Events of 1991 - 7 February 1992

One of the smallest and scariest items it was possible to ferret out of the news in the past fortnight or so was a sentence that just barely caught my eye. This is it. "Twice a week United States U-2 spy planes take off from a base in Saudi Arabia to patrol over Iraq and look for secret weapons sites."

My first thought was, so he's still at it, resisting the United Nations nuclear testing team. Only last Wednesday morning did the large and menacing possibilities of that sentence emerge in a news release from the United Nations headquarters here in New York. Iraq has rejected a United Nations plan for monitoring its armaments industry and has broken off talks about selling oil to pay for imports of vitally needed food and medicines and for compensation to victims of the invasion of Kuwait.

You have to read that opening phrase again to appreciate the full gall, the nerve of this incredible and apparently indestructible tyrant. Iraq has rejected a UN plan. To an outsider, if there is such a thing as an outsider on this globe, that suggests that Saddam Hussein and the United Nations Security Council are equal partners in a social experiment and that it's part of the regulation procedure for one of the partners to put up an interesting proposal and the other to knock it down. Eventually they find a proposal that takes something here, gives something there and they sign an agreement and the parties go off to celebrate. Saddam certainly is acting on that outrageous assumption, that he is an equal partner in a dispute. What he's doing in plain fact is, almost one year after he was forced into a surrender, is to say: I've decided not to comply with the terms I agreed to for ending the Persian Gulf War.

A friend of mine who boasts that he's a total innocent in political affairs asks, can Saddam do that? To which the only answer is, he's doing it. He's Hitler starting to tear up the Versailles Treaty but in double-quick time, less than a year after his shattering defeat. The effect of this move on the United Nations delegates here was first bewilderment, then some brisk private consultations between members of the Security Council, most especially the permanent members whose unanimity made the Gulf War justifiable in the first place and also between members of the fighting Coalition, including, don't forget, Egypt, which after the United States, had the largest military force engaged there in the Gulf.

On Wednesday, the Council met and deplored Iraq's decision to suspend talks about the sales of oil, lamented the consequent loss of humanitarian help, announced that the UN embargo would not be modified in any way and cited serious evidence to show that Iraq is failing to comply with the terms of the ceasefire etc, etc. He's not failing to comply, he's defying the very idea of complying, saying rudely that he does not recognise the Security Council resolutions that embody the terms of the ceasefire and furthermore, he will not make any further declarations on weapons production plans.

Now there was a commission set up to report on the destruction of Iraq's secret nuclear and other facilities and the report details the various tricks used to conceal centrifuge plants. The worst item of the report is the sad confession that while Baghdad was positively known to have factories for making 10 different types of chemical weapons, the United Nations inspectors found only two and, oh yes, Saddam admits he developed plans for biological warfare but he's not going to show them to anybody.

Now either this is an immense bluff or he's prepared to face another war, perhaps quickly, while the United States is busy reducing its armed forces and cutting back on weapons production. Somebody in authority at the Pentagon the other day said: we couldn't possibly mount today the invasion force that was sent to Saudi Arabia. To the Security Council last week, President Bush hinted at more sanctions or stronger measures and late this week the countries involved, the countries of the Coalition, were prepared to say unwillingly, that the Council may be forced, I should think they'd been forced, to consider further steps, which is surely a very pale, tactful euphemism for the second Gulf War.

At the very end of January, the results came in of a survey of world opinion about what were the 10 top news stories of 1991. The method was to poll famous news agencies and the best serious papers in a range of countries around the world and if there was a bias in the choice of countries, it was a deliberate one to go worldwide, for too often in the past, such surveys have been exhaustive for Western Europe and the United States and offhand for the Third World. Two American news services were involved and one British and other editors polled from other countries like Dhaka in Bangladesh, from Costa Rica, from Lima, Peru and through the Associated Press international poll, 90 editors in 42 countries.

The first and perhaps the least surprising thing is that everybody was agreed about the two stories that topped the news of 1991. Either, one the break-up of the Soviet Union and two, the Gulf War or vice versa. After that there is no agreement at all, not even on the third most important item. Or rather two countries agreed, Bangladesh and Peru. They put down as number three, the closing down of BCCI. I imagine if the Scottish islands had been polled, that might have been number one. Overall of course, the survey proves that most countries are interested first in themselves, unless something absolutely massive and totally unpredicted happens, like the collapse of the Soviet Union.

There are some interesting surprises though. The subscribers to the London news service put the Robert Maxwell scandal up as high as number six and Bangladesh squeezes it in as number 10 but with an interesting touch – Robert Maxwell's death and his links with Israel. Nobody else even mentions him.

The most unrelievedly serious list comes those 90 editors in 42 countries, unspecified, but you can be certain that among them the Africans, Middle Easterners and Asians loom large. It's a list you would have expected in another century from one of those Victorian polymaths, who read everything about everywhere over an open atlas… 1, the Gulf War. 2, the Soviet coup attempt. 3, Yugoslavia's civil war. 4, the Middle East peace talks. 5, the end of the Cold War. 6, South Africa dismantles apartheid. 7, the European Community's wrangle over closer political and financial integration. 8, the spread of the Aids epidemic. 9, the Cambodian peace settlement. 10, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. It's by far the most comprehensive, the most adult list and mind, it is the consensus mainly of Middle Eastern, African and Asian readers and viewers.

It's striking that the London news service has two African items and one Asian and the big two American services, the AP and UP have none of either, though American relations with Asia and Asians grow more direct and more indispensable every day. The London service picks multi-party talks in South Africa as the fourth most important story of the year. The assassination of Mr Gandhi as number five and the fall of the Ethiopian and Somalian president as ninth on the list. Lima, Peru, has a fascinating combination: the same first two, the BCCI scandal third, sixth is understandably the cholera epidemic in Latin America, seven, Magic Johnson and world awareness of Aids and, 10, global titillation with the Judge Thomas hearings and the William Kennedy Smith trial. Hong Kong appears unconcerned with Aids as a big news item, though it emphasises its own location by picking as number six and seven on the list, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines and the killer cyclone in Bangladesh.

Everybody, it seems, outside the United States, was sufficiently moved by Mr Gandhi's assassination, to make it one of the top 10 stories of the year. Neither of the two American services mentions it and we come at last to them. I'm afraid, jumping the gun of your judgement, I'm afraid they do confirm the comment of a veritable editor of a famous Far Eastern economic review. The lists of the Associated Press and the United Press International, he says, reveal a "little America" mentality. Anyway, here they are.

Both of course begin with the Gulf War and then the collapse of Communism. I'm skipping number three at the moment, which is the same in both polls. Fourth for the AP is the release of the American hostage, Terry Anderson. Fourth for the UP is the American recession. The AP grants the end of the Cold War sixth place, seven, ominously, Aids because it's the 10th anniversary. (It is something of a shock to realise that it's been only 10 years since the first identified case of Aids was reported from San Francisco.) The AP's seventh item is improbably like Lima, Peru's, Magic Johnson's retirement from championship basketball, after announcing that he'd tested positive for HIV. But to the editors polled by both the American Associated Press and the United Press International, taking in together 225 editors, the number three news story of the world was, astonishingly, the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearings and his accusation by the Southern law professor, Anita Hill.

I really doubt that the sex element was paramount in this. All Senate hearings are dramatic but this, like many another Senate hearing, like the McCarthy hearings of the '50s, the Watergate Senate hearings of the '70s, the Thomas hearings were about human beings recalling or defending themselves against an act of betrayal and the emotion of such hearings is so tense and naked, that you never forget them. There is one shattering news event that didn't make it in 1991 because it didn't happen until last week but if it had happened last year, it certainly would have been listed way up there. For the bankruptcy of Macy's marked the end of civilisation as we knew it.

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