The problem is that we spent too much money on the military. If we hadn't, the WTC attack likely wouldn't have happened.
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guardian.co.uk
Getting the Right Result
Nicaragua's election showed the US still won't allow a free vote
Duncan Campbell
Wednesday November 7, 2001
The Guardian
During a recent television discussion in
the United States chaired by veteran
presenter Barbara Walters, the subject for
discussion was the new national puzzle:
why they hate us. The reason, suggested
Karen Hughes, President Bush's special
counsellor and his senior press officer
during his election campaign, was that
"they hate us because we elect our
leaders".
Voters in Nicaragua, queuing at the polls
last Sunday to elect a new government,
might have been forgiven a wry smile on
hearing those words. While the United
States government radar may seem to
have been pointed in the direction of
Afghanistan and the Middle East, the
state department and many American
politicians and officials still found time
over the last few weeks to use money,
free food and propaganda to try to
influence the vote in Nicaragua. In the
short term, they may have succeeded -
the US's favoured candidate, the
73-year-old entrepreneur and landowner
Enrique Bolanos of the ruling Liberal
party, defeated the Sandinista leader and
onetime guerrilla Daniel Ortega - but who
knows what the long-term effect will be?
Some history: the Sandinistas ended the
Somoza family dictatorship through a
revolution in 1979. Their leaders were
more pluralistic and less ideologically
strait-jacketed than many similar
movements and the victory was broadly
welcomed in the country. When the
Sandinistas stood for election in 1984,
they won with 67% of the vote. The US,
having seen which way the vote was
going, indicated before the election that
they would not recognise it. Instead, they
supported what, certainly by today's
definition, amounted to a terrorist
campaign under the contras or
counter-revolutionaries. It was an illegal
war which resulted in up to 50,000 deaths
in Nicaragua. In 1990, a weary electorate
backed the US-favoured candidate,
Violeta Chamorro, and Ortega surrendered
power, the first such peaceful transition
through the ballot box in the country's
history.
Ortega's political career since then has
disappointed many of his former
supporters, not least because of the
powerful allegations of sexual abuse by
his step-daughter, Zoilamerica Narvaez.
Few imagined he would ever again
challenge seriously for the presidency.
Then, earlier this summer, came the
results of opinion polls in the local press:
Ortega was running some six or seven
percentage points ahead of his nearest
rivals and might, it seemed, return to
power.
The US dispatched a state department
official who told the local chamber of
commerce how damaging this would be to
the country. Pressure was successfully
put on the third party candidate, the
Conservative Noel Vidaurre, to drop out in
order to prevent the splitting of the
anti-Ortega vote. The US ambassador,
kitted out in a Liberal party baseball hat,
embraced the Bolanos election campaign
and invited the candidate to join him on an
emergency food-aid distribution trip.
(Think the US ambassador to the Court of
St James dressed in Tory T-shirt, handing
out free choc ices in Swansea or Sheffield
shoulder to shoulder with Iain Duncan
Smith.)
John Keane, the US's acting deputy
assistant secretary of state for western
hemisphere affairs, said last month that
the Sandinistas included people
responsible for "abominations" of human
and civil rights. Such has been the official
US rhetoric that former president Jimmy
Carter, in Nicaragua to oversee a fair
election, was moved to say last week: "I
personally disapprove of statements or
actions by another country that might
tend to influence the votes of people of
another sovereign nation."
Jeb Bush, the US president's brother and
governor of the state of Florida, home of
the one of the dodgiest election results in
recent history, wrote an article in the
Miami Herald last month in which he
attacked Ortega because he "neither
understands nor embraces the basic
concepts of freedom, democracy and free
enterprise". Bush jnr added: "Daniel
Ortega is an enemy of everything the
United States represents. Further, he is a
friend of our enemies. Ortega has a
relationship of more than 30 years with
states and individuals who shelter and
condone international terrorism." The
article was duly reprinted last week as an
ad by the Liberal party in the Nicaraguan
daily, La Prensa, under the headline "The
brother of the president of the United
States supports Enrique Bolanos". As
satirist Tom Lehrer said on the occasion
of Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel
peace prize - who needs irony?
Then, last week, three US politicians:
Jesse Helms, the North Carolina
Republican, Bob Graham (Democrat,
Florida) and Mike DeWine (Republican,
Ohio) put a resolution to Congress calling
on the president to re-evaluate his policy
towards Nicaragua if the Sandinistas were
to win - effectively suggesting the further
impoverishment of an impoverished
country if the wrong result came through.
The resolution was duly reported in the
Nicaraguan press.
In the meantime, two of the architects of
the illegal contra war have returned from
the elephants' graveyard. John
Negroponte, who had not noticed anything
untoward when atrocities were being
committed in Honduras during the war,
was confirmed as UN ambassador within
days of September 11 when the nation's
attention was elsewhere. Earlier, Elliott
Abrams, who had pleaded guilty in 1981
to lying to Congress over the conduct of
the war, was installed by the president to
head his "office for democracy and human
rights". See Tom Lehrer again. His
criminal offence was described by White
House spokesman Ari Fleischer as "a
matter of the past".
Ortega, sadly, was no Nelson Mandela.
Now that he has lost, some of the
idealistic souls who once stood beside
him in what was, by any standards, a
brave revolution may now return to the
political arena. Other younger, untainted
politicians may emerge. But just at the
moment when the US needs to be
convincing the world that they do not
impose their will to protect their
commercial interests with little regard to
local people's desires, the events of the
past few weeks in Nicaragua will serve to
create more cynicism.
The Sandinistas, a small, disorganised
party in one of the world's poorest
countries, posed no threat to the US. To
link them to terrorism in the wake of
September 11 was a cheap and dishonest
shot. The next time Barbara Walters asks
Karen Hughes why do they hate us, she
can add one small but not insignificant
cause.
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WTC was an attack on democracy and freedom! -g-
Tom |
