Dorothy-Grace Guerrero and Firoze Manji (ed) (2008) China’s New Role in Africa and the South: A search for a new perspective. 
Current Issue
Pambazuka News 370: Mauritania: Between Islamism and terrorrism
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Highlights from this issue
FEATURES: Armelle Choplin on terrorism and Islamism in Mauritania
COMMENTS AND ANALYSIS:
- Horace Njuguna Gisemba on the land question in Kenya
- Women in Zimbabwe appeal to women in Africa and the world
- Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights on state violence in Zimbabwe.
- The National Internally Displaced Persons Network of Kenya calls for urgent action
PAN-AFRICAN POSTCARD: Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem on the media and us
LETTERS: Readers' comments and announcements
Features
Mauritania: Between Islamism and terrorrism
2008-05-13
Armelle Choplin
Armelle Choplin examines the case of Mauritania to debunk the oft-proffered links between Islamism and terrorism.
In the space of a few weeks, Mauritania suffered a number of terrorist attacks, responsibility for which was claimed by Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb. Radical Islamism is not new in Mauritania, but terrorism and the sheer scale of violence witnessed in these acts is unprecedented. Although radical trends are on the rise, this should not be confounded with terrorism, which has not taken root in Mauritania. In this case, the threat originates elsewhere.
On the 24th of December 2007, Christmas Eve, four French tourists were brutally killed in Mauritania. It quickly became apparent that this was not an ordinary crime, but rather a terrorist attack. Two days later, three soldiers were killed at the Al Ghallawia military base in Northern Mauritania. The Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), formerly the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) claimed responsibility for the attack.
On the 5th of January 2008, the organizers of the Paris-Dakar rally decided to cancel the race, following advice from the French government that has been on high alert against terrorist threats in Mauritania, where most of the attacks have taken place. On the night of 1st February, 2008, Nouakchott’s biggest night club the “VIP”, and the adjoining Israeli embassy were targeted: six gunmen opened fire, injuring a French woman and two French Mauritanians. Once again Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb claimed responsibility.
Mauritania, previously a little-known country, suddenly hit the headlines. Straddling the Arab and Black world in this Sahara-Sahel “grey area”, suspicious of the West, particularly the US, Mauritania is today awash with Maghrebin extremists whose influence continues to grow. This is a radical shift from the past when Mauritania professed a tolerant form of Islam that was open and receptive. Recently, the International Crisis Group (ICG) reported that Islamic fundamentalism had only a limited foothold in Mauritania due to a socio-religious system based on ethnicity and under the control of powerful Islamic brotherhoods that curtailed the rise of extremist ideas (ICG, 2005).
In this paper we shall attempt to raise a number of key points that may serve to explain the current sequence of events and debunk the oft –proffered links between Islamism and terrorism. This analysis is by no means exhaustive, given the sheer complexity of the situation in Mauritania.
It is noteworthy that the central government has always had an ambiguous policy towards Islam in general and in particular Islamist movements. This brief exposé will give us a better understanding why these movements are attracting a following, in an environment characterized by despair and growing poverty – ideal conditions for the rise of dissent. We must however emphasize that the Mauritanian Islamism has no directly linked to these acts of terror perpetrated in the name of foreign terror groups such as the AQIM, in this case.
From the Islamic Republic, to the rise of Islamism in Mauritania
The official name “ Islamic Republic of Mauritania” can be misleading, since an Islamic state is nothing more than a Muslim state. However there has been a rapid lexical shift from “Islamic” to “Islamist”, the “Islamic Republic” of Iran under Khomeini as an oft-quoted example. Iran under Khomeini, however, bears little similarity to the “Islamic Republic of Mauritania”, that has always espoused a more “tolerant” brand of Islam.
The appellation was adopted upon attaining independence, and was a response to the political aims of Mauritania’s first president, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, who envisioned the country as a bridge between North Africa and Black Africa. In order to overcome the dual cultural identity and ensure cohesion between the Moors and the “Black Mauritanians” (Halpulaar, Soninke, Wolof), Islam was brought to the fore. This lent legitimacy to the Mauritanian state and brought together a 100% Muslim nation.
Colonel Haidar came to power in 1980 and sought to further entrench Islam and it practice in the country. To this end, Sha’ria law was enacted in 1982. Maouiyya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya took over in 1984 and maintained the trend, instituting restrictions on, among other things, alcohol. Come 1990, Taya was under immense external pressure to “democratize” the country. In this new climate, Islamists were prevented from active involvement in politics: in 1991 Taya further eroded their influence by banning the formation of religion-based political parties.
Between 1994 and 2005, there were numerous arrests, followed by equally frequent pardons. This was part of a government strategy to harass these groups rather than openly fight them. Taya frequently asserted that there was no place for Islamism in Mauritania, since everyone was Muslim. According to the ICG (2005), the Taya regime was in effect using the “Islamic threat” to gain the support of the West and detract from the frequent calls for greater democracy in the country.
Following the coup of 3rd August 2005, there was a radical change of policy towards Islamism. The Military Committee for Justice and Democracy (CMJD) came to power and embarked on democratic renewal. It sought to distance itself from the coercive methods that Taya used in his 20 years of power. The CMJD, led by Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, immediately began consultations with civil society and bringing about democratic reforms. In this climate of change, the Islamists quickly re-emerged. The members of the CMJD committed to exclude themselves from the presidential elections in order to restore civilian rule. The March 2007 presidential elections were the culmination of the democratic transition initiated by the military junta, and Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi was democratically elected as Head of State.
The new government was similarly tolerant of Islamism. In June of 2007, several individuals accused of being members of an Islamist organization were acquitted for lack of evidence. As it turns out, among those acquitted was Sidi Ould Sidna one of those accused of murdering four French tourists. This shift in attitude is further evidenced in the registration of Tawassoul (National Congress for Reform and Development), led by Mohamed Jemil Ould Mansour, a moderate Islamist. The party holds a parliamentary seat in the heart of Nouakchott, a clear symbol of its legitimacy.
For some, this new attitude towards Islamism, smacks of connivance. For others, it is reassuring, and symbolizes a “restoration of the Faith”, manifest in the return of the Muslim weekend (Friday and Saturday), the construction of a mosque at the presidential palace, and frequent raids and arrests at bars and restaurants in Nouakchott suspected of selling alcohol..
A state of socio-economic crisis ripe for conflict
The “democratic transition” and the installation of a new elected government gave the population a renewed sense of hope for change. The transition was widely hailed and held up as an example. At the same time, Mauritania joined the elite group of petroleum-exporting countries. The sinking of an offshore well in 2006 brought about economic renewal and raised expectation. However, petroleum production had to be reviewed following technical glitches and the fact that only a small minority was reaping the economic rewards.
Three years after the discovery of oil and the start of the transition, hope and enthusiasm had given way to despair and anxiety. On the one hand, Mauritanians quickly realized that the much-touted “democratic transition” was only relative – it was still the same cabal holding the reins of power. On the other hand, the population noticed a decline in living standards, in contrast to the promised growth fueled by the famous “oil find” and the redistribution of resources following the democratic transition. In the autumn of 2004 the breakout of “bread riots” in several towns following the rise of consumer prices pointed to social breakdown. These social conditions led to a growth of sympathy for extremist views.
These views called for a moral regeneration in government, and resonate with poor citizens who watched Nouakchott’s skyline dotted with an increasing number of palatial residences, each more opulent than the last. Never before had luxury been more conspicuous. People began to question the source of this newfound wealth. Corruption was suspected. Development aid given to a country seen as a good example was regularly misappropriated.
The new government claimed to fight against scourge, with few results. The drug trade was also very lucrative, and the country was now seen as a hub for Mafia networks. There have been a number of arrests in recent months, one involving the son of ex-president Haidallah. There is a widening gap between the public and the urban elite with its questionable western values.
The radicalization of the discourse and growing unrest are most visible in the urban milieu, which is rich in debate and vociferous expression, and highly politicized. There have been massive waves of rural-urban migration in the last thirty years, following long periods of drought. The capital Nouakchott was built from scratch in 1957, and, with its 1 million inhabitants, provides the clearest example of this spectacular urban grown (Choplin, 2006). The Neo-urbanites are connected to various information networks: the Arabic language channels, notably Al-Jazeera, and the Internet. In fact, it is in these urban areas that citizens gain a sense of their marginalization and seek to have their voices heard (Choplin, Ciavolella, 2008).
In the face of rising poverty levels, some have turned to highly critical political movements. Wahhabi Islamic readings, spread through Saudi influence and Islamist NGOs, began to appear in the poorer parts of town. Sociologist and expert in Mauritanian Islam, Yahya Ould El Bara (2003) showed the rise in the number of mosques in the last few years: between 1967 and 2003 the number rose from 17 to 617. Of these, 322 were run by benefactors from the Persian Gulf, a further 17 of which were distinctly fundamentalist in character.
The most notable of these fundamentalist mosques is in an impoverished part of the city. A large number of the faithful at this mosque are young 'haratin' (descendants of former slaves) who are particularly drawn to the egalitarian discourse of so-called pure Islam (ICG, 2005). The haratin eschew the Mauritanian form of Islam that has never questioned the oppressive traditional social hierarchies. In fact, fundamentalism provides a means to challenge the hegemony of the Marabout tribal chiefs who see themselves as the custodians of the religion.
Mauritanian Islamism versus foreign terrorism
This growth of the fundamentalist discourse does not mean that all Mauritanians are followers of Bin Laden, ready to perpetrate acts of terror. Rather, the Mauritanian public has been quick to denounce these acts, whose motives it does not share. The murder of four French citizens drew a lot of popular indignation and reproach. Even though the VIP club was not viewed in a popular light, and was seen as a venue frequented by foreigners, and where alcohol, prostitution and drugs were common currency, the attack was roundly condemned.
Those who attacked the Israeli embassy clearly sought to condemn the Mauritanian government’s decision to bow to US pressure and establish diplomatic ties in 2000. Even though many Mauritanians, particularly the moors, who hold a great affinity to the Arab world, have always been strongly opposed to these political ties, there was no support for this attack. Likewise, many Mauritanians reacted with disappointment to the cancellation of the Paris-Dakar Rally, puzzled at how their country had overnight transformed from a “peaceful country” into “a dangerous enemy of the West”.
It must be noted that however radical Mauritanian Islam might be, it has never condoned acts of terror, as the case may have been elsewhere (Kepel, 2000; Roy, 2002; Gomez-Perez, 2005). Islamist parties clearly proclaim that they have never called on their followers to use violence, and have no links whatsoever to Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb. In a recent interview with RFI, Jemil Ould Mansour, a moderate Islamist leader, roundly condemned the acts of terror, attributing them to isolated groupings. The terrorist threat is thus seen to originate outside the country, and have no ties to local groups. Another telling fact is that after the murder of the French citizens, the attackers fled to neighboring countries, indicating the absence of a Mauritanian rearguard to protect them.
Therefore the supposed links between Islamism and Islamist terrorism do not hold water in the case of Mauritania. Today, ordinary citizens are alarmed by the authorities’ apparent inability to control the situation. They continue to distance themselves from terrorism through public demonstrations and numerous articles in discussion forums. It still begs the question, however, whether the growing disaffected radical groups may consider acts of terror in the future. The line between the two realities holds for the moment, but could easily become porous, if the number of locals leaving to join foreign “Jihadist” groups is anything to go by.
* Armelle Choplin (armelle.choplin@gmail.com) lectures in geography at l’Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée. She is also an Associate researcher at UMR PRODIG, where she completed her studies, and currently conducts research on Urbanization in Mauritania and Sudan.
The original article in French can be found at http://echogeo.revues.org/document4363.html
The article also appeared in the French language edition of Pambazuka News: http://www.pambazuka.org/fr/category/features/47831
* Translated by Josh Ogada
** Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
Announcements
Announcing this year's 1st Edition of Wajibu
2008-05-13
“People who ignore their history are bound to repeat it” said Desmond Tutu. If we really wish never again to see a repetition of the traumatic events that we experienced after the 2007 Kenyan elections, we CANNOT AND WE MUST NOT bury the memory of what happened in the early months of 2008.
WAJIBU, in this first double first issue of the year brings you not simply the events of that period as lived by many Kenyans but also the reflections of thoughtful writers (many of them young but established) on the underlying reasons for this outbreak of violence. At the same time, we give you the thoughts of religious leaders as well as of social activists on the paths we must choose if we wish to live in “unity, peace and liberty” in the Kenya we love.
Some of the well-known writers and leaders who have contributed to this issue are: Sheikh Said Athman, Muthoni Garland, Shalini Gidoomal, Fr. Patrick Kanja, Mukoma wa Ngugi, Yvonne Owuor, Stephen Partington, Binyavanga Wainaina and Rasna Warah.
WAJIBU can be obtained for Ksh. 100/= at the following outlets: Stanley Kiosk, Simply Books, University of Nairobi Bookshop, Catholic Bookshop, LISS library at the Rahimtulla Trust Building on Mfangano Street.
If you would like to subscribe or purchase copies, please contact:wakurayag@yahoo.com, tel: 254 720 970197
Comment & analysis
A short history of land settlements in the Rift Valley
2008-03-26
Horace Njuguna Gisemba
Since the outbreak of post-election violence in the Rift Valley, there have been numerous reports in the local dailies claiming that the root cause of this conflict is ‘the land question’. Without exception, these reports fail to inform or educate us precisely because of their misrepresentation of history. Horace Njuguna Gisemba seeks to rectify this.
Given the scale and the urgency of the current crisis and its repeated association with the so-called ‘land question’ it is time for a complete unpacking of the history behind colonial and post-colonial settlement in the White Highlands. Only then will we determine with certainty whether land is at the centre of the ongoing systematic evictions in the Rift Valley.
The first argument that is normally presented is that the North Rift region (Uasin Gishu, Trans Nzoia, Nandi and West Pokot Districts) exclusively constitutes the ancestral land of the supra-ethnic group we have come to term ‘the Kalenjin’, i.e. the Nandi, Keiyo, Pokot, Tugen, Marakwet and Kipsigis. A quick etymology of geographical names in the North Rift region such as Uasin Gishu, Eldoret, Sirikwa, and Kipkaren confirms that the Maasai long lived in and named these places. Indeed, it is the Maasai who were displaced from these lands by the colonialists and therefore, any question of restitution to ancestral owners – if at all it can be achieved - must of necessity be resolved with the full inclusion of the Maasai.
In the early 1900s colonial settlement in Central Kenya displaced many Gikuyu families. In their search for productive agricultural land, many of these families gradually moved west through Kijabe and into the Rift Valley. At the same time, white settlers moving into the Rift Valley aggressively recruited Gikuyu farmhands from Central Kenya who became their tenants at will. Between 1904 and 1920, 70,000 Gikuyus had migrated to the Rift Valley. By the end of the 1930s that community had grown to more than 150,000, many of whom were second and third generation Rift Valley Gikuyus. As the tension between these increasingly successful squatter farmers and their white landlords heightened the white settlers in some districts decided to do away with squatters altogether. In 1941 the first Government re-settlement scheme for Africans was established in Olenguruone north of Nakuru and it absorbed many of the Gikuyu squatters who were being driven out by their white landlords. But the larger majority of the Gikuyu, numbering over 100,000, were forcefully repatriated to Central Kenya between 1946 and 1952. This cyclical pattern of Gikuyu removals from Central Kenya, then settlement in the Rift Valley, followed by forceful evictions and painful repatriation back to Central Kenya, should be the subject of real concern. For each time they have occurred (1952, 1991/92, 1997 and 2007/2008) these returns have generated bitterness and inflamed the Gikuyu in Central Kenya. As a barrage of Kenyan historians agree (David Throup, Tabitha Kanogo, David Anderson, Frank Furedi, Rosberg & Nottingham) these reactions ignited the 1952 Mau Mau Uprising, and in 2008 they have been the reason for the vicious revenge attacks of the past two weeks.
The eviction of the Gikuyu from Olenguruone in the late 1940s and early 1950s made room for a new government-initiated settlement of Africans in the White Highlands. This 1955 settlement was conceived for the purposes of benefiting loyal African farmhands. Given that this re-settlement was taking place at the height of the Mau Mau uprising, the colonial authorities were quick to exclude the Gikuyu people from this scheme. The question of loyalty was to determine another pattern of settlement in the run-up to Independence and soon thereafter - some departing white farmers chose to gift their parcels to trusted farmhands. This is the history behind the ownership of farms running to hundreds and even thousands of acres by some people of Teso origin in Trans Nzoia District.
The third wave of African settlement in the White Highlands was the Million Acre Scheme which begun in 1963. On the eve of Independence the departing colonisers negotiated a scheme by which white settlers were bought out of their farms by the in-coming Kenya government. The money for this purchase was made available as a loan by the British government, hence the acrimonious dispute that pitted Jomo Kenyatta on the one hand and Bildad Kaggia and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga on the other. The argument of the latter nationalists was that there was no justification for a people to buy that which had been forcefully wrenched from them. The vehicle that the independent Kenya government used to facilitate the acquisition and subsequent distribution of these lands was the Settlement Fund Trustees (SFT). SFT was a separate legal entity whose trustees were government ministers. It is important to note that the SFT exists to this day and the records of all their transactions from 1963 to date, including those allocations that were made in the Moi era, are available for perusal at the Ministry of Lands.
Through the 1960s and 1970s the SFT would, through the local dailies and village barazas, advertise and invite applications for allocation of land in recently created settlement schemes. These schemes were constituted from the farms that the SFT had acquired from the white farmers. The conscious process of designing these schemes involved several steps. First was the amalgamation of parcels and sub-division by use of aerial surveys into economically viable units, including the provision of access roads. This was followed by conversion of the land registration system from the complex Registration of Titles Act (RTA) to the simpler Registered Land Act (RLA) which was borrowed from Australia. Along with that, the government made loans available not only for the purchase of land, but also for the acquisition of livestock, farm inputs and other developments. These loans, which were part of a revolving fund, were administered by the SFT.
As individuals responded to the advertisements and applied for allocation of land, grassroots leadership and enterprise were ultimately critical to the ways in which communities organised to make the best of the emergent SFT opportunities. For instance, it was the power of what John Lonsdale defines as positive ethnicity that saw the Maragoli community congregate to purchase SFT land in Lugari District which, though it lies in Western Province, was part of the White Highlands. Matunda Scheme, which straddles Rift Valley and Western Province, attracted the Abanyore people. Likewise the close-knit Abagusii people drew each other into significant purchase of the Sinyerere Settlement Scheme in Trans Nzoia District. There was no political patronage in this manner of settlement. Rather, it was solely the desire for productive land that drove these traditionally agricultural communities to participate in these schemes.
It is worth noting that even in the 1980s, under former President Moi’s regime, the SFT continued to acquire land. In Kipkabus, Uasin Gishu District, SFT took over a large parcel from East African Tanning Extract Co. Ltd (EATEC), a Lonrho subsidiary. Through sponsored economic mobility and political patronage it was allocated to members of the Kalenjin community.
Because of the publicity surrounding it, the fourth pattern of resettlement in the Rift Valley in the late 1960s and early 1970s overshadows all of the above. Perhaps on account of the elaborate organisational infrastructure attending to it and the entrepreneurial genius required to enable its proper realisation, references to this pattern of resettlement invariably carry grave misrepresentations. The venture capitalists who conceived this scheme saw an opportunity in the mobilisation of low income earners for the purchase of large-scale white-owned farms. They therefore set up public companies and in some instances cooperative societies. These became the vehicles through which they raised capital from the masses and then acquired farms that were being offered for sale on a willing buyer-willing seller basis. Examples of this abound, and records of the companies and their transactions should be readily available from the advocates who oversaw these processes. In Kitale, the Abagusii acquired a parcel that they renamed North Kisii while the Maragoli mobilised to purchase what was later to be known as Bidii Farm. Another group from the same community bought Vihiga Farm in Soy Divison. In Uasin Gishu, a group of Kalenjins set up Kapkures Farm Ltd and bought land in Moiben Division. Others bought land in Lessos through Barkeiwo Farm Ltd while Kaplogoi Estates Ltd and Sessia Farm Ltd made good of other opportunities within the district. The populous Gikuyu formed several land-buying companies, the most famous of which were Gema (Gikuyu, Embu Meru Association), Ngwataniro, and Nyakinyua and all of which bought land in the Rift Valley as well as in Central Province.
Farms such as Kiambaa, Kimuri, Yamumbi and Kondoo in Uasin Gishu District which are at the heart of the on-going violent post-election evictions were purchased by land-buying companies of this nature. In the initial years, the farms that were acquired in this manner remained as large-scale parcels and were only sub-divided through presidential edict in 1981. This edict by former President Moi was aimed at undercutting the growing influence of the venture capitalists who had used land-buying companies as a springboard for electoral politics. The names that immediately come to mind are Kihika Kimani, Njenga Karume and Stephen Kairo. The result of the sub-division was the creation of tiny parcels of land that were then transferred to the low-income shareholders who had formed the original land-buying companies.
Alongside land-buying companies in the willing buyer-willing seller resettlement model were transactions between departing white settlers and individual members of the emergent African elite. This class had access to funding from the Agricultural Finance Corporation (AFC) and was drawn from across the ethnic divide. Thus one finds large-scale farms in excess of 1,000 acres in the hands of Kalenjins, Gikuyus, Luos, Luhyas, Kisiis and Masaais in the Rift Valley.
The wrath of the Kalenjin peoples over what they consider the appropriation of their ancestral lands is not a new phenomenon, neither does it have its roots in the 1991/1992 ‘land clashes’. As far back as 1969, the Hon. Jean Marie Seroney (MP for Tinderet) had drawn controversy when he authored ‘The Nandi Declaration’ that demanded all non-Nandi vacate the ancestral land of this sub-tribe. The Kenyatta government reacted by imprisoning Seroney for sedition but his ideas did not die. Ironically, in 1991/1992 Moi and his foot soldiers were to adopt Seroney’s template for ethnic exclusivity (expanded to encompass the larger Kalenjin community) by evicting Gikuyus, Luos, Luhyas and Kisiis in their bid to secure political victory in the Rift Valley.
Borrowing from Kenyatta’s example of using land to reward cronies and in some cases emergent national heroes such as athletes and popular musicians, Moi expanded this other form of settlement in the Rift Valley. In the best practice of political patronage, Moi used state forests, demonstration and research land owned by parastatals such as the Agricultural Development Corporation (ADC) and Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) to reward loyalists largely drawn from his community. This is how a select new elite acquired, at well below the market price, sizeable parcels of prime land in Trans Nzoia, Nandi and Uasin Gishu Districts. Apart from this latter settlement by political protégées all other forms of post-independence settlement in the Rift Valley were essentially valid commercial transactions. They were, in fact, no different from the commercial transactions by which the coffee farms bordering Kiambu District came to be transformed into the residential areas that we now know as Runda, Gigiri, Loresho, Kitisuru, Nyari and Rosslyn.
Towards the end of Moi’s tenure, EATEC decided to divest and sold off 49,000 acres on a willing buyer-wiling seller basis. Even so, these 2001 transactions caught Moi’s eye and he demanded that most of this land be sold to Kalenjins. The top EATEC management that had been summoned to State Lodge in Eldoret provided Moi with a list to prove that they had indeed taken cognisance of this concern.
Contrary to what has so often been posited as an irrefutable fact, there are several reasons why the eviction of non-indigenous communities from the Rift Valley has had nothing to do with the so-called ‘land question’. Indeed this systematic on-going violence is not about remedying of past injustices, land scarcity, growing impoverishment of the Kalenjin or protests against the outcome of the flawed December 2007 General Election. To keep repeating that the Gikuyu got to the Rift Valley through presidential favour fails to explain how the Kambas, Luhyas and Kisiis, who have never produced a president, became land owners and flourished in the Rift Valley. And if indeed it is the declaration of Mwai Kibaki as president that is the offending spark, then why are non-Gikuyus under attack?
Further, if this violence is about the pressure or scarcity of land, these issues would not wait to crop up in every election year. Does it take one five years to realize that they have a neighbour whose presence prevents them from tilling a larger piece of land or using that land to pursue some other profitable business? Given the vast state machinery that former President Moi had at his disposal from the end of 1978 he would long have righted purported land injustices against the Kalenjin. That he only picked up ‘the land question’ at the onset of multi-party politics in 1991 proves that his motivation was never simply the restitution of land to the Kalenjin. Rather, the clashes were instigated for political expediency.
The third reason why these aggressions are not about the scarcity of land is that the huge tracts of highly productive agricultural land in the hands of elite Kalenjins, a select caucus of the political class across the ethnic divide, non-Kenyan multinationals and Kenyan white and Indian farmers have never been the target of land invasion and redistribution. Genuine pressure for land would not be so selective in choosing the enemy. Indeed, pressure for land would not lead a Kalenjin man to drive out his Gikuyu wife as has happened in the current crisis.
Fourthly, in the on-going crisis the Gikuyus, Kisiis and Luhyas (on the Kapsabet-Vihiga border) who have been targeted for eviction have been given no notice to vacate. Were it simply about land, one would have expected the matter to stop upon their expulsion. That the Kalenjin warriors have designed an elaborate mechanism for vetting and exterminating fleeing residents at roadblocks signals that their goal is not the simple take-over of land. Further, the aggressors have gone so far as to follow victims who have already deserted the land and taken refuge in churches. The burning of these sacred sites and the inhuman killing of those who had taken refuge therein raises urgent questions about the moral ethos driving the Kalenjin community.
Claims such as Kipchumba Some’s in the Daily Nation of 9 February 2008 that the Kalenjin have reacted to their neighbours with so much aggression because they have been impoverished after selling their land to these ‘outsiders’ are ludicrous. For in the sale transactions that have taken place over the years, the Kalenjin were never robbed of their land, they always got market value for it. In 2001 EATEC was prevailed upon by Moi to reduce the sale prices and they did. Many Kalenjins who later sold what they had acquired from EATEC made profits of well over 600% within a space of six years. If their investments from these profits have not paid off, they can not now forcefully reacquire what they freely and voluntarily sold. It is akin to the original owners of Runda, Gigiri, Loresho, Nyari, Kitisuru and Rosslyn citing growing poverty and therefore coming to reclaim their ‘lost’ lands by burning the residences that diverse people have invested in.
It is clear that the passions and goals that have repeatedly driven the Kalenjin community in these intermittent spates of violence emanate from somewhere else. In each instance, they have targeted as the enemy communities whose industry has transformed the landscape of the Rift Valley economy. What drives them to attack these peoples and the means by which they have been galvanized for the onslaughts ought to be the subject of thorough investigation. A solution that looks to the restitution of ‘Kalenjin land’ will not be sufficient to address their imagined exclusion from profitable enterprise. The much-needed process of unearthing the driving impetus of the pre-planned evictions and murders, of finding lasting solutions and restoring harmony, is the rightful work of a Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission.
*Horace N. Gisemba is a former resident of Uasin Gishu District.
**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
Zimbabwe: Women of the world help stop the violence!
2008-05-13
Women In Zimbabwe
As a result the terror campaign by the military and the youth militia, the most affected are women and children as 80% of Zimbabwean women live in the rural areas. This statement urges women in Africa and the world to take action against the Mugabe government.
On March 29,2009 Zimbabwe went to the polls to elect its next government until 2013.Results for the Presidential elections were announced a month later and people in Zimbabwe maintained peace. From 2 April 2008 the government organised a retribution campaign to target those who allegedly voted for the opposition and since then there has been terror in mostly rural Zimbabwe with youth militia under the command of the army and police have gone on to unleash terror in a campaign to teach the rural people how to correctly vote in the forthcoming presidential run off supposed to take place on 23 May according to the law but whose date remains unannounced
As a result the terror campaign by the military and the youth militia, the most affected are women and children as 80% of Zimbabwean women live in the rural areas. So far, over 800 homes have been burnt down, over 10 000 people have fled their homes, over 40 people have been shot dead in cold blood, over 7000 teachers have fled their schools as a number have been beaten in the eyes of parents and pupils, Doctors for human Rights report that over 2000 serious cases of physical torture and beatings have passed through their hands and a lot of those they treated have suffered serious fractures to an extent that most are permanently handicapped. The oldest victim of the post election violence is an old woman with 12 grandchildren all of them orphaned and whose son is alleged to have campaigned for the opposition. The youngest female victim is a 15 year old girl who was stripped naked together with her pregnant mother forced to lie down and beaten on the breasts and buttocks. Many women including the old have been forced to strip naked and beaten on the breasts and buttocks. 7000 teachers, a third of them women have fled their homes and several schools mostly in rural areas are closed. Several girls and women are feared raped. The youngest child seriously assaulted is only 3 years. Despite calls from all corners of the world for the violence to stop, it has become worse and we fear more and more people are getting killed and buried
Our situation is such that an estimated 5 million Zimbabweans mostly professionals and the young have left the country. An estimated 3 million are in South Africa with half being illegal immigrants facing inhuman deportations daily. Women cross border traders cross over the crocodile infested Limpopo River and many have been allegedly raped. HIV and AIDS prevalence is 60% among women and girls and their life expectancy is 34 years. Domestic violence is rife with a woman killed or left dead weekly. Unemployment is 80% and inflation is 165 000 % and the highest in the world. 95% of women of the 200 000 women made homeless and jobless by the government 2005 Operation Restore Order which demolished their homes and markets that earned them an income has left them in the open cold and in commercial sex work since then and now the same women are alleged to have voted opposition and have gone through torture.
At least 6800 girls get raped annually and with the current displacements the number is expected to treble. Most female teachers have been displaced and many have fled the country and a lot more have sought refuge in the cities. Access to the rural areas has always been a big challenge for humanitarian organisations but now that women in rural areas are held hostage by the militia and the army and the rural areas have been declared no go areas we have seen it almost impossible to assist. Women Directors of NGOs are on government hit list that seeks to arrest, detain and destroy the organisation.
Zimbabwean women in rural areas constitute women abandoned by husbands and dumped in the rural areas because of HIV status, they have gone through the war of liberation in the 1960s and 1970s and war songs by the youth militias at their doorsteps have left them semi slaved. The worst is that they have been beaten because their husbands, brothers, uncles, boyfriends ,grandsons and other male relatives allegedly campaigned for the opposition. Old grandmothers struggling to feed orphans and sickly, women who are bed ridden, orphaned HIV positive children, the poorest and weakest have been tortured, terrified, displaced from homes and the organisations that normally help them are denied access and with most of the leaders on the government hit list.
OUR URGENT APPEAL FOR ACTION TO AFRICAN WOMEN AND THE WOMEN WORLD ALL OVER THE WORLD
- First we come to you because we have exhausted all channels and have failed to get help and urgent attention .Please help us find how best we can deal with the situation and appeal to anyone you know who can help victims get immediate help like medication, safe shelter, counselling and support leaders of women’s groups with security as they are also under threat and have been victimised and most of them are on the government hit list for those to be tortured and eliminated
- Reach out to SADC and AU Countries to put in place measures to protect women and girls fleeing Zimbabwe to take refuge in neighbouring countries
- Help us to see how we can use the AU protocol for women’s rights for protection of women and girls. Zimbabwe ratified the AU protocol
- Help us get SADC and UN put in place a security and protection plan for women and girls and help demilitarise the youth militia and stop torture of ordinary citizens
- Get our case on crimes against humanity taken to the UN security council. We have all the documented evidence since the terror started in 2000 to have the perpetrators brought to book
- Mobilise female ministers and female vice Presidents to convene an urgent meeting in the region and make appeals to the Liberian President Her Excellency Ellen Johnson to help us broker peace talks in Zimbabwe with leaders of women’s groups in the continent
- Help us set up African women in solidarity with Zimbabwe women focal point persons in African countries who go to their Presidents to lobby them to come to the urgent rescue of Zimbabwean women
- Pass on this message to any networks you know and those who can assist should email coalition@zol.co.zw or dakotareed07@gmail.com and we will refer you to all the women in Zimbabwe working in various areas.
**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
Zimbabwe: Stop the violence!
2008-05-13
Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights
Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights issued this statement concerning escalating cases of organised violence and torture, and the intimidation of medical personnel.
Since the last report on the 25th of April, our members have reported a dramatic escalation in incidents of organised violence and torture with the number of victims documented in the post election period now standing at over 900. This figure grossly underestimates the number of victims presenting countrywide as the violence is now on such a scale that it is impossible to properly document all cases. There have been 22 confirmed deaths but at least double that number have been reported but are yet to be confirmed. It is alleged that some of those killed have been buried on the orders of state agents before documentation can take place.
There has been a dramatic increase in violence since the beginning of May. In the last 24 hours alone, 30 victims of violence have been treated for limb fractures in Harare hospitals and clinics and supplies of Plaster of Paris bandages are reported to be exhausted in most health centres.
One hospital in Harare has treated an average of 23 victims a day over the last week. On the 8th of May, there were a total 53 more seriously injured patients (13 females and 40 males) admitted to wards in 3 Harare hospitals. These included one 30 year old man on life support in the intensive care unit with severe, irreversible head injuries and a 30 year old man with severe soft tissue injuries to the buttocks and secondary renal failure, also on life support. Both of these patients died later that day. Also admitted was a 3yr old boy with trauma to his R eye from being struck with a rock and a 78 year old man with a fractured lower leg from blunt trauma. One young breast-feeding mother had bilateral fractures of her hands and was unable to hold her baby to feed her. Among the other patients, 20 had defensive, forearm or hand fractures, 5 had leg fractures and 1 fractured ribs. Fourteen patients had severe injuries to the buttocks from blunt trauma which required surgery for the removal of necrotic (dead) tissue. The perpetrators in all cases were alleged by the victims to be war veterans and Zanu PF supporters. Similar patterns of injuries are being reported from other hospitals.
As emphasised in the previous ZADHR reports, the cases documented by our members represent only a fraction of the total number countrywide. ZADHR is concerned that many victims of current violence are not receiving treatment. Numerous incidents of violence are being reported from remote rural areas where there is no access to transport and there are also widespread reports of the injured being denied treatment at health centres where staff have been intimidated and/or are acting under specific instructions from state agents not to treat victims of violence. It was reported from one district (Headlands) that medical care was being provided only if the victim had a letter from the police authorising this. Accounts have also been received of ambulances, sent to collect seriously injured victims, being turned away by war veterans. Under these circumstances, it is likely that many of those with less severe injuries are not seeking medical attention. This seems to be confirmed by increasing reports of victims presenting with complications such as wound infections or infected haematomas which are directly attributable to delayed treatment.
Doctors and nursing staff at rural hospitals are working under conditions of severe stress and many health workers have reported intimidation with some having been specifically instructed by state agents not to treat opposition supporters. These health workers, who, according to some reports are treating up to 60 victims of torture and violence a day, are emotionally traumatised and depressed. One nursing sister treating victims in a rural clinic was observed to be shaking so violently with fear that she was unable to write.
Government spokespersons have repeatedly claimed that they have not received reports of violence or of deaths from the police. However, there is evidence that the police themselves are being intimidated. ZADHR has eyewitness statements that on the 24th of April, at Mayo Police Station in Headlands District, a high-ranking police officer from Harare physically assaulted the Member in Charge, accusing him of being sympathetic to the opposition. The police post had been taking statements from victims and referring them for medical treatment. The Member in Charge was summarily transferred out of the district.
The current pattern of organized torture and violence being perpetrated by state agents in the rural areas of Zimbabwe is similar to that documented prior to the 2002 elections. However, the current violence is dramatically more intensive and unrestrained. The level of brutality and callousness exhibited by the perpetrators is unprecedented and the vicious and cowardly attacks by so called war veterans on women, children and the elderly shames the memory of all true heroes of the liberation struggle.
It has been clearly documented that much of the violence has been specifically directed against members of the opposition party, particularly those who acted as election agents or monitors in the recent elections. Villagers and school teachers from districts where the opposition predominated in the elections have also been targeted even though they have no political affiliations. Without exception, victims treated by our members have identified the perpetrators either as war veterans, armed security force members or Zanu PF youth militia or varying combinations of the three. The few acts of violence attributable to opposition members appear to have been retaliatory or defensive. It is clear from the widespread and coordinated nature of the violence and the consistent pattern of injuries inflicted, that state agents including elements of the security forces are organizing and directing this campaign of terror.
It is now obvious that the intent of the campaign is to secure victory for President Robert Mugabe in a run off election. As in the 2002 election, it may be anticipated that the violence will be halted just prior to the arrival of international election monitors, to create the illusion of a peaceful and fair election, although state agents will maintain an intimadatory presence throughout the rural areas.
ZADHR again appeals for the immediate cessation of acts of violence and for the restoration of the rule of law in Zimbabwe. To this end it calls for:
1) the immediate, large- scale deployment of teams of SADC and other credible international observers to all districts where violence is being reported.
2) attested members of the Zimbabwe Republic Police to assume sole responsibility for the enforcement of law and order, and for the protection of the law be extended to all Zimbabweans irrespective of political affiliation.
3) the immediate withdrawal of all military personnel, both regular and irregular to barracks and the arrest of those war veterans and those posing as war veterans who are instigating violence.
4) the withdrawal of uniforms and arms from all irregular police and army militia not formally attested into the service and not entitled under law to bear arms.
5) the postponement of all run off election activities until the above conditions have been achieved.
Finally, ZADHR again appeals to the international community of health workers, including the Zimbabwe Ministry of Health and Child Welfare and the Zimbabwe Medical Association to bring whatever effective pressure is within their capability to bear on the Government of Zimbabwe to stop these grotesque, cruel and shameful acts of violence, and to be prepared to actively defend their colleagues facing intimidation and physical threat.
**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
Urgent action: Stop forced closure of IDP camps in Kenya
2008-05-13
The National Internally Displaced Persons Network of Kenya
The National Internally Displaced Persons Network of Kenya is deeply concerned with recent moves by the Government of Kenya to forcibly close IDP camps across the country in violation of the international Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and basic human decency.
Operation "Rudi Nyumbani" seems to be based on no policy or legal framework but instead uses the force of the provincial administration to prematurely close the IDP camps. It aims at solving the problems of displacement by simply forcing people back to their homes:
1) without honoring legal obligations to compensation;
2) without providing adequate security and;
3) without allowing time for some reconciliation to take place.
The National IDP Network asks that the Government of Kenya recognize its responsibility to protect these victims of violence including many children. According to the guiding principles, which it has agreed to in the Great Lakes Pact, the government is also required, to give the displaced choices and alternatives to returning to the site of very recent trauma. By closing the camps the government is in effect forcing people to return or face starvation, disease and perhaps home in a slum. Such scenarios are likely to breed more poverty and recruits for gangs and future violence. Few seem to remember that Mungiki was a product of the 1991-92 violence and that we are in danger of magnifying and multiplying such groups if we do not deal with both the sites of violence and the trauma and plight of the displaced in a comprehensive manner.
It should also be noted that a number of those IDPs who have agreed to be taken back to such places as Kuresoi have experienced threats, violence and no services. At least one man has committed suicide on return, and many have literally returned by foot to the camps. In Nakuru, the site of one of the largest camps the government discontinued water five days ago to the camp causing much distress and the potential outbreak of disease. Residents have been forced to send children out to collect water and tomorrow they will bury a child killed by a car on one desperate mission to collect water. This is no way to treat victims of violence who are already traumatized.
We are asking concerned citizens and friends of Kenya to take urgent action:
- Ask the Kenya Red Cross and international partners to end any complicity in forced returns. Water must be restored to the Nakuru camp immediately. The Kenya Red Cross can be e-mailed at info@kenyaredcross.org or texted at 722-206958 or 733-333040
- Ask the Kenya National Commission for Human Rights to investigate and monitor the ongoing Resettlement and camp closures and to demand that the government recognize the Guiding Principles as the legal framework for dealing with IDPs. Commissioner Maina Kiai can be reached at mkiai@knchr.org
- Ask the government to create an IDP policy that includes some alternatives, which could be in the form of reinstatement of salaries for displaced government employees, monetary compensation, trauma counseling and help in individual relocation choices. Some IDPs have also suggested that they enter into temporary farming arrangements on underutilized land until reconciliation and security can be restored.
- Ask the Government to recognize that some IDPs will prefer to relocate in other parts of the country including Nairobi to do business rather than return. This must be respected and the Ministry of Special Programmes must work with the Ministry of Lands to find alternatives as well as temporary farming arrangements for those who do not wish to return. Finally, urge them to restore water to the Nakuru camp immediately.
*Dr. Naomi Shaban can be texted at 722814412.
**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
Pan-African Postcard
Kenyan media - we too are to blame
2008-05-13
Tajudeen Abdul Raheem
Tajudeen Abdul Raheem asks the question: Do we expect too much from the media when we ourselves are failing African societies?
May 3 was International Press Freedom Day. Journalists make their living by poking their noses into other people’s affairs but are not very good at looking at themselves, their institutions, their own practice and how they advance or hinder the values of freedom of expression that their profession is built on.
I was at the Goethe Institute in the City of Nairobi to hear journalists celebrate the day and talk about the various challenges facing the Media in Kenya. A very interesting documentary film ‘Uncovering Kenya Media’ produced by one of Kenya’s veteran Pan Africanist photojournalists, Khamis Ramadan was screened. The film looked at the unsung contributions of photojournalists. In general African journalists are badly paid and ill treated by their employers, governments and the wider society.
But photojournalists are even more badly treated because media houses and the wider society do not recognise their real value. In Africa they are still seen as poor cousins of the ‘main stream’. Yet in this age of multimedia the image is increasingly more important than the written word. What people can see or hear are more believable than what they can read. How many times have you heard people affirm the truth of their position by saying: ‘I saw it on telly’ or ‘I saw the pictures with my own eyes’? These are more validating than even ‘I heard it with my ears’ that used to put stamp of authority on radio. In the order of things ‘I read it’ is less affirming because many people still can neither read nor write. And even among those who are ‘literate’ many will read more ‘pictures’ than the text!
The film was both a celebration of the media and also an auto-critique by practitioners. There was a sad illustration of both the courage and danger of being a working journalist in Kenya is the case of journalist who was handicapped escaping Police arrest in the bloody days of Moi/KANU dictatorship and was bedridden for many years. He died after the film was concluded. It raises the question of how those in power treat the media but it is also about how journalists treat one of their own.
Kenyan media has seen a rebirth in the past few years where acts of courage and hope triumph over adversity. But the political glasnost in the post Moi era has its own dangers and as the society became more polarised the media itself is caught up in the conflicts. It is not just an impartial reporter but also active partisans.
There was a very interesting exchange of views after the film. Sometimes the exchanges were recriminatory, at times heated and impassioned but mostly educative throughout. The discussions were led by an impressive panel of experienced media persons including my UN Millennium Campaign colleague, Sylvia Mudasia, who in a previous life was a frontline journalist in both Kenya Times and The Nation and also David Matende (Editor/Publisher), Mitch Odera (Editor/Media Trainer) and Kabando wa Kabando, an MP and Assistant Minister in the Grand Coalition government.
Most of the interventions, understandably, focused on the role of the media in the recent political conflicts and violence that unfolded in Kenya consequent to the inconclusive nature of the Presidential elections and its mismanagement by the Kenya Electoral Commission. There were all kinds of questions and even more comments. There was a set directed at the role of the media in the recent conflicts. Did the media foresee the calamity? Could they have done anything to avert it? Did they contribute to it? Did they fan the embers of ethnicity and xenophobia?
Another set of questions and comments were about the professional role of the Media. Is the media free in Kenya? Is it performing according to the highest of professional core values? Is it controlled by the powerful? Is it too beholden to the rich and other vested interests? Is it cowed by government? Does the public trust it? Does it reflect the truth?
There were as many people on either side of these questions as there were people in the audience and all argued their cases passionately.
What I found very interesting is the assumption implied in all the condemnations, criticisms or praises of the media that we expect the media to be above conflicts, prejudices, sectarianism and partisanship in its discharge of its functions. Yet the journalist, the TV or Radio producer, the radio announcer, the anchor woman or man, the photographer, the subeditor, the editor, including this columnist and other columnists are all human beings and living in the same environment as their readers, listeners or viewers.
In any polarised society would it not be expecting too much to believe that the media will not be part of it? They are also citizens and being in the media should not deny them the right to political participation. What can be legitimately expected is for the media to discharge its duties in as non-partisan way as possible.
As for being political we are all political whether we state so openly or not. Even when many feign lack of interest in politics it does not mean that they do not have a political position. Not having a position is also a political position! Politics affects you whether you are interested in it or not. The Media is both a source of information and disinformation depending on the social, ideological or political perspectives of the persons involved. Objectivity itself is an inter-subjective process mediated by education, skill, personal integrity or lack of it, values, cultural norms, and the power relations between the journalist and his or her employers and between them and the powerful in society be they government, corporate leaders, advertisers, their audience, etc.
If we are not angels ourselves, it is unrealistic to expect that our media will be peopled by saints because like governments a people get the media they deserve. They report as much as they reflect their society and the world around them, its contradictions, its highest and lowest of values and sometimes the plainly mediocre.
The election conflicts exposed the various fissures in Kenya long neglected by a self satisfied elite and complacent public. It is not only media that should engage in retrospection about its role in the conflict. The whole of Kenya needs the honesty to confront their not so hidden but conveniently ignored socio-economic and political demons. No institution is neutral. The religious establishments failed woefully in its moral duty to speak truth to power.
But they were not alone as many leaders in the arts, academia, professional associations, the NGOs/ CSOs, and respected public intellectuals failed the same moral test. It is convenient to blame the media but every Kenyan and to some extent all of us who live in the country need to ask where we stood / stand on the issues that divided / divide the country. Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?
*Dr Tajudeen Abdul Raheem writes this syndicated column as a concerned Pan Africanist.
**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
Letters
Open letter to Nadine Gordimer
Dorothy Naor
2008-05-13
This letter is written in the wake of your justification to Dr. Haider Eid of your intention to attend a Writers' Festival in Israel.
I write to you as an American-Israeli Jew who ignorantly immigrated from the US to Israel 50 years ago. I came then to raise my children as Jews in a Jewish country. Only many years later, after much experience living here in Israel and much research, did I finally realize how misguided I'd been about Israel—what it was meant to be and what it is.
Let me begin with a question: how would you, an individual so widely recognized and admired both as author and as courageous rebel against apartheid, how would you have felt about a celebrity who during the height of your efforts against apartheid would have agreed to come to South Africa to attend a public function of the kind that you propose now to attend?
Would you not have felt that it was a debasement of all the efforts that yourself and others—particularly of those who were calling for sanctions, boycott, and divestment—were engaged in? Would you not have realized that however respectable and honest the intentions of the celebrity in coming to South Africa, that the government would use his/her attendance at the function for its own purposes?
Do you not realize that even though the writers' festival that you intend to come to is not sponsored by the Israeli government, the event nevertheless will be associated with the 60 years of so-called Independence celebrations? Do you not realize that your criticisms of Israel's policies will be so much stronger if instead of expressing them while attending a forum in Israel you state them as explanation of why you refuse to attend?
I deeply hope that it is still possible to convince you to not come, at least not as a guest to a public function. For you to attend a formal affair organized by Israelis in Israel--be it literary, academic, or other--is to undercut the endeavors of those of us who call for change, and believe that boycott, sanctions, and divestment from Israel can help bring about that change.
Israel is a disaster for Israeli Jews as well as for the indigenous Palestinians. Not that there is symmetry—for, as I'm sure you realize, there can never be symmetry between occupier and occupied, oppressor and oppressed.
Nevertheless, Israel, instead of being a safe haven for Jews, is the contrary. Where else since WWII have Jews gone through 10 wars and battles in less than 60 years? Where else since WWII have over 23,000 Jewish soldiers been killed in violence? Where else in the world do so many Jewish youngsters suffer from post-traumatic distress symptoms following their army service (and during it) because of what they experienced and what they did to Palestinians? Where else in the world do over 80,000 Holocaust survivors live in dire poverty, ignored by their government, which has money for expansion but not for them or for health, education, or social benefits?
Peace could have come long ago had Israel's leaders wished it. There have been many opportunities for peace (e.g., the Saudi Arabian proposal). But because Israel's leaders deem expansion more important than life, they not only do not protect Israelis but demand instead of Jewish inhabitants to be forever prepared to live by the sword. As Professor Robert Aumann, an American-Israeli Nobel Prize Laureate, has argued, the country is more important than lives; Israel's continued existence, he says, rests on readiness to sacrifice its young: "We are too sensitive to our losses, and also to the losses of the other side . . . In the Yom Kippur War, 3,000 soldiers were killed. It sounds terrible, but that's small change."*
'Small change,' indeed! Yet the acts of Israel's leaders from Ben Gurion till today clearly imply that to them lives are 'small change.' Thus, for example, Israel's present government instead of furnishing the long-suffering residents of Sderot either peace or shelters to protect them from the missiles fired from Gaza, tells the people of Sderot to learn to endure. Israel's leaders hold the residents of Sderot hostage so as to use their sufferings from missile attacks as propaganda.
Some of the above data is elucidated in a petition that Israelis recently sent to the United Methodist Church in support of its proposals to divest from companies that contribute to the occupation: http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Israelis/petition.html More data is available in two compilations that I prepared as handouts for my speaking tour in the United States in March and April this year. I would gladly send them to you (and to anyone else interested) by email or other means, if you wish.
Rather than celebrating 60 years of Israel's existence, there is every reason to reconsider the establishment of an ethnographic state—a Jewish state—whose criterion is not democracy but demography, whose leaders care not an iota for peace but for expansion. For centuries Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived in Palestine in amity prior to Zionism. They could again live together in peace. But this will not happen until there will be justice, freedom, and security for Palestinians (including the right of refugees to return).
Your agreement to come here to participate in any official or semi-official function undermines our endeavors to bring justice, freedom, and security to all who love this land—be they Jews, Muslims, Christians, or seculars.
Kudos to Nefta Freeman
2008-05-13
Sayeed Mulagata
Finally a commentary [Zimbawe - the other kinds of silences; http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/47925 ] that objectively evaluates the shortcomings of ZANU-PF without degenerating into an echo of imperialist propaganda.
Mugabe and Idi Amin - not a fair comparison!
2008-05-13
Okello Oculi
I must express deep appreciation to Jeremy Cronin for his piece on the Zimbabwe election struggle (Why South Africa will never be like Zimbabwe: http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/47873 ). His use of the rural site of struggles (for Zanu PF) in contrast to the urban-township sites (for ANC combatants), to struggle from, is most helpful in understanding the possible power of the mass-base to monitor and discipline their post-freedom leaders.
That analysis does, however, have problems when compared with the experience of TANU/Chama Cha Mapinduzi in Tanzania (with its predominantly rural base); as compared to Kenya, where KANU under Kenyatta's determination to create a "Kenya aristocracy" (according to an interview he gave to Sunday Times Magazine in London 1967), met a different fate. In the former, Nyerere used various devices, including his stepping down from Prime Ministership for one year to tour among the rural majority so as to devise strategies for holding elected politicians accountable and committed to the implementation of "one-party democratic elections" as well as to "Ujamaa". In Kenya, Kenyatta ruthlessly demobilized the party and its branches; and eliminated all effective challengers among the political class, including Tom Mboya. Pio Gama Pinto and J.M. Kariuki.
In this regard, Cronin's quip about Fidel Castro not blaming the failure of Americans to subsidize Cuba's tobacco or sugar-based economy, is most apt in highlighting the role of bold and ideologically focused leadership. He, however, fails to bring in that invisible but creatively lethal force called the rump of the White Settler political class that had known power and political management, including electoral competition ( albeit within a limited racial electorate), since the 1920s. Their combination of control of economic power, deep political experience and bitter but resurgent ambition for power, must not be left out of the picture.
Mugabe had made the mistake of failing to constantly call attention to this critical mass of race-located economic and political energy whose critical location made them a vital entry-point for any external British, American and European Union "sabotage" initiatives against Mugabe. As an example, the political skills of this class was demonstrated during the summit of Commonwealth leaders when they met in Abuja, Nigeria's capital. The efforts of their agents to capture the debate on Zimbabwe at sessions held by civil society groups, was formidable; if crude in parts when white individuals found it hard hiding their commandist relationship with the black activists in their team.
A critical focus on this group, and its much larger and more complex sector in South Africa, must not be hidden by a form of analysis that appears like a form of 'tribalism by silence' by analysts who share or do not share their aspirations for a return to the front row in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe and post-Mbeki South Africa. Such silence inhibits a creative and continuous engagement of this group for the challenge to undertake internal regeneration towards contributing to building de-racialized political and economic cultures in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Seen in this light, their possible success in exploiting Mugabe's disadvanatges since 1980, should not be glorified without drawing attention to poisonous racism that drives it; and their failure to join hands in creating rehumanized freedom and equality-rooted new societies.
President Obasanjo went on television in Nigeria to take some of the blame for Mugabe's difficulties. He told Nigerians that in 1980 and 1990 African leaders pressurized Mugabe and Zanu PF to stay their hands off land-reform. In 1990, African leaders begged Mugabe to make it easy for the conservative white settlers in South Africa to go along with getting Nelson Mandela out of prison; and for the elections, that gave power to the ANC, to be held. This information should be put on the table as we judge Mugabe. That, as Cronin rightly insists, must not exonorate the policy failures and crimes against the people of Zimbabwe by Mugabe and the Zanu PF's class of 'primitive accumulationists'. But my stomach did get some bitter knots when I watched Jacob Zuma on a BBC interview dismissing the political delays of the election agency in Zimbabwe while failing to acknowledge shackles that Mugabe was pressured to wear by other African leaders in the interest of ANC.
I deeply appreciate Cronin's drawing attendion to the gap in the political education that the ANC went through in comparison to the highly compressed military-combat dominated schooling of Zanu-PF. A deeper exploration of such factors would give value to his analysis; and be a useful guide for comparative studies of experiences with succession traumas in other African countries.
Finally, it is not honourable to treat Mugabe as if he had tripple machine-gunned MDC challenegers. He is also decades away from Idi Amin's treatment of Asians in Uganda and Amin's use of massacres of opponents as a form of remuneration for his killer squads: from the first night of his grabbing power in 1971 to his last moments of panic and flight in 1979. Put the credit on the Catholic priests who gave Mugabe education, or Ian Smith's barbaric refusal to let Mugabe see his sick child when he was in detention; but do give Mugabe credit where he deserves it. That will help us build a healthy tradition of critical review of leadership and governance in Africa while plucking off warts from out plumes.
Racism & xenophobia
Fracas on SAA flight
2002-04-18
TV star David Vlok was involved in an altercation with a first-class passenger on a South African Airways flight to London after the man delayed its departure from Johannesburg International Airport on Thursday night by demanding that two Muslim passengers be taken off the plane.
Internet & technology
Africa on the threshold of wider competition for international access
2002-04-18
http://www.balancingact-africa.com
Exciting new developments around African control of Internet access for our continent. Take a look at this weeks edition of News Update for more details.
Jobs
Programme Manager: Projects
Save the Children UK
2002-04-18
http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/vacancies
The Programme Manager: Projects will be responsible for the management of the technical components of the programme. This will be achieved by the direct line management of the project managers in each sector and ensure effective communication of information between the members of the LMT and projects. These projects include the livestock, water sanitation and hygiene, education and child protection projects. The role requires the promotion of an integrated child focused approach to programme design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation, with an emphasis on child participation.
Fahamu - Networks For Social Justice
www.fahamu.org
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ISSN 1753-6839