On the world stage another tragic drama is being played out in Libya. Luckily for Tunisia and Egypt, their leaders quickly saw the wisdom of demitting office before the protesters could conclude that they should resort to force to remove them. Unluckily for the Libyan rebels, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi must have thought “Hold on a minute! These rebels don’t know how to use the weapons they’ve captured, and they’re not properly organised. Even I, who everyone believes to be crazy, can ruthlessly crush these idiots.”

The words and phrases – dictator, corruption, repression, lack of human rights, injustice, poverty, waste of resources, extra-judicial killings, political prisoners, massacre, poverty, and then, naturally, humanitarian crisis, are commonly associated with long-suffering, poor and oppressed people. I think we are seeing too many of these applying to our country, Jamaica.

That Libya was, until a couple of weeks ago, on the United Nations Human Rights Council, might seem a little strange to most of us, considering their record. However, first remember a Caribbean prime minister said on TV a week or so ago something to the effect that, sure we have a Libyan embassy, Mr Gaddafi is not a nice fellow, but big countries like the USA and a few others do the same thing, so why shouldn’t we? Second, I think the balloting that got Libya on to the Human Rights Council is secret. I think that it might be interesting to see (if we could, but I don’t think we can) which poor countries around the world, who have Libyan embassies, and have been receiving significant grants or low-interest loans, or buy oil from Libya, voted for Libya. That might explain it.

To prevent such a travesty from happening again I think the United Nations should, as a rule, not have secret balloting for such bodies.

I strongly believe that James F Toole who spoke of “mad leader disease” got it right, speaking at the World Congress of Neurology in London, in June 2000, where he was reported as having said “Never forget that war begins in the minds of men.” And that leaders are granted unparalleled powers over resources, including weapons of mass destruction, and their influence on public citizens cannot be overestimated.

This is self-evident. Unless you happen to be deaf, dumb, blind, and live under a rock.

Generally, what should the world do? Do nothing, and watch thousands of innocents die at the hands of the “mad leader”? It should of course be pointed out that if you look carefully, most of those bleating about “interference in the internal affairs” of the country in question, themselves have repressive or dictatorial regimes. Aha! You may say.

Looking at Hitler in Germany before World War II, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Gaddafi in Libya, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Kim Jong Il in North Korea and, so many others; was it not, and, is it not clear that these leaders have or had being going, to put it mildly, “crazy” for quite a while?

They have been responsible for the death of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions by various means; starvation, denial of the cause of AIDS, and caused devastation of a country’s social and physical structures, even whole countries. Those countries busy making, or who have developed nuclear weapons, like North Korea and Iran have “mad leaders” who are almost certain to eventually, as they say, “nuke” a neighbour, or give some nasty terrorists a nuclear bomb or two.

We now live in a world where natural resources are being rapidly depleted. I don’t think we can afford to waste these depleting resources and time on war and strife, when we should be concentrating on, dare I say, saving the world from climate change and resource depletion. Or even asteroids coming from space to smash us into extinction like the dinosaurs, millions of years ago.

Luckily for Libya, those who can, have at last started doing something concrete, since the mad leader and his tyranny would likely rise again without concerted action. If he were to be allowed to succeed, the later monstrous cost, perhaps in terms of a successful detonation of an atom bomb by terrorists supported by the mad leader, and the loss of the potential of the repressed Libyan people would make the current cost seem trivial.

So, what is needed from the United Nations (because they are generally accepted throughout the world) immediately after the removal of the “mad leader” are:

1) A post-revolution handbook, giving general guidelines as to:

* How to achieve recovery after the overthrow of the “mad leader”

* How to maintain order until everything can be straightened out

* How to set up a new constitution, a kind of “Constitution Writing for Dummies”

* How to set up a fair and transparent justice system (We could do with this one here in Jamaica), etc.

2) UN support to keep essential services going, for an agreed fixed period, after which the supported country would try to stand on its own. The composition of a “Post-Mad Leader Removal Reconstruction Team” should be: administrators, engineers (to get the public utilities working again), public health specialists, logistics specialists (to get materials moving efficiently), communications specialists, specialist judges, etc.

A reason for the UN to be selected to act in this manner is that many of the skills required already exist in its many agencies. Of course, the UN needs a bit of internal housecleaning.

One major consideration for all countries is that there ought to be a clause in their constitutions for the removal of “mad leaders” as a kind of conflict and waste of resources. This should involve annual psychiatric exams to see if they have fallen sick with “Mad leader disease”, and procedures for the orderly removal and replacement and treatment of the ill. (Seeing the antics of our politicians recently, I wonder how many of our politicians would be diagnosed with “Mad leader disease”?) A useful practice that I think Jamaicans should seriously consider where there are, say, two public figures who have said things, one of which must be a lie, or members of the public who accuse law enforcement personnel of (often) serious offences is to offer both sides the opportunity to take a polygraph test, the results to be made public. This would reduce the incidence of lying in public, and the perception that, similar to jokes about practitioners of a certain profession, they are lying if their lips are moving. Hmmm.

hmc14@cwjamaica.com