MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"

PLOTSOVA

by Kevin Carey

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In the light of apparent diplomatic and political impotence to stem violence in Northern Ireland and East Timor, KEVIN CAREY looks at the negotiating process and the role of the media.

Every evening in every capital city in the world an embassy hosts a party for the diplomatic corps. While the champagne flows, the High Commissioner for Plotsova warily eyes the Ambassador for Conspiratoria over the canapÈs and the tipsy Correspondent of the Daily Gloss mutters semi incoherently with the Special Reporter from Whine Magazine, desperately trying to emphasise the magnificence of his latest scoop without betraying its substance. When it reaches a bewildered newsdesk it turns out to be so abstruse that the now deeply somnolent correspondent must be aroused if his ravishing morsel is to be tucked into a tiny corner of page 27.

Meanwhile, in Ulster former terrorists, now turned racketeers, decide where people live and how justice will be savagely dispensed, scores are murdered in East Timor, including some junior staff from the United Nations, a vast tract of Africa from Uganda to the South African border is ungovernable in spite of a new multi-national peace treaty, more than one third of fabulously wealthy Colombia is only the most startling example of Latin America's ungovernability and the Khmer Rouge lives.

Of late this bewildering phenomenon of diplomacy humbled by criminals has exercised those interested in Northern Ireland and Indonesia's East Timor. Why did the Good Friday Peace Agreement not put an end to beatings, knee-cappings and murder in Ulster? Why have so many people been slaughtered by paramilitary thugs over the status of a sliver of Indonesia? The answer is so profound, so shocking, that nobody in government may utter it; diplomats may construct frameworks within which politicians can do business but politicians have no simple methods of dealing with organised crime, particularly if the psychopaths wisely don the garb of political liberation though, to be honest, the more usual phenomenon is for the political psychopath to descend into the banal cruelty of entirely greed-driven organised crime.

Governments can only operate to the extent to which they command the general, as opposed to the particular, consent of the people. That consent is conventionally seen at its best in the way opposition politicians behave and the art of opposition - wanting your country to do well but its government to do badly - is often more difficult than governing. When government is ethnically oriented, as it formerly was in Ulster and still is in many countries with internal dissent, terrorism is a natural response and its need for arms and other illegal supplies and its routine performance of illegal acts drives it into contact and then collusion with criminal communities.

In Northern Ireland, as elsewhere, those, including all the major politicians, who persist in maintaining the omnipotence of diplomatic and political processes, are either deluding themselves or, more likely, are whistling to maintain their courage, more aware than most of how close so-called civilisations are to implosion. We elect and pay our democratic politicians to do the dirty work we would not do ourselves and to lie to us as kindly as they can but that is not why we buy newspapers and pay journalists. The collusion between the Daily Gloss and the diplomatic corps has gone well beyond a joke.

Just because Tony Blair, Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein IRA, David Trimble of the Ulster Unionists and John Hume of the SDLP can't individually or collectively bring themselves to say that they are unable to induce arms de-commissioning or put a stop to protection rackets and murder through a diplomatic twist of the Good Friday Agreement does not mean that journalists shouldn't say it. Indeed, in the decades following the Second World War when current contemporary history has it that the media were deferential, journalists would have seen it as their duty to say what politicians would or could not bring themselves to say. Now in this supposed age of iconoclasm there may be less deference in respect of the private lives of public figures - and even a positive desire to broadcast all manner of sexual and financial gratification - but my guess is that most politicians are uncertain whether or not this is a fair price to pay for never being questioned about their politics.

Politicians and the ponderati who report their doings have perpetrated an image of captaincy which varies between the metaphor of the battleship and the oil tanker, but the governance of modern states is more like steering a yacht through a storm in shark-infested waters. We might have more sympathies for our navigators if they were slightly more honest about their plight and our vulnerability.

The worst case of collusion is the way in which journalists cover - that is the word they use - events at the United Nations. Anybody with History 101 or a Boy Scout Certificate in journalism could have told you that:

• (a) Indonesia was insincere in proposing a referendum for East Timor,
• (b) it first tacitly and then openly backed the anti-independence militias,
• (c) those militias, together with many in the police and the army, have huge economic and career path stakes in East Timor,
• (d) the overall plan was to stage the referendum, cause havoc and evacuate the pro independence victors, leaving the anti-independence losers in charge of the island,
• (e) all this is possible because Indonesia is one of the world's potentially most powerful countries, the USA doesn't care either way and Australia is cursed with the Howard Government whose Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, possesses a rare combination of cowardice and stupidity, and, finally
• (f) the whole episode has been fabricated to warn other more important Indonesian territories not to think about independence.

Here we have that saddest of cases, a government willingly conniving at the slaughter of its own people. We have seen it all before and we will see it again; but in this case the reports are full of the distress of Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, who can scarcely perform the diplomatic equivalent of boiling an egg and the helplessness of the Security Council whose combined armaments could, if wanted, destroy the earth in fewer days than God is supposed to have created it.

The world's press whispers ponderously as if it were collected in St. Murdoch's Cathedral and, meanwhile, the Special Correspondent of the Daily Whine wants to know why the High Commissioner for Plotsova has not entirely rid his country of crime and the Ambassador Plenipotentiary of Conspiratoria gains a strange satisfaction from the centre spread in the Daily Gloss which, he thinks, shows him to advantage on a beach in Unguentia in the company of a naked model, a story surely much more interesting than the traduction of its government.

KEVIN CAREY is a writer, broadcaster and social entrepreneur. His interests range from the relationship between information technology and social exclusion and the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. He is the director of a UK charity, HumanITy, which combines rigorous social analysis with experimental field projects on learning IT skills through content creation. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard before a spell at the BBC, followed by 15 years in Third World Development, Carey offers a unique perspective on world affairs. He is a politcal theorist, moral philosopher, classical music critic and published poet.

Kevin Carey can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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