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Book Café: Appeal for help

Pamberi Trust

2008-09-10

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/action/50448

Pamberi Trust and African Synergy are independent registered charitable trusts, governed by constitution, and under authority of Board of Trustees.

Today free expression in Zimbabwe is bloodied and torn. Crisis and repression have trampled basic tenets of our social and cultural life. Some of us inside the country have decided to create the kind of life we wish to live; our chosen power is the arts. The humanity and freedom of African arts and its role in fostering social cohesion, is upheld at Book Café in Harare.

At Book Café we have created a place of beauty, joy, togetherness and tolerance; an arts centre that celebrates free expression, where artists work with dignity and audiences appreciate a diverse multitude of perspectives.
Since 1997 our Book Cafe in Harare has guaranteed no censorship. It is a refuge from violence and threat that imposes cruel uniformity; a refuge from the denial of free creation that is the antithesis of African values. Book Cafe has grown into a cultural icon in Zimbabwe - everyone goes because they can say things they feel must be said. We cry, laugh, sing and dance together. If you sit at Book Cafe long enough you meet every type of Zimbabwean.

Art is not a weak force: with freedom threatened, the economy in ruins and mob brutality tearing people’s lives apart, there is humanity through the arts. Art is not escape, it is transcendence. Book Café fights for human dignity. Through Book Café hundreds of artists derive their livelihood and thousands more benefit from development, training, support and services.

BOOK CAFÉ IS UNDER THREAT

Economic freefall in Zimbabwe is painful. Zimbabwe is operating at 5% of manufacturing capacity, the economy has shrunk by over half, unemployment is 85%, life is expectancy 35 years, the main referral hospital cannot perform surgical procedures, universities and schools barely open, the currency has collapsed and over a quarter of the population has fled.

Aside from surveillance, intimidation of artists, and threats Book Café faces impossible economic conditions – 2,000,000% inflation, shortages of every commodity, spare parts, unbearable poverty and extreme hardship. One billion Zim dollars, the largest note in circulation, is now USD 80c and falling.

In April the authorities ‘quarantined’ (ie ‘borrowed or stole’) our entire project funds and financial reserves. We have begged permission to obtain our own funds, and very little has been availed to us. Book Café and its hundreds of artists are suffering. It is illegal, arbitrary and punitive.

Because of these 3 reasons: economic disaster, repression and theft of our financial assets our very existence is threatened. Our survival and phenomenal growth in arts (from 500 to over 650 events a year, plus huge increase in the numbers of artists engaged, maybe double, and now over 1000) counts as big past achievements. We intend to survive. OUR SURVIVAL

We have survived everything thrown at us (including attempted bombing by apartheid agents in 1987 and threats from our own government for 25 years). We are determined to survive this most difficult and trying period ever.

Having cut expenditure to bare minimum, we have reserves to see us through to September. Thereafter, we are uncertain. We are asking for help. If you or your friends would like to make any donation, please write to Steve Khoza, Director skhoza@zol.co.zw We will reply with details.


* For BBC and Al Jazeera footage "Six Nights a Week at the Book Cafe" see, Part I at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=HeYLB0ok_e4 and Part II at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=oo3JUXNkftQ

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Darfur, ICC and the new humanitarian order

How the ICC’s “responsibility to protect” is being turned into an assertion of neocolonial domination

Mahmood Mamdani

2008-09-17

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/50568

On July 14, after much advance publicity and fanfare, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court applied for an arrest warrant for the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, on charges that included genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Important questions of fact arise from the application as presented by the prosecutor. But even more important is the light this case sheds on the politics of the “new humanitarian order.”

The conflict in Darfur began as a civil war in 1987–89, before Bashir and his group came to power. It was marked by indiscriminate killing and mass slaughter on both sides. The language of genocide was first employed in that conflict. The Fur representative at the May 1989 reconciliation conference in El Fasher pointed to their adversaries and claimed that “the aim is a total holocaust and no less than the complete annihilation of the Fur people and all things Fur.” In response the Arab representative traced the origin of the conflict to “the end of the ’70s when ... the Arabs were depicted as foreigners who should be evicted from this area of Dar Fur.”

The ICC prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has uncritically taken on the point of view of one side in this conflict, a side that was speaking of a “holocaust” before Bashir came to power, and he attributes far too much responsibility for the killing to Bashir alone. He goes on to speak of “new settlers” in today’s Darfur, suggesting that he has internalized this partisan perspective.

At the same time, the prosecutor speaks in ignorance of history: “AL BASHIR…promoted the idea of a polarization between tribes aligned with him, whom he labeled ‘Arabs’ and...the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa...derogatory [sic] referred to as ‘Zurgas’ or ‘Africans’.” The racialization of identities in Darfur has its roots in the British colonial period. As early as the late 1920s, the British tried to organize two confederations in Darfur: one Arab, the other black (Zurga). Racialized identities were incorporated into the census and provided the frame for government policy. It is not out of the blue that the two sides in the 1987–89 civil war described themselves as Arab and Zurga. If anything, the evidence shows that successive Sudanese governments — Bashir’s included — looked down on all Darfuris, non-Arab Zurga as well as Arab nomads.

Having falsely attributed to Bashir the racialization of the conflict, Moreno-Ocampo focuses on two consequences of the conflict in Darfur: ethnic cleansing through land-grabbing and atrocities in the camps. He attributes both to Bashir. He is again wrong. The land-grabbing has been a consequence of three different, if related, causes. The first is the colonial system, which reorganized Darfur as a series of tribal homelands, designating the largest for settled peasant tribes and none for fully nomadic tribes. The second is environmental degradation: according to the United Nations Environment Program, the Sahara expanded by 100 kilometers in four decades; this process reached a critical point in the mid-1980s, pushing all tribes of North Darfur, Arab and non-Arab, farther south, onto more fertile Fur and Masalit lands. This in turn led to a conflict between tribes with homelands and those without them. The imperative of sheer survival explains in part the unprecedented brutality of the violence in every successive war since 1987–89. The third cause came last: the brutal counterinsurgency unleashed by the Bashir regime in 2003–04 in response to an insurgency backed up by peasant tribes.

It is not just the early history of the conflict that the prosecutor is poorly informed about. In his eagerness to build a case, Moreno-Ocampo glosses over recent history as well. He charges Bashir with following up the mass slaughter of 2003–04 with attrition by other means in the camps: “He did not need bullets. He used other weapons: rape, hunger and fear.” This claim flies in the face of evidence from UN sources in Darfur, quoted by Julie Flint in the London Independent, that the death rate in the camps came down to around 200 a month from early 2005, less than in South Sudan or in the poor suburbs of Khartoum.

The point of the prosecutor’s case is to connect all consequences in Darfur to a single cause: Bashir. Moreno-Ocampo told journalists in The Hague, “What happened in Darfur is a consequence of Bashir’s will.” The prosecution of Bashir comes across as politicized justice. As such, it will undermine the legitimacy of the ICC and almost certainly will not help solve the crisis in Darfur. It is perhaps understandable that a prosecutor in a rush would gloss over all evidence that might undermine his case. But we must not. A workable solution to the conflict requires that all its causes be understood in their full complexity.

Darfur was the site of mass deaths in 2003–04. World Health Organization sources—still the most reliable available information on mortality levels then—trace these deaths to two major causes: roughly 80 percent to drought-related diarrhoea and 20 per cent to direct violence. There is no doubt that the perpetrators of violence should be held accountable, but when and how are political decisions that cannot belong to the ICC prosecutor. More than the innocence or guilt of the president of Sudan, it is the relationship between law and politics—including the politicization of the ICC—that poses a wider issue, one of greatest concern to African governments and peoples.

THE NEW HUMANITARIAN ORDER

When World War II broke out, the international order could be divided into two unequal parts: one privileged, the other subjugated; one a system of sovereign states in the Western Hemisphere, the other a colonial system in most of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Post-war decolonization recognized former colonies as states, thereby expanding state sovereignty as a global principle of relations between states. The end of the cold war has led to another basic shift, heralding an international humanitarian order that promises to hold state sovereignty accountable to an international human rights standard. Many believe that we are in the throes of a systemic transition in international relations.

The standard of responsibility is no longer international law; it has shifted, fatefully, from law to rights. As the Bush Administration made patently clear at the time of the invasion of Iraq, humanitarian intervention does not need to abide by the law. Indeed, its defining characteristic is that it is beyond the law. It is this feature that makes humanitarian intervention the twin of the “war on terror.”

This new humanitarian order, officially adopted at the UN’s 2005 World Summit, claims responsibility for the protection of vulnerable populations. That responsibility is said to belong to “the international community,” to be exercised in practice by the UN, and in particular by the Security Council, whose permanent members are the great powers. This new order is sanctioned in a language that departs markedly from the older language of law and citizenship. It describes as “human” the populations to be protected and as “humanitarian” the crisis they suffer from, the intervention that promises to rescue them and the agencies that seek to carry out intervention. Whereas the language of sovereignty is profoundly political, that of humanitarian intervention is profoundly apolitical, and sometimes even anti-political. Looked at closely and critically, what we are witnessing is not a global but a partial transition. The transition from the old system of sovereignty to a new humanitarian order is confined to those states defined as “failed” or “rogue” states. The result is once again a bifurcated system, whereby state sovereignty obtains in large parts of the world but is suspended in more and more countries in Africa and the Middle East.

The Westphalian coin of state sovereignty is still the effective currency in the international system. It is worth looking at both sides of this coin: sovereignty and citizenship. If “sovereignty” remains the password to enter the passageway of international relations, “citizenship” still confers membership in the sovereign national political (state) community. Sovereignty and citizenship are not opposites; they go together. The state, after all, embodies the key political right of citizens: the right of collective self-determination.

The international humanitarian order, in contrast, does not acknowledge citizenship. Instead, it turns citizens into wards. The language of humanitarian intervention has cut its ties with the language of citizen rights. To the extent the global humanitarian order claims to stand for rights, these are residual rights of the human and not the full range of rights of the citizen. If the rights of the citizen are pointedly political, the rights of the human pertain to sheer survival; they are summed up in one word: protection. The new language refers to its subjects not as bearers of rights—and thus active agents in their emancipation—but as passive beneficiaries of an external “responsibility to protect.” Rather than rights-bearing citizens, beneficiaries of the humanitarian order are akin to recipients of charity. Humanitarianism does not claim to reinforce agency, only to sustain bare life. If anything, its tendency is to promote dependence. Humanitarianism heralds a system of trusteeship.

It takes no great intellectual effort to recognize that the responsibility to protect has always been the sovereign’s obligation. It is not that a new principle has been introduced; rather, its terms have been radically altered. To grasp this shift, we need to ask: who has the responsibility to protect whom, under what conditions and toward what end?

The era of the international humanitarian order is not entirely new. It draws on the history of modern Western colonialism. At the outset of colonial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leading Western powers — Britain, France, Russia — claimed to protect “vulnerable groups.” When it came to countries controlled by rival powers, such as the Ottoman Empire, Western powers claimed to protect populations they considered vulnerable, mainly religious minorities like specific Christian denominations and Jews. In lands not yet colonized by any power, like South Asia and large parts of Africa, they highlighted local atrocities — such as female infanticide and suttee in India, and slavery in Africa — and pledged to protect victims from their rulers.

From this history was born the international regime of trusteeship exercised under the League of Nations. The League’s trust territories were mainly in Africa and the Middle East. They were created at the end of World War I, when colonies of defeated imperial powers (the Ottoman Empire, Germany and Italy) were handed over to the victorious powers, who pledged to administer them as guardians would administer wards, under the watchful eye of the League of Nations.

One of these trust territories was Rwanda, administered as a trust of Belgium until the 1959 Hutu Revolution. It was under the benevolent eye of the League of Nations that Belgium hardened Hutu and Tutsi into racialized identities, using the force of law to institutionalize an official system of discrimination between them. Thereby, Belgian colonialism laid the institutional groundwork for the genocide that followed half a century later. The Western powers that constituted the League of Nations could not hold Belgium accountable for the way it exercised an international trust, for one simple reason: to do so would have been to hold a mirror up to their own colonial record. Belgian rule in Rwanda was but a harder version of the indirect rule practiced to one degree or another by all Western powers in Africa. This system did not simply deny sovereignty to its colonies; it redesigned the administrative and political life of colonies by bringing each under a regime of group identity and rights. Belgian rule in Rwanda may have been an extreme version of colonialism, but it certainly was not exceptional.

Given the record of the League of Nations, it is worth asking how the new international regime of trusteeship would differ from the old one. What are the likely implications of the absence of citizenship rights at the core of this new system? Why would a regime of trusteeship not degenerate yet again into one of lack of accountability and responsibility?

On the face of it, these two systems — one defined by sovereignty and citizenship, the other by trusteeship and wardship — would seem to be contradictory rather than complementary. In practice, however, they are two parts of a bifurcated international system. One may ask how this bifurcated order is reproduced without the contradiction being flagrantly obvious, without it appearing like a contemporary version of the old colonial system of trusteeship. A part of the explanation lies in how power has managed to subvert the language of violence and war to serve its own claims.

SUBVERTING THE LANGUAGE OF GENOCIDE

War has long ceased to be a direct confrontation between the armed forces of two states. As became clear during the confrontation between the Allied and the Axis powers in World War II, in America’s Indochina War in the 1960s and ’70s, its Gulf War in 1991 and then again in its 2003 invasion of Iraq, states do not just target the armed forces of adversary states; they target society itself: war-related industry and infrastructure, economy and work force, and sometimes, as in the aerial bombardment of cities, the civilian population in general. The trend is for war to become generalized and indiscriminate. Modern war is total war.

This development in the nature of modern war has tended to follow an earlier development of counterinsurgency in colonial contexts. Faced with insurgent guerrillas who were simply armed civilians, colonial powers targeted the populations of occupied territories. When Mao Zedong wrote that guerrillas must be as fish in water, American counterinsurgency theorist Samuel Huntington, writing during the Vietnam War, responded that the object of counterinsurgency must be to drain the water and isolate the fish. But the practice is older than post–World War II counterinsurgency. It dates back to the earliest days of modernity, to settler-colonial wars against American Indians in the decades and centuries that followed 1492. Settler America pioneered the practice of interning civilian populations in what Americans called “reservations” and the British called “reserves,” a technology the Nazis would later develop into an extreme form called concentration camps. Often thought of as a British innovation put into effect during the late-nineteenth-century Boer War in South Africa, the practice of concentrating and interning populations in colonial wars was in origin an American settler contribution to the development of modern war.

The regime identified with the international humanitarian order makes a sharp distinction between genocide and other kinds of mass violence. The tendency is to be permissive of insurgency (liberation war), counterinsurgency (suppression of civil war or of rebel/revolutionary movements) and inter-state war as integral to the exercise of national sovereignty. Increasingly, they are taken as an inevitable if regrettable part of defending or asserting national sovereignty, domestically or internationally — but not genocide.

What, then, is the distinguishing feature of genocide? It is clearly not extreme violence against civilians, for that is very much a feature of both counterinsurgency and interstate war in these times. Only when extreme violence targets for annihilation a civilian population that is marked off as different “on grounds of race, ethnicity or religion” is that violence termed genocide. It is this aspect of the legal definition that has allowed “genocide” to be instrumentalized by big powers so as to target those newly independent states that they find unruly and want to discipline. More and more, universal condemnation is reserved for only one form of mass violence — genocide — as the ultimate crime, so much so that counterinsurgency and war appear to be normal developments. It is genocide that is said to be violence run amok, amoral, evil. The former is depicted as normal violence, and the latter as bad violence. Thus the tendency to call for “humanitarian intervention” only where mass slaughter is named “genocide.”

Given that the nature of twentieth-century “indirect rule” colonialism in Africa shaped the nature of administrative power along “tribal” (or ethnic) lines, it is not surprising that the exercise of power and responses to it tend to take “tribal” forms in newly independent states. From this point of view, there is little to distinguish between mass violence unleashed against civilians in Congo, northern Uganda, Mozambique, Angola, Darfur, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast and so on. So which ones are to be named “genocide” and which ones are not? Most important, who decides?

There is nothing new in legal concepts being used to serve the expedience of great powers. What is new about the “war on terror” is that action against certain forms of violence is simultaneously being moralized and legally deregulated. Is it then surprising that these very developments have led to violence run amok, as in Iraq after 2003 or, indeed, in Bashir’s own little war on terror in Darfur in 2003–04? As the new humanitarian order does away with legal limits to pre-emptive war—thus, to the global war on terror—it should not be surprising that counterinsurgency defines itself as a local war on terror.

The year 2003 saw the unfolding of two counterinsurgencies. One was in Iraq, and it grew out of foreign invasion. The other was in Darfur, and it grew as a response to an internal insurgency. The former involved a liberation war against a foreign occupation; the latter, a civil war in an independent state. True, if you were an Iraqi or a Darfuri, there was little difference between the brutality of the violence unleashed in either instance. Yet much energy has been invested in how to define the brutality in each instance: whether as counterinsurgency or as genocide. We have the astonishing spectacle of the state that has perpetrated extreme violence in Iraq, the United States, branding an adversary state, Sudan, as one that has perpetrated genocidal violence in Darfur. Even more astonishing, we have a citizens’ movement in America calling for a humanitarian intervention in Darfur while keeping mum about the violence in Iraq.

THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT

The emphasis on big powers as the protectors of rights internationally is increasingly being twinned with an emphasis on big powers as enforcers of justice internationally. This much is clear from a critical look at the short history of the International Criminal Court. The ICC was set up by treaty in Rome in 1998 to try the world’s most heinous crimes: mass murder and other systematic abuses. The relationship between the ICC and successive US administrations is instructive: it began with Washington criticizing the ICC and then turning it into a useful tool. The effort has been bipartisan: the first attempts to weaken the ICC and to create US exemptions from an emerging regime of international justice were made by leading Democrats during the Clinton Administration.

Washington’s concerns were spelled out in detail by a subsequent Republican ambassador to the UN, John Bolton: “Our main concern should be for our country’s top civilian and military leaders, those responsible for our defense and foreign policy.” Bolton went on to ask“ whether the United States was guilty of war crimes for its aerial bombing campaigns over Germany and Japan in World War II” and answered in the affirmative: “Indeed, if anything, a straightforward reading of the language probably indicates that the court would find the United States guilty. A fortiori, these provisions seem to imply that the United States would have been guilty of a war crime for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is intolerable and unacceptable.” He also aired the concerns of America’s principal ally in the Middle East, Israel: “Thus, Israel justifiably feared in Rome that its pre-emptive strike in the Six-Day War almost certainly would have provoked a proceeding against top Israeli officials. Moreover, there is no doubt that Israel will be the target of a complaint concerning conditions and practices by the Israeli military in the West Bank and Gaza.”

When it came to signing the treaty, Washington balked. Once it was clear that it would not be able to keep the ICC from becoming a reality, the Bush Administration changed tactics and began signing bilateral agreements with countries whereby both signatories would pledge not to hand over each other’s nationals — even those accused of crimes against humanity — to the ICC. By mid-June 2003, the United States had signed such agreements with thirty-seven countries, starting with Sierra Leone, a site of massive atrocities.

The Bush Administration’s next move was accommodation, made possible by the kind of pragmatism practiced by the ICC’s leadership. The fact of mutual accommodation between the world’s only superpower and an international institution struggling to find its feet on the ground is clear if we take into account the four countries where the ICC has launched its investigations: Sudan, Uganda, Central African Republic and Congo. All are places where the United States has no major objection to the course chartered by ICC investigations. Its name notwithstanding, the ICC is rapidly turning into a Western court to try African crimes against humanity. It has targeted governments that are US adversaries and ignored actions the United States doesn’t oppose, like those of Uganda and Rwanda in eastern Congo, effectively conferring impunity on them.

If the ICC is accountable, it is to the Security Council, not the General Assembly. It is this relationship that India objected to when it—like the United States, China and Sudan—refused to sign the Rome Statute. India’s primary objection was summed up by “The Hindu”, India’s leading political daily, which argued that “granting powers to the Security Council to refer cases to the ICC, or to block them, was unacceptable, especially if its members were not all signatories to the treaty,” for it “provided escape routes for those accused of serious crimes but with clout in the U.N. body.” At the same time, “giving the Security Council power to refer cases from a non-signatory country to the ICC was against the Law of Treaties under which no country can be bound by the provisions of a treaty it has not signed.”

The absence of formal political accountability has led to the informal politicization of the ICC. No one should be surprised that the United States used its position as the leading power in the Security Council to advance its bid to capture the ICC. This is how The Hindu summed up the US relationship to the court: “The wheeling-dealing by which the U.S. has managed to maintain its exceptionalism to the ICC while assisting ‘to end the climate of impunity in Sudan’ makes a complete mockery of the ideals that informed the setting up of a permanent international criminal court to try perpetrators of the gravest of crimes against humanity.”

LAW AND POLITICS IN TRANSITIONAL SOCIETIES

Human rights fundamentalists argue for an international legal standard regardless of the political context of the country in question. Their point of view is bolstered by the widespread and understandable popular outrage, not just in the West but also throughout Africa, against the impunity with which a growing number of regimes have been resorting to slaughter to brutalize their populations into silence. The realization that the ICC has tended to focus only on African crimes, and mainly on crimes committed by adversaries of the United States, has introduced a note of sobriety into the African discussion, raising concerns about a politicized justice and wider questions about the relationship between law and politics.

In no country is the distinction between legal and political issues self-evident. In a democracy, the domain of the legal is defined through the political process. What would happen if we privileged the legal over the political, regardless of context? The experience of a range of transitional societies — post-Soviet, postapartheid and postcolonial — suggests that such a fundamentalism would call into question their political existence. Several post-Soviet societies of Eastern Europe with a history of extensive informing, spying and compromising have decided either not to open fully secret police and Communist Party files or to do so at a snail’s pace. Societies torn apart by civil war, like post-Franco Spain, have chosen amnesia over truth, for the simple reason that they have prioritized the need to forge a future over agreeing on the past. The contrast is provided by Bosnia and Rwanda, where the administration of justice became an international responsibility and the decision to detach war crimes from the underlying political reality has turned justice into a regime for settling scores.

Those who face human rights as the language of an externally driven “humanitarian intervention” have to contend with a legal regime where the content of human rights law is defined outside a political process—whether democratic or not—that includes them as formal participants. Particularly for those in Africa, the ICC heralds a regime of legal and political dependence, much as the postwar Bretton Woods institutions began to pioneer an international regime of economic dependence in the 1980s and ’90s. The real danger of detaching the legal from the political regime and handing it over to human rights fundamentalists is that it will turn the pursuit of justice into revenge-seeking, thereby obstructing the search for reconciliation and a durable peace. Does that mean that the very notion of justice must be postponed as disruptive of peace? No.

SURVIVORS’ JUSTICE

If peace and justice are to be complementary rather than conflicting objectives, we must distinguish victors’ justice from survivors’ justice: if one insists on distinguishing right from wrong, the other seeks to reconcile different rights. In a situation where there is no winner and thus no possibility of victors’ justice, survivors’ justice may indeed be the only form of justice possible. If Nuremberg is the paradigm for victors’ justice, South Africa’s postapartheid transition is the paradigm for survivors’ justice. The end of apartheid was driven by a key principle: forgive but do not forget. The first part of the compact was that the new power will forgive all past transgressions so long as they are publicly acknowledged as wrongs. There will be no prosecutions. The second was that there will be no forgetting and that henceforth rules of conduct must change, thereby ensuring a transition to a postapartheid order. It was South Africa’s good fortune that its transition was in the main internally driven. South Africa is not a solitary example but a prototype for conflicts raging across Africa about the shape of postcolonial political communities and the definition of membership in them. The agreement that ended the South Sudan war combined impunity for all participants with political reform. The same was true of the settlement ending Mozambique’s civil war. Had the ICC been involved in these conflicts in the way it is now in Darfur, it is doubtful there would be peace in either place.

© 2008 Mahmood Mamdani

* Mahmood Mamdani, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, was director of the Institute of African Studies from 1999 to 2004. This article is excerpted from the conclusion to his book Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, forthcoming from Pantheon in January 2009.

* This article also appeared in The Nation 29 September 2008. The article is reproduced here with the permission of the author.

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Amnesties and the International Criminal Court?

Jegede Ademola Oluborode

2008-09-10

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50449

(We) are unable to forgive what (we) cannot punish and (we) are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable - Hannah Arendt [1]

INTRODUCTION

The granting of amnesty [2] is by no means new in history. Religious testaments, notably the bible records the creator as saying, ‘I am the one who wipes away all your sins and remember them no more'[3]. Down through the ages, the practice has evolved not only as the exclusive of the divine, but has become an elastic and effective tool for striking compromise for peace by nations in transition. Consequently, amnesties have featured prominently at various times in the peace efforts of nations for the protagonists of war. With the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), amnesties as a shield against accountability for international crimes have become a debatable prescription. At the heart of this argument are certain provisions of the Rome Statute of the ICC on the ‘complementary’ arrangement which allows the ICC to prosecute only when a national state is unwilling or unable to perform its prosecutorial role.

This essay argues that although the Rome Statute is silent about amnesties, the purport of amnesties which is not to condone impunity but to chart a path of peace agrees with the spirit of the Rome Statute which essentially is to end impunity and contribute to the prevention of international crimes. The essay concludes on the note that it is difficult for the International Criminal Court to ignore limited amnesties as a bargaining tool in civil wars or political crimes negotiations.
AMNESTY: PURPOSE AND JUSTIFICATION

As far as the transition of states from war situation to peace is concerned, writers have argued that the granting of amnesties for crimes of international concern is an inevitable choice [4]. This view appears justified when it is considered that amnesties have played significant role at the various phases of political negotiation and national reconciliation efforts in such nations as Chile [5], Columbia [6], East- Timor [7], Mozambique [8] ,Sierra Leone [9], Uganda [10] and South Africa [11]. For instance, in justifying the need for amnesties in South Africa’s political transition, Justice Mahomed noted in the case of The Azanian Peoples Organization (AZAPO) v The President of the Republic of South Africa and ors. [12] that ‘but for a mechanism for amnesty, the ‘‘historic bridge’’ [the negotiated transition to democratic rule] itself might never have been erected.’

To be sure too, the United Nations does not rule out the possibility of amnesties in the quest for lasting peace. At least, in 1993, the United Nations expressed full support for the Governors Island Agreement which granted full amnesty to members of General Cedras’ and Brigadier General Biamby’s military regime accused of committing crimes against humanity in Haiti from 1990-1994. According to the Security Council, the Agreement was ‘the only valid framework for resolving the crisis in Haiti [13]’ Even more instructive, is the fact that amnesty is also a choice endorsed in the United Nations Guidelines for United Nations Representatives on Certain Aspects of Negotiations for Conflict Resolution [14]. According to the Guidelines:

"…demands for amnesty may be made on behalf of different elements. It may be necessary and proper for immunity from prosecution to be granted to members of the armed opposition seeking reintegration into society as part of a national reconciliation process. Government negotiators may seek endorsement of self-amnesties proposals; however, the UN cannot condone amnesties regarding war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide or foster those that violate relevant treaty obligations of the parties in this field."

Thus, while there appears to be an international recognition for amnesties as a vital tool for peace building, it is certain that amnesties for international war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are not permissible under international human rights law. The jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) demonstrated this in the case of Furundzija [15] where the Trial Chamber stated that due to the importance of the values it protects, a State cannot avoid its responsibilities by absolving perpetrators of torture through amnesty law.

Yet, the endorsement of amnesties in some circumstances by the United Nations Guidelines does in itself excuse accountability for international crimes for some category of persons. This is necessary particularly where conflict involve large scale violations of the laws of war by people. Therefore, limited amnesty for those who bear less responsibility is a good tool for ending civil wars, facilitating the transition to democratic civilian regimes [16] or aiding the process of reconciliation [17]. Also it is instructive that the truth about international crimes may never be told if a person subject to a domestic amnesty (on condition of full disclosure of his or her involvement in the international crime) fears prosecution if he or she crosses a border [18]. It is uncertain whether the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court will not recognise these practical realities, in performing its complementary role to national criminal jurisdictions.

AMNESTY AND THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT

The Rome Statute is silent about amnesties. This leaves room for speculation and does suggest that the grant of amnesties to international criminals either by the national authorities of a State party to the Rome Statute of the ICC or by Truth and Reconciliation Commissions might conflict with the exercise of the jurisdiction of the ICC or constitute an obstacle to prosecutions before it [19]. This quandary will feature prominently in the exercise by the ICC of its ‘complimentary arrangement’ among others.

THE PRINCIPLE OF ‘COMPLEMENTARITY’

It is noteworthy that by virtue of paragraph 10 of the preamble and article 1 of the Rome Statute, the power of the ICC to exercise jurisdiction over persons for international crimes is complementary to national criminal jurisdiction. Article 17 of the Rome Statute generally recognises that the ICC will be complementary to national criminal jurisdiction and that the ICC will only prosecute where the state is unable [20] or unwilling [21]. Thus, an interesting question is whether on the basis of the principle of complementarity, the ICC may consider the State unwilling and unable to prosecute the crimes that fall within its jurisdiction and enact a request for arrest and surrender of the persons to whom amnesty has been granted by the States.

In addressing this question, the provisions of article 17 (1) (b) and (d) of the Rome Statute are very significant. It provides that: Having regard to paragraph 10 of the Preamble and article 1, the Court shall determine that a case is inadmissible where:

(b)The case is being investigated or prosecuted by a State which has jurisdiction over it and the State has decided not to prosecute the person concerned, unless the decision resulted from the unwillingness or inability of the State genuinely to prosecute;

(d) The case is not of sufficient gravity to justify further action by the Court It is argued that where genuine national proceedings have preceded the grant of amnesties in the interest of peace and reconciliation, as in the cases of South Africa [22] and Mozambique [23] it is unlikely that such will be regarded as constituting unwillingness or inability of the State to prosecute. This is more so considering that such national proceedings on amnesties will agree with the spirit of the Rome Statute as indicated by the preamble [24] which is to put an end to impunity and contribute to the prevention of international crimes. Further reinforcing this is the view of writers that there appears to be some recognition of amnesties on the basis of article 53(2) (c), which allows the Prosecutor to refuse prosecution where he or she concludes that ‘a prosecution is not in the interests of justice, taking into account all circumstances,’ article 16 giving the Security Council the power to defer proceedings; and article 15, which gives the Prosecutor discretion to decline to prosecute proprio moton[25].

Also, since amnesties often involve accountability measures such as truth commissions which focus on reconciliation, victims’ satisfaction and restitution, it is difficult to state that this does not agree with the concepts of restitution and reparations to victims as provided by article 75(2) of the Rome Statute which indicates that the Court may issue directly against a convicted person an order for reparations.

CONCLUSION

Accountability for international crimes has become axiomatic with the coming into effect of the Rome Statute of the ICC. Amnesty however is a vital tool of reconciliation, restitution and peace building for nations in transition. Although, the Rome Statute of the ICC is silent about amnesties, it is feasible from its certain provisions that the power of the ICC to prosecute crimes of international concerns is not absolute. The ICC may be influenced by the Security Council not to prosecute and it may not assume jurisdiction to prosecute unless a state is unwilling or unable to prosecute indictees. The principle of complementarity of the ICC appears not to have excluded limited amnesties granted by states to those who bear less responsibility in crimes of international concern. This is within the broader practice of the United Nations which does not reject limited amnesties as part of national reconciliation if done not to excuse perpetrators for the most serious crimes of international concern. Amnesties agree with the spirit of the Rome Statute which is not only aimed at the prosecution of international crimes but in their prevention and promotion of peace and security. These realities make it difficult to state that amnesties are not compatible with the Statute of the ICC.

* Jegede Ademola Oluborode is a legal practitioner and a human rights activist in Nigeria.

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

NOTES:

1. H Arendt The Human Condition (1958)Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press 171

2. Amnesty literally means ‘a pardon extended by the government to a group or class of persons, usually for a political offence; the act of a sovereign power officially forgiving certain classes of persons who are subject to trial but have not yet been convicted’. Black’s Law Dictionary 8th edition 2004.

3. The Holy Bible, King James Version Isaiah Chapter 43 verse 25.

4. D Orentlicher ‘Settling Accounts: The Duty to Prosecute Human Rights Violations of a Prior Regime’ (1991) 100 The Yale Law Journal 2537; D Cassel ‘Lessons from the Americas: Guidelines for International Response to Amnesties for Atrocities’ (1996) 59 Law and Contemporary Problems 225; J Dugard ‘Dealing with crimes of a past regime. Is amnesty still an option?’(1999) 12 Leiden Journal of International Law 1009.

5. In 1978, the Chilean military granted itself a broad amnesty that covered most of its crimes from 1973 (when it took power) until 1978. See Chile Executive Decree No 2191 of April 18, 1978.

6. ‘KR trials are vital, but won’t solve everything’ Phnom Penh Post 20 December 2002 – 2 January 2003 Issue 11 to 26.

7. Regulation No. 2001/10 on the Establishment of a Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor UNTAET/REG/2001/10 13 July 2001.

8. In 1992, Mozambique adopted through its Parliament a general amnesty for ‘crimes against the state’ 10 days after the signing of the 1992 Peace Agreement, which brought an end to 16 years of armed conflict between the warring parties in Mozambique. See H Cobban www.archipelago.org/vol10-34/cobban.htm

9. Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act of 22 February 2000 (Sierra Leone) and art XXVI of the 1999 Lomé Peace Agreement.

10. The Amnesty Act of 2000 offers pardon to all Ugandans engaged or engaging in acts of rebellion against the government of Uganda since 26th January 1986. See Refugee Law Project 2005. ‘Whose Justice? Perceptions of Uganda’s Amnesty Act 2000: The Potential for Conflict Resolution and Long-term Reconciliation.’ Working Paper No. 15 February 2005 4.

11. South Africa National Unity and Reconciliation Act 34 of 1995 which sets up a mechanism to grant a broad amnesty for those who had committed politically motivated crimes during the apartheid regime and who fully disclosed all acts in respect of which amnesty was sought. When granted, the amnesty exempted individuals from criminal prosecutions and barred civil suits for damages.

12. The Azanian Peoples Organization (AZAPO) v The President of the Republic of South Africa and ors. 1996 4 SA 671 (CC) para 22.

13. Statement of the President of the Security Council, UN SCOR, 48th Sess., 329th meeting at 26, UN Doc. S/INF/49 (1993). See M Scharf ‘Swapping amnesty for peace: Was there a duty to prosecute international crimes in Haiti?’ (1996) 31 Texas International Law Journal pp 1-42.

14. www.ohchr.org/Docments/Publications/RuleoflawTruthCommissionsen.pdf (accessed on 25 February 2008).

15. Prosecutor v. Furundzija (10 December 1998) IT-95-17/1-T, Judgment of the Trial Chamber p 155.

16. N Roht-Arriaza ‘State responsibility to investigate and prosecute grave human rights violations in international law’ (1990) 78 California Law Review p 451.

17. no 11 above.

18. AZAPO (n 12 above) pp 683-685.

19. Paper delivered by R May, Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (6 – 7 November 2003).

20. According to art 17(3) of the Rome Statute, in order to determine inability in a particular case, ‘the Court shall consider whether, due to a total or substantial collapse or unavailability of its national judicial system, the State is unable to obtain the accused or the necessary evidence and testimony or otherwise unable to carry out its proceedings.’

21. According to art 17(2) of the Rome Statute, in order to determine unwillingness, the Court ‘shall consider, having regard to the principles of due process recognized by international law, whether one or more of the following exist, as applicable: (a) The proceedings were or are being undertaken or the national decision was made for the purpose of shielding the person concerned from criminal responsibility for crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court referred to in article 5; (b) There has been an unjustified delay in the proceedings which in the circumstances is inconsistent with an intent to bring the person concerned to justice; (c) The proceedings were not or are not being conducted independently or impartially, and they were or are being conducted in a manner which, in the circumstances, is inconsistent with an intent to bring the person concerned to justice.’

22. no 11 above.

23. no 8 above.

24. Preamble: the States to this Statute [….] Recognizing that such grave crimes threaten the peace, security and well-being of the world, Affirming that the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole must not go unpunished and that their effective prosecution must be ensured by taking measures at the national level and by enhancing international cooperation, Determined to put an end to impunity for the perpetrators of these crimes and thus to contribute to the prevention of such crimes, Recalling that it is the duty of every State to exercise its criminal jurisdiction over those responsible for international crimes (emphasis added).

25. M Scharf ‘The amnesty exception to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court’ (1999) 32, Cornell International Law Journal p 507; R Wedgwood ‘The International Criminal Court: An American view’ European Journal of International Law (1999) 10 p 97.

The impact of small arms on women in Central Africa

Marie-Claire Faray-Kele

2008-09-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50607

It is with much interest that the women’s network of IANSA followed the different interventions presented since the beginning of this meeting. This is an opportunity to advance the application of the Program of Action for the control of small arms and light weapons, in all its aspects, including gender violence.

The illicit use of small arms includes the offences of domestic violence as well as sexual violence against women.

It is recognized that women are less able to resist or to escape, and even less able to receive help from others, and thus to survive, a crime committed with a firearm.

Incidents of domestic violence involving firearms cause as many problems as violence perpetrated in the streets, and their number increases during and after armed conflicts, due to the illegal circulation of these arms in the community.
We are then encouraged by the states who have successfully harmonized their policies of arms control and their legislation regarding domestic violence. And we urge other states to follow this example. IANSA’s women network has formulated some recommendations, translated into several languages, of which you can get a copy.

Numerous reports and analyses have documented and demonstrated that the illegal trafficking, the availability, and the use of firearms have had a disastrous impact on the lives of women during conflicts which have ravaged the Great Lakes Region of Africa.

Let us take the example of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Sexual violence of an immeasurable atrocity has been made against women with the use of firearms. In the majority of cases, women have suffered physical and mental trauma which exceed all understanding of human nature and human imagination.

Many women were raped in front of their family and community under the menace of a firearm. They have been kidnapped and enlisted by force to serve in the rebels camps as sexual slaves. Consequently, many women have had unwanted pregnancies, some at a very young age, and they have been reduced to a state of human wreckage. There have been cases where child soldiers have raped and killed women (young and old), using their firearms like toys, which give them power.

Allow me again to take the example of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Resolution 1756 of the Security Council links the illegal exploitation of natural resources and the illicit trafficking of small arms. This has a direct impact on the lives of women, because the majority of these illicit arms are in the hands of assailants who spread anarchy. In April 2008 alone, almost 900 cases of rape committed by armed men have been reported in the province of North Kivu in east Congo. Therefore, you can see that this conference room would be full of raped women.

The cases are so numerous that the Congolese hospitals do not have the capacity to help all the victims who come. Numbers of them do not even dare to go for fear of being disgraced and rejected by their community.

These cruelties have been made possible because of the proliferation of small arms in the region of the Great Lakes of Africa to quench the thirst for natural resources of some individuals and organised groups. Women have been reduced to a state of non-existence, suffering the terrible psychological and psychosocial repercussions in an environment of absolute poverty.

The continual presence of armed bandits and hidden, non-declared arms in the Great Lakes Region has created very strong insecurity. Women living in absolute fear always feel threatened and cannot assert their demands! They do not know who to trust.

In addition to the reports of rapes, there are also reports incriminating misbehaving agents mandated to ensure the security of populations and those who were supposed to maintain the peace in times of conflicts. Because of the lack of rigorous control, it is reported that those agents have trafficked and supplied arms to certain armed groups in exchange for natural resources. Therefore, how can we face this insecurity, especially when the trafficking, the sale, and the use of weapons remain uncontrolled, illegal, and unpunished?

It is true that the United Nations has made many efforts, in adopting Security Council Resolution 1325 on the participation of women in the consolidation of peace and reconstruction, as well as the new Resolution 1820 which demands the immediate and complete end of sexual violence in conflict zones. But these resolutions will not be put into action as long as women are the victims of domestic and sexual violence due to small arms outside all control. What would be their relevance? Mr. President,

Firearms are conceived and perceived as a detonator of death, regardless of whether it is aimed at animals or at humans. Women and children make up the largest number of human victims.

In this year where we celebrate the 60 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we call on the States which have the duty to protect the most vulnerable groups of their populations against the threat of firearms, in particular, the victims of domestic violence and sexual violence.

* This article is based on Marie-Claire Faray-Kele's full presentation to delegates on guns and both domestic and sexual violence at the Third Biennial Meeting of States (BMS) on Small Arms and Light Weapons, held at the United Nations in New York, July 2008.

*Marie-Claire Faray-Kele is a Congolese research scientist in infectious diseases at Barts Hospital and the Queen Mary University of London, and is also an active campaigner for peace and women’s rights in the DRC.

*Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

A big devil in the shacks

The politics of fire

Matt Birkinshaw

2008-09-17

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50572

On average in South Africa over the last five years there are ten shack fires a day with someone dying in a shack fire every other day. Shack fires are not acts of God. They are the result of political choices, often at municipal level.

Shack settlements are a poor people’s solution to a lack of affordable housing, especially in cities. In eThekwini municipality, a third of the population, and around half of the African population live in shacks. This is around 920,000 people. 16.4 per cent or about one in six of all South African households live in shacks. The number of South African households living in shacks is increasing at more than double the rate of population growth and is now nearly two million.

People live in shacks for many reasons. People move to the cities from rural areas in search of work, tertiary education, and health care. People also leave formal housing to live in shacks when they can no longer afford that housing after a breadwinner dies or loses a job. They may also come to live in the shacks because they wish to escape family violence or to have their own home independently of their parents. Some people came to avoid political violence in the 1980s. However, it is hard to find work in the cities, and when people find it, they often don’t get paid enough to afford rent in formal housing. 60.7% of people in eThekwini live on less than R427 a month. Rent might be R500 a month plus bills.

Shack communities are often referred to as ‘informal’, as ‘temporary’ and as ‘camps’, but a survey in 2001 found that “over half of the household heads with informal dwellings have lived in their homes for between five and ten years and a quarter have lived in them for over eleven years”. Shack communities are not temporary. But because they are not in places that city officials call ‘suitable’, they are refused basic services and prevented from taking their proper place in the city. The lack of services is seen as a deliberate attempt to force people to leave their homes and accept relocation.
CAUSES OF FIRES: LACK OF LAND

Shack settlements occupy unused land. Because the land is not legally theirs, people who live there live in fear of eviction. If they manage to stay on the land, the settlement is not allowed to expand and the shacks become very dense. Often people build very close together so that new shacks will not be noticed (and destroyed) by the Land Invasions Unit. Shack settlements in eThekwini are, on average, around six times more dense than the average for housing in the municipality as a whole. Crowded settlements may be up to 31 times the average density. In some communities the only space that is not for housing is the paths between the houses.

LACK OF HOUSING

Fires happen a lot in the shacks and not in rich areas because shacks burn easily. If a paraffin stove is knocked over in a shack, people inside have less than a minute before the fire will kill anyone inside. Shacks burn easily because they are made of wood and plastic and cardboard. People are not allowed to formalise their shacks themselves. If someone replaces a plastic wall with a brick wall the Land Invasions Unit can destroy the whole shack.

DENIAL OF ACCESS TO ELECTRICITY

Ask anyone from a shack settlement the causes of fires and they will tell you: candles and paraffin stoves. Open flames were the biggest single determined cause of fires in informal dwellings in 2006, and nearly half of the known causes. The eThekwini Municipality will not allow electricity in shacks. This is despite the fact that paraffin is more expensive than electricity, and hard to afford for many people. Paraffin is also a danger to health. Many shack dwellers note that paraffin fumes cause chest problems. Children in the shacks are poisoned after drinking it by accident.

Since 2001, when eThekwini's Slums Clearance Programme was announced, the municipality has refused to extend electricity to shacks as they are now considered ‘temporary’. The policy states that 'lack of funding' as the reason that electrification of informal settlements has been discontinued. However, the Municipality has continued to spend public money on non-essential projects like the theme-park and casino. The refusal to allow electrify shacks sends a clear message to shack dwellers, whose children must grow up without electricity while seeing electricity in the houses around them. How long will shack dwellers have to remain at the risk of fires while waiting for their settlements to be upgraded or developed?

Instead of electricity, the Municipality pays for Disaster Management to provide blankets and food after fires. Sometimes they pay to put shack dwellers in tents or transit camps. Sometimes they pay for funerals.

It is the duty of authorities and government to make cities safe through the provision of basic services, such as electricity. We would like to ask for a review of the decision to suspend electrification of informal settlements. If the issue is saving money; does disaster response and burials use the same money? We would like to balance the money used to respond to fires. We would like to hear them say “we are saving ten per cent at least when you die, when your shack gets burnt”. If it’s not that, we will see what it is. - S'bu Zikode, Kennedy Road, Durban

Abahlali baseMjondolo acknowledges that there is a national electricity shortage in South Africa but asks why the poor must be blamed and forced to pay the price. The big corporations run their businesses day and night using electricity for profit while the shack dwellers use it just to light and cook. The refusal to electrify shacks cannot be justified by the Municipality using the technocratic language of available resources. The refusal of electricity is a political choice that hurts the poor.

WATER

Water provision in informal settlements is inadequate. At Kennedy Road in Durban there are 8,000 people sharing five communal standpipes. At Foreman Road there are a similar number of people sharing an ablution block with one standpipe and five sinks for washing. As shack settlements do not have piped water, when there is a fire, unless it is close to the taps, it is hard for people to put it out themselves.

EMERGENCY SERVICES

Shack fires are a big problem for the Fire Service; over a quarter of fires in South Africa are shack fires. They are the biggest single type of fire after bush fires. The Fire Department now comes to shack settlements. Before, shack dwellers would have to ask their neighbours in formal housing to phone the Fire Department for them. They seem to come quicker to settlements that are known for the struggle, and in some places, not so well known for the struggle, they are still much too slow.

The Fire Service is not the only Municipal service that fails to respond properly to shack communities. Ambulance and Police are also slow to respond if they know calls are from shack settlements. People die waiting for an ambulance.

REFUSE COLLECTION

Refuse collection in shack settlements is frequently poor or non-existent. This leads to unsanitary conditions that are often blamed on the residents. On 26 January this year a four month old baby Nkosi Cwaka died after being bitten by a rat at Kennedy Road. In July a three month old baby was also bitten. As uncollected refuse that leads to vermin is often burnt, the problems of fires and rats are related. Fires, and rats, are a result of the policy of local government to refuse life saving basic services to shack settlements.

EFFECTS OF SHACK FIRES:

INJURY AND DEATH

In 2006, 141 people died in shack fires, nearly 60% of all deaths in fires and more than deaths in all other types of fires combined. Data from the Medical Research Council suggests that the number of deaths is higher still. Between 2001 and 2005, a total of 1003 people died in shack fires in South Africa’s five largest cities; an average of 200 deaths a year in these cities alone.

The Kennedy Road settlement has been badly affected by fires, causing a number of deaths. Mhlengi Khumalo, who was one year old, died in a fire in October 2005, the third fire that month. In August 2006 Zithulele Dhlomo was killed in a fire when the plastic sheeting roof of his shack melted. In April 2007 three people, Ephraime Phulungula, Nobuhle’s sister Ntombi and Ben Mhlakwana, a mother of two, died in a fire that left 100 families homeless. In October 2007 Mamu-Khuzwayo died in a fire that destroyed the shack where she lived with 12 other people.

HOMELESSNESS AND DESTITUTION

Thousands of people are made homeless every year after shack fires. For many of them it will not be the first time. Often people will stay with friends or family in the area, or in other areas. They may also stay at their work places. If a fire happens at night when people are sleeping, or they are not in the area, many people are left with only the clothes they are wearing. When people store money in jondolos, years of savings may be wiped out by a fire. A recent fire in Motala Heights destroyed one woman’s savings of over R15,000. Personal items (such as photos) are also lost and can never be replaced by second-hand clothes, blankets and tinned food.

LOSS OF LIVELIHOOD

Shack dwellers' livelihoods are often precarious. When fires burn peoples’ homes and belongings they are less able to earn a living. Time at work will be lost. Tools or stock are destroyed. Informal businesses are lost. Matric, diplomas and training certificates, as well as ID books (needed to access state healthcare and grants) are also burnt, requiring a lengthy and expensive process of replacement. Student’s books and uniforms have also been destroyed – affecting attendance and grades.

TRAUMA

Fires terrorise communities in the shacks. Shack dwellers go to sleep every night knowing that they may be woken by shouting and need to flee for their lives. People may leave their houses everyday wondering whether their home will still be there when they come back.


MUNICIPAL RESPONSES TO FIRES:

DE-ELECTRIFICATION

We ask them who told them to come here and disconnect the lights and so. [...] They never tell us where they came from or full information. The security had guns and they stop us from asking. If we ask them what they doing or who told them to come they say they going to shoot us or going to kick us – Bongo Dlamini, Motala Heights

Since 2001, electrification has not only been discontinued – the municipality has pursued a dangerous campaign of armed de-electrification against shack settlements. This is often accompanied by police violence and theft. In some cases this tactic seems to be a response to mobilisation by Abahlali. The day after Abahlali announced that they would be challenging the legality of the KwaZulu Natal Slums Act in court the Municipality arrived with 'heavily armed' police and a dog unit at Kennedy Road. They made over 300 disconnections and destroyed the cables. In November 2007 when Abahlali marched on Mayor Mlaba demanding electrification to stop fires, peaceful protesters were attacked and beaten by police and 14 people arrested. At the eMagwaveni settlement in Tongaat, electricity connections have led to police violence, including ‘a police shooting at a meeting held by residents to address the issue of electricity’. Pemary Ridge also faces tension with police over electricity. Philani Zungu, an Abahlali activist who lives at Pemary Ridge has been arrested and charged for unlawful connections. He has not denied the charges, but points out that Pemary Ridge has not burnt and demands to be judged on that fact. When access to electricity is criminalised, the very poor have to break the law to keep their communities safe. People that take these risks on behalf of their communities are considered heroes. It is the eThekwini Municipality’s policy to deny electricity to people living in shacks that is considered criminal.

NEGLECT

When a shack burns down in some areas, nothing happens. After years of struggle the Fire Department has started to attend shack fires. The media has also started to attend. However, people denied adequate services and emergency response also complain of neglect by the politicians who are supposed to represent them. In many areas, people in shacks frequently complain that their councillors are not interested in them, and only come to the settlements at election time, with more empty promises. Many shack dwellers feel betrayed and discriminated against by local government and politicians who have exploited their votes and naturalised their poverty.

'They promise so many times to build the houses, but they failed to do that. I don’t trust the municipality or Department of Housing. I think they don’t care about the people in shacks. They think if you staying in shacks you not same like others. They think we are short-minded because we are staying in this place. They think it our right to stay here, we think it’s our right to stay in rooms like others, like whites, like coloureds, like Indians, but the municipality don’t think like us. They think we deserve to stay like this. They think we deserve to die like this.' - Lungile Mgube, Kennedy Road, Durban

BLAME/EDUCATION

When there is a fire the victims of that fire are frequently blamed for the fire. Alcohol is often also mentioned as a contributory factor. However, people who live in middle class houses also drink alcohol, also knock things over and also have accidents. eThekwini Municipality’s refusal to electrify shacks, or provide adequate housing,is the reason why a small accident in a house just a small accident, while a small accident in a shack leaves hundreds of people homeless. It is insulting to assume people need to be educated to use candles and stoves while the causes of fires are lack of electricity and lack of housing.

DISASTER MANAGEMENT

Shack fires are usually treated as ‘natural disasters’ and eThekwini Disaster Management is directed to provide short-term relief; basic blankets and food. However, many shack dwellers are very critical of the Municipality responding to shack fires as disasters but not taking any steps to mitigate the problem and prevent them from happening.

At Ash Road, Pietermaritzburg, after a fire on 9 June, where 20 shacks were burnt, the Municipality has refused to let those left homeless rebuild their shacks. They are still sleeping in cold, wet, overcrowded tents. One person has already died of pneumonia. They are forced to remain in the tents while emergency accommodation is being built. In this situation, the provision of supplies from Disaster Management is regarded as an insult.

They just provided tent, 10kg rice, no stove – how can you cook it with no stove? Rice without stove is useless! Tents, mattress, food, no stove. They are just decorating material. - Flo, Ash Road, Pietermaritzburg

TENTS AND TRANSIT CAMPS

Since the Slums Clearance Programme was adopted in 2001 the municipality has prohibited the rebuilding of shacks after fires. Although residents at Kennedy Road started clearing the debris and rebuilding before the ground had cooled, it was only to watch as their partially rebuilt houses were bulldozed by the Land Invasions Unit under armed police protection two days later.

Currently Msunduzi Municipality is spending R4.3m building temporary accommodation for residents of Ash Road settlement displaced by fire and floods. 200 people were made homeless by flooding at the beginning of the year. They were refused permission to rebuild their shacks and were forced to stay in tents for six months while the Municipality arranged tin shacks. Residents are worried that the Municipality is using disasters to remove people, now or later, by forcing them into purpose built temporary accommodation. The Municipality’s response to residents expressing their concerns over this accommodation has been removal of the community’s toilets and taps.

At Jadhu Place on April 20 2008, 300 shacks burnt down, leaving 1,500 people homeless. The municipality refused to allow people to rebuild and instead provided tents. People in the settlement were forced to stay in tents, or with friends or family in the area (or elsewhere) for weeks while the municipality began building standardised tin shacks, known by residents as a ‘transit camp’. The municipality is still building the transit camp at Jadhu Place and has reportedly said that they are going to place all the people there in tin shacks. However, residents are now unhappy because the lack of communication from the municipality leads them to fear that there are no plans to move them out of their new (inadequate) temporary accommodation. They note that residents at Mayville who were also moved into tin shacks after a fire and told that it was a temporary measure but have now been there about two years.

REBUILDING MATERIALS

At Kennedy Road, people decided to refuse the transit camp and to rebuild themselves. After a while the City supported them with building materials and the rebuild has been fully completed in around a week. The provision of materials to Kennedy Road may be a response to Abahlali’s mobilisation, but rebuilding on site is also now identified by municipal officials as the preferred option after a shack fire. There may also now be a move towards provision of materials for shack settlements after fires. Provision of materials for rebuilding is something that the Municipality should now replicate for all communities after fires. The gain won by Kennedy Road should now be claimed by all settlements.


DEMANDS: In response to the fires, Abahlali is demanding:

- Immediate provision of taps, hoses and fire extinguishers;

- Electrification by the city and support for electrification by residents;

- Democratic upgrading of all settlements;

- Good service from the fire brigade and adequate supply of building materials after fires;

- Compensation from the City for all the people that have suffered in the fires from 2001 until now.


* Matt Birkinshaw did his MA on Abahlali baseMjondolo at the University of London and then worked, living in a squat to save money, to be able to come and spend some months doing solidarity work with Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban. He has lived in the Kennedy Road settlement (where his first shack was lost in a fire) and the Foreman Road settlement. After he had been living in Kennedy Road for two weeks a meeting was held to see how Matt could best contribute and he was asked to produce a report on shack fires. In two weeks time he will be leaving for Cape Town to do solidarity work with Abahlali baseMjondolo's sister organisation, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign

* Full report for Abahlali baseMjondolo, South African Shack Dwellers' Movement available at http://abahlali.org/files/Big_Devil_Politics_of_Shack_Fire.pdf or by clicking here

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

The political economy of ethnic identities in Kenya

The paradox of tribalism within the kenyan diaspora

Onyango Oloo

2008-09-10

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50451

During the 2007 election campaign period and beyond some of the most virulent hate messages of an ethnic kind were to be found spilling over in Kenyan online communities, largely populated by young to middle aged Kenyans living in places like the United States, Sweden, Germany, Britain, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Canada, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Japan, South Africa, India and other places overseas. I was once one of those Kenyans living for years and years in Toronto and Montreal

For the almost two decades that I resided in Canada I became quite perplexed and intrigued by the reckless display of rabid ukabila on display at various online Kenyan forums.

Many of the worst Kenyan tribalists in cyberspace have lived for years in such cosmopolitan and liberal urban locales such as Oakland, Boston, Toronto, Leeds, Dallas, St. Paul, Chicago and Washington DC.

Offline, these Kenyan immigrants and naturalized citizens in the West share the collective plight of other people of colour when it comes to systemic racism and discrimination. Some of them are married to Asian-Americans, Jamaican- Canadians, Zambians, Greeks and Iranians not to speak of fellow Kenyans from the very same ethnic groups they bash online about.
Why do you find the stubborn survival of the INNER MKABILA in persons who last lived in a village twenty or thirty years ago? The sad thing is that you will be startled to discover such tribalists to be loners who DO NOT even contribute to community development within the tribes they keep praising online.

One more manifestation of crude tribalism has to do with a discussion groups that many Kenyans do not even know about. For instance there is this place which is an online community discussion forum that is RESTRICTED to ETHNIC Waswahili who are also Muslim. Now, some of the people who are active in that group including at least some of its founders are dear friends of mine, but I would be DISHONEST if I did NOT DENOUNCE them for their narrow ethnic bigotry which has clear overtones of racism, religious intolerance and xenophobia, some of it a stubborn holdover from the pre-colonial Master/Slave relationships between Wangwana na Watwana at the Kenyan Coast a relationship that had the so called “Bwambadi” lording over the so called “Wafirika” whether they were local Mijikenda or upcountry “watu wa bara.” To become a member of the group, one has to be introduced by a member of the forum who will verify that the prospective individual of the requisite pedigree. That is why someone like Onyango Oloo, even though I have adopted Mombasa as my hometown and I am quite comfortable in Kiswahili, will never be deemed worthy to join this cloistered cultish cybercommunity.

I find it comical that most online tribalists shun the ethnospecific forums like jaluo.com, kikuyu.com, kisii.com etc to come to the more NATIONAL and INCLUSIVE forums like Kenyaonline, Jukwaa or Africa-oped to broadcast their tribal stupidity. It is almost as if they are acknowledging the obvious- you can only distinguish yourself ethnically from others in a Kenya national forum where there are people from diverse backgrounds. Ironically, as a GENERAL RULE these so called ethnic forums frequently are the LEAST TRIBAL of the Kenyan forums.

SHINING A TORCH ON MIJIKENDA VERSUS SWAHILI/WAARABU TENSIONS

Kenyan mainstream politics for the last forty years has been dominated by the discourse of the so called Luo/Gikuyu schisms and privileges in the cabinet, in parliament and other aspects of national life.

To those of us who subsist on a trenchant class analysis the punditry that ascribes everything to tribal machinations and ethnic arithmetic is not only simplistic and reductionist, it has tended to trivialize other even more deep seated conflagrations simmering under the surface in which ethnicity is definitely a factor.

Any Kenyan who is familiar with the history of this region is aware of the potent and potentially toxic mix of ethnicity, religion, race, class and political factions.

I will speak more about Mombasa because I am more familiar with it having lived there for more than half of my life.

The British colonialists exploited these divisions when it maintained a buffered colour coded stratified society that put the European conquistadors at the top, the Arabs and the Indian rentier and dukawallah strata slightly below that with the Waswahili and Wadawida enjoying a relatively “privileged” access to the uneven spoils of orthodox colonialism compared to say, the Mijikenda indigenous communities.

The presence of migrant workers from the Kamba, Manyala, Luo, Gikuyu, Somali and other Wabara ethnic groups from as early as the mid 1930s in places like Shika Adabu, Mtongwe, Mwandoni, Mshomoroni, Chaani, Kibarani, Miskiti Noor, Magongo, Tudor Estate, Buxton, Manyimbo, Sparki and Shimanzi introduced a permanent sticking point to those saw external intrusion not so much in terms of the foreign imperialists who took over Kenyan land throughout Kenya but in much more simplistic terms in terms of who spoke the language and practiced what religion.

The early migrants from upcountry were largely working class and seamlessly got accepted and assimilated in many Mombasa and surrounding neighbourhoods. Elsewhere, Kamba settlers at Shimba Hills and Luo plantation workers at Ramisi Sugar Mill or the Manyala port workers living in Shika Adabu and Mtongwe were not viewed in any hostile manner, by and large- same with the Miraa Meru businessmen at Mwembe Tayari or the Gikuyu shopkeepers and bar owners of Buxton, Tononoka, Sparki, Changamwe, Magongo and Mtopanga. Place in the mix immigrants from Tanga, Tanzania, Wangazija from the Comoros, Waziba (Hayas, many of them sex workers) from Bukoba, Wanyarwanda and of course the various waves of Ugandans especially from the early seventies when Idi Amin Dada came to power.

The large local South Asian communities in Mombasa were bolstered by Ugandan and Tanzanian Ismailis and there were quite a few Arabs from Zanzibar who resettled in Mombasa. We do know of course, the visible presence of Italians in Malindi. I still cannot forget the shock I got in 1975 when I found out that the wife of our new Kamba neighbour in the Jomo Kenyatta/Kipchoge Keino area near the Saba Saba Bar was this Malindi raised Italian-Kenyan woman who could trash talk you fluently with the eloquent Kiswahili of an indigenous Mswahili. Her mother was even more well versed and if possible even more foul mouthed in Kiswahili. They were such sweethearts those neighbours and I never once heard them refer to themselves as “Italians”.

In the sixties and seventies a palpable resentment started growing when many people associated with Jomo Kenyatta were seen to be grabbing prime real estate land and beach properties merely because of their proximity to the octogenarian despot. Other people have done much more extensive research into the patterns of land and property ownership in the Coast Province so allow me leave this at that.

The Mijikenda is the collective name given to a cluster of nine tribes including the Ribe, Rabai, Kambe, Kauma, Giriama, Duruma, Chonyi, Digo and the Jibana and loosely associated with the Pokomo of Tana River.

Almost more than many other Kenyan nationalities, land and the national environment play a central and highly hallowed sacred role in the lives of the Mijikenda. The Kaya Forests are especially revered...

The Mijikenda communities are very complex and unique For instance, a profile of the Duruma, one of the sub tribes of the Mijikenda, reveals very interesting connections to Somalia, Mozambique, escaped slaves, Islam, Christianity and the growth of the Kiswahili language.

And speaking of the Waswahili, I have been astounded to witness the thick blanket of unadulterated ignorance with which my fellow Kenyans (especially my fellow Luos) persist in covering themselves when it comes to discussing our national language of Kiswahili and its origins.

When we were kids in primary school (and by “we” I mean those of us who grew up in the sixties and early seventies) we were indoctrinated with the following potpourri of colonial racist myths and neo-colonial tribal lies:

“The Waswahili are a mongrel race, and their language developed when the mixed breed of Arabs and the local Bantus spontaneously started THEIR OWN language by mixing and matching Arab and Mijikenda words when they were playing in the dirt.”

I mean, how stupid can you get?

There is a reason why we refer to the languages we speak at home as our mother tongues.

Where in the world have you ever witnessed this strange phenomenon where 13th century toddlers cobble a brand new language in the compound outside their huts while their Giriama mothers fry the Kadzora and their Arab fathers sip some kahawa tungu inside while waiting for the chapatis?

Languages simply DO NOT develop that way.

In any case, when we are studying a language, we should pay far more attention to its morphology and syntax rather than to its vocabulary.

If we were to use vocabulary as a scientific yardstick to identify the historical, cultural and geographic origins of a language, where would we end up with English where it is estimated that up to 80% of the vocabulary is borrowed from other tongues(just to cite a mere handful of common examples, the word “thug” is from India, “tomato” and “tobacco” are from the Indigenous People of Turtle Island aka the Americas, and we are not even going to bother with words like rendezvous, zeitgeist, angst, origami, sushi, rickshaw, tofu, Jehovah, opera, sonata, soprano, contralto, safari, samba, mambo, salsa, bolero, cuisine, haute couture, sang-froid, Jacuzzi, zamboni, banshee, zombie, voodoo, juju, obeah, calaloo, marijuana, algebra, alchemy, nirvana or zen).

In sharp contrast to that colonial upumbavu, the historical facts about Kiswahili is today beyond dispute.

Kiswahili is an AFRICAN language, in fact, a BANTU language, despite the copious terms it has borrowed from Arabic (and even then, when it imports a word ending in a consonant, it immediately Africanizes and Bantufies said word so that Ahmed becomes Hamadi, Khamis, becomes Hamisi, Shukran becomes shukrani, and Omar becomes Omari and so on).

To see how close Kiswahili is to its Bantu cousins, try and compare some words in KiRabai, Zulu, Lingala and Shona respectively and if you are familiar with Kiswahili you will guess their meaning without knowing those languages in question.

It is therefore, not that difficult to make the case that Kiswahili is definitely an African, specifically a Bantu based language and not, as some local, uninformed strangers would posit, an import smuggled in from the Arabian peninsula.

It is said there are at least fifteen lahaja (dialects) of Kiswahili from Ki a’amu on the northern Kenyan coast, Kimvita (Mombasa) Kiunguja (Zanzibar) Kipemba (Pemba) Kimrima (around Dar es Salaam) Kitangata to Kingwana in the eastern Congo.

Many of the purist coastal Waswahili scoff at the Congolese Kiswahili (Kingwana) as being imperfect and riddled with grammatical errors, yet the Wangwana respond that at 9 million native speakers of that local dialect, they are the single largest bloc of Kiswahili speakers in the Swahili world that encompasses southern Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, northern Mozambique parts of Malagasy, the Comoros, Seychelles, pockets of South Africa, a very big chunk of Oman and entire neighbourhoods in the United Arab Emirates.

What further complicates the discourse in Kiswahili is the way in which affiliated African tribes have been collapsed and conflated into being Waswahili when in fact, they are distinct ethnic groups with unique histories.

One such group is the Bajun, found in southern Somalia and the northern Kenyan coast Malika, the legendary Kiswahili speaking taarab diva known most for her Vidonge monster hit, is actually a Somali citizen with Bajun and Banadir ancestry.

About three years ago, when I was living in Montreal I called up a family friend of mine, a Kenyan married to a Tanzanian. Since she had grown up in Mombasa, I had always assumed that she was a “Mswahili”. She surprised me when she clarified that she was a Mgunya from Lamu who were distinct from Wa’amu and also the Bajun.

She explained to me that the Wagunya are found in three islands along the Kenya/Somalia border- Ras Kitao, Ras Kiambini and Ras insecure?wa. She said that the Wagunya are originally Black African Bantus although there has been intermarriage over the centuries.

She intrigued me further by revealing to me that among the Bajun for instance, you will find Caucasian skinned, blue eyed Bajuni who had Portuguese forbears, Bajuni who had Chinese features, Bajuni who looked like Arabs and Bajuni who had a midnight black African complexion. In the nearby islands Pate (two hours by boat from Lamu you found the Wapate who had their own unique dialect and also north of Lamu you met the Washela who pronounced words in their own peculiar way.

I asked her about the “Wabwambadi” and she informed me that it was actually a pejorative, class based term to refer to those coastal peoples who claimed Arab ancestry and saw themselves as aristocratic high borns who could not mix with the local Watwana. In fact she told me that until quite recently her people the Wagunya, could not inter marry with the Wa’amu who looked down on them as descendants of slaves.

When I told her that many, many years ago I used to have a Mswahili lover from Mombasa who was actually a Mu’amu from Lamu, she was shocked because a non Muslim Luo from upcountry, no matter how Swahilized was in traditional terms not considered good enough to talk to, let alone approach and have an intimate sexual and long term relationship with a mwanamwali from an indigenous Swahili family. Well, times have changed, that is all I can say about dating the daughters of the Waswahili, dear readers men and women in their ordinary everyday lives are saying no thanks to all these internalized racist, tribal, religious walls that separate human beings from each other.

Who are the Washirazi, I asked?

These were the people, I was told, who came from Iran, known until recently as Persia.

What complicates matters is when the Coastal peoples of East Africa migrate and relocate to the Middle East. I was talking recently to a very good friend of mine who is an Abu Dhabi-Canadian who just so happens to be a Mgikuyu Muslim woman who was born in Nyeri but grew up in the United Arab Emirates since the late 1970s.

She told me that many of the countries in the Gulf have xenophobic tendencies and they will look down on ANYONE who is not indigenous, irrespective of whether they are “Arab” or not. She told me of instances where local Gulf Arabs with dark African complexions expressed disdain for light skinned “ Arab” transplants from East Africa and further explained to me that even on the question of Arab identity there is no consensus and certainly you can not reduce things to skin colour- a local Dubai resident will not give a hoot for any Wamangas, advising them to go where they came from-Oman… So you have the phenomenon of a Kenyan “ Arab” boarding a plane from Port Reitz in Mombasa and landing in the Gulf only to learn that he too is considered a khal(black spot) or worse, referred to as an abd (black servant/slave). So all those colour coded social gradations mean nothing all in a context where family lineage and clan pedigree counts for much more.

I further queried my friend about the so called “Wamanga” and I was told that this was the Kiswahili term for Omani Arabs who had settled in East Africa. The Mazrui dynasty was considered to be Wamanga.

Of course I was very familiar with the Mazrui name for it has produced several internationally known Kenyan personages:

Professor Ali Mazrui’s father was the Chief Kadhi and a much respected Islamic scholar. Mbaruk al Amin Mazrui led an armed uprising against British colonial annexation in 1895-96;

Dr and Prof. Alamin Mazrui of Ohio State University is not only one of the most recognized Kiswahili linguists and academics along with the Leipzig based Prof. Abdilatif Abdalla-both of them are veterans of the Kenyan anti-imperialist movement- Dr Alamin Mazrui was detained by Moi in 1982 and is the author of the seminal Kiswahili play Kilio Cha Haki while Prof. Abdilatif Abdalla was imprisoned in 1969 by Kenyatta and composed his poetry collection Sauti ya Dhiki at Kamiti where they both served stints.

One cannot speak about the history of resistance to foreign domination in Mombasa over centuries without invoking the Mazrui family name as you can see when you peruse this link. I was actually shocked to find the Kenya government’s own ministry of foreign affairs agree with me in this regard.

Likewise, one cannot understand the contemporary tensions and conflicts between the Wamanga, Waswahili, Washirazi, Wagunya, Wa Bajuni and other largely Islamic Swahili affiliated communities of Lamu, Kilifi, Kwale and Mombasa districts on the one hand, and the various mostly Christian and animist Mijikenda communities all over the Coast Province on the other hand without factoring in the terrible twin legacies of the East African Slave Trade and the subsequent colonization of Kenya by both the Germans and the British.

ON KENYANS WHO ARE ETHNIC SOMALIS

The notion of the Kenyan nation has developed in struggle with the machinations of colonialism and necolonialism which paradoxically wanted to lump different tribes and nationalities together into one state while SIMULTANEOUSLY using divide and conquer tactics of tribalism, regionalism, racialism and religious difference.

But we all share a KENYAN identity that flows from our common, collective historical experience of a people ruled by the same British invaders, land grabbers, thieves and looters like Lord Delamare and their ilk.

It is this experience that enables someone like Onyango Oloo, whose ethnic cousins are the Acholi , Lango and Padhola of Uganda; the Alur of the Congo; the Dinka and Nuer of the Sudan and the Anywak of Ethiopia- this is what makes me call myself a KENYAN, sharing a NATIONAL identity with a Zarina Patel and a Davinder Lamba whose ancestors are from the Indian sub-continent; a Leonard Mambo Mbotela whose slave ancestors are from Malawi; a Najib Balala some of whose forbears have roots in the Arabian peninsula; a Mwandawiro whose ethnic relatives are the Pare of Tanzania; a Ngugi wa Thiongo who can dig up the seeds of his family tree very close to Kinshasha; a Moody Awori whose own brother ran for President in Uganda in 2002; a Yusuf Hassan, Mohammed Ibrahim or Nimo Gulleid who may have kith and kin among the Issaq of Hargeisa, the Hawiyes and Daroods of Mogadishu or the Baajun of Kismayu; an Ole Ntimama who may have uncles in Arusha or Namanga or a Richard Leakey who comes from British stock.

To be a Kenyan can not be reduced simplistically to ethnicity.

And the case of the Somali speaking peoples of Kenya offers the BEST PROOF of what I am saying.

For a variety of reasons, Canada is home to close to half a million ethnic Somalis from Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya, Tanzania and Somalia itself. Following the collapse of the Somali state in the early nineties many people from that tortured land of great promise reverted to narrow clan identities. Among these ethnic Somalis resident in Canada are approximately 20,000 KENYAN nationals.

Even though they are identical in terms of physical features, Kenyan Somalis are quite distinct from ethnic kith and kin from across the northern Kenyan border.

They are referred to as "Sijui".

And you know WHY?

Because more often than not, in the early days at least, when say, someone from Hargeisa, Baidoa or Mogadisho went over and said " Nabat" (Hello) to an Halima from Eastleigh, Nairobi or a Yalahow from Wayani, Mombasa or to an Aida from Kambi Somali, Nakuru, what the Somali nationals would get from ethnic Somali Kenyan nationals would be blank stares followed by a mumble, “Sijui Kisomali" meaning " I cannot speak the Somali language"!

So what language did many of these KENYAN ethnic Somalis speak?

Take a wild guess.

Kiswahili of course!

The HISTORICAL experiences of ethnic Somalis in our country has given them a stamp of national identity that today makes them have more in common with Kambas, Merus, Kisiis and Turkanas than with the far flung tribal communities in Puntland.

Kenyans in northern Kenya in places like Mandera, Wajir, Garissa underwent unspoken atrocities and endured a lot of humiliation as second class citizens in their own country.

Finally in the mid 1960s they decided to do something about the genocidal and ethnic cleansing campaigns of both the colonial and neocolonial governments of Kenya.

Since 1903 there had been a PERMANENT STATE OF EMERGENCY in the so called NFD.

The so-called Shifta rebellion had secessionist aims.

The problems faced by the North Kenyan peoples are rooted in imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism and can only be tackled in the context of solving the National Question in Kenya along consistent democratic and social justice principles that affirms the right of ALL Kenyan people to determine their destiny.

As a Kenyan who is NOT ethnic Somali I know the kind of propaganda and prejudices that I was fed over the decades by our own government to try and convince me that my compatriots in Mandera, Wajir and elsewhere are not Kenyans.

When I was at Kamiti prison between 1982 and 1987, I spoke to former Kenyan soldiers who described their brutal raids against Somali communities in northern Kenya- they had been indoctrinated, just like those American youths dying for Bush, Rumsfeld and Haliburton in Iraq that they were fighting “foreign enemies” instead of their own fellow Kenyans.

The North Eastern province is still the MOST underdeveloped among all the regions of Kenya. Even today many northern Kenyans when they are bidding bye to someone bound for Nairobi will say, “ Please say to those Kenyans” underscoring their ambivalent attitude towards the neocolonial state which embraces them and spurns them simultaneously. In this context their identity as a people is contested and challenged by their lived experience of blatant state oppression and discrimination.

CONCLUSION: NAVIGATING CONSTRUCTED SOCIAL IDENTITIES IN THE KENYAN CONTEXT

I have endeavoured to demonstrate that ethnicity, tribe, race and other identities, far from being “genetic” “innate” and “primordial” are actually socially constructed, historically determined experiences that interplay with contemporary political realities in a complex and non-linear way. The phenomenon we know as “tribalism” in Kenya is a tool often employed by cynical and conniving politicians who often incite poor working class, lumpen and peasant populations to rise up against equally deprived communities to push very nefarious agendas of the same politicians who are UNITED by class and other elitist interests.

In tacking social issues camouflaged by the “tribal” veneer, progressive Kenyans must revisit history and examine the terrible legacy of imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism, even as they strive to unite diverse Kenyan communities to fight together for national independence, democracy, social justice and equality across gender, generational, regional and yes, ethnic identities.

* This is the second part of a two part paper. Part 1 of this paper appeared in Pambazuka News last week.

* Onyango Oloo is Secretary General Social Democratic Party of Kenya Nairobi. This paper was delivered at the Goethe Institute, Nairobi on June 18, 2008.

*Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Zimbabwe has the Kenya virus

COSATU

2008-09-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50603

The Congress of South African Trade Unions has noted the agreement signed by the leaders of the political parties in Zimbabwe on 15 September 2008. We stand by our view that it is only the people of Zimbabwe who must judge whether or not this deal is in their interests. We are therefore awaiting the comments of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) and will be guided by them.

Meanwhile, while awaiting the ZCTU’s response, only insofar as the people accept it, we give the agreement our cautious support, but note that many of the demands raised by civil society and supported by COSATU have not been met, including:

- Civil society has been shut out of the negotiations and it has thus been an agreement between the political leaders;

- The agreement does not recognise the result of the 29 March elections. As a result the loser has become the winner and the winner the loser;

- MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai is effectively in charge of a cluster of ministries, while President Mugabe still has extensive powers;

- The agreement is not for an interim government until new elections have been held but for a normal full-term government;

- All Mugabe’s draconian laws remain in place, which give him, for example, the power to arrest political opponents.

The agreement marks a dangerous spread of the Kenyan virus that sends a signal to dictators that they can defy the will of the people by force and then retain power through negotiations, brokered by other African leaders.

It marks a retreat from the principles that the African Union and SADC are supposed to uphold and a return to the bad traditions of the Organisation of African Unity that sacrificed the interests of the people to protect dictators. Meanwhile COSATU waits to hear from the ZCTU, after which it will consider their advice as to whether to continue with the proposed programme of boycotts. If they ask us to proceed we shall do so.


* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

The market has spoken!

Zimbabwe, South Africa and Nigeria

Patrick Bond

2008-09-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/50598

The past week has been a wild roller-coaster ride down the troughs of capitalism and up the peaks of radical social activism. Glancing around the world from those peaks, we can see quite a way further than usual.

First, look to Wall Street where Monday's stock market crash was worse than any since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, and where one investment bank after the other faces ruin or bale-out – three of the USA’s five largest flushed down the toilet.

Fourteen years ago, these same New York financiers put extreme pressure on Nelson Mandela’s new African National Congress government (a time I worked in his reconstruction and development program ministry and saw first hand). Mandela was defeated by neoliberal strategies - nicknamed ‘Freedom next Time’ and ‘Shock Doctrine’ by John Pilger and Naomi Klein, respectively, in their excellent South Africa chapters in recent books.
The then deputy president, Thabo Mbeki, ordered state officials to ‘Send the signals to the markets’. Rising unemployment and inequality were the logical result, as Mbeki’s team made SA much more vulnerable to international finance than ever in its history.

In the same spirit, just under a year ago, Merrill Lynch investment bank held what amounted to a job interview for Jacob Zuma, as Mbeki’s apparent successor gave a speech “aimed at reassuring them that there was no need for the market to be 'jittery'” according to one of his aides.

Mbeki was under threat of outright dismissal – by his new political masters in the ANC - this week, in the wake of a high court judgment in Pietermaritzburg last Friday that at least temporarily relaxed corruption charges against Zuma. Notable in the judgment was a critique of Mbeki’s conspiratorial handling of his competitor’s career, starting in 2001.

Inept procedure was the technical problem that freed Zuma. His enemies in the National Prosecuting Authority will appeal, which is one reason Mbeki is under more criticism than ever. More profoundly, however, the coalition of forces – led by trade unionists and the communist party - which backed an allegedly corrupt and sometimes feudal Zuma did so for explicitly political reasons.

As a Machiavellian back-stabber, Mbeki simply made too many enemies. But as a neoliberal economist, he was doomed in any case, trying to bring “Growth, Employment and Redistribution” – the 1996 policy he introduced with the pronouncement, “Just call me a Thatcherite”.

Witnessing his downfall since last December’s ANC congress, when Zuma took over the ruling party’s presidency, has been the source of much Schadenfreude.

What has become of those financial markets for whom so many South Africans were sacrificed? Gambling in real estate, Merrill Lynch lost 82% of its share value since early 2007, before Sunday's $50 billion rescue by the Bank of America.

If finance is one of the world’s sources of profound crisis, another is oil.

Look now to Nigeria, where Environmental Rights Action (ERA) in Port Harcourt worries about the revival of a war harking back more than 15 years, when Ken Saro-Wiwa's Ogoni survival movement intensified its non-violent efforts to rid the Niger Delta of the super-exploitive Shell Oil.

Saro-Wiwa faced a repressive state whose army was called in by Shell to execute him on a frame-up charge in 1995, in spite of appeals by Nelson Mandela.

Last week, a powerful guerrilla force, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, kidnapped two South African oil workers amongst a crew of foreign workers, and on Monday forced Shell to evacuate 100 employees from an installation, demanding that all multinational corporations leave the area.

Meanwhile, ERA director Nimmo Bassey spent last week with dozens of African OilWatch activists here in Durban, at a meeting organised by the NGO groundWork, Environmental Rights Action's partner in the Friends of the Earth network.

Bassey's strategy is to “keep the oil in the soil”. To pay for needed development and environmental clean-up, ERA demands ecological debt repayment by the north to the south.

The OilWatch network ventured out last Friday on the famous “Toxic Tour” hosted by the South Durban Community and Environmental Alliance, stopping in on leaky refineries and pollution hot spots that give the area such high leukemia and asthma rates. That alliance will soon file an environmental impact assessment complaint to halt a proposed $7 billion pipeline that will double petrol flows to Johannesburg.

Aside from environmental racism (the pipeline takes a 200km southerly detour to avoid white-dominated areas) several other reasons have emerged to rethink the pipeline: climate change, refining problems, Johannesburg auto congestion and the lack so far of political will to build an alternative public transport system aside from an elitist white elephant train from the airport to the financial district aimed at 2010 World Cup visitors.

Far better to blow up the Durban-Joburg petrol pipeline before it is built, through legal, nonviolent means, the South Durban activists reckon, than to contend with Niger Delta-type disasters such as the series of major tank fires at local refining installations that began a year ago. Then and now, municipal officials failed South Durban residents, by keeping secret the evacuation plan.

Look a bit further south, to the South African “Wild Coast” in the Eastern Cape, where a similar confrontation between communities and an unresponsive, crony-capitalist state seems to have backfired against the multinational corporations.

A few weeks ago, SA government minerals and energy spokesman Bheki Khumalo claimed that the government carefully weighed all the ‘development’ options available, choosing strip-mining of dunes for titanium, by an Australian firm (Mineral Resource Commodities) over eco-tourism and Local Economic Development. But after receiving a stern lecture last Friday, minerals and energy minister Buyelwa Sonjica conceded that the multibillion-dollar project suffered from flawed consultation.

After an uprising by the Xolobeni community and traditional leaders, Sonjica confessed, "I am disappointed because most of the things said here today, I did not know". Like so many officials, she had not listened to civil society, especially the Amadiba Crisis Committee and the Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa.

Whether the mining license secretly granted the Ozzies in July can be revoked remains a site of struggle, but once again, militant community movements have rattled the state machinery.

A final glance should be towards Zimbabwe, where civil society demands have been systematically ignored by power brokers, especially Mbeki, who has been chief negotiator.

Instead of heeding suggestions for a neutral transitional authority and progressive socio-economic interventions made by the National People's Convention in February, a fragile deal was done to keep Robert Mugabe in power and seduce back multinational corporate investors and financiers.

Does Mbeki deserve the high praise he is getting for this travesty – in the wake of the electoral victory by Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change – 47%, just short of the outright majority he needed – back in March, and Mugabe’s thuggery in the June run-off, from which the opposition withdrew?

Consider Zimbabwean civil society activist Elinor Sisulu's point of view: "If I was sitting in Mbeki's powerful position, I know that I would have conducted myself very differently. I would never ever have pulled out all stops and used my power and influence to keep a ruthless and ageing dictator in power. I would never have turned a blind eye to the violence meted out to citizens in Zimbabwe. I would never have sat on a report by my own generals, not only failing to act on that report, but doing everything in my power to stave off pressure on the perpetrators."

The new Zimbabwean government now being stitched is being pressured to follow the advice of a Johannesburg investment banker straight from the Merrill Lynch mentality: Investec's Roelof Horne. Last week he called for "austerity from within" (tighten those belts, Zimbabwean workers!), and was joined by local SA newspaper editors demanding that Tsvangirai "introduce drastic policies, including slashing government spending and freeing up price, currency and other controls” as “conditions for receiving foreign aid".

This is the same sick logic which would have the new Zimbabwean government repay around $5 billion in Mugabe’s foreign debt. As economic justice campaigner Joy Mabenge explained about the Mugabe-Tsvangirai deal this week, “It is only a change in the nature of the struggle... This is space that we have to use for the struggles ahead. The struggles against impunity, against the privatisation of our parastatals and auctions of our natural resources, against poor social service delivery, against repayment of illegitimate foreign debt. It is a new phase of struggle for social and economic justice. Now is not the time to be drunk with illusions.”

But in spite of the crash of former hegemonic neoliberal powers like those New York investment banks, the ironies of financial market power and now vulnerability remain, because it will take yet more African grassroots pressure to lift their boots from Zimbabwean necks.

As former University of Zimbabwe student leader Tinashe Chimedza explained poignantly,


pass me the cognac

the elites scramble for power and profit

the poor become footnotes

we write epitaphs 'rest in peace Cde Tonde'

the bubbly flows

pass me the Borboun

am tired of the imported Cognac

more drivers, another motorcade

four more motorcades

another charade

dish me my share of toil

'ndakadashurwa' - any questions?

the rubble will eat tomorrow

who wants to jump with them anyway,

the commoners, teach them culture first

am waiting for my OBE

they are fodder, my cdes remind me

lets dance ball room tonite

on the bellies of the filth


* Patrick Bond is the director of the UKZN Centre for Civil Society – http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Peace is a mere illusion when rape continues

Eva Maina Ayiera

2008-09-17

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/50570

The essay, Peace is a mere illusion when rape continues by Stephen Lewis, must be one of the most compelling pieces I have read on the conflict/rape/gender violence scourge in Africa. Besides being very intersting, very passionate and very well written, it brings out some profound, solid truths that need to be broadcast across Africa, if at last the continent will do something about women, war, rape and violence.

New guide to China's overseas dam industry

2008-09-10

http://www.internationalrivers.org

International Rivers announces the availability of a new guide for concerned groups and dam-affected communities: The New Great Walls: a Guide to China’s Overseas Dam Industry.

Chinese companies and financiers are key to hundreds of new dams around the world, particularly in Southeast Asia and Africa, but also in countries like Pakistan and Albania. With Chinese dam companies and financial institutions now outpacing their competitors overseas, We hope this guide will provide helpful tools for engaging with the Chinese dam industry on issues of social and environmental responsibility. With this guide, we address the question: what can communities impacted by these projects do to protect their rights, and advocate for rivers targeted for dams built by China?


* A pdf of the guide can be downloaded for free at internationalrivers.org. Hard copies may be ordered free of charge by contacting Nicole Brewer, nicole@internationalrivers.org.
The guide includes:

-A “who’s who” among Chinese companies and financiers;

-Information about policies and commitments Chinese companies and financiers should follow;

-A map of China’s major overseas dam projects;

-Analysis of the reasons behind the global expansion of China’s dam industry;

-An action guide for how to address problematic dams built by Chinese companies and financiers, and who to contact for help.

Afro-Mexicans: Discourse of race and identity in the African Diaspora

2008-09-16

http://www.africaworldpressbooks.com/

This book is about a little known branch of the African Diaspora—Afro-Mexicans. It discusses their conditions of arrival and establishment in Mexico within the context of Spanish colonialism, and the race-based socio-economic hierarchy known as sistema de castas which provided a basis for the contemporary socioracial terms that are the focus of the main study: indio, blanco, negro and moreno. Today, these terms are used ubiquitously in variable ways as tags of social identity in Mexican discourse. An ethnographic sketch of a representative Afro-Mexican community located in the state of Guerrero then provides a setting for the analysis of their contemporary uses. These are then tied to concepts of “race” and identity in Mexico, all within the wider context of modern global Diaspora formations.

Call for papers: Africa and blackness in world literature and visual arts

African Literature Association

2008-08-26

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/50186

35th Annual Conference
April 15-19, 2009
University of Vermont

Second call for panels, roundtables, and papers

General Theme: Africa and Blackness in World Literature and Visual Arts

The past two ALA conferences focused on various ways African and African Diaspora literature has functioned as a cultural catalyst that nurtures black people's subjectivity in the age of globalization. As a conclusion to the series, the 35th Annual ALA Conference will focus on the ways creative writers and artists from other cultural traditions imagined Africa and blackness in the past as well as the extent to which that imagining has evolved and can be said to foster intersubjective dialogue in the age of globalization. As always, the conference will also welcome panels on other unexplored or inadequately explored aspects of African and African Diaspora literature.
Subthemes:

- Africa and Blackness in Classical Literature and Visual Arts

- Africa and Blackness in Modern Literature and Visual Arts

- Africa and Blackness in Contemporary Literature and Visual Arts

- Africa in African Immigrant Writers' Literature and Visual Arts

- Africa in African American and African Caribbean Literature and Visual Arts

- Black Artists and Reconstitution of Black People's Subjectivity

- Cosmopolitanism in African and African Diaspora Literature

- African and African Diaspora Literary Criticism and Global Cultural Dynamisms

- Postcolonialism and Postcoloniality in Relation to Africa and Blackness

- Approaches to Teaching African and African Diaspora Literature (Teacher Workshop)

- Other aspects of African and African Diaspora Literature

Plenary speakers: Wole Soyinka, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michael Echeruo, V.Y. Mudimbe, Nkashama Pius Ngandu, and Zakes Mda.

Please send a short abstract to the conveners at ALA.conference@uvm.edu, or by mail to Lokangaka Losambe, Department of English, University of Vermont, 400 Old Mill, Burlington, VT 05405, USA. The submission and pre-registration deadline is October 30th, 2008. For information on pre-registration and ALA membership dues, please visit the 2009 ALA conference website at: http://www.uvm.edu/conferences/ALA2009

Call for inspirational writing for Storymoja

Doreen Baingana

2008-09-16

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/50536

Storymoja is organizing a workshop for writers of inspirational material, however broadly this can be defined. We know there are many of you with powerful, life-changing experiences to share, but may need the structure and know-how we can provide to get the story down. These stories must be presented in an attractive, informative, clear and well-edited manner so that even those with a bias against books, but are hungry for the content, can read them.

Storymoja is inviting you to participate in a writing workshop led by Betty Wamalwa, a development consultant and poet (among many other things), Doreen Baingana, author and managing editor of Storymoja. We have tentative dates and a structure, and would like to know if you can attend. The goal is to have a completed, ready-to-publish manuscript of 20,000 – 30,000 words that Storymoja will publish if it meets our standards.

PROPOSED DATES: Mondays and Thursdays, 6pm to 9pm
22/09/08, 25/09/08, 29/09/08, 2/10/08 followed by a weekend retreat on the 17th, 18th and 19th October (or one weekend earlier) for the final editing of the manuscript.

The cost is only Kshs 300 for photocopied materials.

If interested, please send a sample of your writing and/or your book idea to Betty Muragori at bettymuragori@yahoo.com or Doreen Baingana at, dbaing@yahoo.com Also, please forward this to any writer you know who is interest in this subject matter.

More details will be sent to those who interested. Please do not hesitate to ask questions and give suggestions. You can also visit out website at: www.storymojaafrica.co.ke

A Review of African Blogs – September 18, 2008

Dibussi Tande

2008-09-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/blog/50602

Nigerian Curiosity
http://www.nigeriancuriosity.com/2008/09/channels-tv-shut-down-by-yaradua.html

Nigerian Curiosity comments on the shutting down of Nigerian television station, Channels TV for incorrectly reporting that President Yar'Adua would step down because of illhealth:

“…it could be understandable that the administration is doing damage control to lessen rumors and fears of Yar'Adua's ability to run the country effectively. However, this reaction - sending State Security Service (SSS) forces to shut down a television station and arrest its staff - is unconscionable and absolutely unacceptable!... To clamp down on the press is to return Nigeria to oppressive times and to renege on Yar'Adua's constantly repeated pledge of 'rule of law' and his proclaimed commitment to Nigeian democracy…

The proper reaction from Yar'Adua's seemingly defensive administration should have been to simply correct Channels TV and any other station that might refer to that incorrect news… Draconian measures of shutting down the press simply harken back to the military regimes of people like Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha whose actions struck fear in the hearts of the people. Yar'Adua has never been one to suggest that sort of dangerous attitude which is highly jeapardous to Nigeria's struggling democracy. Why should he start now?”


Moses Paul Sserwanga
http://msserwanga.blogspot.com/2008/09/mps-should-not-allow-govt-to-destroy.html

Moses Sserwanga condemns the decision of the National Forestry Authority (NFA) of Uganda to
to grant a licence to Uganda Electricity Transmission Ltd to cut 69 hectatres of Mabira Forest for the construction of a new high voltage power line.

“… it’s imperative for us to remind NFA that there can be no doubt about the dangers posed by their reckless disregard of the conservation of critical resources like Mabira Forest.

NFA’s latest machinations point to one thing though - the well known government plot to illegally parcel out more than 7,100 hectares of the natural forest to private investors like Mehta and now Uganda Electricity Transmission Ltd.

This is what they call human culpability - when people work to destroy their environment - thus threatening their own very existence. With the on-going campaign against global warming resulting from poor management of the world’s environment, everyone including NFA bosses should be deeply concerned about the threat that climate change poses to human security and their economic wellbeing.”


Thinking Aloud
http://pitsotsibs.blogspot.com/2008/09/no-great-excitement-about-zimbwabwe.html

Thinking Aloud is not thrilled by the recent agreement between the Zimbabwean opposition and president Mugabe:

“… the agreement has not given Zimbwabwe a real fresh start, they have to fix a broken car, but they have been told that they will have to keep the same engine. This for me is a serious problem, with Mugabe as president, still wielding some power, how can a fresh start be possible?

It is a shame that Mugabe had to be begged to give away ill-gotten power, it is a shame that his old cronies are still allowed to hang on to power, MDC will have to struggle again, struggle for power which they have won in March 29. It is sad that today Mugabe is president of a country that has rejected him.

…these types of arrangements should never ever be entered into again, they are a disgrace, and they only serve to fuel dictators to seek deals instead of walking away from power. Today we have distorted justice, our kids should never be taught this model of compromise, because it defies a sense of justice, it teaches that the bullies can hang on to power and there is nothing that the citizens can do about it. It says clearly, the Gun is Mightier that the Vote, this is a shame!”


Blackman Time
http://www.blackmantime.com/why-robert-mugabe-is-a-hero.htm

Not everyone is against or skeptical of the agreement between the political rivals in Zimbabwe or critical of President handling of events that led to the agrrement. One of the bloggers with a favorable opinion of Mugabe after the peace deal is Blackman Time:

“If your view or vision of Mugabe is the one defined by Western media then, no doubt, you will hate the man who has just reluctantly agreed to share power with the opposition Zimbabwe... So when the Western media starts running up its mouth about how terrible Mugabe is, ask yourself whose interest are they really serving? The people of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe’s or the colonialists?

And, it is good that in agreeing to share power with Morgan Tsvangirai who has promised to focus on hope, Mugabe has offered coded warnings to Tsvangirai’s party with whom he will share government that they’d better not be colonial stooges. This is the Mugabe I know: a man who has lived, fought, killed for and ruled his African country; a man who cares for its cultural and political autonomy to be free from colonial puppeteering.

If it wasn’t for a man like Mugabe, Zimbabwe would not exist: it would still be called Rhodesia being treated as a playground or resource for colonial types, while locals are treated as third class citizens in their own backyard.”


Abesha Bunna Bet
http://abesha.wordpress.com/2008/09/05/ethiopias-bloody-hand-in-somalia/

Abesha escoriates the Ethiopian government for what it considers its ill-advised, poorly planned and bungled invasion of Somalia:

“With the support of the U.S. [the world's police], the Ethiopian government had cooked up a threat that was non-existent, to make the case for invading Somalia. And now, after creating Africa’s biggest Humanitarian crisis, the Meles regime had indicated its strong urge to pull its troops out of Somalia, completely...

Our leadership had dropped the ball in every aspect of Somalia’s invasion. The rebellion by which the Ethiopian troops were met, was in no way unforeseen. If anything, the leaders of the ICU had forewarned of this danger.

Invasion must be planned and one must prepare for the overwhelming burden of peacekeeping and securing the nation it chooses to invade. That also had been lacking in Somalia. The Meles regime clearly choosing to leave kids and their parents in the hands of fate.”


Scribbles from the Den
http://www.dibussi.com/2008/09/the-political-l.html

Scribbles from the Den revisits the legacy of Ruben Um Nyobe, founder of the Cameroonian nationalist party, UPC, who killed by French colonial forces 50 years ago on September 13, 1958:

“... the modern political state of Cameroon has arisen not so much as the realization of a national consciousness uniting diverse peoples into one movement against the colonial power - as was the case in most African countries - but out of the suppression of such a movement. In short, it was on the basis of struggling against the most politicized sections of its own population that the independent Cameroun state established its authority... The abnormality of having not only to derive its legitimacy from the armed force of the colonial power, but also of having to destroy both radical and moderate exponents of the profound nationalist sentiments which took root in post-war Cameroun, resulted inexorably in the establishment of a police state...

* Dibussi Tande, a writer and activist from Cameroon, produces the blog Scribbles from the Den

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org/

Cabinet talks deadlocked

2008-09-19

http://www.swradioafrica.com/News180908/deadlocked180908.htm

Zimbabweans are once again having to wait for details of the new government, this time the cause of the delay is the composition of the new cabinet. The political leaders Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai met on Thursday morning to decide who controls which of the 31 ministries up for grabs, but MDC spokesperson Nelson Chamisa said the issue of the “key ministries is really becoming quite problematic.”

EU maintains sanction despite deal

2008-09-19

http://euobserver.com/?aid=26747

EU foreign ministers decided on Monday (15 September) to maintain sanctions against Zimbabwe in place, despite Robert Mugabe, the country's president for almost three decades, agreeing to share power with his political rivals. According to EU foreign ministers' statement, the EU "will study the details of the agreement and will be attentive to its implementation, which will mean immediate cessation of all forms of intimidation and violence."

New deal faces challenges

2008-09-18

http://www.ipsterraviva.net/Africa/currentNew.aspx?new=2137

Violent clashes broke out between supporters of the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (Zanu PF) and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) outside the Rainbow Towers Hotel following the signing of a historic power sharing deal. Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe of Zanu PF, and MDC leaders Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara signed an agreement Monday that will form an inclusive government involving their parties.

Violence persists while ink is still wet

2008-09-19

http://www.swradioafrica.com/News180908/Violence180908.htm

Arrests and beatings continue in Zimbabwe barely three days before the ink has dried on the power sharing agreement between ZANU PF and the two MDC formations. 10 students from Bindura State University were arrested on Wednesday during protests calling for a conducive learning environment. Three student leaders Chiedza Gadzirayi (22), Laswet Savadye (24) and Respect Mbanga (21) were allegedly beaten up while in police custody.

Zimbabwe Deal

AU Monitor Weekly Roundup: Issue 151, 2008

2008-09-17

http://www.aumonitor.org

Zimbabwe’s three main political parties have signed a power-sharing agreement, bringing to an end to nearly 30 years of exclusive rule by Zanu-PF. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, facilitator of the Zimbabwe talks, told journalists that ‘a unanimous agreement, arrived at without any reservation by all the negotiating parties had been concluded.’ The AU Commission chairperson, Jean Ping, commending the Zimbabwean parties for arriving at the agreement, added that ‘the deal marked a turning point in efforts aimed at promoting reconciliation, stability and fostering conditions conducive for the recovery of the southern Africa country.’ In the power-sharing accord, President Robert Mugabe effectively remains head of state and government, chairman of the cabinet and commander-in-chief of the armed forces and his party will have 15 ministers in a 31-member cabinet. Morgan Tsvangirai will become prime minister and will have 13 cabinet ministers while Arthur Mutambara will be deputy prime minister and his party will have three ministers in cabinet. While the power sharing agreement has been widely acclaimed among policy makers, Johann Kriegler, a retired South African judge who is leading the independent commission investigating the integrity of Kenya’s 2007 elections, argued that the trend towards power sharing pacts was dangerous and warned that competitive elections, though costly, were 'cheaper than civil war'.

In peace and security related news, The AU commissioner for peace and security began a series of talks in Mauritania with the members of the country’s new governing body, the High State Council, the government, the political community and the civil society, in order to find a solution to the current crisis. Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete, current chair of the AU, announced that Nigeria and Tanzania were seeking ways to stop the International Criminal Court’s plans to charge President Bashir, while affirming that the AU and United Nations would work with the Sudanese government to bring about peace and justice in Darfur.

In economic development news, the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the government of Japan signed a loan agreement to the AfDB of $300 million that will finance the bank’s private sector initiative. Meanwhile, the economic affairs department of the AU, in collaboration with the Regional Economic Communities and the Association of African Universities, has called for papers for the first congress of African economists.

Finally, the African Centre for Democracy and Human Rights Studies will host the Forum on the Participation of NGOs prior to the 44th ordinary session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in Abuja, Nigeria on November 7-9, 2008.

Africa: Gender inequality shackles African economies

2008-09-19

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A843581

What can a mother of six do when her husband’s sporadic contributions to the household run dry? Thirty-five-year-old Amina created a job — an extraordinary achievement for a previously unemployed woman living in Djougou in northwest Benin. A micro loan from a local organisation helped her create a successful business. Today she is selling cooked rice at the nearby school. One day, Amina says, she will open a restaurant.

Africa: Gender training community of practice

2008-09-19

http://tinyurl.com/3n3squ

Gender training as a concrete mechanism for building capacity for gender mainstreaming, and a way to make development cooperation more inclusive and responsive, has been implemented - from differing perspectives, with differing methodologies, and with varying levels of commitment - since the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995.

Africa: Women still seeking the political kingdom

2008-09-18

http://www.ipsterraviva.net/Africa/currentNew.aspx?new=2141

While women are active in political campaigns, few manage to stand for election themselves. Mauritius - along with Botswana, Malawi and Madagascar - did not sign the Gender Protocol at the Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit in August. While the island nation has made some recent progress in political representation of women at the level of Parliament, much remains to be done to allow women to enjoy their full rights in the political arena.

Algeria: Women work twice as hard during Ramadhan

2008-09-19

http://tinyurl.com/4nhaxr

Algerian women do most of the work at home, and Ramadan is no exception. They go to work, shop, cook, and prepare the table for iftar. By end of the month, they are exhausted, but their work continues.

Global: Women fight to put violence on global agenda

2008-09-18

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43911

Joyce and Tanya - two women of different ages, nationalities, cultures and religions - share something: both became victims of a missing goal. Combating violence against women is what Inés Alberdi, executive director of the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), calls the missing goal, because it is not an issue addressed by the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Kenya: Ready for new abortion law?

2008-09-18

http://www.ipsterraviva.net/Africa/currentNew.aspx?new=2140

In May 2008, a group of civil society activists launched a campaign to reform Kenya's archaic abortion laws, sparking a countrywide debate. Now, as a new draft bill on women's reproductive health and rights seeking to decriminalise abortions is set to be tabled in parliament, the battle lines between opponents and advocates of abortion are clearly drawn.

Rwanda: Women MPs to the fore in healing

2008-09-19

http://tinyurl.com/3twkbz

Rwanda is on course to become the first country in the world where women MPs outnumber men. The small central African country, known for one of the worst genocides of modern times, is now comparatively stable and the elections passed off peacefully. The head of the electoral commission, Chrysologue Karangwa, said: "We have not yet got full results, [but] it's clear women representatives will be more than 50 per cent."

West Africa: Nigeria 'accounts for 10% of global maternal deaths' - study

2008-09-19

http://www.afrol.com/articles/30421

Nigeria has accounted for 10% of the 5.2 million global maternal deaths, research finding released by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) showed.The report showed that 52,000 Nigerian women die of pregnancy-related complicated annually.

Zimbabwe: Women 'have had more trauma since independence' - study

2008-09-19

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=43860

Zimbabwean women have experienced higher levels of trauma, including violence and lack of food, after the country's independence from Britain in 1980 than before. This is one of the findings of a study conducted by the civic movement Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) on trauma in the collapsing southern African state.

Ghana: Victims of military abuses to prosecute officers

2008-09-19

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=80473

Victims of violations committed by military officers are taking their case to the country’s highest court after a military investigation confirmed its officers were forcing parking offenders to violate corpses in July 2008.

Global: Activists win human rights awards

2008-09-19

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/09/15/global19810.htm

Five brave and selfless advocates of human rights from Burma, Congo, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka and Uzbekistan have been awarded the prestigious 2008 Human Rights Defender Awards, Human Rights Watch has said. All five have been persecuted and threatened for their work. One winner, Saudi lawyer Abd al-Rahman al-Lahim, is under a travel ban, which Human Rights Watch urges the Saudi government lift so that he may receive his award in person in London.

Senegal: Victims charge Habré with crimes against humanity

2008-09-19

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/09/15/senega19813.htm

Fourteen abuse victims, backed by a coalition of African and international rights groups, have filed complaints with a Senegalese prosecutor accusing the former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré of crimes against humanity and torture. The charges mark a new phase in the long-running effort to bring Habré to trial for atrocities committed during his 1982-1990 rule.

Africa: The Great Lakes pact and the rights of displaced people

A Guide for Civil Society

2008-09-19

http://tinyurl.com/54bklk

Following the entry into force in June 2008 of the Pact on Security, Stability and Development in Africa’s Great Lakes region (the Great Lakes Pact), the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and the International Refugee Rights Initiative (IRRI) released The Great Lakes Pact and the Rights of Displaced People: A Guide for Civil Society. The Guide aims to help organisations use the Great Lakes Pact to promote the rights of refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) in the region.

Kenya: Rethinking 'return home'

2008-09-18

http://www.ipsterraviva.net/Africa/currentNew.aspx?new=2133

The most urgent test of the grand coalition in Kenya is resettlement of the estimated 350,000 or so people made homeless by the violence after the December 2007 elections. Launched in May, the government's Operation 'Return Home' has been riddled with flaws and many experts on internal displacement argue it has exacerbated the crisis rather than resolving it.

South Africa: Constitutional Court to decide fate of safety camps

2008-09-19

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=80438

An interim order by South Africa's Constitutional Court could keep temporary shelters open for the foreigners displaced by xenophobic violence earlier this year - or it could leave more than 4,000 camp residents out on the street. Civil society has called for the camps to remain open until government publishes a detailed reintegration plan, and is hoping an interim court order will delay closure, set for the beginning of October by Gauteng provincial government.

Zambia: Conditions right for Congolese to return home - UNHCR

2008-09-19

http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/48d3b7f64.html

The UN Refugee Agency and the governments of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) this week intensified efforts to encourage the last 51,000 Congolese refugees in camps in northern Zambia that the time is right to go home.

Kenya:Defending the right to food for all Kenyans!

2008-09-19

http://www.bulamwa.co.ke//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=98&Itemid=39

We are hungry and angry Kenyans who have chosen to stand up and demand that the government ensures the right to food for all Kenyans. We are tired of eating "airburgers"; we are tired of watching our children go to bed hungry and we can no longer keep to the-skip-a-meal program.

South Africa: 63 Orange Farm residents arrested

2008-09-18

http://apf.org.za/article.php3?id_article=311

More than 63 residents were arrested Monday morning for public violence and were to appear on Tuesday at the Vereeniging Magistrate court (they have since all been released without charge). A strong crowd of more than 2000 residents organised by the Orange Farm Water Crisis Committee took to the streets in the early hours of Monday morning, 15 September 2008, to blockade traffic on the Golden Highway. Police opened fire with rubber bullets injuring demonstrators and arresting residents randomly.

South Africa: Forced relocations to make way for new freeway

2008-09-19

http://www.abahlali.org/node/4154

Siyanda shack-dwellers, facing eviction from the MR577 Freeway site, are staging ongoing marches to halt building and allocations at the Kulula Housing Project. The contractors have just been stopped from proceeding with the patently unfair allocation of housing that has been undertaken without any form of meaningful consultation. There is a heavy police presence again today and the situation is tense

Angola: Irregularities marred historic elections

2008-09-19

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/09/15/angola19808.htm

Angola’s parliamentary elections on September 5, 2008, reportedly won by the ruling MPLA party, were marred by numerous irregularities, Human Rights Watch has said. Preliminary results indicate that the MPLA won more than 80 percent of the vote, the first held in Angola since 1992.

Angola: Opposition appeal rejected

2008-09-19

http://tinyurl.com/6bcnlo

Angola's electoral commission has rejected appeals from the country's main opposition party to challenge election results on grounds of "voting irregularities" at polling stations. "The claims of Unita are not accompanied by any proof," Adao de Almeida, a spokesman for the national electoral commission, said in the Luanda province on Monday.

Cote d'Ivoire: Electoral process now irreversible - UN

2008-09-19

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28061

The launch of the identification and voter registration operations for upcoming presidential polls in Côte d’Ivoire confirms that the electoral process is irreversible, the top United Nations official to the West African country has said. Speaking in the capital, Yamoussoukro, at the launch of the operations, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative Y. J. Choi said the launch offered an historic opportunity for Ivorians to resolve the issue of identification once and for all.

Global: International Day of Democracy, 15th September

2008-09-19

http://www.idea.int/democracyday08.cfm

To celebrate this year's International Day of Democracy, International IDEA organised a series of activities that highlight the link between democracy, development and diversity. This included the launch of a joint action plan for democracy in collaboration with the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on the 12th September. The action plan is a first step in the implementation of the African Union Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance.

Swaziland: Swazis vote in controversial poll

2008-09-19

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7624634.stm

Swaziland is holding its first parliamentary election under a new constitution, amid growing protests calling for more democracy. Political parties remain banned in the tiny African mountain kingdom, one of the world's last absolute monarchies. The government says it expects a good turnout at the polls, to be watched by foreign observers for the first time.

Zambia: Government puts IT to use in October presidential election

2008-09-19

http://tinyurl.com/4gywvt

The Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) will use biometric data to identify those replacing their lost voter registration cards for the Oct. 30 presidential election. The election follows the Aug. 19 death of President Levy Mwanawasa at Percy Military Hospital in Paris. The ECZ has already established a permanent register, capturing biometric data from voters in the form of fingerprints, said ECZ deputy director of IT Brown Kasaro in an interview.

Kenya: Shady deals, intrigues haunt privatisation

2008-09-19

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=43919

The Kenya Railways Corporation was more than a national utility. It was a repository of Kenya’s history, beginning in the 19th century when indentured Indian labourers were brought to the East African region to build the Kenya-Uganda railway line.

Africa: Diaspora are key to Africa’s sustainable development

2008-09-19

http://www.africanexecutive.com/modules/magazine/articles.php?article=3552

No single person or institution has a monopoly of solutions to Africa’s development challenges. What is worse, ‘business as usual’ has not helped Africa in the last 40 years and is not going to help Africa in the foreseeable generation unless we change our way of thinking. We need to ‘think outside the box’ for new ideas, argues FW Kwoba

Africa: Final document from Accra HLF3

2008-09-19

http://www.afrodad.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=323

Ministers of developing and donor countries responsible for promoting development and Heads of multilateral and bilateral development institutions endorsed the following statement in Accra, Ghana, on 4 September 2008 to accelerate and deepen implementation of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2 March 2005).

Africa: Mbeki to lead high-level meeting on Africa's development

2008-09-19

http://www.buanews.gov.za/news/08/08091815451006

President Thabo Mbeki is expected next week to lead a high-level meeting with African leaders to review the continent's developmental needs as well as the implementation of its development goals. Addressing reporters at the Union Buildings on Thursday, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad said the meeting, held on the sidelines if the 63rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), will seek to discuss the remaining challenges facing the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Africa: New aid for agriculture: How will it be realized?

2008-09-19

http://www.eldis.org/go/country-profiles&id=39599&type=Document

After years of ‘neglect’ in favour of health and education assistance in Africa, the food crisis has concentrated the donor community’s minds on the need for overseas development aid for African agriculture. This is welcome, but what sort of policies are being proposed and what impact will they have for the African farmer? This report reviews policy documents of some of the major donors providing aid for African agricultural development – between 2004 and 2008 – as well as United Nations, international finance, agricultural research and African institutions.

Africa: Why the richest continent is also the poorest

2008-09-19

http://www.afrodad.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=322

The ecological impact of natural resource exploitation on the lives of the poor in Africa and other regions is not being addressed sufficiently in aid effectiveness and development discussions, aid experts say. ”Africa is known as one of the richest parts of the world when it comes to natural resources, yet it is also the poorest region -- despite the natural wealth and the aid flow,” said Charles Mutasa, executive director of the African Forum and Network on Debt and Development (AFRODAD) û a Zimbabwe-based NGO working on Africa's debt problem.

West Africa: Cotton symbolises global trade system’s 'iniquity'

2008-09-18

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43918

The international cotton trade has been a sad tale for West African countries. The region produces five percent of the world’s cotton and 15 percent of the global cotton fibre trade. Yet West African cotton farmers are among the poorest in the world. Their purchasing power is only five percent that of farmers in Europe, the U.S. and Japan. Purchasing power refers to the value of goods (cotton) compared to the amount of money paid.

Africa: HIV treatment 'must lead transformation of primary health care'

2008-09-19

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/B4BAECF1-98DE-4031-9A17-DE08EB158FBC.asp

The scaled–up delivery of antiretroviral drugs through primary healthcare offers an important opportunity for health care systems to manage the transition towards caring for people with chronic illnesses as populations age and cancers and cardiovascular disease become more common, according to the authors of a South African study looking at causes of death over 13 years in rural South Africa.

Cote d'Ivoire: Safety of AR therapy during pregnancy studied

2008-09-19

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/7ED1056F-CFBD-4FC6-A627-0121915E6E6F.asp

Combination antiretroviral therapy significantly reduces the risks of women with advanced HIV disease having an HIV-infected baby, but increases the risk of having a low birth weight baby, according to research conducted in the Cote d’Ivoire and published in the September 12th edition of AIDS. But the investigators found that low birth weight did not increase the risk of infant mortality – the only risk factor for this outcome was HIV infection in the infant.

Global: Less than 25% getting ARVs in developing countries

2008-09-19

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/57662AFF-B651-4A0F-9EC7-086878829537.asp

An analysis by Global Fund Observer published this week shows that just under half of the countries eligible to apply to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria are providing antiretroviral therapy to less than 25% of those who need it, or still have more than 25,000 in need of treatment despite higher levels of coverage.

Guinea Bissau: Cholera kills 122

2008-09-19

http://www.africanews.com/site/list_messages/20579

Cholera has killed 122 people and new cases have been reported in the last three weeks alone in Guinea Bissau. The epidemic is uncontrollable in the capital Bissau and elsewhere, experts told IRIN. The hardest hit regions are Bijao Island 158 cases, Biombo 836, Quinara 216, Oio 215 and Bissau 4,500.

South Africa: Treating HIV and TB together halves deathrate - study

2008-09-19

http://www.aidsmap.com/en/news/81BF3B62-9197-42D6-9DB3-44A784E2F0B1.asp

Taking antiretroviral drugs at the same time as TB treatment halved the death rate when compared with delaying HIV treatment until after TB treatment was completed, a major South African study has found. Trial investigators announced on September 17th that they have terminated an arm of the study in which patients waited until they had completed TB treatment before starting antiretroviral therapy, because patients in this arm had a significantly higher risk of death.

Liberia: School feeding programme launched

2008-09-19

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28110

The Liberian Government and the United Nations have launched a new school feeding programme in the capital Monrovia for 150,000 children going hungry because of high food prices. Another 400,000 rural school children are already benefiting from joint feeding programmes organized by the Government and the World Food Programme (WFP), according to a press statement issued by the UN

Senegal : UN project to reduce Africa’s brain drain

2008-09-19

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28081

Scientists at a Senegalese university are the first to benefit from a United Nations-backed project aimed at providing colleges in five African countries with the technology and tools needed to prevent the migration of graduates and reduce the continent’s “brain drain.” The installation of the first computing grid at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar is part of a joint initiative by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Hewlett-Packard and the Grid Computing Institute of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

South Africa: Film festival tackles bitter issues

2008-09-19

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=southafrica&id=1957

The South African Out in Africa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival ended last Sunday in Johannesburg with the Cape Town festival running until 21 September. The festival attracted at least about 300 members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community of different ages, races and class on the opening night.

Uganda: Human rights defenders released

2008-09-19

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=uganda&id=1959

George Oundo and Kiiza Brendah have been released from Nabweru Police Station where they were accused and apprehended for ‘recruiting people into homosexuality’.The two lesbian, gay, bieszexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) rights activists were arrested at Oundo’s home last week, and were deprived the right to appear in court within 48 hours as stipulated in that country’s constitution.

Uganda: Stop unlawful detenetions, HRW tells government

2008-09-19

http://www.mask.org.za/article.php?cat=uganda&id=1958

Turmoil has erupted once again in Uganda as police clamp down on homosexuals in that country, which started this Monday 15 September. Two men have already been arrested and charged with ‘recruitment of homosexuals’, something which, according to Human Rights Watch, is not even a legislation in Uganda’s laws.

Climate call - protest in Copenhagen on 30/11/09

2008-09-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/environment/50606

We stand at a crossroads. The facts are clear. Global climate change, caused by human activities, is happening, threatening the lives and livelihoods of billions of people and the existence of millions of species. Social movements, environmental groups, and scientists from all over the world are calling for urgent and radical action on climate change.
The following call to climate action was developed during a meeting of nearly 100 activists from organizations around the world who came together in Copenhagen, Denmark to discuss a mobilization on climate change to coincide with the 2009 UN climate conference that begins in Copenhagen on November 30, 2009. The meeting included participants in The Durban Group.

A Call to Climate Action:
We stand at a crossroads. The facts are clear. Global climate change, caused by human activities, is happening, threatening the lives and livelihoods of billions of people and the existence of millions of species. Social movements, environmental groups, and scientists from all over the world are calling for urgent and radical action on climate change.

On the 30th of November, 2009 the governments of the world will come to Copenhagen for the fifteenth UN Climate Conference (COP-15). This will be the biggest summit on climate change ever to have taken place. Yet, previous meetings have produced nothing more than business as usual.

There are alternatives to the current course that is emphasizing false solutions such as market-based approaches and agrofuels. If we put humanity before profit and solidarity above competition we can live amazing lives without destroying our planet. We need to leave fossil fuels in the ground.

Instead we must invest in community-controlled renewable energy. We must stop over-production for over-consumption. All should have equal access to the global commons through community control and sovereignty over energy, forests, land and water. And of course we must acknowledge the historical responsibility of the global elite and rich Global North for causing this crisis. Equity between North and South is essential.

Climate change is already impacting people, particularly women, indigenous and forest-dependent peoples, small farmers, marginalized communities and impoverished neighborhoods who are also calling for action on climate- and social justice. This call was taken up by activists and organizations from 21 countries that came together in Copenhagen over the weekend of 13-14 September, 2008 to begin discussions for a mobilization in Copenhagen during the UN’s 2009 climate conference.

The 30th of November, 2009 is also the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Organization (WTO) shutdown in Seattle, which shows the power of globally coordinated social movements.

We call on all peoples around the planet to mobilize and take action against the root causes of climate change and the key agents responsible both in Copenhagen and around the world. This mobilization begins now, until the COP-15 summit, and beyond. The mobilizations in Copenhagen and around the world are still in the planning stages. We have time to collectively decide what these mobilizations will look like, and to begin to visualize what our future can be. Get involved!

We encourage everyone to start mobilizing today in your own neighborhoods and communities. It is time to take the power back. The power is in our hands. Hope is not just a feeling, it is also about taking action.
To get involved in this ongoing and open process, sign up to this email
list: climateaction@klimax2009.org

East Africa: Erosion of pastures is a big climate change threat - study

2008-09-19

http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2008/august/pastures.htm

Climate change is a real and current threat to households and communities already struggling to survive in east Africa. Global climate modelling results indicate that the region will experience wetter and warmer conditions as well as decreases in agricultural productivity.

East Africa: Rain 'linked to Northern climate'

2008-09-19

http://tinyurl.com/4xkkv6

Sediment cores drilled from one of East Africa's Great Lakes show that rainfall in the region is highly sensitive to climate changes in the Northern Hemisphere. Analysis of the cores — collected from the bottom of Lake Tanganyika in East Africa's Rift Valley and dating back 60,000 years — suggest that rainfall is sensitive to changes in winter winds in northern Asia and sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean.

Nigeria: Environmentalists denounce arrests in gas flaring-affected community

2008-09-19

http://tinyurl.com/52x8nb

Environmental Rights Action / Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) has condemned the September 2 arrest and detention of a group of around 25 people including journalists attending a community forum on gas flaring at Iwherekan community (Delta State). The arrests were made by Nigerian soldiers at the Iwherekan community gas flaring site operated by oil giant Shell.

Uganda: Turning up the heat: climate change and poverty

2008-09-19

http://tinyurl.com/47zm5p

People in Uganda, whose contribution to global warming has been minuscule, are feeling the impacts of climate change first and worst. On the one hand there is more erratic rainfall in the March to June rainy season, bringing drought and reductions in crop yields and plant varieties; on the other hand, the rainfall, especially in the later rains towards the end of the year, is reported as coming in downpours that are more intense and destructive, bringing floods, landslides, and soil erosion.

Congo: IFJ calls for probe of “violent” assault of journalist

2008-09-19

http://tinyurl.com/52yrex

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called for an investigation into the “violent” assault by Congolese police officers on journalist Giscard Mahoungou who was attacked while covering a student demonstration. “We condemn this violent assault, which looks like reprisals against media reporting on police violence,” said Gabriel Baglo, Director of the IFJ Africa office.

Morocco: Blogger acquitted

2008-09-19

http://tinyurl.com/3m8wgx

The Blogoma, or Moroccan blogosphere, was buzzing over news of Moroccan blogger Mohammed Erraji's acquittal. Erraji was arrested last week for writing on his blog that the King or Morocco's charity toward his people encourages them to remain helpless rather than work hard. Under local media laws, it is illegal to criticize the monarchy.

Niger: Court defers decision on fate of Moussa Kaka

2008-09-19

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=28569

Reporters Without Borders called on Niger’s judicial authorities to uphold an investigating judge’s decision to drop all charges against imprisoned journalist Moussa Kaka after a Niamey court began to hear the department of public prosecution’s appeal against the decision, and then adjourned until 7 October for further consultation.

Nigeria: Reporter brutalised on orders of oil company manager

2008-09-19

http://mediarightsagenda.org/attackaug08_03.html

Mr. Luka Binniyat, Energy Reporter with the Lagos-based independent daily, Vanguard newspaper was, on August 20, 2008, at about 2:50pm local time, beaten and brutalized with gun butts by security personnel attached to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) in Abuja on the orders of Dr. Levi Ajounoma, its Corporate Affairs Group General Manager (GGM). He sustained injuries including spraining his left elbow.

Nigeria: Suspected assassins murder journalist

2008-09-19

http://mediarightsagenda.org/attackaug08_01.html

Paul Abayomi Ogundeji, a member of the editorial board of the Lagos-based private daily, Thisday newspaper was on August 17, 2008, at about 10.30pm local time, shot dead in Dopemu, a suburb of Lagos metropolis by unidentified gunmen. Mr. Ogundeji, was ambushed by the bandits while returning home. Nothing was removed from the Kia Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) which he was driving.

Tunisia: Journalist sues Internet agency for censorship

2008-09-19

http://tinyurl.com/4zvs5r

Tunisian blogger and journalist Ziad El Heni has filed a legal action against the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI), seeking damages sustained as a result of censorship. This is the first case of its kind against ATI since its creation in 1996 to manage the national internet backbone and provide internet services.

Haiti: Women and girls require life-saving assistance

2008-09-19

http://www.unfpa.org/news/news.cfm?ID=1184

More than 800,000 people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance in Haiti in the wake of hurricanes Fay and Gustav and tropical storm Hanna. Houses, medical facilities, main roads and bridges have been destroyed, and an estimated 100,000 people have sought refuge in temporary shelters.

East Africa: South Sudan accuses Uganda rebels of attack

2008-09-19

http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnBAN951941.html

South Sudan's military accused Ugandan rebels on Friday of attacking them on the Congo border, killing one soldier and the son of a local chief. Major General Biar Ajang of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SLPA) said the attack by Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) guerrillas took place on Thursday in Sukure Payam district.

Chad-CAR: Ban recommends 6,000-strong force

2008-09-19

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28090

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has proposed that the Security Council consider sending 6,000 United Nations troops to replace a European Union force in eastern Chad and north-eastern Central African Republic (CAR), which have both been wracked by violence and civilian displacement in recent years.

DRC: Aid for children affected by new fighting

2008-09-19

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28115

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is scaling up existing emergency programmes in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where increased fighting has forced over 100,000 people to flee their homes, social services to close, and humanitarian organizations to suspend aid.

DRC: Fresh fighting in the east

2008-09-19

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28088

Intense fighting has broken out between the army and rebels loyal to the former general Laurent Nkunda in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with the army using rocket launchers and other heavy artillery, the United Nations peacekeeping mission hasreported. To ensure that civilians were not harmed, the peacekeepers interceded with Congolese troops who agreed to cease fire by the end of the day. The fighting took place in Kirotshe, a town near Goma, which has seen several fierce battles in recent days.

Horn of Africa: Border tension could escalate, warns UN team

2008-09-19

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28109

The situation on the Djibouti-Eritrean border remains volatile after a flaring of tensions on the border in June left over 35 dead and dozens wounded, a United Nations fact-finding mission has reported. The mission concluded that Djibouti is being drawn into a crippling and expensive military mobilization to deal with a situation that may threaten national, regional and international peace.

Nigeria: Militants launch new attacks in "oil war"

2008-09-18

http://www.reuters.com/article/homepageCrisis/idUSLF652982._CH_.2400

Nigerian militants on Monday attacked a Shell-operated oil installation, forcing the evacuation of nearly 100 people, in a third day of heavy fighting with security forces in the Niger Delta region. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) declared an "oil war" on Sunday and warned all oil workers to evacuate the delta immediately, threatening to further disrupt production in the world's eighth largest oil exporter.

Africa: Internet in Africa: A well-organised racket

2008-09-19

http://tinyurl.com/3m8wgx

Ibrahima Yade climbs the stairs leading to the floor where his small company, SeneLogic, is housed. A start-up social economics company, whose slogan is “La sénégalaise des logiciels libres” [The Senegalese of free software]. From his height of two metres, Ibrahima, the forty-year old, tells his four younger colleagues that the software development session has been interrupted because of a power cut.

Africa: Online training course focuses on OSS for Africa

2008-09-19

http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=3103

A new e-learning curriculum aimed at African IT businesses includes thorough coverage of open source software such as Ubuntu Linux, IT security and e-business applications. The online training course, called Open source & more IT for African Business, was created by Information Technology in African Business (it@ab) and backed by the funds from the German federal ministry for economic co-operation and development.

2009 STARS Impact Awards: Applications open

2008-09-18

http://starsfoundation.org.uk/

Stars Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of the 2009 STARS Impact Awards recognising organisations working in children’s health, education and protection. Each Award carries US$100,000 of unrestricted funding as well as consultancy support. For information on previous Award recipients and this year's finalists, please visit the website. The closing date for applications is 28 November 2008.

Africa: African Humanities programme

Fellowship competitions in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda

2008-09-18

http://www.acls.org/grants/Default.aspx?id=3210

Through a program of fellowship competitions, regional workshops, and peer networking, the African Humanities Program provides support to the humanities in five African countries, including Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. The program is supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Global: Climate law in developing countries conference

2008-09-18

http://www.iucnael.org/content/view/17/30/lang,english/

The IUCN Academy of Environmental Law at the University of Ottawa would like to announce an upcoming conference: "Climate Law in Developing Countries Post-2012: North and South Perspectives" from September 26th to the 29th. This conference will examine the legal and policy challenges that developing countries face in mitigating and adapting to climate change while meeting their social and economic needs.

Kenya: STORYMOJA Inspirational Writing Workshop

2008-09-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/50683

Storymoja is organizing a workshop for writers of inspirational material, however broadly this can be defined. We know there are many of you with powerful, life-changing experiences to share, but may need the structure and know-how we can provide to get the story down. These stories must be presented in an attractive, informative, clear and well-edited manner so that even those with a bias against books, but are hungry for the content, can read them.
Storymoja is organizing a workshop for writers of inspirational material, however broadly this can be defined. We know there are many of you with powerful, life-changing experiences to share, but may need the structure and know-how we can provide to get the story down. These stories must be presented in an attractive, informative, clear and well-edited manner so that even those with a bias against books, but are hungry for the content, can read them.

Storymoja is inviting you to participate in a writing workshop led by Betty Wamalwa, a development consultant and poet (among many other things), and I, Doreen Baingana, author and managing editor of Storymoja. We have tentative dates and a structure, and would like to know if you can attend. The goal is to have a completed, ready-to-publish manuscript of 20,000 – 30,000 words that Storymoja will publish if it meets our standards.
PROPOSED DATES: Mondays and Thursdays, 6pm to 9pm
22/09/08, 25/09/08, 29/09/08, 2/10/08

A weekend retreat on the 17th, 18th and 19th October (or one weekend earlier) for the final editing of the manuscript.

The cost is only Kshs 300 for photocopied materials.

If interested, please send a sample of your writing and/or your book idea to me AND Betty at bettymuragori@yahoo.com Also, please forward this to any writer you know who is interest in this subject matter.
More details will be sent to those who interested. Please do not hesitate to ask questions and give suggestions.


www.storymojaafrica.co.ke

Kenya: The 1st Broadcast & Film Africa conference & exhibition

2008-09-18

http://www.aitecafrica.com/node/660

The first African Broadcast & Film Conference, will be held in Nairobi over 23-25 September, 2008. The event is being organised by AITEC Africa and held under the auspices of the Ministry of Information and Communications.

Kenya: Call for a consultant - CREAW

2008-09-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/50681

The Centre for Rights Education and Awareness (CREAW) is a non-governmental, non-partisan, membership organization whose Mission is to transform society by empowering women and expanding new frontiers for women’s rights and freedoms. Our Vision is to realise a just and free society in which women and men have, exercise and enjoy equal and full rights and opportunities. We are seeking the services of a researcher. Appliction deadline: 26 September 2008.
CALL FOR A CONSULTANT


CENTRE FOR RIGHTS EDUCATION AND AWARENESS
Deadline for application: 26th September 2008

The Centre for Rights Education and Awareness (CREAW) is a non-governmental, non-partisan, membership organization whose Mission is to transform society by empowering women and expanding new frontiers for women’s rights and freedoms. Our Vision is to realise a just and free society in which women and men have, exercise and enjoy equal and full rights and opportunities.
We are seeking the services of a researcher.
Selection Criteria
The consultant must have the following qualifications to be considered:
• At least five years experience in research and gender programming or gender equity work in a development setting
• At least a masters degree in relevant field
• Ability to conduct high level discussions with senior government officials/representatives and experts on gender issues
• Knowledge of developing frameworks and gender mainstreaming
• Experience, knowledge and good understanding of women and decision making issues in Kenya, existing policies and legislative frameworks
• Excellent writing and communication skills

Duration
• The research is to be conducted within twelve days, starting 1st October 2008


Interested or eligible researchers with experience and qualifications, should send in their application (preferably by email) indicating their professional capability to undertake the consultancy. Such information may include details of past experience especially in their area of expertise, description of similar assignments and appropriate skills, with a quotation of the consultation fee.
Interested or eligible researchers may obtain further information from the office before the deadline.
Contact Information:
To the Selection Committee
Centre for Rights Education and Awareness (CREAW)
Convent Drive, Lavington, off Isaac Gathanju Road
P.O. Box 11964 00100 GPO Nairobi
Email: info@creaw.org
Tel/fax: +254-20-3860640/ 3861016/ 2378271/ 720357664

Fahamu