HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED IN 30 YEARS
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon joined an international chorus urging the government (of Somalia) to work with other groups and avoid revenge or triumphalism. The government should “engage in an inclusive political process including moderate Islamic Courts members, clan elders, religious leaders and civic community leaders,” Ban told a news conference.
The above was the signal news item that honed the pages of the world’s press early this week. How things have changed in 30 years.
30 years ago this year a group of conspirators, all fellow citizens of ours, carrying AK-47’s which they had illegally spirited into the country, overthrew our democratically elected government. The legal President, James Mancham, was in London attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. He couldn’t have had a better world stage to cry out loud for international help to save our democracy, let alone his government. London is the mother of parliament, the symbol of democracy after all.
Britain’s intelligence community knew even before the event, that the conspiracy, though hatched by Albert Rene in Seychelles, was given credence by Julius Nyerere’s socialist government who provided not only weapons but also facilitated the training of a handful of conspirators in the ANC camps, as well as to provide 100 seasoned troops after the event in order to assist the usurpers to consolidate their hold on power. At the United Nations the year before, precisely on September 21st, our country was accepted as a fully fledged member with open arms and our president was given the podium to address the membership at that year’s General Assembly as the latest member.
However, after the 5th June, 1977 there were no international outcries; no call for the usurpers of power in Seychelles “to work with other groups and avoid revenge or triumphalism”. No demand for the “government” to “engage in an inclusive political process” with “members, elders, religious leaders and civic community leaders”. But the world did not just remain silent or indifferent. At the Commonwealth headquarters in London and the British Foreign Office next door there were frantic activities. Here is how the former Secretary General of the Commonwealth, Emeka Anyaoku described his organisation’s actions after the world learnt about the overthrow of our legal and democratic government:
Two anecdotes are associated with the 1977 CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting) are worth recalling. Just as President James Mancham of Seychelles arrived in London for the summit, news came of a coup d’etat in his country and the overthrow of his government. When, as Conference Secretary, I sought to ascertain his intentions, I found that Mr Mancham was determined to attend the meeting. We in the Secretariat needed to act fast in order to stave off a potentially embarrassing situation. So the Secretary General contacted Sir Anthony Duff of the British Foreign Office, who succeeded in discouraging him from attending the summit and creating what could have been a difficult situation for the meeting.” (Quoted from The Inside Story of the Modern Commonwealth published by Evans Brothers Ltd).
Note that in the view of the Commonwealth Organisation, according to Anyaoku, it was Mancham – a legally and democratically elected head of state – that would have caused an embarrassment to the organisation, had he appeared in front of his peers, rather than the establishment of an illegal regime through violence in one of its member states. The Commonwealth is still burdened by this baggage as Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe continues to defy even the new tenets of the Commonwealth, that democracy is good in itself.
There is here a salutary lesson in modern international diplomacy that we have learnt at considerable cost. The regime that was established after June 5th 1977 ruled not by accommodation nor was it interested in an “inclusive political process”. In fact it is believed in the opposite. Although Mancham himself did not suffer the indignities of imprisonment without trial, discrimination on the grounds of political affiliation, forced or voluntary political and economic exile abroad, many of his followers and adherents of his party in Seychelles did, and those indignities lasted well over 15 years. There was also an assassination as well as numerous disappearances.
We are where we are today as a nation, not because the usurpers of power 30 years ago, suddenly saw the light that democracy was good and dictatorship bad or that inclusiveness of the political process was a desired end in itself. The turnaround took place as an exercise in political expediency, as they saw that the world was no longer the same after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and their hold on power under a one party state system was untenable in the long run.
One version of modern international diplomacy will roll into town next week in the form of the President of the People’s Republic of China with a retinue of 150. This version of diplomacy is cheque book diplomacy rather than gunboat diplomacy. And China couldn’t care less who gets the cheques, whether the entity is ruled by a tyrant or a cutthroat as long as it gets what it wants in return - natural resources. It would literally be an invasion of a different sort and it has already stretched the tiny but inefficient bureaucracy to breaking point. Thousands of school children, civil servants and party loyalist will no doubt line the streets to welcome the only head of state to visit our country since Algeria’s Chadhi Benjedid rolled into town in 1980 and “donated” Maison du Peuple" to our nation which the SPPF now claims as its own. Algeria then was a one party state dictatorship espousing socialism.
China today is still a one-party state which espouses communism (at least it used to) and one of the anticipated donations will be a brand new state of the art National Assembly building where our new democracy will supposedly flourish. It will be located so far away from the seat of political power as to make representative democracy a peripheral issue in our day to day discourse. Our own representative democracy is in crisis though. Parliament has been sitting with half of the people’s representation preferring to remain outside and its leader literally bludgeoned into submission. In China today, Hu Jintao presides over a different kind of parliament, one where the expression of diverse opinions is merely tolerated not a right. The party President Hu leads is the Communist Party of China, the sister party to the ruling SPPF here in Seychelles. Will Mr Hu hold a tête-a- tête with the SPPF leader who is not President Michel?
As the words of the Secretary General of the United Nations reverberate around the world another version of international diplomacy careens forward. This one devised by Condoleezza Rice and forcefully implemented by President George W Bush, the leader of the only superpower, with Britain under Tony Blair in a supporting role. The tennet of this new diplomacy is that democracy is a good thing in itself and is the necessary if peace and security is to prevail everywhere, and that it can be established in the wake of military action. Iraq, despite the criticisms, is the perfect setting to test this new philosophy as it is a country divided within itself whilst democracy provides for diversity of opinions and tolerance. The break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia following the demise of communism has destroyed the myth that dictatorship, which suppresses individual aspirations, was a force for unification or unity. Our own experience attests to this, although there is no sectarian divide in Seychelles. Can democracy as we know it astride the sectarian divide of Iraq or even China for that matter?
Our own President has decided on his own version of inclusiveness. He has simply declared, for the Love of Seychelles, that we should ignore all the traumas and indignities of the past that he and his associates put us through after 5th June 1977, as if it never happened. His idea of inclusiveness is not to embrace or to consult those who do not share his political philosophy, in determining the language of inclusiveness, so that everyone would be content that we have a shared objective. One hopes he will take heed of the UN Secretary General’s declaration and start talking to his political adversaries on equal terms, for the Love of Seychelles even if, in his case, it is 30 years late.Better late than never.
