Dateline: Rest of the world

<a href=www.thestar.com>The Toronto Star Apr. 20, 2003. 09:10 AM OAKLAND ROSS FEATURE WRITER

There are roughly 6.3 billion people in the world. Not all of them live in Iraq.

In fact, only about 0.37 per cent of them do, while the rest live someplace else.

Granted, this is not the impression that TV viewers — or newspaper readers — might have gained in recent weeks, as the eyes and ears of the globe have been straining toward Baghdad, bent on registering every conceivable detail of the U.S.-led war to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (now better known as former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein).

Since the desert hostilities began on March 19, when the first U.S. missile of the war lit the night sky above the Iraqi capital, almost every other news story on the planet — from a crackdown on political dissidence in Cuba to a still unexplained massacre in northeastern Congo — has been pushed to the bottom of the headlines, shunted from TV screens and all but ignored by the scribes, pundits and populace of this war-weary orb called Earth.

There have been exceptions, of course — notably, the rapid and alarming spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which has jetted from China to Hong Kong, Singapore and beyond. Metropolitan Toronto has been especially hard hit by the new and sometimes lethal virus.

Concern about SARS has at times equalled and even overshadowed the Iraq war in the hearts, minds and media outlets of Toronto.

But for the most part, here as elsewhere, the past month has been dominated by images of bombs in the night over Baghdad, tanks and armoured personnel carriers rattling across the Iraqi desert, and the rudely inverted statues of a widely reviled man.

Meanwhile, far from the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, the rest of the world has blundered on — unnoticed perhaps, but undeterred.

Herewith, as a service to readers, the Star provides some snapshots of the world beyond Iraq. This is what news junkies may have missed while waiting for Saddam to fall.

• First stop: Venezuela.

When last featured in the news, before being obscured by the dust storms of Iraq, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez seemed poised to survive a general strike called by his opponents in an effort to force his resignation.

Last December and early this year, the oil-rich but conflict-ridden South American republic tottered on the brink of outright civil war, but the left-leaning Chavez seemed determined to tough out the street demonstrations and the strife, not to mention the near strangulation of his country's economy by various sectors opposed to his rule.

Well, he seems to have made it.

The former paratroop officer, who once served two years in prison for leading a failed military coup of his own, is still in power and has lately taken to criss-crossing the length and breadth of Venezuela in efforts to rally support for his presidency, an office that at least twice he has seemed likely to lose.

In fact, just over a year ago, he himself was temporarily overthrown in a coup. That upheaval took place on April 12, 2002.

But the voluble and combative ruler resurfaced two days later and was restored to office, where he has continued to arouse his supporters and enrage his opponents with interminable speeches spiced with searing invective and populist rhetoric.

Political unrest continues, and the Venezuelan economy has plummeted, but Chavez's opponents seem to accept that they cannot topple him — or anyway not now. Instead, they are turning their attention toward the midpoint of the president's six-year term in August, when they will be legally entitled to seek his peaceful removal in a national referendum.

Chavez, who may not be everyone's idea of a statesman but is surely a survivor, has vowed to fight them every step of the way.

• And so to Cuba, where long-time ruler Fidel Castro — a close friend of Chavez, as it happens — chose the outbreak of hostilities in Iraq as the perfect moment to launch a harsh crackdown on mounting dissent.

The severity of his response stunned Cuban reformers and outraged governments and human-rights agencies abroad.

In all, 75 Cuban opposition activists were rounded up, to be jailed, tried and convicted in an exercise of repression whose severity is possibly unmatched in Cuba since the 1960s.

Long jail sentences were imposed against all of the detainees, ranging in most cases from 14 to 28 years.

• On April 12, in a separate case, a Cuban firing squad executed three men who had been convicted of trying to commandeer a ferry on Havana bay in a failed attempt to abscond to Florida, the latest in a recent string of mostly unsuccessful hijackings. The executions followed brief, secret trials and have been roundly criticized abroad.

Cuban authorities cast much of the blame for the crackdown on the U.S. government, which they accuse of aggressively fomenting rebellion within Cuba while not doing enough to discourage Cubans who try to flee the island.

Still, Castro's heavy-handed response seems certain to isolate his regime from democratic friends such as Canada and the European Union, while only deepening the rancour that already exists between Washington and Havana.

• As the war in Iraq was raging toward Baghdad, another, far bloodier conflict finally seemed to be edging toward a close — the long spiral of horrors that has convulsed the Democratic Republic of the Congo in West Africa since 1998.

Earlier this month, most of the parties to the war — including the armies of at least six neighbouring countries, in addition to a welter of rival armed factions within the Congo itself — finally signed a peace accord hammered out in South Africa. Not a moment too soon.

Last week in New York, an organization called the International Rescue Committee announced that the Congolese war has claimed the lives of at least 3.3 million people during its five-year span, making it "the deadliest documented conflict in African history."

Unfortunately, the death toll continues to rise.

Only days after the signing of the Congo peace accord in Cape Town, reports began to filter out of northeastern Congo concerning a series of apparently co-ordinated massacres committed in and around a town called Drodro, in which upwards of 1,000 people were feared dead.

So far, details of the atrocities remain uncertain, although it seems the carnage was not as great as initially thought — perhaps 150 to 350 people may have died. Still, the latest killings are harrowing evidence that the only reliable peace accords are the ones written, not on paper, but in the hearts of men.

It is not yet clear who was responsible for the recent massacres or why.

• Farther south on the same continent, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe — who apparently bases his notion of statecraft on the example set by Saddam Hussein — has had an awkward few weeks.

Intolerant of dissent in any form, Mugabe was undoubtedly dismayed this month when the opposition Movement for Democratic Change held a protest rally in Bulawayo, the southern African country's second largest city.

But his efforts to make his displeasure felt have lacked their usual sting.

First, Zimbabwean police detained Gibson Sabanda, the MDC's vice-president, for his role in organizing the protest. But they released him on April 7, a week after his arrest. Then, they promptly detained the organization's chief spokesperson, Paul Themba-Nyathia, and tossed him in jail instead.

That didn't work, either. Through error or oversight, the authorities failed to charge Themba-Nyathia properly, and a high court judge ordered his release four days later.

If Zimbabwean politics were played with bats, balls and wickets, Mugabe would be falling behind in the score. Unfortunately, the septuagenarian president's game is anything but cricket, and he makes most of the rules.

Still, Mugabe has had a sticky fortnight, and the Zimbabwean opposition has scored a few, which must count for something, somewhere.

• In Israel and the occupied territories, hostilities continue. A Canadian serving in the Israeli army was shot and killed on Tuesday in the West Bank city of Nablus, after a Palestinian emerged from a building under siege and began firing a pistol. Daniel Mandel, 24, of Toronto was shot dead and another soldier was wounded.

The armed Palestinian, identified as Mazen Fraitekh, was also killed in the shooting.

In another incident the same day, two Israeli workers were killed and three were wounded when a Palestinian threw grenades and opened fire near a truck crossing between Israel and Gaza.

• Finally, on a happier note, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has declared voodoo to be an official religion.

Now, Haiti's thousands of voodoo priests — known as houngans — will be able to exercise many functions formerly denied them, such as performing legal marriage ceremonies.

The African-based faith is practised by many and perhaps most of the country's more than 8 million people.

For further developments in these and other stories, check your newspaper. Normal coverage has resumed.