Hum. I suppose it is easier to worry about human rights in general when you don't have to worry about having a job, being poor, being addicted, being sick and the rest of it. (I will admit to being surprised that recreational facilities was so high on the list; it makes me wonder exactly how many teenagers there were in this sample of people from 14-35.)
It's sad, really. For some reason that I've never understood, everyone seemed to believe that once apartheid was gone, South Africa would suddenly become the economic powerhouse of Africa and all would be well for everyone, ignoring the fact that the people who actually had the economic know-how would flee in droves. (Although that could have been predicted; it's what happened to Zimbabwe, after all, and that country had been through considerably less.)
Instead, you have a country with desperate poverty, in which murder and rape have reached rates that would have produced a police state in this country -- their murder rate is eight times ours, their rape incidence even higher. We worry about having enough teachers because the job is so difficult and underpaid; they worry about having enough teachers because they're all dying in their 30s. As Archbishop Tutu says, South Africa is now being run by "people who, apart from having never voted at all, had no experience of government." That's pretty much a textbook design for a badly run, corrupt government.
The archbishop's idea for an African "Marshall Plan" is lovely ... if unworkable. The problem is, what he seems to want is for the US to dictate nation/state building, as well as expenditures, in all of southern Africa, which we would never do. After all, we've been so wonderfully successful in all our proxy state building attempts: Liberia, the Philippines, various and sundry places south of the border, various and sundry places in Asia ... About the only place we've been what could be called successful at state building was in Japan-- and they at least had had a central nation state before, they had a relatively educated populace, and we were in a position -- however ethical or proper one may consider it -- to say, "This is what you WILL do." We wouldn't be in that position in southern Africa. (That said, things are so bad in southern Africa that we're actually giving funds to help them prevent AIDS in their armies; the armies are going about, collecting and spreading disease on their routes as armies will, and we're hoping to make it slow down a bit. And elsewhere, they're looking to US prison policy to guide them in handling AIDS in their prisons -- good grief. That can't be helpful. Although I would love to see what would happen if our federal government did as the article suggests and made states liable for HIV transmission in prison. I expect that it would immediately end all testing programs; the states' positions would be, "If we don't know, then we can't be liable." But I digress from my digression.)
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
Search entries:
12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!