Global apartheid? : race and religión in the new world order

              Global apartheid?
Race and religión
in the new world order ALI A MAZRUI
INTRODUCTION
Now that secular ideological divisions bet-ween
East and West have declined in rele-vance,
are we witnessing the re-emergence of
primordial allegiances? Are we witnessing
new forms of RETRIBALIZATION on the
global arena —from Natal in South África to
Bosnia-Herzegovina, from Los Angeles to Slo-vakia.
It is true that in Europe two levéis of
RETRIBALIZATION are discemible. In Eas-tern
Europe micro-retribalization is particu-larly
strong. Micro-retribalization is concer­ned
with micro-ethnicity, involving such con-flicts
as:
— Serbians vs Croats,
— Russians vs Ukrainians,
— Czechs vs Slovaks.
On the other hand, Western Europe shows
strides in regional integration inspite of such
hiccups as the 1992 referendum in Denmark
agaínst the Maastrícht Treaty. Regional inte­gration
can be Macro-retríbaJization if it is
race-conscious. Macro-retribalization can be
solidarity of White people, an arrogant Pan-
Europeanism greater in ambition than any-thing
since the Holy Román Empire.
Por both Eastern Europe and Western is
the White world closing ranks? Will we see
a more uníted White world, and potentially
more prosperous, presiding over the fate of
a fragmented and persistently indigent Black
world?
To put it another way, now that apartheid
in South África is disintegrating, is there a
GLOBAL APARTHEID in the process of
formation? With the end of the cold war, is
the White world closing ranks at the global
level —inspite of current divisions within indi­vidual
countries Uke Yugoslavia? Is the dan-ger
particularly acute between Black and
White people? Will we see a more united
and potentially more prosperous white world
presiding over the fate of the Black peoples
of the 21st century?
In addition to the Black-White divide in
the world, Muslim countries may have spe-cial
reason to worry in the era after the cold
war. Will Islam replace communism as the
West's perceived adversary? Did the West
exploit the Gulf War of 1991 to put Islam
and its holiest places under the umbrella of
Pax Americana? It is to these issues that we
turn.
BETWEEN IDEOLOGY
AND RACE
There was a time when White people of
the Soviet Union colonized fellow White peo­ple
of Eastern Europe —while at the same
time Soviet weapons and money were helping
Black líberation. In other words, Moscow
was an imperial power in Europe, and a libe-rating
forcé in África. At the global level
alliances for or against ímperialism did not
coincide with racial differences.
Indeed, the liberation of Black people from
White minority governments in África would
probably have been delayed by at least a
generation without the support of white socia-list
governments during the days of the Cold
The end of the Cold war has ended inter-white
rivalries within the Third World. On
the positive síde this has meant an earlier
end to African civil wars. The war in Eritrea
would not have lasted 30 years had there
been no external encouragement. The war in
Angola would not have lasted a decade and
a half if the cold war between the super-powers
had ended sooner. Similar things can
be said of the war in Mozambique —which
was virtually a child of external racist mani-pulation.
On the negative side, former members of
the Warsaw Pact have lost all interest in sup-porting
Third World causes. Leninist anti-imperialism
seems to be as dead as other
aspects of Leninism.
V. I. Lenin had added things to Marxism
some of which are responsible for the present
crisis of socialism woridwide. V. I. Lenin had
added the following factors to Marxism:
— Vanguard Party
— Dcmocratic Centralism
— Statism
— Marxism as Ideology of Development
(which in the end failed to deliver economic
goods)
But Lenin also rescued Marxism from eth-nocentrísm
and racism. Marx's historical
materialism had once applauded Brítish ímpe­rialism
in India —as a forcé which was des-troying
older pre-capitalist Hindú forms pro-gressively
towards capitalism as a higher
phase. Engels also applauded French coloni-zation
of Algería as two steps forward in the
social evolutionary process. Engels and Marx,
in other words, were so Eurocentric that
their paradigm legitimated European Ímperia­lism.
It was Lenin who put European Ímperia­lism
on trial with his book ímperialism: The
Highest Stage of Capitalism. From then on
Marxism became one of the major anti-imperíalíst
forces of 20th century history.
Now that even Marxists in Eastern Europe
have got de-Leninized, socialist anti-imperialism
has been in decline. White socía-lísts
are far less hkely to support Black líbe­ration
today than they were two or three
decades ago. De-Leninízation has strengthe-ned
the bonds between white socialists and
white imperialists.
There is much in Lenin's contribution to
Marxism which deserves to die. His critique
of ímperialism is not one of them. But for
the time beíng the process of de-Leninízation
is quite comprehensive. What were once Afri-y\
A
ca's comrades-in-arms against colonialism
have now become coUaborators with aparth-eid
in South África.
The, demise of Leninism in Eastem Europe
has resulted in the decline of anti-racism as
wetl. Some Eastern European countñes in
1990 started moving almost obscenely
towards full resumptíon of relations with the
apartheid regime in South África before the
racist structure had begun to be dismantled.
Some newly "democratized" Eastern Euro-pean
countries seem to have started violating
intemational sanctions against Pretoria even
before they held their first multi-party elec-tions.
The Soviet Union itself in 1990 started
using a subsidiary of a South African com-pany
(DeBeers) to market its diamonds for
Moscow something which would have been
unthinkable before glasnost and perestroika.
Liberalization among the former Warsaw
Pact members has meant their greater readi-ness
to do business with the world's leading
racist regime, Pretoria.
BETWEEN IDEOLOGY
AND RELIGIÓN
Meanwhile, another tilt was taking place
—not a shift from ideology to race but a
transition from anti-communism to anti-
Islam. In a sense, Western fears of Islam are
centuries older than Western fears of commu-nism.
But in recent times Western anti-
Islamic tendencies had for a while been ame-liorated
by the indisputable superiority in
technological and military power that the
West had. Western nervousness about Islam
was also ameliorated by the West's need for
Muslim allies in its confrontation with the
Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.
Three things have happened in the last
quarter century. Firsüy, elements in the Mus­lim
world leamt that those who are militarily
weak had one strategy of last resort against
the mighty-terrorism. Those Muslims became
convinced that terrorism was no worse than
any other kind of warfare —if anything, it
killed far fewer civilians than conventional
warfare, let alone nuclear.
If terrorism is the weapon of the militarily
weak, nuclear weapons are for the technolo-gically
sophisticated. While some elements of
the Muslim world were experimenting with
terrorism and guerrilla warfare, other ele­ments
began to explore the nuclear option
and other weapons of mass destruction.
Ancient Western worries abut Islam were re-kindled.
Egypt must be bribed to sign the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty whether or
not Israel did so. Pakistán must be stopped
from acquiring a nuclear capability. And Iraq
must be given enough rope to hang itself
over Kuwait —so that all Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction could then be destroyed.
A related reason for Western anxiety
about Islam is the importance of Muslim oil
for Western industry. Although Western tech­nological
power was still pre-eminent and
undisputed, its dependence on Middle Eas­tem
oil made it vulnerable to political chan­gos
in the Muslim world —changes of the
magnitude of the revolution in Irán or of
Iraq's annexation of Kuwait.
As the fear of communism receded in the
1980s, the West felt freer than ever to be
tough about terrorism from the Mushm
world. Libya was bombed. Syria was put
into diplomatic cold storage. American ships
went to the Persian Gulf to intimídate Irán
in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war, and pro-tect
Kuwaiti ships. In the process the Ame-ricans
shot down an Iranian civilian airline
and killed all on board.
It seems almost certain that Muslims are
the frontline military victims of the new
world order —while Blacks are the frontline
economic victims of this emerging global
apartheid. Muslims —especially in the Middle
East— have felt the firing power of Ameri­can
guns and American subsidized Israeli pla­nes.
Blacks have felt the deprivation of both
economic exploitation and economic neglect.
The military victimization of Muslims has
taken either the direct form of Western bom-bing,
as in the war against Iraq, or the surro-gate
Western aggression of heavily subsidising
Israel without adequately criticising its repres-sive
and military policies. There have also
been Western double-standards of crying
"Foul" when Muslim kill MusUm (as when
Arab Iraqis repress Kurds) but remaining
apathetic when the Indian army commits
atrocities in Kashmir.
Was the Gulf War against Iraq part of
Global Apartheid? Aspects of the war were
certainly ominous —including Soviet submis-siveness
to the United States, Western hege-mony
in the United Nations, the attempted
re-colonization of Iraq after the war, Western
insensitivity to the killing of over two hun-dred
thousand Iraqi Uves. It was not a war;
it was a massacre. Admittedly, it was indeed
triggered off by IRAQ's unforgivable aggres­sion
against Kuwait. But Bush in tum was
more keen on saving time rather than saving
Uves. He refused to give sanctions enough
time —even if it meant killing hundreds of
thousands of Iraqi lives.
The coalition against Iraq was multiracial.
Its leadership was decidecUy and unmista-kably
white. Bush regards the war against
IRAQ as the first major war of the New
World Order. Perhaps one day we wiU also
lament the Gulf War as the first major war
of the era of Global Apartheid. Just when
we thought apartheid in South África was
over, apartheid on a global scale seemed to
rear its ugly head.
The apparent demise of Soviet and East
European anti-imperiaUsm has also hurt the
Muslim world in other ways. When a United
States ship shot down an Iranian civilian air­line
over intemational airspace, the new
Soviet Union under Gorbachev did not
attempt to rally the world against this act of
manslaughter committed by Americans.
Would the Iranian airline have been shot
down if there was a chance that European
passengers were on board? Would Soviets
have been silent if Soviet citizens were
aboard? Moscow said it was deUberately not
going to follow the accusatory precedent set
by the United States in 1984 when Washing­ton
led the world in vigorously denouncing
the Soviet Union's shooting down of a
Korean civilian airline. When the Soviets
shot down South Korea's Füght 007 the cold
war was on. Many of the passengers killed
were Westemers, including a U.S. Congress-man.
The USA served as the conscience of
the world. When a U.S. battleship shot down
the Iranian airline, the cold war was ending.
There was no reason to believe that any Wes­temers
or Soviet citizens were on board. The
USSR refused to serve as the conscience of
the world. The USSR refused to denounce
this fatal accident.
If there is GLOBAL APARTHEID in for-mation
how wiU it affect European Soviet
Union as against Asian Soviet Union? One
out of 5 of the citizens of the oíd USSR was
a Muslim —and the MusUm pace of natural
reproduction was much faster than that for
non-Muslims. One future scenario was that
of an alliance between the Russian Federa-tion
and the Muslim Republic. Indeed, the
possibiUty of a MusUm President of the
USSR was already in the cards —though
with much reduced power. Even Gorbachev
was already considering a MusUm Vice-
President.
No less Ukely is a scenario in which the
European parts of what used to be the
Soviet Union would get closer to the newly
integrated Western Europe —while the Mus­Um
parts of the former USSR found new
relationships with the rest of the MusUm
woild and the rest of the Third Worid. Pakis­tán
is seeking new markets in places like
Uzbekistán —and may open a consulate
there. Turkey is seeking a new role in that
part of the MusUm world.
Such a trend would once again reinforce
GLOBAL APARTHEID. There is even a
risk that the former MusUm RepubUcs would
become Russian Bantustans, "backyards"
with even less power than they had before.
But not all aspects of the newly emerging
global apartheid may be detrimental to Mus­lim
interests globaUy. After all the new world
order is predicated on the foundation of Pax
Americana. An imperial system valúes stabi-lity
and peace (henee the "pax") —though
on its own imperial terms. Objectively the
main obstacle to peace in the Middle East
since the 1970s has been Israel. WiU Pax
Americana not only forcé Israel and the
Arabs to the negotiating table —but compel
them to consider exchanging land for peace?
Indeed wiU the Gulf War of 1991 against
IRAQ tum out to be the undoing of
ISRAEL as we have known it so far?
Before he went to war against Iraq George
Bush vowed that there was no linkage bet­ween
the Gulf crisis and the wider Arab-
ATLANTICA
Meilleurs Voeux.
Israeli conflict. Almost as soon as the war
was over, Secretary of State Baker started a
series of shuttle diplomacies —in order to
help start a peace process in the Arab-Israeli
conflict. There was de facto linkage.
The Gulf war Bush and his allies had laun-ched
was not really a war. It was indeed a
massacre. On the other hand, Desert Storm
temporarily made Bush so strong in domestic
pohtics that he was able to stand up to the
pro-Israeli lobby and defy the Israeli Prime
Minister. George Bush may turn out to be
the toughest President on Israel since Eisen-hower
in 1956. Are there signs that the Gulf
war may turn out to be the beginning of the
political undoing of the oíd defiant Israel
after all?
ISRAEL's political decline in Washington
D.C., modest as it is, maybe due to two very
different factors —the end of the cold war
and the new U.S. Arab realignments foUo-wing
the Gulf War. The end of the cold
war, as we indicated, reduced the strategic
valué of Israel to the United States. It has
also increased Syria's desire to be friends
with the United States. Israel may become
less intímate as a friend to the U.S.A. Syria
is already becoming less objectionable as an
adversary to the U.S.A. The Gulf War pro-vided
a test for US-Syrian realignment.
Damascus and Washington D.C. have moved
closer as a result of the Gulf War.
Most commentators have focussed on the
political and economic losses which Palesti-nians
have sustained as a result of the Gulf
War. Almost no commentator has noted that
this is balanced out, at least to a small
degree, by the political losses sustained by
Israel as a result, fírstly, of a new U.S.
—Arab realignment and, secondly, the popu-larity
of George Bush in the aftermath of the
war. The popularity was great enough to
withstand the criticism of the pro-Israeli
lobby, at least for one year.
What is not certain is whether George
Bush will start another war against Iraq
—war in installments. If he did, how would
this affect the new U.S. —Arab realignment?
And would it hurt Bush at home —or make
him more popular than ever?
Would Israel continué to be one of the
political casualties of the war against Iraq.
Or would the situation be transformed? In
any case, is the American relative toughness
towards Israel simply a reflection of the per­sonal
hostility between President Bush and
Prime Minister Shamir? The answer is in the
womb of future events.
On the other hand, the end of the cold
war has also reduced the strategic valué of
PAKISTÁN to the Western world. Pressures
on Pakistán to conform to Western prescrip-tions
have already increased. Pakistan's
nuclear credentials have become even more
of an issue in its relations with the United
States. As far as the West is concerned.
Islam must on no account be nuclearized:
a) Stop Pakistán from going nuclear
b) Destroy Iraq's capacity in weapons of
mass destruction
c) Neutralize Egypt by getting it to sign
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
d) Coopt Syria inte pro-Western respecta-bility
e) Prevent Qaddafy from buying nuclear
credentials.
On the other hand the United States' con-ventional
capability —though originally tar-geted
at the Second World of Socialist coun-tries—
has in reality tended to be used
against the Third World. Muslim victims
have been disproportionate.
Under the Administrations of Reagan and
Bush, the United States has:
a) Bombed Beirut from the Sea
b) Invaded Grenada
c) Bombed Trípoli and Bengazi in Libya
d) Hijacked an Egyptian plañe in Interna­tional
airspace
e) Shot down an Iranian civilian aircraft
in the Gulf and killed all on board
O Invaded Panamá and kidnapped No-riega
AT
g) Bombed Iraqi cities as pan of an anti-
Saddam coalition.
More than two thirds of the casualties of
American military activity since the Vietnam
War have been Muslims —amounting to at
least a quarter of a million, and possibly half
a million Muslim deaths.
BETWEEN IDEOLOGY
AND ECONOMICS
If the first military victims of global apart-heid
have been disproportionately Muslims,
the first economic victims of global apartheid
may be Blacks. The good news is that
Europe —inspite of Yugoslavia and the frag-mentation
of the Soviet Union— is carrying
foTward the torch of continental unification
and regional integration. The bad news is
that countñes like France —often champions
of Afrícan interests in worid affairs— are tur-ning
their eyes away from África towards
Europe.
In the struggle against oíd style narrow
nationalism and the nation-state, Western
Europe has been leading the way. The Trea-ties
of Rome created the European Economic
Community in March 19S7, and set the stage
for wider regional integration. 1992 will see
an enlarged European Community achieve
even deeper integration —as further walls bet-ween
the members come down.
The former Germán Democratic Republic
has now been re-united with the rest of Ger-many
as part of this wider Europe. And the
newly liberated Eastern European countries
are seeking new links with the European
Community —further eroding narrow natio­nalism
and enlarging regional integration.
Even Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union
—torn by ethnic separatism as they are—
still manifest in the European áreas an eager-ness
to be accepted into the wider European
fratemity. The decline of socialist ideology all
over Eastern Europe is accompanied by a
resurgence of primordial culture. Marxism
has either died or been de-Leninized, but a
pan-European identity is re-asserting itself on
a scale greater than the Holy Román
Empire.
Marxism-Leninism, while it lasted, was
trans-racial. It made European Marxists seek
allies and converts among people of colour.
European identity, on the other hand, is by
definition Eurocentric. It increases the chan­ces
of Pan-Europeanism. The bad news is
that Pan-Europeanism can carry the danger
of cultural chauvinism and even racism.
Anti-Semitism has been on the ríse in Eas­tern
Europe as an aspect of this cultural
chauvinism. And racism and xenophobia in
the re-uniñed Germany have reached new
levéis. Racism in France has taken its highest
toU among North Africans. And all over
Europe there is a new sense of insecurity
among immigrants who are of a darker hue
than the local populations —some of the
immigrants further north may even be Por-tuguese
mistaken as Turks or North Afri­cans.
Where does xenophobia end and
racism begin? An oíd dilemma has once
again reared its head.
Then there is the racial situation in the
United States, with all its contradictions. On
the one hand, the country had changed
enough to produce the first Black Govemor
of a State (Virginia) and the first Black
Mayor of New York City. On the other
hand, the state of Louisiana produced in
1991 a startling level of electoral support for
David Duke, a former member of the Klu
Klux Klan and former advócate of Nazi poli-cies.
Duke got a majority of the white votes
which were cast but lost the election because
of the other votes. In April 1992 a mainly
White jury in California found that beating
and kicking of a Black suspect (Rodney
King) while he was down was not excessive
forcé. The verdict sparked off the worst riots
in U.S. history in which nearly sixty people
were killed in Los Angeles.
George Bush had himself exploited white
racial fears in the presidential election cam-paign
of 1988. A televisión commercial of the
Bush campaign had exploited to the utmost
the image of a Black convict Willie Horton
who had been prematurely "furloughed" in
Massachusetts —and who killed again. The
televisión commercial was probably a signi-ficant
factor behind George Bush's victory in
the presidential election of 1988.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of the Uni­ted
States has been moving further and furt­her
to the right —endangering some of the
inter-racial constitutional gains of yesteryears.
The new right wing Supreme Court has been
legalizing atrocities which range from violence
by prison wardens to kidnapping by U.S.
agents in countries like México. The econo­mic
conditions of the Black underclass in the
United States are as bad as ever. Poverty,
drug abuse, crime, broken homes, unemploy-ment,
infant mortality, and now the dispro-portionate
affliction by AIDS are a stubbom
part of the Black condition in America.
The holocausts of the Western hemisphere
have continued to the present day to inflict
pain and humiliation on native Americans
and descendants of Afrícan slaves. Approxi-mately
40 % of prísoners on dcatb-row in the
United States are African-Americans. The
jails, mortuaríes, and pólice cells still bear
anguished testimony to the disproportionate
and continuing suffering of American holo­causts.
In the United States today there are
more male descendants of Afrícan slaves in
príson than in coUege.
Equally ominous on a continental scale is
the economic condition of Afríca itself. The
continent still produces what it does not con­sume,
and consumes what it does not pro­duce.
Agriculturally, many African countries
have evolved dessert and bevemge ecoaomies
—producing what are, at best, elements of
incidental consumption in the Northern
hemisphere. These dessert-and-beverage eco-nomies
produce cocoa, coffee, tea and other
incidentals for the Northern dining table. In
contrast, África imports the fundamentáis of
its existence —from basic equipment to staple
food.
In addition, África is liable to environmen-tal
hazards —which sometimes lead on to
drought and famine in certain African áreas.
The Hom of África and the Sahel have been
particularly prone to these ecological depri-vations.
The external factors which have retarded
Africa's economic development have included
price fluctuations and uncertainties about prí-mary
commodities —issues over which África
has had very little say. The debt crisis in
África is also a major shackle on the pace of
development. Although as compared with
what countries like Brazil and México owe,
the debts of African countries are modest, it
is important to remember that African eco-nomies
are not only smaller, but also more
fragüe than those of the major Latin Ame­rican
States.
The West has shown more flexibility in
recent times about Africa's debt crisis. And
some Western countries have been ready to
extend debt forgiveness. Speedy action
towards resolving the debt problem would be
a contribution in the fight against the forces
of Global Apartheid.
Just as Afrícan societies are getting more
democratic, Afrícan states are having less
influence on the global scene than ever. Afri­can
people are increasing their influence on
their govemments —just when African coun­tries
are losing leverage on the world system.
As the African electorate is getting empowe-red,
the African countries are getting enfee-bled.
Africa's intemational marginalization does
include among its causes the absence of the
Soviet bloc as a countervailing forcé in the
global equation. A world with only one
superpower is a world with less leverage for
the smaller countries in the global system.
Africa's marginalization is also due to the re-emergence
of Eastern European countries as
rivals for Western attention and Western lar-gesse.
África is also being marginalized in a
world of such megaeconomies as an increa-singly
unifíed North America, an increasingly
unified European Community, an expanding
Japanese economy, and some of the achieve-ments
of the Association of South ' East
Asian Nations (ASEAN). In the economic
domain, global apartheid is a starker and
sharper reality between white nations and
black nations than between white nations
and some of the countries of Asia.
In the United Nations and its agencies
África is also getting marginalized, partly
because Third World causes have lost the
almost automatic support of former members
of the Warsaw Pact. On the contrary, former
members of the Socialist bloc are now more
likely to follow the American lead than join
A > I A "^ A
forces with the Third World. Moreover, the
African percentage of the total membership
of the UN system is declining. In 1991 five
new members were admitted to the United
Nations —none of them African. (Two
Koreas and three Baltic States.) The disinte-gration
of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union
may result in at least ten more members. The
numerical marginalization of África within
the world body is likely to continué.
In the financial world the power of the
World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund not only remains intact, but is bound
to increase in the era of global apartheid. It
was once said of a British monarch: "The
power of the king has increased, is increasing
and ought to diminish". I once quoted this
statement to the President of the World
Bank, Mr. Barber B. Conable. I meant that
the power of the World Bank in África had
increased, was increasing and ought to be
arrested. Unfortunately all indications conti­nué
to point in the direction of greater esca-lation
of Africa's dependence upon such Inter­national
financial institutions.
On the other hand, the World Bank some-times
acts as an ambassador on behalf of
África —coaxing Japan, for example, to alio-cate
more money for African aid. The World
Bank may help to persuade Western coun-tries
to bear African needs in mind even as
the West remains mesmerized by the conti-nuing
drama in the Soviet Union and Eas-tem
Europe. At its best the World Bank can
be a forcé against the drift towards global
apartheid. But at its worst the World Bank
is an extensión of the power of the white
races upon the darker peoples of the globe.
It is virtually certain that Germán money
is already being diverted from Tanzania and
Bangladesh towards the newly integrated East
Germany and to compénsate the Soviet
Union for its cooperation with Germán reuni-fication.
Western money before long will be
going in larger amounts to Poland, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia and the newly independent
Republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
Western investment in former Warsaw
Pact countries may also be at the expense of
investment in África. Western trade may also
be re-directed to some extent. Now that
white Westerners and white Easterners no
longer have an ideological reason for mutual
hostility, are their shared culture and their
shared race acquiring more primary salience?
Are we witnessing the emergence of a new
Northern solidarity —as the hatchets of the
cold war are at last buried? Are Blacks the
first economic victims of this global aparth­eid?
CONCLUSIÓN
Are we witnessing new forms of retribali-zation
and race consciousness —^just as the
more localized apartheid of South África is
coming to an end? Micro-retribalization is at
the sub-state level. Macro-retribalization is
race conscious regional integration.
Kairouaa flat-froveu textile motil: Plumea baaaers.
ATLA
We have argued that if there is a new
world order, its fírst economk victims are
Black people of Afñca, the Ameiicas, Europe
and elsewhere. We have also argued that Üie
new world order's first military victims are
Muslims —about half-a-million of whom
have been killed by the West or Westem-subsidized
initiatives since the Vietnam War.
Palestinians, Libyans, Iraqis, Lebanese are
among the casualties.
Since World War II far more Muslims
have been killed by the West than have citi-zens
of the former Warsaw Pact —from the
Suez War of 1956 to the Gulf War of 1991.
One advantage about the oíd East-West
divide was that is was trans-racial and inter­racial.
White socialist countries supported
Black liberation fighters militaríly against
white ininority govemments in África.
But now the former Socialist countries are
among the least supportive of Third World
causes. In the United Nations the former
communist adversaries are often more coope-rative
with Washington than are some Wes­tern
allies. In reality París is indeed more
independeat oí Washington than is Moscow
since the Gorbachev Revolution.
With regard to this new World Order, are
there racial and racist differences between
Western response to Iraqi aggression against
Kuwait in 1990 and Western response to Ser-bia's
aggression against BOSNIA-HERZE­GOVINA
in 1992?
Both Bosnia and Kuwait had pñor inter-national
recognition as sovereign states. Both
Bosnia and Kuwait had prior historical Unks
with the countries which committed aggres­sion
against them, Serbia and Iraq respecti-vely.
Bosnia and Serbia had once been part
of Yugoslavia; Kuwait and Iraq had once
been part of the same province of the Otto-man
Empire.
IRAQ in 1990 had territorial appetites mas-querading
as a dispute on oil wells between
Iraq and Kuwait: SERBIA had territorial
appetites masquerading as protection of eth-nic
Serbs in Bosnia.
The West under the leadership of the Bush
Administration could say to Iraqi aggression:
"This will not stand!" To end Iraqi aggres­sion
in Kuwait, the West and its aUies were
prepared to bomb Baghdad and Basrah. To
end Serbian aggression in Bosnia was the
West in 1992 prepared to bomb Belgrade? If
not, why not? Did the reasons include
racism? Was it aü right to bomb Arab popu-lations
thousands of miles away —but insup-portable
to bomb fellow Europeaiu next
door?
The new idea of creating a European army
answerable to the European Community, as
well as to NATO, also seemed to draw a
sharp distinction between "military inter-veatioa"
outside Europe and "peacekeeping"
withia Europe.
According to Joseph Fitchett, writing for
the International Herald Tribuae:
Braving Bush administration objections,
France and Germany are pnxxeding... to esta-blish
a substantial joint military forcé that
could assume functions previous reserved for
NATO.
Conceived as the core for a future Euro-pean
army, the proposed Euro-corps is sup-posed
to ready the equivalent of two divisions
by 1995 for military intervention outside
Europe and for peacekeeping and other, as
yet undefíned, operations within Europe (t).
Is there a clear reluctance to shed Euro-pean
blood among some of the nations, like
France and Britain which have very recently
shed Arab and MusUm blood?
Regarding the war in Bosnia Anthony
Lewis of the New York Times has recently
said:
The Americans and Europeans have plenty
of warplanes, based near enough... to take
command of the air... We could have said to
Mr. Milosvic, and still could: Stop your
aggression at once, or our military aircraft
wiU control your skies. Not just over Dubrov-nik
or Sarajevo, but over Belgrade... The fai-ture
of nerve and imagination in the face of
Serbian aggression is Europe's as well as Ame-ríca's.
But Mr. Bush raised expectations so
high in the Gulf War that disappointment
naturally focussed on him. What happened to
the man who three days after Iraq grabbed
Kuwait said, "This will not stand? (2).
Was it America's and Europe's "failure of
nerve"? Or was it a triumph of macro-racial
empathy? British planes bombing Belgrade in
1992? It was easier to remember British pla­nes
bombing Baghdad in 1991.
American planes bombing Sarajevo or
Dubrovnik in the 1990s in order to save
them? It was easier to bomb parts of Kuwait
in 1991 —and would be easier to re-bomb
TripoU and Benghazi in 1992-3.
Long before the end of the cold war I had
occasion to worry publicly about a "global
caste system" in the making. I argued in a
book published in 1977 that the intemational
stratification did not have the flexibility and
social mobility of a class structure, but had
some of the rigidities of caste.
If the intemational system was, in the first
half of the twentieth century a class system,
it is now moving in the direction of rigidity.
We may be witnessing the consolidation of a
global caste structure... Just as theie are heie-ditary
factois in domestic castes, so there are
hereditary elements in intemational castes.
Pre-emínent among those factois is the issue
of race... If people of European extraction are
the brahmíns of the intemational caste
system, the black people belong disproportio-nately
to the caste of the untouchables. Bet­ween
the highest intemational caste (whites)
and the lowest (blacks) are other ranks and
States (such as Asians) (3).
What prevented this global caste system
from becoming global apartbeid at that time
was, ironically, the cold war, which divided
the white world ideologically. Rivahy between
the two white power blocs averted Áe risk of
racial solidarity among the more prosperous
whites. The white world was armed to the
teeth against each other. This was unlike
apartheid in South África. At the global level
we had Brahmins at daggers drawn (4).
But there is now a closing of the ranks
among the white peoples of the world. The
ethnic hiccups of Yugoslavia and the Soviet
Union notwithstanding, and after allowing
for Denamrk's caution and Brítain's relative
insularity, the mood in Europe is still
towards greater continental unión. Pan-
Europeanism is reaching levéis greater than
anything experienced since the Holy Román
Empire. The question which has arisen is
whether this new Pan-European forcé, com-bined
with the economic trend towards a
mega-North America, will produce a human
race more than ever divided between prospe­rous
white races and poverty-strícken Blacks.
Is a global macro-retribalization in the
making? Are its fírst economic victims Black
people?
The era of global apartheid has coincided
with the era of a unipolar world —a global
system with only one superpower. The main
military victims of the unipolar world have
so far been disproportionately Muslims. The
declining fear of communism may have reac-tivated
an older Western fear of Islam. The
location of petroleum disproportionately in
Muslim lands, combined with the tensions of
the Arab-IsraeU conflict, have cost the Mus­lim
world upward to half a million Uves as
a result of military actions by the United Sta­tes
and its allies during the Reagan and Bush
administrations. The main victims have been
Libyans, Iranians, Lebanese, Palestinians and
most recently Iraqis.
Race and religión remain potent forces in
global afíairs. Historically, race has been the
fundamental divisive factor between Wester-ners
and people of African descent almost
everywhere. Religión has been the fimdamen-tal
divisive factor between Westemers and
people of Muslim culture almost everywhere.
Was the coUapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989
the beginning of the racial re-unifícation of
the White World? Did the Gulf War of 1991
put the holiest places of Islam under the
imperial umbrella of Pax Americana! Is the
twentieth century getting ready to hand over
to the 21st century a new legacy of global
apartheid? The trends are ominous —but let
US hope that they are not irreversible.
(1) "París and Bonn to Form the Nucleus of a
'Euro-corps', Intemational Herald Tríbiwe, May 14,
1992.
(2) "What was that About a New World
Order?" Intemational Harold Tribune, Monday,
May 18, 1992.
(3) Ali A. Mazmi, Africa's Intemational Rela-tions:
Tbe Diplomacy of Dependency and Cbange
(LoiKlon: Heinemann, and Boulder, Colorado: West-view
Press, 1977) pp. 7-8.
(4) Gemot K5hler did use the concept of "Glo­bal
Apartheid" in a working paper published for
the World Order Models Project. See KOhler, Glo­bal
Apartbeid (New York: World Order Models
Project, Working Paper NO. 7, 1978). His ddinition
of apartheid did not requíre a fundamental solida-ríty
within the privileged race. My deñnition does.
A-HANM. A