can
think of an example, I'll let you know.
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