BBC News
Desmond Tutu, the first black South African archbishop of the Anglican church and veteran campaigner against apartheid, gives a lecture in London on Thursday to mark the 75th anniversary of the British Council. Here, he explores some of the same themes in an article written for BBC News.
I make no apology for talking and writing, in the UK, about a foreign leader. But expectations of him are so high and attention worldwide is glued to his every step as he reaches the end of his first month in office. He is the story of the moment.
I am obviously referring to Barack Obama.
Three months ago as I watched the news that could define an era, I rubbed my eyes in disbelief and wonder. It could not be true that Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan, was to be the next president of the United States.
During the previous administration’s term, I’d been asked to suggest one unilateral magnanimous gesture or action that the incoming US president might make to counteract anti-Americanism abroad. I said that while there were clearly pockets of anti-Americanism around the world, this was definitely not a global phenomenon nor was it directed towards the American people.
What I certainly could attest to was substantial resentment and indeed hostile opposition to the policies of a particular US administration.
I contended, as I do now, that the two are quite distinct and separate.
An elucidating example dates back to the years of the anti-apartheid struggle. The Reagan White House was firmly opposed to applying sanctions against the South African apartheid regime, preferring what it described as “constructive engagement”. Many of us were incensed by this policy and opposed it with every fibre of our being.
Black role models
I probably dismayed many people when on one occasion I was told of the latest Reagan rejection of our call for US sanctions against Pretoria. I retorted, out of deep exasperation, “The West can go to hell!” I was then Bishop of Johannesburg, and some thought it was decidedly un-episcopal language.
I was very angry toward the Reagan administration, but that did not make me anti-American. And that is the point, anger and resentment toward the policies of a particular administration do not necessarily translate into anti-American sentiment.
When I was nine or so, I picked up a tattered copy of Ebony magazine. I still don’t know where it could have come from in my ghetto township with its poverty and squalor. It described how Jackie Robinson, a black man like us, had broken into major league baseball and was playing scintillatingly for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
I did not know baseball from ping-pong. That was totally irrelevant. What mattered was that a black man had made it against huge odds, and I grew inches and was sold on America from then on.
Remember the extraordinary outpouring of sympathy and concern after 9/11? That surely could not have happened, certainly not on such a vast global scale if people hadn’t genuinely cared. Everywhere, virtually.
But what happened that all these positive warm feelings toward the United States were disrupted and turned into the negative ones of hostility and anger?
‘Lean years’
For those of us who have looked to America for inspiration as we struggled for democracy and human rights, these past seven years have been lean ones.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu speaks to the BBC’s Allan Little.
When war began, first in Afghanistan and not long after in Iraq, we read allegations of prisoner abuse at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and of rendition to countries notorious for practising torture. We saw the horrific images from Abu Ghraib and learned of gruesome acts performed in the name of gathering information. Sometimes the torture itself was couched in the US government’s euphemisms – calling waterboarding an “interrogation technique”.
To the past administration’s record on torture, we must add a string of other policies that have damaged the standing of the United States in the world: its hostility to the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases; its refusal to assent to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court; its restrictions on the use of US funding to fight Aids; and the arrogant unilateralism it has employed in declaring to be enemies any countries it deemed “against us” because they were not “for us”.
‘Bully-boy attitude’
I never imagined in my worst dreams that I would live to see the day when the United States would abrogate the rule of law and habeas corpus as has happened in the case of those described as “enemy combatants” incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay. Or that I would hear an American government and its apologists use exactly the same justification for detention without trial, as had been used by the apartheid government of South Africa – a practice that the United States at the time condemned roundly, as was so utterly right to have done.
So, it was a devastating case of deja vu for some of us, thoroughly disillusioning.
The Bush administration managed to rile people everywhere. Its bully-boy attitude sadly polarised our world.
Against all that, the election of Barack Obama has turned America’s image on its head.
On US election night last November, I wanted to jump and dance and shout, as I did after voting for the first time in my native South Africa on 27 April 1994.
My wife cried with incredulity and joy as we watched a broadcast of the celebrations in Chicago, after the election results came through. A newspaper here ran a picture of Obama from an earlier trip to one of our townships, where he was mobbed by youngsters. It was tacitly saying that we are proud he once visited us.
Caution
Because the Bush years have been disastrous for other parts of the world in many ways, Obama’s victory dramatises the self-correcting mechanism that epitomises American democracy. Elsewhere, oppressors, tyrants and their lapdogs can say what they like and, for the most part, they stay put.
But ordinary citizens living in undemocratic societies are not fools; they may not always agree with US foreign policy, but they can see and register the difference between the United States – where people can kick an unpopular political party out – and their own countries. …
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7897206.stm
But before the people thank Mr. Bush for what he has done – let the World Court thank him first.
Let the World court “Thank” Mr. Bush for what he has done: to Iraq –to Guantanamo’s detainees and to detainees secretly scattered throughout the world. Let the World Court thank or pass judgment on Mr. Bush and his neocon’s “interrogation techniques”. The Bush team and neocons seemed to have little or no respect for laws be they domestic or be they international.
Trying to re-establish respect for the rule of International law would be a fitting place to start “thanking Mr. George W. Bush”.
