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Ghostly predator gnawing at Tanzania’s Union
2006-05-30 10:39:46
By James Otenyo
Where elections results agree with the US foreign policy, the superpower considers the country’s leadership legitimate and democratic, otherwise it is a victory of a dictatorship, James Otenyo looks at the union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar, and asks if it is rocky because some superpower does not accept it.
Five months after Tanzania’s general elections last December, some adventurous groups are already questioning the legality of the union between Zanzibar and Tanganyika.
It is puzzling why such a question could be raised after the chief opposition party in the country Civic United Front (CUF) lost in the general elections in Zanzibar. Who is behind the question?
A brief look at the wider world’s politics could perhaps provide an answer.
Who could, for instance, answer why, say North and South Korea, China and Taiwan cannot unite so far?
Who is the chief mastermind of the Yugoslavian breakdown? The union of nations is becoming difficult in many areas around the globe.
However, there is only one country that is trying its outmost to remain the sole world superpower the United States of America.
Iraq for one is a country threatened by division into three independent states, political arguments suggest. In the midst of all these political wrangles, reasons for the American invasion have been forgotten.
However, there can be no gainsaying that the USA continues to maintain the reality of the motto of ’’divide and dominate’’.
Having failed to find in Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, it is hard for the rest of the world to see why the White House is present in the Arab country.
The recent elections in Iraq, by an inexperienced observer, can be called a farce just because of the conditions under which they were held.
But the Americans presented them to the international community almost as a pattern of pure democracy.
At the same time America has appropriated the monopoly for interpreting democratic values and bends them to suit their own interests.
They hardly abide the documentary declaration of its principles, which state clearly the qualities of democratic and undemocratic regimes.
The US cannot even let other nations have the appearance of such document itself for fear they might come up with their own analysis of their own.
If Yoweri Museveni or Mubarak carries out pro-American policy in their respective countries, Washington is ready to overlook their re-elections for the third and fifth term respectively.
But if Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo follows his independent policy, which is directed at the strengthening economic relations with China and Iran, White House warns that election of the Nigerian leader for a third term, his country run on the basis of the democratic society, is inadmissible.
We can see the same thing in Asia. As soon as President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov closed American military base in his country, he became an autocrat and dictator at once.
The president of the neighboring Kazakhstan Nazarbaev, who has been in power for just about as long as Karimov, enjoys the support of the White House, because he does not hinder the superpower from the realisation of the economic projects in his country by Americans, where the biggest part of the oil and gas sector is controlled by Nazarbaev personally or by his relatives.
The US interest in Russia is seemingly increasing after it took part considerably in the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The moment a former soviet republic tries to arrange closer economic relations with Russia, there is a negative reaction from Washington.
According to a BBC report, the US vice president Dick Cheney, at the conference called ’’Common Vision for the Common Neighborhood’’ attended by heads of states from the Baltic and Black Sea regions, US Vice President Dick Cheney baselessly accused Russia for pressurizing some of its neighbours to acquiesce to its wills by cutting down the gas levels it sold to them.
To the US, President Putin, who takes care of his people and safety of his country the best way he knows is a dictator.
However, Moldovia, Georgia, Ukraine and such other countries in the region, are models of democracies despite declining standards of their peoples.
With such a scenario, Africans, being under pressure of Americans, are just beginning to build pure democratic societies and must understand that there are no true friends in the modern world.
Speaking to members of the press from Africa countries at the 6th Symposium on Good Governance for African countries, Paul Kagame was right in saying that problems facing African countries will be solved by Africans themselves and not by people from outside the continent.
Africa can and indeed ought to learn by others’ mistakes. Democracy is not a text to be copied verbatim.
We have our own history and traditions that we would be ill-advised to forget.
Giving donors free reins to dictate terms for Africa won’t ever let the continent develop, Rwandan President Paul Kagame said.
Speaking at the closure of the sixth Africa Governance Forum in Kigali, President Kagame said Africa was underdeveloped socially and politically because it allowed donor countries to spell out for the nations of the continent the way forward for African governments.
Kagame said that just because donors have money to support us does not mean they should dictate to us.
’’We should also be able to tell them where they should put their money and not where they think it should be.
We are going to fight corruption not because our partners say so but because we feel it should be fought. We raise ourselves to where we deserve to be,’’ said Kagame.
In the Annual Address to the Federal Assembly, President Vladmir Putin’s speech caught the attention of International community when he spoke of issues that hinder road to human rights and democracy in the World today.
He said that he saw, after all, what was going on in the world. The wolf knows who to eat, as the saying goes. It knows who to eat and is not about to listen to anyone, it seems.
’’How quickly all the pathos of the need to fight for human rights and democracy is laid aside the moment the need to realise one’s own interests comes to the fore.
In the name of one’s own interests everything is possible, it turns out, and there are no limits,’’ the president said.
He emphasized the claim for the voiceless countries that are squeezed in the strong arm of America whose interests are undeniable.
’’I stress that we unambiguously support strengthening the non-proliferation regime, without any exceptions, on the basis of international law.
We know that strong-arm methods rarely achieve the desired result and that their consequences can even be more terrible than the original threat,’’ Putin stressed.
Could America and its aliens be like Russia? Russia’s modern foreign policy is based on the principles of pragmatism, predictability and the supremacy of international law and this is what other Supper Powers of the World should do.
To make changes work reforms must first take place through the world organ. Reform should make the UN’s work more effective.
Second, reform should have the broad support of a maximum number of the UN’s member states.
Without consensus in the UN it will be very difficult to ensure harmony in the world.
The UN system should be the regulator that enables us to work together to draw up a new code of behaviour in the international arena, a code of behaviour that meets the challenges of our times and that we are so in need of today in this globalising world.
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