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<text> <title> (Jan. 04, 1993) The World's Other Newsmakers </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992 Jan. 04, 1993 Man of the Year:Bill Clinton </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> MAN OF THE YEAR, Page 44 BILL CLINTON The World's Other Newsmakers </hdr> <body> By James Walsh Karl Marx was a bearded Jehovah thundering through the industrial age, but in outlook he would have been more at home in knee breeches and a powdered wig. Like Jefferson and Rousseau, he was a creature of the Enlightenment who viewed history through a prism of universal principles and causes. Nationalism, he believed, was an outmoded impulse that the world would soon forget. Poor Marx: one more prophecy destined for the dustbin. Poor world: one more menace to face down. No sooner did the steamroller of communism run out of steam than the meat grinder of nationalism began cranking up. The great year of liberation, 1989, gave way more fully in 1992 to localized fissures, war and outright anarchy. Nostalgists for the cold war--there are some--like to point out that the global ancient regime at least had an architecture to it. The dismantlement of that fearful symmetry, however, has provided an opening for freedoms where few or none had existed for generations. In TIME's selection of international Newsmakers of the Year, two stand out because of the resolute ways in which they have tried to build on democratic opportunities in Mexico and Hong Kong. The other two are faces of the post-cold war world's micro-apocalypses: the ringmaster of hostilities in the Balkan slaughterhouse and a victim of Somalia's primal chaos. EUROPE--The Butcher of The Balkans SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC is the high priest of "ethnic cleansing" Just a few years ago, any number of countries doted on Yugoslavia as the Cinderella of the communist world. Yugoslavia's rags-to-sufficiency story inspired other developing nations, while its practice of a mere bikini kind of communism fascinated the West. If any crisis lay in waiting, outsiders believed, it would arise from a superpower duel for Yugoslavia's hand in marriage. The postwar regime created by Josip Broz Tito had been Europe's only Marxist government to resist Stalin's importune advances. Albania broke out of the Soviet bloc 20 years later, but the cold war rivalry's choice prize in southern Europe remained Tito's state. Yugoslavia's fate has been to show how far history can defy expectations. Today the unraveled federation of southern Slavs is Europe's ugly sister--a cockpit of massacre and rapine animated wholly by internal grudges. The violence that has spread from Croatia to Bosnia and Herzegovina is not only a disaster in its own right and a torment to the world's conscience, it is also a cautionary example of the ethnic blood feuds that could yet engulf nearby parts of postcommunist Europe. In this drama of substantive symbolism, no one has played more of a commanding role than the man who came to power in the Balkans preaching ethnic hatred: Slobodan Milosevic, the 51-year-old President of Serbia. The degree to which he has instigated domestic strife has made him the embodiment of an older European scourge: the spirit of tribalism, which has begun to threaten much of the Continent again. In many ways, Milosevic's career has paralleled the slow, unnoticed burning of the nationalist time bomb's long fuse. A run-of-the-mill communist apparatchik for many years, the former law student gradually gained prominence after the 1980 death of Tito, whose iron grip had stifled the expression of ethnic loyalties. In 1984 Milosevic became president of the Belgrade city committee, rising two years later to membership in the Serbian party presidency. Communism was losing its legitimacy, though, and he sensed the need for a new focus if he were to retain power. In 1989 he won Serbia's presidency by trampling on Tito's key taboo and inflaming grievances against a cultural minority. Milosevic's maiden venture in hatemongering was to target Kosovo. Because ethnic Albanians make up 90% of the population of this southernmost, upland province of Serbia, it had enjoyed considerable autonomy for 15 years. Along with the heavily ethnic-Hungarian province of Vojvodina in the far north, Kosovo even had its own representative in the collective federal presidency. Belgrade's super-Serb railed against Kosovo's Albanians in the manner that Hitler voiced outlandish complaints about all the supposed injustices visited on Germans by Poland and Czechoslovakia: that is, Milosevic accused a politically weak people of persecuting Serbs, Yugoslavia's dominant nationality. That the province also happens to be the Serbs' proud homeland of old, a subject of folklore and popular sentiment, made his message a high-voltage provocation. He proceeded to strip Kosovo of its privileges and to suppress local Albanian rights. A European diplomat in Belgrade calls him "the man who let the nationalist genie out of the bottle." Milosevic's eye for the main chance also served him when communism performed its vanishing act all around him. Renaming his party Socialist, he managed to stay in the saddle after every other Marxist strong man in Central and Eastern Europe had been toppled. But it was when Slovenia and Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia last year that Milosevic's real talents for mischief came to life. He charged that an independent Croatia, which had been a Nazi puppet state during World War II, represented "some kind of restoration of fascism." Because the Axis-allied Croatian leadership had systematically killed Serbs, Gypsies and Jews by the hundreds of thousands under the German occupation, Croats today, according to Milosevic, threatened Serbs on their territory with genocide. His 1989 rallying cry to fellow Serbs about Kosovo--"no one will ever beat you again"--became the cause for war. Long since then, of course, hostilities have spread from Croatia, where at least 10,000 people were killed, to the charnel house and moral wasteland that is Bosnia today. By cautious estimates, at least 19,000 Bosnians, mostly Slavic Muslims, have died--many of them in the capital, Sarajevo--as a result of a ferocious land-grab campaign by Serbs in the mountainous republic. Supported rhetorically by Milosevic and armed by the heavily Serb-officered Yugoslav army, the insurgents have shelled, burned, looted, massacred and raped their way to control of about 70% of Bosnian territory. Altogether, nearly 1.5 million refugees have fled the lands that used to compose Yugoslavia. What is left of the federation may be only a token alliance between Serbia and little Montenegro, but it affords a convenient cover for international purposes. In mid-1992 "Slobo," as the Serbian leader is popularly known, engineered the return of American self-made pharmaceutical tycoon Milan Panic, a Yugoslav emigre, to become federal Prime Minister and a respectable face in the Balkan killing fields. Panic's eventual mutiny in this role has illustrated not only how impossible the job is but also the extent to which the many decent or at least exhausted Serbs want to silence the drums of nationalism. While Milosevic campaigned for re-election in recent weeks by assuring his flabbergasted countrymen that U.N.-imposed economic sanctions on Serbia have had no effect--in reality, industrial production is down one-third and unemployment is approaching 40%--Panic ran against him on an end-the-war platform. In the end, Milosevic by all accounts resorted to outrageous propaganda and vote rigging to clinch the Dec. 20 election, suggesting that the strong man, while still popular, is no universal hero at home. In one of his typically nonconformist essays, Bertrand Russell once dissected the fallacy of regarding oppressed peoples as morally superior. The fact that they are tyrannized, the British philosopher observed, does not mean that they will perform wonders of nobility and high-mindedness once given their freedom. On the contrary: as unfolding events are proving, communism, even Tito's diluted version, enforced a denial of base instincts that have now burst out all over Central and Eastern Europe. Slovaks are parting ways with Czechs, whatever the fundamental senselessness of a national split, because of longstanding grudges. In Hungary, Istvan Csurka, vice president of the ruling Democratic Forum, has written a magazine piece in which he inveighs against a supposed Jewish-liberal conspiracy and condemns the "genetic causes"--read Gypsies--of what he sees as Hungary's deterioration. In eastern Germany, small bands of racist skinheads sporting Nazi symbols have brutalized Gypsies, Turks, Vietnamese and other alleged Untermenschen. In the former Soviet Union, nationalism is also trying to stage a comeback under the banner of an ill-assorted and, so far, largely feckless breed of would-be strong men. Serbia's President is the leading exemplar of self-determination's ugly side today--but Slobodan Milosevic hardly marches alone. AFRICA--The Offspring Of Anarchy IBRAHIM ALI MOHAMMED symbolizes Somalia's anguish Most days he spends curled up on the concrete floor of a room for orphans in the feeding center of Baidoa, a dot on the map of Somalia's south-central hunger zone and a place better known today as the City of Death. More bones than flesh, Ibrahim Ali Mohammed wears a cotton wrap, under which his adolescent frame is hardly discernible. Around the boy's neck hangs a thin red-and-blue string, a crude charm that his mother fastened there years ago to ward off evil spirits. The talisman has not helped his family. Over the past year, Ibrahim's mother, father and three brothers and one of his sisters have all died of starvation, victims of the seventh circle of hell that Somalia has come to represent. On a good day the boy remembers his family's life before the great dying began. "We had a big farm," he recalls. "Ten acres. Cattle and goats and many camels. I remember many animals." Then, one morning in August 1991, several dozen heavily armed soldiers loyal to Mohamed Siad Barre, the country's deposed dictator, stormed into Ibrahim's home village of War Hawein, 10 1/2 miles northwest of Baidoa. The troops had taken to foraging for food and were laying waste whatever population centers they stumbled across. With a strangely impassive face, the 15-year-old survivor relates what happened: "They were looting and capturing the women and raping them. I ran into the forest. They were shooting everywhere. They were shooting without reason." Ibrahim's could be a story from any civil war that has spun out of control. His face is one of millions like it in a land where extreme suffering and deprivation have already taken at least 300,000 lives. Somalia's tragedy, however, is no garden-variety breakdown of authority. A country that became independent 32 years ago with an incalculable advantage over most other emergent African states--an ethnically homogeneous population--Somalia today is only a geographical term. Whatever constituted nationhood has disappeared, shattered by a form of turmoil that surpasses understanding. Siad Barre's 22-year rule emphasized the higher principles of Marx and Islam in place of blood ties. "Tribalism divides," went his slogan. "Socialism unites." When he fell from power with a bang two years ago, rebel armies and gangs of hoodlums began drawing distinctions of kinship where they could find them, from cutthroat clan loyalties down to a shoot-first attitude toward any stranger on the road. As much as any other casualty, Ibrahim represents Somalia's claim on the world's conflicting emotions in the face of an ultimate form of social fission and decay. At the Isha shelter in Baidoa, in the middle of the country's most ravaged landscape, Ibrahim has been recovering slowly on a steady diet of gruel and biscuits. He still wears the red bracelet that denotes serious malnutrition, entitling bearers to extra doses of milk and Unimix, a paste of oil, beans and grain. Because teenagers bounce back from the brink of starvation less easily than young children, the boy is taking longer to recuperate than most of his orphan-room companions. Still, he is alive, and that says something about the international relief efforts that rushed in to help save Somalis well before the U.S. Marines landed. Late in December, American and French troops, acting nominally under the U.N.'s aegis, reached Baidoa with their lifeline of support for relief agencies such as Irish Concern, which runs the Isha center. While the missions of mercy are freer to ply their trade as a result, all the armed horsepower and men cannot put Somalia back together again. Ibrahim's plight is a metaphor for the moribund national culture. When the marauders entered War Hawein 16 months ago, they forced Ibrahim's father, a village elder, to reveal where the grains and seeds were stored. Over the next two months, other gangs attacked War Hawein to loot whatever was left, finally burning the village down with the exception of a few huts. The elders gathered to plan a strategy of defense, but the weapons they possessed were pitifully inadequate--mostly bows and arrows. Says Ibrahim: "My older brother had a small gun, but not a very good one." With no food and no seeds to plant for the next growing season, the family began scavenging for food. The boy recalls, "We were eating grass, roots and the dried skins of cows"--livestock that had already perished. By the end of 1991, his mother had died of hunger, and not long afterward Ibrahim's father died as well. Two men carried the body outside the village and "buried him like a chicken," the son says. Throughout early 1992, War Hawein and countless other hamlets like it were reduced to ghost towns. In July, Ibrahim and his little sister Elmio, the family's sole survivors, were sitting in their hut when two men arrived with the news that "airplanes filled with food" had landed in Baidoa. The youngsters set out with 15 others on a trek to the regional capital, moving slowly down a road littered with corpses. The next morning a foreign nurse found the brother and sister, both naked, lying on the outskirts of town. Says Halima Edow, a Somali woman who helped care for the youth: "Every day we thought he was going to die." "When they first come in, they just sit and stare at the walls," explains Francis O'Keeffe, Irish Concern's medical director. "We really have a lot of trouble convincing them to eat." With an inexhaustible supply of time and attention, perhaps hundreds of thousands of other Ibrahims in Somalia may make it and begin to take an interest in the future again. The world left them by their elders does not allow a lot of room for hope, though. A fiercely proud people, Somalis were once among Africa's most promising children. Of Ibrahim, Edow says, "Look at his eyes. They are very well now." The same cannot be said for his country. LATIN AMERICA--The Real Revolutionary CARLOS SALINAS DE GORTARI is reversing Mexico's history On a recent speaking tour of several Mexican cities, Mikhail Gorbachev stressed that economic and political reform must proceed hand in hand. The message was not exactly what Carlos Salinas de Gortari might have wanted to hear. Mexico's hands-on President since December 1988, Salinas continues to insist that economic liberalization must come first if Mexico is to avoid a Soviet-style upheaval. The theory also suits his Institutional Revolutionary Party (or P.R.I.) which still blanches at the prospect of surrendering the monopoly on national power it has commanded since 1929. Yet his difference of opinion with the Kremlin's former jefe surely did not lose Salinas any sleep: after all, he enjoys a public approval rating of 80%, while Gorbachev is out of a job. Perhaps the former Soviet President should have visited Mexico while he still had a Kremlin office. Long a one-party state in which the ruling establishment dominates the national economy, Mexico is shifting historical gears with the greatest of ease--at least compared with the dissolved Soviet Union. It has passed from the panicky, debt-laden, nearly unmanageable '80s to a straight and orderly course offering high promise for the next century. Mexicans have not abandoned the corporatist state entirely, but more than other Latin Americans they have broken the shackles of the past. "Mexico is on the crest of a wave," asserts Denise Dresser, a political scientist at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. The nation, she believes, could soon become the Latin counterpart of Eastern Asia's newly industrialized economies, such as South Korea and Taiwan. Why? Because Mexico, according to Dresser, is a regional "paragon of stability" that has been able to "push through vast reforms without discontent." Those successes in the leap to the free market, moreover, are largely due to the man at the top. An astute planner who admires Asia's success stories--he once sent his children to a private Japanese school in Mexico City--Salinas has almost single-handedly energized a nation that used to be jealous and resentful of the dynamism exhibited north of the border. Two-thirds of the way through the single six-year term allowed him by law, the reformer in chief has already won himself a place in Mexican history books. Salinas may look mild-mannered, but he is a stickler for efficiency and demands results. At the outset of his term, he took advantage of low expectations, first by projecting a forceful commitment to change and then by using it to make his reforms work. "Salinas forced us to be competitive," says Dresser. "He transformed Mexico from an inward-looking country to an outward-looking one." At the same time, he challenged the P.R.I.'s entrenched power structure. Taking his case for modernization directly to the people, he bypassed sclerotic government and party bureaucracies to sell the electorate directly on his vision of the Mexican Dream. Nothing exemplifies that shift in outlook so much as Salinas' most ambitious experiment: the North American Free Trade Agreement, linking Mexico with the U.S. and Canada. Signed by the three heads of government on Dec. 17, NAFTA aims to take the continent giant steps toward the formation of a common market in which Mexico will play an important role. The concept flies in the face of the protective, introspective economic nationalism that characterized Mexico for most of the 20th century, yet it came about largely at Salinas' initiative. Though NAFTA still faces a tough hurdle in the U.S. Congress, oddsmakers favor its passage, and the free-trade regime, due to commence on Jan. 1, 1994, stands to give Mexico the supercharging needed for real lift-off. Says Jonathan Heath, general director of Macro Asesoria Economica, one of the leading business consulting firms: "With Salinas, we have confidence we didn't have before--but we're aware of how fragile all this is." The caution is wise, even though Mexico's progress is impressive. The triple-digit inflation that prevailed through the 1980s dropped to about 11% in 1992, and experts believe the rate will fall to half that in about three years. Deregulation is under way, the budget is balanced, and the crippling $103.7 billion foreign-debt burden has been refinanced. Once again the country is rated a good credit risk. Mexico is also the largest recipient of foreign investment in Latin America, having attracted $24.9 billion during Salinas' four years in office. For every rosy figure, though, another statistic reflects Mexico's many remaining hardships. Its $19 billion trade deficit has senior officials "scared to death," according to a high-level foreign diplomat. Private credit is tight, with interest rates around 20%, and a general economic slowdown to about 3% annual growth--an enviable performance in most other places today--has boosted urban underemployment to two-fifths of the 35 million-member work force. Over the past decade, the minimum wage has declined in real value by one-third. Getting enough to eat remains a serious effort for more than half of Mexico's 87 million people, 15% of whom control 70% of the national wealth. The pyramid-like power structure has opened up to some political competition, but not enough. Without the support of Washington, Salinas would probably not have been able to go as far as he has so fast. Says a foreign diplomat: "The U.S. prefers Spain to Bangladesh on its border. It's that simple." But the prospect has also required extraordinary vision and force of will. It may take two generations for Salinas' reforms to produce a full harvest of plenty, but in the meantime he has afforded Mexicans the ballast of hope and the beacon of pride. ASIA--Hong Kong's Brash Viceroy CHRISTOPHER PATTEN fights, perhaps quixotically, for democracy Richard Nixon's favorite film 20 years ago was Patton, a production with which he may have regaled his newfound friends from China. In the movie, George C. Scott plays General George Patton as a perversely beguiling superpatriot who struts with swagger stick and ivory-handled pistols in front of a huge American flag. In real life, the World War II commander outraged Americans by slapping a G.I. hospitalized for combat fatigue--post-traumatic stress disorder, as today's description would have it. Patton's posthumous reputation was largely redeemed by the film, however: the cinematic general is still bullheaded, but he also comes across as a man of vision, depth and moral complexity out of step with his time. Will a White House incumbent years hence screen for his Chinese guests a movie called Patten? Stranger things have happened, but the likelihood is next to nil. For one thing, Christopher Patten, Britain's new Governor of Hong Kong, is no swaggerer. In office only six months, the soft-spoken career politician and former British Conservative Party chairman looks ill-suited for heroics. More important, he faces a distinctly uphill battle with history: as a result of his modest effort to extend democracy in the crown colony before China's 1997 resumption of sovereignty, Patten has proved to be about as welcome to Beijing's palate as pepper in the plum sauce. In China's view, the only acceptable film version of Patten's life would parade him before a huge Union Jack that collapses on his head. The new Governor's mission is in dead earnest, though. Appointed to serve as the last British viceroy of Hong Kong, Patten, Prime Minister John Major's close friend and election-campaign strategist, seems determined to cut a better deal for the colony's 5.9 million people. After Beijing crushed the Tiananmen Square protests in mid-1989, Hong Kong lapsed into a deepening sense of cynical resignation about China's promised "high degree of autonomy" and respect for civil freedoms after the 1997 transfer. Scarcely had he arrived at Government House in Hong Kong, when Patten, 48, delivered the equivalent of a slap to the shell-shocked patient. He challenged the status quo with a limited but novel plan to widen democratic representation. The offer to fortify the colony with the tonic of greater popular say in government won him instant favor among a large share of Hong Kong's edgy millions. It also made him an instant pariah across the border, where official fear of political contamination by "peaceful evolution" is acute in the wake of the Soviet Union's demise. So passionately has the People's Republic sought to demonize Patten that an unwary consumer of the party line might think him hardly human. Wen Wei Po, a pro-Beijing daily in Hong Kong, sneered that the last viceroy was aspiring to become the colony's "God of Democracy." Wrote a Wen Wei Po columnist: "His politician's style of being perfidious is completely incompatible with Oriental values and morals." China has put the Governor in the deep freeze. On his first official trip to Beijing in October, no high-level authority would see him. Instead, Lu Ping, the director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, delivered stern ultimatums about what China would do if Patten did not back down; it would refuse, for example, to honor any contracts awarded for Hong Kong's planned $16 billion port expansion and new international airport. Moreover, any planes leaving the airport would be denied entry into the mainland's airspace. Perhaps what really infuriated Beijing's gerontocrats is that Patten has managed to foil them at their own game. Chinese officials are adept at being faithful to the letter of an agreement while squeezing out maximum advantage from between the lines. After promising that Hong Kong representatives would have ample say in the formulation of a post-1997 Basic Law, or local constitution, China in the end ignored the considered options and produced a highly conservative plan. The blueprint calls for keeping the 60-member legislature essentially a debating club, reserving most of the seats for pliable representatives of business, industry and the professions. What Patten did was work within the formula to find scope for extending democracy anyway. He proposed that all employees, from chairman of the board to night watchman, be allowed an equal vote in choosing the legislature's occupational representatives. He also called for lowering the voting age from 21 to 18--a prospect that Beijing apparently hates. One thing that seemed to seal the proposal's doom, however, was a Hong Kong newspaper's opinion survey conducted across the border in bustling Guangdong province. The unscientific telephone canvas found that Patten had higher name recognition than the provincial governor and that the southern mainlanders favored Patten's political ideas by a wide margin. China's economic threats have nonetheless rattled the Hong Kong stock market, and local anxieties have eroded public enthusiasm for Patten's proposals. Businessmen in particular are balking as the depth of Beijing's opposition sinks in. When it comes to foreign policy, says a Beijing journalist, "China needs to win one battle, and this is it." Patten, the man, is certainly not counting on Patten, the movie. But if his shock therapy succeeds, his political vision may yet be redeemed. </body> </article> </text>