Pope John Paul II Dies and Benedict XVI is Elected, Syria Withdraws from Lebanon After 29 Years and Live 8 Demands Justice for Africa on the Eve of Gleneagles

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 July 2005 | Reporting Period: 3 April – 2 July 2005

Quarterly Briefing

• Pope John Paul II, who died on April 2 on the eve of our reporting period, is buried on April 8 in a ceremony attended by over four million pilgrims in Rome; his successor, the German theologian Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is elected as Pope Benedict XVI on April 19 in the conclave’s second day; the transition marks the end of the longest and most globally influential papal reign since Pius IX.
• Syria completes its military withdrawal from Lebanon on April 26, ending a 29-year military presence; the withdrawal is the direct consequence of massive popular protests — the Cedar Revolution — following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on February 14; Lebanon holds parliamentary elections in May-June that produce an anti-Syrian majority for the first time in decades.
• Live 8, a series of ten free concerts across the G8 nations on July 2, draws 1,000 performers and tens of millions of viewers to demand debt cancellation and increased aid for Africa ahead of the G8 Gleneagles summit beginning July 6; the event, organised by Bob Geldof twenty years after Live Aid, is the largest music event in history and places Africa’s economic justice at the centre of political debate.
• Iraq’s transitional government holds office following January’s elections; the drafting of a permanent constitution is underway but proceeding slowly amid continuing insurgent violence; car bomb attacks are averaging more than one per day; the total coalition death toll passes 1,700; the insurgency shows no signs of diminishing and is acquiring an increasingly sectarian character.
• Uzbekistan’s government massacres hundreds of protesters in Andijan on May 13 when security forces fire on demonstrators who had stormed a prison to release political prisoners; the Karimov government claims the protesters were Islamic extremists; international observers estimate 500-1,000 killed; the United States, which maintains an air base in Uzbekistan, is caught between strategic interest and human rights obligation.
• China announces on July 2 that it will revalue the renminbi and move to a managed float against a basket of currencies, ending its decade-long peg to the US dollar; the revaluation is an initial 2.1 per cent and modest in economic terms, but its significance as a shift in China’s exchange rate policy and its implications for global trade imbalances are substantial.

Prologue: Succession, Transition and the Demands of Justice

The second quarter of 2005 was shaped by three political transitions, each of which carried implications well beyond the immediate event. The death of John Paul II ended a 26-year papal reign that had been one of the most politically significant in modern history; his successor would inherit both the institutional challenges of a Church in numerical decline in the West and his predecessor’s extraordinary moral legacy. Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution produced Syria’s withdrawal from a country it had dominated for nearly three decades; whether Lebanon could build a functioning sovereign state from a population divided among eighteen religious communities and a history of civil war was a question that the withdrawal opened but did not answer. And Live 8’s global concert on July 2 — timed precisely to mobilise public opinion before the Gleneagles summit the following day — placed the demand for African justice at the top of the G8’s agenda in a way that direct lobbying by African governments had never quite achieved. For the Caribbean, all three developments carried some resonance; the Gleneagles commitments on debt relief were most directly significant.

Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution and Caribbean Democratic Solidarity

The Cedar Revolution — the wave of peaceful mass demonstrations that filled Beirut’s Martyr’s Square following Hariri’s assassination — was one of the decade’s most encouraging democratic moments. It demonstrated that a fractured, multi-confessional Arab society could mobilise across communal lines around a shared political demand: an end to Syrian military occupation and the restoration of Lebanese sovereignty. Syria’s withdrawal on April 26, under combined domestic and international pressure, appeared to vindicate the peaceful protest model. But Lebanon’s politics remained deeply divided; Hezbollah and Amal performed strongly in the May-June elections; the UN investigation into Hariri’s assassination was implicating Syrian intelligence; and the structural conditions for renewed conflict — armed non-state actors, regional proxy competition, external interference — remained entirely in place.

Africa, Gleneagles and Caribbean Development Parallels

The Live 8 concerts and the approaching Gleneagles G8 summit placed African development at the centre of the world’s attention in a way that Caribbean diplomats observed with a mixture of solidarity and strategic interest. The debt relief and aid commitments being negotiated at Gleneagles — which would formally be agreed on July 8, after our publishing date — included provisions for HIPC debt cancellation that would benefit several Caribbean nations alongside African ones. The Caribbean’s development finance challenges — high debt-to-GDP ratios, vulnerability to natural disasters, limited export diversification — shared structural characteristics with those of the African states whose advocates had been most effective at securing international attention. CARICOM’s capacity to make its own case within G8 and UN development forums was strengthened by the visibility that Geldof and Bono’s campaign had given to development justice as a global concern.

Looking Ahead

The G8 Gleneagles summit, meeting as this edition is published, will determine whether the development commitments mobilised by Live 8 translate into binding government pledges; the early signals are cautiously encouraging. Iraq’s constitutional process must produce a draft that the Sunni community can accept; the alternative is a deepening insurgency with no political exit. Syria’s formal withdrawal from Lebanon does not end its intelligence presence or its patronage of Hezbollah; the next phase of the Lebanese-Syrian relationship will be more covert and potentially more destabilising than the overt military one. And the hurricane season that begins in June is forecast to be above average; the Caribbean’s preparedness for a major storm, following Hurricane Ivan’s devastating passage through the southern islands in 2004, will be tested again.

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

Follow Jamaica Homes on Youtube @jamaicahomes and Instagram @jamaica_homes and on Facebook @jamaicahomesnews Send us a message or email us at onlinefeedback@jamaica-homes.com or editor@jamaica-homes.com