Putting People First

Common Sense
John Maxwell

It took George Bush several years to achieve national recognition in the United States. A woman named Cindy Sheehan has attained worldwide recognition in one week by camping outside the gates of Mr Bush's 1,500 acre ranch in Texas.

Mrs Sheehan wants to talk to Mr Bush. Mr Bush does not want to talk to Mrs Sheehan. He says he has spoken to her before now.

Mrs Sheehan says that when she first spoke to Mr Bush, as a newly bereaved mother of a young US soldier freshly killed in Iraq there was no real communication between them.

Mrs Sheehan's ire is provoked by memories of her meeting with the president last June in company with several other families bereaved by the Iraq war. "He wouldn't look at the pictures of Casey. He didn't even know Casey's name. Every time we tried to talk about Casey and how much we missed him, he would change the subject."

According to her, Mr Bush behaved as if he were at a tea party. He was disrespectful to her she said, not bothering to find out who she was or what had happened to her son and he kept calling her 'mom'. Mr Bush is older than Mrs Sheehan.

Mrs Sheehan said she was so distraught at the time that she failed to ask the questions she now wants answered."I want him to honour my son by bringing the troops home immediately," Sheehan told reporters Saturday. "I don't want him to use my son's name or my name to justify any more killing."

Mrs Sheehan's son, Casey, was 24 years old when he was killed in Iraq, five days after arriving in that country.

The shock must have been extreme. Parents do not nurture their children to adulthood to see them sent out to be killed. On Thursday Mr Bush said he felt compassion for Mrs Sheehan as he took time out from his five week vacation to hold a press conference at his ranch.

But the president said he could not agree with Mrs Sheehan that American troops should be withdrawn from Iraq. That, he said, would send a "terrible message" to the insurgents.

Mrs Sheehan says she had always opposed the Iraq war in a vague way but her son's death crystallised her views; she now thinks he died in an immoral and unnecessary war, and no kind words from the president will change her view.

She wants President Bush to explain why it was necessary for him to send young americans to die in Iraq. Her anger was stoked by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and further fuelled by the Downing Street memorandum which made it plain that the facts were manipulated to justify the war.

"I want to ask the president, why did he kill my son?" Sheehan told reporters. "He said my son died in a noble cause, and I want to ask him what that noble cause is."

Last week Texas Rangers told Mrs Sheehan she would be arrested if she continued to camp out on the road to Mr Bush's ranch. She was given until Thursday to move.

She is still there, and says she won't move until she sees the president or he ends his vacation.

If this were a chess game, Mr Bush would be in Check.

The Invisible Poor

For much of the last several weeks the world's television screens have been populated by images of starving children, thin as sticks, many on the point of death.

The United Nations says that 32,000 children in Niger are in danger of dying from starvation and corollary ailments But strangely, the ruler of Niger, a former colonel named Mamadopu Tandja told correspondents last week that there was no famine in Niger.

It was all a conspiracy by journalists and NGOs like Oxfam who were promoting the idea of a famine in the hope of attracting more money.

Niger is an enormous country in the interior of West Africa, and includes some of the Sahara desert. As a child I remember looking at the map and wondering at the long, straight lines which defined colonial Africa.

It was only later that I realised that these countries were artificial constructs, designed by soldiers with protractors and set squares and admitting nothing of culture, language or any other civilised consideration.

Like most of post-colonial Africa the departure of the colonial power has meant that people coralled together by European power decided to establish their own identities as soon as they got the chance.

This brought wars and economic disruption, most of which was settled by the armies, the one functioning institution left behind by the colonisers.

Niger is a classic of the genre. It is a desperately poor country rich in natural resources. It boasts the largest uranium deposits in the world, but the wealth goes to a French company which mines the uranium, and to the dealers who buy uranium on the world market and sell it for about $20 a pound.

The uranium boom of the 1980s rapidly created a deep economic and social split within the country. A few rich, an elite, lived in the cities. The poor of various tribes, lived outside. In the population of about 13 million there are estimated to be 50,000 slaves - a legacy of the Atlantic slave trade.

And, of course, since the poor are outside the purview of the elite, they don't exist. Niger, unlike Haiti, is large enough that one can drive for days without seeing anyone, rich or poor. President Tandja told the BBC on Wednesday, "The people of Niger look well fed, as you can see." All the talk of mass starvation was just "foreign propaganda", deception by relief agencies to obtain increased funding. What problems there are, he says, "are not serious".

His critics insist that there is starvation. They insist that President Tandja himself is responsible for much of it. A severe drought and plagues of locusts devastated the country's farms. Tandja decided, as a faithful student of the World bank and the IMF, that if people wanted food or medicine they had to pay for it.

When people marched on the capital in July he refused to heed them saying it would be foolish to run down the government's reserves of food carefully built up for just such an emergency.

Meanwhile, Niger is waiting patiently for debt relief promised years ago by the World Bank and IMF in their Heavily Indebted Poor Country initiative and re-promised by the G8 in July. No doubt relief will arrive before the last peasant dies.

It is ironic, isn't it, that a country on which the West depends for its nuclear authority and a substantial portion of its electricity generation, is too poor to feed its own people?

That the country which provides the nuclear muscle for economic domination by the titans of the earth is existing literally, from hand to mouth? That Niger is the poorest country in the world?

The Reckoning

I am not surprised that those who defend Prime Minister Patterson's record seek to portray his critics as motivated by personal animus including racism. It doesn't surprise me because most of those defenders are members of the clique surrounding the prime minister, insulating him from any contact with the real world.

It was odd, though, when on the Breakfast Club on Friday I asked Mr Patterson's apologists to supply me with what they thought were Mr Patterson's signal achievements nobody could name one. The problem with PJ is simple.

He, like President Tandja and a host of others round the world, bought into the latest incarnation of the Trickle Down Theory. Instead of tackling human development he chose to build monstrous highways to get us more quickly from one urban traffic jam to another. He rescued the financial sector, lowered income tax, raised sales tax and borrowed money to pay the shortfall.

The result is that Jamaica is alone in the world in spending more on debt repayment than it spends on governing.

Our Millennium Project (MP) is the most expensive undertaking in our history - the Doomsday Highway. Norway - one of the world's richest countries - put its entire educational system free for all on the internet for its MP.

Instead of community development we spent millions on police cars, high powered weapons and bullet proof vests. Instead of spending money on education we spent it on rescuing rich investors from the consequences of their own folly and then marveled at the crime rate.

While Mr Patterson and Fidel Castro are probably the only world leaders still in office who signed the Treaty of Rio, Cuba is one of the most environmentally friendly countries in the world and Jamaica is one of the least.

The government flouts its own rules about public consultation and environmental impact assessments. Instead of building new schools, playing fields and swimming pools it first decided to give away part of our major Botanical Garden, and, thwarted in that piece of lunacy, handed over a precious biodiversity reserve, Long Mountain for a millionaire to make more millions.

And while neglecting public recreation and destroying the natural patrimony Mr Patterson's government latest bright idea is to steal public beaches to be handed over to private investors and to wall off the people from the sea.