New World Disorder

▪ 1994

by Daniel Schorr

      My friend Flora Lewis summed up the year 1991 in these pages, with appropriate tentativeness, as "a time of transition." She noted the fears and uncertainties that had started cropping up in the wake of the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War. My friend Hedrick Smith saw, in 1992, the trend lines of history no longer pointing upward, but downward as explosions of ethnic and religious violence signaled a more chaotic world. His article was headlined "The Not-So-New World Order." In 1993 the trend line plunged more sharply downward. Not only did sources of instability multiply, but the international community displayed a waning capacity to cope with its many firestorms. Call this, then, "The New World Disorder."

      The year opened with Czechoslovakia dividing into two states, continuing the centrifugal tendency of nation-states to fragment into state-nations. In January also, negotiations on Bosnia and Herzegovina termed "the last chance for peace" were in progress, one of many "last chances" that proved to be no chance at all. At the same time, Croatia was conducting an offensive against Serbia in which thousands were killed. In Somalia the first American soldier was killed. On Haiti, President-elect Bill Clinton reversed his promise to lift the antirefugee naval blockade that Pres. George Bush had imposed. All these sores on the body politic continued to fester during the year, and more were added, among them an attempted coup against Pres. Boris Yeltsin in Russia and civil wars in former Soviet states such as Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova.

      If Year Four after the collapse of communism should have brought us anything, it was surcease from nuclear peril, but that did not happen. In January, Presidents Bush and Yeltsin signed a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, START II, which provided for the dismantling of a large part of the nuclear weapons stocks on both sides, but in Russia the process was delayed by economic problems. Ukraine, the world's number three nuclear power, because so many Soviet weapons had been left on its soil, dragged its feet on disposing of them. Iraq sparred with nuclear inspectors as though still reluctant to come clean about its weapons potential. And North Korea, ruled by the last unreconstructed Stalinist regime, resisted effective inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, suggesting the chilling prospect that it was on its way to breaking into the nuclear club. Indeed, by the end of the year, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had concluded that North Korea probably already had one or two nuclear devices.

      Ruth Leger Sivard, a one-time U.S. government economist who produces, from her Georgetown home in Washington, D.C., a unique annual survey of the world's investment in its salvation and in its destruction, reported in November that when all current arms-reduction commitments are met, the five acknowledged nuclear powers will still have 900 times the explosive power expended in World War II. She reported also a record number of 29 "conventional" wars going on around the world, from Turkey to Peru, from Georgia to South Africa. Since the end of World War II, she noted, more than 23 million people have been killed in internal and across-border conflicts.

      Particularly dismaying about 1993 was the growing sense of international helplessness in trying to quench the flames. There had been a season of high hopes after the United Nations-brokered Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and after the big powers, freed of the Soviet veto, had successfully assembled a coalition to fight the war in the Persian Gulf. The new secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, began planning for the day when an international force, free of colonial taint, would be on call to control eruptions around the world. President Clinton told the UN General Assembly that the United States, while not earmarking combat units, would make a modest contribution to a combined headquarters and provide sophisticated communications. At one heady juncture, the UN expanded its definition of "threat to peace" to apply not only to invasions but to human tragedies generating a flow of refugees in countries such as the former Yugoslavia and Somalia.

      The heyday of multilateralism did not last long. Soon Boutros-Ghali found himself being jeered at in Sarajevo and Mogadishu. UN authority was eroded by lack of funds, lack of consensus, and, under the pressure of events, a cooling of America's enthusiasm about multilateral approaches.

      Bosnia soon became an enormous source of frustration to President Clinton, who had denounced President Bush during the campaign as not being assertive enough and who promised forceful intervention to rescue the Bosnian Muslims. But, in trying to go beyond humanitarian aid to lifting the arms embargo on the Muslims and threatening air attacks on Serbian siege artillery, the president found himself checkmated by Western Europe and Russia. He talked for a while about taking unilateral action but was quickly persuaded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that this was not feasible. Soon the Clinton administration retired to the sidelines, leaving a series of fruitless peace initiatives to UN and European mediators. Clinton called his failure to achieve consensus for intervention "the greatest single disappointment" of his first year in office. Secretary of State Warren Christopher's epitaph for American engagement was, "We are doing everything we can consistent with our national interest," and "This is a problem from Hell."

      In the series of on-again, off-again negotiations about the fate of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one fact stood out sharply—whatever the final outlines of partition, Bosnia was finished as a unitary multiethnic state. This meant that, for the first time since World War II, the internationally recognized borders of a sovereign state were being changed by force—a flouting of everything collective security stands for and a precedent as menacing to the rule of law as the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the German-Italian-supported civil war in Spain that served as harbingers of world war.

      Nor would dismemberment of Bosnia necessarily end the fighting. One goes back over the history of partition arrangements—Ireland, Korea, Vietnam, India, Palestine—and notes that in each case bloody conflict ensued.

      Somalia became an almost equally frustrating problem for a president threading his way through the international arena while trying to focus on problems of the economy, health, and crime at home. What started, with President Bush, as a humanitarian enterprise for U.S. forces, ensuring safe delivery of food to starving people, deteriorated into a punitive—and punishing—military expedition. Hardly realizing how the mission was changing, the Clinton administration allowed its Army Rangers to be drawn into a hunt for Somali strongman Gen. Muhammad Farah Aydid. When, in June, 24 Pakistani soldiers under UN command on a search mission were ambushed and killed, Rangers became involved in the effort to track down Aydid, with the result that 18 Americans were killed in an ambush on October 3, and a helicopter pilot was taken prisoner.

      In the age of live, instantaneous global television, foreign policy tends to be video-driven, influenced by viewers' reactions to the scenes presented to them. So, ironically, U.S. forces were drawn into Somalia by televised scenes of hunger and suffering and, in effect, driven out again by pictures of an American body being dragged through the streets and an injured American pilot in hostile hands. This was, in its way, like the videotape of American hostages in terrorist hands in Lebanon that helped to push the administration of Pres. Ronald Reagan into trying to ransom them by selling missiles to Iran. In any event, Clinton, under strong congressional pressure, gave orders that the U.S. contingent first be beefed up for its own protection and then withdrawn from Somalia by March 31, 1994—the end of a second well-intentioned involvement that went sour.

      Twice burned—in Bosnia and Somalia—the Clinton administration was thrice shy when it came to dealing with Haiti. In July, in negotiations on New York City's Governors Island, the military junta led by Gen. Raoul Cédras, feeling the pinch of UN sanctions, agreed to the restoration of the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, on October 30. But, when American troops arrived to fulfill technical tasks under the terms of the agreement, they became the target of an organized demonstration on the docks at Port-au-Prince, and their ship was quickly withdrawn. One could only speculate on whether the military junta had been emboldened by American faltering on Bosnia and Somalia. In any event, Cédras reneged on his promise to step down, and the introduction of some form of democratic rule to Haiti was aborted. By year's end the Clinton administration was displaying impatience with Aristide's intransigence and his unwillingness to strike a new deal with the Haitian military.

      It had become all too easy to face down a mighty superpower, deeply involved in its own economic and social problems, wrestling with natural disasters like the Midwestern floods and the Southern California fires and human disasters like the assault on the Branch Davidian sect near Waco, Texas. The one deliberate use of force abroad by the Clinton administration—the missile raid in June on intelligence headquarters in Baghdad in reprisal for a supposed Iraqi attempt to assassinate former president Bush during a visit to Kuwait—was an action that stood out because of its singularity.

      In the fourth year of the post-Cold War era, it seemed remarkable how little influence the sole remaining superpower exerted on the principal arenas of conflict. President Yeltsin found the West solidly supporting him as he grappled with the colossal task of converting Russia from bureaucratic governance and a command economy to representative government and a market economy. But, unable to affect the course of events, the U.S. watched with the rest of the world as Yeltsin, in September, dissolved an obstreperous Parliament, then became the target of a coup that resulted in occupation of the Parliament and City Hall buildings and almost succeeded in capturing the Ostankino television centre—probably the most crucial objective. In the end it was not the U.S., NATO, or any outside force but the Russian army that saved Yeltsin. The West watched also as Yeltsin cracked down on his opponents, arranged elections for a new Parliament—but not for a president—and cracked down on opposition parties and the media. The West was left with some doubts about Yeltsin's fealty to democracy but without any other options or any idea how to exercise those options if it had them. The lack of an acceptable alternative to Yeltsin was driven home by the appearance on the political stage of a new menace—the ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, vaulted by the December 12 elections into the position of principal opposition leader in the new Parliament.

      It seemed characteristic of the year 1993 that when long-festering conflicts showed signs of finally yielding to peaceful resolution, it was usually more because of the internal dynamics of each situation than because of outside intervention. The world's three most enduring and intractable civil conflicts were in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East. In all three, 1993 produced stirrings of hope for peaceful outcomes. In all three, peacemakers had to cope with forces of violent resistance.

      In South Africa, Nobel Peace laureates Pres. F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, president of the African National Congress, agreed in February to form a "transitional government of national unity," then began steadfastly campaigning for an election in April 1994 that would introduce majority rule to a country long ruled by apartheid. More than 13,000 persons had died in violence since February 1990, when the dismantling of apartheid began. Violence continued through 1993, mainly between ANC supporters and its rivals in the black community. It seemed not in the cards that a new South Africa would be born without further bloodshed. By year's end, however, South Africa had a new interim constitution, and apartheid was officially ended.

      In Northern Ireland, where for a generation the language had been guns and bombs, it seemed a miracle that there had been talks between antagonists. Over a period of many months, the British government had maintained contacts with the Irish Republican Army and its political arm, Sinn Fein. The disclosure of the talks in November produced a political explosion, but when the dust settled, the British and Irish governments were still talking. This was a slender reed on which to base any hope of peace in this bloody conflict but, yet, the first hope in a very long time. It was bolstered when the British and Irish governments agreed on a set of principles for peace negotiations that would allow the IRA to participate and opened to the people of Northern Ireland the possibility of a referendum to decide their own fate.

      The most dramatic breakthrough of the year occurred in the Middle East. Forty years of alternating wars and negotiations had failed to bridge the gulf between Israel and the Palestinians. The latest negotiating process, starting with a full-dress conference in Madrid, was plodding along with little visible result. Suddenly, on August 31, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, stunned the world with the announcement of a preliminary agreement reached after months of secret talks in Norway. Its essence was a grant of autonomy, under PLO auspices, in the Gaza Strip and in Jericho. On September 13, President Clinton presided over the photo opportunity of the year, nudging Rabin and Arafat into a self-conscious handshake on the White House lawn. But the main credit belonged not to him but to them, both taking tremendous political risks for peace.

      Eruptions of violence followed—Palestinian against Israeli, Israeli against Palestinian, Palestinian against Palestinian. But, as in South Africa, and perhaps someday in Ireland, the imperative for violence was finally being countered with an imperative for peace. The year's end found Israel and the PLO strenuously working to resolve their differences over implementation of the autonomy agreement.

      During the Cold War it would have been most unlikely to see so much movement in deep-seated conflicts with so little big-power involvement. During the Cold War all conflicts, and efforts to resolve them, were measured on an index of how they fitted into East-West confrontation. For the U.S., the proxy battles with the "Evil Empire" tended to take the form of military or covert CIA action to bolster or destabilize regimes from Vietnam to Nicaragua, from Iran to Chile. The East-West theme was gone, and perhaps with it the motivation to keep the pot boiling in Third World countries.

      Now the pot was kept boiling by an outburst of ethnic, religious, and, in some cases, tribal passions. If any new unifying theme was to be found to replace communism versus capitalism, it was the threat of militant Islam. There was no doubt that what had helped bring Israel, Palestinians, and Arab states together was a shared apprehension of Iranian-based holy war, threatening all the secular states in the region alike—Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and, eventually, Syria. Prime Minister Rabin, visiting Washington, said that the wave of fundamentalist fervour and terror sweeping out of Iran was much more threatening than the secular radicalism of Iraq had ever been. (A pity that Israel had not realized this in 1985 when it was shipping missiles to Iran and helping to involve the Reagan administration in doing the same.)

      The U.S. State Department branded Iran "the world's most dangerous state sponsor of terrorism" and called the Iranian-supported, Lebanon-based Hezbollah, or Party of God, "the most aggressive and lethal" sponsor of terrorism in the world. The name could also have been Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, or Islamic Salvation Front. These were all evidences of radical Islam on the march.

      Shadowy, unstructured groups, including many veterans of the Afghan war who were once protégés of the CIA, sometimes clustered around mosques with radical sheikhs. In Egypt terrorists tried to assassinate the prime minister and sought to scare off foreign tourists with attacks on tour buses. In Argentina the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires was bombed with the all-too-familiar car full of explosives. An Iranian dissident was killed in Rome.

      In 1993 the Islamic holy war was transported to the United States. In January an immigrant from the Afghan border region of Pakistan, where guerrillas had once consorted with CIA agents, stood outside the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va., killed two of its employees and wounded three others, and then fled the country. Muslim militants were allegedly involved in the explosion in New York City's World Trade Center in February—the most destructive terrorist act ever perpetrated on American soil. Plans for other attacks on UN headquarters and the Lincoln Tunnel were foiled. The terrorists were connected, in one way or another, with a radical Egyptian sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman. He denied issuing any orders to kill but, in his Jersey City, N.J., mosque, had been heard exhorting his followers, "Hit hard and kill the enemies of God on every spot."

      Other than the threat of religious fanaticism, however, the West seemed to lack any unifying theme to replace the anticommunist ideology that had guided policy making and resources allocation for a half century. In the wake of the Cold War, there were a series of corruption scandals from Italy to Japan to the U.S. As though concluding that they had taken their governments too long on trust, voters in many countries began turning against long-accepted leaders and parties.

      In February, Canada's Prime Minister Brian Mulroney resigned, his approval rating at 17%, and in the October election his Conservative Party was all but swept away (plunging from 154 to 2 seats in the House of Commons). In Japan the government of Kiichi Miyazawa fell in a no-confidence vote in the parliament in June, and in the July election his Liberal-Democratic Party lost its majority. In Italy the long-ruling Christian Democrats lost heavily in municipal elections in November, and the successor to the Communists, the Democratic Party of the Left, emerged as the strongest political force. (This must have been particularly galling to veterans of the American effort, starting with the Marshall Plan in 1948 and involving years of CIA covert operations to support the Christian Democrats against the Communists.) In Germany the long-ruling Christian Democrats led by Chancellor Helmut Kohl suffered humiliating defeats in regional elections in November and December, and the former Communist Party came back strongly in eastern Germany. In December angry voters in Venezuela rejected the nation's two traditional ruling parties and elected as president Rafael Caldera, who ran as an independent.

      It was as though some "political immune deficiency" virus were sweeping across much of the industrialized world. Indeed, one could hardly find an incumbent leader, President Clinton and Britain's Prime Minister John Major included, who enjoyed a majority approval rating in opinion polls. (It should be noted, however, that Clinton's standing improved to 53% in December.)

      No longer afraid about a communist monolith, people seemed now to be mainly worried about economic insecurity as a recession spread across the industrial world, tempering even the economic miracles in Japan and Germany. In Germany, where economic tensions have historically expressed themselves all too quickly in political extremism, recession combined with anti-immigrant xenophobia and the burden of absorbing eastern Germany to produce a rash of skinhead violence and neo-Nazi political activity. The Central and Eastern European states of the former Soviet Bloc, finding the West more generous with verbal support than economic aid, knocked in vain at the door of the European Community. They also sought shelter in the North Atlantic alliance, which offered them something less than half the loaf of participation with a vague NATO "partnership" status.

      For the U.S., slowly climbing out of its recession, the closest thing to an international ideology seemed to be international trade. In the name of trade, China was forgiven its human rights trespasses. In the name of trade, President Clinton fought and won a battle for congressional approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Then he went on to woo the nations of the thriving Pacific Rim at a Seattle, Wash., summit conference and to stage a full-court press for conclusion of the long-stalled General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which was crowned with success hours before the December 15 deadline.

      It was significant that President Clinton, who campaigned for the desk in the White House with the incessantly repeated invocation of "change," shifted his emphasis to "security." As he learned from the off-year elections, "change" could be a double-edged sword for an incumbent. But, beyond that, he seemed to be addressing global anxieties when he set his sights on three forms of security—economic, health, and personal. If Americans did not respond with the enthusiasm they had shown for Pres. Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" speech in 1941, it was, well, perhaps because they were too anxious to be lulled by words.

      A paradox of 1993 was that leaders enjoying such high-tech capabilities for communicating their messages still seemed to be held, generally, in such low esteem. The "Information Highway," which broke into American consciousness in 1993, promised a new dimension of interactive communication. Whether leaders would have anything more inspiring to communicate remained to be seen.

Daniel Schorr, the last of Edward R. Murrow's legendary news team still active in daily journalism, is senior news analyst for National Public Radio. Among his most recent honours was the presentation in 1993 of the George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award, the radio-television equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, which cited him "for a lifetime of uncompromising reporting of the highest integrity." His books include Clearing the Air and Don't Get Sick in America.

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