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                                                                                MAN OF THE YEAR, Page 44

BILL CLINTON

The World's Other Newsmakers


By JAMES WALSH


    Karl Marx was a bearded Jehovah thundering through the
industrial age, but in outlook he would have been more at home
in knee breeches and a powdered wig. Like Jefferson and
Rousseau, he was a creature of the Enlightenment who viewed
history through a prism of universal principles and causes.
Nationalism, he believed, was an outmoded impulse that the world
would soon forget.

    Poor Marx: one more prophecy destined for the dustbin.
Poor world: one more menace to face down. No sooner did the
steamroller of communism run out of steam than the meat grinder
of nationalism began cranking up. The great year of liberation,
1989, gave way more fully in 1992 to localized fissures, war and
outright anarchy.

    Nostalgists for the cold war -- there are some -- like to
point out that the global ancien regime at least had an
architecture to it. The dismantlement of that fearful symmetry,
however, has provided an opening for freedoms where few or none
had existed for generations. In TIME's selection of
international Newsmakers of the Year, two stand out because of
the resolute ways in which they have tried to build on
democratic opportunities in Mexico and Hong Kong. The other two
are faces of the post-cold war world's micro-apocalypses: the
ringmaster of hostilities in the Balkan slaughterhouse and a
victim of Somalia's primal chaos.

    EUROPE
    The Butcher of The Balkans

    SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC is the high priest of "ethnic cleansing"

    Just a few years ago, any number of countries doted on
Yugoslavia as the Cinderella of the communist world.
Yugoslavia's rags-to-sufficiency story inspired other developing
nations, while its practice of a mere bikini kind of communism
fascinated the West. If any crisis lay in waiting, outsiders
believed, it would arise from a superpower duel for Yugoslavia's
hand in marriage. The postwar regime created by Josip Broz Tito
had been Europe's only Marxist government to resist Stalin's
importune advances. Albania broke out of the Soviet bloc 20
years later, but the cold war rivalry's choice prize in southern
Europe remained Tito's state.

    Yugoslavia's fate has been to show how far history can
defy expectations. Today the unraveled federation of southern
Slavs is Europe's ugly sister -- a cockpit of massacre and
rapine animated wholly by internal grudges. The violence that
has spread from Croatia to Bosnia and Herzegovina is not only
a disaster in its own right and a torment to the world's
conscience, it is also a cautionary example of the ethnic blood
feuds that could yet engulf nearby parts of postcommunist
Europe.

    In this drama of substantive symbolism, no one has played
more of a commanding role than the man who came to power in the
Balkans preaching ethnic hatred: Slobodan Milosevic, the
51-year-old President of Serbia. The degree to which he has
instigated domestic strife has made him the embodiment of an
older European scourge: the spirit of tribalism, which has begun
to threaten much of the Continent again.

    In many ways, Milosevic's career has paralleled the slow,
unnoticed burning of the nationalist time bomb's long fuse. A
run-of-the-mill communist apparatchik for many years, the former
law student gradually gained prominence after the 1980 death of
Tito, whose iron grip had stifled the expression of ethnic
loyalties. In 1984 Milosevic became president of the Belgrade
city committee, rising two years later to membership in the
Serbian party presidency. Communism was losing its legitimacy,
though, and he sensed the need for a new focus if he were to
retain power. In 1989 he won Serbia's presidency by trampling
on Tito's key taboo and inflaming grievances against a cultural
minority.

    Milosevic's maiden venture in hatemongering was to target
Kosovo. Because ethnic Albanians make up 90% of the population
of this southernmost, upland province of Serbia, it had enjoyed
considerable autonomy for 15 years. Along with the heavily
ethnic-Hungarian province of Vojvodina in the far north, Kosovo
even had its own representative in the collective federal
presidency.

    Belgrade's super-Serb railed against Kosovo's Albanians in
the manner that Hitler voiced outlandish complaints about all
the supposed injustices visited on Germans by Poland and
Czechoslovakia: that is, Milosevic accused a politically weak
people of persecuting Serbs, Yugoslavia's dominant nationality.
That the province also happens to be the Serbs' proud homeland
of old, a subject of folklore and popular sentiment, made his
message a high-voltage provocation. He proceeded to strip Kosovo
of its privileges and to suppress local Albanian rights. A
European diplomat in Belgrade calls him "the man who let the
nationalist genie out of the bottle."

    Milosevic's eye for the main chance also served him when
communism performed its vanishing act all around him. Renaming
his party Socialist, he managed to stay in the saddle after
every other Marxist strong man in Central and Eastern Europe had
been toppled. But it was when Slovenia and Croatia seceded from
Yugoslavia last year that Milosevic's real talents for mischief
came to life. He charged that an independent Croatia, which had
been a Nazi puppet state during World War II, represented "some
kind of restoration of fascism." Because the Axis-allied
Croatian leadership had systematically killed Serbs, Gypsies and
Jews by the hundreds of thousands under the German occupation,
Croats today, according to Milosevic, threatened Serbs on their
territory with genocide. His 1989 rallying cry to fellow Serbs
about Kosovo -- "no one will ever beat you again" -- became the
cause for war.

    Long since then, of course, hostilities have spread from
Croatia, where at least 10,000 people were killed, to the
charnel house and moral wasteland that is Bosnia today. By
cautious estimates, at least 19,000 Bosnians, mostly Slavic
Muslims, have died -- many of them in the capital, Sarajevo --
as a result of a ferocious land-grab campaign by Serbs in the
mountainous republic. Supported rhetorically by Milosevic and
armed by the heavily Serb-officered Yugoslav army, the
insurgents have shelled, burned, looted, massacred and raped
their way to control of about 70% of Bosnian territory.
Altogether, nearly 1.5 million refugees have fled the lands that
used to compose Yugoslavia.

    What is left of the federation may be only a token
alliance between Serbia and little Montenegro, but it affords
a convenient cover for international purposes. In mid-1992
"Slobo," as the Serbian leader is popularly known, engineered
the return of American self-made pharmaceutical tycoon Milan
Panic, a Yugoslav emigre, to become federal Prime Minister and
a respectable face in the Balkan killing fields. Panic's
eventual mutiny in this role has illustrated not only how
impossible the job is but also the extent to which the many
decent or at least exhausted Serbs want to silence the drums of
nationalism.

    While Milosevic campaigned for re-election in recent weeks
by assuring his flabbergasted countrymen that U.N.-imposed
economic sanctions on Serbia have had no effect -- in reality,
industrial production is down one-third and unemployment is
approaching 40% -- Panic ran against him on an end-the-war
platform. In the end, Milosevic by all accounts resorted to
outrageous propaganda and vote rigging to clinch the Dec. 20
election, suggesting that the strong man, while still popular,
is no universal hero at home.

    In one of his typically nonconformist essays, Bertrand
Russell once dissected the fallacy of regarding oppressed
peoples as morally superior. The fact that they are tyrannized,
the British philosopher observed, does not mean that they will
perform wonders of nobility and high-mindedness once given their
freedom. On the contrary: as unfolding events are proving,
communism, even Tito's diluted version, enforced a denial of
base instincts that have now burst out all over Central and
Eastern Europe. Slovaks are parting ways with Czechs, whatever
the fundamental senselessness of a national split, because of
longstanding grudges. In Hungary, Istvan Csurka, vice president
of the ruling Democratic Forum, has written a magazine piece in
which he inveighs against a supposed Jewish-liberal conspiracy
and condemns the "genetic causes" -- read Gypsies -- of what he
sees as Hungary's deterioration. In eastern Germany, small bands
of racist skinheads sporting Nazi symbols have brutalized
Gypsies, Turks, Vietnamese and other alleged Untermenschen.

    In the former Soviet Union, nationalism is also trying to
stage a comeback under the banner of an ill-assorted and, so
far, largely feckless breed of would-be strong men. Serbia's
President is the leading exemplar of self-determination's ugly
side today -- but Slobodan Milosevic hardly marches alone.

    AFRICA
    The Offspring Of Anarchy

    IBRAHIM ALI MOHAMMED symbolizes Somalia's anguish

    Most days he spends curled up on the concrete floor of a
room for orphans in the feeding center of Baidoa, a dot on the
map of Somalia's south-central hunger zone and a place better
known today as the City of Death. More bones than flesh, Ibrahim
Ali Mohammed wears a cotton wrap, under which his adolescent
frame is hardly discernible. Around the boy's neck hangs a thin
red-and-blue string, a crude charm that his mother fastened
there years ago to ward off evil spirits. The talisman has not
helped his family. Over the past year, Ibrahim's mother, father
and three brothers and one of his sisters have all died of
starvation, victims of the seventh circle of hell that Somalia
has come to represent.

    On a good day the boy remembers his family's life before
the great dying began. "We had a big farm," he recalls. "Ten
acres. Cattle and goats and many camels. I remember many
animals." Then, one morning in August 1991, several dozen
heavily armed soldiers loyal to Mohamed Siad Barre, the
country's deposed dictator, stormed into Ibrahim's home village
of War Hawein, 10 1/2 miles northwest of Baidoa. The troops had
taken to foraging for food and were laying waste whatever
population centers they stumbled across. With a strangely
impassive face, the 15-year-old survivor relates what happened:
"They were looting and capturing the women and raping them. I
ran into the forest. They were shooting everywhere. They were
shooting without reason."

    Ibrahim's could be a story from any civil war that has
spun out of control. His face is one of millions like it in a
land where extreme suffering and deprivation have already taken
at least 300,000 lives. Somalia's tragedy, however, is no
garden-variety breakdown of authority. A country that became
independent 32 years ago with an incalculable advantage over
most other emergent African states -- an ethnically homogeneous
population -- Somalia today is only a geographical term.
Whatever constituted nationhood has disappeared, shattered by
a form of turmoil that surpasses understanding.

    Siad Barre's 22-year rule emphasized the higher principles
of Marx and Islam in place of blood ties. "Tribalism divides,"
went his slogan. "Socialism unites." When he fell from power
with a bang two years ago, rebel armies and gangs of hoodlums
began drawing distinctions of kinship where they could find
them, from cutthroat clan loyalties down to a shoot-first
attitude toward any stranger on the road. As much as any other
casualty, Ibrahim represents Somalia's claim on the world's
conflicting emotions in the face of an ultimate form of social
fission and decay.

    At the Isha shelter in Baidoa, in the middle of the
country's most ravaged landscape, Ibrahim has been recovering
slowly on a steady diet of gruel and biscuits. He still wears
the red bracelet that denotes serious malnutrition, entitling
bearers to extra doses of milk and Unimix, a paste of oil, beans
and grain. Because teenagers bounce back from the brink of
starvation less easily than young children, the boy is taking
longer to recuperate than most of his orphan-room companions.

    Still, he is alive, and that says something about the
international relief efforts that rushed in to help save Somalis
well before the U.S. Marines landed. Late in December, American
and French troops, acting nominally under the U.N.'s aegis,
reached Baidoa with their lifeline of support for relief
agencies such as Irish Concern, which runs the Isha center.
While the missions of mercy are freer to ply their trade as a
result, all the armed horsepower and men cannot put Somalia back
together again. Ibrahim's plight is a metaphor for the moribund
national culture.

    When the marauders entered War Hawein 16 months ago, they
forced Ibrahim's father, a village elder, to reveal where the
grains and seeds were stored. Over the next two months, other
gangs attacked War Hawein to loot whatever was left, finally
burning the village down with the exception of a few huts. The
elders gathered to plan a strategy of defense, but the weapons
they possessed were pitifully inadequate -- mostly bows and
arrows. Says Ibrahim: "My older brother had a small gun, but not
a very good one." With no food and no seeds to plant for the
next growing season, the family began scavenging for food. The
boy recalls, "We were eating grass, roots and the dried skins
of cows" -- livestock that had already perished. By the end of
1991, his mother had died of hunger, and not long afterward
Ibrahim's father died as well. Two men carried the body outside
the village and "buried him like a chicken," the son says.
Throughout early 1992, War Hawein and countless other hamlets
like it were reduced to ghost towns.

    In July, Ibrahim and his little sister Elmio, the family's
sole survivors, were sitting in their hut when two men arrived
with the news that "airplanes filled with food" had landed in
Baidoa. The youngsters set out with 15 others on a trek to the
regional capital, moving slowly down a road littered with
corpses. The next morning a foreign nurse found the brother and
sister, both naked, lying on the outskirts of town. Says Halima
Edow, a Somali woman who helped care for the youth: "Every day
we thought he was going to die."

    "When they first come in, they just sit and stare at the
walls," explains Francis O'Keeffe, Irish Concern's medical
director. "We really have a lot of trouble convincing them to
eat." With an inexhaustible supply of time and attention,
perhaps hundreds of thousands of other Ibrahims in Somalia may
make it and begin to take an interest in the future again. The
world left them by their elders does not allow a lot of room for
hope, though. A fiercely proud people, Somalis were once among
Africa's most promising children. Of Ibrahim, Edow says, "Look
at his eyes. They are very well now." The same cannot be said
for his country.

    LATIN AMERICA
    The Real Revolutionary

    CARLOS SALINAS DE GORTARI is reversing Mexico's history

    On a recent speaking tour of several Mexican cities,
Mikhail Gorbachev stressed that economic and political reform
must proceed hand in hand. The message was not exactly what
Carlos Salinas de Gortari might have wanted to hear. Mexico's
hands-on President since December 1988, Salinas continues to
insist that economic liberalization must come first if Mexico
is to avoid a Soviet-style upheaval. The theory also suits his
Institutional Revolutionary Party (or P.R.I.) which still
blanches at the prospect of surrendering the monopoly on
national power it has commanded since 1929. Yet his difference
of opinion with the Kremlin's former jefe surely did not lose
Salinas any sleep: after all, he enjoys a public approval rating
of 80%, while Gorbachev is out of a job.

    Perhaps the former Soviet President should have visited
Mexico while he still had a Kremlin office. Long a one-party
state in which the ruling establishment dominates the national
economy, Mexico is shifting historical gears with the greatest
of ease -- at least compared with the dissolved Soviet Union.
It has passed from the panicky, debt-laden, nearly unmanageable
'80s to a straight and orderly course offering high promise for
the next century. Mexicans have not abandoned the corporatist
state entirely, but more than other Latin Americans they have
broken the shackles of the past.

    "Mexico is on the crest of a wave," asserts Denise
Dresser, a political scientist at the Autonomous Technological
Institute of Mexico. The nation, she believes, could soon become
the Latin counterpart of Eastern Asia's newly industrialized
economies, such as South Korea and Taiwan. Why? Because Mexico,
according to Dresser, is a regional "paragon of stability" that
has been able to "push through vast reforms without discontent."

    Those successes in the leap to the free market, moreover,
are largely due to the man at the top. An astute planner who
admires Asia's success stories -- he once sent his children to
a private Japanese school in Mexico City -- Salinas has almost
single-handedly energized a nation that used to be jealous and
resentful of the dynamism exhibited north of the border.
Two-thirds of the way through the single six-year term allowed
him by law, the reformer in chief has already won himself a
place in Mexican history books.

    Salinas may look mild-mannered, but he is a stickler for
efficiency and demands results. At the outset of his term, he
took advantage of low expectations, first by projecting a
forceful commitment to change and then by using it to make his
reforms work. "Salinas forced us to be competitive," says
Dresser. "He transformed Mexico from an inward-looking country
to an outward-looking one." At the same time, he challenged the
P.R.I.'s entrenched power structure. Taking his case for
modernization directly to the people, he bypassed sclerotic
government and party bureaucracies to sell the electorate
directly on his vision of the Mexican Dream.

    Nothing exemplifies that shift in outlook so much as
Salinas' most ambitious experiment: the North American Free
Trade Agreement, linking Mexico with the U.S. and Canada. Signed
by the three heads of government on Dec. 17, NAFTA aims to take
the continent giant steps toward the formation of a common
market in which Mexico will play an important role. The concept
flies in the face of the protective, introspective economic
nationalism that characterized Mexico for most of the 20th
century, yet it came about largely at Salinas' initiative.
Though NAFTA still faces a tough hurdle in the U.S. Congress,
oddsmakers favor its passage, and the free-trade regime, due to
commence on Jan. 1, 1994, stands to give Mexico the
supercharging needed for real lift-off. Says Jonathan Heath,
general director of Macro Asesoria Economica, one of the leading
business consulting firms: "With Salinas, we have confidence we
didn't have before -- but we're aware of how fragile all this
is."

    The caution is wise, even though Mexico's progress is
impressive. The triple-digit inflation that prevailed through
the 1980s dropped to about 11% in 1992, and experts believe the
rate will fall to half that in about three years. Deregulation
is under way, the budget is balanced, and the crippling $103.7
billion foreign-debt burden has been refinanced. Once again the
country is rated a good credit risk. Mexico is also the largest
recipient of foreign investment in Latin America, having
attracted $24.9 billion during Salinas' four years in office.

    For every rosy figure, though, another statistic reflects
Mexico's many remaining hardships. Its $19 billion trade deficit
has senior officials "scared to death," according to a
high-level foreign diplomat. Private credit is tight, with
interest rates around 20%, and a general economic slowdown to
about 3% annual growth -- an enviable performance in most other
places today -- has boosted urban underemployment to two-fifths
of the 35 million-member work force. Over the past decade, the
minimum wage has declined in real value by one-third. Getting
enough to eat remains a serious effort for more than half of
Mexico's 87 million people, 15% of whom control 70% of the
national wealth. The pyramid-like power structure has opened up
to some political competition, but not enough.

    Without the support of Washington, Salinas would probably
not have been able to go as far as he has so fast. Says a
foreign diplomat: "The U.S. prefers Spain to Bangladesh on its
border. It's that simple." But the prospect has also required
extraordinary vision and force of will. It may take two
generations for Salinas' reforms to produce a full harvest of
plenty, but in the meantime he has afforded Mexicans the ballast
of hope and the beacon of pride.

    ASIA
    Hong Kong's Brash Viceroy

    CHRISTOPHER PATTEN fights, perhaps quixotically, for
democracy

    Richard Nixon's favorite film 20 years ago was Patton, a
production with which he may have regaled his newfound friends
from China. In the movie, George C. Scott plays General George
Patton as a perversely beguiling superpatriot who struts with
swagger stick and ivory-handled pistols in front of a huge
American flag. In real life, the World War II commander outraged
Americans by slapping a G.I. hospitalized for combat fatigue --
post-traumatic stress disorder, as today's description would
have it. Patton's posthumous reputation was largely redeemed by
the film, however: the cinematic general is still bullheaded,
but he also comes across as a man of vision, depth and moral
complexity out of step with his time.

    Will a White House incumbent years hence screen for his
Chinese guests a movie called Patten? Stranger things have
happened, but the likelihood is next to nil. For one thing,
Christopher Patten, Britain's new Governor of Hong Kong, is no
swaggerer. In office only six months, the soft-spoken career
politician and former British Conservative Party chairman looks
ill-suited for heroics. More important, he faces a distinctly
uphill battle with history: as a result of his modest effort to
extend democracy in the crown colony before China's 1997
resumption of sovereignty, Patten has proved to be about as
welcome to Bei jing's palate as pepper in the plum sauce. In
China's view, the only acceptable film version of Patten's life
would parade him before a huge Union Jack that collapses on his
head.

    The new Governor's mission is in dead earnest, though.
Appointed to serve as the last British viceroy of Hong Kong,
Patten, Prime Minister John Major's close friend and
election-campaign strategist, seems determined to cut a better
deal for the colony's 5.9 million people. After Beijing crushed
the Tiananmen Square protests in mid-1989, Hong Kong lapsed into
a deepening sense of cynical resignation about China's promised
"high degree of autonomy" and respect for civil freedoms after
the 1997 transfer. Scarcely had he arrived at Government House
in Hong Kong, when Patten, 48, delivered the equivalent of a
slap to the shell-shocked patient. He challenged the status quo
with a limited but novel plan to widen democratic
representation.

    The offer to fortify the colony with the tonic of greater
popular say in government won him instant favor among a large
share of Hong Kong's edgy millions. It also made him an instant
pariah across the border, where official fear of political
contamination by "peaceful evolution" is acute in the wake of
the Soviet Union's demise. So passionately has the People's
Republic sought to demonize Patten that an unwary consumer of
the party line might think him hardly human. Wen Wei Po, a
pro-Beijing daily in Hong Kong, sneered that the last viceroy
was aspiring to become the colony's "God of Democracy." Wrote
a Wen Wei Po columnist: "His politician's style of being
perfidious is completely incompatible with Oriental values and
morals."

    China has put the Governor in the deep freeze. On his
first official trip to Beijing in October, no high-level
authority would see him. Instead, Lu Ping, the director of the
Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, delivered stern ultimatums
about what China would do if Patten did not back down; it would
refuse, for example, to honor any contracts awarded for Hong
Kong's planned $16 billion port expansion and new international
airport. Moreover, any planes leaving the airport would be
denied entry into the mainland's airspace.

    Perhaps what really infuriated Beijing's gerontocrats is
that Patten has managed to foil them at their own game. Chinese
officials are adept at being faithful to the letter of an
agreement while squeezing out maximum advantage from between the
lines. After promising that Hong Kong representatives would have
ample say in the formulation of a post-1997 Basic Law, or local
constitution, China in the end ignored the considered options
and produced a highly conservative plan. The blueprint calls for
keeping the 60-member legislature essentially a debating club,
reserving most of the seats for pliable representatives of
business, industry and the professions.

    What Patten did was work within the formula to find scope
for extending democracy anyway. He proposed that all employees,
from chairman of the board to night watchman, be allowed an
equal vote in choosing the legislature's occupational
representatives. He also called for lowering the voting age from
21 to 18 -- a prospect that Beijing apparently hates. One thing
that seemed to seal the proposal's doom, however, was a Hong
Kong newspaper's opinion survey conducted across the border in
bustling Guangdong province. The unscientific telephone canvas
found that Patten had higher name recognition than the
provincial governor and that the southern mainlanders favored
Patten's political ideas by a wide margin.

    China's economic threats have nonetheless rattled the Hong
Kong stock market, and local anxieties have eroded public
enthusiasm for Patten's proposals. Businessmen in particular are
balking as the depth of Beijing's opposition sinks in. When it
comes to foreign policy, says a Beijing journalist, "China needs
to win one battle, and this is it." Patten, the man, is
certainly not counting on Patten, the movie. But if his shock
therapy succeeds, his political vision may yet be redeemed.