Antalya Is a Moveable Feast

ANTALYA, Turkey.  The skies over the Middle East and South Asia were crowded Monday night as no fewer than seven VIP aircraft carried heads of state and government from one summit to another.  It began stage two of a moveable feast.

The special planes, most of them 747s, brought President Obama and the leaders of China, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Australia and Canada from the G20 in Antalya to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Manila.

John Kirton, a summit watcher at the University of Toronto, complains that leaders often spend more time flying to summits than actually talking to each other face to face.

Despite the extravagance and expense of these now annual meetings they are useful as leaders benefit from getting to know each other. Surprises are avoided. Cross-cultural interaction reduces misunderstanding. Informal chats in corridors or at social events are opportunities for unscripted communication. They’re often more important than the meetings themselves.

Such was the case at Antalya, a summit likely to remembered if at all for the unplanned 35-minute corridor meeting between President Obama and Russian president Vladimir Putin.  The subject was Syria and how to stop the catastrophic civil war.

A photograph of the two leaders leaning toward each other seated in a hotel lobby, was taken by Russian summit planner (Sherpa) Svetlana Lukash.  It was an image tweeted around the world.

Following

Obama, Putin, national security chief Susan Rice, and interpreter

University of Rochester scholar Alan Wallis, a summit planner for President Reagan, defended summits as “meetings of peers who have no peers at home.” Their real value, he said, is leaders meet their counterparts as equals.”

Only the leaders and their closest advisors know what really went on over two days in Antalya. However there must have been awkward moments. What did 91-year-old Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe make of the long discussion about refugees?  Representing the African Union at the summit, up to a third of Zimbabwe’s population—some four million people-- have become refugees since Mugabe assumed power in 1980.

Not all of the dual members of the G20 and APEC have moved on to stage two of the moveable feast. Vladimir Putin chose not to travel to Manila and neither did the president of Indonesia.#

Barry D. Wood has been reporting from economic summits since 1980.

Remembering Portugal's Revolution That Changed Africa

Forty years ago a brave band of junior officers overthrew Portugal’s dictatorship. On April 25th, 1974 thousands poured into Lisbon’s plazas in celebration. Flower sellers did a brisk trade in red carnations that poked from the barrels of soldiers’ rifles. Marcelo Caetano, the despot who headed the fascist government in power since 1932, fled to Brazil.

The young captains behind the coup had seen for themselves that the colonial wars in distant Guinea Bissau, Angola and Mozambique could not be won. To me, an aspiring journalist eager to get to southern Africa, the carnation revolution was a signal that dramatic changes lay ahead. A glance at the map suggested that the white Rhodesians who had defied Britain by declaring independence in 1965 would face increased pressure as their Portuguese allies departed from Mozambique.

Arriving by ship in Cape Town in late 1974, I became a writer at South Africa’s Financial Mail magazine. I soon traveled to Lourenco Marques and Beira and from there by train to Salisbury, the colonial name of Zimbabwe’s capital. In Mozambique I found a white community divided between those welcoming independence and those who wanted out as quickly as possible.

Interviewing Portugal’s last governor-general and one of the coup plotters, Victor Crespo, it was clear that haste not caution guided the revolutionaries in Lisbon. Mozambique’s Frelimo insurgents were similarly surprised by the speed of Portugal’s planned withdrawal. Negotiations in Zambia quickly produced an agreement to hand over the territory that is twice the size of California to the Marxist guerrillas. The accord contained no provision for elections.

An eerie calm settled over Mozambique in early 1975. A transitional government went about its business but big decisions like nationalizing banks and industries were put off. Tensions rose. Fear was near the surface. Radio stations and newspapers rehearsed citizens on the texts of Frelimo’s socialist anthems while the middle and upper classes worried their property would soon be seized. Refugee flights to Lisbon became more frequent.

Back in Johannesburg on the anniversary of the first Portuguese coup, I put a red carnation in my lapel and went to the offices of a Portuguese bank. Stepping from the elevator I met a banker who upon seeing my carnation tore it from my jacket and crushed it. He fumed, “Eu sou um fascista (I am a fascist).”

As independence day (June 25th, 1975) approached, Frelimo leader Samora Machel left Tanzania and journeyed the length of Mozambique, as Frelimo rhetoric described it, “from the Ruvuma to the Maputo.” When he reached the capital I was among the crowd at the airport observing the charismatic leader in battle fatigues step from his plane.

There was torrential rain the night of independence, soaking the thousands at the soccer stadium watching the Portuguese flag lowered and Frelimo’s banner for the People’s Republic of Mozambique hoisted. At city hotels war reporters, several fresh from Vietnam in flak jackets, clustered at telex machines that clattered with their dispatches. The experienced among them called out the calibers of the celebratory gunfire heard in the distance.

Returning to Johannesburg there was confusion over the name of the Mozambican capital. The notice board at what is now Oliver Tambo airport mistakenly spelled out “Can Pfumo,” as it was not yet known that the name was Maputo.

In Angola, the even larger oil rich territory on the Atlantic, official Portuguese conduct was disgraceful. Unable or unwilling to seek cooperation among three rival guerrilla armies, Portugal chose simply to sail away when their flag was lowered on November 11, 1975. Terrified of ethnic conflict, thousands of settlers fled, many crossing into Namibia with the few possessions they could carry. The stage was set for great power intervention, including later ferocious clashes between South Africans and Cubans. Angola’s cruel civil war went on for two decades.

Upon independence Mozambique made good on its promise to close Rhodesia’s vital rail links to Beira and Maputo. Still defiant, the Ian Smith government responded by stepping up its war against insurgents, a brutal conflict that killed thousands and continued several more years until Smith sued for peace and Zimbabwe won independence in 1980.

In the 1980s South Africa assumed from Rhodesia the supplying Renamo rebels that wreaked havoc and destabilized Mozambique’s government. In 1986 Machel was killed when his plane mysteriously crashed inside South Africa on its approach to Maputo. His successor Joachim Chissano was less of an ideologue and in 1989 Frelimo abandoned socialism and gradually embraced multiparty democracy and a market economy. There is a competition to replace the Mozambican flag still emblazoned with an AK 47 rifle.

Mozambique flag, 1975

Mozambique is in the midst of economic boom with foreign investment pouring in to mineral and natural gas resources in the north.

Buffeted by crippling sanctions and mounting unrest, South Africa’s last apartheid leader F.W. DeKlerk shocked the world in 1990 by ending apartheid and freeing Nelson Mandela. He began negotiations with the ANC. The result was the new constitution and South Africa’s first free elections whose 20th anniversary has just been observed.

In Portugal the flirtation with Marxism was of short duration. Banks and big industries were nationalized just as in Mozambique and Angola. But in Portugal they were privatized in the 1980s as Western Europe’s poorest country opted for modernization and membership in the European Union, which it joined in 1986.

Now in his ‘80s, Victor Crespo, the Portuguese naval officer I met in 1975, has been reflecting on the 1974 revolution. He told a Lisbon broadcaster that democracy overcomes all adversity and that the will of the people will triumph over today’s economic hardship. Crespo didn’t speak of democracy in 1975.

The Portuguese revolution set in motion many events, most immediately in the African colonies. It importantly hastened independence in Zimbabwe and Namibia and contributed to the coming of democracy in South Africa. In Europe the carnation revolution inspired the Spanish and Greeks who similarly overthrew their own dictatorships.

Zimbabwe's Transition to What?

Zimbabwe is entering an unsteady transition politically and economically.  Robert Mugabe, its sole leader since independence in 1980, turns 90 on February 21^st.  He can’t live forever.  Who will follow Mugabe and what course will his successors steer?

After four years of gradual improvement, the economy is again deteriorating.  Money is in short supply. Workers are losing jobs.  Government is starved of tax revenue because exports are falling and business activity has slowed. The country remains cut off from official lenders like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Six months after Mugabe’s flawed electoral victory, uncertainty reigns. Zanu PF is in complete charge.  There’s a new finance minister and central bank governor. Acting central bank chief Charity Dhliwayo says the economy faces a severe liquidity crunch and that local industry can’t obtain credit.

Because of the cash shortage Dhliwayo is allowing four additional currencies—principally the Chinese yuan and Indian rupee—to freely circulate. They join the US dollar and the South African rand, the euro, British pound, and Botswana pula as legal tender.  Pity the poor clerks who have to calculate prices.

In the aftermath of the July election Tendai Biti, finance minister in the coalition government, is out, replaced by Mugabe loyalist Patrick Chinamasa. The new finance minister recently went to China where he hoped to obtain money for the government’s ambitious development plan.  Rebuffed, he returned empty handed.

Ex-minister Biti worries that without meaningful exports and domestic production, “the liquidity crisis is so bad that echoes of 2008 are beckoning.”  He says if the cash squeeze persists the government may resort to printing money, i.e. bringing back the discredited Zim dollar that he discarded upon taking office in 2009.

50 billion dollar Zim bank note from 2008

Deterred by the government’s indigenization program, foreign investors are staying away. Corruption has reached exorbitant levels even by Zimbabwe diminished standards. People are outraged by revelations of obscenely inflated salaries and theft within state owned enterprises.

But amid all this distress there are hopeful signs for Zimbabwe’s long-suffering people. The European Union is poised to lift most remaining sanctions, an action likely to boost aid flows.  To their credit, Chinamasa and Mugabe are sticking with the IMF’s staff monitored program designed to impose financial discipline, boost confidence and lay a foundation for sustained growth. That program, promulgated by Biti, is still in place and runs until June.  An IMF team will visit Harare in late March to assess progress.  If the government holds to the program there could be a rapprochement with multi-lateral lenders and eventual action to clear the arrears that have long blocked Zimbabwe’s access to official financing.

During the relative stability that followed the taming of hyperinflation, Zimbabwe’s economy grew rapidly, albeit from an horrendously depressed level.  From 2009 to 2012, Zimbabwe registered 11% annual growth, the fastest in sub-Saharan Africa. Last year growth slowed to 3%, in large part because of the decline in commodity prices and depreciation of the rand against the US dollar. South Africa is Zimbabwe’s biggest trading partner and domestic producers are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with South Africa products. Growth for 2014 is unlikely to exceed 3%.

Since Zimbabwe is a virtual treasure chest of raw materials, foreign companies are eager to join Chinese firms in regaining a foothold in the country.  Over the next six months they’ll be watching policy pronouncements and economic conditions in Zimbabwe very carefully.