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The revolution and the emancipation of women

A Reflection on Sankara’s Speech, 25 Years Later

Amber Murrey

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/83074

cc L AThe life and work of Thomas Sankara can be taken as a reminder of both the power and potential for human agency to enact transformation.

I would like to situate my ideas within the geo-political context of the popular uprisings that continue to take place around the world as people organise against neoliberal policies of advanced capitalism and their resultant gross inequalities in wealth, health and education. Accompanying the intensifying neoliberal crises - manifested through the financial crisis, food security crisis, and struggles over land reform and landed property - is an ever expanding militarisation. The US military now has more bases and more personnel stations in more countries than ever in its history. The US Africa Command is one component of the US military’s current phase of expansion, including millions of dollars of military equipment, arms and training in African nations.

This is our contemporary moment as we approach the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Thomas Sankara.

The revolutionary transformation of the West African country Upper Volta to Burkina Faso (what is known as the August revolution of 1983) occurred during a previous neoliberal crisis, that of the 1980s African debt crisis. Sankara vehemently and publicly denounced odious debt and rallied African political leaders to do the same.

Sankara’s politics and political leadership challenged the idea that the global capitalist system cannot be undone. During four years as the president of Burkina Faso, he worked with the people to construct an emancipatory politics informed by human, social, ecological and planetary wellbeing. The people-centred revolution was a pivotal point for a shift towards new societies on the continent. We have much to learn from the Burkinabé revolution.

What distinguishes Sankara from many other revolutionary leaders was his confidence in the revolutionary capabilities of ordinary human beings. He did not see himself as a messiah or prophet, as he famously said before the United Nations General Assembly in October of 1984. It is worth quoting from Sankara at length, when before the delegation of 159 nations, he said:

‘I make no claim to lay out any doctrines here. I am neither a messiah nor a prophet. I possess no truths. My only aspiration is…to speak on behalf of my people…to speak on behalf of the “great disinherited people of the world”, those who belong to the world so ironically christened the Third World. And to state, though I may not succeed in making them understood, the reasons for our revolt’.

Furthermore, Sankara placed women’s resistance agency at the centre of the revolution. He saw women’s struggles for equal rights as a focal point of a more egalitarian politics on the continent.

Meaningful social transformation cannot endure without the active support and participation of women. While it is true that women have been deeply involved in each of the great social revolutions of human history, their support and participation has historically often gone relatively unacknowledged by movement leaders. This was the case when Russian women united to march in St. Petersburg in February of 1917, demanding bread. Similarly, French women marched to Versailles in 1789, again to demand bread. Despite significant contributions to revolutionary movements, women remained second-class citizens. Oftentimes women’s political organisations were chastised by formalised male-led revolutionary groups.

Women mobilised for freedom against colonial and neocolonial oppressions In revolutionary and social struggles across the African continent. Again, many male leaders either omitted or failed to recognise the vital nature of the work carried out by women to mobilise and maintain social movements.

Sankara was somewhat unique as a revolutionary leader - and particularly as a president - in attributing the success of the revolution to the obtainment of gender equality. Sankara said, ‘The revolution and women’s liberation go together. We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph’.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The West African country of Upper Volta, a former French colony with more than seven million inhabitants, was among the poorest countries in the world at the time of the popular uprising on 4 August 1983. At 280 deaths for every 1,000 births, it had the world’s highest infant mortality rate. School attendance hovered around 12 per cent and was even lower for girls. Thomas Sankara, a Burkinabé with military training, had witnessed the student and worker-led uprisings in Madagascar. He was influenced by what he witnessed there as a young man and returned to Upper Volta with an anti-imperialist worldview, founding in a strong notion and respect for the power of the grassroots. This put him at odds with the ruling party of Upper Volta and he was imprisoned in 1983. The people demonstrated in mass to protest his arrest and on 4 August 1983, Blaise Compaoré and some 250 soldiers freed Sankara. Sankara took over as president and formed the National Council of Revolution (NCR). He was 33 years old at the time. One year later the people of Upper Volta embraced a new national name, that of Burkina Faso - meaning the land of upright men.

During four years as the president, peasants, urban and rural workers, women, youth, the elderly and all ranks of Burkinabé society mobilised to create a more egalitarian and human-centred society. Sankara focused especially on the political education of the masses. A literacy campaign was organised and school attendance doubled in two years. He nationalised all land and oil wealth as a means of ending oppressive class relations based on landed property. An anti-corruption campaign was implemented. A massive reforestation project was undertaken as millions of tree saplings were planted to halt desertification. They sunk wells, built houses, and immunised 2.5 million children, including children from bordering countries.

Then on 15 October 1987, Captain Blaise Compaoré led a military coup against Sankara. It is widely accepted that the coup was in the interests of the landed and upper classes, whose domination was threatened by the revolution. Sankara and 12 of his aides were assassinated.

Blaise Compaoré remains the president of Burkina Faso today and has been implicated in conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, and in arms trafficking and the trafficking of diamonds. There has been no independent investigation into Thomas Sankara’s assassination, despite repeated requests by the judiciary committee of the International Campaign for Justice for Thomas Sankara, a legal group working in the name of the Sankara family. The UN Committee for Human Rights closed Sankara’s record in April of 2008, without conducting an investigation into the crimes.

SANKARA AND GENDER

To a rally of several thousand women in Ouagadougou commemorating International Women’s Day on 8 March 1987, Thomas Sankara took a distinctive position as a revolutionary leader and addressed in great detail women’s oppression. He outlined the historical origins of women’s oppression and the ways in which acts of oppression continued to be perpetuated during his lifetime.

He said:

‘Imbued with the invigorating sap of freedom, the men of Burkina, the humiliated and outlawed of yesterday, received the stamp of what is most precious in the world: honor and dignity. From this moment on, happiness became accessible. Every day we advance toward it, heady with the first fruits of our struggles, themselves proof of the great strides we have already taken. But the selfish happiness is an illusion. There is something crucial missing: women. They have been excluded from the joyful procession…The revolution’s promises are already a reality for men. But for women, they are still merely a rumor. And yet the authenticity and the future of our revolution depend on women. Nothing definitive or lasting can be accomplished in our country as long as a crucial part of ourselves is kept in this condition of subjugation - a condition imposed…by various systems of exploitation.

Posing the question of women in Burkinabe society today means posing the abolition of the system of slavery to which they have been subjected for millennia. The first step is to try to understand how this system functions, to grasp its real nature in all its subtlety, in order then to work out a line of action that can lead to women’s total emancipation.

We must understand how the struggle of Burkinabe women today is part of the worldwide struggle of all women and, beyond that, part of the struggle for the full rehabilitation of our continent. The condition of women is therefore at the heart of the question of humanity itself, here, there, and everywhere.’

His words display a profound understanding of, and active solidarity with, women’s struggles, of which he posits as a struggle belonging to all of humanity.

He locates the roots of African women’s oppression in the historical processes of European colonialism and the unequal social relations of capitalism and capital exploitation. Most importantly, he stressed the importance of women’s equal mobilisation. He urges Burkinabé women into revolutionary action, not as passive victims but as respected, equal partners in the revolution and wellbeing of the nation. He acknowledges the central space of African women in African society and demanded that other Burkinabé men do the same.

In an interview with the Cameroonian anticolonial historian Mongo Beti, he said, ‘We are fighting for the equality of men and women - not a mechanical, mathematical equality but making women the equal of men before the law and especially in relation to wage labor. The emancipation of women requires their education and their gaining economic power. In this way, labor on an equal footing with men on all levels, having the same responsibilities and the same rights and obligations…’.

This means that while the revolutionary government included a large number of women, Sankara did not believe that an increase in female representation was an automatic indicator of gender equality. He truly believed in grassroots organising and that change had to originate with the energy and actions of the people themselves.

He urged his sisters to be more compassionate with each other, less judging and more understanding. He questioned the need to pressure women into marriage, saying that there is nothing more natural about the married state than the single. He criticised the oppressive gendered nature of the capitalist system, where women (particularly women with children to support) make an ideal labour force because the need to support their families renders them malleable and controllable to exploitative labour practices. He characterised the system as a ‘cycle of violence’ and emphasised that ‘inequality can be done away with only by establishing a new society, where men and women enjoy equal rights’.

HIs focus on labour rights and the gendered means of production was symbolised through the day of solidarity that he established with Burkinabé housewives. On this day, men were to adopt the roles of their wives, going to the marketplace, working in the family agricultural plot and taking responsibility for the household work.

This speech provides a powerful heritage of political leadership and stands as a source of political ideas and inspiration for liberation movements on the continent. Sankara offers a possibility for continued male political engagement and solidarity with women’s oppression.

MILITARISM

Radical feminist theorists Barbara Sutton and Julie Novkov (2008) explain militarization as ‘how societies become dependent on and imbued by the logic of military institutions, in ways that permeate language, popular culture, economic priorities, educational systems, government policies, and national values and identities’. US-backed militarisation of Africa takes a couple of different forms. First, it means an increase in troops on the ground. US Special Ops and US military personnel have been deployed in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Mauritania, South Sudan, and (potentially) Nigeria.

Second, US military personnel conduct training sequences with African militaries. Training is underway in Algeria, Burundi, Djibouti, Chad, Namibia, Somalia, South Africa and many others. This is often presented as a ‘counterterrorism’ effort to stifle the spread of Al Qaeda across North Africa but it is a political tool. Bolstering local military capabilities in un-democratic nations is one means to ensure the control and suppression of local populations, who are often labeled as ‘terrorists’ to justify brutal crackdowns on social and political protests.

Third, the US military funds social science research into African society, culture and politics. This takes various forms, one of which is the use of SCRATs (or Sociocultural Advisory Teams) for the purposes of preparing US military personnel for deployment and missions. This can be understood through the same framework of contemporary counterinsurgency-style warfare in Afghanistan (and previously in Iraq), where winning the ‘hearts and minds’ requires in-depth knowledge of local peoples and cultures (what the military refers to as ‘human terrain’). British and French counterrevolutionary theorists during the anti-colonial period of the 1950s and 1960s also promoted the need for in-depth knowledge of local revolutionary culture and social organisation as a means of anticipating and controlling anti-colonial social unrest.

Although the US government claims that the US Africa Command is an extension of peacekeeping and humanitarian aid, an historical analysis of US intervention on the continent indicates otherwise. At every instance of African agency the US was willing and ready to intervene on the side of the colonisers.

In our contemporary moment, neoliberal promises and free-market policies have failed to return on their promises of increased wealth and progress. But more than this, they have caused increased social inequalities that is accompanied by a dangerous militarism. Scholars (see Sutton and Novkov 2008, for example) have explored the ways that increased poverty and the narrowing job markets caused by neoliberal policies pushes people into the military as a means of economic survival. This is true in the so-called Global North as it is in the so-called Global South.

The process of militarism is accompanied by gender-specific inequalities and disadvantages. Horace Campbell in his article, ‘Remilitarisation of African Societies: Analysis of the planning behind proposed US Africa Command’, (2008) explains, ‘Sexual terrorism…finds its echo in Africa where insecurities generated by warfare, ethnic hatred, rape, sexual terrorism and religious fundamentalism increase violence and lead to unnecessary military mobilization’.

The voices of African women activists and intellectuals are particularly necessary as the interconnections between militarism, masculinity and violence become clearer. Patricia McFadden writes, ‘By imbuing the notion of rampancy with political weight in terms of its use as a gendered and supremacist practice within militarism…[it] facilitates both class consolidation and accumulation, as well as gendered exclusion of women and working communities in Africa’. Women have been combating their exclusion through both organized and non-organized action.

A strong military structure paves the way for the resource plunder and large scale dispossessions that are seen in neoliberal states in the so-called Global South. In this system, the state ensures profit for class elites (both international and domestic) by guaranteeing the super-exploitation of labour and the dispossession of millions of people of their lands and livelihoods for resource extraction at serious costs to local ecology, health and wellbeing. This guarantee can only be made through an increased militarism that stifles political mobilisation.

But Thomas Sankara and the August Revolution of 1983 tells us another story. They provide a different way of thinking about social organisation. Sankara understood that capitalism is dependent upon the unequal deployment of and distribution of power, particularly state power. But, as he showed us, the state is not unalterable. The state is a complex system of human relationships that are maintained through violent power/coercion and persuasion. And what Sankara did was work to bring the state apparatus down to the level of the people, so to speak. He encouraged people to engage with the state and to change the unequal power relations embedded in the state structure. He did this - as demonstrated earlier through the example of gender empowerment - by exposing the ways that power is generated, controlled and dispensed and then identifying alternative forms of social relations. This is what the August Revolution of 1983 sought to perform in Burkina Faso.

The life and work of Thomas Sankara can be taken as a reminder of both the power and potential for human agency to enact transformation and as a reminder of our obligation to engagement of and for human wellbeing. As the social mobilisations taking place across the world are demonstrating right now, this engagement for human wellbeing means refusing to submit to neoliberal policies that see humans in terms of labour and profit.

CONCLUSION

I’ve been told that the first time that my daughter’s paternal grandfather cried was at the news of Thomas Sankara’s assassination. It was certainly the first time that my daughter’s father saw his father cry. He recalls, even at the age of seven, his sense of confusion and sadness over Sankara’s death.

The image of my daughter’s grandfather entering his home and collapsing onto the sofa, holding his face in his hands and crying emerges in my head each time I think of Sankara. This image of a middle aged Cameroonian man, Jacque Ndewa, thousands of miles away, who had never travelled to Burkina Faso, crying quietly on his sofa. This is the resonance that Sankara had, across the African continent and among disenfranchised and dispossessed people everywhere.

In honour of his memory, I praise and celebrate his fearlessness, his resilience and his political leadership for human emancipation.

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* This text is from a presentation by the author at a Revival of Pan-Africanism Forum event entitled 'Celebrating the Life of Thomas Sankara' and held at Jesus College, University of Oxford on 8 June.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Land grabs: how the law pushes people off their land

Tomaso Ferrando

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/83076

cc Y GThe state as an instrument of capital interests is providing cheap and disposable labour, land, and fiscal privileges to land grabbers.

Subverting the classic vision of the private-public power relationships, some African countries are repeating the same motto that an East European newspaper used on the occasion of the visit of the German chancellor in 1999: 'We forgive the crusaders and await the investors’.[1] As pointed out by Ulrich Beck, in fact, ‘in a global context where capitals are free to flow without restrictions and where competition among countries represents the rule rather than the exception, the threat is no more represented by the fact of being absorbed in the dominant paradigm, but of being left outside’. It must be of no surprise, therefore, that ideologically and economically constrained participants of a global competition for investments, which are mainly subsidised by low interest rates and financial alchemies, are currently participating in a global regulatory race to the bottom where anything is on sale, included land.

In particular, there are two different legal ways through which investors can acquire different rights over land, depending on their counterparts and on the proprietary regime of the host countries. Without making any reference to the distinction between private and public law, these two mechanisms could be called that of ‘public grabbing’ and ‘private grabbing’. Independently from the chosen method, the current events and the historical comparison demonstrate that whether land in Africa is expropriated, declared void, or exposed to rising competition between small and commercial farmers, the fact that the regional population increased from 230 to 860 million between 1960 and 2010, that the average cultivated are amounts at 0.3 hectares per capita,[2] and that the global demand for land and production is far from refraining, make us affirm that the paradigmatic shift from small-scale farming to industrialized exploitation will inevitably impact on low income countries and the poorest and most vulnerable and marginalized segments of the populations. If that is the reality of the facts, the history of Africa shows that displacement and migrations, mainly intra-regional, represent the solution to present or perceived risks, and thus what we have to expect.

PUBLIC LAND GRABBING AS DIRECT EVICTION

Entering more into the details of the ‘public grabbing’, which on the basis of the available data seems to be the most diffuse,[3] the land at the center of the deal is considered by the host State as ‘public or national’ on the basis of its own legal order or expropriated on the basis of a declaration of 'public interest' or 'public necessity'. In both cases, sovereign states maximize their internal power in order to define the content and boundaries of their internal legal system, giving meaning to broad concepts like 'public domain' and development, or drawing a series of lines that trace a clear distinction between legal and illegal occupation, used and unused land, available and not available land, and determining who has the right to see his/her property title formalized. The way in which these sovereign actions are undertaken can lead toward very divergent paths, the two extremes of which are represented by the complete pursuit of the common good and the total subordination to the needs of the global market and of exogenous actors. What I claim hereafter is that sovereign, trapped in the prisoner dilemma and in a ideological homogenization, is exercised by several Sub-Saharan African countries in a way that unequivocally tends toward the latter extreme, completely turning its back toward legal diversity and alternative forms of development.

WHAT 'PUBLIC' AND WHAT 'INTEREST' IN THE DECLARATION OF PUBLIC INTEREST?

Taking as an example the 2012 report on villagization in Ethiopia by Human Right Watch provides the dramatic reconstruction of the ongoing process of resettlement that is taking place in the Gambella Region, and across the border between Ethiopia and Somalia, under the auspices of the Ethiopian government and its project of villagization for rural development. Undertaken with the official goals of guaranteeing to relocated populations ‘access to basic socioeconomic infrastructures […] and to bring socioeconomic & cultural transformation of the people’, the Gambella plan is part of a broader program of resettlement, that concerns 1.5 million people in four regions (Gambella, Afar, Somali, and Benishangul-Gumuz), more then 100,000 of which lived or are still living in the Gambella Region. On the basis of the data presented in the report, the decision of the federal government to intrusively exercise its sovereign power over its land and population,[4] undoubtedly raises several doubts concerning the respect for national and international procedures in resettlements, the existence of the required Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) of the local population, the pledged voluntary character of the resettlement, the effectiveness of the compensation plans, and the subordination of people's interests to the needs and wills of global investor. But, above all, it clearly demonstrates the potential of sovereignty as a legitimate coercive power over the population.

Although in the report the connection between large-scale agricultural development and land displacement is kept in the background and there is no direct connection with the 100,000 hectares of land that have already been leased by the Federal Government to Karuturi Global Ltd.,[5] the case of the Gambella Region appears as an emblematic example of a functional use of sovereign prerogatives: according to the Ethiopian national constitution, in fact, the federal state is provided with the power to expropriate and resettle people after having identified and declared the existence of a public purpose. In particular, Proclamation No. 455/2000 has codified in the federal legislation the constitutional provision that protects people from unjustified expropriation and guarantees the right to compensation.[6] More precisely, Proclamation No. 455/200558 discloses the rationale lying behind expropriation, and provides us with a clear image of how the notion of development is currently filling the empty box of public interest and giving it a meaning.

From the point of view of smallholders, public purpose represents a double-edged sword that in the past was certainly utilized by some governments in favor of local farmers and non-owners and against the rights and interests of landlords, but that is now become a legitimate tool for forced eviction informed by what certainly is a constrained, market-led and economically driven ideological and political framework of the leading elite. The Ethiopian case, together with the endless series of cases of development projects which have been undertaken over inhabited land and forced resettlement, represents, in fact, a classical example of the monopolization of 'public purpose' by the idea of 'development', and of its use in order to pursue objectives which are clearly against development as intended by international law.

According to the 2004 'Review of progress and obstacles in the promotion, implementation, operationalization, and enjoyment of the right to development' by the UN Economic and Social Council, and on the basis of article 1 and the preamble of the Declaration of the Right to Development, in fact, the right to development is defined as a right to a particular process of development in which ‘all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized’.[7] Pursuing development, rather than being a mere economic process, has to enable people to realize the 'rights and freedoms set forth in the International Bill of Human Rights, in their totality as an integrated whole'.[8] Pursuing development, in other words, is not an end that legitimizes any violation and abuse, but a process that has to be treated as a right, a dialectic between state and people where all rights, i.e. economic, social and cultural, as well as civil and political, are realized together.

However, irrespective of the limits and boundaries determined by international law as a supranational obligation, States are continuously referring to 'development' as the key word to ideologically and legislatively legitimize the acceptance of large-scale investments in land that, as stated before, clearly violate the most fundamental rights of the involved population. On the other hand, international financial institutions, oblivious of the fact that, 'if one excludes the performance of China from the estimates, from 1987 to 1999 there was a rise in the number of poor from 880 million to 945 million',[9] and deaf to the critics, continue pursuing an economic-development strategy, and to play a fundamental role in financing large-scale investment in Sub-Saharan Africa, manly by 'helping attract investors and shaping policy and law that allows streamlined and lucrative contracts'.[10]

Although some remedies are some time provided in order to minimize the negative impact of forced resettlement or to obtain the free, prior and informed consent, it is also true that it is possible to count infinite cases in which rules have been violated, therefore transforming the completed resettlement from legal to illegal, and that the idea underlying the possibility of compensation is that any plot of land is the same for farmers, disregarding the evidence that the fact that some land is commercially more attractive than other means that it is more productive, and completely ignoring all the anthropological and sociological studies that have demonstrated the unique relationship between land, culture and identity. The clearest evidence is provided by the Gambella case: although the Ethiopian authorities affirm that the entire 'villagization' procedure is voluntary, entire households are moving back to their original villages, unequivocally demonstrating the fact that land is not a commodity that can be exchanged with any other available good.

By defining as 'national interest' or 'national good' land-related development projects that do not respect the idea of the right to development, that generate migration, and produce unresolvable violations of the fundamental rights of people and local communities, states abuse the rights that are conferred on them both by the international and national community. If the distinction between internal and external sovereignty is artificial, and if internal sovereignty has to be exercised in respect of international law, in fact, the use of internal discretion in order to define as 'of national interest' projects which negatively impact local people and violate international obligations even when mitigation procedures are in place, is, therefore, an abuse of sovereignty that can be condemned in the appropriate fora.

In conclusion, as recently reminded by Liza Alden Wily,[11] the current rush to land does not represent anything new for our planet, nor is the use of sovereignty and legality as an instrument to perpetuate injustices and favor private accumulation. The state as an instrument of capital interests is utilizing its prerogatives to provide the latter with cheap and disposable labor, land, and fiscal privileges. Extending what Erik Hobsbawn had already affirmed in the '50s of the last century about public interest, we can thus conclude that in many circumstances sovereign prerogatives are ‘no more than the forces of profit-pursuing private enterprise’ which seek ‘to turn land into a commodity’, ‘to pass this land into the ownership of a class of men impelled by reason; i.e. enlightened self-interest and profit’, and ‘to transform the great mass of the rural population into freely mobile wage-workers’ (1962, 184).

In a system of international and national law based on fragmentation and the maximization of national prerogatives in favor of selfish interests, the legal response can hardly succeed if it remains individual: What is needed is a network of local seeds of global resistance.

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* Tomaso Ferrando is a PhD Student, Sciences-Po Law School, Paris.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

REFERENCES:

[1] Beck U., 2010, 'Reframing Power in the Globalized World', Organization Studies 29(05)
[2] Int'l Fund for Agric. Dev., Doc. EB 2008/94/R.2, 'Policy on Improving Access to Land and Tenure Security', 17
[3] Liz Alden Wily, 'Looking back to see forward: the legal niceties of land theft in land rushes', 39 Journal of Peasant Studies 751–775 (2012).
[4] Article 51 (1) of the Federal Constitution entrusts the federal government with the task of enacting laws 'for the utilization and conservation of land'. Article 52(2)(d) gives regional states the powers and functions 'to administer land and other natural resources in accordance with Federal laws.'
[5] Article 1.1 of the Land Rent Contractual Agreement Made between Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and Karuturi Agro Products PLC, signed 25 October 2010, states that: 'The scope of this Lease Agreement is to establish a long-term land leas of rural land for [the] development [of] palm, cereals and pulses farm on the land measuring 100,000 hectares (Itang 42,088 hectares and Jikao 57,912 hectares), located in Gambela Regional State, Nuer Zone, Jikao District and Itang Special District together with the lease certificate serial No. EIA-IP 14584/07 with all rights of easement of amenities, fittings, fixtures, structures, installations, property or other improvements standing thereon, to the company incorporated for the purposes hereinafter mentioned by the lessee in the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia'. See Stebek E.N., op. cit.
[6] 'A Proclamation to Provide for the Expropriation of Land Holdings for Public Purposes and Payment of Compensation', Proclamation No. 455/2005, Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.
[7] First report: E/CN.4/1999/WG.18/2; second report: A/55/306; third report: E/CN.4/2001/WG.18/2; fourth report E/CN.4/2002/WG.18/6 and E/CN.4/2003/WG.18/2
[8] UN Economic and Social Council
[9] UN Economic and Social Council, op. Cit., p. 9
[10] Oakland Institute, 2011, 'Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa. The Role of the World Bank Group', The Oakland Institute, Oakland, USA
[11] Alden Wily, supra note 3.

Turning tables in hip music

Mapping female agency from 50 Cent to Ĩno nĩ Mũmũ

Ng’ang’a wa Muchiri

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/83124

cc E AEast Africa’s music videos periodically engage in regressive gender politics. But one could still trace female agency and empowerment and immediately begin to counter notions of male dominance.

It’s a bit of a cliché to decry the demeaning depiction of women in music videos, but Loverance’s “Up!” featuring 50 Cent deserves a re-hashing of that old argument. The anatomical description of exactly what the male persona is interested in reduces the female half of our planet into walking sex objects. What the woman has, the man wants and “really, really “needs. The result of this heterosexual match-up? The woman’s moans and groans and a lot of visceral liquids. Globally, the black female body undergoes similar real or figurative assault—from rape as an instrument of war in Darfur and the Congo, to dancehall lyrics from the Caribbean which deploy rhetoric similar to 50 Cent’s.

What I am most interested in, however, are those moments when patriarchal hegemony exposes fissures. No single form of domination has the potential to entirely overcome resistance. Colonial forces succumbed to indigenous political agitation during the 1950s and 1960s in Africa, just like women’s liberation movements began to retract male supremacy.

In similar ways, arguments constructed in the entertainment industry about male-female relations betray moments of dissonance. East Africa’s music videos periodically engage in regressive gender politics. Thankfully, however, it is easy to trace female agency and empowerment and immediately begin to counter notions of male dominance.

I would like to look at three tracks: ‘Binti Kiziwi’ by Zanto, ‘Sinzia’ by Nameless, and ‘Ĩno nĩ Mũmũ’ by Murimi wa Ka-Half. For all three songs, I will discuss both the lyrics and the accompanying videos; each representation by the respective artist does unique and complementary work in communicating its message.

Zanto’s record works hard to place the female body on a pedestal — an act that silences women rather than according them due agency. ‘Sinzia’ by Nameless demonstrates fissures in the fiction of male control; ultimately, however, the music video resorts to heterosexual configurations to maintain men’s assumed control over women. Wa Ka-Half’s music is a wonderful contrast to Loverance’s Up! In the former, all references of violence are male-oriented; unlike Loverance and 50 Cent’s song though, the only thing getting “beat” in Wa Ka-Half’s song is the man.

Masculinity silencing women, attempted in Up!, is best exemplified by Zanto’s Binti Kiziwi [1]. The Tanzanian artiste sings about a deaf and dumb girl with whom he is in love, but is unable to communicate his emotions. The singer can neither rely on language nor the girl’s friends to send his missives of love. The symbolism of a woman who, though pursued by men, cannot speak for herself is the ultimate fantasy for conservative patriarchy. The woman cannot “talk back;” she neither fights back nor seeks to assert her presence. In the lyrics she is not heard, and in the music video she is seated for the entire length of the song. Although the camera follows the male singer and his retinue in various parts of an urban area — presumably Dar es Salaam — the woman sits on a tree trunk and waits.

However, the video is very astute in its discussion of the power of visual texts. The video, directed by Adam Juma, is a meta-commentary on visual studies and their effective ability to communicate across barriers. Having failed to secure his beloved’s attention, the male persona in the video — performed by Zanto — uses sketched drawings to pass on his message. In one scene he is shown working on pencil figures while seated in a commercial structure. Both the viewer and the woman whom Zanto is wooing get to see the drawings at the same time. The sketches depict a man, who is dressed like Zanto, and a woman, dressed like his object of affection. They also depict a heart-shaped love symbol — eliciting a smile from the girl. Finally, they depict another representation of Zanto with tears spilling from his eyes as he gestures rejection with his hands. The whole package is complex and connects with viewers on different levels: the lyrics, the music video, and the drawings featured in the video.

For the most of the song, the woman is an object to whom Zanto directs his attention and emotions. It is not until she places her hand in Zanto’s open palm that she asserts her own subjectivity. She can now exercise her agency to make choice: accept him or reject him. The smiles on the couple at the end of the song demonstrate she chose to welcome him into her life. Zanto, who has been kneeling in front of the girl while showing her the drawings, takes the arm she offers and kisses her on the back of her hand. These gestures are all part of the vocabulary that his viewers comprehend; he is aping a proposal as depicted by Hollywood and his kissing gesture suggests he regards her as some kind of royalty. Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because she is placed on a pedestal of beauty, the woman has no voice, and her choices are only celebrated to the extent that they coincide with those of the man after her.

The commercial nature of this relationship is not explicitly alluded to in Zanto’s lyrics; however, the fact that it is staged at a curio shop forcibly brings a discussion of economic and monetary exchange to the fore. Curio traders sell “cultural” items to tourists seeking a physical souvenir to complement memories of their travels. In modern day tourism, an individual has to return home with an object that supposedly captures the essence of her destination. Dragons might epitomize China, while lions, elephants, giraffes and buffaloes do the same for Africa. In Zanto’s music video we catch glimpses of necklaces, cowry shells, batik prints, wooden sculptures etc. stock generally found in such shops. Despite Africa’s international acclaim as a tourist destination waiting to woo its visitors with safaris, pristine beaches, and snowy-capped mountains, the majority of tourism is foreign-oriented and domestic travel only makes a small percentage of earnings garnered. Thus, many of the clients to whom curio traders sell are foreigners, especially from Europe, Japan and North America.

There are many levels of economic oppression in this scenario. The juxtaposition of women’s bodies and cowry shells, immediately invokes the African slave trade. This is further reinforced by the location of the music video—Dar es Salaam, and the nearby island of Zanzibar were key transit points for trafficking humans. Tourism depends upon its connection to prostitution and drug trafficking to ensure clients get as enjoyable an experience as possible. All these economic exchanges reinforce a form of marginalization that is similar to that invoked by Zanto’s song. Zanto places a beautiful woman on a podium; she is separated from production and is not seen engaged in any form of labor. She is twice handicapped—physically due to her deafness—and economically—due to her inability to produce. The moment she places her hand in Zanto’s she places herself at his mercy. He turns into her “knight in shining armor” who will support her, not only emotionally, but also materially.

‘Sinzia’, by Kenyan musician Nameless, stages a possible response to Zanto. ‘Sinzia’ is similar to Zanto’s music in that it also features a voiceless woman — portrayed as the epitome of beauty — and who is made the object of male attention. She transgresses the construction of an unproductive female figure that Zanto advances and is thus a double threat: virile and productive. However, the music video resolves this conundrum by providing the woman with a male escort. Masculinity can rest at ease knowing that its mechanisms of control have once more won the day.

Nameless’s song features an attractive young woman, who first appears on camera to apply make-up. She is a housewife; she cleans, cooks and does laundry — remarkable at a time when high educational achievements in East Africa mean more women hold professional careers outside the house. The above traits make her extremely desirable and the men she comes into contact with openly admire her and jostle each other to attract her attention. This happens when she ventures into a male homoerotic space — a construction site — where she delivers food. Unlike the woman in Zanto’s video, she is productive and seems to run her own catering business. As the only female figure in the song, she is very prominent and is recorded dancing to the music in several scenes. Her singularity offers her more agency than that accorded the two women in Loverance’s and Zanto’s tracks. This is further supported by the fact that she is an entrepreneur who is engaged in a profitable business.

Precisely because of this, she is the embodiment of masculinity’s worst nightmare. The fact that she is a threat is well demonstrated by her incursion into a homosocial construction site. Before she arrives, the men are peacefully working together. Her presence, however, causes workplace accidents—one man falls into a barrow while another applies paint onto a colleague as the beautiful woman’s figure distracts him. She is also the cause of male-male competition that was absent before; the men push each other to get closer to her and, supposedly, be the one to tame and/or mate with her. The lyrics also support a reading of the virile and productive woman as a terror to masculinity. The chorus repeatedly references dreams and sleep whenever the male persona—performed by Nameless—reflects on the woman’s beauty.

Nasinzia nikikuwaza (oohh!) x2
Miaka rudi miaka nenda
Nasinzia nikikuwaza (oohh!) x2
Kila siku ya kalenda

Sleep takes over me when I think of you (oohh) x2
Year in, year out
Sleep takes over me when I think of you (oohh) x2
Every day of the year

It is clear that temporality is a key issue in the affection that the men have for the woman. However, her presence and her personality are not compatible with traditional masculinity. That she is both sexually available and economically productive is too much for patriarchy to bear. She must be tamed. It is important to note that the lyrics themselves do not betray any gender tension. They could be understood as a love song for a woman whom a man admires. However, the music video, as a visual supplement to the song, adds several debates to those of love as communicated by Nameless’s words.

The music video resolves the dilemma it sets up for the audience by attaching the woman to a man. After she serves a meal to the construction workers, the young woman is picked up by a man driving a white pick-up truck. The vehicle and the appliances in her house show she is clearly living a very modern life. However, the kisses she and the driver share demonstrate that she has been controlled through a heterosexual relationship. Although the male construction workers are sad to see her leave, they are at least comfortable that she is in the arms of another man.

The inaudible female body, present only to be “seen and not heard,” appears several times in East Africa’s hip music videos. Ĩno nĩ Mũmũ, by Kikuyu musician Murimi Wa Ka-Half, explores the relationship between a young man and his girlfriend, a woman who, in addition to being a few years older than him, is obese — her main identifier in the song. “Mũmũ,” is a nonsense Kikuyu word that has come to mean “fat person” after the song appeared. The song and the accompanying music video depend on several assumptions about a “suitable” woman. It depicts the man’s girlfriend as an unsuitable match, except that the man has no choice due to economic constraints.

At the beginning of the song, the artist portrays the male persona as a victim of economic hardship. “Ndũkire Nairobi, gũetha kĩbarũa/ Itekũmenya ngũtuĩka ngũmbũ ya Mũmũ” discusses how he travelled to Nairobi in search of satisfactory employment only to end up the slave of a mũmũ. “Ngũmbũ,” the word Wa Ka-half uses to depict a parasitic relationship between the couple, denotes economic servitude; however, the sexual nature of this particular configuration is not lost to the audience.

Murimi Wa Ka-Half’s is a heterosexual relationship gone wrong and the video, as the visual complement to the song, works hard to communicate this. The video shows the woman take several bites from a plate of food before sending the dish flying across a table towards the singer. Presumably, the woman has come to weight as much as she does by eating not only her portion, but also that of her “better half.”

The music video also features a grazing dairy cow, ostensibly to support a line in the lyrics which says that the woman “eats like a lactating Fresian.” This scene can be placed in contrast to that of a traditional and submissive mate, the kind Wa Ka-half thought he was getting. The suitable wife, supposedly, takes her husband’s coat when he returns from work, prepares a warm bath and serves him a hot meal. What we see in the video, instead, is a woman who literally starves her partner such that his body diminishes, while hers expands.

Another way the woman is depicted as unsuitable is through her embodiment of violence. She is photographed chasing the man while holding a wooden cooking spoon and a machete. The cooking spoon is a banal symbol of male-oriented domestic violence; the machete, however, understood as male weapon suggests that the woman has crossed gender boundaries while simultaneously emasculating her partner. Neither the eating scene nor the domestic abuse are explicitly referred to in the song, indicating that the music video relies on a gender discourse that listeners to the song are expected to already possess.

There is, however, some correlation between items mentioned in the song and those that appear in the video. The chorus makes a connection between the woman and heavy farm equipment.
Ĩno nĩ Mũmũ
Ĩno nĩ Mũmũ
Ũkimĩikia cavi nũnginya ĩkunde magana
Yanyua yaigania, nũta karagita
Ĩraramaga ũta ngũma ĩnyuĩte kairasĩ
Yanyua yaigania, nũta karagita
Ĩraramaga ũta ngũma ĩnyuĩte kairasĩ (Ĩno nĩ Mũmũ)

This is Mũmũ
This is Mũmũ
A gas-guzzler that’s expensive to run
Well-fueled it’s a tractor
That groans like a she-devil intoxicated on Kairasĩ [2]
Well-fueled it’s a tractor
That groans like a she-devil intoxicated on Kairasĩ

Earth-moving machines and an eighteen-wheel truck, shown in the music video to represent the woman, increasingly retract her humanity. She is an ogre, not only for her oppressive behavior, but also due to her eating habits, her size and her use of violence. The correlation between ogres as animals and the woman as an animal is achieved by referring to her as a “big fat cow.”

Technically, the music video deploys camera shots from below to capture the woman towering the viewer and literally filling up the screen. Video manipulation is also clearly evident when used to magnify and enlarge certain parts of the woman’s body, especially her buttocks as she faces away from the camera. This is an uncanny repetition of the Sara Bartman case; the black female body suffers similar distortion in the hands of white, or black, men. [3] The underlying concern that this particular woman is “not wife material” is fully encapsulated by the inclusion of slim, skimpily-dressed female dancers.

These, it seems, are the kinds of women Wa Ka-Half, as a representation of other Nairobi men, was hoping for. The female persona in the song is silenced and listeners do not get any of her opinions regarding the relationship. The male persona, as one variant of dogmatic masculinity, decries his emasculation and even calls upon his mother to pray for him to overcome his current tribulations: living with a Mũmũ.

Religion is invoked as another mechanism to control female bodies gone wrong, since the man does not possess the necessary economic muscle to do so effectively. In the music video, however, the silencing and the de-humanization of the woman are not entirely successful. It is more evident that the man is living off of his partner who is effectively head of household. Standards of beauty rely upon visual texts to achieve dominance. Wa Ka-Half’s lyrics borrow from western norms which privilege quasi-anorexic bodies as the ideal proportion of female splendor. The music video, however, offers the viewer a woman who deliberately defies such constricting definitions of her body, and confidently asserts her existence in a heterosexual bond.

Music by Wa Ka-Half, Zanto and Nameless offers an illustration of masculinity in its attempts to control women. Many of the mechanisms deployed towards this end are re-hashed from prior colonial encounters and are only new in the sense that they are currently used by postcolonial, rather than colonial, actors. Nevertheless, it is clear that women do not willingly stand by as patriarchy circumscribes their lives. Women actively engage with gender constructions, either to transcend them or at least to problematize them. This is possible because Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, like other East African urban settlements, harbor a diverse mix of cultures and norms. Part of the effect of such proximity is that traditions of resistance are acquired by, and shared amongst, marginalized groups. Whatever its conservative inclinations, this popular music also represents resistance against patriarchy.

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END NOTES

[i] Kiziwi is the Swahili word for a deaf person

[ii] Kairasĩ is an illicit brew that is famous for its potency. Over the last ten years, Kenyan dailies have carried stories of people blinded or even killed after consuming illicit brews laced with lethal chemicals such ethanol.

[iii] Sara Bartman was a South African woman exhibited in European museums for her physical features, especially her buttocks.

The failed emergence of Egypt, Turkey and Iran

Samir Amin

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/83115

cc S CThese three Middle Eastern nations have not succeeded in their attempts at emergence due to meddling by imperialist powers and the lack of capacity to challenge them.

These three Middle Eastern states should normally have been found in lists of today’s ‘emerging’ states. They have each attempted, in the past, to modernise as a response to the challenge from Europe. Egypt attempted this under Pacha Mohamed Ali of the nineteenth century, as well as under Nasser. In Ottoman Turkey the Tanzimats (a reorganisation aimed at modernising the state) and later endeavours during the time of Ataturk (1920-1945) can be seen as the same, while Iran began with its revolution in 1907, and later the reign of Reza Palavi (until 1979). These were, in their own manner, leaders in modernising transformation of capitalist peripheries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However today none of these three states could reasonably be called ‘emerging’, not in the same way as China, South Korea, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina and others. The three states of focus are all important, in their own right, and also have similar populations of around 80 million people.

WHAT IS ‘EMERGING’?

This term has been used by some to mean one thing and by others something entirely different in different contexts, often without any caution regarding precision around the meaning of the term. I will therefore here define the sense that I will give to the set of economic, social, political, and cultural transformations which permit one to speak of the ‘emergence’ of a state, a nation, and a people who have been placed in a peripheral place in the capitalist world system. (The term peripheral having the meaning that I have defined in my own work.)

Emergence is not measured by a rising rate of GDP growth (or exports) over a long period of time (more than a decade), nor the fact that the society in question has obtained a higher level of GDP per capita, as defined by the World Bank, aid institutions controlled by Western powers, and conventional economists.

Emergence involves much more: a sustained growth in industrial production in the state in question and a strengthening of the capacity of these industries to be competitive on a global scale. Again one must define which specific industries are important and what is meant by competitiveness.

Extractive industries (minerals and fossil fuels) must be excluded from this definition. In states endowed by nature with these resources, accelerated growth can occur in these countries without necessarily leaving in its wake productive activities. The extreme example of this situation of ‘non-emergence’ would be the Gulf States, Venezuela, Gabon, and others.

One must also understand that the competitiveness of productive activities in the economy should be considered as a productive system in its entirety and not a certain unit of production alone. Due to the preference for outsourcing and subcontracting, multinationals operating in the South can be the impetus for the creation of local units of production tied to transnationals, or autonomous and capable of exporting to the world market, which earns them the status of competitive in the language of conventional economists. This truncated concept of competitiveness, which proceeds from an empiricist method, is not ours. Competitiveness is that of a productive system. For this to exist, the economy must be made up of productive elements with branches of this production sufficiently interdependent that one can speak of it as a system.
This competitiveness depends upon diverse economic and social factors, among others the general level of education and training of workers of all levels and the efficiency of the group of institutions which manage the national political economy – fiscal policy, business law, labour law, credit, social services, etc. The productive system in question cannot reduce productive transformation to only activities involved in manufacturing and consumption – although the absence of these annuls the existence of a productive system worthy of the name – but rather must integrate food and agriculture as services required for the normal functioning of the system.

A real productive system can be more or less ‘advanced’. By this I mean that the group of activities must be qualified: is it involved in ‘banal’ productions or high technologies? It is important to situate an emerging state using this point of view: in what measure is it on the path of generating value added products? It is important to see emergent states from this point of view: at what stage are they in mounting the ladder towards producing value-added products?
The question of emergence therefore requires both a political and holistic examination. A state cannot be emerging if it is not inward (rather than outward) looking with the goal of creating a domestic market and thus reasserting national economic sovereignty. This complex objective requires sovereignty over all aspects of economic life. In particular it demands policies which protect food security and sovereignty, and equally sovereignty over one’s natural resources and access to others outside of one’s territory. These multiple and complementary objectives are contrasted with those of the comprador class who are content to adopt growth models which meet the requirements of the dominant global system (liberal-internationalism) and the possibilities which these offer.

This proposed definition of emergence does not address the political strategy of the state and society: capitalism or socialism? However this question cannot be left out of the debate as the choice made by the leading classes will have major effects, both positive and negative, for a successful emergence. I would not say that the only option is to follow a capitalist perspective, which implements a system of a capitalist nature – control and exploitation of the workforce and a free market. Nor would I suggest that only a radical socialist option which challenges these forms of capitalism – property, organized labour, market controls- is able to last over long periods of time and move the society forwards in the world system.

The links between the politics of emergence on one hand and the accompanying social transformation, on the other hand, do not depend solely on the internal coherence of the former, but equally its degree of complementarity, or conflict, with the latter. Social struggles, whether class based or political, do not adjust themselves to fit the logic of a state’s implementation of an emergence. Rather they are a determinant of this program. Current experience shows the diversity and dynamism of these links. Emergence is often accompanied by inequalities. One must examine the nature of these: inequalities where the beneficiaries are a tiny minority or a large minority (the middle class) and are realised in a framework which promotes the pauperisation of the majority of workers, or, on the contrary, one where the same people see a betterment in their quality of life, even if the growth rates of compensation for workers will be less than those who benefit from the system. Said in another manner, politics can associate emergence with pauperisation or not. Emergence does not follow a definitive set of rules. Rather it is a series of successive steps; the first can prepare the way for following successes, or bring about deadlock.

In the same manner the relation between the emerging economy and the global economy is constantly transforming as well. From these two different perspectives come policies which can promote sovereignty or weaken it, and at the same time promote social solidarity in the nation or weaken it. Emergence is therefore not synonymous with growth in exports and an increase in power measured in such a manner. Growth in exports can strengthen or weaken the autonomy of an emerging state relative to the world market.

We cannot speak of emergence in general, nor can we speak of models – Chinese, Indian, Brazilian and Korean – in general. One must concretely examine, in each case, the successive steps in the evolution of their emergence, identify the strong and weak points, and analyse the dynamic of their implementation and the associated contradictions.

Emergence is a political and not only economic project. The measure of success is therefore determined by reducing the means by which the dominant capitalist centre perpetuates their domination, in spite of the fact that economic success of emergent states is measured in the conventional economic terms. I define the means as control of the dominant powers over the areas of technological development, access to natural resources, the global financial system, dissemination of information, and weapons of mass destruction. The imperialist collective triad – United States, Europe and Japan – intends to conserve, using all of these means, their privileged positions in dominating the planet and prohibiting emergent states from bringing this domination into question. I conclude that the ambitions of emergent states enter into conflict with the strategic objectives of the triad and the measure of the violence emanating from this conflict will be determined by the degree of radicalism with which the emergent state challenges the aforementioned privileges of the centre.

Economic emergence is not separable from the foreign policies of the states. Do they align themselves with the military and political coalition of the triad? Do they accept strategies put in place by NATO? Conversely, will they oppose them?

The reflections which follow will concern the failure of Turkish, Iranian, and Egyptian attempts at emergence, long ago and in the recent past, their frustration due to the intervention of imperialist powers or by the lack of capacity to challenge them, and the notions of today’s leading classes which render doubtful the prospect of any of these three countries emerging. The reflections must be understood using the theoretical framework of the preceding pages.

TURKEY

Is Turkey European? The debates around this question are generally extremely polemical and lack a solid scientific foundation. It is important to note that the ruling classes have considered themselves so for a long time, going back to the Ottoman age and 1453 when Mehmet El Fateh, the conqueror of Constantinople, would have hesitated and reflected before proclaiming himself “(Orthodox) Emperor of Byzantium/Constantinople”, as the soldiers, who had battled under the banner of Islam, as ghazis or conquerors, would not have accepted it. Still in the 19th century, Ottoman Turkey engaged in a reorganisation of the state known as Tanzimat – ‘reorganisation’ or ‘perestroika’ –the purpose of which can be clearly seen: to make Turkey a ‘European’ state. Whether the Ottoman/Turkish society advanced in this direction, or if the progress remained insignificant, is a question of which there has been no shortage of examination by historians.

Towards the end of the 19th century a large number of intellectuals and Ottoman politicians, Turkish or otherwise, organised themselves, under the name Young Turks, to accelerate this pace, beginning by ridding themselves of a Sultan judged incapable of imagining either the overthrow of his empire or the abandonment of its imperial character ( the control of Arab Mashriq). Echoing European nationalist ideologies, they identified themselves overtly as Turks rather than Ottomans.

The war from 1914 – 18 created the conditions to unambiguously implement the Young Turks program, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk). The Arab provinces were lost, the caliphate was abolished, and the war against the intervention of the Entente was won. The newly proclaimed Turkish Republic could imagine itself on the route towards successful Europeanization.

It was unquestionably a project of emergence. It was also carried out by a capitalist transformation of society. All that was necessary, they believed, was the desire for power. The idea that the logic of global capitalism – with its creation of a global system consisting of a polarisation between the core and integrated partners in the periphery – would not permit this development was unthinkable at that time. The fact that Ataturk’s project coincided with the Russian Revolution could have raised questions regarding the appropriateness of a capitalist approach. But Ataturk and his contemporaries did not dwell on this thought, and the Turkish Communists had even fewer clear ideas on the question.

Social reality was to shape the implementation of the new attempt at emergence. A capitalist ‘bourgeoisie’ was, at most, in its infancy in 1924’s Turkey. However there was an important class of intellectuals, politicians and bureaucrats – only male – and the military who were responsible for assuming the leadership of the country. This class was recruited from the western part of the country – Istanbul, Edirne, Smyrne – and was identified – by themselves and others – as ‘Rumelian’, from the origin Rome – or Byzantium – which indicated the cultural aspirations. The east, Anatolia, was made up exclusively of peasants. The Turks at that time recognized Rumelians as ‘civilized’ or ‘European’ and Anatolians as wretches in need of being civilised. Of course the Rumelians were generally secular or even atheist, while the Anatolians were devoutly Muslim.

The Rumelians and followers of Ataturk were nationalist in the intolerant and chauvinistic manner of the term. They would never recognize the Armenian genocide, and the shameful treatment to which the rarely spared Armenian child was subjected (forced conversion to Islam and discrimination) nor the situation of the Kurds or the Arabs of Hatay. All of the governments in Ankara, even the Islamists of today, share this chauvinism. The ‘Arab’ ideologues of political Islam privilege the Islamic identity to the point where other identities are nearly forgotten – we are neither Algerians, Arabs, nor Berbers, but Muslims, proclaim these ideologues. Political Islam in Turkey shares this somewhat but not fully; a Turk is Muslim, but just as much Turk.

The only development model possible in this situation would be state capitalism led by an enlightened despot. The implementation of the model would benefit the popular masses, both urban and rural, by allowing them to climb in the social hierarchy through children’s education, as well as receive a higher quality of life. The benefits of enlightened despotism brought about an incontestable legitimacy in the eyes of the people. It did not hurt that it was also linked with anti-imperial struggles.

This is precisely where the attempt at emergence diverges from the Arab states. The nationalist powers of the latter, as we will see from the example of Nasser’s Egypt, were systematically attacked by the imperialist powers. The Turkish regime never was. This was at the same time both their strength and their weakness.

From 1945, Turkey, still Kemalist, opted for a Western alliance against the Soviet threat (determined unfortunately by Stalin’s claims that year concerning Kars and Ardahan and the status of the Bosphorus strait). Turkey would become a founding member of NATO, at a time when no requirement existed that the members make any declaration of democracy.

The weakness of the Kemalist capitalist state permitted them as an American ally, instead of opponent, to integrate into the global capitalist system that followed the war. Washington ‘counselled’ Ankara and secured ‘elections’ in 1950 that brought Menderes to power. But his electoral victory would transform the relations between the Kemalist/Rumelian forces and the Anatolian peasantry. Menderes looked towards a class of newly rich Anatolian peasants, produced by agricultural development. The end of the Rumelian/Kemalist elite’s privilege had begun and would only continue. The new model, suggested and supported by the USA, the World Bank, and their contemporaries, effectively emphasised the development of capitalist agriculture. But the rich peasants remained ‘Muslim’ , in opposition to the Kemalist state. The compradorisation of the Turkish development path occurred gradually yet plainly: capitalist agriculture, openness towards industrial outsourcing, privatisation of large parts of the originally capitalist state, possibilities for mass emigration of the poor Anatolian peasantry. The new class of businessmen associated with and benefitting from the compradorian development, was recruited primarily from the children of the rich Anatolian peasantry.

Politically the last defenders of Kemalism, the army, would travel from defeat to defeat, despite the restoration of the dictatorship twice, until the day, only some years distant, when Anatolian Turkish political Islam would be established as henceforth dominant in society.

This evolution, which I define as a re-compradorisation, which ends the Kemalist project of emergence, is accompanied by the strong affirmation of the continued importance of the essential tenet of NATO, that being the support for the strategies of the imperialist triad. It is in this sense that I say that Turkey was ‘the Colombia of the Middle East’. For those who question this affirmation I direct their attention to the recent interventions of Ankara in the ongoing Syrian crisis.

It should be understood that the Americans’ Turkish ally remains a candidate for accession to the European Union (EU). However there is no contradiction, but rather a complementarity, between membership in this Union and NATO. This project of ‘Europeanization’, which nourishes the illusion that the new Turkey has inherited the mantle of Kemalism, constitutes a real, albeit minor, question. That different European political forces in the EU accept, while others reject, Turkey’s candidacy and that the justification of these postures ends in polemics (never a ‘Muslim’ country in ‘Christian’ Europe) constitute equally real questions, but again of lesser importance. But compradorisation, the antithesis of emergence, is completed by the enthusiasm of its cheerleaders for the EU. So will Turkey rediscover the Middle East? Or perhaps even Turan? How would this eventually happen?

Turkey is active in the Middle East. But what role does it fill? In fact Turkey intervenes as an ally of the US and not as an autonomous emerging power. This is not new. Turkey was at the centre of the Baghdad Pact rejected by Nasser following the 1958 Iraq revolution. Turkey is, and remains, the military ally of Israel. It presently intervenes in Syria at the behest of Washington. Turkey is therefore easily ‘the Colombia of the Middle East’. The Turanian alternative to reject Europeanisation was tried first in 1918 by Enver Pacha. But the rise of the Soviet Union rendered these ambitions impossible; though after its collapse it appeared that it could be reborn from the ashes. However Turkey can hardly do more than be a subordinate ally implementing the plan of its American masters.

Postures taken by the powers in the South are not neutral in the effects on the orientation of economic development. Inclusion in the geostrategic considerations of the imperialist powers is naturally associated with economic compradorisation, the antithesis of emergence. Turkish political Islam is, like the Arab states or Pakistan, reactionary in its social postures; they overtly oppose the struggles of workers and peasants. This is in line with what is permitted in the corridors of power in the West, who are always therefore eager to certify their democracy.

Emergent states must enter into conflict with the dominant imperialists, even if the intensity of the conflict is variable from moment to moment. How prepared are they though, to be treated as an adversary by the imperialist powers in order to be a candidate for emergence?

IRAN

Iran is an old and great nation, proud of its history, which reacted strongly, and quite early, to the European menace, both English and Russian. From 1907 they began a revolution against the regime of the decadent Qadjars dynasty, who were judged incapable of resisting foreigners. Moreover many intellectuals who participated in the revolution were trained in the Russian Caucasus with the POSDR (which would later produce Bolshevism). This left many leading Iranians with a much firmer grasp than elsewhere of certain issues and of the relation between imperialist domination and the historical pattern of exploitative class relations (feudal system).

The new power of Pahlevi, established in 1921, addressed this fact in a particular manner: they were reactionary to the overtures for social change; however they refused to be the lackeys for the dominant forces of the world market. The long term effects of the Soviet presence in the north of the country during the Second World War, the support given to the construction of the autonomous Azerbaijan and Kurdish societies and states, the emergence of a powerful anti-imperialist and socialist party (the Toudeh), the nationalist position taken in 1951 by the Prime Minister Mossadeqh who nationalised oil, could not be erased by the CIA sponsored coup which permitted Mohamed Reza Shah to turn the tide and rejoin the Western camp.

To defend against the challenge of the powerful democratic, nationalist, and progressive forces in Iran, Mohamed Reza Shah engaged in a ‘White Revolution’, beginning in 1962, associated with a ‘neutral’ international posture. Land reform was not really part of this; it did not reduce the power and the riches of the laitifundia; even though modernisation was encouraged, this merely facilitated the rise of a newly rich peasant class. Added to this was the modernisation of morals (especially towards women) and an effort in the domain of education. The neutral postures: reconciliation with the USSR in 1965, China in 1970, another nationalisation of oil in 1973, were, in these conditions, accepted by the Western powers who had no better alternative. The regime, heavily dependent on security (the crimes of their political police, the Savak, have gained a well-earned notoriety) were the only way to maintain a reactionary social order. The emergence project of Mohamed Reza Shah was certainly one conceived in the manner of capitalism (albeit a state capitalism). The limits and contradictions were products of having chosen this option and principle.

The destruction of Toudeh by police violence cleared the path for a new force to challenge the regime. This was organised around Shiite Mullahs and their leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Islamist regime, in place since 1979, is also undermined by its internal contradictions. At its foundation, in regards to its desires to reconstruct society, it is reactionary, not only in its cultural approaches (women are veiled) but also in its relations to economic and social life. Most of its support is provided by two social groups: the ‘Bazaris’, or the commercial/comprador traditional bourgeoisie, and the newly rich peasants. The regime inherited a state capitalism managed by ‘technocrats’ allied to the Shah’s dictatorship. What the regime did was simply substitute this ‘civil’ management with a religious one. The Mullahs in managerial positions enriched themselves with no regard for the overall coherence of the Shah’s modernisation project – which became modernisation led by religious figures, equally troubled by its own limits and contradictions. However at the same time, as the Shah’s regime had been pro-Western, the new regime could adorn itself with an anti-imperialist mantle, although this posture would be confused with anti-Western.

The confusion is extreme. It explains how many Western analysts can qualify the system as ‘modernising’ (modern Islam, the say). They base this on real evolutions, but mistake the significance that these are given. Of course the female marriage age has been raised, and there are a larger number of women working and occupying the same roles and responsibilities. But this progress is found throughout the Southern world (with the exception of the Gulf States!) as in the North (where the word ‘change’ is well understood). Modernity, not to mention emancipation, requires much more.

Washington had supported the Shah until the end, and their reaction elicited the expected nationalist Iranian stance. This is why Washington mobilised its erstwhile ally, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, to engage in ten years of criminal and irrational war beginning in 1980. This lead to a constitution, under the aegis of Washington, of an Arab camp (the Gulf supporting Iraq) who initiated the Iran (Shiite)/Gulf (Sunni for the most part) hostility. This conflict has been described as atavistic. There exists, however, no supporting facts of this conflict that had permeated the region through history ending in an imminent, constant and invariable reality. With the assistance of falsehoods, it could appear to be so: reactionary political Islam allied with one or another other group.

In this manner Iran (Islamic, Shiite, Khomeiniist), became the adversary of the Western powers, even if they had not wanted it to. Iran under Khomeini could not conceive of managing their economy other than by the simple rules of capitalism. A modus vivendi would have been easy to find between this local capitalism and that on the global scale. The Mullahs, particularly those who advance ‘reforms’, have studied such a path. The Gulf sought to frustrate these attempts, by alarming Washington.

Tehran’s nuclear option can do nothing but further poison the atmosphere. This is not a new initiative of the Khomeini regime. Rather, it was the Shah Mohamed Reza who started his country down this path. During his time, Washington had nothing to say. Khomeini’s regime did nothing but continue along the same route. There is no reason to reproach them, even using the hypothesis that behind the civil nuclear program lays a nuclear weapons program. They have truly no reason to accept the point of view of Washington, and its subordinate allies in NATO, concerning proliferation. One is not declared dangerous or a potential adversary unless the declaration benefits the imperialist powers. The silence concerning Israel’s monstrous nuclear equipment shows the Western powers’ method of judgement: differing weights, differing measures. Were denuclearisation to occur (the best possible option), it could be initiated only by the most menacing state in the world, the USA. One concludes therefore, that the threat of aggression against Iran proceeds directly from those howling in Tel Aviv.

The situation is also more complex as the occupation of Iraq and the stalemate in Afghanistan have not given Washington the results they desire. Certainly Iraq has been destroyed, not only the state (split into four de facto regimes: Sunni, Shiite, Kurd 1 and Kurd 2!), but also the society. Among other things, all scientists were assassinated under the orders of the occupier. But the destruction of Iraq has at the same time given Iran a formidable card to play, who can mobilise its (Shiite) allies if needed. To combat this problem Washington has decided to weaken Iran by destroying its regional allies, beginning with Syria!

All of this confirms that the political conflict between the USA and Iran is very real. But that does not change the question posed in this reflection: is Iran on the path to emergence? My pure and simple response is no. Nothing in the evolution of Iran’s economic system permits one to see the state leave the ‘lumpen development’ in which Khomeini’s state is stuck. It is not enough to be considered an adversary by the imperialist powers to become, miraculously, an emergent state.

EGYPT

Egypt was the first country in the periphery of globalized capitalism that tried to “emerge.” Even at the start of the nineteenth century, well before Japan and China, the Viceroy Mohammed Ali had conceived and undertaken a program of renovation for Egypt and its near neighbours in the Arab Mashreq (Mashreq means “East,” i.e., eastern North Africa and the Levant). That vigorous experiment took up two-thirds of the nineteenth century and only belatedly ran out of breath in the 1870s, during the second half of the reign of the Khedive Ismail. The analysis of its failure cannot ignore the violence of the foreign aggression by Great Britain, the foremost power of industrial capitalism during that period. Twice, in the naval campaign of 1840 and then by taking control of the Khedive’s finances during the 1870s, and then finally by military occupation in 1882, England fiercely pursued its objective: to make sure that a modern Egypt would fail to emerge. Certainly the Egyptian project was subject to the limitations of its time since it manifestly envisaged emergence within and through capitalism, unlike Egypt’s second attempt at emergence—which we will discuss further on. That project’s own social contradictions, like its underlying political, cultural, and ideological presuppositions, were undoubtedly responsible at least in part for its failure. The fact remains that without imperialist aggression those contradictions would probably have been overcome, as they were in Japan. Beaten, emergent Egypt was forced to undergo nearly forty years (1880–1920) as a servile periphery, whose institutions were refashioned in service to that period’s model of capitalist/imperialist accumulation. That imposed retrogression struck, not only its productive system, but also the country’s political and social institutions. It operated systematically to reinforce all the reactionary and medievalistic cultural and ideological conceptions that had been useful for keeping the country in its subordinate position.

The Egyptian nation—its people, its elites—never accepted that position. This stubborn refusal in turn gave rise to a second wave of rising movements which unfolded during the next half-century (1919–1967). Indeed, I see that period as a continuous series of struggles and major forward movements. It had a triple objective: democracy, national independence, and social progress. These three objectives—however limited and sometimes confused were their formulations— were inseparable one from the other. In this reading, the chapter (1955–1967) of Nasserist systematization is nothing but the final chapter of that long series of advancing struggles, which began with the revolution of 1919–1920.

The first moment of that half-century of rising emancipation struggles in Egypt had put its emphasis—with the formation of the Wafd in 1919—on political modernization through adoption (in 1923) of a bourgeois form of constitutional democracy (limited monarchy) and on the reconquest of independence. The form of democracy envisaged allowed progressive secularization—if not secularism in the radical sense of that term—whose symbol was the flag linking cross and crescent (a flag that reappeared in the demonstrations of January and February 2011). “Normal” elections then allowed, without the least problem, not merely for Copts (native Egyptian Christians) to be elected by Muslim majorities but for those very Copts to hold high positions in the State. The British put their full power, supported actively by a reactionary bloc comprised of the monarchy, the great landlords, and the rich peasants, into undoing the democratic progress made by Egypt under Wafdist leadership. In the 1930s the dictatorship of Sedki Pasha, abolishing the democratic 1923 constitution, clashed with the student movement then spearheading the democratic anti-imperialist struggles. It was not by chance that, to counter this threat, the British Embassy and the Royal Palace actively supported the formation in 1927 of the Muslim Brotherhood, inspired by “Islamist” thought in its most backward “Salafist” version of Wahhabism as formulated by Rachid Reda—the most reactionary version, antidemocratic and against social progress, of the new-born “political Islam. The conquest of Ethiopia undertaken by Mussolini, with world war looming, forced London to make some concessions to the democratic forces. In 1936 the Wafd, having learned its lesson, was allowed to return to power and a new Anglo-Egyptian treaty was signed. The Second World War necessarily constituted a sort of parenthesis. But a rising tide of struggles resumed already on February 21, 1946 with the formation of the “worker-student bloc,” reinforced in its radicalization by the entry on stage of the communists and of the working-class movement. Once again the Egyptian reactionaries, supported by London, responded with violence and to this end mobilized the Muslim Brotherhood behind a second dictatorship by Sedki Pasha—without, however, being able to silence the protest movement. Elections had to be held in 1950 and the Wafd returned to power. Its repudiation of the 1936 Treaty and the inception of guerrilla actions in the Suez Canal Zone were defeated only by setting fire to Cairo (January 1952), an operation in which the Muslim Brotherhood was deeply involved.

A first coup d’état in 1952 by the “Free Officers,” and above all a second coup in 1954 by which Nasser took control, was taken by some to “crown” the continual flow of struggles and by others to put it to an end. Rejecting the view of the Egyptian awakening advanced above, Nasserism put forth an ideological discourse that wiped out the whole history of the years from 1919 to 1952 in order to push the start of the “Egyptian Revolution” to July 1952. At that time many among the communists had denounced this discourse and analyzed the coups d’état of 1952 and 1954 as aimed at putting an end to the radicalization of the democratic movement. They were not wrong, since Nasserism took the shape of an anti-imperialist project only after the Bandung Conference of April 1955. Nasserism then contributed all it had to give: a resolutely anti-imperialist international posture (in association with the pan-Arab and pan-African movements) and some progressive (but not “socialist”) social reforms. The whole thing done from above, not only “without democracy” (the popular masses being denied any right to organize by and for themselves) but even by “abolishing” any form of political life. This was an invitation to political Islam to fill the vacuum thus created. In only ten short years (1955–1965) the Nasserist project used up its progressive potential. Its exhaustion offered imperialism, henceforward led by the United States, the chance to break the movement by mobilizing to that end its regional military instrument: Israel. The 1967 defeat marked the end of the tide that had flowed for a half-century. Its reflux was initiated by Nasser himself who chose the path of concessions to the Right (the infitah or “opening,” (an opening to capitalist globalization of course) rather than the radicalization called for by, among others, the student movement (which held the stage briefly in 1970, shortly before and then after the death of Nasser). His successor, Sadat, intensified and extended the rightward turn and integrated the Muslim Brotherhood into his new autocratic system. Mubarak continued along the same path.

Under Nasser Egypt had set up an economic and social system that, though subject to criticism, was at least coherent. Nasser wagered on industrialization as the way out of the colonial international specialization which was confining the country to the role of cotton exporter. His system maintained a division of incomes that favoured the expanding middle classes without impoverishing the popular masses. Sadat and Mubarak dismantled the Egyptian productive system, putting in its place a completely incoherent system based exclusively on the profitability of firms most of which were mere subcontractors for the imperialist monopolies. Supposed high rates of economic growth, much praised for thirty years by the World Bank, were completely meaningless. Egyptian growth was extremely vulnerable. Moreover, such growth was accompanied by an incredible rise in inequality and by unemployment afflicting the majority of the country’s youth. This was an explosive situation. It exploded.

During the Bandung and Non Alignment period (1955-1970) the Arab countries were in the forefront of the struggles of the peoples, the nations and the states of the South for a better future and a less unequal global system. Algeria’s FLN and Boumedienne, Nasser’s Egypt, the Baas regimes in Iraq and Syria, the South Yemen Republic, shared common characteristics. These were not “democratic” regimes according to the Western criteria (they were “one party” systems), nor even according to our criteria which implies positive empowerment of the peoples. But they were nevertheless legitimate in the eyes of their peoples, for their actual achievements: mass education, health and other public services, industrialization and guarantees for employment, social upward mobility, associated with independent initiatives and anti imperialist postures. Therefore they were continuously and fiercely opposed by the western powers, in particular through repeated Israeli aggressions.

These regimes achieved whatever they could in that frame within a short period, say 20 years, and then ran out of steam, as a result of their internal limits and contradictions. This, coinciding with the breakdown of Soviet power, facilitated the imperialist “neo liberal” offensive. The ruling circles, in order to remain in office, have chosen to retreat and submit to the demands of neo liberal globalization. The result has been a fast degradation of the social conditions. All that had been achieved in the era of the National Popular State to the benefit of the popular and middle classes was lost in a few years, poverty and mass unemployment being the normal result of the neo liberal policies pursued. Thus the objective conditions for the revolts were created.

The period of retreat lasted, in its turn, almost a half century. Egypt, submissive to the demands of globalized liberalism and to US strategy, simply ceased to exist as an active factor in regional or global politics. Instead, the major US allies—Saudi Arabia and Israel—occupied the foreground. Israel was then able to pursue its course of expanding colonization of occupied Palestine with the tacit complicity of Egypt and the Gulf countries.

De-politicization of the society due to the modus operandi of the Nasserist regime is behind the rise of political Islam. Note that Nasserism was not the only system that took this approach. Rather, most populist nationalist regimes of the first wave of awakening in the South had a similar approach in the management of politics. Note also that the actually existing socialist regimes have also taken this only approach, at least after the revolutionary phase, that was democratic in nature, when they solidified their rule. So, the common denominator is the abolition of democratic praxis. And I do not mean here to equate democracy with multiparty elections. Rather, the practice of democracy in the proper sense of the word, i.e. respect for the plurality of political views and political schemes and for political organizing. Because politicization assumes democracy, and democracy does not exist if those who differ in opinion with the authority do not enjoy freedom of expression. The obliteration of the right to organize around different political views and projects eliminated the politicization, which ultimately caused the subsequent disaster.

This disaster has manifested itself in the return to the bygone archaic views (religious or otherwise), and this was also reflected in the acceptance of the project of the "consumer society" based on solidification of the so-called trend of “individualism,” a trend which spread not only among the middle class that is benefiting from such pattern of development, but also among the poor masses who call for participating in what appear a minima welfare—even though with its maximum simplicity— in the absence of credible real alternative. Therefore one must consider this as a legitimate demand from the popular classes.

The de-politicization in Islamic societies took a prevailing form that was manifested in the apparent or superficial "return" to "Islam". Consequently, the discourse of the mosque along with the discourse of the authority became the only allowed ones in Nasser’s period, and more so during the periods of Sadat and Mubarak. This discourse was then used to stop the emergence of an alternative based on the entrenching of a socialist aspiration. Then this “religious” discourse was encouraged by Sadat and Mubarak to accompany and cope with the deteriorating living conditions resulting from the subjugation of Egypt to the requirements of imperialist globalization. This is why I argued that political Islam did not belong to the opposition block, as claimed by the Muslim Brotherhood, but was an organic part of the power structure.

The success of political Islam requires further clarification regarding the relationship between the success of imperialist globalization on the one hand, and the rise of Brotherhood slogans on the other hand.

The deterioration that accompanied this globalization produced proliferation in the activities of the informal sector in economic and social life, which represents the most important sources of income for the majority of people in Egypt (statistics say 60%). The Brotherhood’s organizations have real ability to work in these circumstances, so that the success of the Brotherhood in these areas in turn has produced more inflation in these activities and thus ensured its reproduction on a larger scale. The political culture offered by the Brotherhood is known for its great simplicity. As this culture is content with only conferring Islamic "legitimacy" to the principle of private property and the "free" market relations, without considering the nature of the activities concerned, which are rudimentary ("Bazaar") activities that are unable to push forward the national economy and lead to its development. Furthermore, the provision of funds widely by the Gulf States has allowed for the boom of such activities as these states have been pumping in the required funds in the form of small loans or grants. This is in addition to charity work (clinics, etc.) that has accompanied this inflated sector, thanks to the support of Gulf States. The Gulf states do not intend to contribute to the development of productive capacity in the Egyptian economy (building factories…etc.), but only the development of this form of “lumpen development”, since reviving Egypt as a developing state would end the domination of the Gulf states ( that are based on the acceptance of the slogan of Islamization of the society), the dominance of the United States (which assumes Egypt as a comprador state infected with worsening poverty), and the domination of Israel (which assumes the impotence of Egypt in the face of Zionist expansion).

The apparent “stability of the regime,” boasted of by successive US officials like Hillary Clinton, was based on a monstrous police apparatus of 1,200,000 men (the army numbering a mere 500,000) free to carry out daily acts of criminal abuse. The imperialist powers claimed that this regime was “protecting” Egypt from the threat of Islamism. This was nothing but a clumsy lie. In reality the regime had perfectly integrated reactionary political Islam (on the Wahhabite model of the Gulf) into its power structure by giving it control of education, of the courts, and of the major media (especially television). The sole permitted public speech was that of the Salafist mosques, allowing the Islamists, to boot, to pretend to make up “the opposition.” The cynical duplicity of the US establishment’s speeches (Obama no less than Bush) was perfectly adapted to its aims. The de facto support for political Islam destroyed the capacity of Egyptian society to confront the challenges of the modern world (bringing about a catastrophic decline in education and research). By occasionally denouncing its “abuses” (like assassinations of Copts) Washington could legitimize its military interventions as actions in its self-styled “war against terrorism.” The regime could still appear “tolerable” as long as it had the safety valve provided by mass emigration of poor and middle-class workers to the oil-producing countries. The exhaustion of that system (Asian immigrants replacing those from Arabic countries) brought with it the rebirth of opposition movements. The workers’ strikes in 2007 (the strongest strikes on the African continent in the past fifty years), the stubborn resistance of small farmers threatened with expropriation by agrarian capital, and the formation of democratic protest groups among the middle classes (like the “Kefaya” and “April 6” movements) foretold the inevitable explosion—expected by Egyptians but startling to “foreign observers.” And thus began a new phase in the tide of emancipation struggles, whose directions and opportunities for development we are now called on to analyse.

The history of modern Egypt is that of successive waves of attempts at emergence, designed using essentially the model of a capitalist society. Nonetheless, it is associated with progressive social transformations and advances in democracy, benefitting from a clear vision that the hostility of Western powers must be confronted. The abandonment of these attempts must be largely attributed to this hostility, which has been directed more at Egypt than against the others, particularly modern Turkey.

Egypt entered, in 2011, a new phase in her history. The analysis which I propose consists of a democratic movement, national and popular in its appeal, and the strategies of the local reactionary adversary and its outside allies permit one to imagine a multitude of different paths towards emergence. In conclusion to this analysis I must say at this time one could not say that Egypt is on the path towards emergence. Rather, for the foreseeable future, Egypt will sink into a fatal combination of lumpen development, powerful political Islam, and submission to the domination of the global imperial system. However the struggle will continue and will perhaps permit an exit from this impasse and a reinvention of an appropriate road to emergence.

Emergence and Lumpen Development

There can be no emergence without state politics, resting on a comfortable social bloc, which gives it legitimacy, capable of constructing a coherent project an inward looking national productive system. They must at the same time ensure the participation of the great majority of social classes and that these groups receive the benefits of growth.

Opposing the favourable evolution of an authentic emergence is the unilateral submission to the requirements of the implementation of global capitalism and general monopolies which produce nothing other than what I would call ‘lumpen development’. I will now liberally borrow from the late Andre Gunder Frank, who analysed a similar evolution, albeit at a different time and place. Today lumpen development is the product of accelerated social disintegration associated with the ‘development’ model (which does not deserve its name) imposed by the monopolies from the imperialist core on the peripheral societies they dominate. It is manifested by a dizzying growth of subsistence activities (called the informal sphere), otherwise called the pauperisation associated with the unilateral logic of accumulation of capital.

One can remark that I did not qualify the emergence as ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’. This is because emergence is a process associated with complementarity, while at the same time conflict, of the logic of capitalist management of the economy and the logics of ‘non-capitalist’ – and potentially socialist - management of society and politics.

Among the experiences of emergence, some cases merit special mention as they are not associated with the processes of lumpen development. There is not a pauperisation among the popular classes, but rather progress in the living standards, modest or otherwise. Two of these experiences are clearly capitalist – those of South Korea and Taiwan (I will not discuss here the particular historical conditions which permitted the success of the implementation in the two countries). Two others inherited the aspirations conducted in the name of socialism – Vietnam and China. Cuba could also be included in this group if it can master the contradictions which it is currently going through.

But we know of other cases of emergence which have been associated with lumpen development of a massive nature. India is the best example. There are segments of this project which correspond to the requirements of emergence. There is a state policy which favours the building of an industrial productive system. Consequently there is an associated expansion of the middle classes and progress in technological capacities and education. They are capable of playing autonomously on the chessboard of international politics. But for a grand majority, two thirds of society, there is accelerated pauperisation. We have therefore a hybrid system which ties together emergence and lumpen development. We can highlight the link between these two complementary parts of reality. I believe, without suggesting too gross a generalisation, that all the other cases that are considered emergent belong to this familiar hybrid, which includes Brazil, South Africa, and others.

But there exist also, and it is most of the other Southern countries, situations in which there are no elements of emergence as the processes of lumpen development occupy much of the society. The three countries considered here (Turkey, Iran, Egypt) are part of this group and it is for this reason that I declare them non-emergent and the projects of emergence abandoned.

In Turkey and Egypt submission to the comprador economic model, geostrategic alignment with the United States, lumpen development and pauperisation, and the increase in reactionary political Islam, trap the societies in a downward spiral. This is because the more a society succumbs to lumpen development; the more susceptible it is to political Islam. In Iran the duo of lumpen development and control of society by the Mullahs relegate the country to the same downward spiral. Despite the political conflict with Washington, there has not been a rupture with the pursuit of a political economy analogous to that of a comprador state. It is therefore more necessary than ever to rid oneself of the illusions of transition led by the local exercise of power by political Islam.

There is a prevailing media discourse, that is extremely naïve, that contends that" the victory of political Islam became inevitable because Islamic self-identity dominates the reality of our societies, and it is a reality that some had rejected, and thus this reality imposed itself on them."

However, this argument completely ignores another reality, namely, that the de-politicization process was deliberate, and without it no political Islam would have been able to impose itself on these societies. Furthermore, this discourse argues further that “there is no risk from this victory of political Islam, because it is temporary, for the authority emerging from it is doomed to failure and thus the public opinion will abandon it". This is as if the Brotherhoods are those who accept the implementation of the principles of democracy even if it works against their interests!

However, the regime in Washington adopts, apparently, this discourse, as well as the public opinion there, which is manufactured by the media. And there is an ensemble of Egyptian and Arab intellectuals who also became convinced by this discourse, apparently, perhaps opportunistically, or because of lack of clarity in thought.

But this is a mistake. Let it be known that political Islam, in the supposition of taking over the governments, will continue to impose itself if not "forever", at least for a long time (50 years?). Let us not forget the case of Iran for example. During this phase of "transition" other nations will continue their march of development, and so we will find ourselves eventually in the bottom of the list. So I don't see the Brotherhood primarily as an "Islamic party"; it is first a reactionary party, and if it managed to take the government, is represents the best security for the imperialist system.

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* Translated from French for Pambazuka News by Jeff Wilson, an MA student in International Studies at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa.
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Rodney and the concept of labour

George Lamming

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/83117

cc WikimediaWalter Rodney’s scholarship of resistance and recognition of the unity created by African and Indian workers’ common experience of labour and struggle for liberation endures.

Pambazuka Press has recently published a new edition of Walter Rodney’s seminal book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. To commemorate the reissue, 40 years after its initial publication, and the 32nd anniversary of Walter Rodney’s assassination, a panel discussion was held at the Cipriani Labour College, Trinidad and Tobago, on 13 June 2012. This week we carry the text of Barbadian novelist George Lamming’s address.

I would like to suggest that we see Walter Rodney’s book – How Europe Underdeveloped Africa - as one critical chapter in the whole body of his work, for there is an impressive continuity from his History of the Upper Guinea Coast, through History of the Guyanese Working People, Groundings With My Brothers and the essay in New World – Masses in Action.

Underdevelopment was the deliberate consequence of capitalist exploitation, and whenever Rodney uses the word exploitation it means robbery in its most extreme forms and by means of torture, or enslavement or murder on a genocidal scale. It’s what the novelist Joseph Conrad in the novel Heart of Darkness means by Kurtz and the words: ‘The Horror. The Horror’. Every page of this classic is stained with blood. The activities associated with names like Barclays and Lloyds in the 17th and 18th centuries would be declared today as crimes against humanity.

It should not be understated that 40 years after its publication, capitalism, which he explores over three or four centuries, has become more aggressive, more sophisticated in its rapacious demands.

We are now a market society where every value is a commodity up for sale. Although the continental terrain is Africa, in this study Africa is a symbol of the dispossessed across all boundaries of race and ethnicity. Webster’s Third new International dictionary ascribes to the term ‘black’ the connotations ‘outrageously wicked, a villain, dishonourable, indicating disgrace connected with the Devil’. On the other hand, ‘white’ carries such connotations as ‘free from blemish, decent…In a fair upright manner, a sterling man’.

This ideology was planted here the very first day the Admiral set foot on these shores. And in the concrete scenario of Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana the question would arise: Where is home and when does it begin? In the 1995 publication Enterprise of the Indies, the Indo- Trinidadian historian Dr. Kusha Haraksingh draws attention to the predicament of the first generation of Indian indentured labourers whose contract carried the condition of return to India after five years. A choice had to be made, and it is Dr. Haraksingh’s opinion that this choice to stay carried a symbolic significance which was deliberately ignored or lost on those who were not Indian:

The decision to stay was often coupled with a residential move away from the plantation to ‘free’ villages, which itself often involved the acquisition of title to property…Thus the trees which were planted around emergent homesteads including religious vegetation, constitute a statement about belonging; so too did the temples and mosques which began to dot the landscape…When all this is put together it is hard to resist the conclusion that Indians had begun to think of Trinidad as their home long before general opinion in the country had awakened to that as a possibility.

It was Rodney’s conception that labour and the social relations experienced in the process of labour, constitute the foundation of culture. It is through work that men and women make nature a part of their own history. The way we see, the way we hear, our nurtured sense of touch and smell, the whole complex of feelings which we call sensibility, is influenced by the particular features of the landscape that has been humanised by our work; so there can be no history of Trinidad or Guyana that is not also a history of the humanisation of those landscapes by African and Indian forces of labour.

This is at once the identity and the conflict of interests that engaged the deepest feeling of those indentured workers inscribing their signatures on a landscape that will be converted into home and also the bitter taste of loss that the emancipated African experiences as he sees the same land become the symbol of his dispossession.

How to reconcile these contradictions with the past is for us, in these circumstances, not just an exercise in memory. The past becomes a weapon that ethnicity summoned as evidence of group solidarity. Politics would become an expression of ethnic grievance made rational and just by any evidence the past would sanction.

And here was the burden of commitment that Walter Rodney assumed, as a Marxist and a humanitarian scholar. Walter Rodney as political activist and historian had sought to show that those Indians in the category of indentured labour had always waged heroic struggle against that condition (31 strikes in 1886 and 42 in 1888). This investment of labour and resistance had made them partners with their African brothers and sisters in a struggle to liberate a people and a region from the imperial encirclement of poverty, illiteracy and self-contempt.

Rodney’s scholarship sought to help dismantle a tradition that, before and after independence, has used the device of race to obscure and sabotage the fundamental unity that married the destinies of Indian and African workers through their common experience of labour.

A democratic future rested, above everything else, on the recognition of that historical fact. Difference in cultural heritage is not an objective obstacle to such an achievement. Indeed, this cultural difference can only be accepted, respected, and cherished after the artificial conflict of race had been abolished by the unifying force which derives from their common experience of labour. It was this possibility that alarmed Rodney’s executioners.

Rodney had achieved at an early age the special distinction of being a permanent part of a unique tradition of intellectual leadership among Africans and people of African descent in the Americas that belongs to the same order of importance as Garvey and Du Bois, George Padmore and James.

His scholarship was sure, but it was also a committed and a partisan scholarship. He believed that history was a way of ordering knowledge which could become an active part of the consciousness of an unsophisticated mass of ordinary people, and which could be used by all as an instrument of social change. He taught from that assumption. He wrote out of that conviction and it seemed to have been the informing influence on his relations with the organised working people of Guyana.

In History of the Guyanese Working People, it is an indication of Rodney’s sense of priorities, his critical realism as a historian, that he should deliberately focus our interest on the peculiar character of the landscape. First he plunges us into the sodden realities of mud and faeces, the menace of flood, either from the sea or from overwhelming torrents of rain. Every triumph of cultivation was subdued by the constant fear that overnight the ocean would advance and swallow up the achievement. The morning would awaken men to the smell of animal corpses. For days, they would follow spectacle of a rotting bull or sheep or cow, the decomposition of carcasses, stuck or afloat across the hidden landscape. Workers quenched their thirst from the same mud water. Fever struck. Gastroenteritis prevailed.

The Venn Commissioners of 1948 noted that the construction of these waterways must have entailed the moving of at least 100 millions tons of soil: ‘The slaves moved 100 million tons of heavy, waterlogged clay with shovel in hand, while enduring conditions of perpetual mud and water. Working people continued making tremendous contributions to the humanization of the Guyanese coastal landscape’. It is the operative word, humanisation, that confirms his real intention.

Caribbean scholars on the whole, have concentrated on the intricate arguments and provisions made by those who ruled the land. This is an important contribution. But Rodney was engaged in illuminating our understanding from a different perspective. Working people of African and Indian ancestry in Guyana have a history of active struggle, which it has been a habit to omit or underestimate in political discourse about the past.

In the History of the Guyanese Working People he sought to explode the myth of Indian passivity before the tyrannical constraints of the plantation. An artificial division was planted between the ranks of labour with consequences that became more complex and debilitating in any struggles against the plantation.

The politics of resistance became obscure or submerged by conflicts of demographic interests and the more dangerous scenario of cultural antagonism, and each group now viewed the other through a filter of that European lens which had brought them, at different times, in the same region for precisely the same purpose. Rodney wanted to participate in overthrowing the hegemonies of the plantation and its vested institutions, and to work towards the emergence of an alternative consciousness.

He did not only argue with those who had taken refuge in the enclaves of research and doctoral pursuits; he walked and talked with those African and Indian peasants and workers who had become the raison d’être of his intellectual activities.

He had initiated in his personal and professional life a decisive break with the academic traditions he had been trained to serve, and died in the conviction that the only fruitful emancipation was self emancipation, that ordinary men and women should be intellectually equipped to liberate themselves from those hostile forms of ownership that are based exclusively on the principle of material self-interest.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an elaboration of all these themes - and in the present crisis of our regional fragmentation - it is more urgently relevant today than it was 40 years ago.


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* George Lamming is a prominent novelist, poet and academic from Barbados. His first novel In the Castle of My Skin was published in 1953.

* This article was first published by Stabroeknews.

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Homophobic murders, refugee woes and Sudan protests

Sokari Ekine

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/83107

cc R S HAttacks on LGBTI people in South Africa and Uganda continue while in Ghana a 20-year-old refugee camp is set to close. Protesters have returned to the streets of Sudan. And is former Egyptian strongman Mubarak still alive?

In the early hours of June 9, 2012, a 23-year-old gay man, Thapelo Makhutle was mutilated and murdered in his home in Kuruman, Northern Cape, South Africa. In the same week, on June 4, 36-year-old Neil Daniels’ body was found burned in Cape Town.

According to the crowdsourcing site, Farmi Tracker, 23 homophobic murders took place in South Africa between April 2010 and February 2012 [http://bit.ly/LBDB4h ]. A 2011 Human Rights Watch report on South Africa and LGBT Rights found lesbian and transgender men in townships and rural areas faced a life of hyper-discrimination and abuse both from private individuals and the government [http://bit.ly/rLTg6l]. Fear of the police was paramount both in terms of protection and reporting crimes and even those which are reported only in one case has sexual orientation been acknowledged as responsible.

“In many instances, interviewees said, police did not respond appropriately when interviewees sought justice, or even compounded the initial abuse. Virtually all of those interviewed who tried to report physical or sexual violence to the police faced ridicule, harassment and secondary victimization by police personnel.”

The question for South Africa is, what is the purpose of a constitutional protection if it is not materialised in people’s everyday lives? It is shameful that neither the South Africa media nor any member of government is outraged by the level of violence unleashed on young black LGBTI people. Yet they hide behind the constitution, which is lauded across the world as being exceptional in its content. For more details on the funeral and memorial service for Thapelo Makhutle see “A dangerous visibility” on Black Looks [http://bit.ly/LvNSlu]

Meanwhile in Uganda, blogger Angelo Izama [http://bit.ly/KyP8U9] reports on the “moral flux” in the country, referring to the continued attack against LGBTI people and the involvement of the church in politics. The Minister for Ethics and Integrity announced he will “de-register 38 NGOs in the country for supporting homosexuality”. He also said he would be de-registering evangelical churches which unlike traditional churches “only entertained”. I don’t think this is anything to cheer about!

“The Minister was a guest of the Hot Seat on 933 KFM in what was a rather disturbing show yesterday. He had come to explain why his ministry was focusing on breaking up “gay promotion” meetings. Amongst other things when I asked him why he was not as outspoken about the perils of child trafficking, child sex abuse or even the plight of men in Uganda’s prison system where non-consensual sex and congestion are pushing up HIV numbers he retorted that he embraced prostitution because it was a lesser evil. I also asked him what he thought of the idea of a military police mooted by the head of the Uganda Police Force since it would mean the force would be soldiers in uniform? His response off air was that the government was being provoked.”

Further evidence of these attacks against LGBTI people and human rights in general took place on the 18 June when the Ugandan government shut down a workshop organised by the East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Project. The workshop was aimed at providing human rights defenders with the skills to monitor, document and seek redress for, human rights violations. [AMSHer - ]http://bit.ly/KNybXv]

REFUGEES

What happens to refugees when the time comes for them to be ‘repatriated’ home? After more than 20 years, Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana is on the verge of closing. At it’s height the camp was home to more than 40,000 refugees from Liberia and a small number from Sierra Leone, including some 25,000 former child soldiers. [http://bit.ly/LfUAN6] There are now just 5,000 people left in the camp. Robtel Pailey wonders what will happen to these people and the thousands of other Liberian refugees in the Diaspora when on the 30 June they will be stripped of their refugee status. [http://bit.ly/LfW3CZ]

Pailey wonders if the people of Buduburam were consulted before rescinding their refugee status. She adds that though the world now has faith in a stable Liberia where there is “rule of law and procedural democracy” and the war against poverty has only just begun. She is also critical of those who frame refugees as helpless, which is certainly not the case in Buduburam. Everything created and built by the refugees will be left behind. Quoting one of the refugees she herself spoke to she writes:

“He accuses UNHCR-Ghana of shirking its responsibilities to the refugees. He says that while the UN agency was responsible for providing basic amenities, Liberians at Buduburam were building their own schools and makeshift houses. The international community’s decision to cease all assistance to Liberians means that the “refugees will be a liability on the Liberian government,” says Jallah. “They are going home the same way they came.” According to Jallah, two thirds of the refugees have no formal education.”

Eritrean blog/online news media Asmarino [ ]http://bit.ly/Klx0sj] comments on the deportation of Eritreans from Israel following the government’s despicable behaviour and language on African migrants. [Electronic Intifada - ]http://bit.ly/LkWN7X] The post is insightful in that it shows how governments make deals between themselves to deport asylum seekers, migrant workers and refugees. Rather than challenge Israel’s racist immigration policy, Eritrea chooses to collude in the deportations of it’s nationals.

The post claims members of the Eritrean government have been in discussion with Israeli officials which compromises ‘Eritrean identity’ by stating they are Sudanese and thereby enabling their deportation. However when it became clear that Eritreans would also be deported the embassy began issuing passports at a cost of $2,000 telling people that their passports would protect them. Accordingly the following discussion took place within the embassy, which led to an agreement to deport all Eritrean nationals.

“The minister made a phone call to Asmara and discussed Eritrean immigrants with General Abraha Kassa (PFDJ head of security). Abraha informed the minister that the Eritrean economy was growing and that the initial cause of migration was not a political problem but the search for better economic opportunities. Abraha Kassa further reiterated that the immigrants had already accumulated a substantial amount of money and even own residential buildings back at home. He assured the minister that Eritrea happily accepts the return of these immigrants and expressed his gratitude to the minister hypocritically as if his government is mindful of its citizens.”

SUDAN REVOLTS

For a brief moment in early 2011 Sudanese students joined other Africans in street protests against their leaders. Although the protests were framed as anti-austerity, it was clear from discussions on forums and Facebook, that students were influenced by uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. On January 29, 2011 the Sudan Tribune reported as follows: [http://bit.ly/hkbVhj]

“Sudanese youth have called for a mass demonstration on Sunday, inspired by the thousands of protesters who have defied authorities in Tunisia and Egypt by calling for their leaders to step down.

‘If the Egyptians can break the fear barrier... so can we. WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR!!!’”

In December 2011 another series of student demonstrations took place in the grounds of Khartoum University after armed police were sent to disperse students protesting over the construction of a dam. Now in June 2012 Sudanese students are once again protesting. Is there any reasons to believe these latest protests will be more sustainable than those in 2011? The group blog Muftah [http://bit.ly/KNvzJk ] believes so as the country’s economic condition has steadily worsened under a regime which has plundered US$ billions. The protests are now in their fourth day [June 20] and spread beyond Khartoum University, including the general population. Even opposition parties have threatened to join protests.
“This latest wave of protests, however, feels different. Motivated by economic shocks, protestors, mostly youth and students, are vowing to continue until the regime is toppled, even in the face of brutal resistance by security forces. A mass protest to do just this has been planned for June 30, 2012, the 23rd anniversary of the National Congress Party’s (NCP) rise to power in the country. Grappling with an annual inflation rate that reached 30.4% in May 2012, the Sudanese can wait no longer for change.”

Egyptian Chronicles [http://bit.ly/KlSaX5]has an excellent report on the Sudan protests [including videos] which, she states, “are no less serious than what is taking place in Egypt or Syria”:

“Several activists have been arrested in Khartoum including women activists who have been reportedly mistreated. Just today the authorities arrested former presidential candidate and human rights activists Kamil Idris. Among other activists who have been arrested in the past 24 hours in Khartoum vlogger Naglaa Siyad Ahmed and her husband whom were taken earlier today by the National state security. Naglaa Ahmed already was assaulted by security forces last April while covering a funeral of a university student that was killed by those forces. “You can watch here speaking about her arrest and the assault”

The protestors have announced June 30 as a day of mass protests under the banner of “Girifna”, meaning ‘we are fed up’. To keep up to date with the Sudan protests, she suggests following Salma Elwardany @S_Elwardany.


Finally, Egypt remains in crisis and Tahrir Square is once again filled with thousands of people awaiting Thursday’s announcement on who will be the next President. I love the sense of humour in all the chaos and uncertainty - maybe to laugh is the best option at this moment - the fight will come later. The website created especially to ask the question: Is Mubarak dead? [http://ismubarakdead.com/] NO!, not yet. Sarah Carr, Inanities, publishes a spoof letter from Mubarak’s old friend and presidential candidate, Dr Ahmed Shafiq. [http://bit.ly/KModFY] He begins with.....

“Hello, my dears, Dr Ahmed Shafiq here.
“Well, as you know I am on the doorstep of victory. In fact, I am inside the house of victory but I mustn’t say anything about that just yet. That presumptuous upstart terrorist claims that he is in the house of victory, even before official results are out. He entered through the back door and thinks he can make all the furniture face Mecca. Are we not Muslims too??”
and ends with...

“El-Ayyat’s riffraff in Tahrir Square think they are fooling us. They are in for a surprise, Hussein told me yesterday.......My dears, this is the end of my message. I was up all night last night celebrating with my followers and also worrying about Hosny, who had another of his brief turns. But I want to leave you with a piece of advice I read in one of my Sufi spiritualism books.....“If you tried to bring people over to your artificial side today, you might make some elements hate you more, just because they’re not on your side today”.
For a more serious analysis see “Egypt’s Emergent Passive Revolution” on Jadaliyya [http://bit.ly/MjZeb8]

“Egypt’s political community is divided across three sociopolitical camps, namely the old regime (also known as the counter-revolution); the revolutionaries; and the forces of passive revolution. The division between the three camps is defined by their commitment to revolutionary goals (or lack thereof), rather than pure ideological or religious principles. In other words, the role of Islam in the new Egypt is by no means the major question defining the country’s emergent political arena. In fact, all three camps encompass individuals and groups desiring a more Islamic Egypt.”

And on The Arabist [http://bit.ly/Nd5GAU] “No Matter Which Way You Look At It, Trouble Ahead” . Here there are two possibilities but only one outcome.....

“So one real possibility is that Shafiq will be declared president and the MB, having already announced its victory, will go ballistic. Or that Shafiq will lose and his supporters will go ballistic.”


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*Sokari Ekine blogs at Black Looks.

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Going home the same way they came

D-day nears for Buduburam

Robtel Neajai Pailey

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/83108

cc WikimediaThousands of Liberian refugees will leave the Ghanaian camp they have lived in for years to an uncertain future back in their country. UNHCR is closing the camp on the grounds that Liberia is now a stable democracy. But is that so?

Perched on vast acres of land dotted with concrete buildings marked in colourful chalk, Buduburam Refugee Camp on the outskirts of Accra, Ghana, has always been a place of transit for Liberians. Camp dwellers are like expectant passengers on a flight whose destination is still undetermined. Most of them hope to land in America, or somewhere in Europe, on a resettlement package. They hope to be anywhere but here.

I remember making the two-hour journey in 2002 to the Camp every Friday at the crack of dawn to teach English at the elementary school. Back then, I was a 20-year-old study-abroad student at the University of Ghana-Legon, an idealist with many causes. Refugees, and particularly Liberian refugees in Ghana, happened to be my latest crusade.

When I enter the Camp in May for the first time in nearly 10 years, Buduburam looks like a town hit by the plague. It is virtually empty. In 2002, there were over 30,000 refugees at Buduburam. Now about 5,000 remain. Nearly 19,000 refugees have been repatriated to Liberia since October 2004, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Ghana. Just 118 Liberians were resettled to third-party countries from 2007 to 2010.

June 30, 2012 is D-Day for refugees at Buduburam and the thousands of Liberians like them throughout the sub-region and the diaspora, accept those exempt for compelling reasons. On that day, Liberian refugees will be stripped of the protection of refugee status. [Liberians who do not have refugee status, but benefit from Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) in the United States are still awaiting their verdict.] The international community now has faith that Liberia has stabilized. UNHCR-Ghana says the country has shown significant improvements in human rights, the rule of law, and procedural democracy through two post-war ‘free and fair’ elections.

I wonder, though, if the international benchmarks for success mean anything to someone who hasn’t touched Liberian soil in over 10 years. I wonder if the international community consulted Liberians before deciding their refugee status would be discontinued. I wonder if the international community knows that although the guns have silenced in Liberia, the war on poverty has only just begun.

In her article, “Humanitarianism in a Straightjacket,” Dr. Barbara Harrell-Bond rages against international agencies such as the UNHCR for not allowing communities they serve to help plan and implement programs that are meant to transform their lives. She is the founder of refugee studies as an academic discipline, and a staunch advocate for refugees. I conducted research with her in Cairo, Egypt, in 2005, and grew to admire her political views. Unlike conventional wisdom that frames refugees as helpless, Harrell-Bond believes they are agents of their own destiny and should be treated as such.

Indeed, Liberian refugees at Buduburam are far from victims, despite their shared tragedies.

Showing me her dark, airless room deep inside Buduburam, Mercy Sio, 52, keeps a healthy dose of optimism. With tight Bantu knots twisted closely to her scalp, Sio wears a smile that hovers between complacency and faith. Like many refugees here, Sio came to Ghana trying to escape death on Valentine’s Day in 2001. But death followed her instead. Since then she has lost two adult children, a son in Liberia to tuberculosis and a daughter in Ghana to liver failure.

When Sio first came to Buduburam, UNHCR provided food to the refugees every two to three months. Eventually, the rations tapered off to nothing. She sustained herself on remittances sent by Liberians abroad or by cooking Liberian food in restaurants in Accra. Sio will be returning to Liberia this month with very little to show for her eleven years at Buduburam. She complains that the 30 kilos of luggage UNHCR-Ghana has promised is grossly insufficient. Even with a cash allowance provided by UNHCR-Ghana of US$375 per adult, I wonder how one can pack over a decade of life into a single checked-in bag. I can barely stuff nine months of existence in London into two large-size suitcases for my pending fieldwork in Monrovia.

Some Liberians at Buduburam are more vocal about their anger and disappointment, like Alfred Mawolo Jallah, who is seated by himself under a tree sulking when I enter the Camp. Since 2006, he has served as the Chairman of the Joint Liberian Refugee Committees in Ghana, an organization that advocates on behalf of Liberian refugees at Buduburam. “Our coming here has not helped,” Jallah says.

He accuses UNHCR-Ghana of shirking its responsibilities to the refugees. He says that while the UN agency was responsible for providing basic amenities, Liberians at Buduburam were building their own schools and makeshift houses. The international community’s decision to cease all assistance to Liberians means that the “refugees will be a liability on the Liberian government,” says Jallah. “They are going home the same way they came.” According to Jallah, two thirds of the refugees have no formal education.

To date, the government of Ghana has not devised a policy to integrate Liberians in Ghana, says UNHCR-Ghana. I believe pressure needs to come from the Liberian government to hold Ghana’s feet to the fire. Given the number of Ghanaians who live and work with ease in Liberia, the least their government could do is allow Liberians the same level of access.

Prospects for more engagement look bleak, however, with accusations being hurled at the Liberian government for not fulfilling its end of the bargain. But the Liberia Refugee Repatriation and Resettlement Commission has attempted to respond to the needs of Liberians returning home by facilitating employment, providing scholarships for vocational and technical education, and enabling refugees to use their skills in agriculture and animal husbandry.

Jallah will return with his family to Liberia this month, and he intends to challenge the government he says has always sided with Ghana at the expense of the refugees. Whether or not these interactions yield positive results, Buduburam will forever be remembered as “Little Liberia,” the transit point that, as of June 30, 2012, ceased to exist.

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* Liberian Robtel Neajai Pailey is an opinion fellow with New Narratives, a project supporting leading independent media in Africa. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Development Studies at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), as a Mo Ibrahim Foundation Ph.D. Scholar. She can be reached at robtel@newnarratives.org

* This article was first published by Front Page Africa Online.

* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

The dismal prospects of Rio +20

Henning Melber and Robert Österbergh

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/83075

cc R BIt is against the background of increasingly greater challenges in almost every environmental respect that the Rio +20 conference takes place. But wouldn't it be more accurate to call it Rio -20?

The international community gathers in Rio de Janeiro at the UN’s conference on sustainable development. For three days, governments, civil society, multilateral organizations, the business community, and other actors assess the agreements from previous summits on sustainable development and lay down a new international environmental policy. The Rio Summit builds on a long tradition of international summits on the global environment, which dates back to the UN's first environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972 and, more recently to the Earth Summit, held in Rio in 1992. Both the Stockholm Conference and the Earth Summit were instrumental in putting environment protection on the multilateral agenda. Significantly, they linked the destruction of ecosystems to global poverty and the rich countries' consumption, as inseparable parts of a complex problem.

When the international community now convenes again in Rio, they have to deal with a harsher reality than 20 and 40 years ago. While global GDP has grown by 75 per cent since 1992, the planet has never been under such massive pressure. Humanity is now facing its biggest threat so far, global warming. It is urgent to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases, but the trend remains the reverse: since 1990 emissions have increased by almost 40 per cent, according to UN statistics. Moreover, the so-called ‘Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report’ (2005), commissioned by the UN and developed by over a thousand leading scientists, demonstrates that as much as two thirds of the world's ecosystems services - on which we are directly dependent for our survival - are threatened or in serious decline. In just 15 years’ time, global demand for natural resources has doubled, with the regeneration of renewable resources that humans consume in a year now taking 1.5 years.

Meanwhile, world population continues to grow, especially the affluent middle class. The UN High Level Panel on Global Sustainability (launched in 2010 by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon) estimates in the report ‘A Future Worth Choosing’ that in 2030, the world will need at least 50 per cent more food, 45 per cent more energy, and 30 per cent more water.

It is against this background of increasingly greater challenges in almost every environmental respect, that the Conference, popularly known as Rio +20, takes place. There is broad consensus that the core issue now is implementation. World governments have in recent decades agreed on a host of principles for sustainable development, but they have not translated them into practice. Given such passivity, Rio +20 actually is more so Rio -20. It’s not much further than square one marked by Stockholm 1972 as the first global conference on environment.

The prospect of achieving adequate and legally binding commitments to address environmental degradation is unlikely to be better today than it was then. The lack of political will shown by the world’s governments in Copenhagen to avert the fatal threat of global warming is a case in point. Continuous economic decline unfortunately also is a major obstacle to environmental action. Perhaps that is why the talk of a ‘green economy’ has been so popular with governments in the preparatory work for Rio +20. The basic idea is that the necessary transformation to an environmentally sustainable economy will also create jobs and increased prosperity.

However, to date there is no universally accepted definition or common understanding of what a green economy is supposed to be. Discussions have focused on the pricing of ecosystem services and the new markets to be opened up thereby, and on the necessity to internalize the costs of environmental degradation in national accounts (beyond GDP). Paradoxically, what governments do seem to agree on is the need for each country to interpret the concept of a green economy according to national priorities. If this stance is adopted in Rio, it means that it is up to each country to define what is meant by a green economy. This would represent a clear departure from the universal principles and norms that have so far characterized multilateral environmental negotiations.

In light of the serious situation we're in, it seems a dubious way to go. Rather, what is now required is precisely the inverse, joint commitments and strict, standardized implementation. Therefore, a reasonable starting point might be the work on ‘planetary boundaries’, recently launched by Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI). SEI's research shows that it is high time that we secure what is called a ‘safe operating space’ for human activities. This is defined by the nine non-negotiable planetary thresholds (e.g., greenhouse gases, land use, biodiversity, and ocean acidification), which must not be exceeded in order to avoid catastrophic environmental degradation. In short, the economy must stay within the planetary boundaries.

Based on this science, world governments should now establish global sustainability goals on the model of the Millennium Development Goals (2000) for poverty reduction and development. The targets should be evaluated and monitored, ideally with the possibility of sanctions if not complied with. An institutional condition is that the Rio +20 heed the general opinion (so far 110 countries) that residual requirement to upgrade the UN Environment Programme, UNEP, to a full UN body's muscles to ensure that commitments are fulfilled. The world has never needed it as much as today.

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* Henning Melber is Executive Director and Robert Österbergh Project Coordinator at the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala/Sweden.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Penalizing protest action

Anna Majavu

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/83120

cc DplanetIncreased police brutality and the prospect of conservative politicians using public money to sue and bankrupt organizations they ideologically oppose - these are the likely outcomes of last week’s Constitutional Court judgment against protest organisers.

In a judgment which upheld a repressive clause in the apartheid-era 1993 Regulation of Gatherings Act, Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng ruled that members of the public who suffer damages from protestors have the right to recoup their losses from whoever hosted the protest – whether the damages were caused by members of the organisation, or not.

There is no onus on the person suing the organisation to prove that the damages were caused by members of the protesting organisation – the mere fact that the damage happened during the march is enough in the way of proof for anyone to be able to claim damages from the organisers.

In May 2006, after a security guards’ strike by the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu) turned violent, then Cape Town mayor Helen Zille decided to sue for damages on behalf of individuals who had suffered losses from the strike.

Ever since then, the DA has been trying to get Parliament to pass their private members’ bill aimed at “holding unions liable for strike damages”. The Constitutional Court has now done their job for them, supported by ANC police minister Nathi Mthethwa who also weighed in on the side of the DA.

However, the judgment has a far broader reach. The head of the Freedom of Expression Institute’s law clinic, Mbalenhle Cele pointed out “assemblies, with all their potential for disruption, are often the only way for individuals to give voice to their grievances, and to do so effectively.” This is primarily because politicians only listen to the language of disruption.

While unions normally follow the correct channels and apply for permission to hold marches, making their leaders easily identifiable as organisers, social movements and communities often protest spontaneously or together with other small organisation. If a small non-profit organisation or a refugee rights group happens to support one of these protests, will they be held responsible for damages as the easily identifiable party?

Unions survive off their members’ subscription fees and while some have made shady forays into the murky world of union investment companies, many unions have little reserve funds, using the bulk of member fees to cover legal costs and maintain basic offices. The DA’s hostility to organised labour and protestors in general is no secret.

The conservative opposition party has been unable to mount any effective propaganda campaign against the unions, which continue to organise high numbers of workers. Having failed to find a working class audience willing to adopt failed free market ideas, it is unsurprising that the DA would resort to finding means to financially cripple the unions – effectively the only way of silencing them.

The process of financially crippling the unions can now be accelerated by anyone with an interest in doing this - the DA, big business, some factions of the ANC and the intelligence services. Any of these groups can land unions with a R2 million damages bill simply by inserting undercover agents into a march with an instruction to cause damage to property.

This is not a far-fetched notion - it has happened before and indeed, with a judgment like this already working in their favour, anti-union groups would be foolish not to use dirty tricks to finish the unions off altogether. The DA, big business, some factions of the ANC and the intelligence services are all aware that in marches of over five thousand workers, it would be difficult for participants to identify non-union members in their ranks, especially since the trade unions have a tradition of inviting supporters ranging from family members, neighbours, churchgoers, priests, and assorted leftists to their marches.

The judgment ignores the police track record of deliberately sparking violence during protests. In the judgment, Mogoeng said unions would not be held liable in the event of a policeman discharging his gun “by accident” into a crowd, causing a stampede. However, he made no mention of violent police who regularly go on the attack – deliberately and not accidentally - against protestors. The case of Andries Tatane, slain by police last year, is an example. The well-publicised case of the residents of Hangberg is another example.

When the people of this hillside community in Cape Town’s Hout Bay stood together to protect their long-standing community from gentrification, the police broke their own regulations by firing rubber bullets at close range into the residents’ faces, taking out the eyes of four people, and provoking pandemonium.

It is well-known that peaceful union marches are unlikely to end quietly because police normally attack the tail end of a march, or pick off a group of people on their way home who have become separated from the crowd. At a union march two years ago in Cape Town, police became extremely annoyed after workers burnt tyres across the road – even though there was no damage to property or person. The police later embarked on a chaotic armed, hunt of workers through the taxi rank – with the workers running for their lives and the police in hot pursuit, firing rubber bullets as they ran. The current culture of police brutality is likely to worsen as a result of this judgment.

The judgment also opens the way for politicians to use public money to promote their own political agendas. Mogoeng made much of the need to protect innocent bystanders who did not choose for their property or persons to be damaged. Yet in the SATAWU case, Zille said she herself instructed lawyers to sue the union on behalf of individuals whose cars and other property had been damaged during the march. These individuals received the assistance of the DA because the case dovetailed with the bill the DA was trying to push unsuccessfully through Parliament. Zille has never made a similar offer to pay for lawyers for the blinded residents of Hangberg to sue the police who shot their eyes out, and this was clearly an ideologically skewed use of public funds rather than a genuine defence of ordinary people.

The judgment also opens the way for politicians to attempt to claim damages even where nothing has been damaged. Zille was furious five years ago when 93 Cape metro police protested by travelling in a pre-planned convoy for two hours along the N2 highway, bringing traffic to a standstill. The protest was entirely peaceful yet if it happened today, the city could make an attempt to quantify the time spent by commuters in the traffic jam as money, and sue for these costs.

A similar scenario is already unfolding in Australia where unions are fined for every day of an unprotected strike. Under the guise of saving the public from “havoc and turmoil", political leaders in New South Wales are currently seeking to fine unions the equivalent of R1.5 million for every day of a wildcat strike - raising the fine from the current R150 000 a day.

In Australia, workers are individually fined if they embark on unprotected strikes. Earlier this year, 13 companies that claimed to have been affected by a seven-day strike at a construction company sued more than 1000 Australian workers for striking. These workers were fined a total of R56 million, suspended for seven years – as long as they didn’t strike again during that time. In this case, private companies were able to argue that the strike had “disrupted work on a site of economic significance to the Australian economy”, the Australian newspaper reported last month.

The Mogoeng judgment in favour of the DA and police minister Nathi Mthethwa has clearly started South Africa down a similarly slippery slope.

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* Anna Majavu is a writer concentrating on the rights of workers, oppressed people, the environment, anti-militarism and what makes a better world. This article was first published by SACSIS.

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Kenya: Postcolonial imperial hangover

A note of caution to the Mombasa Republican Council

Nicholas Githuku

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/83114

cc E & HThe secessionist group based at Kenya’s coast raises genuine concerns about historical injustices. But they are dead wrong to demand their own state.

I distinctly remember watching on television with concern how young men from the Coast province of Kenya were ambushed and rounded up by security forces who busted them in the midst of military training with homemade wooden rifles a few years ago. Given the ragtag nature of this wannabe “army,” my initial reaction was to dismiss them as a bunch of loonies. But a few months to roughly a year later, I again saw in the news this time a group of well-clad young men being frog-marched by police in the streets of Mombasa, the second biggest and oldest trading city in Kenya on the Indian Ocean that is also home to the country’s naval force. This group, it was later to emerge was the secessionist Mombasa Republican Council (MRC) that is no doubt one of the biggest headaches for Kenya’s political leadership, and to some extent a great concern to the international community of nations considering the geo-political significance of Mombasa, which is a remarkable commercial and military nerve centre. The MRC has dominated national news for the last few months as their secessionist demands have hit a new high octave. These young men, women and children are not a passing cloud that can be wished away and their existential frustrations and subsequent pain and distress motivating them to secede from Kenya after almost fifty years ought to be an issue of great concern to all.

Watching those poor chaps being dragged to the waiting police truck, as a trained historian with the cause of ordinary and marginalized people very close to the heart of what I do I thought to myself: “There but by the grace of Allah go I.” It is then that I embarked on the quest for what motivated my compatriots and mostly angry age-mates from Pwani, as the coast region of Kenya is called. That is because as a young man I identify and empathize with their plight and cause but only to a certain extent.

NOT YET UHURU: THE CASE OF PWANI

Many years after independence, sections of the Kenyan population still live in landlessness and abject poverty. The good thing is that they are slowly stirring to political consciousness and social action to demand their fair share of the fruits of independence or uhuru. This is clearly borne out in the group’s poorly-thought-out and hastily sketched manifesto that seeks redress with regard to education and healthcare facilities as well as ensuring a substantial share of benefits accruing from local and foreign beach-tourism for residents of the region. This is perhaps why the MRC should not stop its demands, considering that the Coast, among other regions, has been unduly marginalized since independence in this regard. Although the MRC manifesto makes for bad reading, the key question and problem, and therefore, grievance of land as stated therein is particularly outstanding and eloquent. These issues are timely now that the MRC has “sympathetic” election-related attention from the powers that be, although this new “concern” is bedeviled by double-speak, which means politicians’ promises cannot quite be taken to the bank. I, therefore, urge the MRC to stick to their guns –but not literally, of course.

The landless situation and consequent poverty and pauperization in the Coast are deplorable and I duly commiserate with the MRC. Needless to say, the eyesore of absentee land ownership is most obvious and acutely felt in the Coast. Having said that, I must advise the MRC to seriously consider dropping their factually flawed and almost childish wish of thinking that “Pwani si Kenya.” [The Coast is not part of Kenya] That is, the ill-advised and doomed secession ambition. Here the lesson of the history of the Ten-miles Coastal Strip of the land of the Zanj stretching from Vanga near the Tanzanian border all the way up to Faza Island near Somalia is instructive. On the strength of historical knowledge, I would herein like to counsel the MRC youth and tell them the resounding truth: that they are neither Arab nor British. They are also not Kenya’s wannabe coastal country of Pwani – a hilarious joke in the light of the following outlined history of stateformation as far as it affected the East African coast below. MRC, you are Mijikenda an African indigenous group of people long harassed and ignored and you ought to remain true to that core identity.

HISTORY OF TERRITORIAL QUAGMIRE AND MIJIKENDA FATE

Attempts to secede, besides what must have been truly inspiring Arab Spring revolutions in the north of Africa, are based on the arrangement reached between two empires, one big and overstretched needing the smaller one (Omani) that had played a crucial role in the politics and economics of the region way before the British made their presence felt in the east coast of Africa. One of my inspirations to specialize in history and war and conflict by extension was the heroics of Saif bin Sultan, the Iman of Oman, who routed the Portuguese from the Zanj in the 1690s. It should be remembered that before this in 1862, France and Britain had agreed reciprocally and mutually “guaranteed” the integrity of Zanzibar’s domains. In the 17th century, Oman Sultan Sai’d Ibn Sultan in 1837 decided to oversee his eastern African coast territorial and trade interests more closely and thus made resplendent Zanzibar his citadel of the growing Oman Empire and influence along the coast. Zanzibar was, significantly, also the nerve center of the slave trade that exploited the hinterland of what is modern Kenya, Tanzania all the way to Zambia and DRC-Congo, which were the supply zones. There’s no gainsaying the fact that trade in African slaves increased with Omani hold on Zanj territory. But that is beside the point.

The British were just buying time before they moved to fulfill what they saw as their main (moral) mission in the east African coast, namely, to end trade in slaves by the Arab overlords at the coast. Indeed, the deal that became the Ten-Mile Coastal Strip was a sort of collusion between the British and the Omani to strip (no pun intended) indigenous people of the strip, the Mijikenda of their land. This is the land that the MRC constituted of the unfortunate descendants of these indigenous African groups whose land was very cleverly misappropriated by the British-Omani Land Titles Ordinance. What this meant was that people claiming ownership of the strip of land (mainly not the Mijikenda but Arabs and the British together with their mission-educated Africans) could acquire title deeds under this legal framework. MRC, please take note of this. I repeat that you are not Omani or British as much as you are admirable and “informed” fighters for your democratic right to sustaining basic livelihood and land.

From the foregoing, it is easy to tell where the rain started to beat our misunderstood MRC kin. Therefore, your claims to a would-be Pwani state are rather farfetched and flawed. As noted above, under the Land Titles Ordinance Zanzibar the Ten-Mile Strip was the personal property of the Omani rulers and Arab and Swahili subjects close to the throne. And this was in the official British mind short-lived sovereignty. Omani sovereignty in Zanzibar and the Ten-Mile Strip carefully checked by the British who now ruled the region by proxy. Before the British Royal Navy broke the back of Omani Arabs in East Africa in 1896 in what is the shortest war in history having lasted 38 minutes, London had played a crucial role in saving Muscat’s hold on region from the Germans. This is, indeed, how the strip of land came about.

In August 1885 Otto von Bismarck sent five German warships to Zanzibar to ask then Sultan, Sayyid Barghash, to “salimu amri”, acknowledge German naval military might and cede power to Kaiser (Emperor) Wilhelm I. Britain intervened on behalf of the poor guy and, working together with Germany and France, called the bluff of Omani claims to the hinterland, which the sultan was now forced to give up to the benefit of the British and Germans who then split it up between themselves along latitude 1° S to Mt. Kilimanjaro and on to Lake Nam Lolwe (Victoria). This left for the Oman sultan Zanzibar and his meager ten-mile holding agreed upon in the mid-1880s and that the Germans were all too happy to lease. What this history tells us is that the strip and interior hinterland were claimed by the Sultan as imperial counter-European bluff. With regard to the coastal strip, the claim was much more credible as it was by virtue of its occupation by the Sultan’s Arab, Swahili and African groups that practiced Islam. Sayyid bin Barghash would, a decade later in 1896, lost claim to either Zanzibar and related Islands and the coastal strip after the short-lived Anglo-Zanzibar war. It is this historical fact that ought to dispel any illusions that the MRC may have of an offshoot state.

The MRC is content to ignore all this and instead cites the more recent history of the agreement between the Government of the United Kingdom, His Highness the Sultan of Zanzibar, the Government of Kenya and the Government of Zanzibar that connects the current stand-off and secessionist claims with another closely related territorial argument of postcolonial East Africa. This agreement was signed in London in October 1963 during the Third Lancaster House Conference, of course as always without asking the people it affected most, the Mijikenda. In the main, it guaranteed the free exercise of any creed or religion of the inhabitants of the ten-mile coastal strip and recognized freehold titles to land in the coast region thus further validating earlier acquisitions under the British-Omani Arab land ordinance. However, the most important principle agreed upon was that territories comprised in the Kenya protectorate ceased to form part of His Highness dominions, which now formed part of Kenya. It should be recalled that that could only have referred to the coastal strip as hitherto what became the Republic of Kenya had been “Colony and Protectorate of Kenya” since 1920. “Protectorate” here referred to and designated the ten-mile coastal strip. This legal history that did provide an opportunity for further historical injustice to the indigenous people of the region (read the Mijikenda) cannot be undone especially not with secession as an alternative. Indeed, it is incorrigible considering the unassailable provision of the Constitution of Kenya in Chapter One Article 3 (2) and Chapter Two Article 5 that state respectively, that it is unlawful to establish a government otherwise than in compliance with the supreme law of the land and that Kenya consists of the territory and territorial waters comprising Kenya on the effective date, and any additional territory and territorial waters as defined by an Act of Parliament. As such, it is admissible for the MRC to seek redress of historical injustices but the case for secession is a goner. If the historical facts adduced herein are not enough, here are more lessons from the short post-independence history of East Africa as far as territorial disputes go.

LESSONS OF POSTCOLONIAL AFRICAN HISTORY

I urge the MRC to remember their Kenyan elementary school Geography History and Civics (GHC) lesson about the Organization of African Unity’s (now African Union) acceptance of colonial spatial administrative blunders in principle. There is no mistaking that I understand your cause perfectly but diagnose it as a case of imperial hangover suffered by most postcolonial African states. In the case of the East African coast this imperial hangover is complicated by the long pre-European history of the layered sovereignty of various city states of Mombasa, Zanzibar, Malindi, Pate, Gedi, Kilwa, Sofala and Pemba among others. I have no doubt that you remember the “entertaining” diplomatic stand-off between Kenya and Uganda over the true treasure island, Migingo. I seem to remember at least one legislator uttering the taboo word over this diplomatic duel: “war.” This scraggy and rocky one-acre, let alone ten miles worth of fertile land, had everyone including the two governments and the media running to the archives to look for old British maps to determine which of the two countries own Migingo. That’s not the only postcolonial headache to have recently rocked us: closer to home and the preceding Omani Empire history was the muffled tension relating to the union between mainland Tanzania and Zanzibar. I know this because a close good old history professor of mine served in the Kituo Cha Katiba fact-finding mission in 2009 to examine this union and gather views on it and how Zanzibar could better be actively integrated within the East African Community.

I give these two examples to show that the MRC’s cause is not stupid or unfounded. It is only calling for the rectification of historical misdemeanors. To what extent and how these are to be resolved is the main bone of contention. The way to go would be a fact-finding mission, which is already underway. The positive noises coming from Deputy Prime Minister and presidential hopeful Hon. Musalia Mudavadi’s United Democratic Forum Party (UDFP) are also encouraging. The UDFP has promised to sponsor a motion in parliament seeking to set up a parliamentary select committee to dialogue with Mombasa Republican Council (MRC). I have also noticed that member of parliament Jeremiah Kioni has drafted a motion to set up this framework for dialogue to seek redress with regard to landlessness and socio-economic marginalization of the people that the MRC represents. Over and above this region-specific enquiry is the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, whose mission has been the evaluation of all historical injustices in Kenya. Lastly, the deconcentration and devolution of power from the center to forty-seven counties around the country suffices in itself to give Wapwani the kind of agency and control of their own destiny that they wish for. The Coast province now boasts six counties, Mombasa being one of them.

I have, however, watched recent news with consternation as young MRC spokespeople hardened their stance and pooh-poohed all this and the recent parliamentary interest in their woes saying “…hiyo ni hiari yao….” (Well, the parliamentary select committee’s their own doing…we didn’t ask for it). This smacks of misplaced arrogance: the MRC has gone from a banned movement branded a “terrorist” group to a much sought-after organization by senior members of the Government of Kenya, including presidential hopeful Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who unfortunately have their eyes on next year’s parliamentary and presidential elections in this regard. The MRC, however, ought to capitalize on this window of opportunity that might soon close to have institutionalized redress of their grievances excepting secession.

MRC claims of “Pwani Si Kenya” are reminiscent of yet another imperial hangover: Somali irredentism that had eyes on the North Eastern Province of Kenya, which led to the Shifta War in the 1960s. The survival and integrity of Kenya, not only in terms of geography but also its ethnic composition, has always since independence been the government’s number one priority, beleaguered and as challenging the task of national integration has been. This is why Jomo Kenyatta the then President of Kenya responded to pan-Somalism and calls for a Greater Somalia with, “not one inch!” This will be, I am afraid, the ultimate rigid and uncaring response from Nairobi if the MRC pushes its luck too far and too hard. It is time to talk, people. After all, there’s no need for another short war. Indeed, there’s no need of a war at all! A settlement agreed upon through dialogue and compromise is preferred as opposed to force that might soon follow after the search for votes from the coast ends with the elections in March 2013. If that date finds you hiding in fox holes instead of sitting prim and proud at the negotiation table, please don’t tell anyone that no one warned you, MRC!

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* Nicholas Githuku is a PhD student at West Virginia University, Department of History (ngithuku@mix.wvu.edu).

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African population, food and the future

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/83116

cc Khym54Africa is often said to be overpopulated. But it is quite easy to debunk this myth. The continent is a spacious, rich and arable landmass that can support its population well into the foreseeable future.

It should be obvious in this discussion that our goal is definitely not to contribute to the ‘politically correct’ rhetoric bandied about incessantly which calls for some ‘decrease’ in African population because we do not believe that Africa, in the first instance, is overpopulated. We must now examine this issue. The population argument is usually advanced on a number of fronts. First, there is a ‘theory’ that the given landmass which presently defines Africa and its various so-called nation-states cannot sustain the existing populations, but, more critically, the ‘projected populations’ in years to come. We shall examine the degree to which this ‘theory’ is able to stand up to serious scientific scrutiny first by comparing Africa’s landmass vis-à-vis its population and those of some of the countries of the World.

Africa’s population is currently 1 billion (all the statistics here on countries’ population, land mass and the like are derived from The World Bank, World Development Report 2011 and United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2011) covering an incredibly vast landmass (11,668,599 sq miles). Ethiopia’s landmass is 471,775 sq miles, five times the size of Britain’s 94,226 sq miles. Yet Britain’s population of 62 million is three-quarters that of Ethiopia’s at 83 million. As for Somalia, it is 2.6 times the size of Britain but has a population of only 9 million. Sudan and South Sudan provide an even more fascinating comparison. Whilst both countries are 10 times the size of Britain, they support a population of 45 million – about 70 per cent the size of Britain. In fact the Sudans have a landmass equal to that of India which is populated by 1.22 billion people i.e. more than the population of all of Africa! Britain is one-tenth the size of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) which has a landmass of 905,562 sq miles, similar to the Sudans and India. In other words, the DRC is about ten times the size of Britain but with a population of 71 million, just nine million more than the population of the latter.

Second, let us examine similarly sized countries. France has a landmass of 211,206 sq miles close to Somalia’s. However, France’s population of 65 million is about seven times the population of Somalia. Similarly, Botswana is slightly larger than France at 254,968 sq miles but with a population of 2 million, a minuscule proportion of France’s. Uganda’s landmass at 91,135 sq miles is comparable to Britain’s, yet with a population of only 33 million. Similarly, Ghana’s landmass of 92,099 sq miles makes it approximately equal to the size of Britain. Ghana is however populated by only 25 million people, far less than one-half Britain’s population.

Southern World to Southern World comparisons can also prove useful in exposing the fallacy of either Africa’s ‘large population’ or ‘potential explosive population’. Iran’s size of 636,292 sq miles is about the same as Sudan and South Sudan combined. Yet, its population, unlike the Sudans’ 45 million, is at least one and one-half times as large at 75 million. Pakistan’s landmass of 310,402 sq miles is just about Namibia’s 333,702 but Pakistan’s population is 174 million while Namibia’s is 2 million. Even though Bangladesh’s 55,598 sq mile-landmass makes it roughly one-eighth the size of Angola (481,350 sq miles) as well as that of South Africa’s (471, 442 sq miles), Bangladesh’s population at 159 million outstrips Angola’s 13 million and South Africa’s 50 million. If we were to return to our earlier comparisons, Angola and South Africa are about 4-5 times the size of Britain but with one-fifth and four-fifths respectively of the latter’s population.

Finally, we should turn to the question of resource, its availability or lack of it, and therefore its ability or inability to support the African population – another component of Africa’s ‘over-population’ fallacy. Well over 50 per cent of Uganda’s arable land, some of the richest in Africa, remains uncultivated. Were Uganda to expand its current food production significantly, not only would it be completely self-sufficient, but it would be able to feed all the countries contiguous to its territory without difficulty. It must be stressed here that Uganda does not need any GM food technology to acquire this capability. Indeed no African country requires any shred of GM technology to acquire food sufficiency and security. None, whatsoever.

STATISTICS OF TRANSFORMATION

The overall statistics of the African situation is even more revealing as with regards to the continent’s long-term possibilities. Just about a quarter of the potential arable land of Africa is being cultivated presently.[1] Even here, an increasingly high proportion of the cultivated area is assigned to so-called cash-crops (cocoa, coffee, tea, groundnut, sisal, floral cultivation, etc.) for exports at a time when there has been a virtual collapse, across the board, of the price of these crops in international commodity markets. In the past 30 years, the average real price of these African products abroad has been about 20 per cent less than their worth during the 1960s-70s period which was soon after the ‘restoration of independence’. As for the remaining 75 per cent of Africa’s uncultivated land, this represents 66 per cent of the entire world’s potential.[2] The world is aware of the array of strategic minerals such as cobalt, copper, diamonds, gold, industrial diamonds, iron ore, manganese, phosphates, titanium, uranium, and of course petroleum oil found in virtually all regions across the continent.

Despite the ravages of history of foreign conquest and occupation and the virulence of locally-brewed tyranny of genocidal regimes and fellow-travellers, Africa remains one of the world’s most wealthy and potentially one of the world’s wealthiest continents. What is not always or simultaneously associated with the wealth profiles of Africa is that it has vast acreage of rich farmlands with capacity to optimally support the food needs of generations of African peoples indefinitely. In addition, the famous fish industry in Senegal, Angola, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana for instance, Botswana’s rich cattle farms, West Africa’s yam and plantain belts extending from southern Cameroon to the Casamance province of Senegal, the continent’s rich rice production fields, etc., etc., all highlight the potential Africa has for fully providing for all its food needs. Again, without a shred of GM technology needed or emplaced. Thus, what the current African socio-economic situation shows is extraordinarily reassuring, provided the acreage devoted to cultivation is expanded and expressly targeted to address Africa’s own internal consumption needs. Land use directed at agriculture for food output, as opposed to the calamitous waste of cash-crop production for export or the parcelling away of land up and down the continent (the ‘land grab’ that is becoming a designer label all over the place!) must become the focus of agricultural policy in the new Africa.

It is an inexplicable and inexcusable tragedy that any African child, woman, or man could go without food in the light of the staggering endowment of resources in Africa. Africa constitutes a spacious, rich and arable landmass that can support its population, which is still one of the world’s least densely populated and distributed, into the indefinite future. There is only one condition, though, for the realisation of this goal – Africa must utilise these immense resources for the benefit of its own peoples within newly negotiated, radically decentralised socio-political dispensations which must abandon the current murderous ‘nation-states’. We now no longer require any reminders that the primary existence of these states is to destroy or disable as many enterprisingly resourceful and resource-based constituent peoples, nations and publics within the polity that are placed in their genocidal march and sights.

It is abundantly clear that the factors which have contributed to determining the very poor quality of life of Africa’s population presently have to do with the non-use, partial use, or the gross misuse of the continent’s resources year in, year out. This is thanks to an asphyxiating ‘nation-state’ whose strategic resources are used largely to support the Western World and others and an overseer-grouping of local forces which exists solely to police the dire straits of existence that is the lot of the average African. As a result, the broad sectors of African peoples are yet to be placed and involved, centrally, in the entire process of societal reconstruction and transformation. Surely, an urgently restructured, culturally supportive political framework that enhances the quality of life of Africans is really the pressing subject of focus for Africa.


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* Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (Dakar and Reading: African Renaissance, 2011). This article was a discussion paper presented at a youth weekend-school, Stratford, London, 16 June 2012.

* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

ENDNOTES

1. ‘Africa’s Development Disaster’, Comment, London: Catholic Institute for International Affairs, 1985:19.

2. ibid

Protecting human rights during peaceful protests

Sarah Mount

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/83122

cc G-SCertain governments in East Africa have recently come under scrutiny for cracking down on peaceful protests. Yet freedom of assembly is a fundamental right enshrined in international law and in the constitutions of these nations.

2011 was a watershed year for the protest movement, with huge protests across the Arab world resulting in the toppling of long-standing regimes. ‘The Protestor’ was even named Time Person of the Year for 2011. Protests were, of course, not just limited to the Middle East and North Africa though, with demonstrations taking place in Asia, Europe, the Americas and Sub-Saharan Africa. Tragically however, many protests were brutally repressed by the ruling regimes, resulting in killings, torture, excessive use of force and unlawful arrest and detention.

In light of these violent responses to generally peaceful protests, the United Nations Human Rights Council has passed a resolution requesting the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to report on “effective measures and best practices” to ensure that human rights are protected during peaceful protests.

This resolution, and the future subsequent report, is of importance for the nations of the East African Community, some of whom have come under international, regional and/or national scrutiny recently in relation to policing of public assemblies.

FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT

The right to peaceful assembly is enshrined in international human rights law and the national constitutions of all five EAC states. Under international law, no restriction can be placed on the freedom to assemble except for those “imposed in conformity with the law and which are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety, public order, the protection of public health or morals or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others”.

But when is a restriction “necessary in a democratic society” in the interests of public order and safety?

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Peaceful Assembly and Association, Kenyan Maina Kiai, recently addressed this question in his own report setting out best practice. His report will inform the UN High Commissioner’s future report.

In his report, Kiai refers to the well-regarded “Key Guiding Principles of Freedom of Association with an Emphasis on Non-Governmental Organizations”, which state that a restriction is deemed “necessary” when there is a “pressing social need for the interference”. After such a need arises, the country must only put in place restrictions that are acceptable in a “democratic society”. Kiai refers to longstanding legal jurisprudence which clearly states that a democratic society is one where “pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness” exist. Therefore any restriction on the right to peaceful assembly must not undermine these key doctrines.

BEST PRACTICE

Kiai also outlines best practice in protecting the right to peaceful assembly in his report, some of which are summarized below.

Presumption in favour of holding peaceful assemblies: National laws should state that there is a presumption in favour of facilitating peaceful protests. This includes not requiring ‘authorisation’ for a public assembly, but at the most, only requiring organisers to notify the police. The Special Rapporteur stresses that any notification procedure should be clear and simple, and should ideally only be required for large meetings or meetings which may disrupt traffic. He also states that, where an assembly is denied or limited, prompt and detailed written reasons should be provided, and the decision should also be able to be appealed before a court.

No sanctions for lack of notification: Importantly for the EAC states, Kiai recommends that, where the organisers of a public assembly do not meet all the notification requirements, the assembly should not be automatically stopped and the organisers should not be subject to penalties. Provisions such as these currently exist in some of the national laws of the EAC states, such as in Tanzania, and should be removed.

Protection for protestors: Kiai stresses that governments have an active duty to protect the rights of their citizens to peacefully assemble, including protecting them from people trying to unlawfully disrupt or shut down peaceful assemblies. He is clear in stating that protestors do not lose their right to peaceful assembly just because others in the same demonstration may turn violent, and that organisers and participants should not be held responsible or liable for the violent behaviour of others. Uganda should take note of this, and consider removing responsibility and liability from organisers of public assemblies from the draft Public Order Management Bill.

Right to life is paramount: Police should ensure that the right to life is protected when policing public assemblies and that no one is subjected to arbitrary or excessive use of force. States should remember that the duty to protect citizens’ right to life is above that of maintaining public order. Kiai refers to the view of Special Rapporteur for extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions who states that “the only circumstances warranting use of firearms...is the imminent threat of death or serious injury”. The EAC nation states should remember this, and in particular Uganda, where it has been widely documented that unnecessary lethal use of force was used in the Walk-to-Work protests.

Monitoring peaceful assemblies: It is best practice to allow observers, including journalists, to observe and document assemblies, to monitor the conduct of participants and the police.

EAST AFRICA CONTEXT

Recently in East Africa, there have been allegations of officials shutting down peaceful assemblies that are perceived to be a “threat” to the government. This is a clear breach of international law, and in most cases the constitutions of each EAC nation state. Further, in some countries, it has been documented that firearms and excessive force have been used arbitrarily in policing of demonstrations; contrary to human rights standards.

It’s time to protect the fundamental right of citizens to peacefully assemble and voice their opinion – it’s a basic and essential way for the public to participate in national affairs. The EAC nations should implement the best practice recommendations of the Special Rapporteur, and closely consider the future report of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights. Such action will only act to strengthen the reputation of the EAC as a group of democratic, secure, law-abiding nations.

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* Sarah Mount is Programme Officer, Access to Justice Programme, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.

* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Why are we still living the apartheid life?

Bandile Mdlalosa

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/83118

cc G & DThe anti-apartheid struggle has been betrayed. But all is not lost. The people must once again unite and wage a new struggle to liberate themselves.

I sit back and fail to understand why there are people still staying in shacks. I fail to understand why there is so much separation in this country, why there are areas for the rich and the poor. I fail to understand why we are still living the same way that we lived in the times of the apartheid. I fail to understand why out of all the things that we said we would have from democracy we can only point to and feel so few of them. Is this what Mandela stayed 27 years in prison for? Is that what so many people struggled for in the trade unions and in the UDF?

Why are the poor still mistreated? Why are our voices still not heard? Why do we still not count? Why are we still voting?

As it is youth month, I sit back and look at where we have come from after all the years of struggle since the deaths of 1976. All is slowly sinking in as the new government is making sure that we remember the heroes of the struggle but not what the struggle was for. Struggle is remembered only to try and make us obey the government and not to encourage us to continue the struggle. I ask myself why Hector Paterson was shot, why Mbuyisa Makhubo had to flee the country and stay in Nigeria?

How many people must die before this country changes? Recently we have seen Andries Tatane being shot just like Hector Peterson. He is not the only one. There are now 25 names on the list of people that have been killed by the police during protests after apartheid. Twenty-five! For how long must we keep quiet? For how long must we be killed in our own country for the truth we behold in our hands?

This time we need to be focused. It is high time that the youth of 1976 rose from the dead. We need to unite and complete the work that they started. Their interest was simple: they were fighting for freedom, which is something that we have only on paper. What’s the point of having the right to protest if police will be guarding us with big guns, sometimes killing us during protests? What is the point of having the right to freedom of expression if the president and the African National Congress are pushing the Secrecy Bill and Blade Nzimande calls political analysts ‘dogs’?

As part of the South African youth of the 1980s I’m passionate enough to complete what was started by the 1976 youth. The country will change, the constitution will be implemented and everyone will be treated with respect and dignity. It’s about time that we should all count the same despite the fact that some are poor and others are rich and without looking at race. Everyone should be equal before the law and when it comes to making decisions about their communities and the future of this country. There should be no discrimination of places – where there is one area for the rich and another for the poor. The social value of land must come before its commercial value. Everyone young person must have a real right to education, an income and a place to stay.

We might not get there in the next hour. But tomorrow the light will be on. We will be celebrating the victory of unity.

Aluta continua!

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* Bandile Mdlalose is a member of Abahlali baseMjondolo, South Africa’s shack dwellers movement.

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Alice Walker refuses Israel permission to publish her novel

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/83083

PRESS RELEASE

19 June 2012

The world-renowned author, Alice Walker, has refused an Israeli company, Yediot Books, from publishing her award winning novel, The Color Purple, citing Israel's "apartheid policies". In a letter dated 09 June 2012, Walker says:

"It isn’t possible for me to permit this [Israeli publishing] at this time for the following reason...Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories."

“The Color Purple,” which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was adapted into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 1985 and nominated for 11 Oscars. Both the book and film deal with racism in the American South in the first part of the 20th century.

This is a significant "victory" for the cultural boycott of Israel which has recently been in the spotlight with Gil Shohat, the Classical Music Advisor to the Israel Festival publicly admitting that the cultural boycott of Israel is working. Shohat commented to Israel's Haaretz newspaper saying: "there are choirs and opera companies which are not interested in coming to Israel. Even if they don’t say it’s because of the political issue, they prefer not to get involved."

Just last week, international Tabla player, Zakir Hussein, who is considered one of the world's "most influential" Indian artists, announced that he was canceling his upcoming Israel gigs.

In the 1980s, during Apartheid in South Africa, Walker also refused South Africa permission to screen the movie adaptation of her book, she writes in her letter:

"How happy we all were when the apartheid regime was dismantled…only then did we send our beautiful movie! And to this day, when I am in South Africa, I can hold my head high and nothing obstructs the love that flows between me and the people of that country."

The 'South African Artists Against Apartheid collective' and 'BDS South Africa' salutes Alice Walker for her brave decision and moral consistency!

Find Alice Walker's full letter below.

FOR MORE INFO:
MPHO MADI (SA Artists Against Apartheid collective spokesperson)
mmadi@southafricanartistsagainstapartheid.com
Muhammed Desai (BDS South Africa spokesperson)
mdesai@bdssouthafrica.com
+27 (0) 84 211 9988
www.southafricanartistsagainstapartheid.com
www.bdssouthafrica.com


Dear Publishers at Yediot Books,

June 9, 2012

Thank you so much for wishing to publish my novel THE COLOR PURPLE. It isn’t possible for me to permit this at this time for the following reason: As you may know, last Fall in South Africa the Russell Tribunal on Palestine met and determined that Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories. The testimony we heard, both from Israelis and Palestinians (I was a jurist) was devastating. I grew up under American apartheid and this was far worse. Indeed, many South Africans who attended, including Desmond Tutu, felt the Israeli version of these crimes is worse even than what they suffered under the white supremacist regimes that dominated South Africa for so long.

It is my hope that the non-violent BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, of which I am part, will have enough of an impact on Israeli civilian society to change the situation.

In that regard, I offer an earlier example of THE COLOR PURPLE’s engagement in the world-wide effort to rid humanity of its self-destructive habit of dehumanizing whole populations. When the film of The Color Purple was finished, and all of us who made it decided we loved it, Steven Spielberg, the director, was faced with the decision of whether it should be permitted to travel to and be offered to the South African public. I lobbied against this idea because, as with Israel today, there was a civil society movement of BDS aimed at changing South Africa’s apartheid policies and, in fact, transforming the government.

It was not a particularly difficult position to hold on my part: I believe deeply in non-violent methods of social change though they sometimes seem to take forever, but I did regret not being able to share our movie, immediately, with (for instance) Winnie and Nelson Mandela and their children, and also with the widow and children of the brutally murdered, while in police custody, Steven Biko, the visionary journalist and defender of African integrity and freedom.

We decided to wait. How happy we all were when the apartheid regime was dismantled and Nelson Mandela became the first president of color of South Africa.

Only then did we send our beautiful movie! And to this day, when I am in South Africa, I can hold my head high and nothing obstructs the love that flows between me and the people of that country.

Which is to say, I would so like knowing my books are read by the people of your country, especially by the young, and by the brave Israeli activists (Jewish and Palestinian) for justice and peace I have had the joy of working beside. I am hopeful that one day, maybe soon, this may happen. But now is not the time.

We must continue to work on the issue, and to wait.

In faith that a just future can be fashioned from small acts,

Alice Walker

Restoring hope and building stable refugee families

The Refugee Law Project

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/83100

BACK GROUND

World Refugee Day is commemorated every year on the 20th of June. In 2012 the theme is “One family torn by war is too many”. The emphasis on family cannot be overstated because the wellbeing of every individual is strongly related to her or his access to family support.

Definitions of family vary from place to place and culture to culture. For some, family is defined primarily in terms of biology; for others, it is used to describe close social relationships, such as those found between the members of a church congregation or a particular workplace; what is common to all these diverse understandings, is that family is a source of support and strength, and that it is within families that important interpersonal and social relational skills are established and practiced. It is here that qualities of honesty, respect for self and others, generosity and accountability; conflict resolution and peace building are grounded in people.

Unfortunately, war attacks and undermines all varieties of family, whether the immediate nuclear family, the extended family, or the non-biological ‘families’ . War uproots people and destroys livelihoods at a physical level; disrupts social fabrics and systems leaving people and families with deep internal wounds. At the same time, war and the experience of being a refugee can at times lead to the creation of new families, and new forms of solidarity to fill the gaps in biological families.

According to UNHCR statistics, Uganda currently hosts more than 150,000 refugees and asylum seekers from Burundi, DRC, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan and South Sudan. Out of this population, about 40,000 constitute the urban refugees who live in Kampala, and the remaining are rural
settlement based refugees. However, these numbers have recently been increasing due to an influx of refugees from Democratic Republic of Congo as a result of a fresh wave of conflict there.

SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS OF REFUGEE FAMILIES IN UGANDA

While the war led to their physical displacement, families continue to be bedevilled by other circumstances in exile. Six key challenges continue to pose a serious risk to family life for refugees:

1. The question of sustainable livelihoods presents gloomy pictures for refugees who because of language barriers cannot access employment that would allow them to earn a decent life. This is compounded by unplanned changes in gender roles that often trigger negative reactions in the form of domestic violence and loss of social status, especially for men because of the separation from their families

2. Refugee families continue to grapple with trauma resulting from a range of forms of violence they have suffered, not least their experiences of rape, torture, destruction of family property, murders, extreme discrimination and xenophobic attacks. Such trauma can have dramatic adverse effects on family cohesion, productivity of household members, children’s learning, and overall well-being

3. Poor or no access to comprehensive health care services due to lack of resources has a profound impact on resource management in families and often leads to family breakdown as members fail to cope with the magnitude of the problems related to particularly the loss of the support from killed or separated family members

4. Many refugee families are faced with dire living conditions in slum areas characterized by poor housing, poor sanitation and high crime rates. This is compounded by over-crowding in small single rooms occupied by large families, with an inevitable loss of privacy for adults and children alike

5. Many refugee families cannot afford proper education for their children. Children enrolled in the primary level frequently have no access to
secondary level, and those who somehow manage to go through the secondary level have no access to tertiary institutions. This leaves families in a disempowered position since no comprehensive development happens without proper skills

6. Unaccompanied refugee children are highly vulnerable yet there are no proper structures in place to assist in receiving, reintegrating, resettling, or fostering and monitoring them. For many unaccompanied refugee children, repatriation is not an option since they cannot trace their homes nor family property Unaccompanied children therefore find themselves at extreme risk of human trafficking, sexual exploitation, child prostitution, and other forms of abuse, yet they cannot defend themselves. They are exposed to sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS which all require expensive medical care. This situation has resulted in child mothers who themselves need care.

WAY FORWARD

1. The Government of Uganda needs to acknowledge that since Uganda is surrounded by conflict prone areas, refugees will be a feature of Ugandan society for the foreseeable future. A such, they too need to their rights to be respected and protected. Refugee issues need to be mainstreamed and integrated into government service provision budgets, particularly health care and education.

2. There is a need for the establishment of reception centers and development of a comprehensive foster care system to address the needs of unaccompanied minors. The probation and welfare department in the Ministry of Gender and Social Welfare needs to become more proactive to significantly cover refugee children in its interventions. This will to a great extent minimize the exploitation of the children and improve on their wellbeing

3. The host communities need to be sensitized through more community policing and outreaches to enable them to understand the plight of
refugees and the general conditions refugees are surrounded with. It is important to keep in mind that being a refugee is a condition unpredicted and anyone can find themselves in foreign country and shall need the same protections that refugees in Uganda demand.

4. A comprehensive and coordinated psychosocial service provision to cover both psychotherapy and counseling needs to be developed to cover the challenges of trauma and to mitigate the extreme conditions of helplessness and hopelessness caused by loss of family members and the negative consequences of being displaced from their country of origin.

5. Where refugees are able to form support groups and associations, which can play a role as surrogate families, such initiatives should be supported and encouraged.

6. The government of Uganda must actively get involved and participate in the regional transitional justice and peace building processes through regional bodies like the East African Community, Great Lakes region forum, IGAD and the African Union to ensure that war situations that result in torn families are nipped in the bud.

* The Refugee Law Project is a community out-reach initiative of the School of Law, Makerere University, created in 1999 to promote the enjoyment of human rights for all refugees within Uganda.

Rio+20: Indigenous peoples insist on rights-based approaches and respect for traditional knowledge and practices

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/83080

RIO DE JANEIRO, 20 JUNE 2012: As government representatives start formal negotiations in Brazil to seek agreements on so-called ‘green economy’ policies and to assess progress in fulfilling commitments on environment and development made at the Rio Earth Summit twenty years ago, indigenous peoples from all over the world have come together at the Rio+20 global summit to put forward their own solutions for sustainable development and to flag serious risks associated with government ‘green’ proposals.

Jean La Rose of the Amerindian Peoples Association (APA), Guyana, said:

“Governments, international agencies like the World Bank and NGOs are pushing for new low carbon development policies in countries like Guyana. Official information on these initiatives does not match our experience. Our communities have not been properly consulted so far and there are no secure safeguards for our land and territorial rights and right to free, prior and informed consent. At the same time, plans for mega dams, roads and continued logging and mining operations in our forests are being developed in the name of ‘green growth’, which risks generating multiple harmful impacts on our peoples.”

Indigenous leaders are also present at the negotiations to highlight the historical and present contributions of indigenous peoples’ cultures, traditional knowledge and practices in sustaining the world’s most fragile ecosystems. They are also raising concerns that despite protection under international treaties and agreements, in many countries traditional livelihoods and practices remain under threat from outdated environmental policies as well as from new REDD+, PES and protected area initiatives that seek to restrict or criminalise customary use of land and natural resources.

Peter Kitelo of the Ogiek people in Western Kenya said:

“Government policies at the international and country levels do not recognise the need for legal and land tenure reforms, which are desperately needed in order to recognise the rights of indigenous peoples. In Kenya there is now a lot of talk among government agencies about sustainable development and community forest management, yet the government is seeking to sell concessions for plantation development and REDD+ projects on our lands without our free, prior and informed consent...”

Leaders also express grave concerns over increasing threats to their lands and livelihoods stemming from land grabbers and the growing global demand for food, fibres, fuel, minerals, hydrocarbons and other resources.

Robert Guimaraes Vasquez of the Shipibo people in the Peruvian Amazon said:

“While governments are coming to Rio to talk about sustainable development, in my country, Peru, the pressure is growing day by day from policies of the national government that seek to open up our remote forest territories to transnational companies through road infrastructure projects. These mega projects pose severe threats to indigenous peoples and in particular those autonomous groups in voluntary isolation. How can this be sustainable? We all know it is not just. Yet governments spin this destructive form of development around and call it poverty reduction and investment for national development...”

Indigenous peoples’ organisations and activists are calling on governments to fully implement their commitments to uphold human rights, including rights to lands and resources as an essential cornerstone for achieving socially just and ecologically sustainable development. They also call on States to fully recognise the importance of cultural diversity and local economies in maintaining ecosystem integrity and sustainable livelihoods. Onel Masardule of the Kuna people and Foundation for the Promotion of Traditional Knowledge of Panama said:

“Governments in most countries have already signed up to human rights agreements and environmental treaties and have endorsed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We are here in Rio once again to demand that States fulfil their obligations and commitments in all development policies, finance and actions and put proper arrangements in place at the national level to implement these agreements. Our rights must be secured so that our lands and territories are maintained for the benefit of our future generations and the whole of humanity.”

CONTACTS

For further information and/or to arrange an interview with any of those quoted above, please email:

Francesco Martone (francesco@forestpeoples.org)

Tom Griffiths (tom@forestpeoples.org)

Uganda Land Alliance: Minister demands apology

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/83082

The Minster for Internal Affairs Hillary Onek, has instructed the Uganda Land Alliance to make a public apology to him over what he termed as “ridicule of government authority and its institutions.” The instruction is contained in a May 31st 2012 letter, Ref. ADM 87/228/1, which among others reiterates that in the event that ULA does not effect the apology and retract the report on land grabbing internationally, its legal permission to operate will be terminated.

The Minister’s recent demands were apparently fuelled by ULA’s Press Statement of April 30th 2012 , which states that government had asked ULA to apologise or face closure. Uganda Land Alliance has since apologised for any misinterpretations or misconceptions that could have arisen out of its press statement

The Uganda Land Alliance Statement in question was in reaction to a damning investigation report by the Ministry of Internal Affairs into her operations, notably the question of land grabbing. The Government report had among other recommendations, a requirement of ULA to recall the research findings in the Global report indicating that over 20,000 people had been unfairly evicted to pave the way for a British Firm, the New Forests Company (NFC), to plant trees for commercial purposes; and to make a public apology to the President, less of which ULA would be shut down.

The Minister in his latest missive says that he has offered ULA a platform to resolve the matter, but the recommendations have not been heeded to. “Indeed the Minister has offered a platform, which ULA believes should be a platform for an amicable resolution of the matter. “The Uganda Land Alliance works towards the promotion of fair land laws and policies. Our struggle to ensure that the injustices that come with large scale investments in land often resulting into land grabs be dealt with in policy and law is only beginning. We remain committed to working on this subject until the small holder farmers and all those whose livelihoods depend on the land are guaranteed human rights; the right to a livelihood, food security and the right to a clean and healthy environment… until investments on land make the livelihoods of Ugandans better off.,” says Esther Obaikol, ULA Executive Director.

ULA understands that the Minister for Water and Environment Maria Mutagamba indeed provided information particularly on the Mubende and Kiboga case while speaking to the Press on November 4th 2011. Hon. Mutagamba rightly admitted that thousands of people had been evicted from the Luwunga and Namwasa forest reserves. ULA maintains that the question of land rights of those evicted can only be resolved by the courts of law as the communities themselves had filed suits in the High Court of Uganda.

Uganda recently signed to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Voluntary Guidelines on Tenure Security , and must therefore respect the provisions therein by guaranteeing the land rights of her own citizens. According to a FAO statement, “While the guidelines acknowledge that responsible investments by the public and private sectors are essential for improving food security, they also recommend that safeguards be put in place to protect tenure rights of local people from risks that could arise from large-scale land acquisitions, and also to protect human rights, livelihoods, food security and the environment.” The Uganda Land Alliance implores Government to heed to its commitments.

EVENTS TRAIL

The Global Report on Land Grabbing was launched on September 22 2011, highlighting cases from various countries including Uganda. The report critically indicates a land rush by foreign governments and international companies often to produce food for their citizens back home and other lucrative non-food investments. An estimated 227 million hectares have so far been either leased or sold in a cross section of developing countries. Other countries profiled in the report include Honduras, Southern Sudan, Guatemala and, Indonesia. The report recommended that concerned governments and companies pay attention to the grievances of affected communities, ensure equitable access and usage of land, transparency in land deals and that if people must be evicted anyway, their human rights be respected. (http://www.oxfam.org/grow/policy/land-and-power).

The affected communities in Mubende and Kiboga have since petitioned the Office of the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO) of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC). The CAO, an independent body, has consequently determined that the issues raised by the affected communities pertain to its mandate to address the environmental and social impacts of IFC investments. A mediation process between the NFC and the affected communities is on-going facilitated by the CAO.

Subsequent to the launch of the report on land grabbing, government started investigations into the activities of Uganda Land Alliance. On April 25th, 2012, the Minister for Internal Affairs summoned ULA to appear before him the following day to answer concerns contained in the Uganda case study in the Global Report. ULA asked for two weeks to study the Government’s Investigation Report and make a formal response as its position had not been sought. Following the response, a meeting was convened at the NGO Board on June 4th 2012, attended by all the concerned parties; and just when the parties appeared to have agreed on a common ground, the Minister has now written another letter, this time requiring an apology to him, and reiterating a retraction of the research findings of in the report on the evictions in Mubende and Kiboga or else her permission to operate shall be terminated.

MEDIA CONTACT FOR INTERVIEWS:

Uganda Land Alliance Communications Officer - Tumusiime K. Deo: +256-785 783 554; E-mail: tumusiimedeo@hotmail.com; Skype name: deo.tumusiime1

Writer Rosa Guy was a Pan-Africanist

Margaret Busby

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/obituary/83085

Activism and writing were the twin poles that drew Rosa Guy, who has died aged 89. She is best remembered as an author - particularly of young adult fiction - who never shirked confrontation with tough social realities. At the time of her death from cancer on 3 June in Manhattan, she had published over 20 books, won numerous awards, and was internationally acclaimed. These were not achievements presaged by her start in life.

Born to Audrey and Henry Cuthbert in the town of Diego Martin in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Rosa was seven years old and her sister Ameze 10 when their parents left them in the care of relatives and emigrated to the United States. In 1932, the children joined them in Harlem, New York. When her mother became ill Rosa was sent to live in Brooklyn with a cousin who was a devout Garveyite; the politics of black nationalism profoundly affected Guy for the rest of her life, and she came to define herself as an Africanist fighting against colonialism and the exploitation of the masses.

On their mother's death in 1934 the sisters returned to Harlem to their father, who remarried, but he too died in 1937. Orphaned at 14, Rosa and her sister lived in a series of foster homes. Leaving school, she found factory employment in Manhattan’s garment district, becoming an active organizer in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

At 19 she married Warner Guy, and in 1942 bore him a son, Warner Charles (who died in 1995). While her husband served in the army during the war, she began to express herself creatively after being introduced by a co-worker to the American Negro Theatre, where Guy studied acting (among fellow members were Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Ruby Dee).

Her marriage ended in divorce in 1946 and shortly afterwards she joined the Committee for the Negro in the Arts. There she met John Oliver Killens and in 1950 she and Killens co-founded the (still extant) Harlem Writers Guild, dedicated to developing the publication of work by writers of the African diaspora. Early members included John Henrik Clarke, Paule Marshall, Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde.

Guy was a regular at the United Nations in 1960 and was often given passes to attend Security Council debates. When in 1961 Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was assassinated, there was widespread rage against UN Secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld, whose actions it was felt were connected. Maya Angelou in her 1981 memoir The Heart of a Woman recalls how she and Guy (as part of a group styling themselves the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage), together with Abbey Lincoln, Carlos Moore and others stormed the Security Council at the UN, interrupting a speech by Adlai Stevenson. Guards were called and a mêlée ensued, sparking day-long protests from one end of Manhattan to the other. “That rage became a part of us,” Guy said, “a rage that went on to become part of the Black Revolution of the sixties and the seventies and the Black Power Movement.”

In 1965 two of her stories, “Magnify” and “Carnival”, were published in the Trinidad newspaper The Nation, at the time edited by C.L.R. James. Her 1966 first novel, Bird at My Window, reprised the desperate conditions of life in 1950s Harlem that Guy herself had overcome; the book was dedicated to the memory of Malcolm X, “the pure gold salvaged from the gutter of the ghetto in which we live”. Her next three novels, The Friends (1973), Ruby (1976) and Edith Jackson (1978) form a trilogy dealing with the forces of race, sex and class that govern the lives of black adolescent girls. Another trilogy focuses on black boys coming of age amid an unforgiving atmosphere of violence and crime. Her books raise provocative questions about human potential, responsibility and the insidious problems of poverty. She believed young people deserved honesty, and that they could handle it.

Her 1985 novel My Love, My Love, or The Peasant Girl was adapted into the hit Broadway play, Once On This Island, nominated for eight Tony awards. Other successful books include A Measure of Time (1983), an adult novel with a central character based on her streetwise stepmother who worked as a “booster” – an upmarket shoplifter – to make her way in 1920s Harlem.

Everything Rosa Guy did was cemented by friendships, notably with a strong core of women writers and artists that included Angelou, Louise Meriwether and Joan Sandler. I, too, was privileged to count her a friend, both before and after being her publisher. Lennie Goodings, who also published her at Virago, adds: “Given the harshness of her beginnings, it was quite something to find Rosa to be a gentle, unembittered soul. She had a way about her that was easy-going, languorous, sexy even. I remember meeting her when she was in her late 60s and she was wearing - fabulously - slinky black leather trousers. She appeared to have not a care, but that belied a deep and passionate drive to tell the truth - especially for young people.”

As Meriwether puts it: “Rosa believed that the responsibility of writers is to try and make the world a better place for us all.” She is survived by five grandchildren - Didier, Warner, Charles, Alice and Ameze - eight great-grandchildren and a grand-nephew.

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Gulf juggernaut

Karen Pfeifer

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/83084

This important, original work should be read by anyone with an interest in the political economy of the Middle East. Adam Hanieh crafts a compelling case that the process of capitalist class formation in the Arab Gulf has created a pan-Gulf elite, “Khaleeji capital.” “Rapidly and in ‘hothouse’ fashion,” he writes, this class grew “from state-supported and family-based trading groups in the 1960s and 1970s to the domination of a few massive conglomerates in the contemporary period” with a “hierarchical structure around a Saudi-UAE axis.” The process, he argues, is tightly interlinked with the US-dominated transformation of global capitalism from the Golden Age through the neoliberal era, making the Gulf the hub of the region and relegating the economies of the Mediterranean, western Asia and South Asia to its periphery. Hanieh concludes: “The entire Middle East is increasingly moving to a single beat -- inextricably linked to the rhythms of accumulation and class formation in the Gulf.” He predicts that the importance of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states for the supply of hydrocarbons, petrochemicals and financial flows to the world market will continue to grow, making the Gulf “a decisive factor for the future trajectory of global capitalism.”

The book is tightly organized around a core theory and methodology, which the author uses systematically throughout its seven chapters. It also seamlessly interweaves economic and political history, logically integrates analysis of Gulf economic transformation with that of global capitalism, and effectively deploys the author’s original research among Gulf-based conglomerates. Its weakness, aside from the smaller matter of lack of clarity in the use of some economic concepts, is the author’s downplaying of core contradictions within the processes of Gulf class formation and global accumulation. The book is thus in danger of overstating the strength of its conclusions.

The opening chapter efficiently reviews colonial history and the emergence of the monarchical structures that dominate Gulf Arab polities to this day. It then offers a collegial critique of rentier state theory, and explains the alternative theory that shapes the rest of the book. Rentier state theory, Hanieh argues, is limited insofar as it rests on the premise that the state is an established, free-standing entity. It also treats natural resource revenues as the result of a simple commodity exchange and ignores the formation of a true private bourgeoisie with its own dynamic. His historical materialist method, in contrast, posits state formation and class formation as co-processes in the evolution of capitalism, complete with internal contradictions such as how to harness surplus revenues to promote accumulation in the long run, how to manage the inevitable conflict between the interests of the working class and those of capital, and how to enable the state to operate on behalf of the whole of the capitalist class rather than particular individuals. In this approach, hydrocarbon production, sale and revenue are not things or events but rather the material expression of processes embedded in the social relations of accumulation.

Hanieh uses the Marxian tool of the circuit of capital -- with its sub-circuits of production, exchange and finance -- as a consistent method for analyzing the evolution of Gulf Arab capitalism and the accumulation process. This concept of accumulation captures the drive for private profit, economic growth based on an expanding social surplus product of labor, concentration and centralization of economic power, and internationalization of all three circuits. The use of this model provides structure and clarity to the argument, but its application in later chapters would have benefited from precise definitions of key concepts, such as the rate of exploitation, the price of labor power, primitive accumulation, and concentration and centralization, either there or where they first appear.

Hanieh provides the global historical context for Gulf transformation in two non-consecutive chapters (2 and 4). The first describes the evolution of global capitalism from the end of World War II to 1990, and how the emergence of the United States as the dominant world-capitalist power was interdependent with that of the Gulf as “a major node of world capitalism.” The second shows how the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s and the demise of the Soviet Union and the opening of China to the global market in the 1990s enhanced both the role of the United States as the sole “hyperpower” and that of the Gulf as the linchpin of US-led global economic policy in its roles as provider of hydrocarbons to the world (production), major purchaser of capital and consumer goods (exchange), and key supplier of petrodollars to the US-dominated financial system (finance). While the concluding chapter of the book discusses the financial collapse and recession of 2008-2010 and the continuing threat of cycles of over-accumulation and deflationary crisis, here the author takes the economic, political and military dominance of the United States, and the strength of its alliance with the GCC, as given and unchanging.

Alternating chapters (3 and 5) focus directly on capitalist transformation in the Gulf in the same two eras, 1960-1990 and 1990-2010, based on Hanieh’s rich research among the top GCC conglomerates. After independence, for example, the ruling regimes hastened to confront the early appearance of socialist and Arab nationalist movements and, eventually, to replace an uppity Arab working class with a non-Arab, mostly South Asian, largely powerless and disposable proletariat (the “spatial fix” to managing the capital-labor contradiction). By the 1970s, the Gulf states were redirecting oil revenues to enhance the economic power of ruling families and to facilitate primitive accumulation for a rising capitalist class made up of citizens favored by the rulers, including traditional merchants and tribal leaders, who became the core of a private sector beholden to, yet distinguishable from, the state. Primitive accumulation entailed, on one hand, the creation of capital and private productive property where none existed before, such as in land, small business and subcontracting, and, on the other hand, providing access to a cheap, docile, non-owning working class. This process generated the formation of specifically “Khaleeji capital” in the 1990s and 2000s, a class that subsumed the simple national-capitalist family-based groups from earlier decades. These pan-GCC corporate entities are both interlinked with their national governments’ economic programs and dominant in virtually all industries and circuits of the Gulf private-sector economy.

The elegance of these arguments is qualified by the author’s lack of precision in use of some economic tools. For one thing, the depression in oil prices during the latter part of the 1980s and the 1990s led to lower surplus revenues or even negative current account balances and concomitant declines in investment and economic growth, but Hanieh’s verbal description leaves the impression that revenues and petrodollars continued to flow unabated in these years, and that the Gulf governments simply intensified their protection and promotion of their private capitalist classes. Another problem is not adjusting for price inflation, showing only nominal GDP growth and touting the “annual double-digit growth in GFCF” -- gross fixed capital formation, a measure of magnitude of investment -- in nominal terms in the 2000s. This assertion ignores the rate of price inflation afflicting the Gulf economies, partly because their currencies were pegged to the US dollar and hydrocarbon transactions were denominated in dollars, and partly because the costs of imported capital and consumer goods were rising quickly during the global boom of the 2000s.

The role of Khaleeji capital in the Middle East “periphery” is presented in the penultimate chapter. Hanieh provides valuable information about Khaleeji capital’s growing importance -- its influence on West Bank “development” institutions, its takeover of major banks in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan in the 2000s, and its rush to invest in post-Saddam Iraq, where US firms feared to tread. This chapter is the weakest, however, because, seemingly uncritically, the author accepts the insulting notion of center-periphery relations between the Gulf Arab states and their neighbors that became fashionable among neoliberal cheerleaders during the 2000-2008 boom. Without mentioning the steep decline in Gulf investment in Mediterranean economies in 2009 and 2010, he expects that “the extraction of profits and the transfer of wealth from these peripheral regions to the GCC” will just grow stronger in the coming years. No mention is made of the elephant in the room -- Iran and Iraq are also Gulf economies, with regimes that may not be molded easily to the GCC capitalist design and that may well contest it in the future. Furthermore, the manuscript was apparently finished before the Arab uprisings of 2011, which may pose a test for Hanieh’s prediction.

The concluding chapter describes the dramatic impact of the 2008 financial crisis and 2009 recession on the Gulf economies, yet ends with the same, almost triumphalist, note taken in the previous chapter. Hanieh argues that, despite the fall in hydrocarbon prices and current account balances, the collapse in value of domestic assets in real estate and the stock market, and the suspension or cancellation of debt-based projects from the boom years, Khaleeji capital emerged stronger than ever from the crisis. Not only did hydrocarbon prices and current account surpluses resurge quickly, but national governments bailed out ailing private-sector firms, stimulated domestic economies through active fiscal and monetary policy, applied the “spatial fix” by repatriating surplus immigrant labor, thus passing the worst of the crisis to those workers’ countries of origin, and encouraged banks to merge. These governments even reaffirmed commitment to a single Gulf currency, the pure monetary expression of the conquest by Khaleeji capital of old-fashioned nation-states.

Hanieh recognizes core ambivalences in the class transformation and accumulation processes he describes, such as “the sharp contradictions between the region’s poor and marginalized classes and GCC and other elites,” between the pan-GCC nature of the private conglomerates and their intimate linkage to their own national governments, and between reliance on an imported proletariat and the increase of unemployment among the citizenry. He concludes, however, that global accumulation’s continued dependence on hydrocarbons and petrodollars is most likely to turn Gulf capital’s rising power into an inexorable juggernaut. Is this conclusion overstating the case? Considering the Arab uprisings, the weak economic recovery in Europe and North America, and Western military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gulf capital’s conquest of the region and promotion to world power may not go so smoothly in the coming years.

* This book review was first published by the Middle East Research and Information Project.

‘Zimbabwe in transition’: A review

Steve Eldon Kerr

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/83123

Community healing implies a transitional process: the divisive events have passed, but their effects still linger, their resolution incomplete. The title of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation’s new collection on Zimbabwe is, therefore, something of a misnomer. ‘Zimbabwe in Transition’ assembles work from eleven lawyers, development experts, and academics, with the stated aim of “preparing the ground for enhanced national reconstruction.”

That much is admirably accomplished. The book provides a nuanced overview of the political, social, and economic dynamics shaping contemporary Zimbabwe. But, though the Zimbabwe described in these 300 pages is populated with many brave and willing figures, it is not yet a nation in transition; rather, it is a nation desperately in need of the political closure that precedes transition, and, eventually, healing.

There are nine chapters in the book; six focus on variations of community, two on political processes and one on the media. The chapters on media and politics best encapsulate the reasons for Zimbabwe’s current stasis. Despite the Global Political Agreement (GPA) and power-sharing Government of National Unity (GNU) formed after the violent 2008 elections, Zimbabweans are still under the thumb of a brutal dictatorial regime. The ZANU-PF leadership, erstwhile liberators and vocal proponents of single-party government, are ensconced with the military.

These “securocrats” – officials who dictate defence policy and who have infiltrated most productive areas of the economy – resist all reforms. Concerned only for themselves, they obstruct progress on every article of the GPA and plunder the country’s natural resources. Though ostensibly a unity government, the junior MDC-T party has its hands tied, able to do little more than arrest a precipitous economic decline and foster development in a few areas such as education and the media.

The piecemeal liberalisation of the media since the GPA was signed is promising, but both James Muzondidya and Juliet Thondhlana identify the establishment of an effective free press as key to Zimbabwe’s future. Since independence, Mugabe has abused subaltern language and anti-imperialist rhetoric to whip up popular support and garner sympathy from other parts of the developing world.

The West’s “clumsy” reaction to Mugabe’s policies, such as offering open support to the then-opposition MDC, “bolstered ZANU-PF’s claims that it is a victim of Western hegemonic designs.” Mugabe’s speeches are distributed widely by the state-run media, and his is a persuasive demagoguery. Arnold Chamunogwa recalls the ZANU-PF youths who, even today, decry the “counter-revolutionary” and “pro-settler” MDC. Ideals die hard; a robust free media is needed before Zimbabweans can begin to properly deal with their shared past.

The essence of this book, then, is the importance of honest communication. Zimbabweans have many wrongs to right; the tricky bit is accounting for different viewpoints, particularly when so much of the violence is undocumented. In the 30 years since independence victims have become perpetrators, and perpetrators have become victims.

In one story, a young man who was brutally beaten up by a group of ZANU-PF supporters almost poisoned the thugs’ village well in retaliation. Confronting this past requires acknowledgment that history contains multiple truths. The crimes of confessed murderers will need to be proved, complicity will need to be determined, and metaphysical guilt – why did I do nothing? – will need to be confronted. All of this is impossible without honest communication, and the media will be tasked with communicating honestly between millions of people.

Of course, many remarkable people never stopped; building a new Zimbabwe is their daily life. Otto Saki and Washington Katema describe the huge role civil society organisations played in creating the MDC as viable political opposition. Chamunogwa outlines the continual struggles of youth movements and the national student union, ZINASU – in many ways the vanguard of physical and intellectual resistance.

Ezra Chitando and Molly Manyonganise show that faith-based groups have provided a reservoir of hope, and have, on occasion, critiqued the government more incisively than any politically-oriented organisation. In 2005 a collection of Christian churches released a statement which said that “the vision of Zimbabwe as a free nation has stifled. The people are frozen in war mode with the language and practices of a command structure. All this we have lived each day, prisoners in a concentration camp from the Zambezi to the Limpopo”. Neither the MDC or ZINASU had the temerity to call Zimbabwe a national “concentration camp”.

Kudakwashe Chitsike laments the plight of women, who have been consistently marginalised despite bearing the brunt of repression. Women housed and fed rebel soldiers fighting Ian Smith’s settler regime, women do most of the caring for the sick and abused today, and groups such as Women of Zimbabwe Arise lead thousand-strong protests. All this despite lacking proper political representation and in a nation with a casual attitude towards violence against women. The “culture of impunity” surrounding gender-based abuse in Zimbabwe violates women’s human rights; unless this is stamped out in the courts, Chitsike argues, attitudes towards women will not shift.

Attempts to let “bygones be bygones” are not just detrimental to women; they litter Zimbabwe’s thirty-year history. And they do not work. Despite much hard work, civil society, women, youth, faith-based, and diaspora communities have all become over-politicised by the struggle between ZANU-PF and the MDC. The MDC emerged from civil society, and yet has subsumed it, creating a toxic environment in which each person is either for or against another. The authors in this book urge unity, arguing for a restorative justice that addresses past wrongs but emphasises the need for healing. This will take time, and it will take communication between and within different communities.

Mbofana Wellington’s chapter on community healing best encapsulates the collective path the authors want Zimbabweans to take. Community healing, we learn, is “a process which aims to help communities deal and come to terms with a divided and violent past....[It] suggests processes that come after an end to, or at least cessation of, the violence or abuses.”

Unfortunately, the violence and abuses have not stopped; there is new evidence the securocrats’ enforcers are being regrouped and sent to the villages as another election campaign approaches. Some fear a military coup. It is encouraging, then, to see the SADC increasing pressure on Zimbabwe’s politicians to adhere to the terms of the GPA; particularly after the regional-association’s ineffectual “quiet diplomacy” under Thabo Mbeki. It is also important to remember that, as Chitando and Manyonganise put it, “it is much easier for political gladiators to hug and make peace than for neighbours who may have committed atrocities against each other to do so.”

But it is because the people who have suffered the most are ordinary Zimbabweans who are neighbours and friends, who share the same history, and who drink from the same wells, that the political environment must enable the healing process, not hinder it. Political rhetoric must give way to careful construction of a constitution that benefits all Zimbabweans; egos and personal interest must take the backseat, and building the capacity of local leaders to create spaces in which Zimbabweans can openly share their stories must be a priority. The nation must be allowed to pull in the same direction. Community healing will begin when the securocrats’ power is removed, but in the meantime this collection provides crucial reading for anyone concerned with helping Zimbabwe’s future transition.

* BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

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* Steve Eldon Kerr is a journalist with The Zimbabwean newspaper.

* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Global: No economic justice without gender justice

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/podcasts/83105

http://bit.ly/NbUVeA

Zimbabwe: Seven WOZA members briefly detained after Bulawayo demo

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/zimbabwe/83092

http://bit.ly/NjOmdF

Botswana: Botswana condemns the African Union on Sudan

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/aumonitor/83051

http://bit.ly/NKASKj

Egypt: Potential law to reduce marriage aid

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/wgender/83094

http://bit.ly/LBVMXD

Egypt: Tough choices for women

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/wgender/83101

http://bit.ly/MjhHlj

Global: Communications procedure of the Commission on the Status of Women

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/wgender/83125

http://bit.ly/MHAaKu

Global: Women-loving-women in Africa and Asia

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/wgender/83062

http://bit.ly/L0Vk25

Angola: Attacks against activists increase

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/83049

http://bit.ly/N37Bo1

Rwanda: Community genocide courts officially closed

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/83069

http://bit.ly/MKS2AI

Senegal: New government must end decades of impunity for human rights violations

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/83093

http://bit.ly/LkHo7I

Sudan: Activists report unprecendented violence by police

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/83063

http://bit.ly/NMWB4c

Sudan: Police, protesters clash over austerity cuts

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/83089

http://bit.ly/Ms1lsY

Swaziland: Army fire at opposition leader's home

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/83061

http://bit.ly/MpqouP

Africa: Donor fatigue forces WFP to cut refugee rations

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/refugees/83073

http://bit.ly/LCixJn

Africa: Donor fatigue forces WFP to cut refugee rations

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/refugees/83112

http://bit.ly/LCixJn

Libya: Hounding of migrants continues

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/refugees/83102

http://bit.ly/LhVcBJ

Senegal: Immigrants rounded up

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/refugees/83071

http://bit.ly/McElMh

South Africa: ‘Meaningless’ system for asylum-seekers at mercy of poor rulings

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/refugees/83065

South Africa is getting two-thirds fewer applications for asylum than a few years ago, but researchers say officials make such bad decisions that the whole system is now meaningless. Department of Home Affairs (DHA) officials are so biased and administratively unfair that asylum-seekers are systematically rejected, resulting in an asylum system which 'functions solely as an instrument of immigration control', according to a report by researcher Dr Roni Amit, of the African Centre for Migration and Society at Wits University.
http://bit.ly/MsNoqu

South Sudan: Aid to refugees 'race against time'

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/refugees/83111

http://bit.ly/Nc7uH5

South Sudan: Returnees complain of harsh treatment in Israel

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/refugees/83072

http://bit.ly/KKxFcT

Global: 90 million unskilled workers will be unneeded by employers globally by 2020, study says

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/labour/83079

http://huff.to/MwutLJ

South Africa: State workers demand 'bare necessities'

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/labour/83052

http://bit.ly/L0oSgm

Algeria: Elite at loggerheads over next president

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/elections/83091

http://bit.ly/NjNN3A

Angola: Parties present candidates' lists

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/elections/83110

http://bit.ly/Nm9UGk

Angola: Rhythms of resistance, past and present

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/elections/83096

http://bit.ly/N9WF8n

Libya: Campaigning kicks off for Libya elections

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/elections/83103

http://aje.me/LhVzwj

Togo: Violent police clash with ‘Save Togo' protesters

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/elections/83097

http://bit.ly/LkJmow

Angola: Diamond battle gets London court airing

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/corruption/83050

http://reut.rs/LyxwFB

Global: ‘Contract monitoring coalition’ kicks off with World Bank support

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/corruption/83060

http://bit.ly/NMKjrn

Africa: Vogue Italia’s 'Rebranding Africa' disaster

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/83067

http://africasacountry.com/2012/06/06/vogue-italias-rebranding-africa-disaster/

Global: New report to expose how corporations ‘capture’ the UN

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/83066

http://bit.ly/LC4Aej

Global: Questions mounting over G20 accountability

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/83078

http://bit.ly/MfrEA8

Global: UN funding falls short of global tasks

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/83099

http://bit.ly/KOCd1S

South Africa: Zuma commits $2-billion to bolster IMF 'firewall'

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/83053

http://bit.ly/M3fTke

Zambia: The mystery of Zambia's mining millions

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/83056

http://bit.ly/Pia0yb

South Africa: TAC still fights for medicines

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/hivaids/83095

http://bit.ly/Ms7q8E

Niger: Food crisis empties schools

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/education/83106

http://bit.ly/KAua7o

Global: UNESCO joins global fight against anti-gay bullying

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/lgbti/83059

http://bit.ly/L0SWsm

Kenya: Bars In Kenya clamp down on gays

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/lgbti/83057

http://bit.ly/MrS1kP

Uganda: NGOs accused of promoting gay rights to be banned

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/lgbti/83090

http://bit.ly/KlboMr

Uganda: Police raid workshop on gay rights, arrest LGBT activists

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/lgbti/83058

http://bit.ly/Ne822y

Global: Alarm bells ring over activist death toll

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/environment/83054

http://bit.ly/MCFG0X

Global: Climate change, technology and intellectual property rights

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/environment/83087

http://bit.ly/Kzqgvz

Global: Countries announce agreement on Rio+20 outcome document

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/environment/83098

http://bit.ly/KAs5Z6

Mozambique: Brazil denies activist entry

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/environment/83055

http://bit.ly/N3nvPg

Mozambique: Farmland is prize in land grab fever

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/land/83070

http://bit.ly/L23DLg

Global: Two special rapporteurs both call for those who violate journalists’ rights to be held accountable

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/83081

http://bit.ly/KMp758

Morocco: Blogger gets two-year jail sentence on trumped-up drug charges

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/83064

http://bit.ly/KxxcJK

Nigeria: Curfews as fresh unrest rocks two Nigerian cities

2012-06-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/conflict/83068

http://bit.ly/KxA9Km

Nigeria: Violence in northern Nigeria kills at least 80

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/conflict/83088

http://bit.ly/LBTmIt

Global: No rest for cyber activists

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/internet/83104

http://bit.ly/LECiQw

South Bulletin: Rio+20 Summit, the key issues

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/enewsl/83086

http://bit.ly/Kx8D0H

Global: Resilient NGOs wanted

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/fundraising/83109

http://bit.ly/Ml1NtB

Amandla! Colloquium 2012

Call for Papers

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/83126

http://bit.ly/MyqC2V

International Capacity Building Coordinator

Amnesty International

2012-06-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/83043

Fixed-term contract of one year in duration
London
£41,124 per annum

If we’re to improve human rights in over 150 countries, we must always strive to improve ourselves. Our Organizational Development professionals make us more effective in the countries that need our help the most. And you’ll make sure those professionals are equipped to deliver the best solutions possible.

About the role

Our International Mobilisation Programme (IMP) harnesses Organizational Development to make Amnesty entities worldwide even more effective. Joining a team of Organizational Development professionals, you’ll work with them to build the capacity of Amnesty entities throughout the global south and east. It will be down to you to deliver the tools and written materials that the Organizational Development professionals need to make a real difference. You might be involved in training, generating new resources or proving vital information. And by strengthening their ability to offer a wide range of support, your expertise will reinforce the work of human rights activists, and help to diversify and grow our supporter base.

About you

We’ll expect you to help develop and promote a coordinated, best practice approach to both capacity building and Organizational Development. So you must have already designed projects and materials that support capacity building, preferably within an international organization. As a result, you’ll be familiar with both the theory and the practice as well as the relevant tools and techniques. Ideally you’ll also be fluent in French or Spanish as well as English.

About us

Our aim is simple: an end to human rights abuses. Independent, international and influential, we campaign for justice, freedom and truth wherever they’re denied. Already our network of over three million members and supporters is making a difference in 150 countries. And whether we’re applying pressure through powerful research or direct lobbying, mass demonstrations or online campaigning, we’re all inspired by hope for a better world. One where human rights are respected and protected by everyone, everywhere.

Closing date: 15th July 2012.
For more information and to apply, please visit www.amnesty.org/jobs

Organizational Development Coordinator

Amnesty International

2012-06-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/83113

Dakar, Senegal
XOF 42,877,548

We bring change for the better worldwide. But to improve human rights in over 150 countries we must always strive to improve ourselves. Our Organizational Development professionals make us more effective in the countries that need our help most. In this consultative role, you’ll strengthen our operations in the global south.

About the role

Growth or governance. Finance or Human Resources. Wherever we need professional support developing operational plans and to achieve a programme’s strategic priorities, you’ll make sure it’s delivered. You’ll be joining our International Mobilization Programme which harnesses Organizational Development to strengthen Amnesty entities worldwide. It’s about capacity building, and developing and mobilizing resources – from standard materials and case studies to tools and techniques. Your input could help our entities grow their base of supporters, boost the quality of their initiatives, comply with local laws and our own policies, or reinforce accountability. Throughout you’ll keep a close eye on the work of different programmes, coordinating regular exchanges of information and acting as a focal point for queries, briefings and strategic advice.

About you

The better you can apply best practice in Organizational Development, the bigger the impact on human rights Amnesty entities will have. So although you don’t need to be an expert, you will need good experience of both the theory and practice of Organizational Development in a multinational setting. You’ll certainly know how NGOs operate; for example, you may have worked as a Programme manager in a development organization. It’s a background that will prove you can identify objectives, develop strategies, plan, prioritise and assess results. What’s more, it will have honed your ability to communicate, collaborate and consult with people all over the world. Fluent English and French are also vital.

About us

Our aim is simple: an end to human rights abuses. Independent, international and influential, we campaign for justice, freedom and truth wherever they’re denied. Already our network of over three million members and supporters is making a difference in 150 countries. And whether we’re applying pressure through powerful research or direct lobbying, mass demonstrations or online campaigning, we’re all inspired by hope for a better world. One where human rights are respected and protected by everyone, everywhere.

Closing date: 11th July 2012.

For more information and to apply, please visit www.amnesty.org/jobs

Programme Officer Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding

Goree Institute

2012-06-20

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/83077

Job title: Programme Officer Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding

Location: Dakar – Sénégal, West Africa

Key relationships: Programme Managers; Executive Director; Finance and Operation staff Policy and Fundraising & Communications

Contract duration: 2 years

Reporting to: Executive Director

Description of the Goree Institute

Gorée Institute: Center for Democracy, Development and Culture was established in June 1992. It is a Pan African civil society organisation dedicated to the promotion of peaceful, self-reliant, and open societies in Africa through the elaboration of new paradigms, the strengthening of networks, of institutions and of people, the optimisation of the continent's “creative” human and cultural potential and its financial resources.

Gorée Institute carries its mission through facilitation and in partnership with state and inter-state authorities, as well as with diverse members of civil society. Innovation, critical reflection, analysis, and action and networking therefore make up Gorée Institute’s core values, expertise and activities.

The strategic plan is focused around three strategic focal areas:

1. Peace-building, Conflict prevention and human security;
2. Democratization, elections and political processes; and
3. Imagine Africa: Appreciation of artistic and literary creativity.

Job Purpose

The Programme Officer, as member of Goree Institute’s programme team, will be responsible for the successful delivery of Goree Institute’s programme of work on conflict prevention and peacebuilding, and developing and establishing new areas of engagement for Goree Institute in West Africa.

He/she will be responsible for conceptualizing and implementing projects and will work in close cooperation with partners to develop and implement Goree Institute’s programme and projects.

Key Responsibilities

• Participate to the development and periodic review of Goree Institute’s strategy
• Manage the overall development and implementation of projects components in fulfilment of Goree Institute’s strategy and in accordance with funded programme obligations, including developing new areas of work as relevant
• Lead in ensuring effective planning, monitoring and reporting for Goree Institute’s programme components and activities, including preparation of high-quality, timely donor reports
• Remain updated on the context in West Africa and ensure that the programme remains relevant and responsive to the context and that context analyses are shared with the wider organization
• Maintain good relationships and regular contacts with: international partners and stakeholders, including Goree Institute’s donors; ECOWAS, AU, civil society organizations that Goree Institute works with and/or supports.
• Ensure effective management of any formal partnerships between Goree Institute and government, ECOWAS, AU, civil society and international partners.
• Monitor official and non-governmental debates on conflict, peacebuilding, security, justice, governance, and development issues in West Africa in order to identify the best opportunities for Goree Institute to provide input into the policy debate;
• Represent Goree Institute at meetings, seminars, co-ordination fora and other events, acting as spokesperson as appropriate
• Identify and develop – together with Programme Team – fundraising opportunities for the programme; play a leading role in developing funding applications

PERSON SPECIFICATION

Essential requirements:

• A masters degree in peace/conflict studies, development, international relations (or equivalent professional experience)
• A minimum of five years’ experience working on peace-building, conflict prevention or development with governments and/or non-governmental organizations or RECs
• Strong staff management and team-building skills
• Strong analytical and strategising skills
• Solid understanding and experience of civil society engagement, networking and capacity building;
• Good knowledge of West Africa, including peace, conflict and security issues
• Good communication and interpersonal skills and ability to work in a non-partisan manner appreciating cultural and ethnic diversity
• Fluency in English (written and spoken)

The ideal candidate will have proven and relevant experiences in project management, in peace building and conflict prevention, in civil society networking, appropriate master’s degrees related to peace building and conflict prevention resolution fields, demonstrated ability to plan strategically to meet the program’s objectives, strong analytical and writing skills, excellent communication and interpersonal skills and be fluent both in English and French.

For applying, please send an e-mail to: info@goreeinstitute.org, no later than June the 30th.

GOREE INSTITUTE, 1 – rue du jardin, GOREE
Tél. : (221) 33 849 48 49 / Fax. : (221) 33 822 54 76
E-Mail: info@goreeinstitute.org
P.O. Box 05, GOREE

Fahamu