Madagascar Faces a Political Devolution

AMBOHIBAO, Madagascar —  Laurette Rasoarinanga was overjoyed to see her two younger brothers again.

As a brass band blared, she and scores of her neighbors wrapped them in expensive new robes, daubed them with pungent perfume, slaughtered an ox in their honor and spent the day happily hugging and dancing with the enshrouded bones.

They gave the guests a final, shoulder-borne parade as twilight fell. Then the two brothers’ skeletons--and those of 38 other deceased villagers given similar tribute--were quickly resealed inside the concrete tomb where they have lain since their deaths long ago.

Dancing with the dead is a common custom in Madagascar. It is also an apt analogy for this country’s current political prognosis.

By most accounts, Didier Ratsiraka, the military dictator who ruled and ruined this impoverished island nation in the Indian Ocean from 1975 until 1993, is expected to regain power after today’s presidential election. The top two contenders will face a run-off if none of the 15 candidates wins a majority.

Ratsiraka’s first reign was a disaster. Per capita income fell by half. Literacy rates plummeted. Infant mortality rocketed.

His closest ally, and ostensible model of economic and social development, was the late Kim Il Sung’s tyrannical Communist regime in North Korea.

“The Western countries abandoned me as if I was the devil, a dictator, the worst dictator in the world,” Ratsiraka said in an interview. “But the people have forgiven me.”

The deposed despot’s current chances reflect Madagascar’s woes.

His elected successor and chief rival in the current race, Albert Zafy, resigned as president on Oct. 10. He had been impeached by Parliament for abuse of power amid charges that his bankrupt government was enmeshed in scandal.

*

Unable to borrow money on international markets, the government had turned to a shady collection of foreign con men and fraud artists. Bizarre proposals were considered to import nuclear waste from the United States and to build a $5-billion solar energy system in one of the world’s poorest countries.

High finance became low farce.

One letter writer claimed to represent “the Board of Governors of the United Nations of America.” A group allegedly based in Dublin misspelled Ireland on its letterhead. Another tried to forge stationery for what was supposedly a Tokyo bank.

“One address was traced to a farm in Texas,” said Prosper Youm, the International Monetary Fund representative in Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital. “He was a goat breeder. Another address was a whorehouse in the Canary Islands.”

The Texas rancher, who had offered $500 million, was later jailed by U.S. authorities for tax evasion. The Canary Islands group was never identified.

Other schemes were just as strange. The governor of Madagascar’s Central Bank signed promissory notes for $2 billion, or half the national debt, in one deal. When news leaked, the prime minister claimed that the signature was forged and warned investors against buying the debt. Both officials were later dismissed.

And in 1994, the government sent $3.2 million to a Swiss bank account for a consortium allegedly headed by a prince from Liechtenstein. The group promised to aid development. It also pledged to repay the cash. It did neither.

“These people, having been isolated for 20 years, were sheep to be shorn by every carpetbagger who could think of a scheme,” a Western diplomat said. “And millions and millions of dollars went chasing fly-by-night schemes.”

The dubious deals frightened legitimate investors just as the infant democracy was battling to overcome years of economic decline. Now, with the scams apparently dead, the IMF and World Bank have signaled their intent to approve the government’s more conventional efforts at economic reform, including lowering tariffs and cutting subsidies.

But one of the most prominent presidential hopefuls, Richard Andriamanjato, speaker of the National Assembly, is campaigning on his promise to continue seeking what he calls “parallel financing.” “If the traditional donors say we can only do what they approve, this is neocolonialism,” Andriamanjato argued.

*

If Madagascar’s politics and economics seem unusual, so are many other facets of life here.

Most of the 12 million people are descendants of early arrivals from Indonesia, Polynesia and China, half a world away. With terraced rice paddies, red-tiled roofs on gabled chalets and rickshaws pulled by barefoot men down winding cobblestone streets, the former French colony looks like nowhere else on Earth.

That’s especially true in the wild. The world’s fourth-largest island--roughly the size of California and Washington state combined--broke off from the African mainland 165 million years ago and was left to evolve in enchanting isolation.

Today nearly everything that flies, crawls or grows here is unique. All but a dozen of the 450 species of reptiles and amphibians are endemic. All the island’s native mammals, more than half its birds and 80% of the flora exist only here. Indeed, the island is home to one-fourth of all African plants.

And more new species--some little changed from prehistoric times--are still being found on what has been called a living laboratory of evolution.

Fourteen new mammals, mostly shrew-like insectivores, have been identified in the last four years. A new lemur, the island’s trademark primate, was found in 1988, becoming the 32nd lemur species here. The rest of Africa has one.

Olivier Langrande, a senior conservationist with the World Wide Fund for Nature, and Steve Goodman, a field biologist from the Field Museum of Chicago, discovered a major new genus of warbler living high in the forest canopy last March.

Scientists are excited about Madagascar’s largely unheralded progress on the environment.

A decade ago, international alarms rang as the country was called the world’s foremost conservation priority, where the greatest number of unique species faced the greatest danger of extinction.

The chief problem is poverty. Faced with limited fertile land and a fast-growing population, subsistence farmers cut and burn forests for charcoal or to plant crops. The slash-and-burn agriculture soon leaves brick-hard soil and causes severe erosion. Half a million acres are denuded each year.

Illegal poaching, largely for covert collectors in Europe and Japan, threatens the wildlife. In May, thieves broke into a research camp in the remote forests of northwestern Madagascar and stole 75 plowshare tortoises, a nearly extinct terrestrial turtle. The breeding program was badly set back.

But Langrande said environmental conditions “are much better now” than when he arrived 10 years ago. The country’s 39 national parks and wildlife areas “existed only on paper then,” he added. “That’s not true anymore.”

About 360 forest guards were trained and deployed, and half of all park entry fees now go to local residents to gain their support.

Conservation groups now push irrigation schemes, community development and environmental education, as well as traditional protection programs. And the second phase of the government’s ambitious environmental action plan was approved in September by the World Bank and other donors.

“There’s been a sea change in attitude,” declared Donald Mackenzie, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development here. “We’ve seen a real turnaround.”

*

Not, however, on the political front. The current election follows years of crisis.

Zafy, a 69-year-old former surgeon, was elected president in 1993 after leading a series of strikes and protests that finally toppled Ratsiraka’s repressive regime.

But the transition to democracy has been wrenching. The suddenly free press exposed soaring corruption among politicians and judges. A new constitution created so many centers of power that it produced political paralysis. And the economy continued to sink.

“The people are very disillusioned,” said Hans Rambelonana, a 22-year-old law student. “They thought their life [would] get better when they got rid of Ratsiraka. But it gets worse.”

Recently returned from two years in Paris, Ratsiraka relishes the public disappointment. Now 60 and in failing health, the former Marxist portrays himself as a strong leader who made mistakes but who now embraces democracy and free-market capitalism.

Drogin was recently on assignment in Madagascar.