Editorial
Of two presidential inaugurations
Two presidential inaugurations in the past few days have naturally aroused two different kinds of feeling around the globe. The thousands of people who decided to demonstrate in protest at the inaugural ceremonies for the re-elected George W. Bush were clearly speaking for a very large number of people the world over. It was their feeling that the second Bush administration can only be a continuation of the first, which means that the military strength and indeed cavalier behaviour the White House has displayed since before 11 September 2001 will not mellow any time soon. There are, for these people, hardly any reasons to think that there will be any change in policy on the part of the administration. That, in essence, ought to go out as a message for the Bush people. Every second presidential term in the United States has actually been a preparation for the administration that will follow it, which has generally meant that a president enjoying a second term has by and large been looked upon as a lame duck. But such a situation does not appear to be true of Mr. Bush, whose crusading zeal about making the world safer for America and its friends has not diminished at all since his victory last November. He has continued to speak of security concerns, a hint that nations such as Iran would do well to beware of what he plans to do in the next four years.
The second inaugural we speak of is Viktor Yushchenko’s in Ukraine. There can hardly be any question that the new man in Kiev is justifiably excited about his ascendance to power after all the global outcry against attempts to keep him out of office. His rival Viktor Yanukovych has surely made matters easier for all Ukrainians with his decision to concede the election rather than turn the whole exercise into a farce through dragging things through the courts. Mr. Yushchenko has made an encouraging beginning through appealing to all sections of the population for support. His message has been one of unity, meaning that he will seek to avoid any conflict between the more nationalistic western part of the country and the predominantly Russian-speaking east. On the diplomatic front, the new president has done quite a remarkable thing by flying off to Moscow a day after the inauguration to reassure President Putin that Ukraine under a Yushchenko administration will not be a threat to Russian interests. It will be hard, though, to please Moscow given that Ukraine’s new leader has always held the belief that his country’s place is in Europe, indeed in the EU. Mr. Putin will likely not be convinced that Mr. Yushchenko can do a balancing act between going into Europe and keeping Russia happy. But he knows too that he cannot ignore the new man in Kiev, that indeed he will have to do good, careful business with him if Ukraine is not to be pushed into turning its back on its former fellow-state in the now non-existent Soviet Union.
It is thus that the significance of the presidential inaugurations in Washington and Kiev is to be noted. President Bush, assuming he has his eye on history, will need to demonstrate that after a first term given over to arrogance founded on military might, he is ready to apply diplomacy in the pursuit of American interests. A failure to do that will prove incalculably damaging for the man or woman who will succeed him in January 2009. For President Yushchenko, the path to Europe must not mean a total reversal of the heritage which has so long defined Ukraine’s place in the world. He cannot afford to alienate those who voted for his rival at the December rerun of the presidential elections.
Why not every day?
The city corporation has been doing quite splendid work by way of keeping the streets clean in a post-Eid situation. On Eid day and the day after, it was noticed that the roads in a number of localities were being disinfected by the corporation people and the garbage accumulating as a result of the animal sacrifices was being towed away. One cannot but register one’s appreciation for the good work done. Where on earlier Eid occasions it was a matter of things taking care of themselves or of rain washing the streets clean, this time it was a well-intentioned, rather well-planned clean-up operation.
That leads one to the next point, which is that the zeal demonstrated by Nagar Bhaban towards cleaning up the city soon after Dhaka residents brought the ritual killing of animals to an end can be extended to cover everyday life as it is lived in this sprawling, albeit chaotic, city. There are, on a normal day, any number of roads and streets which stay dirty owing not only to the pressure of the population but also because of the propensity towards a lack of cleanliness on the part of many. Matters of hygiene, indeed behaviour in public, have remained at a level that does not quite infuse confidence in us about things improving any time soon. It is here that the city corporation can step in in a two-dimensional way. In the first place, it can do what has for years been done in places like Kolkata, where municipal trucks have regularly sprayed water on the streets every morning. In the second, the city authorities through a regularity of clean-up operations can inculcate a sense of civic responsibility among people by making them aware of what they need to do or not do in public. Spitting, littering, et cetera, are habits that the city fathers can help people to turn away from.
All public responsibility is a trust. It is at the same time an educative affair. The Dhaka city corporation is, hopefully, cognisant of the principle.
TALLEYRAND’S WORLD
The loneliness of the statesman
With Makgatho Mandela’s death, Nelson Mandela’s loneliness assumes a stark form. There is a broken father in him, for nothing can be more heart-wrenching than the sight of a man presiding over the burial ceremonies of his own children. Television images of Mandela at Makgatho’s funeral have clearly revealed a man drained of the earlier energy
Nelson Mandela buried his son two weeks ago. Makgatho Mandela, aged fifty four, died of HIV, an affliction which has for a very long time been part of life in South Africa as indeed elsewhere in the continent. And for an equally very long time, President Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor as president of South Africa, refused to acknowledge the existence of the disease in his country. That was strange behaviour from a man who had always been looked upon as the image of a modern South Africa. In the years of struggle against apartheid, Mbeki, whose father Govan suffered in the way Mandela suffered, lived in London, from where he directed the diplomatic offensive of the African National Congress. It was chiefly owing to Thabo Mbeki’s efforts as a young strategist for the ANC abroad that more and more peole across the globe came to understand the morality behind the campaign which Mandela and his colleagues conducted, even as they languished on Robben Island, in defence of black majority rule in South Africa.
No one expected Mbeki to be a second Mandela once he assumed office as president after Mandela went into the sunset. Unlike Mandela, a man with huge doses of charisma, Mbeki was more of a hands-on leader. He was perceived as a man who wanted to get things done. That is why, when he refused to recognise the potency of HIV/AIDS and when he saw it all as a western conspiracy against Africa, people were a trifle stunned. It then took his predecessor to come forth in public with appeals that the disease be treated for the debilitating ailment it was. And now that Mandela’s own son has died from the ravaging effects of the affliction, the whole of Africa, indeed the world, knows how malignant and murderous AIDS is and what must be done to contain it. But concealed behind this story of how Mandela has struggled to have the disease given the importance it deserves by the government of his successor lies the tale of a man who has suffered in a number of ways even as the world has revered him as a statesman. One of Mandela’s sons died in a car crash in 1969. The white South African regime refused to grant him permission to attend the funeral. Earlier, in the late 1950s, he went through a divorce from his first wife before marrying the riotous Winnie Madzikela. During his years in jail, it was Winnie who suffered assorted abuses at the hands of the apartheid regime. She was carted off to imprisonment, separated from her young daughters and yet she persisted in carrying the struggle forward. But as she braved, resolutely, every form of organised assault on her, rumours emerged of the peccadilloes she herself was engaging in. The result was her divorce from Mandela a few years after he emerged into freedom in February 1990.
With Makgatho Mandela’s death, Nelson Mandela’s loneliness assumes a stark form. There is a broken father in him, for nothing can be more heart-wrenching than the sight of a man presiding over the burial ceremonies of his own children. Television images of Mandela at Makgatho’s funeral have clearly revealed a man drained of the earlier energy. The brilliance in the eyes has been papered over by a pale light. And he walks haltingly, aided by wife Graca.
Parents and dead children
All this talk of how the death of children affects the lives of parents raises anew thoughts of some other important people who have suffered in the way Mandela has suffered. At the funeral of her son Murtaza in 1996, Begum Nusrat Bhutto did not seem to be in possession of her normal self. Talleyrand has it on good authority that she went on talking about various kinds of achar, or pickle, with the women gathered around her in mourning. She should have been wailing, beating her breasts. But she had already gone through too much of shock in life to be aware of what was going on around her. The execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979 was a traumatic moment from which she never quite recovered. That was followed by the mysterious death of younger son Shahnawaz in Paris. By the time Murtaza Bhutto was gunned down before his home in Karachi, Nusrat Bhutto had in a way become impervious to pain.
Compare that with the pain that must have wound through Indira Gandhi when son Sanjay died in a plane crash in 1980, months after she returned to power, having spent three years in the political wilderness. From the moment the news came through that Sanjay Gandhi, a young man accused of a huge number of sins and for very good reasons, had died and till his cremation, Mrs. Gandhi wore dark glasses. It was convenient, for the strong woman in her was unwilling to let her emotions be observed flowing freely through her tears. There can be little doubt, though, that Sanjay’s death made the ground shake under her feet. Whatever the rest of the world might say about the damage Sanjay had done to India through misusing his mother’s position, his mother gave every sign of the affection she felt for him. She had him elected MP and clearly looked forward to the day when Sanjay would succeed her in prime ministerial office. It is interesting to speculate what course India might have taken had Sanjay Gandhi not died and had he rather than Rajiv Gandhi become prime minister in 1984. Suffice it, for now, to recall B.K Nehru’s comment on the tragic end of Sanjay Gandhi. The death of Sanjay, he told an interviewer only weeks after the tragedy, may have been the best thing to happen to India. That says a whole lot. One wonders if the young man’s mother too felt that way, secretly, behind those dark glasses.
Mao Zedong suffered badly as he waged war against the Nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s. One of his wives was executed by the forces of Chiang Kai-shek. Abraham Lincoln saw his little son die in the White House, a pain which gnawed at him for the rest of his life, which was not much anyway. Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865. In August 1963, John F. Kennedy buried his dead infant son in much sorrow. He himself was to be murdered in Dallas three months later. Kennedy’s tragedy takes one back to the way his own parents suffered through the deaths of their children. Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., who clearly was being groomed by his father as a future president, died in the Second World War. A daughter, along with her husband, died in a plane crash around the same time. A mentally retarded daughter, Rosemary, who died recently at age eighty six, spent all her life in a sanatorium. After JFK’s assassination in November 1963, it was the turn of Senator Robert F. Kennedy to be murdered in Los Angeles in June 1968. In the mid-1960s, Edward Kennedy survived a plane crash but spent months lying on his back in hospital. All this with Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Kennedy alive.
Waiting for 2008
Not many people around the world are happy that George W. Bush has embarked on four more years of presidential leadership in the United States. For his part, the president has said nothing in his inaugural address that can reassure people that he means to lead a more humane government in his second term. The implication is that the United States will be engaged in dishing out more of what it has done in Bush’s first term. In other words, the world will just have to endure four more years of pain and Republican arrogance. For Americans, those worried about the damage already done to their country’s reputation abroad by the superpower zeal of their president, the future lies in hope. And the hope is that four years down the road, a good, respected Democrat will arise and lead America to a new beginning as president. It could be Hillary Clinton or it could even be the just-beaten John Kerry. Whatever happens, Americans know — and with them the rest of the world — that if another Republican is elected president in 2008, the darkness which descended on the world under George W. Bush will not lift.
In November 2008, therefore, a better day should dawn on the planet, through the way Americans turn their backs on Republican politics.
Talleyrand can be reached at editorial@newagebd.com
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