By Eqbal Ahmad The distinguishing features of the year 1998 were continuity and incoherence. Like so many of its predecessors, it was a year of strife and frustrated prospects of peace. With the exception of Ireland, where American diplomatic efforts yielded an agreement between Great Britain and its Irish adversary -- the Sinn Fein with its redoubtable armed wing, the Irish Republican Army -- the conflicts of the past continued. In many places such as Algeria, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and the Congo, the bloodshed simply became bloodier and more irrational. All over the world atrocities were committed in the name either of religion or national security. In Algeria the year opened with the ugliest escalation to date in the six-year long war between the military-dominated government and its Islamist opponents. Masked killers massacred more than four hundred innocent villagers on the outskirts of Algiers, the capital city. Their identity remained obscure, but their intent was obvious: to terrorise. More such massacres of innocents occurred throughout the year, the latest such horror being reported on 13 December. No one knows who the killers are. People mourn and curse the military and the 'Islamic' militants alike. In Algeria as in Kashmir, Pakistan, Mexico, Nigeria, the Congo and Afghanistan, the distinction between law and terror has been, to varying degrees, obliterated. Thus the shallow roots of legitimacy in post-colonial states are further eroded, as countries move towards ever greater internal strife and, possibly, implosion. In March, violence erupted in Kosovo ahead of a UN meeting which was expected to impose sanctions on Serbia. Yet Serbia's president, a war criminal on many counts, was once again appeased by the Western powers, the six-nation "contact group" recommending that sanctions be deferred. In return, Slobodan Milosevic made promises to end his bloody repression in Kosovo; as usual, his promises were broken. By the autumn, the Serb army's ethnic cleansing of Muslims had reached such alarming proportions that NATO had to threaten air strikes. An inconclusive halt to the depredations followed, but by the year's end war was resuming between the Serb forces and the Kosovan Liberation Army, with no end in sight to the bloodletting. In Afghanistan, the Taliban's tense relations with the UN, which for the last decade has been the primary source of relief for the Afghan people, came to a head after the radical Islamists hardened their 'Shari'a' on access to schooling and health services for women. UN personnel were murdered in Kabul. As a consequence, the UN withdrew from the country protesting Taliban harassment and interference. Until late into the autumn, the Taliban continued to make gains against their opponents in northern Afghanistan. Their victories accompanied by massacres, particularly of Hazaras, a Shi'a minority, which were forcefully condemned by the world community, including the UN. Among their victims were nine Iranian diplomats accredited to Iran's consulate in Mazar Sharif. Iran demanded an apology and a full account of the fate of its officials, and upon not getting it mobilised its troops along the Afghanistan border. War was averted when Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations representative, mediated an agreement of sorts. Tension between Iran and the Taliban has continued nevertheless, spilling over to sour relations between Iran and Pakistan, hitherto friendly neighbours who now support rival factions in the Afghan civil war. At year's end, the forces of Ahmad Shah Masoud, the Tajik commander, had made some advances and begun to bombard Kabul, the capital city which is under Taliban control. The Taliban government in Kabul is now recognised only by Pakistan, after Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador. As the control of natural resources moved back centre stage in world politics, the Middle East remained a primary focus of attention. The spotlight once again was on Iraq. American determination to emaciate the country and break its will, coupled with Saddam Hussein's proclivity to provoke Washington, brought the two countries to the brink of war again, a disaster averted only by the timely intervention of Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general. Iraq's allegation that under Richard Butler the weapons inspection group UNSCOM was a partisan outfit, was largely confirmed when it was revealed that top UNSCOM officials had been passing key information on Iraq to the government of Israel. In November, another American threat to bomb Iraq was averted when Iraq allowed the weapons inspectors to return to Baghdad, but the unresolved tension between the two countries finally exploded on the eve of Ramadan, and is likely to yield more confrontations in 1999. Meanwhile, no less than one million Iraqis, mostly children and the elderly, are estimated to have died as a result of the sanctions against Iraq. There is no end to their suffering in sight. Persistent American efforts to mediate another Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza failed. Yasser Arafat accepted and Israel continued to reject an American plan which would commit the Palestinian Authority to suppressing anti-Israeli violence even more rigorously in return for an Israeli troop withdrawal from 13 per cent of the West Bank. In May, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in an unsuccessful bid to convince him to accept the American proposal. In the same week, seven Palestinian youths were killed by Israeli forces as they commemorated the anniversary of the Intifada. As Washington's standing registered a steep decline in Arab eyes, Bill Clinton invited Arafat and Netanyahu to talks at the conference centre on the river Wye, not far from Washington. Three days of talks in October yielded the 'Wye River Memorandum' which Clinton, Netanyahu and Arafat signed at the White House in a much publicised ceremony at which Jordan's King Hussein was a prominent participant. The Palestinian Authority made three broad commitments -- to renounce at a public ceremony attended by the US president a clause in the 1964 PLO charter that described Israel's destruction as a PLO objective, to forcefully suppress violent Palestinian resistance in the Occupied Territories, and to submit its anti-resistance measures to monitoring by the American CIA. Israel promised to hand over to the Palestinian Authority the local administration of 13 per cent of the West Bank. This measure, if enforced, would bring 16 per cent of the West Bank under full municipal control of the Palestinian Authority. By the year's end, Yasser Arafat had met all his commitments while Israel's prime minister was stalling on his. As a "reward" to Arafat, the US president visited Gaza to witness the PLO's renunciation of the offending clause in its Charter. Notwithstanding the drama and moral-boosting presence of Clinton in Gaza, there was no reason at the end of 1998 to expect that Israel would relinquish the Occupied Territories, that the Palestinians would one day obtain justice and freedom, or that Jerusalem will be spared systematic "Judaisation". Internal struggles between reformist and conservative Islamists continued in Iran over the future shape of both state and society. Officials and supporters of the reformist President Mohamed Khatami clashed in countless ways with the conservatives who are supported by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the vilayet-i-faqih, and who control nearly all the most powerful organs of the state such as the Welfare Foundations, the radio and television networks, the judiciary and the National Guard. The confrontation peaked with the sentencing of Tehran's reformist former mayor Ghulam Hossein Karbaschi to five years in prison on corruption charges which most observers regarded as dubious, and the impeachment by parliament of Interior Minister Abdullah Nuri for permitting political rallies and relaxing "Islamic rules". Several pro-reform magazines and newspapers were closed or banned, reformist intellectuals were arrested, the Iranian majlis (parliament) passed laws to strictly enforce separation of the sexes in such remaining areas as medical facilities and to reaffirm the sentence of death against Salman Rushdie (after a Minister in Khatami's government had indicated that the death sentence might be withdrawn). The Assembly of Experts rejected the nomination of most reformist candidates to the Assembly elections. The conservatives were obviously on the offensive. While events such as those above attracted media attention throughout the world, a potentially more important development went largely unnoticed by all except a few experts outside Iran. A lively debate opened up in Iran on the nature of the Islamic state, and liberal versus conservative perspectives on the relationship of religion, society and the state. Iran's scholarly President Khatami made a strong contribution with his appearances at seminars, lectures at universities, and the publication of two books -- Bim-i-moj (Fear of the wave) and Az dunya-i-shehr ta shehr-i-dunya: Sair-i-dar andesheye siyasi-i-gharb (From the world of city to the city of the world: A survey of western political thought). Those who care about the future of reformism and the reconstruction of religious thought in Islam had reason to welcome this important development. Here the reformists had the upper hand. Sadly, though, by the year's end the struggle between the reformist and conservative tendencies had assumed a violent aspect. In November, unidentified men entered the home of Dariush Foruhar, a prominent intellectual and politician who had spent years in the Shah's prisons, and brutally murdered the old man and his wife. There was no sign of entry by force and nothing was stolen. The crime sent shock waves through reformist circles of Iran. Their fears may well have been justified, as by mid-December several Iranian writers had either disappeared or were slain. On 15 December, 2,000 Iranian writers and other sympathisers gathered to protest the murder of Mohammed Mokhtari, a dissident poet who was found strangled. The mystery of his murder like those of the others remained unresolved. It is to be hoped that these murders and disappearances are not being perpetrated with the complicity of Khatami's conservative opponents. If they are, then the great promise of renewal and reform may once again be defeated in Iran -- and, by extension, in the Muslim world. Corruption appeared to have become a global epidemic. With Indonesia's Suharto family and Mexico's Solinas brothers in the lead, Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto and her consort occupied prominent places in the pantheon of world class kleptomaniacs who siphoned off billions of dollars from their poverty-stricken countries. The epidemic penetrated even the playing field. Among a host of stars named for taking bribes and kickbacks in the world of sports were cricketers Shane Warren and Mark Waugh. Malaysia's entire team was disqualified on corruption charges. After a year and a half of highly publicised "accountability" proceedings against Ms Bhutto and her jailed husband, news emanated from London that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's family was also accused of financial irregularities and was hiding substantial assets abroad. Corruption, once viewed as a deviation from the norm, appeared to have become an integral part of what is now fashionably described as the 'globalisation process'. The autumn of dictatorships, which began in 1978 with the outbreak of the Iranian revolution, continued to take its toll of fascistic rulers. All the fallen tyrants of 1998, save for one, were friends of the United States, and all suffered from the wrath of the people they had tormented. The exception was Pol Pot. Ill and isolated in his jungle redoubt, the Cambodian was captured, tried in secret and executed by his conspiratorial former comrades. One of the great mass murderers of this century, he appeared frail and harmless in the photographs taken by the sole journalist at the scene of his trial in a Cambodian jungle clearing. After months of popular agitation in which many people died, Suharto of Indonesia was forced out of office by the army that he had led in his coup d'etat and mass murders of 1965. His family's theft of Indonesia's wealth is estimated at more than two billion US dollars. Yet so far no serious process of recovery and prosecution has been begun, and at year's end Indonesia remained in the grip of ethnic and political violence egged on by the collapse of its artificially ballooned, overheated and dependent economy. Overwhelmed by a collapsing economy and public discontent, Nigeria's President Abacha died and was succeeded by another General, Abdus Salam Abu Bakar, who has promised to restore parliamentary government. The most important setback for tyranny this year provided a moral tale in its own right. General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator who in 1973 overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende, was in London for medical treatment when the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon issued an international warrant for his arrest for "crimes of genocide and terrorism that include murder." For the first time in history an international convention on terrorism was invoked against a former head of state, an ally of the United States and other western powers. As a member of the European Community, Britain had no choice but to comply, arrest Pinochet and take him to court. What began was a cliffhanger of a judicial process that is now set to continue into 1999. Most governments, especially that of the United States, support the former dictator, while his victims and human rights organisations are determined to push for his prosecution. After the Lords ruled in favour of extradition, it seemed likely that Pinochet would lose his appeal and face trial in Spain. A precedent would then have been decisively established that neither power, nor the notion of sovereignty, nor rubber-stamp statutes of exemption, can guarantee tyrants and state terrorists immunity from prosecution. (Like Mohammed Ziaul Haq, the Chilean dictator had a rubber-stamp parliament declare his own and subordinates' crimes immune from prosecution as a condition for his leaving office). Brave Baltasar Garzon has made history indeed! In April, the European Union took another step toward unification when it voted to create a single currency for eleven member countries. The "euro" should be in circulation early in 1999. Turkey remained excluded from the Union, a symbol of Europe's continued attachment to racial and religious discrimination. Rejected Turkey was lured instead into a US-supported alliance with Israel, forging a link of sorts between NATO and the Zionist State. NATO took another step to extend its outreach and isolate Russia when Germany finally dropped its resistance to the entry into the alliance of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Meanwhile, socialism staged a comeback of sorts, as social democratic parties won elections in Germany and Sweden. The greatest preoccupation in the United States was the sex scandal involving Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, an intern at the White House when the American president became involved with her. The scandal grew out of investigations into the Whitewater case in which the Clintons were suspected of unethical conduct in a land deal. That investigation yielded no evidence of wrongdoing on the original charges. Yet the activist prosecutor Kenneth Starr, a congressional appointee and Republican, broadened his investigation's remit to include the charge that Clinton had committed perjury when he lied about his relations with Monica Lewinsky. As the woman and her colleagues testified before a Grand Jury and the President himself was questioned by it, the proceedings took on the character of an inquisition. A large majority of citizens recoiled from the spectacle and sympathised with Clinton. He had been a good President and excellent economic manager, and now he was being persecuted for a private not a political or administrative failure in office. The sympathy translated into an unexpected victory for the Democratic party in the mid-term congressional elections in November. But defeat failed to chastise the Republican legislators. In December they voted to impeach Bill Clinton. So one more cliffhanger is set to ignore the calendar and keep us guessing into 1999. Trouble and embarrassment at home did not discourage Bill Clinton from pursuing an activist foreign policy agenda. The expansion of NATO was finalised. Though in my view this was a mistake, it answered to an American agenda. The very worst was averted in Kosovo -- though not the just plain bad -- on Clinton's initiative. He capped the peace agreement on Ireland. Above all, in June he made a successful nine-day visit to China, and went a step further in consolidating relations with that important country. He pushed for and got a multi-billion dollar IMF/World Bank package to rescue Russia's tottering economy, and lobbied hard and successfully to entrench American oil interests in Central Asia. American interventionism also showed its ugly face when, following the atrocious terrorist bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, Clinton ordered cruise missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan. It was a trigger-happy decision, taken without any convincing evidence and in violation of international law. Only in the Middle East Clinton faced failures and frustrations, to the point that the die-hard partisan of Israel had by the year's end begun to sound like a bitterly jilted lover. Through all these happenings a coherent picture of American foreign policy yet again failed to emerge. The most memorable and historic events of the year occurred here in South Asia. Atal Vehari Vajpayee became India's prime minister leading the BJP, a Hindu nationalist party. Missiles flew, bearing names like Ghauri, a most unfortunate nomenclature, from Pakistan, and rockets named Rohini in India. Then on 11 and 12 May the desert shook, and two weeks later the great mountain of Chagai turned pale. India and Pakistan became overtly nuclear and in sheer self-delusion called themselves the world's sixth and seventh nuclear powers. The US and Japan in particular imposed economic sanctions on the poverty-ridden lands. Both economies suffered, the Pakistani more than the Indian. At the year's end, the leaders of both countries were still nurturing their costly illusions, having taken a road that leads nowhere but to an Armageddon. At the time of the explosions, the common people had welcomed the "bum" enthusiastically. Now they look bewildered when you ask them what it was all for. There is no sign anywhere of the glory and security they were promised. Prices are up and jobs have vanished, and that hurts. In India, the BJP has now taken a sound beating in three state elections. In Pakistan, the prime minister promises to dismantle the "rotten system" he has solemnly sworn to uphold. For us one billion people it was indeed a year of the "bum". Whatever next?
