COLONIZED & CORRUPTED PANAMA

Now that the killing has subsided and Gen. Manuel A. Noriega is gone, the pernicious and persistent disease of colonialism is the real danger--to Panamanians and Americans.

Calling them nation builders, the U.S. Army has activated scores of reservists in the “civil affairs units” of the Special Forces--judges, doctors, lawyers, police officers, electricians, firemen, municipal bureaucrats, even a historian--and ordered them south to help reconstruct a battered Panama. Agency for International Development specialists are sure to follow, with the Peace Corps volunteers not far behind. All our leaders, from President George Bush down, have made clear that the United States is embarked on the noblest form of tutelage: to restore democracy.

Yet the decades of experiences among such industrialized powers as Britain, France and ourselves in the Third World make clear that colonialism, no matter how noble its intent, invariably breeds contempt in the colonizers and a strange combination of dependence and resentment in the colonized. It rarely instills a sense and understanding of democracy.

The first signs from Panama are obvious and a little depressing. The U.S. military campaign to denigrate Noriega--sneers about his red underwear, voodoo paraphernalia, witch’s notebooks, vats of blood, mistress, pornography, portrait of Adolf Hitler--had all the echoes of all the campaigns mounted by colonial powers to prove that the native opposition was less than civilized and beneath contempt. The British justified jailing Jomo Kenyatta in the Mau Mau rebellion of Kenya many years ago by denouncing him as a man having “at least a passing acquaintance with the practices of black magic current in the Middle Ages.”

Even on the surface, scenes of U.S. soldiers patrolling the streets of Panama City, hunting for hoarded weapons, ordering traffic, mistreating Nicaragua’s ambassador with disdain are disquieting. U.S. soldiers are learning to push civilians around--hardly a lesson we want carried home.

It is a subtle and insidious problem. A colonizer cannot easily suppress the superiority implied in the relationship. The legendary missionary, Albert Schweitzer, was open about these feelings; he believed “the Negro is a child and with children nothing can be done without the use of authority.” This paternalism insured that his bush hospital in Gabon would never serve as a model for massive public health; it would end up no more than a monument to his goodness.

The dependence of colonialism is hard to shake off. It is demonstrated in post-colonial Africa whenever an African bureaucrat, faced with a problem somewhat out of the ordinary, relays it to the office of a European adviser.

Panama has long lived with dependence on the United States, ever since U.S. might created Panama more than 85 years ago by pressuring Panama to rebel against Colombia and then assuring its independence. Until five years ago, the United States ran the Canal Zone as a sovereign slice of U.S. territory and thus monopolized the main source of wealth in this little Central American country.

Panama has been trying to move away from dependence for two decades, but without much success. Even in a season of great citizen outpourings against tyranny throughout Eastern Europe, the opposition in Panama could not remove Noriega without the United States.

Now dependence is sure to deepen. Panamanians have neither the resources nor managers to construct a stable society out of the destruction wrought by invasion. With relief funds and a host of advisers, the United States will have to help hammer up a new bureaucracy and a new security force for a new civilian government.

Dependence can be seductive at first. The colonized often feel grateful and even tend to idealize the colonizers.

The idealizing, reflecting the unnatural relationship of colonialism, shows itself in strange ways.

During negotiations for a new Panama Canal treaty in the 1970s, for example, a Harvard-educated Panamanian official bemoaned the failure of his government to make its case well in the heartland of America. Newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Washington Post understood Panama’s feelings about the canal, he said, but others did not. When I suggested he invite a number of newspapers that did not have Latin American correspondents to send writers on a tour of Panama at his government’s expense--just the way the auto industry lays on press excursions in the United States--he refused: “No American newspaper would ever accept such a free trip.” He had learned too well the lessons about fierce U.S. press independence.

This kind of idealizing only leads to disillusion. Panamanians may now be shouting at U.S. soldiers, “Tell President Bush we are grateful from the bottom of the Panamanian soul.” But they are likely to change their minds when the United States fails to fulfill unrealistic expectations.

Dependence eventually and naturally transforms itself into resentment. The virulence of anti-Americanism in the former U.S. protectorate of Cuba and the former U.S.-occupied territory of Nicaragua are simply the most bitter examples. Panamanian politicians have been able to whip anti-American feelings to their advantage for decades, and they surely will be able to do so again once the U.S. forces leave.

The odds are against the United States instilling democracy in Panama. The Third World is strewn with tyrannies left behind by colonial powers that fancied themselves tutors of democracy. Even the relatively benign U.S. colonization of the Philippines--with its rhetoric about shaping “a showcase for democracy”--left the people with a society too corrupt and unequal for real democracy to take hold.

The lessons taught by colonialism are, at heart, a negation of democracy. During the time leading up to self-rule in Kenya-- a kind of trial period for Africans practicing at government--an African Cabinet member defended a British colonial law that allowed banning books by subversive politicians. That’s exactly the kind of law Kenya will need, the Cabinet member explained to the Parliament, once it is independent.

It is, of course, too late to call off our involvement in Panama. The invasion, the chaos are history now and the United States is morally obliged to repair as much damage as it can before departure. The task is thankless, daunting, best done as quickly as possible by those with sensitivity, humility and low expectations--three qualities that seem in short supply.