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Jewish World Review April 20, 2005 / 11 Nisan, 5765 Africa's leaders are quickly learning the art of the spin By Clarence Page
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
BANJUL, Gambia -- Before Gambian journalist Deyda Hydara was killed in a yet-unsolved drive-by shooting in December in this West African capital, many residents of Africa's tiniest country woke up eagerly to his witty political column with the distinctive title: "Good Morning, Mr. President."
That cheeky greeting was aimed at Gambia's President Yahya Jammeh, who took charge after a bloodless coup in 1994 at age 29 and has stubbornly avoided his country's news reporters ever since.
Worse, he has been quoted referring to journalists by such colorful sobriquets as "the bastards of Africa," a view undoubtedly shared by many world leaders, if usually not in public.
President Jammeh's thinly veiled hostility to the media might be more laughable were it not accompanied by a series of unsolved criminal attacks and restrictive new laws aimed at journalists over the last five years.
They include arson attacks by masked, armed and uniformed men in 2000 against private broadcaster Radio 1 FM, a station with a pro-democracy stance, and two against The Independent that destroyed that biweekly newspaper's printing press last April. Employees barely escaped injury. Some, like BBC correspondent Ebrima Sillah, whose home was damaged in a late-night arson last August, have fled the country.
That's why I am here with two other representatives of the Committee to Protect Journalists, of which I am a board member. With Joel Simon, CPJ's deputy director, and Julia Crawford, the New York-based organization's Africa coordinator, we met with a variety of government officials and journalists, and witnesses to some of the crimes.
As an African-American who remembers the national sensation sparked by Alex Haley's "Roots" three decades ago (the TV mini-series of Haley's best-selling book broke records as the most-watched entertainment program in TV history), I have come to Gambia with a mixture of excitement and dismay. My ancestors may have come from this tiny land (about 200 miles long and up to 50 miles wide) as surely as Haley's did. Unlike other parts of Africa that I have visited, the savvy street merchants here spot my "American walk" and get my attention by shouting, "Welcome home!"
But there's a larger story here: I am dismayed to arrive for the reason that journalists usually visit African countries: Bad news is happening.
Mother Gambia is afflicted by yet another leader who has not resolved Western democratic values, the key to a prosperous future, with the traditional monolithic "big-man" rule of African tribal chiefs and political potentates.
The result is an odd amalgam that broadcaster George Christensen, owner of Radio 1, described ironically as "military democracy."
Tiny Gambia is indicative of a big story happening across Africa and the rest of the Third World in the post-Cold War, post-Sept. 11 age of globalism, the Internet and the political spin industry. To paraphrase that eloquent philosopher Donald Rumsfeld, you deal with the African leaders that you have, not the ones that you wish you had.
Gambia, for example, does not have Africa's worst media environment, although that is not saying much. President Jammeh has not shut down his independent media like Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president, or scattered all of his country's independent journalists in secret dungeons like Eritrea's outrageous regime.
But Jammeh's regime has slipped backward in recent years while countries like Senegal, Ghana, Benin, Mali and Cape Verde, to name a few, have made great strides forward, resulting in increased commerce, tourism and international respectability. Democracy pays. Monolithic governments invite political and ultimately economic stagnation.
And that offers a window of hope for Gambia under Jammeh, who wants to be a player in the African Union, which Gambia hosts next year. He also wanted to be elected to lead the Economic Community of West African States in January but may have lost that opportunity because of international anxiety over the recent media attacks in his country.
He also is said to be a great admirer of President Bush, whose administration has praised Gambia for cooperating in capturing a couple of terror suspects. Jammeh received military police training at Ft. McClellan, Ala., and led Bush's security detail when he visited Gambia during his father's presidency in 1990. Small world.
U.S. officials hope their mutual appreciation will encourage Jammeh to make further reforms in human rights and press freedoms. Unfortunately, he also seems to have picked up the Bush administration's worst habits of spin: Treat the news media with benign neglect and thinly veiled contempt, as if they were representing only their own interests, not the public's interest. That's a line of jive, but too often it works.
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Comment on Clarence Page's column by clicking here. © 2005, TMS |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
