Barack Obama’s Victory and what it Means to Me
By **Lieutenant Colonel Samsudeen Sarr (Rtd.)
It has been a while since I last contributed to The Echo; nevertheless, I have indeed been following your publications on a regular basis. I was in fact, often tempted into sending you rejoinders on some provocative articles, but somehow I would abort the desire. You may in part attribute that to my busy schedules but the better part was mainly due to the past exciting USA election drama. I had to follow that religiously.
Now that we have President-Elect Barack Obama, I thought I owed it to myself to share my feelings about what it means to me. Please consider it purely my personal opinion with even the recommendations highlighted. In my conclusion I was going to wait until after his inauguration to finally write this paper but the structure of his government is already shaping up with some signs of the direction his administration is poised to adopt. 
America being the place I now increasingly see as my home than my native The Gambia I left ten years ago, has after this election projected a political image that I believe, will in effect influence, if not all, a lot of present and future world governments. This phenomenal change with so much to be concerned about by every scholar was evidently realized from a long historical process that I thought-wrongly of course- was still not yet achievable in 2008. Yes, I didn’t think it was time for a black man to be elected president of the United States of America in 2008, a feeling I had shared with many people before the election. In fact, that kept me all along skeptical over the outcome until the victory day.
It is however fair to say that for a black man to be voted president of the most powerful nation in the world-factoring in what being black in the USA had signified in the past, is symbolic of a major shift from a pervasive social and institutional biasness prevalent for far too long. I see it both at the public and private paradigm as a final rejection of the backward notion that only middle-aged white men were the true Americans qualified to govern this country, opening up a new awareness among especially, minority groups to feel genuinely included in the political process for the first time.
What I found remarkable however, and immensely commendable, is the decisive role played by the white voters without whose awakening to the fallacy of racial supremacy, the fundamental concept behind the sustenance of the rejected status quo, the change would have been delayed a little longer. I think, it was just a matter of delaying it but the change was imminent, since bias, prejudice, racism-call it what you may- no matter how one might try to justify it, has never been predicated on any scientific or reasonable premise.
The last time I had a similar feeling in the change of a political status quo was when Nelson Mandela won his freedom, ending the decadent apartheid system of South Africa in 1994.
But the Obama victory, though still in its infancy, seems comparatively more universal with regard to its future impact among nations or governments generally practicing identical policies. For America to do this means a lot to the rest of the world. In fact, I will not hesitate to say that, if you want to popularize a concept or idea in the world just try making it work in the USA. It’s hard to make an accurate evaluation of the knock-on effect this would eventually have outside the country, but I believe that most nations around the world will sooner rather than later start feeling that effect.
One can however now recognize the sign of its imminence from the sudden economic meltdown often experienced before such major political changes occur. South Africa, the Soviet Union, if one could recall, were all besieged by severe economic problems shortly before being forced into compromising their rigidly-entrenched political systems, underscoring a clear pattern of special significance to the process.
In South Africa although the white Africana vote helped in changing the racially bias political landscape, there was a deliberate effort by the international community-mainly the Western nations- through coordinated trade sanctions that finally choked the regime’s economic lifeline to a political compromise.
But before that, despite the West’s overt position of promoting global democracy, human and civil rights among especially, new emerging African nations of the post-colonial era, they covertly rendered financial and moral support to the repressive apartheid regime in a style best defined as hypocritical and immoral. Fearing Soviet expansionism those days was their rationale for propping up the regime which had meant that if the so-called communist threat hadn’t ended in 1991, their support of the government would have continued indefinitely no matter what. Those who were familiar with those events might be able to remember how billions of dollars were funneled from the West to keep the South African regime militarily superior in the region. It was also good business for weapons manufacturers and traffickers making huge profits off the open-ended wars fought against liberation movements. The West then branded the ANC a terrorist organization especially, when the Soviet Union started arming nations and organizations determined to bring down the apartheid government. It later led to large numbers of Cuban forces deployed to Angola by Castro who for a while had effectively contained the well-equipped South African forces. In the end, the whole region was turned into a twilight zone of death and mayhem with the poor helpless Africans bearing the brunt of the carnage.
But I don’t think anyone was deceived into thinking that the Soviets were in anyway a better Superpower then because of their willingness to counter the West’s position towards South Africa’s government. It was just how the world was polarized by an ideological conflict between the East and the West. So under the guise of spreading the Marxist-Leninist philosophy, supposedly aimed at maximizing global communism and minimizing capitalism, the Kremlin also perpetrated a reckless course of arming and aiding any gang of active bandits or political criminals claiming to acknowledge Das Capital as the gospel truth for emancipation. Billions of rubles were also used to purchase arms manufactured from their factories and poured into the region for more hellish wars.
Coupled with their huge military failure in Afghanistan, their economy finally took a nosedive with a domino effect that lost them their long-consolidated ideological empire together with almost all their strategic allies. It was a shocker still not fathomable by the Russian old guards. The lesson one could have learnt from that era was that armed conflicts, or wars for whatever reasons one might start or sponsor them, often end up undermining the economic foundations of nations or groups involved and could result in the total disintegration of social and political fabrics of those very countries.
If the current economic crisis in the USA was exclusively confined within its national boundaries, I would have perhaps concluded that this was deje vous all over again to the same phenomenon that brought down the Soviet empire, given that under the Bush administration, America pursued resembling self-destructive programs-economic and military- that have gutted the country’s financial pillars so badly that even the Russian old guards seem delusional over the possibility of the return of the good old communist days. I don’t want to go into the Iraq war mess that by economic and personnel statistics has been undoubted linked to some of the financial crisis we are faced with; but the problem is as bad in the USA as it is in Europe, Asia and even in Russia. So by my deduction, this is a different issue but of an unprecedented magnitude still baffling the most lucid economists.
However, former President Vladimir Putin with his KGB credentials bracing up for a fulltime come back to the Russian political platform after it was clear to the world that President Dmitry Medvedev was after all his mere proxy, indicates how over carried the Russians are about the situation.
When Vice-President-Elect Joe Biden sounded a warning about Obama being tested in his first six months in office and got hounded for saying so, no body had imagined that few hours after he was declared winner of the presidential election, the Russians would be threatening to deploy nuclear missiles aimed at the Ukraine and other NATO countries. And as if that was not irresponsible enough, they still promised to hook up with Cuba and Venezuela for military activities reminiscent of the confrontational days between Khrushchev and Kennedy in the sixties. Battle frigates from Russian are at this moment in Venezuela with perhaps more destined for Cuba as well.
Of course, the Bush administration has been providing Putin with the compelling stories to help rally Russian support for his new course. The USA’s intention of deploying missile shields in Poland, Ukraine and Czech Republic, countries once known to be strong Russian allies is viewed in Moscow as unacceptable and highly provocative. Coupled with the August armed conflict in Georgia where the Russians are convinced that President Mikhail Shaakashvili’s government is just a puppet regime to the USA and the belief that the crisis in South Ossetia was instigated by America, adds more weight to Putin’s belief that he is well justified to rekindle the cold-war-like psychomotor agitations.
What that will mean in terms of more global armed conflicts and their social, economic and political ramifications will be hard to quantify until they start popping up everywhere in the planet.
Well, Obama shouldn’t take the bait but stick to his foreign policy principles as echoed throughout his campaign. He has consistently said that his administration was not only going to be working closely with governments considered friendly, but will also do everything within its means to befriend those viewed by the Bushes as enemies. War will be his last resort of solving domestic or international problems. So if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran could get it to the point of congratulating Obama for his victory, one must wonder why Putin couldn’t.
The Russians I believe are harboring a hidden agenda for wanting to backpedal to the confrontational past when the tone set by Obama is clearly to fast-forward to a reconciliatory future. I think humanity has gotten enough of that scare politics of superpower threats of nuclear war rhetoric. Already, humanity is at the brink of an irreversible path to self-annihilation, thanks to our greedy habits of destroying out entire habitat, the environment. The rate at which we are destroying the environment with no desire to urgently come together for a reversal of our approach is likened to cancer cells in an organism bent on destroying the very host keeping them alive.
If the Obama administration takes the baits by adopting the confrontational approach from where President Bush left, then that would mean a betrayal of those who elected him and a roadmap for bigger failures with only wars and conflicts dictating his policies.
Even the idea of removing US troops from Iraq to Afghanistan doesn’t sound good to me. Too many innocent Iraqis have been killed, maimed, displaced or driven away from the country, not forgetting the destruction of properties in a mission that was meant to be simpler than what it has turned out to be. American casualty in the war is also beyond logic with over 300,000 soldiers now diagnosed with post-traumatic syndrome disorder. Yet winning the war still seems illusive and too expensive while the US economy hemorrhages on a daily basis.
Invariably, Afghanistan by my assessment will prove to be more difficult than Iraq if the war is continued and not halted soonest. There is no way anyone could beat the Taliban into capitulation. And one must not forget that the Russians who last tried it and failed miserably are still upset with the US for assisting the Mujahideen into defeating them, which could not otherwise have happened. The Soviets lost of that war is still associated with the ultimate collapse of their empire. I may be wrong, but I’m afraid if the war in Afghanistan is not brought to an immediate end through negotiating with the Taliban, the Russians might seize the opportunity to sabotage the US effort there. If for nothing else, at least, the yearning pleasure of a good payback.
Furthermore, by retaining Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, I feel that the war campaign will drag on for as long as he is there. A lot of nice things have been said about the man but if he is to stay just to continue the Bush war policy, then the change expected of the new government will in my view, simply bring more financial problems to the US economy. And that is the last thing an Obama administration needs for a starter.
The same provocation to lure the new administration into deeper war commitment in the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan was echoed by Al-Queda’s number two man Ayman Al-Zawaheri in his latest offensive remarks about Obama being nothing but a house slave. According to some Arab linguists and translators, the actual meaning of the Arabic adjective used by Al-Zawaheri against Obama was worst than a mere house slave. They said it was a racial slur comparable to “Nigger”.
So far as we know, President-Elect Obama has been sounding a lot more reconciliatory than President Bush over how to approach the so-called “war on terror“. Obama said he will close Guantanamo Bay; that he will stop the indefinite incarceration of so-called enemy combatants without charging or trying them; they have been mostly Al-Qaeda members or their affiliates; he will ensure that water boarding or any form of harsh interrogation method used by US security forces on those captured “enemy combatants” that is now considered as torture will stop; nonetheless, Al-Zawaheri had nothing good to say about Obama and his willingness to be reasonable or considerate but to call him a house slave. Al-Zawaheri racial slurs and or attributes wouldn’t surprise some Africans especially, a Gambian friend I had written about in my book- Coup d’etat By The Gambia National Army-who was very bitter in the 1998 Al-Qaeda bomb attack aimed at killing twelve Americans at the US Embassy in Kenya but ended up killing along over two-hundred and fifty Kenyans-black people- but dismissed by the attackers as collateral damage. Did they care about the numerous innocent Kenyan Muslims killed in that blast? Now Al-Zawaheri is upset by what he said was “Obama’s rejection of his Muslim roots from Kenya”. What an irony?
But again Obama should stay on course and avoid the treacherous warpath. Withdrawing from this war doesn’t mean cutting and running but a more responsible approach to a hopeless situation where staying to fight is not a better option. We could be firing precision guided missiles from drones to high profile targets with hopes of killing enemy leaders but the way I see it, the more we kill the more we give them the means to remain resilient. These are people who believe that a better life awaits them after death. In other words suicidal enemy combatants with a bottomless reservoir of voluntary recruits convinced of their martyrdom when killed in a war against “infidels” will be difficult to defeat in any kind of war.
When the ills of racism are discussed in the America, we often tend to forget about the other parts of the world where people of color mean far less of human beings than one could imagine. I still do not understand why in Saudi Arabia, only black men are appointed executioners, who chop off the heads of those sentenced to death by courts? I was really flabbergasted when I learnt about it during a visit to the Holy city of Mecca in 1996.
Well, in the past, a black person in America was by mere prejudice considered as a fraction of a human being-5/8 to be precise-that was when their status was elevated from the category of a beasts of burden to that of a real human being. That was about a century ago; but try the Indians and see how their “cast system” rates the black people in this 21st Century. Economists have been talking about the rapid growth of India’s economy to the point where surplus money in excess of millions of dollars is now invested in space exploration. Yet it looks like they are either pretending or choosing to remain indifferent to the sad reality that over 300 million Indians, mainly blacks live on less than a dollar a day. The awakening of that marginalized crowd could one-day proof to be India’s worst nightmare, if the government doesn’t take aggressive measures to remedy it in their own terms and conditions. In this modern world of the Internet and the extranets, people all across the world are becoming better informed at a pace faster than ever. And with this crisis-ridden world affecting both the rich and poor, old and young, blacks and whites, men and women, peoples’ curiosity level is ever getting elevated for better understanding of what is wrong with the world. The increasing disparity between the rich and the poor is a reality that might trigger more conflicts in the world. We might not be reasonable to the drug cartels if we want them to stop their illicit trade because of its deadly effect to civilized societies but still accept small arms weapon manufacturers making their merchandise and dumping it in poor nations like Africa in particular. Not a single AK47 riffle, 9MM, Rocket Propelled Grenada or Improvised Explosive Device weapon is manufactured in Africa but the continent is in flames with all kinds of arsenals produced from distant weapon factories to the continent and perfectly deemed legal and normal. Where do we think the Somalia pirates are getting the arms, ammunition, speedboats and technical support that is making them so efficient in their hijacking operations? The Somalia I know doesn’t even know how to manufacture a box of matches. But how the world is going to handle that crisis is very important to think about carefully. If those highly efficient pirates are forced into going back to the land with nothing to do with their lives, the world could be shocked with another possible wave of terror carried out by perhaps ordinary criminals claiming to be Islamic militants. That’s everybody food for thought!
General Lauren Nkunda armed to the teeth with foreign weapons and on a rampage in the Congo is a typical example of what I am bothered with about arms trafficking and proliferation in poor nations. In West Africa, South American drug cartels are reported to have opened up new export conduits for cocaine and the like destined for European markets. If that grows bigger than what it is now, arms dealers will soon be looking for markets there for dealers to protect their lucrative markets with the possibility of initiating more crises in an otherwise peaceful region. Producing and distributing the drugs will be deemed illegal but producing and distributing the weapons will not because of the world’s double standard when it comes to means of enriching one’s self.
People have asked me what the change Obama campaigned on means to me, and this is what I have been saying:
1. For him as a black man to be the president of the USA alone is a great change for me. That’s why I think it should be a matter of not what he can do for me but what I can do for him. Let him continue his cool demeanor with that smile in his face that shows a person for humanity and not against it.
2. I also wish to advise him to start looking into the Godly task of stopping all existing wars in the world rather than starting new ones. But this has to go along with trying to bridge the huge gap between the poor and the rich.
3. Instead of focusing too much attention on global nuclear weapons freeze, more attention should be given to small arms manufacturing and their distributions to poor countries where senseless wars are fermented by their availability. Time and again we have seen effective fighters and killers especially, children not trained from conventional military schools but forced into vicious military careers by abductors after their parents are murdered. Governments around the world need his leadership to put a stop to all those problems and work for global peace.
4. I was a soldier for fourteen years before coming to live in the USA, but since I arrived here, events of the world and the people in my life have helped in altering my outlook about the world we live in. Most important of all, I now believe that working for peace and harmony is the only chance we have as a species to live together safely and happily.
In my next article I may explore how African governments should map out a strategy for improvement in the wake of the Barack Obama phenomenon.
** Lt. Colonel Samsudeen Sarr is a US trained military officer and former Commander of The Gambia National Army. He is author of Meet Me In Conakry (A Novel) and Coup D'etat By The Gambia National Army.