LONDON – The world is still going forward, but only just. After September 11th, after Enron, after the stock market crash, after the Israeli invasion of Palestine, after the war talk about Iraq that continuously hovers in the air above us like some putrid cloud, and after the latest reports that say that AIDS is the biggest plague in the history of humanity, we can still argue the world on the whole is getting better.
Economic growth is picking up in Africa and the share of the world’s people living in extreme poverty is slowly but steadily declining. Primary school enrolments have risen worldwide. Since 1990, 800 million people have gained access to improved water supplies and improved sanitation. On the political and civil liberties front there has also been enormous progress. Since 1980 some eighty countries have taken significant steps towards democratisation, and the number of people being killed by war has fallen dramatically.
Still, it is obvious to all of us that these achievements are precariousness. If the Clinton boom can evaporate overnight so can all this. We cannot let our guard down for a moment.
Today the United Nations Development Program publishes its annual Human Development report and its director, Mark Malloch Brown, observes in his downbeat preface: “Many countries are poorer than 10, 20 and in some cases 30 years ago. Just as troubling, the flush of euphoria that saw the number of countries embracing many of the hallmarks of democracy soar to 140 over the past fifteen years is starting to turn into frustration and despair.”
Are we going backwards? “Globalisation is forging greater independence, yet the world seems more fragmented- between rich and poor, between the powerful and the powerless, and between those who welcome the new global economy and those who demand a different course.” One of the important reasons for the rapid rate of progress during the 1990s was that no one was any longer distracted by the demands of the Cold War- building up alliances, winning friends and influencing people, “he may be a son-of a-bitch but he is our son-of-a-bitch”, and all the Machiavellian policies that went with it. At last human rights, democracy and a more honest-to-goodness economic development were able to move to centre stage. Today there is a real danger, despite the Bush Administration’s decision to sharply increase economic aid, that in this new age when “who is not with us is against us” we will regress to a state of affairs where strategic alliances move back to the centre of national policy-making. Who is given aid and help will depend once again more on their political stance vis a vis America than on their long term economic and social policies, and human rights will be traded off for a supposed added security.
Two problems seem intractable and a third is becoming more complicated. The first is what the UNDP calls “income poverty”. To halve the share of people living on $1 a day we need to see at least an annual per capita income growth in poor countries of 3.7% a year. But even in the “boom decade” of the 1990s only 24 developing countries grew that fast. (Admittedly China and India, which between them contain two thirds of the people of the developing world, were of the 24 and that is a momentous achievement.) 127 countries with 35% of the world’s population have not grown at this rate. Indeed, many have suffered negative growth in recent years.
The second major problem is child mortality. The good news is that 85 countries appear to be on track to reduce by the year 2015 under 5 mortality rates by two thirds compared with 1990 levels. But another 81 countries with more than 60% of the world’s people won’t, at their present rate, make this goal. Most of these countries are in Africa.
On the democracy front a growing number of the new democracies of the 1980s and 90s are finding themselves in trouble. Too many are slipping back into increasingly undemocratic practices, with leaders altering constitutions, bullying weak legislatures and judiciaries and openly manipulating elections. Further, even though majority rule is now established, minorities are persecuted or discriminated against. Too often the absence of a democratic culture means that those who lose elections are either persecuted by the winners or refuse to accept the electoral verdict. Democracies require not just legitimate governments but legitimate oppositions too. Of the 81 countries that embraced full democracy in the last twenty years only 47 have gone on to become fully functioning democracies. Several have returned to authoritarian rule- a mercifully small 6 – but many other countries have got stalled somewhere between democracy and authoritarianism.
The progress of the world is very finely balanced. Since the 1980s – thank Jimmy Carter for this- and even more since the end of the Cold War- thank Mikhail Gorbachev for that – the steps forward became very apparent. But they will only continue if the world gives the unmet problems its undivided attention. India and Pakistan have not been doing that with their talk of nuclear war. Africa with its multitude of wars and run away corruption has not either. Nor has America which under President George Bush sees the world through an ever-narrowing prism of self-interest.
I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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40th Anniversary of Amnesty International
“Like Water on Stone – The Story of Amnesty International”
