Back Issues

Oxford University hosts major Rwandan genocide conference in Kigali

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/Announce/55330

Some of the most controversial issues stemming from the 1994 Rwandan genocide will be addressed at a symposium in Kigali, co-hosted by the University of Oxford, on 3 April 2009. The event entitled, ‘15 Years after Genocide: Where Now for Rwanda?’ will commemorate the 15th anniversary of the genocide and feature provocative presentations by leading policymakers, academics and journalists on a range of key issues affecting post-genocide Rwanda, including:

- The ongoing problem of genocide denial
- The complicity of the French government in the Rwandan genocide
- The impact of the release from French custody of Rose Kabuye, Rwandan Minister for State Protocol
- The continued presence of Hutu rebels in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
- The impact of the gacaca community courts on post-genocide justice and reconciliation
- The refusal of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to transfer genocide cases to the Rwandan national courts
- The legacies of the ICTR and the future of international justice

The symposium will take place from 2 to 7pm at the Laico Umubano Hotel, Kigali, and will be co-hosted by the Rotary Club of Kigali-Virunga, Oxford Transitional Justice Research, the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and the Law Faculty at the University of Oxford.

Speakers at the symposium will include:

- Dr Alfred Ndahiro (Senior Advisor to H.E. President Paul Kagame)
- Martin Ngoga (Prosecutor General, Republic of Rwanda)
- Dr Phil Clark (Research Fellow in Courts and Public Policy, University of Oxford)
- Professor Christine Stansell (Professor of History, University of Chicago, and writer for The New Republic)
- Commander Alfred Kwende (Office of the Prosecutor, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda)
- Zachary D. Kaufman (University of Oxford and Yale Law School)
- Tom Ndahiro (Journalist and Researcher)
- Mrs. Bernadette Kayirangwa (Senior Researcher, Institute of Research and Dialogue for Peace)
- Andrew Wallis (University of Cambridge and author of Silent Accomplice: The Untold Story of France’s Role in the Rwandan Genocide)

A full symposium programme is included below.
The event will also serve as a launch of After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond, edited by Phil Clark and Zachary D. Kaufman and published by C. Hurst and Co. and Columbia University Press (2009). The volume includes an unprecedented debate between President Paul Kagame and historian Professor René Lemarchand on issues of Rwandan history and governance. Details of the book can be found at www.aftergenocide.com Proceeds from the sale of the book will go to the Kigali Public Library project: www.kigalilibrary.org.
For more information, please contact Dr. Phil Clark on philip.clark@csls.ox.ac.uk or +250 0(78)8941332.

15 YEARS AFTER GENOCIDE:
WHERE NOW FOR RWANDA?

2-7pm, 3 April 2009
Laico Umubano Hotel, Kigali

Hosted by the Rotary Club of Kigali-Virunga
in association with
Oxford Transitional Justice Research,
The Law Faculty and Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford

2:00-2:15: Introduction

Welcome and Introduction
Rtn. Ambassador Zephyr Mutanguha, President, Rotary Club of Kigali-Virunga

Opening Remarks
Hon. Dr. Alfred Ndahiro, Senior Advisor to H.E. President Paul Kagame, Government of Rwanda

2:15-3:30: Session 1 - Genocide History and Memory
Chair: Dr. Phil Clark, University of Oxford

Genocide Memory and Ideology
Mrs. Bernadette Kayirangwa, Senior Researcher, Institute of Research and Dialogue for Peace

Genocide Denial and the Case of the Rassemblement Républicain pour la Démocratie au Rwanda (RDR)
Tom Ndahiro, researcher and journalist

Rwanda/France: After Bruguière, Where Now?
Andrew Wallis, University of Cambridge, and author of Silent Accomplice: the Untold Story of France’s Role in the Rwandan Genocide

Audience Discussion

3:30-4:15: Session 2 - National Post-Genocide Justice and Governance
Chair: Zachary D. Kaufman, University of Oxford and Yale Law School

Judicial Responses to Impunity in Rwanda
Hon. Martin Ngoga, Prosecutor General, Government of Rwanda

Justice, Reconciliation and the Impact of Gacaca
Dr. Phil Clark, University of Oxford

Audience Discussion

4:15-4:30: Coffee Break

4:30-5:30: Session 3 - International Justice after Genocide
Chair: Dr. Phil Clark

The Establishment of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
Zachary D. Kaufman, University of Oxford and Yale Law School

The Legacies of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
Commander Alfred Kwende, Office of the Prosecutor, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Audience Discussion

5:30-6:00: Session 4 - Launching After Genocide and Closing Remarks
Chair: Zachary D. Kaufman

Putting After Genocide in Context
Prof. Christine Stansell, University of Chicago

Closing Remarks and Launch of After Genocide
Rtn. PP Raj Rajendran, Past President and Kigali Public Library Committee Chair, Rotary Club of Kigali-Virunga

6:00-7:00: Cocktail Reception

Political, economic and climatic crises of Western civilisation

Dangers and opportunities

Yash Tandon

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/55334

cc HitchsterWestern civilisation has been going through a deepening crisis over the last 120 years, writes Yash Tandon, and it is deeper than most people realise or are willing to acknowledge. Focusing on the present systemic crisis – the most recent manifestations of which are the global financial crisis and the ecological crisis – Tandon sets out how progessive forces both in the South and the North could respond to the array of challenges the world currently faces. The time has come he says, for ordinary people to take back the right to think and plan their futures from the institutions, that have in part, been the authors of the situation we find ourselves in.

Western civilisation has been going through a deepening crisis over the last 120 years – to be precise since around mid-1880s when serious colonisation began of the African continent as a desperate attempt to get out of the crisis created by the limits to growth within Europe. The present systemic crisis – whose most recent manifestations are the global financial crisis and the ecological crisis – is only its latest manifestation. Western civilisation’s crisis is deeper than most people realise or willing to acknowledge.

There are profound dangers inherent in the impending collapse of Western civilisation. The ruling political and corporate elites in the West are losing control both in their own countries and over much of the South. Judging by the attempts made by them in recent months, it is evident that they have no clue about how to get out of the dual political-economic and ecological crises. They have serious problems of resource depletion and global warming which compound to create a situation not unlike what they experienced in the 1880s when they faced limits to growth in Europe.

The re-colonisation option does not look promising for the future, because although they are presently attempting to neo-colonise the South, this will meet with stiff resistance not only from the South but also from progressive peoples in the North. By 2099 the white races will be swamped by the non-whites whether they like it or not, even in many of their own countries, including significantly the United States and Israel. (This is not supposed to be a racist statement, only a highly likely demographic prediction). Fear has become a major international relations factor in the behaviour of Western nations. There are serious dangers of increasing militarism, fascism and racism in the West, possibly aggressive wars in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’ or ‘failed states’, or ‘human rights violations’. Such prospects bode ill for progressive efforts to create an all-inclusive alternative civilisation.

So the question is: What do the peoples of the South and progressive peoples everywhere do in this impending collapse of Western civilisation?

There are many possible answers – depending on ones political and human perspectives. Some people in the South are likely to take an aggressive and combative view in a revengeful spirit. This would be utterly wrong. An eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth spirit will destroy the entire civilisation. I believe that there has to be a more sensible approach to this question. In the short to medium term the peoples of the South should resist being re-colonised. They should demand justice and the right to determine their own destinies without interference from the North. They should demand a fair share of the world’s resources whilst working out a joint strategy with the North to save this planet – the only one we know – and its natural resources and the environment.

However, in the long run, the peoples of the South should show understanding and compassion to the peoples of the North – despite history. They will need to assure the North that there will never be unity of the South to cause serious concern to the North – which is a good thing. Non-white populations living in the North (as immigrant citizens, short term workers, or as refugees) must fight for their rights within those countries, of course, but they must integrate or merge (depending on the circumstances of each country) within the communities of their host nations. Also, the peoples of the South must recognise that there are aspects of Western civilisation that are positive and progressive in the evolution of world history; that there are common values which they share with the West – a common humanity. The South should celebrate these positive virtues of Western civilisation, and make their own contributions for a better, peaceful and just world. Above all, and in the immediate to medium term, the progressive peoples all over the world – South and North – should reflect on alternatives to the impending collapse of the West-dominated present civilisation. An alternative global civilisation will take hundreds of years to evolve and mature, but the time to start is now.

The West (also referred to as the North, depending on the context) is currently in serious crisis, which it may survive only if progressive civil society movements in the North take heed of the gravity of the situation facing them, and if they work closely with progressive peoples and movements in the South.

WESTERN CIVILISATION IN CRISIS

The crisis in the North began with the completion of the first phase of the industrialisation project by the end of the 1880s. Here we refer to the modern phase of the developments in the North, namely, the capitalist phase. There were crises in earlier periods –both in the South as well as in the North, much worse indeed impacting civilisations in the South than in the North. By the end of the 16th century, however, the North had managed to get out of their ‘dark ages’ and with the enlightenment and the reformation, a reinvigorated Western Europe was able to create nation-states out of warring tribes, and develop their productive forces – science and technology and the organisation of production and society – at an astonishing pace and with a huge global impact.

The first major crisis modern Europe faced in the capitalist era was in the late 1880s. Having finished the early phase of industrialisation, the European ruling oligarchy faced dual crises. One was that Europe reached its limits of growth within its own geographical space, and the lack of adequate local resources for further development of its productive forces. The second was the upsurge in the class consciousness of the workers in the North that demanded a fair return to their labour which had spawned a burgeoning and hideously exploitative capitalist class.

The resolution of these problems was, however, not possible within Europe itself. The only way out was imperial expansion in the South. When the British arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes said ‘the Empire is a bread and butter question’, he meant every word of it, adding, self-righteously, that to ‘save’ England from ‘a bloody civil war’ it was necessary to ‘acquire new lands to settle the surplus population’. In further explanation, and speaking for all Europe, he said, ‘We are the first race in the world, and the more of the world we inherit the better it is for the human race.’ The historical parody in our own times is that the British now make harsh judgment on present-day Zimbabwe, which was acquired by the British based on deceitful signing of a treaty with Chief Lo Bengula. The theft of land was more insidious than the theft of public money by the greedy officials of the American Insurance General (AIG) today. The land was named ‘Rhodesia’ after Cecil Rhodes.

Why is it necessary to recount this story? Is it not best forgotten? Perhaps it is. However, because mainstream European historiography obfuscates history, it is important to tell the story also from the other side. Also, the present crisis in Western civilisation makes it important to look at where we have come from, and to acknowledge the legacy of European exploitation of weaker or weakened civilisations in the South. It is important to remember history, even in its not very flattering details, in order to be able to go beyond it, to sublimate it, to pardon those who may have perpetrated acts of brutality in the course of what they regarded as their so-called ‘the white man’s burden’.

Close on the heels of England were the other European countries, just industrialising out of medieval rural backwardness. Led by Germany’s Bismarck the European political leadership met in Berlin (in this city where we assemble today) in 1884 to partition Africa amongst themselves as their colonies. Imperial exploitation enabled European capitalists to reduce their cost of production through importation of cheap raw materials as well as secure captive markets for their manufactured products and lands for the settlement of European farmers and bureaucrats. All this ensured high rates of profits for the capitalist class, out of which they could now afford to pay higher wages to their own workers at home (the imperial labour aristocracy), and thus continue to develop their national productive forces. The gains of imperialism were unequal, if there were indeed any gains for the South. The Austrian-American political-economist, Joseph Schumpeter, was later to describe capitalism as ‘creative destruction’, but he failed to notice that there was more destruction in the South and more creation in the North.

The story of the first half of the twentieth century is all too familiar – the collapse of the pre-first World War economy with the Wall Street crash of 1929; the years of the Great Depression; the emergence of ‘new deal’ economics brilliantly crafted by Keynes to rescue the Empire; the rise of fascism and militarism; and then the Second World War. And, finally, there was the Jewish holocaust, which ended with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 – an imperial extension of Europe into the heartland of the Middle East – through which Europe was able, or so it thought, to expunge its guilt. The two world wars were essentially inter-imperialist wars, except for the complication of the Second World War where a revolutionised Soviet Union entered the War as an ally of one sub-set of imperialist countries (the Allied powers), but soon after the War, the communist challenge posed a threat to the global domination of the capitalist West. That story of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union is also well known.

All this time, the South did not matter. It was colonised (like most of Africa and Asia) or semi-colonised (like China and most of Latin America). But, further down the road, the loss of the colonies between 1950 and 1970 presented Europe with a major crisis. The US benefitted for a short time out of the liquidation of the European empire, but the Cold War soon wiped out, or corrupted, most of those gains. The process of decolonisation was not always peaceful – Algeria, Kenya, Vietnam, Indonesia, Angola, Mozambique and South Africa, among others, are testimony to the bitter struggle of the Europeans to maintain control over their empire. The ‘loss’ of China to communism was a shock to the West, and so also the rebellion of Cuba after the 1959 revolution. Now we have a new situation. The indigenous peoples of South America are gaining collective political consciousness and self-confidence, and in countries like Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, demanding a rightful ownership and control over their natural resources.

The second oil crisis in 1979 hit the North as well as the South. The West was already facing other multi-pronged crises – the saturation of western markets in invest¬ment finance and goods, the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, the invasion of Afghanistan in the same year, the domestic crisis of profitability, the rising demand of the working classes (especially in the UK) for a better share in the national income, and the loom¬ing recession.

Faced with this situation, among other policy measures, the British government deregulated its economy, privatised state assets, and took away welfare benefits from the people (including pensions) and siphoned these to their business corporations to salvage them from declining profits and higher wage demands from their workers. Then, at the international level, a rapid move towards trade liberalisation followed by the demand for removing all restrictions on the movement of capital, and ‘national treatment’ for the owners of imperial capital - the demand that they be given the same treatment as nationals in the third countries. The UK was quickly followed by the US under Reagan and then by other Northern countries. In this they used their power in rule-making bodies such as the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the WTO (World Trade Organisation) and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). In the WIPO, they used their power to enforce property rules on the South to enforce intellectual property systems that hinder technology transfer from the Empire. At the same time – through the WTO TRIPS agreement, strict rules of intellectual property and other means – it promoted expropriation of traditional knowledge of food and medicines. This undermines the systems of the commons, which rules in many African traditional societies in the areas of water, seeds, herbal medicine, etc.

This is an important detail of history that is not sufficiently acknowledged, or even understood, by those who talk about globalisation in general terms. What is not realised is that the specific policies put in place to get the Anglo-Saxon economies out of their multiple crises got translated into policies for universal application under the banner of ‘globalisation’ taken out of their political and geographical context. It is this – namely the official adoption by the institutions of economic global governance of the Anglo-Saxon liberalisation of the economy – that was the beginning of what is now identified as the neoliberal ideology. Globalisation in this period (from about the mid-1980s to 2005), in other words, had a distinct Anglo-Saxon face. It was not just any kind of globalisation; it was neo-liberal globalisation. The countries of the south that were compelled to borrow from the IMF or the World Bank or the donors were subjected to stiff conditions and penalties in order to force them to conform to certain macroeconomic policies as set out by the donors and the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs). These included:

- Free market ideology – let the market decide
- Privatisation of state assets and denationalisation
- Deregulation (minimum state interference in the economy)
- Control over wages and conditions of work
- Stiff budget deficit controls
- Trade liberalisation and reduction of tariffs
- Reduction of social expenditure on things like health and education; and
- Forcing the South to open up of the capital market to investments from the North.

From an intellectual point of view, the tragedy of this particular phase of globalisation is that the evolution of ‘development theory’ got decoupled from the political-economic context of the south. The mainstream development theory had been constructed not for the benefit of the developing countries, as it purported, but for integrating them into a global economy for the benefit of those who dominated the global economy.

However, now we enter a new phase of history.

The twenty years of Western hegemony is ending fast as we speak. For twenty years, the West imposed its will on the governments and peoples of the South using agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), the regional banks and agencies of the IMF/WB in the South, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). The most outstanding success of the Western offensive was that most of the leaders of the South, as well as the post-1989 leadership of Russia, accepted the ‘triumph’ of Western ideologies and Western methods of work. But now Western ideas and ideologies are being seriously questioned not only in the South but also within the countries of the North.

This is where we are now. The assault on America on 11 September 2001 has put the US and its citizens in a state of panic and paranoia. The bursting of the dot-com bubble soon after blew the whistle against the hazards of financialised speculative capitalism – a warning, however, that was largely ignored by the euphoric ruling political and corporate elite. And then, predictably, the sub-prime house mortgage crisis broke surface in September 2007, and since then financialised capitalism is swallowing down its own authors, like a snake swallowing its own tail.

In the process speculative finance capital has left behind a trail of misdeeds, among them the following:
- It has mopped up all the small savings of the people through credit institutions, and the securitisation process, that evolved into the so-called ‘democratisation’ of the stock exchange, the emergence of the ‘Casino Society’, and the bubbling of the speculative capital. The 1990s dot-com bubble and the housing bubble (post 2005) are concrete outcomes of this ‘democratisation’ of wealth.
- It internationalised securities as a way of expanding the shrinking national base of Western economies into the emerging countries of the South, and ‘dematerialised’ the commodity market through for example the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, thus robbing commodities of their real value, creating highly volatile, unpredictable and unsustainable productive base in the commodity-exporting countries of the South, many of which, especially in Africa, are now critically on the verge of collapse.
- It is now at a point where, using state power and ‘public savings’ to back the ‘value’ of fictitious capital, the political leaders of the West are on the dilemma, having been captive of finance capital for over 120 years, of deciding whether to win the confidence of the banks or of the people.

The North is looking in the mirror only to see its less than 300 years of capitalist civilisation crumbling. From the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 to 1914, it took 460 years for the Ottoman Empire to finally collapse. From Adam Smith (1723-90) to Alan Greenspan, the former head of the US Federal Reserve who admitted on October 24, 2008 that he found a serious ‘flaw in the free market theory’ which he had been nursing for forty years, it has taken barely 260 years for ‘free market imperialism’ to begin to sound its own death knell. The crisis of confidence, the loss of moral high ground, the utter non-functionality of the neoliberal paradigm that has created chasms between nations and within nations, the ruinous exploitation of the environment, and the fear of the rise of China, India and Latin American countries on the historical train of the Bolivarian revolution – all these are making the political and corporate leadership in the North extremely jittery, anxious and nervous. The 250 years of Renaissance (c.1340 to 1600) that helped Europe to jump out of its dark hole, has sadly turned into its opposite – the North is sinking into another hole of its own making.
And so now the question for us all is: what next? Should the people of the South take delight in this? Should the working classes in the North rejoice in the impending demise of capitalism?

Before we answer these questions, it is necessary to examine the main blind spots of the Western response to the looming crisis so that the same mistakes are not repeated on the way forward.

BLIND SPOTS OF WESTERN RESPONSE TO ITS LOOMING CIVILISATIONAL CRISIS

The first blind spot is that the pundits of finance capital who advise the political leadership in the West (and now among them some of the leaders of the South sitting on the round table with the West in the so-called G20 gatherings) have not fully acknowledged the scale of the crisis, and the gravity of the situation. The fire-fighting measures put in place by the US and European governments, such as the bailing out of banks, deficit financing, and other countercyclical measures, touch barely the surface of the crisis. The present crisis is not a trade cyclical phenomenon, nor a simple ‘recession’ that will be ‘turned around’ in a couple of years, as they continue to believe. At its roots the crisis is deeply embedded within the very fabric of capitalist production and distribution.

To those who are now turning to Keynes for ‘answers’ to the present crisis (as somebody said, ‘We are all Keynesians today’), it should be sobering for them to be reminded that Keynesianism was an answer to the Empire in crisis, and it achieved its purpose for fifty years. But it has come to the end of its mission. In any case, Keynesianism addresses only rather superficial aspects of a crisis that is more deeply rooted in the capitalist system than is generally understood or appreciated. The Keynesians talk about restoring the regulatory function of the state, forgetting that in the now all too familiar cant about the ‘greed’ of corporate managers ‘craving for money as a disease’ etc, the capitalist state has been complicit all along.

A second blind spot of the West (shared by many political leaders in the South as well) is to continue to believe that the private sector is the ‘engine of growth’. This is now belied by facts. The private sector is now maligned as ‘greedy, corrupt, selfish, and parasitic’. The latest (March 2009) debacle with the AIG is tragic-comic; some US Congressmen have suggested that the AIG directors who paid themselves hefty bonuses for their ‘failure’ should offer to commit ‘hara-kiri’, or suicide Japanese style.

Beyond economics, there are other blind spots. These include:

- Attempts to maintain nuclear monopoly
- Attempts to hold back immigration from the South
- Attempts to maintain ideological hegemony and moral high ground – for example, with reference to democracy and human rights (in the case of Darfur, for example)
- Attempts to fight that ill-defined enemy called ‘terrorism’ in what is described by Western military intelligentsia, with obvious irony, as ‘asymmetric war’
- Attempts to buy off the political and business leadership in the South by promises of 0.7 per cent of their GNPs as ‘development aid’, and securing their consent to neo-colonisation of their economies in the name of ‘aid effectiveness’ under the World Bank–OECD led ‘Paris Declaration’ that was thrust on Southern leaders in Accra in September 2008
- Attempts to pass on to the South the burden of rectifying the historical damage inflicted on the climate by Northern profligacy in callous consumerism;
- Attempts to enforce a ‘two states solution’ on the unwilling Jewish and Arab populations of Palestine. Israel is a guilt-ridden blind spot of the West, especially in Germany.

Each of these responses to the multiple crises the West faces is very short-sighted and indeed selfish. Take the attempt to hold back immigration from the South, a measure also widely supported by the Western public, especially the working classes. Personally I find this reaction on the part of the Western general public and workers understandable – except the most virulent and racist expressions of it. I can even empathise. But the matter has to be put in proper perspective. All history can be written as a history of migration of people from resource-deficit to resource-surplus countries and from war-torn to relatively peaceful surroundings. This is nothing new. What is new in the present epoch is that whereas the migration of the people of the North to the South continues relatively unrestricted, as indeed also between North and North, that between the South and the North (and indeed between South and South) is substantially blocked by border controls, barbed wire fences, police patrols, and ghettoised refugee settlements.

SUGGESTIONS FOR RESPONSE OF THE PROGRESSIVE FORCES IN THE SOUTH AND THE NORTH

How do the progressive forces in the South as well as in the North respond to these challenges?

Many on the left believe, mistakenly, that capitalism is already dead or dying. Many have gone back to reading Karl Marx in the hope that they would find answers there for the future. We owe a lot Marx, of course. He was a shrewd analyst of the capitalist system, and showed us where its fault lines lie. But he did not have concrete answers to where to go from here beyond some general propositions about ‘the stateless society’ and the working classes marching on to seize the means of production in order to usher in an era of communism.

So where do we go from here? The following is offered as some ideas among many that need further reflection and discussion among the progressive left of the South as well of the North.

1. Our first responsibility is to try and understand the dynamics of the unfolding drama. This is not easy. We know some of the dynamics, and I have tried to analyse some of these as I understand them, but we must in all humility say that we do not know all. It is necessary to debate and listen to one another, especially the voices of the people on the ground (both in the North as well as in the South) who are victims of the present catastrophic impending demise of the capitalist-imperialist system.

2. Since Marx’s theoretical treatise, we have accumulated considerable knowledge of extant socialist experiments, including those in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam and Cuba, all of which need to be synthesised in order to learn from their weaknesses as well as strengths.

3. It is important to recognise some of the gains of the masses of people over the last 120 years of struggle, both in the South as well as in the North. These gains cannot be brushed aside. The democratic struggles, the struggles for a fair distribution of the wealth of nations, the struggles for human rights including the rights of women, children and indigenous peoples, the struggles against violence and war – all these have to be acknowledged in their invaluable contributions to charting a way forward.

4. We must recognise the extraordinary and exponential development of the productive forces of the last 120 years through the intellectual labour of the world’s scientific community. The application of the increased knowledge in science and technology to production is overall, globally, a positive force. However, these gains have been appropriated as ‘intellectual property’ by the corporate world, mostly in the North but also by a small part in the South, and, moreover, the distribution of its benefits is uneven, within and between countries. This has to be rectified.

5. It must be recognised that much of the South is still in the phase of consolidating the gains of national struggles. The vilification of these efforts as ‘failed states’ or as ‘terrorist states’ is misguided and dangerous. We must not fall into that trap.

6. On the question of aid, the dominant view in the North, especially among the left, is that the developed countries have an obligation to provide aid to the poor countries of the world. This is correct only from a Northern citizen ethical perspective. But looking from the perspective of the South, it is imperative that we recognise that development is a self-defined process, and that ‘aid’ from outside is often a hindrance to real development. This does not mean that there is no place for genuinely ‘solidarity aid’ – fraternal help to advance common causes of peace and justice as long as it does not come packaged in ‘conditionalities’, such as ‘good governance’, the demand to respect human rights, and certain North-defined macro-economic policies. This kind of ‘aid’ – aid tied to strings – must be rejected. The nations of the South must stand on their own feet, and not look for crutches from the North.

That said, it is possible to agree that certain kinds of ‘assistance’ (not ‘development aid’) is useful. For example:
- Emergency assistance against the effects of natural disasters.
- Negotiated purchase or provision of, for example, vaccines and drugs to prevent and treat diseases which are widespread.
- Building the capacity of weaker countries and Southern institutions to negotiate in the international fora, especially the WTO, WIPO, and the United Nations and related agencies, such as the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation), ILO (International Labour Organisation), ITU (International Telecommunication Union), UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), and EPA (Economic Partnership Agreements) negotiations between the EU (European Union) and ACP (African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States) countries.
- Adjustment costs imposed on the poor countries forced on the road to trade and financial liberalisation before they are ready.
- Compensation costs when such forced liberalisation results in losses in revenue or employment to the poor nations of the world.
- Compensation costs when small-island developing states (SIDS) are endangered by, for example, the effects of climate change.
- Assistance to fulfil obligations under international agreements and conventions.

The above are not part of the ‘development aid’; they are best characterised as humanitarian help, or solidarity help, or compensatory financing.

7. There are some gains made at the global level that must not be wiped out in our zest to change things. These include the so-called Global Public Goods (GPGs). Many of these GPGs are already enshrined in international agreements and conventions, such as:

- The Convention on Bio-diversity.
- The Montreal Protocol.
- The 1997 Ottawa Convention to ban land-mines.
- Conventions on Human rights and gender equality.
- The Tokyo Agreement on Climate Change.

The following must be borne in mind when working out the modalities of cooperation at the global level:

- The South is usually more vulnerable to natural catastrophes such as the tsunami than the North, although the South’s share of the destabilization of the global ecology (e.g. global warming) is less than of the North;
- Many countries in the South do not have the capacity or the resources to supply GPGs.
- The market is not a reliable mechanism for delivering GPGs.
- The provision of National Public Goods (NPGs), as distinct from the GPGs, must be left to the developing countries themselves, and not be either globalized or privatized.

8. Much of what applies at the global level applies also at the South-South level too. For example, the richer countries in the South can provide humanitarian or solidarity help to the poorer nations of the South, provided they do not project themselves as ‘donors’, and provided there are no conditions attached to them. Some of the areas in which more effort is called for are:

- Help resist pressures to turn land and forests of the South away from the food needs of the people towards the production of export crops or bio-fuels because of pressure to sustain a pattern of elite consumption in the South as well as in the North that is clearly unsustainable.
- Help build solidarity to vigorously pursue the provision of Global Public Goods (GPGs), but also vigorously resist pressure to open up National Public Goods (NPGs) to global corporations, and these include the corporations of the South. The NPGs include, for example, the provision of water for household use, energy and electricity for national enterprises, education at all level, indigenous knowledge and cultural expressions.
- Provide instruments to undertake genuine transfers of technology on non-commercial terms and outside the intellectual property regimes.
- Help build capacity to negotiate with Western providers of technology and investment capital. Here, for example, countries such as India, China and Brazil have an experience and knowledge from which countries in Africa or the Caribbean may learn.
- Help build capacity building to negotiate in the WTO and related trading fora.
Create southern financial and credit institutions (the creation of the Bank of the South, for example, is a step in the right direction).
- Give further impetus to the Global System of Trade Preferences (GSTP) that allows the countries of the South to make preferential concessions to one another without having to extend these to the countries of the North.
Development of regional markets and free trade areas outside of the ambit of North-dominated FTAs such as, for example, the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.
- South-South news agencies and broadcasting systems.
- South-South exchange of knowledge and capacity to develop and utilise knowledge-intensive productive assets.
- Liberal rules allowing for the movement of people across borders, including relaxation of visa requirements.

9. What is to be done with the inherited institutional baggage of the Bretton Woods institutions – the World Bank and the IMF? The unrepresentative and illegitimate grouping of the so-called G20 countries (which, in essence, is the old G7/8 plus a few selected countries from the South) is seeking to extend a lifeline to these institutions looking for ways to survive the present crisis. The progressive forces of the South should put pressure on policy-makers in their countries not to bale out these institutions for to do so would be like inviting the fox back into the henhouse. If these institutions are dying, they should be allowed to die. The South and all progressive forces in the North must now try and create alternative financial structures, starting with the national to regional levels.

10. There is horrendous deficit in the global governance of the health of this planet and the environment. There is increasing consciousness that something has to be done about it, that the 1972 Rio agenda needs to be revisited, and that serious action is called for at the global as well as local level. The immediate priority for all concerned about climate change, to be sure, is to find the ways and means to achieve the goals set by the UNFCCC, Kyoto and Bali as we move towards Copenhagen. These must be done on the basis of the following principles:

a) The recognition of climate as a global public good;
b) Common but differentiated responsibility and capabilities for climate change;
c) Factoring into any negotiations of the historical responsibility of the industrialised countries for global warming;
d) The primacy of the United Nations process; and
e) The commitment to the broader human rights and development goals.

Equity demands that in the long run the world moves towards an equal per capita emissions at ecologically sustainable levels. Realism demands that we all must change our life-styles. If everybody were to emulate the ‘Western life style’ then we will need many more planets. But we only have this one planet with its finite resources. We are already reaching critical tipping points in large parts of the world such as in the Arctic sea, the Atlantic deep water formation, the meltdown of Greenland ice sheet, permafrost and tundra loss; etc. Small islands, such as the Maldives, are already facing the almost certainty of a catastrophe in not too distant a future.

The challenge humanity faces at this point in time is to balance the demands and needs of the immediate in the on-going negotiations on climate change under the UNFCCC with a move (also starting immediately) towards the longer term objective of a sensible approach to life-style and the search for alternative sources of renewable energy and replenishing of life-sustaining resources. The mitigation measures that are in place or in the pipeline for transport, building construction, industry, agriculture, urban planning, etc. are all very well, but unless an alternative source of energy is found – and quickly – all these mitigation measures will not ensure climate security whilst meeting the fair demand for an equitable development for all the citizens of the world. Changing life-style is the most pressing immediate to long-term objective.

The other immediate to long term pressing need is the search for a viable alternative source of energy than either hydro-carbons or nuclear. The Ecuadorian Yasuni project of leaving oil in the ground is an excellent initiative. The international community should seriously consider paying half the cost to the people of Ecuador for not bringing oil to the ground. If a small step, at least it is a step in the right direction, given that self-indulgent oil consumption is one of the major causes of global warming.

The bigger challenge is to reverse the 500 years old dependence on fossil fuels since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The reasons are not far to seek:

- Fossil fuel is a finite resource, no matter how hard profit-driven corporations try to persuade us that there is enough potential coal, oil and gas buried in land and under the seas.
- Even if emissions are reduced by 50 per cent of 2000 levels by 2050, this might reach emissions to around 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide but that would still mean a rise of 2-2.4 degrees celsius in temperature by 2050; whether this will stabilise the climate is still debatable;
- The global energy crisis and the rush for bio-fuels have serious implications for food security across the world, especially in the poor South;
- And, above all, and this is often overlooked in climate change debates, the scramble for oil and gas is a major source of conflicts in the world (Caucasus, Middle East, Africa, Latin America), that has led, and could lead, to increased instances of war, violence and violations of human rights.

11. Finally, there is need for the North, and this includes the left in the North, to remove their 50 years of blinkers on the Palestine question. Guilt-ridden Europe and America had dumped what was essentially a European problem into the heartland of the Middle East. The fact of the matter is that the West is exploiting the Jews in Israel for their own geo-political and strategic interests in the Persian Gulf area, and the Jews, in turn, are super-exploiting the Arabs amongst them and oppressing the Arab nation. The war in Gaza has finally brought home the point that the two-state ‘solution’ is not workable. I have written on the subject on one of the issues of the South Centre publication, South Bulletin, suggesting a possible way out of this age-old problem, including the relocation of the willing Jewish population from Israel to lands allocated between Nevada and California in the US, a prospect that may look unrealistic now, but one that is quite doable, once the futility of the two-state imposed solution becomes evident.

CONCLUSION

The above is a list of my ideas. They are neither a blueprint nor an agenda. They are reflections focused on the global or systemic aspects of the crisis of Western civilisation. I have not touched the complex set of issues that need to be faced at the regional, national and sub-national level. This is a vast area, and needs a whole new paper.

At the end of the day, it is the people that are the drivers for change. These include, among others:
- People in villages and peri-urban areas where the vast majority of the peoples of the South live, and that means the bulk of humanity
- Peoples` movements and leaders of progressive and pro-people non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
- Academic and social activists that seek to create a more just and humane society.

Many of these are already involved in reflecting on, and working on, alternative paths to human development based on the principles of justice, common values of humanity, and peace. One example of this is the ANSA project in Southern Africa. ANSA stands for Alternatives to Neo-liberalism in Southern Africa – a broad-based movement led by sections of the trade unions and progressive intellectuals in the region of southern Africa, a movement that is still in its early stages, and that is supported, among others, by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation on the basis of the principles of solidarity.

We, as peoples of the world, have to take back the right to think and plan, which for 30 years and more we have surrendered to the very people and institutions that are the authors of the civilisational crisis that stares at us with multiple faces and manifestations. We must claim back the lost grounds. We must come out in the open to declare that the G20 meeting that is in session in London – now as I speak – is unrepresentative, illegitimate and does not have the mandate of the people of the world. We cannot allow the very authors of the present civilisational crisis and ask them to write the future history of mankind. We cannot surrender to the banks and global financial institutions to determine the destiny of our future generations and the global environment when they have been so reckless in managing their own finances.

We must get out of the intellectual and ideological ghettoes created by neoliberal orthodoxy and their global and national institutions of research and learning. The time has come for a radical paradigm shift in the way we think and act.

The time has come for the ordinary people of the world to own the universe.

* Yash Tandon is former executive director of the South Centre, and chairman of SEATINI (Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Institute)

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

G20: Nothing for Africa

Demba Moussa Dembele

2009-04-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55435

The main objective of the G20 meeting was to save global capitalism. The emphasis on more regulations, the attacks on tax havens, the reference to the “moralization of capitalism” all converge toward the same objective: restore trust in global capitalism and some of the legitimacy it has lost in the eyes of the general public.

One of the most remarkable decisions of the G20 is to triple the IMF sources in order to increase its lending capacity to “poor” and middle-income countries. If this decision may save the institution from financial bankruptcy, it cannot, however, save it from moral and intellectual bankruptcy. In fact, the world financial crisis is a further illustration of the abject failure of the policies advocated by this institution along with the World Bank and the WTO. .

So tripling the IMF sources is not good news for Africa because it will only give the institution more power to continue imposing the same failed and ruinous policies. It is a new debt cycle that will start with the loans the IMF will be making with these resources. For Africa, the IMF is part of the problem, not of the solution. Therefore, any move aimed at strengthening it is not in the interest of Africa.

As expected, the G20 has failed to rise to the challenge of proposing structural changes in the world monetary, financial and trading system. In some respects, the Stiglitz Commission has made bolder and more interesting proposals to respond to the crisis. However, those proposals remain somehow within the confines of global capitalism.

But the genuine solutions to the current multiple world crises lie in the shift in paradigm. This is one of the messages sent by the tens of thousands of protesters who jammed the streets in London for two straight days. They not only denounced the horrors and crimes of global capitalism but also stressed the need to move toward alternative policies which would put people at their center, not profit and greed.

Tower of silence – African leaders and the G20

Jacques Depelchin

2009-04-06

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55467

We hear a lot of people speak of a systemic crisis, yet at the same time there is very little systemic analysis going on. With regard to Africa, the most tragic is the paralysed silence in which the ruling cliques have found themselves. Africans, who have suffered the most from the most predatory system ever invented by humans, are still trying to survive in that same system as if there is no other way. Intuitively, every single human being on this planet has known for a very long while that a system that has at its roots the industrialisation of slavery cannot possibly have brought about anything positive.

One has to ask questions one never dared ask. For example, are we – not just those who are privileged to have a decent job – really better off than during the height of Atlantic slavery? By ‘we’ I do mean all those who find themselves looking for alternatives ways of living by risking their lives, and dying in unthinkable, outrageous and unacceptable ways.

Could it be that this predatory system has been so predatory that every one of us gets, in one way or other, affected/infected by its venom? And so, in the words of Aimé Césaire, have we have come to:

‘When the world shall be a tower of silence
Where we shall be the prey and the vulture’?[1]

As Africans, one of the ways out of this suicidal dead-end the world has come to is to stop spitting and trampling on our peoples and peoples' histories as though they are dispensable. Is it not time for our so-called leaders to stop mimicking and following whatever is propagated by those who have seen nothing wrong in slaughtering large segments of humanity, for the sake of maintaining a way of life (for them), a way of death for the rest of the world?

* Jacques Depelchin is a CAPES fellow at the Universidade Federal da Bahia.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

NOTES

[1]From ‘Batouque’ in Les Armes miraculeuses, Gallimard, Paris 1970, p.64

G20: Will the global economy resurface?

Walden Bello

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55321

cc flickr.comThe Group of 20 (G20) is making a big show of getting together to come to grips with the global economic crisis, writes Walden Bello. But here's the problem with the upcoming summit in London on April 2: It's all show. What the show masks, says Bello, is a very deep worry and fear among the global elite that it really doesn't know the direction in which the world economy is heading and the measures needed to stabilise it.

The Group of 20 (G20) is making a big show of getting together to come to grips with the global economic crisis. But here's the problem with the upcoming summit in London on April 2: It's all show. What the show masks is a very deep worry and fear among the global elite that it really doesn't know the direction in which the world economy is heading and the measures needed to stabilise it.

The latest statistics are exceeding even the gloomiest projections made earlier. Establishment analysts are beginning to mention the dreaded ‘D’ word and there is a spreading sense that a tidal wave just now gathering momentum will simply overwhelm the trillions of dollars allocated for stimulus spending. In this environment, the G20 conveys the impression that they're more commanded by than in command of developments (In addition to the seven wealthy industrial nations that belong to the G7, the G20 includes China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Australia, South Korea, Turkey, Italy, and South Africa).

Indeed, perhaps no image is more evocative of the current state of the global economy than that of a World War Two German U-Boat depth-charged in the North Atlantic by British destroyers. It's going down fast, and the crew doesn't know when it will hit rock bottom. And when it does hit the ocean floor, the big question is: Will the crew be able to make the submarine rise again by pumping compressed air into the severely damaged ballast tanks, like the sailors in Wolfgang Petersen's classic film Das Boot? Or will the U-Boat simply stay at the bottom, its crew doomed to contemplate a fate worse than sudden death?

The current capitalist crew manning the global economy doesn't know whether Keynesian methods can re-inflate the global economy. Meanwhile, an increasing number of people are asking whether using a clutch of Social Democratic-like reforms is enough to repair the global economy, or whether the crisis will lead to a new international economic order.

A NEW BRETTON WOODS?

The G20 meeting has been trumpeted as a new ‘Bretton Woods.’ In July 1944, in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, representatives of the state-managed capitalist economies designed the postwar multilateral order with themselves at the centre.

In fact, the two meetings couldn't be further apart.

The London meeting will last one day; the Bretton Woods conference was a tough 21-day working session.

The London meeting is exclusive, with 20 governments arrogating to themselves the power to decide for 172 other countries. The Bretton Woods meeting tried hard to be inclusive to avoid precisely the illegitimacy that dogs the G20's London tryst. Even in the midst of global war, it brought together 44 countries, including the still-dependent Commonwealth of the Philippines and the tiny, now-vanished Siberian state of Tannu Tuva.

The Bretton Woods Conference created new multilateral institutions and rules to manage the postwar world. The G20 is recycling failed institutions: the G20 itself, the Financial Stability Forum (FSF), the Bank of International Settlements and ‘Basel II [1],’ and the now 65-year-old International Monetary Fund (IMF). Some of these institutions were established by the elite Group of 7 after the 1997 Asian financial crisis to come up with a new financial architecture that would prevent a repetition of the debacle brought about by IMF policies of capital account liberalisation. But instead of coming up with safeguards, all these institutions bought the global financial elite's strategy of ‘self-regulation.’

Among the mantras they thus legitimised were that capital controls [2] were bad for developing economies; short-selling, or speculating on the movement of borrowed stocks, was a legitimate market operation; and derivatives – or securities that allow betting on the movements of an underlying asset – ‘perfected’ the market. The implicit recommendation of their inaction was that the best way to regulate the market was to leave it to market players, who had developed sophisticated but allegedly reliable models of ‘risk assessment.’

In short, institutions that were part of the problem are now being asked to become the central part of the solution. Unwittingly, the G20 are following Marx's maxim that history first repeats itself as tragedy, then as farce.

RESURRECTING THE FUND

The most problematic component of the G20 solution is its proposals for the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The United States and the European Union are seeking an increase in the capital of the IMF from $250 billion to $500 billion. The plan is for the IMF to lend these funds to developing countries to use to stimulate their economies, with US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner proposing that the Fund supervise this global exercise.

If ever there was a non-starter, this is it.

First of all, the representation question continues to exercise much of the global South. So far, only marginal changes have been made in the allocation of voting rights at the IMF. Despite the clamour for greater voting power for members from the global South, the rich countries are still overrepresented on the Fund's decision-making executive board and developing countries, especially those in Asia and Africa, are vastly underrepresented. Europe holds a third of the chairs in the executive board and claims the feudal right to have a European always occupy the role of managing director. The United States, for its part, has nearly 17 per cent of voting power, giving it veto power.

Second, the IMF's performance during the Asian financial crisis of 1997, more than anything, torpedoed its credibility. The IMF helped bring about the crisis by pushing the Asian countries to eliminate capital controls and liberalise their financial sectors, promoting both the massive entry of speculative capital as well as its destabilising exit at the slightest sign of crisis. The Fund then pushed governments to cut expenditures, on the theory that inflation was the problem, when it should have been pushing for greater government spending to counteract the collapse of the private sector. This pro-cyclical measure ended up accelerating the regional collapse into recession. Finally, the billions of dollars of IMF rescue funds went not to rescuing the collapsing economies but to compensate foreign financial institutions for their losses - a development that has become a textbook example of ‘moral hazard’ or the encouragement of irresponsible lending behaviour.

Thailand paid off the IMF in 2003 and declared its ‘financial independence.’ Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina followed suit, and Indonesia also declared its intention to repay its debts as quickly as possible. Other countries likewise decided to stay away, preferring to build up their foreign exchange reserves to defend themselves against external developments rather than contract new IMF loans. This led to the IMF's budget crisis, for most of its income was from debt payments made by the bigger developing countries.

Partisans of the Fund say that the IMF now sees the merit of massive deficit spending and that, like Richard Nixon, it can now say, ‘we are all Keynesians now.’ Many critics do not agree. Eurodad, a non-governmental organization that monitors IMF loans, says that the Fund still attaches onerous conditions to loans to developing countries. Very recent IMF loans also still encourage financial and banking liberalisation. And despite the current focus on fiscal stimulus – with some countries, like the United States, pushing for governments to raise their stimulus spending to at least 2% of GDP – the IMF still requires low income borrowers to keep their deficit spending to no more than one per cent of GDP.

Finally, there is the question of whether or not the Fund knows what it's doing. One of the key factors discrediting the IMF has been its almost total inability to anticipate the brewing financial crisis. In concluding the 2007 Article IV consultation with the United States, the IMF board stated [3] that ‘[t]he financial system has shown impressive resilience, including to recent difficulties in the subprime mortgage market.’ In short, the Fund hasn't only failed miserably in its policy prescriptions, but despite its supposedly top-flight stable of economists, it has drastically fallen short in its surveillance responsibilities.

However large the resources the G20 provide the IMF, there will be little international buy-in to a global stimulus program managed by the Fund.

THE WAY FORWARD

The North's response to the current crisis, which is to revive fossilised institutions, is reminiscent of Keynes' famous saying: ‘The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.’ So, in Keynes' spirit, let's try to identify ways of abandoning old ways of thinking.

First of all, since legitimacy is a very scarce commodity at this point, the UN secretary general and the UN General Assembly – rather than the G20 – should convoke a special session to design the new global multilateral order. A Commission of Experts on Reforms to the International Monetary and Financial System [4], set up by the president of the General Assembly and headed by Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz, has already done [5] the preparatory policy work for such a meeting. The meeting would be an inclusive process like the Bretton Woods Conference, and like Bretton Woods, it should be a working session lasting several weeks. One of the key outcomes might be the setting up of a representative forum such as the ‘Global Coordination Council’ suggested by the Stiglitz Commission that would broadly coordinate global economic and financial reform.

Second, to immediately assist countries to deal with the crisis, the debts of developing countries to Northern institutions should be cancelled. Most of these debts, as the Jubilee movement reminds us, were contracted under onerous conditions and have already been paid many times over. Debt cancellation or a debt moratorium will allow developing countries access to greater resources and will have a greater stimulus effect than money channelled through the IMF.

Third, regional structures to deal with financial issues, including development finance, should be the centrepiece of the new architecture of new global governance, not another financial system where the countries of the North dominate centralised institutions like the IMF and monopolise resources and power. In East Asia, the ‘ASEAN Plus Three’ Grouping, or ‘Chiang Mai Initiative,’ is a promising development that needs to be expanded, although it also needs to be made more accountable to the peoples of the region. In Latin America, several promising regional initiatives are already in progress, like the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas and the Bank of the South. Any new global order must have socially accountable regional institutions as its pillars.

These are, of course, immediate steps to be made in the context of a longer-term, more fundamental and strategic reconfiguration of a global capitalist system now on the verge of collapsing. The current crisis is a grand opportunity to craft a new system that ends not just the failed system of neoliberal global governance but the Euro-American domination of the capitalist global economy, and put in its place a more decentralized, deglobalized, democratic post-capitalist order. Unless this more fundamental restructuring takes place, the global economy might not be worth bringing back to the surface.

* Walden Bello is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist, professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines and senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.
* This article first appeared in Foreign Policy In Focus

NOTES

[1] www.bis.org
[2] www.ips-dc.org
[3] imf.org
[4]www.un.org
[5]www.globalpolicy.org

The G20 summit and Africa

Dani Nabudere

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55319

cc flickr.comWe need a new financial system that is transparent and accountable to all, writes Dani Nabudere, as G20 leaders meet in London to tackle the current global economic ‘meltdown’. The G20's task, he says, is to expose all that has gone wrong, including the role the African leaders have played in the crisis, through the externalisation of billions of pounds intended for the development of their countries. These activities, Nabudere notes, have helped position Africa as a net creditor to the world, with the external assets of 40 African countries outstripping their external liabilities over the period from 1970–2004. In other words, says Nabudere, despite the widely held view that Africa was 'decoupled' from the global economy, African leaders have contributed to the activities of ‘shadow banks’ being used to create ‘toxic debt’, their wealth contributing to the global economic turmoil.

The leaders of the G20 now assembling in London have only one African amongst them. Their self-imposed task is to try to formulate programmes to deal with the current global economic ‘meltdown’ and to try to formulate a new global ‘financial architecture.’ Many of them are fixed on the idea that what they are dealing with is a ‘financial crisis.’ The more sophisticated ones, such as Gordon Brown, are prepared to refer to the crisis as a ‘global economic’ one, but no-one is prepared to talk of the crisis as being a capitalist systemic crisis, except President Nicholas Sarkozy, who thinks that it is ‘American’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ capitalism that needs reform towards a ‘New Capitalism.’

The magnitude of the problem is so big that some leaders are just blaming one another for the crisis. Remember when the crisis blew up, there was an attempt to blame it on the ‘sub-prime mortgagees.’ These were poor home-owners who had been induced into the financiering game by the financial oligarchy. Later these leaders were able to adjust their words and were prepared to call it a ‘credit crunch’ when Northern Rock bank in the UK began to struggle as a result of ‘shadow banking’ activities that had undermined its credit. President Silva da Lula of Brazil has gone as far as correctly blaming the crisis on the ‘white, blue-eyed bankers.’ Many, although they are not prepared to accept the racial slur, agree with him.

When the crisis became pronounced for all to see, it was said by some leaders in Africa that Africa would not seriously be affected, because the view was then widely held that Africa was ‘decoupled’ from the ‘global economy.’ President Museveni of Uganda had gone as far as assuring Ugandans and investors that there was no need for them to panic because Uganda’s financial system was strong and sound: ‘Our financial sector has been effectively regulated and banks have been following prudent lending procedures.’ He had even gone further to state: ‘We are now in a position to advise our development partners who are facing a crisis, because some of the reasons for this crisis are well-known.’ Very soon however, these brave declarations were abandoned as the pinch began to be felt, with a fall in prices of commodities such as coffee by over 40 per cent, as well as a reduction in transfers from Africans working outside the continent. This was already clear by October 2008.

The better view to take on the part of African leaders on the crisis should have been that they were not blameless and that Africa was part of the global economy. They should have also accepted their negative role in that system. Studies that had previously been made had revealed that African leaders have all along been externalising financial resources intended for the development of their countries by stealing these resources and banking them in their private accounts. One of these studies, carried out by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the University of Massachusetts and reported in the East African of 13–19 October 2008, revealed that capital flight from 40 African countries surveyed between 1970 and 2004 amounted to US$607 billion including interest earnings, compared with a total of US$227 billion external debt owed by those countries.

These researchers concluded that what was happening was that Africa was in effect ‘a net creditor to the rest of the world in the sense that external assets, as measured by the stock of capital flight, exceed external liabilities, as measured by the stock of external debt.’ In other words, the African leaders were part of the activities of those ‘shadow banks’ being used by the banks to create more and more ‘toxic debt.’ In short, African leaders’ wealth was contributing to the global economic turmoil. The World Bank’s own Stolen Assets Recovery Programme had estimates that the cross-border flow of the proceeds from these criminal activities, corruption and tax evasions amounts to between US$1 trillion to US$1.6 trillion per year, about half of which, according to the same estimates, comes from developing and transitional economies of Eastern Europe. Therefore the problem was clearly a ‘global’ one in every sense.

Therefore, the task for the G20 is to expose all that has gone wrong including the role the African leaders have played in the crisis. There is no point in ‘reforming’ the financial architecture when everything else will remain in place. There is no need to call for strong ‘supervision’ of the banks, when those using their political power are still in a position to manipulate them for their own interests. The real question is: ‘Who will supervise the supervisors?’ Therefore we need recognition of alternative credit systems that the people have built up in their ‘informal’ activities to be the basis of new credit systems and not the ‘old boys’ networks’ that will continue the same old game. We need a new system that is transparent and accountable to all.

* Professor Dani W. Nabudere is the executive director of the Afrika Study Centre.

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

Memory and denial: The Rwandan genocide fifteen years on

Gerald Caplan

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55324

cc Michael DziedzicWhile most of the world is familiar with Rwandan genocide, fifteen years later the influence of a small band of deniers is growing thanks to the embrace of the deniers' arguments by a small but influential number of left-wing, anti-American journals and websites, cautions Gerald Caplan.

April 2009 marks the 15th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda of most of its Tutsi population and of many Hutu who refused to embrace violent extremism.

Five years ago, the world marked the 10th anniversary of what almost the entire world regards as one of the definitive genocides of the 20th century. Perhaps it was somehow symmetrical that both the first and the last genocides of the 20th century took place in Africa. In 1904, soldiers representing Imperial Germany deliberately sought to exterminate the Herero people of Namibia, then the German colony of South-West Africa. Anxious to occupy the lands of the Herero, the German colonial army came precious close to achieving its grisly, racist goal. Before it ended, some three-quarters of 80,000 Herero were dead.

Exactly 90 years later, the racists were powerful Hutu extremists in Rwanda who conspired to annihilate the minority Tutsi people, largely to avoid sharing power and wealth with them. Like the Germans before them, the genocidaires in Rwanda were remarkably successful in executing their plot. Before they were defeated, about three-quarters of all the country's Tutsi had been murdered, often in the most sadistic ways imaginable. Exact numbers remain unknown to this day, but it is possible that as many as a million Tutsi were killed in the 100 days of the genocide.

But very like South-West Africa, outside influences were key to events in Rwanda. Had European missionaries not invented an ideology that blatantly set Tutsi against Hutu, had the Belgian colonial government not institutionalised this false ideology, had the French government not offered all possible support to the Hutu government of Rwanda in the years immediately leading to the genocide, the genocide might never have happened. Once triggered, it was the Security Council, urged on by the United States, that refused to take a single step to stop the slaughter.

Before the 10th anniversary, the international movement known as Remembering Rwanda was motivated by a fear that the genocide was being forgotten by the rest of the world. That concern has proved premature. Rwanda is probably as well known today as any tragic event very far from western countries, and causing direct harm to none of them, can be.

Tragically, one of the forces that revived the memory of 1994 was the conflict that began in Darfur, western Sudan, in 2003. When the secretary-general of the United Nations commemorated the 10th anniversary of Rwanda in 2004, his cry was that Darfur must not be allowed to become ‘the next Rwanda’. And so Rwanda's international role was finally crystallised: It was the latest acknowledged failure of the solemn, eternally repeated, never heeded, pledge of ‘Never Again’. Perhaps one day in the not too distant future, Rwanda's invidious distinction will be replaced by Darfur, and the international community will vow not to permit ‘the next Darfur’.

At the same time as Rwanda was being turned into symbol of betrayal by the international community, it was attracting the interest of western filmmakers. This entirely unanticipated phenomenon has also given the genocide a renewed lease on life, as it were. It is probable that more feature-length films and full-length documentaries have been made about the genocide than any other contemporary international crisis save Iraq or the so-called ‘war on terror’. Not all the films were of top quality and few bothered to show the critical and malevolent role of western influence in Rwandan history. The most popular film, Hotel Rwanda, the one that really dragged Rwanda into mainstream western consciousness, had as its hero a man who now trivialises the genocide. Nonetheless, his story, overblown as it may have been, combined with the others, has assured that the genocide in Rwanda is in little danger of being forgotten.

THE DENIERS

Yet at the same time, as in virtually every other genocide, denial is alive and kicking. Here is yet another common thread that binds the people that suffered through what many consider the three classic genocides of the 20th century – the Armenians, the Jews and the Rwandan Tutsis. The bitter and apparently never-ending fight against deniers, or revisionists, is a common cause among the survivors of all these genocides, one that will be highlighted in Rwanda in April 2009 as people from all over the world will gather to mark the 15th anniversary of the genocide of the Tutsi – Remembering Rwanda 15, or RR15.

If much of the world now remembers the genocide in Rwanda, the battle against those who deny that genocide is much less familiar though no less insidious than its Armenian or Holocaust equivalents. The persistence of Holocaust denial remains a reality everywhere in the world that anti-Semitism rears its head. In some countries it attracts elites. In the west it is the preserve of a lunatic fringe, and usually more an irritation than anything else. But there is always a well-earned fear that it could explode into something more ferocious, especially as anti-Semitism and opposition to Israeli policies sometimes become difficult to distinguish.

Denying the Armenian genocide is a decidedly more precise phenomenon. It exists only when attempts are made to recognise the genocide for what it is, either by resolutions of legislative assemblies or through education. And unlike either Holocaust or Rwanda denial, it is invariably orchestrated by the Turkish government and its acolytes, most of them on that government's payroll. By a terrible irony of realpolitik, among the most steadfast collaborators of the Turkish government in its hardball efforts to prevent recognition of the genocide is its close ally Israel and some powerful Israel support groups throughout the western world. Whether Turkey's unexpectedly vehement condemnation of Israel's recent aggression against Gaza changes these equations is still not at all clear.

Rwanda is a different case. For one thing, in much of the English-speaking world, denialism has been very much a fringe phenomenon, largely peddled by a motley coalition. There are anti-American left-wingers who are perversely convinced that Rwandan president Paul Kagame, in their eyes the evil genius behind the conflict (they deny it was a genocide), was an American stooge. There are those who have ties of some kind with the defence at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Sometimes these are the same people. They are still largely unknown to most English-speakers who have seen the movies, or admire General Romeo Dallaire (another American puppet, in the twisted view of the deniers) and have no reason to doubt that a genocide actually was carried out.

Naturally the small band of leading deniers are well-known to the Rwandan diaspora community, which is not only wounded by the denials but fails to understand why their lies are given any media attention at all. At least as ominously, the deniers' reach and influence has been spreading, metastasising like a malignant cancer, thanks to the anarchy of the blogosphere and to the embrace of the deniers' arguments by a small but influential number of left-wing, anti-American journals and websites.

Google Rwanda and you're quite likely get a deniers' rant featuring the tiny band of usual suspects – French Judge Bruguiere, former UN Rwanda chief Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, Robin Philpot, former Australian investigator Michael Hourigan, American academic Christian Davenport – each enthusiastically citing the others as their proof that the entire so-called genocide was really an American imperial plot. That there is no evidence for this assertion, that every single reputable scholar who has studied the genocide has categorically disagreed with it, carries no weight with this incomprehensible band of true believers. At the same time, the harsh criticisms of the present Rwanda government by respected human rights advocates has unhappily provided a certain illogical legitimacy to the deniers' pernicious cause.

Thanks to the reach of Hotel Rwanda, which has been seen by more people than all other Rwanda films combined, many ordinary English-speakers are likely to know of only one Rwandan, Paul Rusesabagina, and to believe him a hero of the genocide, a righteous man who saved Tutsi lives at great personal risk. That he now is the most prominent person in the world claiming Kagame's rebels were as deadly as the genocidaires, that he insists Rwanda today is comparable to Rwanda during the 100 days, and that he openly works with known genocidaires and western deniers against the Kagame government, is still not grasped by his western admirers. That's why the uncritical adulation in which he is held and his own fierce determination to spread his message makes him a serious threat that should not be underestimated.

In Europe and in French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec, genocide denial is more mainstream. In large part this is due to longstanding ties between the pre-genocide francophone Hutu elite and assorted government and church officials in western Europe and Quebec. But as elsewhere, deniers in these areas reflect a miscellany of motives. A number are former genocidaires themselves, some being protected by political and religious allies of the old regime, others walking free and peddling their poison. All of these Rwandans and non-Rwandans cherish a fantasy of someday reviving ‘Hutuland’ and the ‘demographic democracy’ that prevailed from 1959 to 1994, in other words, a Hutu dictatorship based exclusively on Hutu constituting a large majority of the population. Others have acted on behalf of the defence at the ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda). Some simply cannot abide Kagame and his inner circle of former Ugandans. A few are well-known non-Rwandan academics, taking every advantage to disparage the Kagame government while consciously cultivating a generation of Rwanda-hating Congolese. The harm being done will be felt throughout the Great Lakes region for decades.

So the final assault common to the classical genocides of the 20th century – the denial that it ever happened – continues to be an ugly shared reality for all those touched by the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsi. The 15th anniversary of the final genocide of the 20th century and of the millennium provides an opportunity to unite all those affected by the three of them in a sustained and systematic counter-attack against deniers of all kinds.

It also moves us into the new century/millennium. It should pre-empt the many friends of the Government of Sudan from insisting, as the al-Bashir government routinely does, that the crisis in Darfur is very much the responsibility of its own victims.

* Gerald Caplan has a PhD in African history He recently published The Betrayal of Africa.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Challenges to democracy: The military in Guinea

Jibrin Ibrahim

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55314

cc WikimediaPresident Dadis Camara of Guinea is an example of militariat rule in West Africa, writes Jibrin Ibrahim, Director of the Centre for Democracy and Development. Camara has been avoiding elections, with claims for the need to challenge drug networks and end corruption, but, says Ibrahim, this is an agenda to legitimise his rule. The drug networks, Ibrahim suggests, are closely linked to a military ruling class that is kept in place by the state’s high expenditure on the military and its exclusion of ordinary people from politics.

I started this column with a recollection of Nigeria’s first coup and the impact of the military in ruling and ruining Nigeria.

I spent a week in Guinea, observing the antics of the new military junta, a rude reminder of the dangers of the militariat.

The Sierra Leonean political scientist, Jimmy Kandeh coined the term ‘militariat’ to describe the process of political decomposition that followed the capture of state power by young conspiratorial junior officers in Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Gambia.

They take over power on an anti-corruption ticket and become very corrupt themselves. They always leave a trail of blood and destruction behind them.

Like Oliver Cromwell, their political philosophy is dictatorial and sadistic – ‘Nine citizens out of ten hate me. What does it matter if the tenth alone is armed?’ Guinea has been ruled by three people since Sekou Toure said no to the French in 1958.

He was in power for 26 years from 1958 to his death. Lansana Conte took over and ruled for 24 years until his death on 22 December 2008 when Captain Dadis Camara took over – the youngest person to have ever taken power.

The Centre for Democracy and Development and the West African Civil Society Forum had organised a conference aimed at mobilising civil society in the Mano River Union (Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast) for increased engagement in the search for democracy.

Guinean civil society was, however, split down the middle and many argued that Dadis Camara should be allowed more time to clean the society of the ‘narco traffickers’ that have made Guinea and Guinea Bissau major transit points for South American cocaine seeking routes to Europe.

Each night, Guineans are hooked to the television watching their young president and the head of the anti-drug agency interrogate generals accused of drug trafficking and producing pornographic films.

The high point last week was when the son of the late president, Captain Usman Conte, was humiliated on television for being a major drug dealer, covering for South Americans bringing in drugs through military air strips.

‘We need more drama,’ Guineans seem to be saying. The problem, however, is that drug trials on television with a serving president as chief interrogator are not a serious attempt to fight crime.

I was appalled when I heard President Camara shout at a general on prime TV – ‘Shut up, you don’t look like a sincere man.’ What do sincere men look like? And how can the president be both prosecutor and judge?

Meanwhile, President Camara has refused to commit himself to the calendar proposed by the international contact group to organise elections and hand over power by the end of this year.

Rather, he is asking for two years to destroy the drug gangs, unravel corruption, review the constitution, develop infrastructure, improve public morality, and the rest of that sad familiar story.

It is clearly an agenda to perpetuate his rule. Guinea has had more than its fair share of arbitrary rule. Under Sekou Toure’s 26-year rule, plots against the regime were imagined on a monthly basis and an estimated fifty thousand people were killed as suspected coup plotters.

I drove past Camp Boiro where most of these people, including Diallo Telli, first general secretary of the OAU (Organisation of African Unity), were killed.

It looked so serene and innocent, located between a mosque and the general hospital. And yet, that is one of Africa’s worst sites for torture and mass murder.

Lansana Conte kept all his colleagues from the colonial army in the service and disregarded the rule that officers should retire at the age of sixty or after thirty years’ service.

Then the old generals virtually all recruited their children into the army, thus establishing a veritable and reckless military ruling class.

Just before I left Guinea, the President of Guinea Bissau, Joao ‘Nino’ Vieira was gunned down by rampaging soldiers who suspected him of being complicit in the assassination of the chief of army staff.

We should note three facts. First, both Guinea and Guinea Bissau are militarised states that devote over 40 per cent of their national budget to maintaining the army.

Secondly, both countries are prime movers of cocaine and the dealers are army generals.

Thirdly, the rank and file of the army in both countries are often not paid their salaries. They are wallowing in poverty.

Indeed, Dadis Camara built his popularity in Guinea after organising a mutiny to force the government to pay soldiers’ salaries. Militarism is not only bad for the people - it’s terrible for the army.

ECOWAS (The Economic Community of West African States) and the African Union have been putting pressure on the Guinean junta to organise elections and go back to the barracks by the end of this year. The international contact group will return to Guinea on 17th March to keep up the pressure.

Guinea needs as much pressure as possible to get the military out and the people back into politics.

* Dr Jibrin Ibrahim is a political scientist and director of the Centre for Democracy and Development.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Who said nearly 50 years ago that Israel was an apartheid state?

Ronnie Kasrils

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55315

cc flickr.comThe repression of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is akin to the worst forms of apartheid, says Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa’s former minister of intelligence. He says parallels can be drawn between Israeli occupation and apartheid,not just in the treatment of those who suffer, but also in the need for international solidarity in the support for change.

At the onset of international 'Israel Apartheid Week' in solidarity with the embattled Palestinian people, I want to start by quoting a South African who emphatically stated as far back as 1963 that ‘Israel is an apartheid state.’ Those were not the words of Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Tutu or Joe Slovo, but were uttered by none other than the architect of apartheid itself, racist Prime Minister, Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd.

He was irked by the criticism of apartheid policy and Harold Macmillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ speech, in contrast to the West’s unconditional support for Zionist Israel.

To be sure Verwoerd was correct. Both states preached and implemented a policy based on racial ethnicity; the sole claim of Jews in Israel and whites in South Africa to exclusive citizenship; monopolised rights in law regarding the ownership of land, property, business; superior access to education, health, social, sporting and cultural amenities, pensions and municipal services at the expense of the original indigenous population; the virtually monopolised membership of military and security forces, and privileged development along their own racial supremacist lines - even both countries’ marriage laws were designed to safeguard racial ‘purity’.

The so-called ‘non-whites’ in apartheid South Africa, indigenous Africans, others of mixed race or of Indian origin - like second or third class non-Jews in Israel – were consigned to a non-citizenship status of Kafkaesque existence, subject to bureaucratic whims and the laws prohibiting their free movement, access to work and trade, dictating where they could reside and so forth.

Verwoerd would have been well aware of Israel’s dispossession of indigenous Palestinian in 1948 - the year his apartheid party similarly came to power - of the unfolding destruction of their villages, the premeditated massacres and the systematic ethnic cleansing.

Within a few short years the apartheid regime was ruthlessly clearing South Africa’s cities and towns of so-called ‘black spots’ – where the ‘non-whites’ lived, socialised, studied and traded – bulldozing homes, loading families into military trucks, and forcibly relocating them to distant settlements. Unlike the “native reserves” – soon to be reconstituted as Bantustans – not too far away from industrial areas because the economy thrived on a quota of cheap black labour.

Whilst he did not live to see the division of Palestinian territory after the Six Day War, and the subsequent creation of miniscule Bantustans in the West Bank and Gaza, he would have greatly admired and approved of the machinations that enclosed the Palestinians in their own ghettoized prisons. This, after all, was the Verwoerdian grand plan, and the reason why Jimmy Carter could so readily identify the Occupied Palestinian Territories as being akin to apartheid. In fact the Bantustans consisted of 13 per cent of apartheid South Africa, uncannily comparable to the derisory, ever shrinking pieces of ground Israel is consigning to the Palestinians.

A further comment about the Bantustans. When I visited Yasser Arafat in his virtually demolished headquarters in Ramallah as part of a South African delegation in 2004, he pointed around him and said, ‘See this is nothing but a Bantustan!’ No, we responded, pointing out that no Bantustan, in fact not even our townships, had been bombed by warplanes and pulverized by tanks. To a wide-eyed Arafat we pointed out that Pretoria pumped in funds, constructed impressive administration buildings, even allowed for Bantustan airlines to service the Mickey Mouse capitals in order to impress the world that they were serious about so-called ‘separate development.’

What Verwoerd admired too was the impunity with which Israel exercised state violence and terror to get its way, without hindrance from its Western allies, increasingly key among them the USA. What Verwoerd and his ilk came to admire in Israel, and seek to emulate in the southern African region, was the way the Western powers permitted an imperialist Israel to use its unbridled military with impunity in expanding its territory and holding back the rising tide of Arab nationalism in its neighbourhood.

After the Six Day War, Verwoerd’s successor John Vorster, infamously stated: ‘The Israelis have beaten the Arabs before lunchtime. We will eat the African states for breakfast.’

But it was not only the racial doctrine of Israel that excited apartheid’s leaders, it was the use of the biblical narrative as the ideological rationale to justify its vision, aims and methods.

The early Dutch pioneers, the Afrikaners, had used Bible and gun as colonisers elsewhere, to carve out their exclusive fortress bastion in South Africa’s hinterland. Like the biblical Israelites they claimed to be ‘God’s chosen people’ with a mission to tame and civilize the wilderness; disregarding the productivity and industriousness of people who had tilled the soil and traded for centuries – claiming it was only they who would make the land flow with milk and honey. They invoked a covenant with God to deliver their enemies into their hands and to bless their deeds. Until the advent of South Africa’s democracy, the racial history books generally taught that the white man arrived in South Africa more or less as the so-called ‘Bantu tribes’ from the north were wandering across the Limpopo – South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe - and that they were pioneer settlers in a land without a people.

Such a colonial racist mentality which rationalised the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia, in Africa from Namibia to the Congo and elsewhere, clearly has its parallels in Palestine.

What is so shameless about this anachronistic colonial barbarism is that Zionist Israel has been permitted by the West to aspire to such a goal even into the 21st Century.

It is by no means difficult to recognise from afar, as Verwoerd had been able to do, that Israel is indeed an apartheid state. Verwoerd’s successor, Balthazar John Vorster visited Israel after the 1973 October War, when Egypt in a rare victory regained the Suez Canal and Sinai from Israel. After that Israel and South Africa were virtually twinned as military allies for Pretoria helped supply Israel militarily in the immediacy of its 1973 setback and Israel came to support apartheid South Africa at the height of sanctions with weaponry and technology - from naval ships and the conversion of supersonic fighter planes to assistance in building six nuclear bombs and the creation of an arms industry.

For the liberation movements of southern Africa, Israel and apartheid South Africa represented a racist, colonial axis. It was noted that people like Vorster had been Nazi sympathizers, interned during World War II - yet feted as heroes in Israel and incidentally never again referred to by South African Zionists as an anti-Semite! This did not surprise those that came to understand the true racist nature and character of Zionist Israel.

Time and space does not allow further elaboration, but it is instructive to add that in its conduct and methods of repression, Israel came to resemble more and more apartheid South Africa at its zenith - even surpassing its brutality, house demolitions, removal of communities, targeted assassinations, massacres, imprisonment and torture of its opponents, collective punishment and the aggression against neighbouring states.

Certainly, we South Africans can identify the pathological cause, fuelling the hate, of Israel’s political-military elite and public in general. Neither is this difficult for anyone acquainted with colonial history to understand the way in which deliberately cultivated race hate inculcates a justification for the most atrocious and inhumane actions against defenceless civilians – women, children, the elderly amongst them. In fact was this not the pathological racist ideology that fuelled Hitler’s war lust and implementation of the Holocaust?

I will state clearly, without exaggeration, that any South African, whether involved in the freedom struggle, or motivated by basic human decency, who visits the Occupied Palestinian Territories are shocked to the core at the situation they encounter and agree with Archbishop Tutu’s comment that what the Palestinians are experiencing is far worse than what happened in South Africa, where the Sharpeville massacre of 69 civilians in 1960 became the international symbol of apartheid cruelty.

I want to recall here the words of an Israeli Cabinet Minister, Aharon Cizling in 1948, after the savagery of the Deir Yassin massacre of 240 villagers became known. He said: ‘Now we too have behaved like the Nazis and my whole being is shaken.’

Recently the veteran British MP, Gerald Kaufman, long time friend of Israel, was reported as remarking that a spokeswoman of the Israeli Defence Force talked like a Nazi, when she coldly dismissed the deaths of defenceless civilians in Gaza - many women and children amongst them.

It needs to be frankly raised that if the crimes of the Holocaust are at the top end of the scale of human barbarity in modern times, where do we place the human cost of what has so recently occurred in Gaza and against the Palestinians since 1948 in the ‘Nakba’ (catastrophe) they have endured?

How do we evaluate the inhumanity of dropping bombs and blazing white phosphorous on civilian populations, burning people alive, gassing them in a Gaza ghetto under relentless siege with no place to run or hide. For 22 days: relentless bombardment, whole families vaporized before the horrified eyes of a surviving parent or child.

Guernica, Lidice, the Warsaw Ghetto, Deir Yassin, Mai Lei, Sabra and Shatilla, Sharpeville are all high on that scale. And the perpetrators of the slaughter in Gaza are the off-spring of holocaust victims yet again, in Cizling’s words, behaving like Nazis. This must not be allowed to go unpunished. The international community must demand they be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. For the lesson is that if apartheid Israel is not stopped in its tracks these crimes will get greater and spread not only to engulf the entire Middle East and Iran, but indeed anywhere that Israel is challenged . Like the apartheid security forces, the hand of Mossad stretches very far indeed. And of course with Israel a key ally in the USA’s ‘War on Terror’ and all the motives for that onslaught, oil resources included, there will be no end to this bloody saga - with the Palestinians targeted to go the way of the extinct peoples of the former colonial era.

But such a fate must not and will not happen, if together with the unconquerable Palestinian people we share the resolve and determination to halt this insidious Zionist project, and its Great Power backing and encouragement.

Once more, let me turn to our South African experience. There, as with other struggles such as Vietnam, Algeria, the former Portuguese colonies, the just nature of the struggle was the assurance for success. With that moral advantage, on the basis of a just liberation struggle, we learnt the secret of Vietnam’s victory and strategies according to what we termed our ‘Four Pillars of Struggle’: political mass struggle; reinforced by armed struggle; clandestine underground struggle; and international solidarity.

At times any one of these can become predominant and it is not for outsiders to direct those at the frontline of the struggle what and how to choose but to modestly provide the lessons of our experience, pointing out that the unity of the struggling people is as indispensable as the moral high-ground they occupy. For the Vietnamese the military element was generally primary but always resting on popular mass support.

In South Africa the mass struggle became the primary way, with sabotage actions and limited guerrilla operations inspiring our people. It all depends on the conditions and the situation.

But unquestioningly, what helped tip the balance, in Vietnam and South Africa, was the force and power of international solidarity action. It took some 30 years but the worldwide Anti-Apartheid Movements campaigns - launched in London in 1959 – for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions – not only provided international activists with a practical role, but became an incalculable factor in (a) isolating and weakening the apartheid regime; (b) inspiring the struggling people; (c) undermining the resolve of those states that supported and benefited from relations with apartheid South Africa; and (d) generating a change of attitude amongst the South African white public generally, and political, business, professional, academic, religious and sporting associations in particular. Boycott made them feel the pinch in their pocket and their polecat status everywhere - whether on the sporting fields, at academic or business conventions, or in the world of theatre and the arts. They were totally shunned like biblical lepers. There was literally no place to hide from universal condemnation backed by decisive and relentless action which in time became more and more creative.

To conclude: We must spare no effort in building a world-wide solidarity movement to emulate the success of the Anti-Apartheid Movement which played such a crucial role in toppling the apartheid regime in South Africa. Nelson Mandela stated after South Africa attained democratic rule that ‘we South Africans cannot feel free until the Palestinians are free.’ A slogan of South Africa’s liberation struggle and our trade union movement is ‘An injury to one is an injury to all!’ That goes for the whole of humanity. Every act of solidarity demonstrates to the Palestinians and those courageous Jews who stand by them in Israel – that they are not alone.

Israel has lost in Gaza. Whilst many Palestinians have lost their lives the Palestinians have not been conquered or cowed. Repression generates resistance and that will grow. Israeli aggression stands exposed. A turning point has been reached in humanity‘s perception of this issue. The time is ripe for us to drive home the advantage. When 150,000 Palestinians within Israel itself demonstrated against the carnage in Gaza; when Jewish women staged a sit-in in at the Israeli Consulate in Toronto; when Norwegian tram drivers stopped their transport in sympathy; when municipalities and colleges decide to divest like Hampshire college in the USA (the first that took this step against apartheid South Africa), when Durban dockworkers refused to unload a ship with Israeli cargo; joining with the countless thousands around the world, from Australia to Britain to Belgium to Canada to Cairo, Jordan, Indonesia and the USA, we know the times are changing and Zionist hegemony is fast losing control. BDS represents three words that will help bring about the defeat of Zionist Israel and victory for Palestine. Like South Africa this can mean, must mean: freedom, peace, security, equality and justice for all - Muslim, Christian and Jew. That is well worth struggling for!

* Ronnie Kasrils is South Africa’s former minister of intelligence. This article was based on Mr. Kasrils’ address during ‘Israel Apartheid Week’ in South Africa.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Obama, King and Kennedy: Empire and the ‘end’ of racism

Andrea Luchetta interviews Juan Santos

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55316

cc flickr.comBarack Obama's claim that people of colour are ‘90 per cent of the way to equality’ with whites in the US is false, says activist Juan Santos in an interview with Il Manifesto’s Andrea Luchetta. Citing figures on unemployment, poverty and imprisonment, Santos suggests that the US operates under a caste system in which race plays a key part in determining social class. Obama's silence on the question of race in the run-up to the elections was tactical, says Santos – to dare to talk openly about race and oppression would alienate the millions of white centre-right voters whose support he needed to win the election. Racism, says Santos, rewards the powerful: 'They have no reason to stop racism unless its continuance results in a level of resistance that endangers the system of profit itself'.

Andrea Luchetta: I’ve interviewed Ms. Makeba Lloyd, of the ‘Harlem4Obama Committee’. According to her, racism is nowadays a minor problem. The main conflict, for her, is of a class nature, rather than racial in nature. The social dividing line, she says, is now between the rich and the poor, not between the white and the black. What do you think of this position?

Juan Santos: This is nonsense; Lloyd’s claim is in line with Barack Obama’s utterly false claim that peoples of colour are ‘90 per cent of the way to equality’ with whites in the US.

Ms. Lloyd is wrong. The poverty line is a race line. Race determines who is poor and who is not. Roughly a quarter of black and brown people in the US live in poverty, while less than one tenth of Euro-Americans live in poverty. A black person in the US is three times more likely to be poor than a white person.

That’s 90 per cent of the way to ‘equality’?

No. The very best thing I can say about the idea that peoples of colour are approaching equality with whites in the US is that it is an example of extremely bad math, or of people promoting an illusion in hopes that it will come true.

Black unemployment in the US is currently at 11.1 per cent – almost double the average for white people, whose rate of unemployment is 5.9 per cent. Among the general population – by which I mean those outside of the reservation system that imprisons Native Americans on the remnants of their lands – blacks have the highest rate of unemployment in the US, followed by Latinos, at 8.8 per cent. Among black youth, unemployment reaches a stunning 32.3 per cent. From 1976 through today, a new study shows, Latino unemployment rates typically exceeded that of the white population by some 65 per cent. The absolute rate of unemployment for Native Americans on the reservations is, however, roughly seventy per cent.

50 per cent of Native American reservation homes have no phones and one fifth of the homes lack complete kitchen facilities.

It might be interesting to show these figures to Ms. Lloyd to see if, reading them, she is still willing to claim a distinction between a race divide and a class divide in the US.

But economics is by no means the only measure of equality.

Race also determines who is imprisoned and who is not.

Black people in the US are 8.5 times more likely than whites to be imprisoned.

On any given day one in nine young black men are in prison.

Latinos are four times more likely to go to prison than white people.

68 per cent of all US prisoners are people of colour, although black, Latinos and officially recognised Native Americans together make up slightly less than 25 per cent of the overall population of the US.

The US has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. It is a system of mass imprisonment aimed at the control of people of colour, who, the elites fear, have the potential to violently and politically rebel again as they did in the 1960s. People in other parts of the world simply cannot begin to imagine the conditions that exist here; the US holds 25 per cent of the world’s prisoners, a Gulag comprised mostly of prisoners from the minority populations of African and Native American descent blacks and Latinos.

This is no ‘minor problem,’ contrary to what Ms. Lloyd suggests. It is a form of mass social control of potentially dissident and rebellious populations based on race and class status. Ms. Lloyd has missed the point entirely.

It’s not a matter of race versus class; race and class are in many ways one thing here in the US.

Usually that kind of system is called a caste system. Despite a few exceptions, like Obama himself, that’s exactly what exists in the US: a caste system.

What the white ruling class did here was this: following the mass rebellions and the burning of major US cities in the 1960s, the white ruling class decided on a strategy of divide and conquer. They created a black middle class almost overnight, largely using government employment to do so, while at the same time they found another way to deal with the millions of people of colour who could not fit into the system; mass imprisonment. These developments are two sides of the same coin. Ms. Lloyd’s failure to see this is why she can make the kind of mistakes of analysis she’s making. See this link.

Andrea Luchetta: You wrote that the price for Obama's election was silence about the racial question. Yet, don't you think, as many participants of the ‘Great Harlem Debate’ have suggested, that his silence was rather tactical?

Juan Santos: Yes it was tactical, but the question is this: what strategy did the tactic serve?

And: Who did that strategy serve?

And: Who did that strategy harm?

As someone put it, ‘hope is not a strategy.’ Hope is nothing but a slogan.

And here’s another question: if, as Obama claimed, blacks in the US are ‘90 per cent’ of the way to equality with whites, then why was the tactic of silence necessary in the first place?

If this claim were the truth and not a lie, anyone could talk openly about race and discrimination, openly celebrate the reality that there is only one tenth of the way left to go, and put forward plans to quickly eliminate the remaining 10 per cent of the problem. If this were true, such a campaign would draw millions upon millions forward as volunteers, people who would be thankful with all of their hearts, joyful to be part of the push to bring racism in this former apartheid state to its complete end.

If racism were 90 per cent eradicated in the US, if blacks and other peoples of colour were 90 per cent of the way to equality, there would be absolutely no reason or need for silence.

If nine out of 10 former racists were no longer racists, the tiny number which remained would already be isolated and powerless. There would be no need for a tactic of silence about racial oppression because the racists who remained would be so small a group that they could not change the outcome of an election, not against a population that was 90 per cent anti-racist or non-racist. But Obama’s claim was a conscious lie, as I demonstrated in answer one. There, I dealt with the quantifiable measures, the facts of social inequality which disprove Obama’s claim. The verifiable, statistical facts disprove Obama’s claim, and they are widely available for anyone to see who cares.

Obama’s silence showed one thing – that he knew his claim about equality was false, that he knew that to dare to talk openly about race and oppression would alienate the millions of white centre-right voters whose support he needed to win the election.

So, Obama’s strategy was to give those voters what they wanted to hear, and to give them silence on what they didn’t want to hear. The tactic he used to give them what they wanted to hear was to offer the lie about ‘90 per cent equality.’ This erased any need on the part of his white audience, the white electorate, to deal honestly with the actual conditions of people of colour here in the US. They could believe the lie of racial progress, and never have to think about the millions in poverty and the millions more in prison. That worked just fine for Obama.

Instead of blaming the system and white racism for the conditions of black people, he could blame black youth for a lack of ‘personal responsibility’ that’s exactly the tactic of white racists, and it looks like that is what Obama means by creating ‘unity’ between peoples of colour and white people to unite with white racists in their tactic of blaming the victim of racism for the impacts of racism.

That’s the same kind of logic wife beaters use to justify their brutality.

In effect, Obama filled the silence about the actual conditions of peoples of colour with the lie about an ‘equality’ that clearly does not exist, and with a tactic of blaming the victim. So, looking back, it wasn’t really silence at all. It wasn’t wrong to say that this silence was the price of Obamas’ election, but more basically, the price of his election was a price now being paid by Gazans, and by the hungry, incarcerated and unemployed people of colour in the US.

A lie filled the silence and took the place of the truths that demanded to be spoken and dealt with. Obama’s strategy and tactics served white racism and served to deeply harm peoples of colour by erasing our conditions of life from the imagination of the majority here.

Claiming that Gazans have ‘almost achieved equality’ with Israelis would not make it so, and remaining silent about the rain of bombs will not make them stop exploding. Obama has remained silent about the literal bombs in Gaza, and he has remained silent about the explosively unjust social conditions for people here. In both cases, the bombs keep falling, people keep going hungry, and here, the US Gulag continues to devour the lives of millions of imprisoned people of colour.

Along with the wealthy Anglo ruling elite, that’s who his strategy served, and that’s who his strategy harmed.

Yes, Obama’s black supporters you interviewed in Harlem were correct.

The silence was, in fact, a tactic.

Andrea Luchetta: Why don't you seem to believe in the possibility of a change coming from within the institutional framework? What is then the possible alternative?

Juan Santos: Change won’t come from within the system because the wealthy profit from the mass impoverishment of peoples of colour here and around the world wherever their money can penetrate to get the cheapest labor for the most work. Having a colour-based caste who you can discriminate against, increases the rate of profit. They also profit at the expense of the earth; they profit from the earth’s destruction actually, and in practice, they profit at the expense of all life. They’re not going to give that up because someone votes for them to give it up. They have police and military power at their disposal, and the bullet always trumps the ballot.

Racism rewards the powerful. They have no reason to stop racism unless its continuance results in a level of resistance that endangers the system of profit itself.

To put it in plain words, the system rewards the rich for hurting people. So, from their emotionally deadened standpoint, and given their control of the bullet, why should anything change?

For me, the most important example of an alternative is the EZLN [Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional – Zapatista Army of National Liberation]; the Zapatistas and the Mayan people of Chiapas in Mexico are a shining example. They have found a striking balance between autonomy and resistance, and between self determination and the nurturing of their culture and the earth. The Mayan people have a profound sense of the meaning and potentials of our times. I’m an indigenist and associated with the American Indian Movement.

I’m also enamored of Evo Morales and his MAS [Movimiento al Socialismo – Movement for Socialism] party in Bolivia, and I have an intellectual and moral admiration for Hugo Chavez, for his willingness to confront the US and Israel, and to unite other oppressed nations in a bloc of opposition to imperial hegemony, but not for his personal style of management or emotional tone.

And at this juncture in history, anyone with a heart has to admire Hamas. I do, even though I don’t view them as a viable alternatives but, then, I don’t have to; it’s not my place to make that determination. I’m not Palestinian.

But, finally, the all-but undeniable reality is that the empire cultures like the US and the European powers are quickly heading toward ‘the trash bin of history’. Their systems are completely irrational, and tend to eat themselves, and the earth, and us alive. They have no future.

Increasingly, it seems, the writing is on the wall, and in the hearts of people around the world. I think the alternative is to begin to build a new way and a new culture, establishing autonomy, and independence, and sustainability for ourselves as communities, even as these empires collapse as flat as the two skyscrapers in New York a few years ago. One good collapse deserves another, I always say.

Andrea Luchetta: You seem quite skeptical toward Obama's rhetoric. What is the ‘change’ that Harlem's people would really need? Which actions would be needed to tackle the racial question?

Santos: Well, we’ve seen plenty of ‘change’ since the 1960s. But what people forget right now is the common folk wisdom that ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’. Really, the only thing the system can do for us is collapse, go away, and get out of our lives. I’m a big fan of the American Indian Movement slogan that says, ‘US out of North America!’. Really, the system can’t do anything to change the caste system that it’s founded on and that it relies on for its continued profit and its continued existence.

As far as tackling the race question goes, they can never tackle it from our perspective and for our good. Just like in the 1960s and 1970s, they can only tackle the race problem, their race problem, not ours.

We are their race problem, and I’ve never been one to ask bullies to tackle me. It’s not a sound or productive strategy.

Andrea Luchetta: Don't you think that, if compared with the situation of the Civil Rights Movement era, a lot of progress has been made on the racial question?

Juan Santos: Again, the old folk saying: ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’. My answer? Sure, if you count a new black middle class, on one hand, combined with the mass incarceration of peoples of colour on the other, and a day to day war in our neighborhoods called the ‘war on drugs’ which is really a ‘war on us’. If you want to count that as ‘progress’ then yes, there’s been ‘progress’. But anyone who actually believes that that is ‘progress’ is lying to themselves.

At the systemic level, there’s been no qualitative, fundamental ‘change’ at all, really. But at the cultural level, yes, there’s been change, and that change, with all of its dramatic difference and all of its dramatic limits, is what Barack Obama represents at his best, as a cultural symbol, not as a champion of the people.

But, yes there has been a limited but very welcome change in people’s attitudes, ethics, and their emotional and cultural openness. That much has changed. The system, though, hasn’t changed at all.

Andrea Luchetta: Why, in your opinion, is Barack Obama often compared with JFK?

Juan Santos: It’s a kind of obvious comparison in terms of their charisma, their intelligence, and their ages. But, it’s not just their personalities or spirits. January 2009 is very much like the period of JFK’s reign. Then, looking back on it now, it’s plain to see that there were two major trajectories the world could take toward nuclear holocaust or toward a cultural renaissance. As it turned out, the cultural renaissance, an effort toward cultural revolution, was the path taken from the bottom-up.

The ecological holocaust we face today is very similar in its meaning to nuclear holocaust, and, according to Michael Oritz Hill, the author of a book called Dreaming the End of the World, which is focused on people’s dreams about nuclear holocaust and ecological holocaust, there are even deep correspondences and similarities between the symbols in these kinds of dreams. By the same token, the feeling is thick in the air today, at least here in California, that another cultural renaissance is being primed. A green renaissance no, not a ‘green economic stimulus’, something more profound and from the bottom-up is coming, that’s how it feels now. I’m sure that if you were in San Francisco or Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, it felt pretty similar.

In the early 60s, Kennedy embodied both potentials, for renewal and destruction. Obama is like that too, a mix of contradictory elements and psychological, cultural, and political trends embodied in a single, charismatic leader. Neither of them brought any focus whatsoever on paths to liberation.

Kennedy was an imperialist and a cold warrior. Obama is the 21st century equivalent of Kennedy, a smart hawk whose basic commitment is to the existence and furtherance of capitalist imperialism.

As a fine essay in Revolution points out, Kennedy sent the young and hopeful he’d inspired to die and carry out imperial genocide in Vietnam.

Obama will do the same in Afghanistan, and, perhaps, Iran.

Beyond that, moving out of the Bush era is not unlike moving out of the 1950s and the McCarthy era here, out of a time of a deep grey repression into open air and sunlight. Just getting finished with the Bush years is enough to give people ‘hope’. Obama just stepped up and rode that wave; he didn’t inspire it, he was just the one to ride it, he was a ‘fit’. There are lots of little correspondences; John McCain, Obama’s rival, was almost as stiff and bad on television as Richard Nixon, Kennedy’s rival.

History and time run in circles and spirals and cycles, not in straight lines. Things come back around. The world is a complete circle. In fact, the Aztec name for the world was cem anahautl, ‘complete circle’.

Andrea Luchetta: Why did most black people vote for Obama? And why did the US choose a black president just now?

Juan Santos: Because he’s black. Because black people are routinely and systematically excluded from full participation and any kind of empowerment in US society. Because they dared to ‘hope’ he might actually turn out to be one of their own, to actually turn the tide for them, despite the political evidence to the contrary. It was largely a symbolic vote, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t truly important at the level of culture. In fact, symbols are, in many ways, the substance of culture.

Look, the guy’s smart, charismatic, and his game is really complex. There is no way that it would be right to ‘blame’ most black people for not seeing through the complex political game, and there is no way that one could fail to love black people when you take even a second to see it through their eyes; to so many the election of Barack Obama looked exactly like the fulfilment of the dream - Martin Luther King’s dream. In one way, in terms of what it said about the changing culture, it had an element of truth, at least in part. At the level of the system, it has no truth at all.

Nor is it the case that Obama represents anything like the values King held to his heart, quite the opposite.

King spoke truth to power, while Obama spoke lies to get in power.

One might say that other than that, and other than the fact that King stood up to end black people’s suffering while Obama stood silent in the face of it, they’re just alike.

*Andrea Luchetta interviewed Juan Santos for the Italian daily,Il Manifesto
*Juan Santos is a member of the Aztlan Mexican Nation Harmony Keepers/American Indian Movement and author of the essays Barack Obama and the ‘End’ of Racism, and Obama's Denial: The Fear of a Black Messiah
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

I find myself thinking of Malcolm...

Lincoln Van Sluytman

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55317

cc SashaIn light of the recent inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the US and subsequent reflection on contributors to the black movement in African American history, Lincoln Van Sluytman questions the exclusion of militant voices, which he says played a profound and historical role in making Obama’s victory possible. Van Sluytman argues for the recognition of influential black leaders who attacked slavery, racial segregation, and the development of pan-African congresses through militant tendencies. The struggle for liberation, independence, and social justice throughout the African American historical trajectory, he says, has been marked by controversial yet mobilising ideologies and philosophies, which have had an impact on the black population in the US and upon many others worldwide.

I find myself thinking of Malcolm. Amidst the pageantry that marked the historic inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the US, and the splendid oratory and reflections of those who served the gallant and exemplary black movement as it unfolded in the US – giving character and depth to the American experience – I listened for acknowledgement of contribution from the militant tendency. I did not hear it. I was not surprised. The black church was honoured, as it should be, by the presence of many ministers of the Christian gospel who were important to the history that created the moment that was being celebrated. The moderate leadership which came out of the black church, those who turned the other cheek and advocated the turning of the other cheek, have been celebrated, and justly so. Their contribution is profound and undeniably progresses through the entire history of the US. But is that not only ‘on the one hand’? Surely there is another ‘hand’, no less profound and with no less historical importance.

That other ‘hand’ is the militant tendency; one can reasonably claim that it found its first public voice in the writings and work of David Walker whose 1829 article, ‘David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the world, but in Particular and Very Expressly, to those of the United States of America’, was the first argument for what became known as Black Nationalism. Walker, a self-described ‘disturber of the peace’, did not depart from the Biblical tradition, albeit grounded his argument for Black Nationalism in the historic promise of the American project itself. Using Biblical reference, Walker forcibly denounced the hypocrisy of prevailing Christian religious practice seeking divine punishment ‘on behalf of the oppressed’ while simultaneously advocating African American educational, spiritual, and political renewal. It was a theme which repeated itself throughout the historic struggle of black people in the US for the defence of the black personality itself.

Walker’s militancy was followed by that of another member of the black clergy, Henry Highland Garnet, whose tract, ‘Call to Rebellion’ in 1843, argued for the justification of violent resistance on behalf of enslaved Africans against their masters. In a famous exhortative passage of that tract, Garnet says: ‘neither God or angels or just men command you to suffer for a single moment. Therefore it is your solemn and imperative duty to use every means, moral, intellectual, and physical that promises success.’ Furthermore, Walker urges his audience to:

'...inform them that all you desire is freedom, and nothing else will suffice. If they then commence the work of death, they, and not you, will be responsible for the consequences. You had far better all die – die immediately, than live slaves, and entail your wretchedness upon your posterity…However much you and all of us may desire it, there is not much hope of redemption without the shedding of blood. If you must bleed, let it come at once – rather die freemen than live to be slaves.'

Garnet’s militancy was so potent that it moved his contemporary, Frederick Douglass, to denounce it as being too violence-oriented. Admittedly, Douglass was, at the time, wandering in the mystical world of ‘moral suasion’. In due course, he found his way and added a more mature voice to the cause of revolutionary Black Nationalism. Douglass exemplified this through his famous speech which occurred in Rochester, New York in 1852. It came to be known as ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ Douglass responded:

'...to him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.'

As with previous statements made by Walker and Garnet, Douglass’s remarks were aimed at the particular barbarity of American slavery. His words however, in addition the voices of Harriet Tubman and Frances Harper, reverberate through every moment of the historical trajectory of African peoples in the US. In the immediate post-slavery period when changing economic conditions created a new social environment and gave rise to the need for a new politics, and leading spokespersons of the anti-slavery struggles were no longer on the scene, this dialectic revealed itself in the arguments of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.

Washington, in his famous Atlanta Exposition – the Atlanta Compromise speech – of 1895, made a distinction between political agitation against the consolidation of the infamous Black Codes and the legalisation of racial segregation, and what he called self-reliance, or the mastering of those positions in the economy that were available to African Americans. Washington advised his fellow African Americans that they could regain their rights in the South only by accepting the political status quo and working gradually to change it by proving themselves valuable, productive members of society who deserved fair treatment before the law. He decried those who argued for political agitation, especially the right to vote, yet conceded its attraction to black people; ‘ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought after than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden’. It is in this speech that Washington issued his famous injunction to the black race to:

'...cast down your bucket where you are...cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions – no race can prosper until it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling the soil as there is in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities...'

DuBois’ response to Washington is best expressed in his classic work ‘The Souls of Black Folk’. He argues that in black thought Washington represents ‘the old attitude of adjustment and submission.’ Essentially, Washington argues that ‘black people give up, at least for the present, three things. First, political power. Second, insistence on civil rights. Third, higher education of Negro youth’, and that African Americans should concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. In his essay ‘On Booker T. Washington and Others’, Dubois’ position is clearly stated:

'...the black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern and delicate, a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their greatest leader. So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience, and Industrial training for the masses, we must hold up his hands and strive with him…But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of cast distinction, so far as he, the South, the Nation does this, we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.'

DuBois indicates that Washington’s policies had been pursued for 15 years, however what did these accomplish? ‘(1) The Disenfranchisement of the Negro. (2) The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro. (3) The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro’. DuBois was clear that:

'...these movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington’s teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment. The question then comes: is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meager chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic NO.'

It is interesting to note the trajectory followed by the tendencies represented by Washington and DuBois which began in the days prior to Emancipation. It cannot be argued that Washington’s great achievement, his success at the Tuskegee Institute, had a lasting and beneficial impact on the lives of those it touched, and as a source of inspiration for the wider black population. Of course, the irony is that the school itself was only possible because one of its founders, a former slave, was able to parlay his influence over black voters into guaranteed funding for what would essentially be a teachers college. Reconstruction was over by1880, and the infamous Black Codes had already begun to disenfranchise blacks, a condition that Washington did not believe merited militant opposition.

DuBois continued to be recognised for his agitated voice – in 1909, in response to the worst racial violence ever witnessed in a northern city (Springfield, Illinois), DuBois was among a group of people uniting in Niagara Falls to establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1909, DuBois founded and became the editor of ‘The Crisis’ magazine, the monthly organ of the NAACP. He remained editor until 1932 when he broke with the growing conservatism of the organisation he helped to initiate. DuBois’s deepening internationalist perspective became evident in 1911 when he instituted a movement for a pan-African congress that was eventually to be held in Paris during the sessions of a peace conference in 1919. At this first pan-African Congress, DuBois’s political insightfulness was reflected in the resolutions passed. In particular, the resolutions proclaimed that the land of defeated Germany, representing approximately one million square miles and 12 and a half million inhabitants, was to become a major part of an ‘internaltionalized African state’ along with the territories of two smaller and weaker European powers, namely Portugal and Belgium. The resolutions further demanded ‘safeguards against economic exploitation, cultural subjection and for increased self-rule, educational and medical facilities for all Africa’. At a preparatory conference held in New York prior to the first PAC, Dubois offered two resolutions; the first concerned the return of Germany’s African colonies to Africans, and the second indicated that ‘if lynchings of Negroes were not stopped in America, a revolution of twelve million Negro citizens might be used to stop it’.

DuBois was a driving force in subsequent pan-African Congresses, and continued to be a militant voice in opposition to Jim Crow in the US. The organisation he helped to establish, the NAACP, went on to become the leading voice in the African American community. Through the inspired work of a team of dedicated lawyers, – later headed by Thurgood Marshall – a thirty year legal campaign against segregation took place which subsequently led to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Oliver Brown et al v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, effectively ending segregation in public schools throughout the South.

The two tendencies were also to be found in the cultural explosion of the early 1900s, the Harlem Renaissance. The assimilationist tendency, historically associated with Booker T. Washington, found its voice in this new era and among other places, in the work of Peter Schuyler. In his essay ‘Negro Art Hokum’, Schuyler derided the notion that there was any such thing as a Black aesthetic. His essay opens with the assertion:

Negro Art, made in America, is as non-existent as the widely advertised profundity of Cal Coolidge...Negro art there has been, is, and will be among the numerous black nations of Africa; but to suggest the possibility of any such development among the ten million colored people in this republic is self-evident foolishness.

This, Schuyler argued, would be easily understood ‘if one stops to realize that the Aframerican is merely a lamp-blacked Anglo-Saxon’. Further, that ‘apart from his color which ranges from very dark brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American’. As far as music was concerned, Schuyler grudgingly ceded that ‘from dark-skinned sources have come those songs based on Protestant hymns and Biblical texts known as spirituals, work songs and secular songs of sorrow and tough luck known as the blues, that outgrowth of ragtime known as jazz (in the development of which whites have assisted)’, but these ought to be seen merely as ‘the contributions of a caste in a certain section of the country…any group under similar circumstances would have produced something similar.’

Schuyler’s essay was equally as famous for the furor it caused as it was for the response that it evoked from Langston Hughes, published just a week after Schuyler’s. In a seminal essay entitled ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’ Hughes charted an approach to the issue of a black aesthetic that assigned the emergence, development, and security of such an aesthetic to the artist themselves. For Hughes, the social material that the artist apprehended and with which the artist worked was essentially the function of class. In a manner reminiscent of DuBois, Hughes infused his analysis of the problems confronting the artist with a class analysis of the black population itself. There is the Negro middle-class whose ‘children go to a mixed school. In the home they read white papers and magazines. And the mother often says “don’t be like niggers” when the children are bad’. ‘The whisper of “I want to be white” runs silently through their minds…one sees immediately how difficult it is for an artist born in such a home to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people. He is never taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not according to Caucasian patterns.’

Then there is the ‘high class Negro’ in whose home Hughes argues there is often just more aping of things white. ‘The family usually attends a fashionable church where few really colored faces are to be found. And they themselves draw a colour line… Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any) and an Episcopal heaven. A very high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist to climb in order to discover himself and his people’

Then there are the ‘low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority – may the Lord be praised!’ Theirs was the credo ‘work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let’s dance!’ It is out of this culture, of finding pride in their unique experience as Africans in the US, Hughes argues, that comes ‘a wealth of colourful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold to their own individuality in the face of American standardizations’. That ‘without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their “white” culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work.’

The poetry of Langston Hughes, and the artistic creations of other members forming the radical tradition in the first quarter of the 20th century were matched by the explosion of black pride generated by the work of the Honourable Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the formidable organisation he created, the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Founded in 1916, by 1920 the UNIA had become the largest and most powerful organisation of black peoples globally. The UNIA convention in Harlem that same year attracted some twenty-five thousand delegates from around the world.

Garvey’s message was as simple as it was unique and controversial. While previous advocates of Black Nationalism had aimed at mobilising African Americans to lift themselves above conditions of servitude and oppression that had been imposed on them in the US, Garvey argued for a global pan-Africanist movement focusing on Africa. Garvey spoke of a ‘Negro Empire’, but (controversially) saw this in terms of a colonising project: ‘It is only a question of a few more years when Africa will be completely colonized by Negroes, as Europe is by the white race’. Garvey was also extremely defensive about the leadership role that himself and the UNIA were required to embrace in this project, denouncing those as opportunist who:

'...now that our organization has started to bear fruit we find some of these doubting Thomases of three or fours ago are endeavouring to mix themselves up with the popular idea of rehabilitating Africa in the interest of the Negro. They are now advancing spurious “programs” and in a short while will endeavoir to force themselves upon the public as advocates and leaders of the African idea.'

Garvey’s brand of Black Nationalism did not preclude even more controversial activities such as his occasional meetings with the Ku Klux Klan who happened to share his racially exclusive view of society. Whatever one may think of Garvey and the contradictory and sometimes confusing ideology he expounded, one cannot seriously challenge the impact that his call for an African homeland, governed by Africans ‘at home and abroad’, had among the global black population at the time and in the present. Garvey’s creed of racial pride and racial solidarity continues as a mobilising force in black cultures around the world, and has inspired every major Afrocentric movement and leader from Malcolm X, who saw him as ‘the father of Black Nationalism’, to the Rastafari movement for whom he is a critically important prophet.

And then there was Malcolm, El Hajj Malik Shabazz, fittingly eulogised by Ossie Davis as ‘our own Black shining prince’. He came out of prison in 1952 as a recent convert to the Nation of Islam. Within a few years, he had become the face of that movement and the chief assistant to its leader, Elijah Mohammed. However, Malcolm’s political appeal went beyond the parameters established by the Nation of Islam and he inevitably found himself at odds with the more conservative approach as advocated by Elijah and the elders. Malcolm’s self-definition offers some insight as to what these clashes may have been about:

'I am a black nationalist freedom fighter. Islam is my religion, but I believe my religion is my personal business. It governs my personal life and my personal morals… If we keep our religion at home, keep our religion between ourselves and our God, but we come out here, we have a fight that is common to all of us against an enemy who is common to all of us.'

For Malcolm, Black Nationalism means ‘that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community.’ Like DuBois and Garvey before him, Malcolm, especially after his break with the Nation in 1964, saw the fate of African Americans as being linked with the fate of all peoples of colour globally:

‘When we look at other parts of this earth in which we live, we find that black, brown, red and yellow people in Africa and Asia are getting their independence. They’re not getting it by singing “We Shall Overcome”. No, they’re getting it through nationalism. It is nationalism that brought about independence of the people in Asia. Every nation in Asia gained its independence through the philosophy of nationalism. Every nation on the African continent that has gotten its independence brought it about through the philosophy of nationalism. And it will take Black Nationalism to bring about the freedom of the twenty-two million Afro-Americans here in this country where we have suffered colonialism for the past four hundred years.’

Malcolm’s forthright talk and his unrelenting and militant denunciation of stubborn racial injustice influenced an entire generation of activists including Stokely Carmichael of the Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and later of the Black Panther Party. It was Stokely who coined the slogan ‘Black Power’, and through his organising work in Lowndes County, Alabama, adopted the Black Panther as the symbol of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. The symbol became more famous some years later as the official symbol of the Black Panther Party founded by Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and others in Oakland, California, organised largely on principles advocated years previously by Malcolm X.

From David Walker, Frederick Douglass, DuBois, Langston Hughes, Garvey, Malcolm, SNCC, the Black Panthers, and the countless millions who have given dedicated service, the militant tradition has progressed through the entire history of Africans in the US. However, they are not yet invited to the table to celebrate the highest victory within the approved structures. Langston Hughes’ may well have been speaking of them collectively:

I, Too

I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
‘Eat in the kitchen,’
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed
I, too, am America.

* Lincoln Van Sluytman is an activist.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Lessons from Kenya’s mediation process

Kenyans for Peace, Truth and Justice

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55322

cc Tom MarukoThe absence of both President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga from UN-convened talks in Geneva to assess Kenya's power-sharing deal is a sign that the country's mediation process has run into problems, writes coalition Kenyans for Peace, Truth and Justice (KPTJ). The mediation process, KPTJ says, is vunerable and in crisis 'because Kenya’s political leadership has continuously and consistently undermined it'.

President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s absence from the Geneva talks is a manifestation of the problems that the mediation process has run into. The mediation process is vulnerable and in a crisis because Kenya’s political leadership has continuously and consistently undermined it.

As the confidence of the political leadership has increased, so too have the prospects for a just peace diminished. Right from the start, at least one party to the dispute was reluctant about, if not openly hostile to, international intervention in the Kenyan conflict. This was evident in the rebuff of mediators from former Ghanaian President John Kufuor to South African lawyer Cyril Ramaphosa. Chief mediator Kofi Annan, who secured a deal despite being subjected to unwarranted personal attacks, appointed two successors who have not had an easier time either.

Increasingly, Kenya’s sovereignty is being used to project the conflicts in the country as minor and to disrupt mediation efforts before the real causes of the conflict are addressed. The mediation process should be insulated from the vagaries of local politics through increased international commitment and oversight. Kenya is regressing to the precipice of instability and the threat of open conflict because the divisive politics that preceded the 2007 election are back in place. The prevailing political climate threatens reform because the forces that precipitated the crisis feel unchallenged. They have not been destabilised in order to secure the delivery of the reform agenda. International pressure and sanctions – even at a personal level for various political actors – must be used in a targeted manner to de-legitimise these interests.

A conflict of interest is inherent in the entrusting the delivery of reforms to the parties to the dispute, as has happened in the Kenya case. The ground has shifted politically and the support that the various parties to the conflict controlled is no longer guaranteed. Resolving the problems takes away the insurance for the coalition government’s survival. There are no incentives for political actors to act against their personal interests. President Kibaki, who is expected to retire in four year’s time, has little incentive to resolve the problems identified by the mediation process. Prime Minister Odinga, on the other hand, would like to remain politically viable and will minimise the risks he takes. His positions on reclaiming the Mau Forest and acting on the recommendations of the Commission of Inquiry into the Post Election Violence illustrate his difficulties in delivering reform while not losing public support.

Reforms are about hard choices: if one is interested in political power, they can become overly expensive. Kenya’s political leadership is characterised by stalemate and paralysis because beyond the two principals in the mediation, there are other interests that feel threatened by the reform of the security services, the public service and the Judiciary. The spirit and vigour of the fight-back by the disbanded Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) through numerous court injunctions are a harbinger of resistance to reform from within the police force, the public service and the Judiciary. These institutions are part of the infrastructure of a deeply entrenched patronage system that must be dismantled if reform is to get apace. It is important that the actors who head these institutions are changed in order for institutional reform to occur.

Additionally, the international community needs to re-evaluate the mediation in order to properly assign responsibility for synchronising reform within a given timeframe to prevent overlap and internal conflicts. UN member countries as well as regional blocs need to speak loudly and clearly about the need to stay the course of reform in Kenya.

One of the important lessons from the Kenyan mediation experience is that at the critical points, it is necessary to deal with the principals at the top to minimise the influence of entrenched and hard line interests. Even then, broader participation in anticipation of a shift in the political environment can reduce the cost of carrying through a challenging reform agenda. Civil society and other citizen groups require support to articulate the demands for reforms that secure the public interest.

Although Parliament has adopted the reports of the special commissions formed under the mediation agreement, there is little concrete action on their recommendations. The Independent Review Commission’s (IREC) recommendations for an independent, lean and efficient elections management body is still not a reality, three months after the disbandment of the ECK. The laws and regulations around elections remain unchanged despite a great need to do so. Kenya is faced with a referendum that is supposed to be managed by the Interim Independent Electoral Commission (IIEC), yet the process of selecting commissioners has not shifted from the political considerations that discredited its predecessor. The reluctance and even refusal by IREC to inquire into political responsibility for the failed 2007 election and to establish the unvarnished truth and seek justice for it is partly responsible for this state of affairs. There are critical tasks ahead that revolve around a credible elections management body, among them the preparation of a new voters’ register, a national census and the redrawing of electoral boundaries. The disputes over the selection of the IIEC members have already eroded public confidence and the moral standing of the commission even before it comes into effect. This can have negative implications for any elections, among them the constitutional referendum. The international community, especially the United National Elections Monitoring Unit, should extend urgent help to Kenya in this regard.

Finally, it is likely that the political jockeying that has characterised the appointments to the IIEC could weigh down the selection of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission members. The political environment for the establishment of a Truth, Justice and Reconciliation process does not exist. This is because no action has been taken on the recommendations of the Commission of Inquiry into the Post Election Violence. Parliament has failed to make laws that would secure justice for the violence arising from the 2007 elections, and the Executive has not taken the necessary administrative steps to reform the security services and protect women. Kenya’s friends must enable the International Criminal Court to begin the process of bringing high-level perpetrators to justice, while at the same time insisting that a local tribunal be established to deal with lower level criminals. The replacement of the Commissioner of Police, the Chief Justice and the Head of Public Service will unlock the process of seeking truth and justice. Civil society organisations require support to build pressure from below by holding mock truth and justice tribunals.

Kenyans for Peace, Truth and Justice is a coalition of organisations and individuals who came together in the aftermath of the 2007 elections debacle.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

The role of trust in Zimbabwean politics

Dewa Mavhinga

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55325

cc SokwaneleZanu PF 'must demonstrate, by concrete positive actions, that it has turned over a new leaf and is now worthy of the nation’s trust' writes human rights lawyer Dewa Mavhinga, as he ponders the importance of trust in human relationships in general and for the future of Zimbabwe in particular, both in terms of the parties to the inclusive government and that government's contract with the country's citizens and the international community.

Recently l had a quiet chuckle as l reflected on the role of trust in Zimbabwean politics. The reflection led me to recall a story my father often told me. The story goes something like this: There was a man in my father’s village, who was notorious for poisoning the beer of his colleagues as they drank in open mugs. The entire village feared him and no-one dared drink with him. My father shared this fear and mistrust but he wanted to show this man that he trusted him, so, quite exceptionally, they went for a beer drink together. During the course of drinking it became inevitable that my father had to respond to the call of nature and of course had to leave the notorious villager in sole custody of his beer mug. As he walked back to rejoin the notorious villager, my father was faced with a difficult situation: Whether to trust that the villager had not tampered with his beer and just finish the beer in the mug, or to reveal his deep mistrust by not finishing up his beer. Fortunately my father was lucky to have a brainwave; he feigned a drunken stupor, stumbled around and tipped the mug over, immediately removing the need to take the ultimate test of trust.

Political parties in Zimbabwe may not be so lucky to escape taking the test of trust. The question of trust was recently thrust to the fore of people’s minds by the tragic death of the Prime Minister’s wife Amai Susan Tsvangirai (may her soul rest in peace) in a tragic road accident. While the causes of the accident will not be examined in detail here, leaving that to an independent investigator, suffice it here to state that the nation was immediately gripped with deep suspicion and many, including yours truly, saw not the hand of God but the hand of Zanu PF behind the unfortunate event. This, l believe, demonstrates fully the levels of distrust that prevail in Zimbabwe.

Now that the Global Political Agreement has ushered in an inclusive government that necessarily requires Zanu PF (Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front) and MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) to work together for the good of Zimbabwe, one wonders whether there is sufficient mutual trust to enable the parties to work effectively together. Trust generally refers to a firm belief in someone or something, or being confident about someone or something. Trust develops over time, based on solid past experiences that inform present levels of trust. Trust is not nurtured by beautiful speeches in, it flowery language; it feeds on consistent action to deliver on promises made.

If history is anything to go by, then it will be very difficult to trust Zanu PF. Its human rights and social services delivery record while it was in government for the past 29 years is appalling, and its propensity to break promises made to the people has been astounding to say the least. Distrust of Zanu PF is therefore not paranoia, rather, blind trust of Zanu PF maybe be an indication of serious amnesia. To what extent can Zanu PF as a political party and partner in government be trusted by the MDC and by the people of Zimbabwe to deliver food, health, democracy and fundamental freedoms to the people of Zimbabwe? Is it a sign of mutual trust that MDC and Zanu PF have joined hands in this inclusive government, or a sign of desperation on the part of both parties? I hazard a guess that the inclusive government is not a reflection of trust but desperation. Zanu PF and MDC are trying to work together under a dark cloud of mistrust, while pretending that there is not a speck of mistrust in the bright blue sky of the partnership.

For the GPA or anything to work – or any relationship for that matter – there is need for a certain level of mutual trust to exist. For parties that have worked together for a long time in a spirit of opposition and mistrust, to build and raise trust to required minimal levels requires solid political will and a lot of hard work. It requires a change of attitude and a radical paradigm shift. Zanu PF must demonstrate, by concrete positive actions, that it has turned over a new leaf and is now worthy of the nation’s trust.

At the moment, Zanu PF’s trust account is overdrawn, there is need to work gradually and progressively to restore people’s confidence, as well as the trust of the international community, that Zimbabwe is open for clean business. The international community must see for themselves concrete evidence that, for instance, financial accountability has been restored at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and that if aid is given it will reach intended beneficiaries and not vanish into thin air.

Unfortunately recent events in Zimbabwe do not contribute to the genesis and growth of trust; rather, they fan the fires of mistrust and suspicion and confirm to the unconverted that perhaps Zanu PF, much like the proverbial leopard, will never changes its spots. Instead of reassuring the nation that abductions and acting outside the framework of the rule of law are a thing of the past, even as the parties were joining hands, a senior member of the MDC and deputy minister of agriculture designate was abducted and slapped with trumped-up and politically motivated charges. Not only that, in open violation of constitutional and GPA provisions, all parties to the GPA agreed to swear-in more cabinet ministers than provided for. How can both the MDC and Zanu PF persuade the nation to trust them that they are indeed putting the best interests of the nation ahead of their own? Again, quite oblivious of the need to build trust, President Robert Mugabe of Zanu PF unilaterally sought to make appointments of permanent secretaries to all ministries.

Another interesting development that raises the question of trust once more is the fact that MDC members of cabinet have been allocated state security agents for their personal security. One really wonders whether these ministers feel more secure or more insecure as a result. My father used to tell me of a statement coined by opposition parties in the 1980s to refer to Zanu PF. It says, ‘Zanu PF Isinjonjo – tamba wakachenjera,’ which in English is ‘when in partnership with ZANU PF, always be on the watch out – better sleep with one eye open.’

Finally, a word of advice to Zanu PF is that trust is earned and once earned must be guarded jealously. To earn the trust of the nation and indeed of MDC, there is need to demonstrate, through action, that there is a difference between the Zanu PF in the inclusive government and the other one that belongs in that past. The MDC must also earn the trust of the nation that they have their bearings and priorities right, and that they represent a change that brings bread to the table for all. Zimbabwe’s finance minister also needs to earn the trust of the international community from whom Zimbabwe is seeking aid, and one way of earning this trust is to clean up the Reserve Bank and put in place water-tight systems of financial accountability, while ensuring that both small and big fish found guilty of looting national resources are locked away.

I end by quoting and respectfully agreeing with Arthur Mutambara who at his swearing in ceremony as the new Deputy Prime Minister said that it was high time for political parties in Zimbabwe to ‘deliver, deliver and deliver.’

* Dewa Mavhinga is a human rights lawyer based in Zimbabwe.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

An open letter to Ban Ki-Moon: Why Haiti can't forget its past

Richard Morse

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/55328

Dear Mr Ban Ki-Moon,

Thank you for the attention you have brought to the country of Haiti.

In response to your New York Times Op-Ed piece I wanted to widen your perspective a bit.

I don't pretend to represent anyone.

I've been living in Haiti since 1985. I grew up in New England with my Haitian mother and my American father during the 1960s and 1970s.

Though my parents were both teachers, I'm nothing more than a musician/innkeeper. When I arrived in Haiti, the Creole pig, an indigenous Haitian pig which was the backbone of Haitian peasant life, had recently been wiped out because of a supposed threat of swine flu.

At the same time, Leslie Delatour and 'the boys from Chicago' (an
Economic club) were convincing everyone that Haitians ought to be importing
inferior rice and sugar instead of producing it themselves.

Those three acts (pig, sugar, and rice) have destroyed the rural lifestyle in Haiti and created overcrowding in the cities. Those three acts also enriched the Gang of Eleven, Haiti's economic elite, who aside from profiting from all that happens in Haiti, also gave us the repressive regimes of Henri Namphy, Raoul Cedras and Gerard Latortue.

Health care in Haiti, non-existent; public education in Haiti, non-existent; infrastructure in Haiti, non-existent; foreign aid getting to the people in Haiti, non-existent.

How many hundred million dollars were allocated to Gonaives since Hurricane Jeanne in 2004? The last time I drove through Gonaives I couldn't tell if more than a few hundred dollars had been spent.

The textile act that you're supporting (HOPE) will further enrich Haiti's wealthy elite but will only provide an opportunity for a small part of the Haitian masses to ‘tread water’, as most of the salaries made at these factories only cover transportation to and from work along with a meal at lunchtime. If, however, you're considering providing health care, a meal and an education for at least two children for all the factory workers plus a reasonable wage, then I think you're working towards something. Otherwise, I think you may be on the wrong side of the fence.

When cell phones first came to Haiti, the companies were run by Haitian elites and their representatives. The phones and phone cards were too expensive for the general population. The ‘Communication Club’ in Haiti was an exclusive club and meant to be that way. The ‘families’ wanted it that way.

Out of Ireland came Digicel to the rescue: inexpensive phones, low rates, superior service. Anyone who wants to communicate in Haiti can now communicate. Democracy in communication. Digicel has had so much success in Haiti that they've moved their Caribbean headquarters here. When the government saw Digicel's success they immediately wanted to raise all communication taxes. Digicel threatened to leave.

If you're preaching democracy in the Haitian economy, I'll support you, but if you're preaching the Gang of Eleven gets richer and every one else gets poorer then I wouldn't even know how to support you. The Haitian people vote the governments in and the gang of Eleven buys them.

The last time Mr Clinton was in town, I had the opportunity to meet him here at my home, the Hotel Oloffson. He asked me how long I've been in Haiti and I replied, ‘22 governments’.

On your recent trip, Mr Clinton asked us to forget our past and look towards the future. Haitians can't forget their past.

Aristide is a phenomenon created as a reaction to the way the Gang of Eleven likes to rule this country. Haitians have an obligation to try and forgive but we don't have the luxury to forget the trials and tribulations of our past.

We also have a culture with deep roots in the past that makes this comment a bit insensitive. I understand and want to believe that you and Mr Clinton have all the best intentions for Haiti, but some times decisions are made and the potential impact of the decisions aren't well represented in the decision making process.

We desperately need national production coming out of Haiti's countryside. Perhaps President Preval is not in a position to tell you this, but it’s a reality. We also need to provide jobs for the urban sector. That's where your HOPE bill comes in. If your support is only for the HOPE bill, everyone from the countryside is going to be moving to the capital looking for a job. Please don't forget the irrigation in the countryside, the farmers in the countryside, schools in the countryside and infrastructure in the countryside and don't forget that when you make your inevitable deals with the Gang of Eleven, they're often looking to suck Haiti dry and spend their long weekends in Miami.

Most Haitians aren't allowed into Miami.

My personal issues are with Culture and Tourism; I'll save those subjects for another day. Hopefully, by then, it won't be too late to correct the path we're heading down.

Yours truly,

Richard Morse
Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

* Richard Morse runs the Oloffson Hotel in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Where have all the Women Gone?

Prespone Matawira

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/zimnotes/55318

A rusted wire fence divides the old Zimbabwe from the new.

On the one side lies Effie Malamba, born in 1901 she was buried beneath a granite headstone 90 years later. On the other is Sylvia Ncube, born in 1974 she was laid to rest just 35 years later.

The wire separates Bulawayo's old Hyde Park cemetery from its extension.
Effie lies amid ordered ranks of stone epitaphs. Sylvia lies in a chaos of churned earth. All around her the mounds of mud and stones, garlanded with plastic flowers, tell the story.

Zimbabwe now has the lowest life expectancy for women anywhere in the world: 34.
A forest of black metal plates mark the mounting death toll and their hand-painted white numbers record the birth dates of a missing generation. Irene Phiri born 1972, Gugu Hlanbangana in 1971, Lulu Olomo in 1975, are just three of thousands.

This cull is not an act of God. It is Zimbabwe’s game of health, of life, of death.

To play the game you will need:

Dice
Minimum of two players
Tiddleywink for each player.

Instructions:

Roll six on the dice to start.
Move along the game board and follow the instructions
Try to avoid finishing

Get PDF copy of the board game [PDF: 60kb].

(Inspired by the game ‘Alternatives to Globalisation’ designed by RW)

* Prespone Matawira is a Zimbabwean feminist and activist who contributes to the new Chii Chirikuita: What’s up?blog.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Women asking the hard questions

Prespone Matawira

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/zimnotes/55327

Now is the time to question the terms on which we organise our struggles and wage our battles.
Now is the time to claim our citizenship.
Now is the time to do the work that ensures our lasting freedom.
In this time of ‘transition’ in Zimbabwe, we need to be asking the hard questions of ourselves and each other. We need to organise, hold our structures accountable, make our demands and claim our visions and dreams. Now.

For if not now, when?

As women we have already lived through many empty promises and betrayals by men: be they located within our homes, communities, nationalist movements, newly found states, emerging political parties or that unwieldy, amorphous civil society.

Our lives as women have deteriorated dramatically in the last decade in Zimbabwe, by now we all know why. This deterioration has impacted on how we organise. It has made things harder and more challenging. It has eroded our sense of humanity and community. The regime has damaged us all, in one way or another.

But now is the time to be creative in order to do the necessary radical change work. It’s difficult but not impossible. One starting point is articulating the vision of our struggle as women and finding ways to unite around its realisation. This unity has to cut through the partisan politics, the suspicion, the political jockeying, the donor stangle hold and the organisational forms of this time.

For women in Zimbabwe, the horizon of liberation that was intimately connected to our early feminist agendas in the 1980s and 1990s was gradually left behind, as many of us started operating with a horizon of the law, policy, of governance and gender. Some argue that this was a strategic discursive move but it was at the expense of losing a destabilising power, and women’s organising losing its beating heart.

Feminist consciousness refers to the political consciousness that the gender roles prescribed by societies all over the world for women are rooted in deep prejudices that put the women at social, political and economic disadvantages. It is the desire to counter and stamp out, through collective action and a broad ongoing cultural conversation, such restrictions imposed upon women. Feminist consciousness might have different roots for different women but the vision is the same.

Feminist consciousness challenges many of our deep-held assumptions which, if are not often noticed, is because they are pervasive like gravity. Its complexity helps us understand other related oppressions based on race, class, age, sexual orientation, and disability amongst others.

Gender consciousness is the realization that gender is a socio-cultural construction and society has roles, not rooted in biology, specifically designed for those born into the male and female sexes. But challenging and changing roles is not enough.

Ultimately, gender consciousness and feminist consciousness are related but different concepts. (But I don’t want to get tangled in words. Many women around Zimbabwe are engaging in acts of resistence that are feminist, even though they may have never heard of the word. As long as we share the same commitment to our freedom, to confronting oppression wherever it may be found, let’s move ahead.)

Surely we, including our non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have learnt that gender policies alone do not equal an end to violence, to discrimination, to the bridging of the divides between the public and the private, to a redefinition of our relationships and re-organisation of society where all women can enjoy the fruits of freedom. Almost always legislative, these policies have lacked financial resources and political will. They have not altered the foundations of our oppression. What they have done however, is help to conceal or assuage some of the most detrimental effects of our inequality.

What the so-called gender perspective hides is a total lack of perspective. It’s a convenient myth that a depoliticised gender perspective will lead to equality and overcome sexism.

Now is the time to be critical. To get to the heart of the matter. To think differently. To confront, unpick, challenge patriarchal and capitalist power in order to make lasting change real for women.

What vehicle is going to allow us to do this? If our organisational forms are not going to allow us to get where we want to be, then we must be bold enough to say so. To step out of the shell of the old and into the possibility of the new.
And of course it’s going to be dangerous. You tamper with power, you feel the effects.

I know. This is a rant. It comes from the belief that the gender perspective is not going to get us as far as we need to go.

I don’t have all the answers but my experience tells me that women’s organising in Zimbabwe and the Southern African region needs to politicise. Politicisation is the (im) pulse running through our organising. ‘The personal is the political’ is a continuous process, a process of transformation which demands time and time again personal engagement, reflection and action. To put it another way. Opening spaces, to gather what I call feminist forces is a start.

This can be done anywhere and everywhere.

It is literally the process of women getting together, telling each other the stories of the conditions of our lives, and crafting collective visions and practices of resistance out of them. Channelling this into action.

These autonomous dynamic spaces can ground our actions, visions and desires, thereby providing a basis to craft common ground, and create, rather than presume, a basis for collectivity and alliances. This is a start.

The sustainability and radical democracy of this process relies precisely on creating new ways of relating to each other that undermine existing hierarchies and the depoliticisation of power inequalities. Also central to this strategy is the need to practice and nurture alliances between different struggles; the linking of scattered resistances cannot be underestimated.

Much lip-service has been paid to these alliances, often skirting over the hard work they demand in practice. Alliances are about engaging with others, and hence also about dealing with positions invested with power. These alliances are inevitably based on the involvement of our subjectivities; they are about working with differences and working through conflicts. Perhaps they are about love. About humanism. In any case, we cannot render them into abstract models. But we can find words of inspiration for the yearnings that push us to engage in them.

Feminism is about a shared engagement, in anger but more importantly in joy, in laughter, in desire, in solidarity. Right now with constitutionalism looming large in Zimbabwe, what we need to refuse, is performing ‘the woman’s question’ within a larger civic or nationalist movement, that can be raised in certain moments of goodwill, only to be dropped later on when it’s time to get back to ‘the real business’ or to have women’s rights relegated to a toothless policy.

When Audre Lorde asks women ‘to see from the centre’, she does so precisely in the context of refusing to be ‘the woman’s question’ or the empty policy. ‘We are not the “woman’s question” asked by someone else’ she comments, ‘we are the women who ask the questions.’

Women need to ask the questions that disrupt, contaminate and create. However we name them, our struggles are [should be] about nothing less.

* Prespone Matawira is a Zimbabwean feminist and activist who contributes to the new Chii Chirikuita: What’s up?blog.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

A response to Tajudeen on corruption

Ikaweba Bunting

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/55332

Capitalism by its very nature encourages and rewards corruption in its many different forms, like low wages, for example. That is corrupt because it robs the worker in Africa of the value of his/her labour and transfers the wealth that that worker produces to the corrupt financial centres in Europe and America. This wealth passes through the hands of an enabling political class that is corrupt in its dealing with the working populations they govern and in its collaboration with the corrupt financial institutions. As Africa embraces free-market neo-liberal (unregulated) capitalism there is an inherent by product of increased opportunities and rewards for corruption
There is an essential element that Tajudeen glosses over – in fact side steps completely – and that Tajudeen, of all people, is keenly knowledgeable of. This element is in regards to corruption as a product of an engendering system. Human agency surely is the engine of all social actions, however, it take place within a structure, a system that it self is a product of human agency.

Capitalism by its very nature encourages and rewards corruption in its many different forms, like low wages, for example. That is corrupt because it robs the worker in Africa of the value of his/her labour and transfers the wealth that that worker produces to the corrupt financial centres in Europe and America. This wealth passes through the hands of an enabling political class that is corrupt in its dealing with the working populations they govern and in its collaboration with the corrupt financial institutions. As Africa embraces free-market neo-liberal (unregulated) capitalism there is an inherent by product of increased opportunities and rewards for corruption.

Punitive policing does not deter corruption i.e. crime. It creates a motivation for more clever methods and schemes as well as encourage another tier that an be bribed and or used for personal purposes. The system of social and economic organization must be based on honesty and a commitment to cooperative collective prosperity, i.e. communal success as opposed to competition and private individual acquisition. Laws informed by values that reinforce cooperative honest and social responsibility together with regulations that shrink the space where corruption is acted out must be instituted.

Ethiopia: where is the outrage

Patricia McFadden

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/55337

Exactly - where is the outrage? ... the question that is posed by Mitmita on Ethiopia goes to the heart of the matter for the entire continent. It can be answered very briefly with two responses: too many Africans gave up the ability to be outraged when they allowed their agency to become the fuel that drives 'global ngos' which have usurped our voices and our agendas - they speak for us and define what we should think about our own lives and futures.
They are based in the safety of the West...and are deep in the pockets of big capital and their hypocritical regimes. After all, most of these so-called ngos are mere extensions of the states of these western societies. That is a fact - even and especially the ones that squeal loudest about human rights ... Additionally the question can be answered through a reminder that the West has always looked after its own interests - wherever they might be (or are perceived to lie) - and Africans who believe in 'western democracy' have to get past their fake belief in western patronage and take their own futures into their own hands. Outrage from the West - my foot ... unless of course it is about private property, African mineral and other forms of natural wealth and 'the protection of our (read USA) way of life' as George W Bush and all presidents before him and after?- are wont to remind those of us on the continent who have become fluffy in the head. Africans are responsible for our own futures - we must mobilise the outrage against dictatorship, violation, and exclusions of every kind ...and we must make the difference for our selves. It's that simple!

Ghana elections

Chielozona Eze

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/55341

I thought this was a very good essay on [url=http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/54963]
Ghana[/url]; it is very encouraging to note that the African electorate gets the opportunity to consider the characters of the candidates for elected offices and that money and advertisements play far lesser roles. Thanks for this essay. I have already created a link to the essay in my blog: http://chielozona.blogspot.com/

Human rights fundamentalism: 1

Kamal Singh

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/55338

Simplification of the complex realities that chacterise Africa is a crime in itself. As Mamdani shows, simplistic (and inconsistent) responses to the problems of Darfur risk creating deeper crisis not only for the people of Sudan but for available instruments of international justice. As in the Nuremberg trials which placed the lens on Nazi atrocities without addressing the complicities of American and other Western capitalists, without whose collusion the Nazi project would not have advanced to the level it did, the powerful obscure their active role in genocide.
The US which has blatantly violated all conventions and protocols in its "war on terror", (including a brazen attack on the rights of its own people), remains above the attention of the ICC. The reputational risk to the ICC in its selective pursuance of some aggressors, is indeed great. Al Bashir must be made accountable for his actions and ommissions, but so too must the others whose hands in the Darfur conflict are not as invisible as they would prefer.

Human rights fundamentalism: 2

F W Smith

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/55339

Accountability is crucial especially when tens of millions of US dollars are raised in the name of 'saving' the people of Darfur. Yet there is no ICC oversight or UN oversight of where and how these funds are used. It is highly likely that more is spent on aidworkers, look and see travel groups than on the needs of the people. It might be possible for oversight to come from the AU?

Human rights fundamentalism: 3

T.Ositelu

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/55340

Should the victims of some of the more brutal aspects of Bashir's regime wait for political reform to get justice? I agree political context is key and the ICC shouldn't be allowed to administer selective justice. I think the article is however insensitive to those who suffer in conflicts like Darfur, at the hands of the likes of Bashir, even if he's not solely to blame, in saying retribution should wait until their country has experienced sufficient political reform. As the head of state, accountability should start with him. I wonder if the author would feel the same if he'd been directly affected by the conflict. The ICC's execution is far from perfect but surely there must be a way to bring all war criminals to book, be it in the US or elsewhere, that takes into account the political sensibilities of the country involved.

Kilalea is inspiring

Tokwe

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/55336

I truly enjoyed reading this interview. Rory Kilalea is so inspiring. I have been writing short stories of late which I had dismissed as not worthy to develop into a book, but feel inspired. My articles though not yet published touch on the tough life being endured by Zimbabweans and also brutal experiences of the last elections as told by eyewitnesses from my home area, something not to be forgotten for a very long time, in fact the next generation should know what happened during that year of madness so that very madness will not rise its head again. (Midlands State University)

On the global crisis

Wadiike-Williams

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/55342

Demba's article is one of the most coherent and cogent analysis of the current global crisis, its impact on Africa and most important of all, the necessary African response. It is no exaggeration to say that all of us and particularly those of us who aspire to a leadership role in Africa must study this document very, very closely indeed!!! This is no less than a key component of the new econo-political architecture of a 'Liberated, Unified and Transformed Africa!!!

Pope is misunderstood

Victor Mosele

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/55343

Geffen and Rebecca Hodes, and much of the world media, have misunderstood the Popes' teaching with regard to sexual education.The objection of the Pope to condoms is not that comdoms are "per se" unable to forestall HIV, but rather that the condom distribution and the mentality created by their use, namely that one can have sex at any time, anywhere, with anybody with impunity as far as sexual dsease is concerned, is a fallacy that valid statistics can abundantly show and prove. Besides, the Pope never proposed that abstinence only is the remedy for the HIV virus. There has to be proper sexual education in the much larger context of morality and spiritual values in understanding the function of sex in human beings.

United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food

Olivier De Schutter

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/55331

I am delighted to announce the launch of a new website which will keep you informed about the activities linked to the mandate. It will help you to keep track of developments in the large number of areas which have an impact on the enjoyment of the right to food: international trade and the role of agribusiness; food aid and development cooperation; the rights of land users and access to land; access to inputs for agriculture and intellectual property rights; legislative frameworks implementing the right to food; or the impact of climate change on the right to food.
We have had the chance to meet or exchange emails, directly or via my team, since I was appointed by the Human Rights Council of the United Nations as Special Rapporteur on the right to food.

I am delighted to announce the launch of a new website which will keep you informed about the activities linked to the mandate. It will help you to keep track of developments in the large number of areas which have an impact on the enjoyment of the right to food: international trade and the role of agribusiness; food aid and development cooperation; the rights of land users and access to land; access to inputs for agriculture and intellectual property rights; legislative frameworks implementing the right to food; or the impact of climate change on the right to food.

Almost one billion people are hungry in the world today. Increased volatility of prices on international markets, climate change and desertification, and increased competition between feed, food and fuel, threaten to make this situation even worse in the future. At the same time, there is a shared understanding among all those who care about this situation that a return to business as usual is not a solution. We have a unique opportunity to change the existing state of things, if we take seriously the many signs, including the recent global food crisis, which demonstrate that the current food system has failed. This system must be fundamentally rethought: it has led to one billion hungry people and to similar rates of obesity; it is neither socially nor environmentally sustainable; it must be changed.

It is important to recognise that policies should be put in place in order to ensure food security for all. It is even better to insist that each individual has a right to adequate food, grounded in international law, and that States have corresponding obligations. Most actors now accept that we need to rebuild the system by taking the realization of the right to food as a departure point: indeed, in the speech he delivered at the Madrid High-Level Meeting on Food Security for All, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon suggested that, in developing actions to react to the global food crisis, we needed to rely on the right to food ‘as a basis for analysis, action and accountability’.

I am equally convinced that the right to food framework can constitute a useful tool as to how States and international organizations can best confront the impacts of the global food crisis.

I would also like to seize this opportunity to announce the creation of an Advisory Board to the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur, including Smita Narula, Raj Patel, Sanjay Reddy, Jo Swinnen and Judi Wangalwa Wakhungu. I am most grateful to these individuals, highly recognized experts in their fields, for having agreed to share their time and expertise in order to support the mandate. Needless to say, the members of this advisory board are not bound by the positions I take; and the views I adopt as Special Rapporteur are developed independently from the input they provide.

It is my hope that the new website which is being launched shall contribute to the efforts of the defenders of the right to food throughout the world, and shall strengthen their link to the mandate. The website shall be updated on a daily basis.

The website shall provide easy access to all information related to the mandate, including:
- official reports, such as the report on my mission to the World Trade Organization which was presented at the March session of the Human Rights Council
- documents issued on special occasions, such as the conclusions I draw from the Madrid High-Level Meeting on Food Security for All
- the calendar of my past and future activities.

I welcome your comments, and look forward for a fruitful collaboration in the upcoming months.

Sincerely,

Olivier De Schutter
UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food

Death of a pioneer activist in Zanzibar: Khalfani Hemed Khalfan

Salma Maoulidi

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/obituary/55329

It was with great sadness that the activist community in Zanzibar received news of the sudden death of Mwl. Khalfani Hemed Khalfan on 28 March 2009, soon after returning from a trip. Without a doubt his death is a loss not only to the Association of People with Disabilities (UWZ), but also to the larger activist community and civil society particularly in Zanzibar and in Tanzania.

The late Mwl. Khalfan was a pioneer of many activist struggles in the isles, not just those relating to people with disabilities. In particular, his efforts in organising and advocating for the rights of people with disabilities in the isles opened a new chapter in the relationship between the state and civil society on the one hand, as well as between civil society and the community on the other. Most observers of civil society will agree that for quite some time UWZ remained the symbol of civil society organising in the isle, in view of the fact that since its inception in the early eighties it has maintained a constant presence with a discernable and active agenda. Moreover, it has given rise to other voices in the larger community of people with disabilities, including the blind, the deaf and dumb and those with developmental disabilities.

And while his death may have been sudden, it consoles us to know that he was able to follow his dream and see that people with disabilities are respected and are given rights like other social groups in Zanzibar. He leaves UWZ a legacy of credibility and respect, something many organisations are still striving for. Certainly Mwl. Khalfani lived to see and taste the fruits of his activism, chief among them the passage of the Disability Act and soon to be passed Disability Policy. He also leaves behind facilities and work tools with which to further future struggles.

As it may be, Mwl. Khalfani did not escape questions or scrutiny over his leadership style or his way of working. Like many visionaries propelled by a dream he may have been guilty of assuming the weight of the dream, just like the female parent may feel compelled to assume a lion’s share of responsibility in caring for a baby. The question to the rest of us remains how, being members of the community of activists, did we contribute in alleviating the load or were we more comfortable leaving this burden to one person and blaming them for stepping up when we did not? How do we ensure that our activism lasts beyond a personality but remains informed by our purpose?

Since Mwl. Khalfani is now among the departed, these are no longer his concerns. He lived to the best of his ability and his beliefs. The challenge he leaves us is to ensure that the disability law and policy is implemented and that we all play our part in making sure that the agenda remains alive not just in the community of people with disabilities but in our larger social struggles against all types of discriminations including on the basis of disability. Importantly, in Zanzibar, his death underscores the necessity of a vibrant and engaged civil society sector. Most recently he tried to realise this dream by inviting the idea of initiating a monthly civil society forum to discuss civil society and development issues.

May the Almighty grant him respite and bountiful rewards for his selfless efforts.

Salma Maoulidi.

Zimbabwe: Nguva Yedu - Post Festival report

2009-04-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/55401

A spectacular concert in an atmosphere of joy and freedom marked the end of the inaugural Nguva Yedu ~ Thuba Letu ~ Our Time youth arts festival in Harare. 600 people packed the Book Café car park for the final concert on Saturday 28 March, which presented 10 hours of outstanding poetry and some of the southern African region´s top music acts.
NGUVA YEDU - OUR TIME - THUBA LETHU
THE BOOK CAFÉ YOUTH FESTIVAL
HARARE, 24-28 March 2009
Riot Zungu of Gang of Instrumentals (SA) + Zimbabwe´s ‘Mic-Inity´

A spectacular concert in an atmosphere of joy and freedom marked the end of the inaugural Nguva Yedu ~ Thuba Letu ~ Our Time youth arts festival in Harare. 600 people packed the Book Café car park for the final concert on Saturday 28 March, which presented 10 hours of outstanding poetry and some of the southern African region´s top music acts.

South Africa´s Gang of Instrumentals inspired the occasion with their tight arrangements and rock-funk inspired hip hop. The Harare audience erupted as the group - first time visitors but already well known to Zimbabweans - delivered one hot song after another.

An electrifying performance by Ugandan star Jose Chameleon had the audience on its feet, waving, dancing, laughing and singing along, and fittingly, on the back of his glitzy stage costume the words “Freedom ... is not Free”.

When young Zimbabwean reggae star MicInity appeared as the last act, waving a massive rasta flag, the crowd was in pungwe (all night) mood. The concert closed with visitors Riot Zungu (GI) and Jose Chameleone joining MicInity on stage, where they delivered a free-style rendition of a Bob Marley classic to a euphoric audience. It had been an unforgettable happening for everyone, passionate and happy. It marked a moment of renewal, the time of youth - our time!

It had all started at 2pm on the afternoon of Saturday 28 March. Wave after wave of youth acts took the stage, featuring young artists from Pamberi Trust´s youth and gender projects; it seemed never ending. The exuberance of each act added to the sense that something wondrous was unfolding, this was a ‘happening´; everywhere in the audience people were amazed at the depth and diversity of young Zimbabwean artists - professionalism, stage craft, musical and poetic skill marked the entire event. Dudu Manhenga performed a lovely set in her own inimitable afrojazz style, backed by the group Color Blu, with massive stage presence, extremely comfortable on the big stage. 19-Year-old John Pfumojena amazed the crowd with his extraordinary vocal control and range. Zimbabwe´s immensely popular afro artist Victor Kunonga was joined on stage by Ghanaian percussionist Yao, and amidst guitar interplay reminiscent of the great guitar bands of the 1980s, the Ghanaian artist from the group Nomad-yi performed one of the finest percussion and drum solos seen on a Harare stage for some time. A poet to watch out for - Outspoken has it all, timing, verve, voice, movement, attitude - a star in the making, while Cde Fatso, toyi-toyi peoples´ poet, has grown in stature - his sound reaching towards chimurenga and 1980s Afro-rock - his laughter infectious and his jokes really very funny.

Over 3 days, the festival had featured powerful performances. The young voice of Sam Mtukudzi is beginning to develop texture and personality, and the audience danced until the end. Nomad-yi literally shook the house with their hard-edged Joburg hip-hop, sung uniquely in Wolof, French, English and siNdebele. Tomas Brickhill´s gentle, personal touch had the audience singing along ‘sokwanele baba´. Antonio Lyons, dressed in white, managed a remarkable feat - he drew the crowd into his poetry - and a boisterous, dancing Book Café quietly listened and applauded in delight at each poetic moment of reckoning.
There were dozens of other performances through the 3 days of festivities, most memorably Bongo Love, Alexio Kawara, Edene Timbe & Fire, Pachena Kids, Initiative Arts from Bulawayo, Afrodiziak with Q Montana and Filbert Marova and The Other Four with Clare Nyakujara.

‘Mindblast: Young Zimbabweans Talk - an exploration into the spirit of Zimbabwe´ had been an intense experience earlier in the festival. An outpouring of expression the debates were chaotic, diverse, questioning and interspersed with moments of brilliant insight. Through it all, patterns of thought began to take shape. Young Zimbabwean creative minds abhorred the repression of ‘freedom of expression´, embraced cultural diversity, and above all, craved renewal - they want their voices to be heard.

Arts writers from Ethiopia, Cameroun, Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa under Marimba Media joined the discussions, sharing their perspectives with Zimbabwean artists and writers. From this came a sense that in some ways Zimbabwe´s difficult political journey has not in fact been that unique - all over the continent Africans have had to find the path towards free expression which has not been easy.

In a ground-breaking Zimbabwean ‘first ever´ the discussions and events were beamed by live webcast and watched by groups of Zimbabwean Diaspora and other interested people in Zimbabwe, South Africa, USA, UK and as far away as Saudi Arabia, Czech Republic and Malaysia. 238 people around the world were logged into the webcast in ‘real time´, responding directly to the webcast team via live chat - applauding the festival and wishing they were there.

The event was organised by Pamberi Trust - Book Café in collaboration with African Synergy, a pan-African network of African arts and festivals with support from the Danish Centre for Cultural Development (DCCD), the National Arts Council, as well as its many friends and partners.

Pamberi Trust says the Nguva Yedu - Thuba Letu - Our Time festival (which had almost everyone singing and saying its name - in songs and poetry and humour, it makes a great rap line!) is the first of an annual youth arts festival - and what a debut it has been!

All across Africa the youth are saying “Nguva Yedu - Thuba Lethu - Our Time!” And now it is time for us to listen to what they have to say. The youth are our tomorrow.

Life is constant negotiation

An interview with H. Nigel Thomas

H Nigel Thomas

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/African_Writers/55326

'I write largely because reality’s surface is for me hardly more than a mask,' says Canadian author H. Nigel Thomas in an interview with Conversations with Writers.'What’s worth knowing is beneath it'. Thomas talks about his life and sources of inspiration as a writer and about his recent novel, Return to Arcadia, an exploration of a mixed-race man's quest for sanity as he tries to cast off the burdens bequeathed by his colonial heritage.
In a recent interview, Nigel Thomas spoke about his concerns as a writer.

Q: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

A: Quite late. In my adolescence, I wrote sketches and directed them principally to raise money for the indigent fund of the Methodist Church to which I belonged. These were short plays. People paid to see them performed. No social welfare system existed in St. Vincent then. The churches that people belonged to aided those who were in need. This was the purpose of the indigent fund. The money thus collected went into the indigent fund.

One of the sketches I thought was significant, but I never saw myself as a writer then, nor did I wish to be a writer then.

I began writing poetry at age 28 and found that I had to do so every day for a period of over four years.

Q: What would you say you were trying to achieve through the poetry?

A: Wordsworth defines poetry as emotions recollected in tranquillity. What caused the intense emotions that required shaping into poetry, I do not know. Perhaps it was the deep sense of exile that I felt. There certainly was a deeply felt angst that poetry relieved.

I wrote about one's place in the universe, about identity, about injustice, about the lessons inherent in nature. I recall a few lines from a poem written in the second year: "Would I have thought that at 29/ My life would be an autumn Vine?" . . . "But we must roll our stones/ And roll them all alone/ And find in art the solace that dogs do in their bones." I think that was the sort of tone found in those early poems. I've published few of them.

"What was I trying to achieve?" Finding language, metre, symbols and metaphors to embody what I was feeling. Robert Graves refers to this as the pearl the oyster creates to coat the grain of sand in its flesh.

I was already in my mid-thirties when I turned to fiction, largely because plots filled my head and I could not fall asleep. In a manner of speaking, it was easier to write than fall asleep.

Q: How would you describe the genre in which you do most of your writing?

Now most of my writing is prose fiction. It seems to lend itself better to the issues my psyche predisposes me to explore.

Q: Which issues are these? And why do you think they are this dominant?

A: They are no different from the ones that interested me when I began writing poetry. It's only the form that's different. My last novel, Behind the Face of Winter, follows a youngster from about age five in the Caribbean through high school and university in Canada. I wanted to show via fiction some of what I know about the Black immigrant experience as it affects Black children in high school in Montreal (I taught in the school system in Montreal for 12 years). My next novel, Return to Arcadia, forthcoming in autumn, explores a mixed-race man's quest for sanity as he tries to cast off the burdens bequeathed by his colonial heritage.

Underlying the premise of everything I write is the notion that life is constant negotiation. We may do it passively sometimes by absenting ourselves from active confrontation and consequently deprive ourselves of the fruits of such confrontation (conversely we may avoid the resulting wounds), or we may jump into the fray. What underlies such choices make for interesting speculation and hence fiction.

Q: What motivated you to start writing in this genre?

A: I vaguely recall that in the early eighties I despaired over what I was not reading in works produced by West Indian writers. Earl Lovelace was the exception. Something told me I had to begin writing that sort of work -- works that focused on African Diasporic identities.

You see, we in the Caribbean had been brought up in a culture of self-hate. It was necessary to explore, (not merely through history -- history does not engage us with the same emotional depth) through characters, the impact of this on our psyches and to imply ways by which we might exorcise it. Prose fiction was the ideal genre for this. The theatre would have been even better, but I’m predisposed to being solitary, and the sort of atmosphere in which plays are born is anathema to what I am.

Q: How are you defining this "culture of self-hate"?

Africa in the Caribbean in which I grew up symbolized savagery. The word Zulu in my village had the same virulence as cannibal. As my protagonist in Spirits in the Dark notes, to call someone African was to challenge him or her to a fight.

Clearly, if we despised Africa and Africans we hated ourselves. It's tantamount to disowning one's mother. This came about via Christianity, which equated Blackness with sin and savagery. But it's also true that we were ashamed of slavery. My father believed that we were the descendants of Ham (Noah's cursed son). The implication, then, is that God had ordained us for servitude. Spirits in the Dark puts such self-hate onto the threshing floor.

I have continued the theme to a lesser extent in Behind the Face of Winter to show in part the evolution that has taken place. I continue the theme as well in Return to Arcadia.

Q: How and why is it that people in the Caribbean accept this teaching?

A: We were too weak to challenge it. We were a hostage society. Opinions that differed from the colonizers' were severely punished. Promotions meant parroting the colonizer's beliefs and expressing a preference for his culture.

Q: Why is it important to exorcise it?

A: The reason is self evident. Hatred of one's self is profoundly debilitating. It goes to the core of one's self-worth. Who should do the exorcising? Educators, artists, the purveyors of the various media -- everyone with the power to influence public opinion.

Q: How does self-hate manifest itself in the Caribbean?

A: Today, there is very little overt verbal expression of such self-hate. We have come a long way, thanks to Bob Marley, Chalkdust, etc. (musicians); and to writers like George Lamming, Earl Lovelace, Louise Bennett, etc. We are also able to read works that hitherto had been proscribed. West Indian history came into the curriculum my last year in high school. I had no Caribbean authors on my high school curriculum. Today the exact opposite is true.

Q: In the writing that you are doing, who would you say has influenced you the most?

A: African American writers primarily: the greats: Wright, Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Toni Morrison; and two unknowns: Toni Cade Bambara and Leon Forrest; African writers: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Alex LaGuma; North American First Nations Writers: Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, James Welch and N. Scott Momaday. The only Caribbean writer who influenced me -- and it was a profound influence -- was Earl Lovelace.

Some showed me how to shape a novel. Others showed me how powerful a banal notion could become once it's transformed into fiction. I also saw the tremendous amount of knowledge I gained from their books, hence I came to believe that fiction could be intellectually enlightening.

Q: How have your personal experiences influenced the direction of your writing?

A: An important dictum for writers is: write about what you know. It doesn’t mean adhering slavishly to facts but rather employing facts as tools for further imaginary exploration. In other words, facts are the screwdrivers to tighten or unscrew the imagination as well as the containers to fill with whatever the imagination produces. For example, it is difficult to find in any of my fiction my own personal experiences. The settings, however much reconstructed, are real and the obsessions that get explored are my own.

Q: What are your main concerns as a writer?

A: To listen to my muse and resist the pressures of the marketplace. I write largely because reality’s surface is for me hardly more than a mask. What’s worth knowing is beneath it. I’m not saying that I discover anything. All I do is try to uncover. I think that the biggest beneficiary of my writing is myself. Self-knowledge is something I’ve gained from my writing much as we discover our fears in our dreams.

Q: Who would you say is your target audience?

A: In all honesty, it would be anyone who reads my writing. I think, however, that since I’m of Caribbean origin and write out of that sensibility, West Indians and Diasporic Africans are likely to be the readers best able to appreciate the issues I explore.

Q: What are the biggest challenges that you face?

A: Finding metaphors that my audience and I share. I am not a consumer of popular culture, so I’m cut off from the source where the overwhelming majority of today’s population find its psychic nourishment and cultural references.

Q: To you, what is popular culture? And, in what ways are you cut off from it?

A: Popular music: rap, hip-hop, dancehall, etc.; televisions programmes; fashion shows, etc. I'm cut off in the sense that I gain far more nourishment from other sources. It's a question of how I'm predisposed to spending my time. I would have to consume a great deal of popular culture to get a small measure of intellectual food. I prefer to go to the sources where an abundance is more likely.

Q: Do you write everyday?

A: Now that I am no longer bogged down by university teaching, I spend a few hours each day. When I was a university professor I wrote chiefly in late spring and summer. I chose to retire early so that I would have time to write.

Q: What will your next book be about?

A: eturn to Arcadia will be about the process of attaining psychological wholeness after enduring a sullying childhood. I've worked on it in spurts over a seven-year period, almost exclusively during the summer months.


* This article was first published on OhmyNews International.
* H. Nigel Thomas, author of 'How Loud Can the Village Cock Crow?'
Canadian author H. Nigel Thomas was a teacher in St. Vincent, his home island, before moving to Montreal where he taught English and French in high school and elementary school. For the past 18 years, he has been working as professor of U.S. Literature at Université Laval in Quebec City. His books include Why We Write: Conversations with African Canadian Poets & Novelists (TSAR Publications, 2006) which features interviews with 15 African Canadian writers and From Folklore to Fiction: Folk Heroes and Rituals in the Black American Novel which appeared in Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, Number 118 (Greenwood Press, 1988). He has written three novels: Return to Arcadia (forthcoming, TSAR Publications, Fall 2007); Behind the Face of Winter ( TSAR Publications, 2001) and Spirits in the Dark (House of Anansi Press, 1993 and Heinemann Caribbean Writers Series, 1994) which was a finalist for the 1994 QSPELL/Hugh MacClennan Fiction Award. In addition to these five books, Nigel Thomas is also the author of Moving Through Darkness (Afo Enterprises, 2000), a poetry volume, and How Loud Can the Village Cock Crow? (Afo Enterprises, 1996), a collection of critically acclaimed short stories set in the Caribbean which explore interpersonal relationships.

Review of African Blogs – April 2, 2009

Dibussi Tande

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/blog/55274

Mmalawi Blog uses the case of Malawi to demonstrate how the Western media promotes ignorance about Africa:

“The Washington Post, the New York Times and other media giants have written about Madonna and her adoption saga, while not mentioning or concentrating on the problems affecting the Malawian population. At the time that the Queen of Pop is fighting with judges, Malawi is experiencing a political crisis that has even escalated to cases of violence… While UK's The Guardian presents a case study on Madonna adoptions; Malawi is mourning with Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) after 22 supporters died at a FIFA World Cup qualifying game in a stadium of Abidjan in a stampede. Malawi is still struggling with problems like gender inequality, high children mortality and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The only time that Malawi gets a window to expose itself to the world, Madonna takes the stage and all eyes unflinchingly focus on her without looking at the problems of the country. It is therefore not surprising that Madonna's adopted son David Banda is more popular than the country's President Mr. Bingu wa Mutharika or Mr. Kamuzu Banda, the Malawian first dictator.”


Afrodissident is pleased with a recent article in Time Magazine which touts Africa’s economic potential:

“Time magazine has named Africa’s business potential as one of the ‘10 ideas changing the world right now’. For once Africa isn’t being depicted as a disastrous basket case – indeed in this article quite the opposite is the case. With positive economic growth for African nations forecasted to continue (despite the global downturn that has caused so many other economies – especially in the first world – to contract) Africa is cited as a glimmer of economic hope in these gloomy recession-hit times…

It’s great that the Africa – at long last – is being feted in mainstream western media as a place of potential. Of course the rampant poverty, conflict and corruption still bedevil the continent. But there’s so much more to the continent.

As Time says ‘Look … at the African growth figures once more. Compare them with this year’s forecasts for the developed world. Who’s the basket case now?’”


Casmir Igbokwe outlines the conditions under which Nigeria’s “rebranding” campaign will have a meaningful impact:

“Nigeria: Good people. Great nation! That’s our brand new slogan. It sounds good...But then, we need to address the peculiar messes surrounding our existence first…

For this rebranding exercise to make meaningful impact, Nigerians generally must resolve to change their attitude, their value system. The President of the country must attend to state functions with dispatch. He must rule with sincerity and love for all. The governors must provide essential infrastructure and other things that make life worth living for their people. The local government chairmen, the legislators, judges and whoever is in government must do their work efficiently and effectively.

Other citizens, on their part, must endeavour to carry out their civic responsibilities. If you are a bricklayer, there is no point stealing some bags of cement you are meant to work with. If you are an auto mechanic, make sure you use the original engine oil your customer has bought for you to service his car. If you are a chief executive, make sure you pay your workers a living wage. If you are a pickpocket, the law will not be merciful to you when caught.”


What An African Woman Thinks comments on a recent talk by anti-aid activist Dambisa Moyo at New York University:

“Moyo… characterised Bono & Co as ‘misguided,’ claiming ‘they paint Africa and Africans as victims rather than countries and people with capabilities and promise.’ And, on top of that, they usurp the role of African leaders, who really ought to be the ones who speak for Africa.

I really feel badly for Bono and Blair and their ilk. They see a problem and they’re compelled to do something. It’s hard to fault them on that ground. There are too many people all over the place doing nothing when they should be doing something.

On the other hand, it’s clear that AID has not worked/is not working as it’s supposed to, unless of course, it had the subversive objective all along of perpetuating dependence, in which case, it’s truly a work of genius. As Moyo says, ‘giving aid to Africa remains one of the biggest ideas of our time,’ which is puzzling no end because all the evidence suggests is that it’s an idea that has failed miserably.”


Bombastic Element reviews a recent report on the Congo by award-winning Canadian photojournalist Finbarr O'Reilly:

“Reporting what's up in the Congo, Finbarr O'Reilly goes off the Western reporter's worn, beaten path. Watching the clip above makes you realize that foreign correspondents need to cut through Congo's tragic thicket of war and displacement in order to catch a glimpse of another Congo.

In O'Reilly's case, he finds that ‘despite the fear and the daily struggle to survive, the women of the DRC maintained their dignity and their looks using creative and inventive hairstyles.’

The human will in Africa to adapt, protest, heal, reinvent and survive is the real African news. Some may dismiss such survival in the face of unimaginable odds as settling for hell. But news like this serves to remind the rest of the world that those dwelling in "hell" still, in their own unique ways, live out, like the rest us, the complete spectrum of human emotions and desires…”

* 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/

Crisis could make China into Africa’s ‘partner of choice’

Stephen Marks

2009-04-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/africa_china/55333

China’s continuing African trade investment and aid could act as a buffer for African economies. And if China can steer its way through the crisis it could become a ‘development partner of choice’, increasing its ‘soft power’ influence in the developing world and acting as a steadying factor in trade and investment compared to the West.

These are among the main conclusions of a policy briefing ‘China and the global financial crisis: implications for low-income countries’ from the UK-based Institute of Development Studies, part of a series funded by Britain’s Department for International Development [DFID].

China’s financial institutions are relatively insulated from the direct impact of the crisis, and the Chinese government has announced a major stimulus package. As a result, the paper argues, China’s trade, investment and aid to Africa are unlikely to see any significant downturn, at least in the short to medium term.

Chinese demand for commodities such as oil, cotton and copper should be maintained, especially since the stimulus package is heavily focused on infrastructure, and African demand for consumer and light industrial products is unlikely to be affected, so trade volumes over the next three years will probably continue increasing, if at a slower rate, the briefing predicts.

Nor should investment volumes fall off, as China’s state enterprises are using the opportunity of the crisis to increase their investments, especially in the energy and food sectors. And increased competition between private firms in China’s domestic market could actually accelerate their investment in Africa. Falling demand in European and American markets could also increase the attraction of African markets.

China’s aid flows should also remain stable the briefing predicts, as it is provided on multi-annual lines of credit of at least three years and while important to some African countries, is still a small share of China’s GDP.

The briefing concludes that these developments require ‘a multi-faceted African response involving government, the private sector, unions and NGOs’.

* The paper is one of a set of briefings What the G-20 needs to know on the impact of the global financial crisis on the developing world.

* Stephen Marks is research associate and project co-ordinator with Fahamu’s China in Africa Project.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

China's IMF Quota Set to Surpass Japan's

2009-04-03

http://english.caijing.com.cn/2009-04-02/110132520.html

China’s contribution to the International Monetary Fund will exceed Japan’s when new quotas are implemented, making it second only to the U.S., under a new formula agreed by the IMF last year, a People’s Bank of China official said. The central bank official, who declined to be identified, told Caijing that the IMF passed a resolution in 2008 to adopt the new formula this year. But the implementation was postponed after G20 finance ministers agreed in London last month conduct the next IMF quota review in 2011, bringing it forward from the original schedule of 2013.

Chinese Involvement in African Conflict Zones

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/c2a4fm

As China expands its engagement throughout Africa, it increasingly finds itself involved in African conflict zones either by design or accident. This involvement takes essentially three forms: Chinese participation in UN peacekeeping operations, Chinese weapons, especially small arms, which make their way into conflict zones, and kidnapping of Chinese nationals or attacks on Chinese facilities and nationals.

China to Buy IFC Bonds to Boost Trade Finance

2009-04-03

http://english.caijing.com.cn/2009-04-02/110132302.html

China has agreed to buy bonds issued by the International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank, to help finance trade credit, the People’s Bank of China said. The central bank did not give further details about the transaction in a statement on its website on April 1. The IFC’s new trade finance program “aims to provide liquidity support to financial institutions engaged in trade finance by providing them additional credit lines so as to restore the damaged trade finance channels and to fight the global economic recession triggered by the crisis,” the central bank said.

China starts driving a harder bargain with African governments

2009-04-03

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4bb6f596-1f1d-11de-a748-00144feabdc0.html

To the dignitaries gathered at Johannesburg's convention centre last month, haunting tales of a Chinese exodus from Africa must have seemed far from the truth. Beneath vast red banners, South African officials and their counterparts from Beijing unveiled a plaque to mark the opening of the first representative office of the China Africa Fund, a $5bn vehicle to further the Asian giant's investment splurge on the continent.

China arrives as a world power today - and we should welcome it

2009-04-03

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/02/g20-china-world-power-economy

2 April 2009 may yet be marked as the day on which, through the catalysis of a global economic crisis, China definitively emerged as a 21st-century world power. Just a few months ago, the talk in western capitals was still about graciously inviting China to join the western club of G7 plus Russia. Now G20 is widely accepted as the new top table of world politics, and China is already seen as one of the biggest players at that table. The question now is: what kind of world power will China be?

China no threat to good governance in Africa

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/dh66my

China's presence in Africa, "taken to be massive," is no t a threat to economic good governance, Carlos Oya, lecturer in development economic policy at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of London Univer s ity, said here on Monday. According to Oya, who spoke at a seminar on the theme of "governance for African development", said there was a manipulation effect through the media which described China's presence in Africa as a threat to economic good governance.

Botswana: Chinese firms to build massive industrial park

2009-04-03

http://allafrica.com/stories/200904010774.html

Cabinet ministers were among the dignitaries who witnessed the groundbreaking ceremony of Daheng Botswana Textile Industry in Phakalane on Monday morning. The project is funded by two Chinese companies, Daheng Holdings Group and Touch International Holdings Group, for US$52 million. The Phakalane Industrial Park will be the first phase of the project, which will major in textiles and clothing products.

Is China pulling out of Africa?

2009-04-03

http://www.doublehandshake.com/2009/04/01/is-china-pulling-out-of-africa/

Conventional wisdom has it that, in the eyes of China, Latin America and Africa are largely interchangeable: vast tracks of land full of precious commodities. It’s simple, really: China invests billions building mines, derricks, roads and schools abroad in exchange for a steady supply of oil, iron ore, copper and bauxite to feed the factories back in Zhejiang.

China should have better representation in IMF

2009-04-03

http://euobserver.com/9/27885/?rk=1

China has adopted an active and responsible attitude and substantial measures to confront the global financial crisis in cooperation with the international community. It has decisively implemented an active fiscal policy and moderately loose monetary policy in a timely fashion in order to stimulate the economy.

China Hydropower group signs big contract with West Africa

2009-04-03

http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews/articleid/3158582

According to FDI: Source from the State Property Management Commission recently, China Hydropower Group and CEB recently signed the commercial contract of Adjarala hydropower station project in Lome, capital of Togo, with the contractual amount of nearly EUR282m. The Adjarala hydropower station project is located on the Mono River where Togo and Benin meet.

China-Africa Development Fund at the Center of Discussion

2009-04-03

http://www.apanews.net/apa.php?page=diff_article&id_article=93303

A delegation of the China-Africa Development Fund (CAD-Fund) led by Mr. J. P. Zhao, Chairman of the CAD-Fund, met with some officials of the African Union Commission, the Chief Executive Officer of NEPAD, representatives of the African Development Bank (ADB) and the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) on Monday 30 March 2009, at the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

StanChart remains bullish on the China- Africa trade

2009-04-03

http://www.mmegi.bw/index.php?sid=4&aid=23&dir=2009/March/Monday3

Standard Chartered has restated its confidence in the continuing resilience of the Africa-China trade and investment corridor. Commenting, Anil Dua, Regional Head of Wholesale Bank, Africa, said: "Trade between Africa and China exceeded $100 billion in 2008." Standard Chartered Bank's senior Wholesale Banking executives have just returned from Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzen, China where they met with leading Chinese corporates with commercial interests in Africa.

Workers grumble about China

2009-04-03

http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=970443

Chinese investment in the West African state of Benin has brought substantial and visible benefits to the country but local workers mutter about exploitation and even slavery. The Beninese government and Chinese entrepreneurs insist that all is well on Chinese-run infrastructure projects but here, as in other parts of Africa, notably Zambia, there is a backlash against Chinese methods and focus on the continent’s vast natural resources.

South Africa, China join forces in commercialisation of pebble bed nuclear technology

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/ddbj9x

The advancement of the next generation of nuclear reactors has received a boost with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in Beijing between the Chinese and the South African developers of pebble bed technology. Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (Pty) Ltd (PBMR) of South Africa has been developing the pebble bed technology in parallel with the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology (INET) of Tsinghua University and Chinergy Co Ltd of China, whose pebble bed concept is based on a 10 MW (thermal) research reactor that was started up in Beijing in December 2000 and achieved full power operation in January 2003.

Sinopec eyes overseas buys, refining turnaround

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/dk9ttt

Top Asian oil refiner Sinopec Corp (0386.HK) is eyeing overseas projects for its exploration and production business, as the sharp fall in crude oil prices spurs bargain-hunting among oil giants. Sinopec (600028.SS), who has aggressively pursued acquisitions beyond China, is focusing on opportunities in Africa and South America in the near term, Chairman Su Shulin told reporters at a media briefing on Monday.

Nigeria, Beware of Chinese gift

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/cb9yxw

A lecturer in African Politics at the Oxford University, England, Dr. Abdul Raufu Mustapha has called on Nigeria to be cautious in its relationship with China, a technological giant and rising world power. He said that while the technology and friendship of China could be beneficial, Nigeria and Africa must be discerning enough not to allow China undermine their interests.

China urges cautious action on Darfur issue

2009-04-03

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-03/28/content_11086871.htm

China Friday called on the international community to "act cautiously" on the Darfur issue as it is afraid rash action could damage peace and stability in Sudan. "The involved parties should fully respect and listen carefully to the voices of the African Union (AU), the Arab League and African and Arabian countries," Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping said in his meeting with visiting Sudanese president's envoy Awad Ahmed al-Jaz in Beijing

JCTR tells Japan and others not to irresponsibly lend money to Zambia

2009-04-03

http://www.lusakatimes.com/?p=10359

“On March 26, the Japanese government offered the Zambian government a loan worth US $274 million for the implementation of the Increased Access to Electricity Services Project to cover five areas in the country”, observes Tina Nanyangwe-Moyo, Coordinator of the JCTR’s Debt, Aid and Trade Programme.

Sinohydro gets EUR 282-mln hydroelectric project in Tog

2009-04-03

http://www.energychinaforum.com/news/21855.shtml

Stated-owned Sinohydro Corp, the largest hydropower engineering and construction company in China, recently won a hydroelectric project in West Africa, according to information released yesterday by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC), sources reported. The EUR 282 million contract was signed by Communaute Electrique du Benin (CEB), Benin's state-owned electricity company, and Sinohydro Corp, in Lome, the capital of Togo, on Mar. 12.

Macau and S. Africa can benefit from each other

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/dfugda

Macau and South Africa can benefit from a co-operation between the two, Jerry Vilakasi, chief executive officer of the Business Unity of South Africa (BUSA), has said. Speaking to the Macau Daily Times before attending a dinner and cocktail reception with the South African Consul where he was invited as a key speaker, Vilakasi said that with tourism, infrastructure investments and gambling as the major sectors in Macau, both would benefit from a co-operation.

Is China the New America?

2009-04-03

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4778

In the Great Depression, as in the current economic crisis, the downturn was particularly severe because of a lack of leadership in the international order. The dominant financial power of the 19th century, Britain, was financially exhausted by the First World War. The new major creditor, the United States, had emerged as a strong economic player, but did not yet have leadership committed to the maintenance of an open international economic order. The simple diagnosis was that Britain was unable to lead, and the United States unwilling.

China Rises Again – Part I

2009-04-03

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=12154

In China’s long history, its leaders have managed other rises in power and preeminence, but the current rise confronts them with a different set of challenges on a global scale. This two-part series reflects on how China handles its rise and responds to other global powers. In the first article of the series, leading historian of China’s foreign relations, Wang Gungwu, details the considerations for Chinese leadership as the country moves beyond a global role largely limited to trade, exports and economics.

Chinamasa says SABC lying about state of prisons

2009-04-03

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news020409/chinamasa020409.htm

Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa dismissed as "false" a South African TV documentary which exposed the appalling prison conditions in Zimbabwe. The documentary showed emaciated bodies of prisoners dying from hunger and disease. RadioVOP quoted the Justice Minister accusing the SABC of fabricating the story and claiming the pictures were taken in other jails in Africa, not in Zimbabwe.

SADC to call for aid for Zimbabwe

2009-04-03

http://zimbabwejournalists.com/story.php?art_id=5478

South Africa's president Kgalema Motlanthe, current chairman of the Southern African Development Community, SADC, has been mandated to present a request for an eight-billion US dollar lifeline for Zimbabwe at the G20 summit in London on April 2. He will also have the unenviable task of pleading with the leaders of the world's richest countries to lift travel and visa restrictions imposed on President Robert Mugabe and more than 200 of his party leaders, government officials and loyalists.

Staff of PM unpaid

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/dxb9yv

Ten staff including James Maridadi, the spokesperson of the Zimbabwe Prime Minister, have not been paid for over two months. The Public Service Commission has refused to confirm their appointment. heir details were submitted two months ago to the Commission headed by ZANU PF's Dr Mariyawanda Nzuwa to be on government payroll but no action has since been taken.

Zimbabwe: SABC film reveals horrors of Zim prisons

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/cdt5nf

The South African Broadcasting Corporation SABC, has produced a remarkable documentary about conditions in Zimbabwean prisons which will be screened nation-wide on Tuesday. Produced by SABC’s Special Assignment team, the film entitled “Hell Hole” takes viewers into Zimbabwe’s prisons – which it ways have become virtual death traps for prisoners.

The African Union suspends Madagascar

AU Monitor Weekly Roundup: Issue 173, 2009

2009-04-06

http://www.aumonitor.org

The peace and security council (PSC) of the African Union (AU) has proclaimed that the process leading to the assumption of power by opposition leader Andry Rajoelina in Madagascar was unconstitutional and therefore has decided to suspended Madagascar’s membership from the organisation. Other African leaders, including the president of South Africa and current chairperson of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Kgalema Motlanthe, also condemned the ousting of President Ravalomanana as the product of unconstitutional action against democratic institutions. Prior to Ravalomanana’s resignation, the PSC had urged all Malagasy parties to uphold the spirit of dialogue and compromise in order to find a peaceful and consensual solution to the crisis and to carefully follow the provisions of the constitution of Madagascar on interim arrangements in the event of resignation. In a communiqué that the PSC issued on Madagascar, it reiterated that ‘the transfer of power was made in violation of the relevant provisions of the Malagasy Constitution and that the subsequent decisions to confer the office of the President of the Republic to Mr Andry Rajoelina constitute an unconstitutional change of government’.

The Libyan leader and chairman of the AU, Mouammar Kadhafi, met with officials of the AU Commission to discuss on a range of issues including the peace and security in Africa, the monitoring and implementation of decisions made at the 12th AU summit and the preparations for the next AU summit among others. Meanwhile, Mauritius has expressed its interest to host the 13th AU summit that was due to be held in Madagascar in July citing the need for the summit to be held in a country of the Indian Ocean region.

SADC leaders, who brokered the power-sharing agreement between Zimbabwean President Mugabe and Prime Minister Tsvangirai, pledged to mobilise economic support for Zimbabwe to the tune of $8.3 billion from international donors at their recent summit. Further, African trade ministers are meeting to discuss the impact of the global financial crisis on African economies, increasing food prices, climate change and global trade. They are also ‘expected to reflect on how to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Doha round of negotiation and the EPA negotiations can be successfully concluded’. Meanwhile, India is seeking to strike comprehensive economic cooperation agreements with the Common Market of Southern Africa and the East African Community (EAC). Also in development news, the self-evaluation report published by the African Peer Review Mechanism forum warned that Mozambique’s development model is creating a wide moat separating the rich from the poor, which could lead to social convulsions in the medium term.

Civil society organisations gathered in Tanzania to talk about their increased participation in discussions on the integration process of the EAC, a contribution that would go a long way in deepening the democratic foundations of the bloc. Meanwhile the EAC deputy secretary general Julius Rotich, stressing the importance of the civil society in the affairs of the region, used the gathering to urge non-state actors to actively take part in the organisation. Participants in the sixth African Development Forum aimed at reviewing progress made towards achieving gender equality in Africa put their leaders to task over their failure to implement international declarations made to end violence against women. Also in regards to civil society, the Forum for the Participation of non governmental organisations in the ordinary sessions of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights will take place in Gambia from the 13th to the 27th of May, 2009, to deliberate on the human rights situation in Africa.

Members of the Pan African Parliament, who feel that they are ready to be vested with some authority, are blaming the AU for slowing down the process of transforming the continental body into fully legislative organ rather than the current advisory role it enjoys. Also in regards to continental integration, Azubuike Ishiekwene analyses the difficulties that the United States of Africa agenda will face as African leaders continue to struggle to put their houses in order.

Benin: Support for women facing violence

2009-04-03

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=46301

Judges and gynaecologists in Benin have undergone training on the interpretation of forensic evidence in cases of violence against women, as well as in investigative procedures when dealing with rape cases. The training took place in Cotonou, the country’s economic capital, at an international conference held Mar. 16 to 19 as part of the Women's Justice and Empowerment Initiative, a U.S. government-funded programme to strengthen awareness of gender-based violence and prosecution of perpetrators in four African countries.

Botswana: Dress rules 'sexist'

2009-04-03

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7977859.stm

A ban on civil servants in Botswana wearing tight or revealing clothes to work is "sexist", a women's group says. The new directive said they could be disciplined for turning up in tight skirts or trousers, sleeveless tops, or clothes that showed cleavages or backs. The BBC's Letlhogile Lucas says women are particularly angered by a ban on headscarves and elaborate hairstyles.

Global: Redefining what it means to be a man

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/d7yo5f

“We need to redefine what it means to be a man, reinforce zero tolerance of gender-based violence, and make sexual and reproductive health services more relevant and user-friendly for men,” Purnima Mane, Deputy Executive Director of UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, told participants in a global symposium on gender equality.

Zambia: Bishops say African Union protocol threatens life, marriage

2009-04-03

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0901369.htm

In a strongly worded letter to the president of Zambia, the country's Catholic bishops called on the government not to ratify an African Union protocol with articles that would threaten the sacredness of life and the sanctity of marriage.

Botswana: UN expert visits Bushmen, sees no access to water

2009-04-03

http://www.survival-international.org/news/4408

The UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, James Anaya, visited Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana this month. He met with Bushmen who are living inside the reserve without access to water. Professor Anaya visited several Bushman communities in Botswana, including the resettlement camps Kaudwane and New Xade, where the government dumped several thousand Bushmen after forcibly evicting them from their homes inside the reserve. He also visited two Bushman communities inside the reserve, Gugamma and Metsiamenong.

Global: UN-Habitat avails funds for pro-poor housing

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/c6zbku

In an attempt to confront the current economic crisis by encouraging pro-poor investment in housing, Mrs. Anna Tibaijuka, Executive Director of UN-HABITAT, Thursday signed six agreements with project partners from Argentina, Bangladesh, Kenya, Nepal, Tanzania and Uganda with the aim of providing funds for affordable housing and infrastructure.

Kenya: ICC threatens officials

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/d8b83m

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has warned Kenyan leaders that he will act expeditiously and relentlessly against the suspects of the post election violence that rocked Kenya last year. In a terse statement, the ICC prosecutor Louis Moreno Ocampo said through his adviser Beatrice le Fraper du Hellen that he and his team are ready to step in once called to do so. He added that when the Kenyan parliament fails to set up a special tribunal to try those behind the violence the ICC would react.

Nigeria: Government issues final ultimatum to Pfizer

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/c57h6z

The Nigerian government has given a final term to end the lingering civil and criminal charges against Pfizer. A lawyer representing the government of that country in the 1996 suit against the drug maker said it will head to court this April if Pfizer fails to comply with the settlement agreement.

South Africa: Human rights and wrongs

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/cg9jre

Aghast, betrayed and angry describe the reactions of many South Africans to their government's refusal of a visa to the Dalai Lama. They describe, too, widely held views on the role that South Africa has played on the UN Security Council, the UN Human Rights Council, and in respect of the crisis in Zimbabwe. Why, many are asking, has South Africa squandered its enormous moral capital and its commitment to human rights to side with some very questionable regimes?

West Africa: ECOWAS ministers meetover human trafficking

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/ddkt9d

ECOWAS ministers responsible for women and children will meet in Accra, Ghana, on Fridayto adopt the regional policy for the rehabilitation of victims of human trafficking in West Africa. In a statement issued in Abuja, Nigeria's federal capital city, Thursday, and received by PANA here, ECOWAS said the policy seeks to establish and maintain a supportive and friendly environment where the victims, including those subjected to exploitative and hazardous child labour, enjoy equitable access to assistance in the region to enable them become functional members of the society.

CAR: Escalating violence uproots tens of thousands

2009-04-03

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30344

Intensified clashes in the Central African Republic have driven tens of thousands of civilians from their homes, the United Nations reported today, noting that the unrest could prolong the humanitarian crisis that has wracked the country for more than a decade. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that the violence could also jeopardize progress towards power-sharing between the Government and rebel groups.

DRC: Congolese flee widespread unrest

2009-04-03

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7977493.stm

Some 250,000 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been displaced following an operation to flush out Hutu rebels, aid agency Oxfam has said. The joint operation against the rebels earlier this year was hailed as a great success by both Rwanda and DR Congo.

Kenya: End abuse and neglect of Somali refugees

2009-04-03

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/03/29/kenya-end-abuse-and-neglect-somali-refugees

Hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees in Kenya face abuse by corrupt and violent police and a rapidly growing humanitarian emergency in the world's largest refugee settlement, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. Kenya should immediately rein in abusive police and grant new land for additional camps, while the United Nations and international donors should urgently respond to Somali refugees' basic needs.

Kenya: UN concerned over forcible return of Somali asylum seekers

2009-04-03

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30381

The United Nations refugee agency has expressed its concern over the increasing trend by Kenyan authorities to forcibly Somali asylum seekers back to their war-torn nation. On 31 March, 31 asylum seekers – nine men, eight women and 14 children – traveling by bus to refugees camps in Dabaab, in north-eastern Kenya, were sent back to Somalia.

North Africa: Hundreds feared dead after immigrant boats sink near Libya

2009-04-03

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,616513,00.html

Hundreds of African migrants are believed missing after the boats they were using to try to reach Europe capsized on Sunday and Monday. At least 21 bodies have already been recovered, and search-and-rescue operations are ongoing, Libyan officials told Reuters. News agencies, citing Italian media reports, claimed 23 survivors had been recovered. One of the boats was believed to be carrying around 250 passengers, and another had as many as 365.

South Africa: South Africa permits for Zimbabwe

2009-04-03

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7980796.stm

Zimbabweans can get permits to stay legally in South Africa for six months, the authorities have announced. Some three million Zimbabweans are believed to have crossed the border to escape the economic collapse and human rights abuses at home. The permit gives migrants the right to work and get healthcare and education.

Global: Global week of mobilisation and action against capitalism and war

2009-04-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/socialmovements/55360

From the 28th March to the 4th April, women and men from all over the world will be in the streets to protest against capitalism and war and to affirm that they will not pay for the crisis. Launched by the Social Movements’ Assembly, that gathered during WSF 2009 in Belem.

Nigeria: Niger Delta militants reject amnesty offer

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/clcyf4

The main militant group in Nigeria's oil producing Niger Delta region has scoffed at an amnesty offer announced on Thursday by President Umaru Yar'Adua, describing it as "unrealistic". "Such an offer by a government known for its insincerity must first be given to those who are being held captive by the Nigerian state for the rest of us to take seriously," the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) said in a statement e-mailed to journalists, in an apparent reference to its leader, Henry Okah, who is being tried for treason by the government.

South Africa: No Land, No Vote Campaign!

2009-04-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/socialmovements/55381

In 2006 while we were being forced to live on the pavement – due to evictions – the Mayoral Committee of Housing promised the Gympie Street Residents that they would be given accommodation in old Woodstock Day Hospital after negotiating with Provincial Government. At the same time as this was going on Mrs Zille ignored a personal plea from the children of Gympie Street to address their educational needs, which were being denied due to the fact that they were being forced to live on the pavement and did not have access to proper meals for six weeks.
Woodstock AEC Press Release

No Land, No Vote Campaign!


Who: Gympie Street Residents
When: 7th April 2009
Where: Cape Town Magistrate’s Court

The children of Gympie Street

In 2006 while we were being forced to live on the pavement – due to evictions – the Mayoral Committee of Housing promised the Gympie Street Residents that they would be given accommodation in old Woodstock Day Hospital after negotiating with Provincial Government. At the same time as this was going on Mrs Zille ignored a personal plea from the children of Gympie Street to address their educational needs, which were being denied due to the fact that they were being forced to live on the pavement and did not have access to proper meals for six weeks. Not long afterwards, once we had moved back into our houses, the City of Cape-Town’s water and electricity departments arrived and removed our water meters and electricity boxes. In doing so, they forced us to live without electricity and use a communal tap to collect water everyday. Through this, Helen Zille and the City of Cape Town have tried to take away our right to water and electricity. We demand that the City reconnect the water in our houses.

Through Mayor Helen Zille’s actions, she is showing that she would be willing to destroy the poor if they stand in the way of her bid to become the next President of South-Africa. Similarly, Pastor Dennis Robertson is willing to destroy a vulnerable community to make money. So all in all between Dennis Robertson and Helen Zille they have tried to take away our right to water, our right to electricity, our right to housing and our children’s right to education. Seeing that according to them we should not have any rights, we are refusing to vote in this year’s elections.

We would like to invite all Social-Movements, Trade Unions, NGO’s, etc, to show solidarity and support us in our bid to reclaim our rights. We also call on them not to vote for any of the parasites that make up the political parties in South Africa.

For more information contact:

Willy (Woodstock Anti-Eviction Campaign) @ 073 144 3619, Margaret @ 072 642 7386, Gary (WCAEC) @ 072 392 5859, Zehir @ 082 492 5207

Algeria: New calls for reconciliation

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/c3k9mv

Four repentant leaders of Algeria's Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) issued a fresh appeal to Islamist militants to surrender under the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation. The statement joins a series of appeals coming to light in the run up to the April 9th presidential elections.

Egypt: Muslim Brotherhood to join national strike

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/dgdfua

The most powerful opposition group in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, has debunked fears that it will sit out a planned national opposition boycott and demonstration on 6 April, when it announced on Thursday that all Egyptians should join in the Monday activities. The move came after the 6 April Movement entertained fears that the powerful Islamic group would not participate in the strike.

Madagascar: OIF suspends Madagascar

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/d3paom

The International Organisation for the Francophonie (OIF) has suspended Madagascar, describing as unconstitutional the process through which the current leader, Andry Rajoelina, assumed office.In a resolution adopted at the close of its standing committee meeting here on Thursday, OIF said the suspension would affect the overall multi-lateral cooperation between it and Madagascar, except humanitarian programmes.

Madagascar: Rajoelina freezes mine contracts

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/czo4kj

Madagascar's transitional leader Andry Rajoelina unveiled his new administration Tuesday and immediately froze all mining contracts, defying regional powers who have ordered him to reinstate his toppled predecessor. Rajoelina, who forced president Marc Ravalomanana to step down earlier this month, said he was ordering a review of all mining contracts with foreign firms to ensure greater revenues from drilling and extraction rights.

Mauritania: Police teargas protesters

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/cj392k

The police fired several canisters of tear gas to disperse opposition protesters in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, late on Thursday. The demonstration was held in response to the call by the National Front for the Defence of Democracy (FNDD), which is opposed to the 6 August 2008 military coup, on Mauritanians to resist the coup.

North Africa: Introducing Algeria’s President-for-Life

2009-04-03

http://www.merip.org/mero/mero040109.html

Across nearly the breadth of North Africa, the head of state enjoys a lifetime appointment. Morocco has a king. In Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, president since 1987, pushed for a constitutional amendment removing term limits and has now announced a bid for a fifth term in office. President Husni Mubarak of Egypt, who assumed office in 1981, is already serving his fifth term.

South Africa: South African elections: A good example for the rest of Africa?

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/d2y548

In less than one month, South Africans go to the polls to elect a government for the next five years. We have already witnessed pre-election violence in KwaZulu-Natal and legal problems regarding the right of South Africans to vote abroad. While no election proceeds without hitches, the question is whether South Africa is setting a good example for the rest of the continent with the way its elections will be conducted.

Sudan: Elections put back to 2010

2009-04-03

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7980032.stm

Sudan will hold general elections in 2010 - a year later than expected - the electoral commission has announced. The deputy chairman of the commission, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, said the electoral process would begin next month and finish in February next year. Under the 2005 peace deal to end years of war in the south, the elections were supposed to be held this year.

West Africa: Guinea cannot hold elections this year, says Kouyate

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/ddgba2

Former Guinean Minister Lansana Kouyate has said his country cannot 'technically' hold elections this year to return the country to democratic rule. Instead, Kouyate, leader of the newly-formed Party for Hope and National Development (PEDN), told journalists here Thursday that a national forum of key stakeholders should be convened to decide on the date for elections in the West African nation, where a military government took power in the wake of the death, on 23 Dec. 2008, of long-serving President Lansana Conte.

Guinea-Bissau: Army 'beats ex-PM'

2009-04-03

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7978452.stm

Guinea-Bissau's former Prime Minister Francisco Jose Fadul is recovering in hospital after being beaten by people dressed as soldiers. Mr Fadul said 15 armed men in uniform had raided his house, assaulting him and his wife and stealing computers, phones and even their wedding rings. The beating came after he had urged the government to hold the military to account for alleged corruption.

Guinea: Ex-ministers repay money

2009-04-03

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7978575.stm

Guinea's military authorities have released three former ministers after they agreed to repay money they are accused of embezzling. The three, who include former Prime Minister Ahmed Tidiane Souare, were arrested last week. They have already repaid the first instalments of the money. However, another ex mines minister was "unco-operative" and remains in custody.

South Africa: Zuma graft decision due on Monday

2009-04-03

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7981689.stm

South African prosecutors say they will announce on Monday whether they will drop corruption charges against African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma. South Africa media has been full of speculation that the charges will be dropped but a prosecution spokesman said the decision could go either way.

Zimbabwe: MDC ministers accept official Mercedes cars

2009-04-03

http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=20564

All but one of Zimbabwe's ministers from the former opposition has accepted an official Mercedes Benz. When they were in opposition MDC politicians condemned the profligacy of Mr Mugabe’s Mercedes Benz-mobilised Zanu PF party. Last September, when the agreement to form a power-sharing Government was signed, senior MDC figures made an informal decision never to accept an official Mercedes.

Africa: G20 slammed for ‘shortsighted’ deal

2009-04-03

http://www.waronwant.org/news/press-releases/16515-g20-slammed-for-shortsighted-deal

The anti-poverty charity War on Want today condemned Gordon Brown and other G20 leaders for throwing money at the global economic crisis rather than addressing its root causes. According to War on Want, the G20 has used the London summit to resurrect the failed policies and institutions of the free market era, in a deal which prioritises short-term action at the expense of fundamental reform.

Africa: G20: Japan Carries African Concerns To London

2009-04-03

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46337

Japan, the world's second largest economy, is calling for global initiatives to reactivate financial flows to Africa, including government grants, concessional loans and lines of credit. This is the crux of a message Prime Minister Taro Aso is carrying to the G20 summit in London Thursday, Japan's ambassador Takahiro Shinyo to Germany told German parliamentarians last week.

Africa: Gathering crumbs from G20's table

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/df9gyb

As leaders of the world's most productive economies meet in London on Thursday, street activism around the need for poverty alleviation and action on climate change is expected to divert the world's gaze from official proceedings. For African governments and civil society organizations, any diversion which focuses attention on issues of social justice will be welcome.

Africa: Sarkozy seeks trade to move away from ‘colonial’ ways

2009-04-02

http://tinyurl.com/dcjqvs

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, on a three-nation tour of Western Africa, pledged to break from his predecessors’ “neo-colonial” policies and forge business ties in the region. “We are still being reproached for neo-colonial interference,” Sarkozy said in Brazzaville, the capital of Republic of Congo, where he stopped after visiting the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. “I’ve already started bringing things back toward greater transparency and common interests.”

Global: Development aid at its highest level ever in 2008

2009-04-03

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/PSLG-7QMJ6T?OpenDocument

In 2008, total net official development assistance (ODA) from members of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC) rose by 10.2% in real terms to USD 119.8 billion. This is the highest dollar figure ever recorded. It represents 0.30% of members' combined gross national income

Southern Africa: Callous decision by SA will scorch Lesotho’s tiny economy

2009-04-03

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A972905

In Sotho there is a saying, “Matlo ho cha mabapi” — a fire at a neighbour’s house is likely to spread to yours. Look no further for proof of the proverb’s wisdom than how the chaos north of the Limpopo has rippled into SA . The Basotho are silent, however, on the consequences of a fire started by a neighbour. And fire is exactly what SA is about to unleash on its poorer neighbour in the Southern African Customs Union (Sacu).

Why G20 leaders will fail to deal with the big challenge

2009-04-03

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/22e0122a-1e1d-11de-830b-00144feabdc0.html

The summit of the Group of 20 leading high-income and emerging countries in London on Thursday seems set to achieve progress. But achievement must be measured not just against past performances, but against “the fierce urgency of now”. Unfortunately, it will come up short.

Africa seeks shelter from global meltdown

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/deyfuo

The tiny, sweltering shop where Barnabus Ossai sells boxes of imported A4-sized printer paper is a world away from the trading floors and banking offices where the global economic crisis was born. Ossai doesn't hold a subprime mortgage — the 28-year old bachelor shares a small Lagos rental apartment with some 10 family members. And with a net worth hovering somewhere around zero, he's hardly exposed to risky collateralized securities.

Africa's EASSY project delayed by a year

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/d2kenp

The East Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSY) will be operational in June 2010 instead of June this year, according to a project official. The delay means that the cable, owned by African and international telecommunications operators, is again the subject of speculation and allegations about the lack of seriousness of the project developers.

Thailand to seek rice deals with African buyers

2009-04-03

http://in.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idINBKK41025720090330

Thailand's commerce minister and rice exporters will visit African countries next month in a bid to secure rice deals, a senior official said on Monday. "It's a roadshow that includes trade and investment in Africa and, of course, rice will be the main issue we'll talk about," said Apiradi Tantraporn, director general of the foreign trade department at the ministry.

Investors eyeing South-South trade to help end crisis

2009-04-03

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=46312

Despite the challenges that the global economic crisis poses to Africa and other developing regions in the southern hemisphere, South-South trade still offers huge opportunities as there is room for growth beyond the current levels. According to Jean-Louis Ekra, president of the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) - a multilateral organisation that finances and promotes trade with African countries - the potential benefit from South-South trade may offer the same financial gains as trade with richer, Northern countries.

Africa: Migration calls for cross-border health policies

2009-04-03

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=46330

The mountain kingdom of Lesotho faces a number of unique hurdles with regard to HIV and AIDS. The country is landlocked within South Africa, the epicentre of the pandemic, and because of limited job opportunities and high unemployment rates within Lesotho, many of its citizens work as migrant labourers in neighbouring South Africa.

Somalia: High-risk sex workers fly under the HIV radar

2009-04-03

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83721

Hodan* spends most of her afternoons sitting outside her tiny house in Hargeisa, capital of the self-declared republic of Somaliland, blowing fruity smoke from a hookah pipe, her face covered in a green paste to help her skin look its best. She does not trawl the streets looking for customers; most of her clients make appointments to visit her at home. In this conservative Muslim country, commercial sex work is practised out of sight. Hodan says not even her neighbours know how she makes a living and if they ever found out, she is sure they would evict her immediately.

South Africa: AIDS programme short of R1-billion

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/cgskky

South Africa’s antiretroviral programme is short of R1-billion this year alone, yet the ANC wants to introduce a “wholly unrealistic” National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme within five years. So said SA National AIDS Council deputy chairperson Mark Heywood at the 4th South African AIDS conference.

South Africa: ANC poised to apologise for disastrous Mbeki policy

2009-04-03

http://www.health-e.org.za/news/article.php?uid=20032258

The ANC is planning a post-election apology to the nation for former president Thabo Mbeki’s disastrous HIV-Aids policy, which has been blamed for the deaths of thousands of infected people, according to a report in The Times. “We owe it to the nation. We, as MPs, were there and we failed to rise up,” said an ANC MP.

South Africa: ‘Hidden HIV epidemic’ among gay men

2009-04-03

http://www.health-e.org.za/news/article.php?uid=20032260

Over 40 percent of men who have sex with men were HIV positive, suggesting a “hidden epidemic” among this group. This is according to results from a survey of 266 men in Johannesburg and Durban, the vast majority of whom were black, under the age of 25 and identified as gay rather than bisexual.

Africa: A call for submissions: LGBT rights are human rights

2009-04-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/lgbti/55366

IGLHRC, Global Rights, INTERIGHTS, ICJ-Kenya and CAL are pleased to announce a call to writers, in the broader sense of the word, to submit pieces of writing of less than a thousand words on the topic LGBT rights are human rights.
A call for submissions: LGBT rights are human rights.

IGLHRC, Global Rights, INTERIGHTS, ICJ-Kenya and CAL are pleased to announce a call to writers, in the broader sense of the word, to submit pieces of writing of less than a thousand words on the topic LGBT rights are human rights.

Background

The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (“ACHPR”) contemplated under the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights was established on 2 November 1987 to monitor states parties' compliance with their obligations under the Charter, and to promote the full implementation of the Charter nationally and regionally. Since its establishment, the ACHPR has worked with human rights defenders and Non Governmental Organisations (“NGOs”) in the discharge of its mandates. The Commission has also contributed to the development of human rights jurisprudence, especially in the areas of economic, social and cultural rights.

The African Charter provides a framework for “NGO’s” to play an important role in the effective functioning of the African human rights system, in particular the promotional and protective work of the ACHPR. It is within this framework that Lesbians, Gays, Bi-sexuals and Transgenders (“LGBT”) issues were introduced at the ACHPR at its 39th ordinary session in Banjul, Gambia at which African LGBT people openly voiced their concerns.

Following the groundbreaking participation of out LGBT people at the 39th ordinary session of the Commission, LGBT advocates from various part of the continent, with the support of International Gays and Lesbians Human Rights Commission (“IGLHRC”) and the Coalition of African Lesbians (“CAL”), took part to subsequent sessions of the commission, consistently drawing the attention of the NGO forum and the ACHPR, on the treatment of LGBT people on the continent. Their active participation, at the NGO forum, over the past three years have enabled the mainstream African human rights movements to begin engaging with rights of LGBT people. At the 40th ordinary session of the Commission, IGLHRC and Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) submitted a shadow report on Uganda to which the Ugandan government responded, a resolution on the situation of human rights defenders with an emphasis on the situation of LGBT rights defenders was adopted at the 41st session of the ACHPR, various statements have been delivered on the situation of LGBT people on the continent by both LGBT and mainstream human rights organizations, commissioners begun to ask various representatives when presenting the country reports on their treatment of LGBT people. The ACHPR is however yet to articulate its position on the rights of LGBT people.

At its 44rd ordinary session, LGBT rights defenders were formally invited by the NGO forum to lead discussion on sexual orientation and gender identity at the NGO forum due to take place in May 9 – 11, 2009 in Banjul, Gambia. The aim of the discussion will be to facilitate an engagement with individuals and NGOs represented on LGBT rights in order to consolidate a common position on LGBT rights, to assist in bringing LGBT rights within broader human rights agenda and to highlight for the commission the violations continue unabated aided by the failure to have a common position on the need to respect, protect and promote the rights of LGBT people.

Context

The need to ensure support from the ACHPR in protecting the rights of LGBT people cannot be over-emphasized. The 45th session will take place at a time when South Africa is yet to prosecute those responsible for the murder of Sizakele Sigasa and Salome Masooa, Senegal has sentenced 9 men to 8 years in prison under the charges of “unnatural acts” and “association of criminals”. Nigeria is prosecuting 18 men in Bauchi under the charges of “vagrancy and idleness”. Four women who had been charged for “unnatural acts and incitement to homosexuality” in 2007 in Cameroon, are currently serving a 3 years suspended sentence and could be rearrested and jailed for up to 6 months in case they continue their “lesbianism practices” during the three years. Cases like these are common. Lesbians, Gays, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) people are often subject to state and non-state human rights abuses throughout the continent. These Human Rights violations are often the direct or indirect effect of an existing law criminalizing same-sex conduct, and/or the non-existence of a codified mechanism protecting the rights of LGBT people on the continent.

38 out of 54 African States still have on their statute books laws criminalising consensual same sex practices among adults. There is also a new wave of legislation and review of criminal laws in order to criminalise same sex relationships. In December 2008, Burundi, a country that has never criminalised same sex relationships included it in their new penal code, which otherwise would have been progressive because it abolished the death penalty. Nigeria is involved in lawmaking aimed at criminalising same-gender marriages. Similar laws were included in the constitutions of Uganda and Burundi in 2005. In 2006, an attempt by the Rwandan government to include sodomy such laws in its penal code failed.

For more examples of ongoing violations, see annexure A

About the booklet

Increasingly, people linked and those not linked to the LGBT movement have continued to make their voices heard on the subject of LGBT rights by saying that LGBT rights are human rights. The booklet will be comprised of writings from opinion makers, mostly writers, from all over the continent. The booklet will be distributed at the NGO forum to participants, State delegates, and Commissioners.

* Writers are asked to respond to the struggle of LGBT rights in Africa focusing on events related to the treatment of the LGBT community on the continent in less than a thousand words.
* The submissions can either be in a form of an essay, a song, a poem, a letter, fiction or any other form of expression that can be printed.

- The overarching message needs to be LGBT rights are human rights or that criminal laws have no place in matters involving consenting adults.

The submissions should be sent by e-mail to:

Joel Gustave Nana

jnana@iglhrc.org

The e-mail subject should be:

LGBT Human Rights booklet

The closing date for submissions is:

14- April- 2009

Global: Everyday racism in China

2009-04-03

http://www.thefrontiertelegraph.com/?p=184

From the early eighties, when African students could still study for free at the Beida University in Beijing, discrimination against Africans in China was reported in the international media. Since then, the story has been regularly repeated. Just before the Beijing Olympics, racism was front page news again. In the bars of Sanlitun, the downtown area for foreigners, they were systematically denied entrance, just as in the discos of the capital.

South Africa: Help us today to fight poverty in South Africa’s slums

War on Want

2009-04-03

http://www.waronwant.org/support-us/south-africa-appeal

Imagine you live in a cramped shack too small for you and your family. You fear eviction by the authorities at any time. You face the threat of your home being demolished. This is a reality faced by hundreds of thousands of people in South Africa - every single day.

Africa: Rice land grabs undermine food sovereignty

2009-04-03

http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=46

In the wake of the 2008 global food crisis, African capitals have been buzzing with renewed talk of the need for food self-sufficiency, and rice is often at the top of government agendas. Although everyone agrees on the need to increase production, the solutions coming out of the corridors of power boil down to the tired old formula of getting more fertilisers and “high-yielding” seeds to farmers.

Global: Inflation and speculation: Ingredients for the next food cCrisis?

2009-04-03

http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2402

In an April 1, 2009 article titled Inflation and Speculation: Ingredients for the Next Food Crisis? published by Common Dreams, Food First executive director Eric Holt-Gimenez and Policy Analyst, Annie Shattuck propose the re-regulation of speculation in commodities--a regulation that was lifted in 2000. The petition to Obama and Congress points out that the 2008 food price volatility "could have been stopped with sensible rules that, if enforced, would have staved off the malnutrition and starvation... caused by excessive gambling on food prices."

Global: Resolution of the HRC following the Special Rapporteur’s WTO report

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/c4wzs3

On March 9th, the Special Rapporteur on the right to food presented the conclusions from his mission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to the Human Right Council. In its March 20th resolution on the right to food, the Council encourages the Special Rapporteur to continue to engage with the World Trade Organization to follow up on the issues of concern identified in his report.

Côte d'Ivoire: Journalists convicted of insulting president

2009-04-03

http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/102076/

On 31 March 2009, reporter Nanankoua Gnamantéh and managing editor Eddy Péhé of pro-opposition weekly "Le Répère" were convicted of "insulting" Ivorian President Laurent Gbabgo and ordered to pay fines of 20 million FCFA (approx. US$ 40,000).

Egypt: Activists mark centenary of freedom of expression demonstrations

2009-04-03

http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/102059/

About 100 journalists, human rights activists and media personnel gathered in Cairo this week to mark the "100 Anniversary of Press Freedom Demonstrations in Egypt 1909", an event organised by IFEX members in Egypt the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) and the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR). It was held in cooperation with the Arab Affairs Committee of the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate (EJS).

Madagascar: Security forces harass bloggers

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/dm98zr

Opponents to the Haute Autorite de la Transition (High Authority for the Transition) have been holding daily demonstrations in the Malagasy capital since March 21, 2009. Last Saturday's protest was harshly repressed by the security forces, and resulted in at least 34 injured people, including children.

Somalia: Freelance Reporter sentenced to three years in Puntland

2009-04-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/55367

SOCFEX condemns the arbitrary detention of Jama Ayanle Fayte, freelance reporter of Lasqorey website and the subsequent sentencing to two years today by the regional court of Puntland. A regional court in semi autonomous state of Puntland has sentenced Mr. Jama Ayanle Fayte of Lasqorey.net – a Somali news website after has been accused of publishing unfounded reports that the authorities deemed as false. The interior minister pressed the charges against Mr. Fayte who appeared the court without defense lawyer.
SOCFEX PRESS RELEASE

30 March, 2009

PRESS RELEASE: Freelance Reporter sentenced to three years in Puntland

SOCFEX condemns the arbitral detention of Jama Ayanle Fayte, freelance reporter of Lasqorey website and the subsequent sentencing to two years today by the regional court of Puntland.

A regional court in semi autonomous state of Puntland has sentenced Mr. Jama Ayanle Fayte of Lasqorey.net – a Somali news website after has been accused of publishing unfounded reports that the authorities deemed as false. The interior minister pressed the charges against Mr. Fayte who appeared the court without defense lawyer.

Mr. Fayte denied the charges but said other reporters could have published the alleged reports on lasqorey.net website without his knowledge.

The SOCFEX is calling the Puntland authority to take concrete and effective action to investigate the case of Mr. Fayte.



We strongly insist on the authorities to respect his rights under the law and ensure that he receives fair trial

Zimbabwe: Freelance journalist released after abduction

2009-04-03

http://zimbabwejournalists.com/story.php?art_id=5477

Gweru based freelance journalist Kudzai Musengi was on 31 March 2009 allegedly abducted by three unknown men who bundled him into their car and blindfolded him before speeding off to a bushy area where he was subjected to intense interrogations. According to MISA-Zimbabwe, Musengi who was eventually released around 7pm on 1 April 2009, was interrogated about his alleged involvement with reports that were being beamed by Voice of America’s Studio 7 on farm invasions. Musengi denied having any links with Studio 7.

Global: Why Haiti can't forget its past

An Open Letter to Ban Ki-Moon

2009-04-03

http://www.counterpunch.org/morse04012009.html

Thank you for the attention you have brought to the country of Haiti. In response to your New York Times op ed piece I wanted to widen your perspective a bit. I don't pretend to represent anyone. I've been living in Haiti since 1985. I grew up in New England with my Haitian mother and my American father during the 1960's and 1970's. Though my parents were both teachers, I'm nothing more than a musician/innkeeper. When I arrived in Haiti, the Creole pig, an indigenous Haitian pig which was the backbone of Haitian peasant life, had recently been wiped out because of a supposed threat of swine flu.

DRC: Legal techincalities stalling Nkunda extradition

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/d8y6lg

The Rwandan Foreign minister, Ms. Rosemary Museminaly, said here Thursday that some legal technicalities were still stalling the extradition, to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), of rebel leader Laurent Nkund a batware, who was arrested in Rwanda in January. Museminaly, who was speaking as a guest of the European parliament, said, however, that the question of extradition had already been agreed upon in principle by the authorities concerned.

North Africa: Bamako to host security conference

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/c5h9g6

A regional conference on security on the Sahelo-Saharan strip running from Mauritania to Darfur, in Sudan, will be organised in Bamako in the coming weeks, President Amadou Toumani Toure of Mali announced here. Toure said the decision followed the endorsement of the proceedings of consultations between experts from two countries in the region, Algeria and Libya, by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Sahelo-Saharan countries.

Sudan: Egyptian troops boost AU force

2009-04-03

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30342

The hybrid United Nations-African Union (AU) peacekeeping force in Darfur, known as UNAMID, received a boost today from the arrival of 100 personnel from the second Egyptian Infantry Battalion. Another 100 troops from the battalion are slated to arrive tomorrow in the strife-torn western flank of Sudan as a meeting of the Tripartite Committee – comprising the Government of Sudan, the AU and the UN – is scheduled to take place for the first time in Darfur.

Sudan: Israel accused of carrying out air strike

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/c2aug8

Israel carried out air strikes in January on a convoy moving through Sudan which it believed to be carrying weapons destined for Hamas in Gaza, according to a report by the US television network CBS. Two Sudanese politicians confirmed that unidentified aircraft targeted the convoy in a remote desert region north-west of Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast.

Sudan: Surviving without the help of NGOs

2009-04-03

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/04/02/sudan-surviving-without-the-help-of-ngos/

On March 4th, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan. In retaliation, 13 NGO’s were banished from the country the day after, a number that rose to 16 within the week. As a result, a handful of projects have halted operations: those offering drinkable water supply, food distribution, health care and teaching systems among others.

DRC: The new blood diamonds?

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/dzc2c5

First there were "blood diamonds," the gems that fueled conflict and human rights abuses in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Then there was "conflict cocoa," the chocolate source that's harvested by children and funds civil war in Ivory Coast. Now concern is rising about the minerals that go into common consumer electronics. Could that be a BloodBerry or a Conflict Cell in your pocket?

Global: Can social networking give a leg-up to the poor?

2009-04-03

http://www.apc.org/en/news/can-social-networking-give-leg-poor

Can Facebook and YouTube help the poor tackle their pressing problems? Or is this promise just hype? One is faced with tough questions: Can “Web 2.0 tools” directly influence the poor themselves? Can those interested in poverty work do better to start with the “situation” rather than the “technology”? Or should one think big and dream of a network of networks encompassing a billion children and their teachers, families and friends — nearly all of the poor people in the world, and most of the rich?

Global: Fighting poverty from telecentres

2009-04-03

http://www.apc.org/en/news/fighting-poverty-telecentres-mali-and-colombia

Throughout Mali, the use of mobile phones, the services offered by telecentres established in different parts of the country – thanks to agreements between local organisations, companies and cooperation agencies – and convergence with local radio stations, are opening doors that were unimaginable just a few years ago for people cut off from the flow of information and communications.

Africa: Commemorating Haiti: A revolutionary story

2009-04-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/55374

Join us as we seek to remember and celebrate Haiti and its Revolutionary history. We shall remember the slave revolution of 1791-1804 which was the only successful slave revolution in history. In addition we shall seek to create awareness about recent political events in the country such as the kidnapping of Aristide, the disappearance of Pierre- Antoine Lovinsky and the deployment of a United Nations military force (MINUSTAH), actions that were all coordinated by imperialist forces.
COMMEMORATING HAITI: A REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY

Date: 4th (Saturday)
Time: 10 –4
Venue : Mathare Environmental Conservation Youth Group Hall- “Pequininos” (Get of at Mlango Kubwa, kwa mkokoteni/ Snack Bar - Mtaragwa Lane)

Activities: (10-1) - Talk on the revolution of 1791—1804 + Recent
Political events. (2-4) - Short Documentary on Haiti and discussions thereafter.

Join us as we seek to remember and celebrate Haiti and its Revolutionary history. We shall remember the slave revolution of 1791-1804 which was the only successful slave revolution in history. In addition we shall seek to create awareness about recent political events in the country such as the kidnapping of Aristide, the disappearance of Pierre- Antoine Lovinsky and the deployment of a United Nations military force (MINUSTAH), actions that were all coordinated by imperialist forces.

Brought to you by Watoto wa Anastasia na Ota Benga, Fahamu, UPePo, Bunge la Mwananchi and Mau Mau Research Centre (MMRC)

www.anastasianaotabenga.org

Africa: MILEAD Fellows Program: Call for Applications 2009/10

2009-04-03

http://www.moremiinitiative.org/events.php

Moremi Initiative is pleased to announce its call for applications to the Moremi Initiative for Leadership Empowerment and Development (MILEAD) Fellows Program. The MILEAD program is a one-year leadership development program, designed to identify, develop and promote emerging young African women leaders to attain and succeed as leaders in their community. Interested candidates from Africa or the Diaspora are invited to apply by contacting Moremi Initiative>

Africa: Peace and Security Fellowships for African Women for 2009/2010

2008-02-27

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/46437

The Conflict, Security and Development Group (CSDG) at King’s College London together with the Africa Leadership Centre (ALC), is pleased to announce a call for applications for the Peace and Security Fellowships for African Women for 2009/2010. These Fellowships1 are intellectual and financial awards for personal, professional and academic achievements, as well as the recognition of future potential. From October 2009, the Peace and Security Fellowships for African Women will be delivered by CSDG and the ALC, which is a partnership of King’s College London and Kenyatta University, Nairobi.
Peace and Security Fellowships for African Women

The Fellowship
The Conflict, Security and Development Group (CSDG) at King’s College London together with the Africa Leadership Centre (ALC), is pleased to announce a call for applications for the Peace and Security Fellowships for African Women for 2009/2010. These Fellowships1 are intellectual and financial awards for personal, professional and academic achievements, as well as the recognition of future potential.

From October 2009, the Peace and Security Fellowships for African Women will be delivered by CSDG and the ALC, which is a partnership of King’s College London and Kenyatta University, Nairobi.
The ALC aims to build a new community of leaders generating cutting edge knowledge on peace, security and development. To this end, the ALC undertakes to do the following:
Create an enabling environment for ideas that are grounded in African realities;
Provide space for interaction with role models;
Build capacity for independent thinking;
Expand the knowledge base to develop transformational ideas that can be developed to create visions of change;
Create opportunities to transfer knowledge to achieve multiplier effects for communities;
Connect with processes nationally, regionally and globally, especially in the field of peace, security and development; and

Build lasting partnerships that will maintain an African-led vision of change.
In addition, the programme of the ALC is guided by its core values, which are as follows:
African-led ideas and processes of change.
Diversity.
Independent thinking.
Recognition of youth agency.
Pursuit of excellence.
Integrity.

The Fellowships bring together African women in the early stages of their careers to undertake a carefully designed training programme in conflict, security and development. This training is followed by an attachment to an African regional organisation or a Centre of Excellence to acquire practical experience in the field of peace and security. It is intended that this project will train African women to develop a better understanding of African peace and security issues in order to increase their participation in conflict management processes and other areas of security concerns for Africans.

The Purpose of the Fellowship
The Peace and Security Fellowships for African Women are designed to expose young professional African women to the complexities of conflict, security and development. The exposure is to equip them for careers in this field by developing their expertise to generate African led ideas and processes of change for addressing challenges on the African continent. The Fellowships especially aim to ground this expertise on peace and security in the pursuit of excellence and integrity.

The Fellowship is conceived against a number of background factors. First is the comparatively low number of African women exposed to rigorous academic writing and policy analysis in the field of peace and security especially as compared with those involved in human rights and development issues. Second is the need to assist African women to meet the demands of the Beijing process and more recently the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 that calls for the inclusion of women at all decision making levels in “all national regional and international institutions and mechanisms for the prevention, management and resolution of conflicts”.

This Fellowship is aimed at challenging the existing tendency that seems to reinforce the male dominant discourse on conflict and security related matters. It will also develop the network of African women scholars working in the field whilst linking them with the peace and security mechanisms of relevant institutions.
Programme Delivery

This is a one-year Fellowship, divided into two 6-month phases. The first phase will be delivered at the ALC, Nairobi and King’s College London. Particular aspects of the programme will be delivered at King’s College London in London. These include orientation, institutional visits and simulation seminars. The core of the training will be delivered at the ALC in Nairobi and will be led by CSDG, King’s College London and ALC Senior Fellows and designated mentors for the programme consisting of renowned international experts in the field of peace, security and development.
During the training, the Fellows will be encouraged to engage critically with the discourse on conflict security and development in Africa. They will also visit and study institutions working in the field of peace and security in Africa and Europe. This phase will end with a simulation seminar series during which mock conflict management situations will be practiced. In the second phase, Fellows will be attached to an African regional organisation or Centre of Excellence to undertake practical work in the field of peace and security including peace and conflict management processes.

Terms of the Fellowship

Successful Fellows will have the status of full time students on the post-graduate non-degree programme at King’s College London and the Africa Leadership Centre, Nairobi. They will be required to obtain UK and Kenyan student visas for at least six months and they will be subject to the immigration rules of the UK and Kenya. The immigration rules for the UK can be accessed on the King’s College London web page for obtaining student visas: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/international/preparing/visas/ Conflict Security and Development Group, School of Social Science and Public Policy, King’s College London 2

Additional information on studying as an international student at King’s College London is available on the College’s webpage for International Students:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/about/structure/admin/acareg/studentservices/intstudents
Please contact the Kenyan Embassy/High Commission in your home country for the relevant procedures to obtain a Kenyan student visa for the Fellowship period of one year.

The position is funded* and will include a stipend of $1,000 per month for the first 6 months based in London and Nairobi. In addition, a sum of $1,000 will be made available to Fellows upon their arrival on the Fellowship Programme to assist with settling in expenses. Fellows are strongly advised to make all necessary accommodation arrangements prior to taking up their positions on the Fellowship Programme. In addition, the Fellowship programme will be responsible for all Fellowship related travel and accommodation costs, to and from home country, between Nairobi and London, for institutional visits and to and from attachment location.

For the second phase of the Fellowship to be based in Africa, Fellows will have a stipend of $1,000 per month, exclusive of medical insurance expenses; in addition to a $500 one-off allowance to enable them settle in to their respective countries. Fellows are expected to find their own accommodation during this phase also.
It is important to note that this financial support is for individual researchers. It does not cover dependants and it is not intended to support family members. Successful candidates will need to make alternative arrangements to cover the costs of dependants before arrival on the Fellowship Programme. Under the UK and Kenyan Immigration laws, prospective Fellows must satisfy the relevant authorities that they have sufficient funds to support themselves and their dependents before arrival in the UK and Kenya (taking into account the stipend to be provided by the Fellowship Programme).

The Fellowship is a full time appointment and Fellows are expected to make a full time commitment. Given the intensive nature of the programme, including its short 6-month phases in different locations, as well as necessary extensive travel, successful applicants that are expectant or nursing mothers will be advised to defer their admission to the Fellowship Programme.

The offer of the Fellowship is subject to successful candidates obtaining visas to cover the 6-month duration of the first phase of the Fellowship in the UK and Kenya. Failure to obtain a visa to enter the UK and Kenya automatically invalidates the offer of Fellowship with no consequences to the Fellowship Programme. Successful applicants will be required to undergo medical examinations at recommended venues prior to taking up their positions. It is a condition of the Fellowship that Fellows shall return to their base or home countries at the end of the Fellowship. Please, note that any deviation from the Fellowship, except as may be lawfully authorised by King’s College London, shall affect a Fellow’s immigration status. Please consult the British Embassy/High Commission and Kenyan Embassy/High Commission in your home country for more information.

The Conflict Security and Development Group reserve the right to terminate the appointment in the event of any breach of the conditions of the Fellowship.

Eligibility
Applicants should:
Be female citizens of an African country, with valid travel documents.
Have knowledge of, or experience of women’s rights, gender and development issues.
Must be able to demonstrate a commitment to contribute to work on peace and security in Africa
Demonstrate commitment to the core values of the programme and the Africa Leadership Centre.
Must have a relevant organisational base and be endorsed by an organisation with which they have been involved for at least two years. Exceptional candidates without such organisational ties will be given special consideration.
Have a demonstrable plan for how to utilise knowledge gained in the Fellowship upon return to their countries and organisations.
Hold a Master’s degree or Bachelors with an equivalent level of professional experience.
Must be fluent in spoken and written English.

Application
To be considered for the Fellowship please e-mail or post the following documents to Eka Ikpe at csdg@kcl.ac.uk or Eka Ikpe, Conflict, Security and Development Group, King’s College London, Strand Bridge House, 138-142 Strand, London, WC2R 1HH, UK by 17:00 hrs, Monday 4 May 2009:
A letter of application detailing your relevant experience
A supporting statement detailing why you think that this Fellowship is important and future plans for engagement with peace and security issues no longer than 2,000 words
2 letters of recommendation(To be received directly from the Referees by the deadline of 17:00 hrs, 4 May 2009)
Recent curriculum vitae
Two samples of your written work (maximum 5,000 words) with a one page abstract
Please ensure all documents are sent in as MS Word attachments in a single email message (separate emails for the same application will not be accepted) or as a single post package and that your name is indicated at the top right hand corner of every page of all documents submitted.

Due to the large volume of applications received it may not be possible to contact all applicants that have not been short listed. Hence, if you have not received a response from CSDG by 24 July 2009, please assume that you have not been shortlisted on this occasion.
* This project is supported by a range of funders including the Foundation Open Society Institute, King’s College London Alumni, UK Department for International Development and King’s College London. It is subject to continued funding support from all funders.

Author brings Harare to London

2009-04-03

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7972962.stm

The challenge of making a fresh start in Britain is the subject of a darkly comic and fast-paced new novel, Harare North, by Zimbabwean writer Brian Chikwava. The novel is set in Brixton in south London, and it offers a view of London as seen through the eyes of its migrant population, particularly Africa's dispossessed. Hence, Harare North, the title and ironic name the book's unnamed hero gives to London.

Film and Panel about Ken Saro-Wiwa and Shell

April 15, 2009 in San Francisco

2009-04-03

http://tinyurl.com/djt2cm

On April 27, 2009 relatives of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other MOSOP members will bring Shell to trial in New York for the company’s complicity in the death of the Ogoni 9. Join us at this benefit for Justice in Nigeria Now (JINN) to support JINN while socializing and learning about the Ogoni and the upcoming trial.

Fahamu