THE GREAT BLACK HOPE:

MOZAMBIQUE BEATS ALL (RALPH PETERS, July 19, 2004 , NY Post)

I just returned from a stroll through Mozambique with my faith in the human spirit reinforced. Forever starved for tales of woe, our media only tell us of Africa's crises — the last time Mozambique made headlines was during the disastrous flooding in 2000. Yet, along with the continent's undeniable problems, there's more than one success story.

After a long civil war — fomented by the old South African apartheid regime — Mozambique almost miraculously converted its warring factions into political parties and held elections. With help from the international community, a model demobilization program turned tens of thousands of unruly soldiers into law-abiding citizens. Even the United Nations came through, removing countless landmines from the countryside.

When the Portuguese revolution of 1974 opened the door to independence, Mozambique was appallingly undeveloped and overwhelmingly illiterate. Then-fashionable socialist theories of regime organization and economics didn't help the new state.

But the country did have one advantage that Western observers misread: The leader of the liberation movement, Samora Machel, was more than a doctrinaire leftist.

He honestly believed in racial equality. And in social justice. He wanted to build a country, not a string of palaces.

At a time when African nationalists, from Idi Amin to Joseph Mobutu, were driving out the many hues of talent their countries desperately needed, Machel envisioned a multi-racial society that prefigured the achievement of Nelson Mandela.

Machel didn't want to see his country re-colonized by the East bloc or the West. He built his own path. The result? The whites-only South African government assassinated him, luring his aircraft into a hillside with a false navigational beacon.

But the seeds he planted took root. When socialist policies failed, Machel's successors switched to a market economy. As in all poor countries, corruption threatened to complete the country's ruin, but enough good men and women fought for the rule of law to move the society forward — including a courageous journalist, Carlos Cardoso, who paid with his life for taking on a Pakistani criminal family whose tentacles had penetrated the government.

Instead of blaming anyone else for their problems, the people of Africa's poorest country rolled up their sleeves and went to work. By the end of the century, Mozambique was posting the continent's highest economic growth rates.

And here the Realists tell us that Africans aren't capable of or interested in such things.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 21, 2004 7:38 AM