Michael Gerson’s Washington Post column last week contained a major scoop that hasn’t received nearly enough press attention. In a piece about South Africa’s woeful support for despots around the world, Gerson revealed:
In late April, about the time this e-mail was written, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa — Zimbabwe’s influential neighbor — addressed a four-page letter to President Bush. Rather than coordinating strategy to end Zimbabwe’s nightmare, Mbeki criticized the United States, in a text packed with exclamation points, for taking sides against President Robert Mugabe’s government and disrespecting the views of the Zimbabwean people. “He said it was not our business,” recalls one American official, and “to butt out, that Africa belongs to him.” Adds another official, “Mbeki lost it; it was outrageous.”
South Africa’s Sunday Times reports that while Mbeki’s office does not acknowledge the letter, the American embassy in Pretoria confirmed that President Bush did receive a letter from Mbeki.
That Mbeki would write a rambling, 4-page screed “packed with exclamation points” to the President of the States is yet further confirmation of his paranoid, conspiratorial world view, and complete unfitness for executive office. It is of a piece with his belief that HIV does not cause AIDS and that those who complain about South Africa’s rampant crime problem are all closet racists. Moreover, as Gerson notes, Mbeki is but symptomatic of the African National Congress’s broader attempt to position South Africa in an anti-Western, Third-Worldist posture on the international stage. Allowing Robert Mugabe to ruin his country is simply the price to be paid when the alternative is the election of a political party favored by the West.
Meanwhile, not long after Mbeki fired off his strange missive to President Bush, Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai sent his thoughts to the dictator-abetting South African president, who had been tasked by both Bush and regional leaders with mediating Zimbabwe’s ongoing political crisis. He does not mince words, informing Mbeki that if his style of “diplomacy” persists, “there will be no country left.” While Mbeki tells President Bush to “butt out” of African affairs (a strange request, considering the fact that the United States has been relatively passive about the chaos in Zimbabwe), Zimbabwe’s democrats wish the reverse: that the United States take a more proactive role while Mbeki exit the stage.
A Reply to Harriet A. Washington
Harriet A. Washington, author of Medical Apartheid, has posted a response to my critique of her op-ed in the New York Times two weeks ago.
Washington says that her “point” is to show how a handful of “Western medical miscreants” practicing in Africa are responsible for the skepticism of “poor patients who desperately need and rarely receive quality medical care.” Yet, the lack of “quality medical care” in South Africa, for instance, is largely a feature of the government’s total ineptitude. To choose just the latest example, that country’s courageous deputy health minister was sacked this week for daring to criticize the appallingly high infant mortality rate at a government hospital.
If Washington’s intellectual project is to analyze and explain the widespread African distrust of Western medicine, she should focus on the health policies of South Africa, the continent’s most developed country. Neither Washington nor any observer of the scourge of AIDS in Africa can deny that more than anyone else, it is South African President Thabo Mbeki, with his scientifically illiterate and paranoid rantings, who has fostered the very skepticism of Western medicine about which Washington writes. Mbeki’s policies as president of the country with the highest number of AIDS sufferers—over five million—have been nothing short of murderous.
Apparently, Washington’s selective and misleading explanations are not limited to her Times op-ed. Sally Satel and Howard I. Kushner reviewed Washington’s book in the May issue of COMMENTARY, writing that her “account is marred by frequent distortions and inaccuracies.” Ultimately, Satel and Kushner write, “Sowing still more distrust and alienation, her book stands to widen the very ‘health divide’ that she seeks to repair.” Giving a pass to the ignorant conspiracy theories and pseudo-science of South Africa’s government is just a continuation of this intellectual cynicism.