Fleeing war-ravaged Somalia for the relative peace and security of South Africa is not paying dividends for the many refugees who find themselves singled out for xenophobic attacks, which the Somali Association of South Africa claims have left more than 400 people dead in the past decade.

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem says, ‘‘The people of Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta are poor not because they do not have resources but because they do not have political power. Those who wield power in Nigeria are building skyscrapers in Lagos and Abuja while there is nothing in the Niger Delta. It is the same at the global level."

Rights activists in Kenya have intensified their campaign against a proposed anti-terrorism law, this after a travel advisory issued by the United States warned of possible terrorist attacks in the East African country during the upcoming World Cross Country Championships (WCCC).

FEATURES
Patrick Burnett reviews Zimbabwean voices and predictions about the future
COMMENT AND ANALYSIS:
- Wamba dia Wamba presents critical analysis of the concept of democracy, applied in the DRC
- Genetically modified rice is not the solution to Diarrhoea, writes Nnimmo Bassey
- Bronwen Dyke asks: will Cape Town legislation criminalise the poor?
- How to beat the internet censors - Dmitri Vitaliev
LETTERS:
- Doreen Lwanga: eight Malian families die in a New York fire
- President of Ghana and Chair of the African Union ambushed in London
PAN-AFRICAN POSTCARD: Tajudeen wonders whether the 'rule of law' is in fact the law of the rulers
BLOGGING AFRICA: Bloodshed in Zimbabwe
BOOKS & ARTS: Public invitation to an independence dance

WOMEN AND GENDER: Ivorian rights group calls attention to sexual violence
CONFLICT AND EMERGENCIES: Ugandan rebels conditionally resume talks
HUMAN RIGHTS: Morocco edging closer to abolishing death penalty
REFUGEES AND FORCED MIGRATION: Liberian refugees face deportation
ELECTIONS AND GOVERNANCE: Mauritania’s elections head for second round
AFRICA AND CHINA: It’s (still) the governance, stupid!
DEVELOPMENT: Mitigating the Brain-drain
CORRUPTION: Make the battle with corruption relevant to Africa
HEALTH AND HIV/AIDS: South Africa in bid to stem spread of HIV/AIDS
EDUCATION: Zambian parliament votes for free education
ENVIRONMENT: Progress in forest loss
LGBTI: Ghana’s gays condemn anniversary celebrations
LAND & LAND RIGHTS: South Africa Government may take first option on land
RACISM AND XENOPHOBIA: Migrants facing race hate in the UK
MEDIA AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION: Egyptian court upholds blogger’s conviction
NEWS FROM THE DIASPORA: Appalling treatment of Europe’s ‘foreign’ children
INTERNET AND TECHNOLOGY: Egypt launches NEPAD E-schools
PLUS: e-Newsletters and Mailings Lists; Fundraising and Useful Resources; Courses, Seminars and Workshops and Jobs

*Pambazuka News now has a Del.icio.us page, where you can view the various websites that we visit to keep our fingers on the pulse of Africa! Visit

The Nigerian Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill which was, for almost two months, in the Nigerian National Assembly for consideration has recently been forwarded to the Justice Committee for review. The Bill, which forbids lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) individuals from entering into same-sex marriages also punishes those who aid, preside over, witness or facilitate such an occasion with a five year jail term.

Two freelance journalists who were arrested when police broke up an opposition demonstration in Harare on 11 March, photographer Tsvangirai Mukwazhi and reporter Tendai Musiyu, were freed on Tuesday evening along with opposition activists who had been arrested at the same time. Both are contributors to the Associated Press news agency.

Different strains of the plasmodium parasites that cause malaria may be behind the failure to develop an effective malaria vaccine, according to a study conducted in Mali.

The rebel administration of Uganda's brutal Lord Resistance Army (LRA) has agreed to resume peace talks with the government aimed at burying the 20-year-old war provided certain conditions are met. The key condition has to do with the involvement of many African countries in the mediation team. These countries include South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya and the Congo Kinshasa (DRC).

The Alexandria Appeals Court ruled against an appeal filed by the attorney of Egypt's first convicted blogger, Abdel Kareem Suleiman, who was sentenced to four years in prison for "insulting Islam and the President of Egypt". His lawyers said they would appeal the judgment at the court of cessation.

Arrested and detained on the eve of this year's international women's day, 42 Gambian sex workers were automatically excluded from the celebrations. And to add salt to their injury, the courts jailed them to serve a week in prison for violating section 167 of the Criminal Code, which outlaws vagabond and roguish life.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has backed a call by the Ugandan Journalists Association (UJA) for the government to protect media covering court cases against opposition groups and put an end to police harassment of journalists.

Gladwell Otieno is the executive director for the Africa Centre for Open governance, based in Kenya. An uncompromising anti-corruption campaigner, she aims to revive Kenyan civil society's work on anti-corruption and good governance.

New research on the rate at which HIV is spreading through the South African population has once again underlined the fact that women under the age of 30 are at much greater risk of getting the disease than young men, sending a warning to government that it needs to dramatically improve prevention campaigns aimed at this group.

An estimated 10,000 civilians have fled the village of Burumba in North Kivu province in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) after violence erupted between the national army and a Rwandan Hutu rebel group, officials said on Tuesday.

I have been struggling with a commissioned article for an online journal about ‘the rule of law’. I was not sure which angle to take, given the multifaceted entry points to this widely used and abused concept and the even more diverse practice and bad practice in real and lived experiences. The question is whether the rule of law is simply a concept used by powerful nations or classes to legitimise their domination of the poorer and weaker nations and classes. When it suits their interests, they will preach rule of law. But they will quickly dispense with any notion of the law, if their interests are threatened.

Another related issue is the normative assumption that all citizens or countries are equal before the law, that our actions are circumscribed by the law whether we are rulers or the ruled, prisoners or presidents, men or women, the minority or the majority, whatever our religion, region, ethnicity, race, nationality, class or clan, whether we are rich or poor countries.

Globally these are not good times both for the concept of the rule of law and the notion of equality before the law. Western countries in general, the US in particular, demand democracy, rule of law and compliance with ‘international standards’, in spite of their continuing flouting of those same standards. Only last week, the US State Department released its annual ritualistic reports on human rights conditions everywhere around the world, except in the US itself!

The report predictably condemns those labelled pariah states - Sudan, Eritrea, etc, and remains silent or lenient about the current darlings of the US - Ethiopia, Kenya and others, while avoiding its own abuses. How can a country that bombs other peoples as it pleases; illegally detains thousands in a third country; and abducts citizens of other countries in the name of ‘rendition’ be so shameless as to be issuing such reports? After Guatanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Somalia, the US should be humble enough not to lecture anyone about rule of law: because it is the most powerful rogue state today. It is so law abiding that it has never signed up to the International Criminal Court (ICC), and will go to war for ‘UN resolutions’!

Bad practices of the West, the US in particular, undermine any regime of international law, and aid other countries in their flouting of international and national law. A situation where everyone is guilty, or potentially so, does not create an environment in which everyone would wish to voluntarily respect the law. Instead the law is interpreted in terms of what you can get away with. For instance, so far, the ICC has been bedeviled by accusations that it is only poor countries, along with regimes and dictators that are out of favour, which are facing trials, such as the late Milosevic or Charles Taylor. Until the day George Bush, Tony Blair or their generals are brought to trial before the ICC for foisting a war that even the UN, albeit belatedly, declared ‘illegal’, no one will believe that international law respects either persons or nations.

However the hypocrisy and lawless behavior of the US should not excuse other states not being law abiding. The bad manners of others should not be a license for the lawlessness of our own leaders. We should ask why is it that only they want to copy Western leaders or declare their sovereignty when it comes to bad practice? Why can they not copy them in terms of respecting and defending their citizens?

For instance, drought regularly occurs in some regions of America but does not become famine, because the country stores enough to take care of most emergencies. Ethiopia and Eritrea on the other hand are ready to beg for food for their citizens but willing to fight wars on behalf of the same citizens. Why is Meles Zenawi willing to be a Bush in Somalia, but not vis-a-vis his starving compatriots?

The past two weeks have not been good for law, human rights, citizenship rights and the democratic movement in Africa in general. As I write, the leader of the opposition in Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai, and other colleagues are in hospital as a result of injuries sustained from the police and other security agents who had arrested them allegedly for participating in an ‘illegal’ prayer meeting. You do not have to be a sympathiser of the opposition MDC to condemn the callousness of the Zimbabwean police and other security thugs. Does Tsvangirai really deserve to be beaten up on the television?

Assuming he and his colleagues are indeed guilty of an illegal act, is it not the responsibility of the courts to convict or acquit them? Is it the duty of the security service to administer punishments to suspects? Supposing they are acquitted by the courts, what penalties would the police thugs pay for their brutalities? Even an accused person has human rights, as do prisoners, irrespective of the gravity of their crimes.

In Uganda, the judiciary that many members of the opposition and human rights activists have always criticised - if sometimes unfairly - as too timid, complacent or conservative, has finally found its voice. It confronted the excesses of the executive over the years, after being pushed against the wall by consistent lawlessness of security agents. All observers and critics agree that rebels and judicial activists are made of sterner stuff than the painfully moderate and loyal personalities of Justice Odoki and Kanyihemba. When such legal luminaries begin to support strikes instead of the President and his over zealous boys (and boys they all are), berating the judges, or threatening to ‘fix the judges’, then they should look at their own bad manners. No government that claims to be based on the will of the people, rule of law and constitutionalism can disobey the courts as and when they please, and expect the citizens to be law abiding.

What threatens a culture of the rule of law taking root in Africa is not the criminals, rebels or disloyal opposition, rather the many reluctant democrats who occupy state houses across this continent. Because we deify them as presidents, they think they have the right to preside over any matter that concerns their citizens: from our toilets not flushing, through who we sleep or should not sleep with, to how judges should interpret the law.

Consequently those who serve them in the security and intelligence agencies believe they can get away with anything, including torture, abuse, humiliation, corporal punishment, intimidation and other kinds of excesses, in the service of their masters. The rule of law will remain a pipe dream so long as presidents perpetrate or condone these acts. It must be a ‘first’ that President Museveni made a grudging apology to the judges. More importantly however, both the president and his trigger-happy security elements need to accept that the rule of law is not a ‘katogo’ meal (a Ugandan delicacy for the masses, bits of this and that, similar to what Kenyans call Sukumawiki) made in state house that they can cherry-pick.

In Nigeria, Obasanjo has the same a la carte attitude to parliament, judiciary and the country. He simply goes on regardless of what the law says, or the people feel. These cavalier attitudes to the law are undermining the principle of separation of powers, and any notion of checks and balances. They are creating elective dictatorships across the continent.

If these presidents think the law is wrong, they can change it through the parliament. But they should have no discretion to choose which of the laws they obey. Similarly, citizens who think a particular law is wrong or unjust, can exercise their right to lobby or campaign to change it, including even defying such laws - as many defied the infamous Pass laws in apartheid South Africa or many colonial laws in the nationalist era. But they must also be ready to face the consequences. The state is not the personal property of the president. Therefore those opposed to him or her should not be treated as if they are ungrateful tenants. We have to deliberately de-programme ourselves, so as not to see opponents as ‘enemies’, and difference in opinion as treason.

Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, is Deputy Director, Africa, UN millennium Campaign and more recently General-Secretary of the Global Pan-African Movement.

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

In what they are calling the Africa Liberate Zimbabwe Campaign the Radical Militant pressure group Free-Zim Youth ambushed President Kufuor as he gave a speech in London Chatham House, marking Ghana’s 50 years of independence.

In just five minutes into his speech, Kufuor praised the AU’s role in uniting Africans. Wellington Chibanguza, 24, stood up with hand-cuffs in his hands lifted up (symbolising the oppressed and repressed people of Zimbabwe by the Mugabe regime) and challenged his statement: 'African Leaders have betrayed the aspirations of black Africans,by perpetuating regimes that use precolonial legislature to oppress its own people, on the face of writing historic wrongs, Now Cde you are travelling around the World adopting neoliberal policies and reforms, enjoying at an elite level while ordinary peasants are suffering'.

'You have betrayed the dreams and vision of Dr Kwame Krumah that Ghana’s independence is meaningless unless Africa is totally liberated.'

Security forces were called to drag Chibanguza out of the event, and the chair of the breakfast apologised by saying 'let's all wait for question and time' cracking a joke to the whole audience to laugh. This did not go down well with Free-Zim Youth, five minutes back into his speech another campaigner, Alois Mbawara walked in front of the whole audience and fanged a newspaper which had a picture of the abused opposition leader in front of Kufuor: 'You are laughing (Murikuseka) this is the betrayal we are talking about Zimbabwe is a burning issue, but AU is failing to openly condemn the ruthless regime of Mugabe.'

'We young Africans feel the AU has been hijacked by fake-left tyrannies who talk left but walk right, Mugabe claims he is a revolutionary, but he is the one who bought all those neoliberal policies to Zimbabwe, AU should expel Zanu PF from the bloc since it has betrayed the revolution.'

'Same with SADC which is failing to exercise authority on a member state which violated all democratic protocol and principles, shame on you our leaders.'

Mbawara was also dragged out by the security forces as he shouted Power to the People. At this time all the audience were now applauding in solidarity with the young campaigners.

The dramatic event continued after five minutes again back into Kufuor’s speech when another campaigner Marceline Mutikori, 26, stood up to challenge: 'Women and Children are dying in Zimbabwe due to a member state that has violated the rule of law, why is AU not expelling or suspend Zimbabwe from the Organization.'

Mutikori was also kicked out by the security forces. By this time the whole audience was waiting for President Kufuor to respond when another militant member Bridgette Maphosa, 23, stood up to challenge: 'Cde President it is now time African leaders practice what they preach, that is why we young Africans are saying to end poverty, it starts from good governance.'

'We should not wait and watch the dreams of father Nkrumah betrayed, solidarity with ordinary black Zimbabweans in the hands of the oppressor.'

The dramatic event took the whole scene and made the head of state openly condemn the Mugabe regime saying: 'African leaders are embarrassed by the situation in Zimbabwe and perhaps could do more to help, but have met stiff resistance from Harare. As The African Union we will do all we can to restore the rule of Law in Zimbabwe.'

Openly condemning the brutal attacks of progressive leaders in Zimbabwe.

Background statement Brilliant Pongo of Free-Zim Youth said 'Direct confrontation is the only language our African leaders can adhere to, we will keep on putting pressure until they push for an African driven resolution.'

Gugulethu sibanda of Free-Zim Youth said 'The Zimbabwean problem is an African problem that needs an African solution and the current African Union is just a playhouse for the dictators, because they fail to enforce the protocols and principals all members are mandated to.'

Free-Zim Youth group statement:

Same applies with the ANC government, why we are holding it accountable for the suffering of black Zimbabweans. We are not saying the ANC should send troops but they have been on the record of legitimisng the Zanu PF regime, trying to push for some form of stability we say no.

And we have declared that all fake African leaders should be probed by the 'Africa Liberate Zimbabwe Campaign' which was ideologically built to question one’s African credentials, we comradely thank you!

Power to the People

For more information please contact Wellington Chibanguza 07706868955 Alois Mbawara 07960333568 [email][email protected]

Kenyan telecommunications operator Safaricom has reluctantly accepted the decision by the industry regulator, the Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK), to reduce mobile tariffs within the country. This is according Michael Joseph, CEO of Safaricom.

Egyptian security forces broke up a demonstration by an anti-government group on Thursday, beating activists protesting against planned constitutional amendments they see as ushering in a police state.

Lack of progress in peace talks between Uganda's government and northern rebels has dismayed women uprooted by 20 years of war and they want to play a bigger role in the dialogue, aid workers said on Thursday.

Leakages of highly toxic sewerage water from the Rundu Sewerage Ponds may in the near future cause the contamination of the Kavango River. Black sewerage water gushing out from these ponds and flowing downstream into the river may pose a serious health hazard for the people in the Kavango as well as the neighbouring countries of Angola and Botswana.

The UK and the other countries of Europe are signatories to children's rights conventions and yet they are systematically robbing a whole group of children of their basic, human rights by classifying them not as children but as foreigners and asylum seekers.

The third Joint Economic and Trade Commission China-Angola is taking place from the 14th to the 16th of March in Beijing. This meeting signifies the augmentation in ties between these two nations in addition to the fact that Angola is already China's largest trade partner in Africa.

The spirit of Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism still lives on in Ghana today through its various citizenship laws. Ghana is the first African country to provide the right to return, and indefinite stay for Africans in the diaspora. The government also recently passed legislation giving Ghanaians in the diaspora the right to vote.

As we commemorate Ghana at 50, let us not forget the founding father of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah and his notion of pan-Africanism. Kwame Nkrumah pursued the political independence of Ghana and committed himself to the struggles against foreign domination in other African colonies. He cemented Arab-African ties through special friendships with Egyptian leader Gamar Abdel Nassar. He welcomed Africa freedom fighters such as Malcolm X, W. E. Dubois, and George Padmore. He established a continental radio station (the External Service of Radio Ghana), which helped fuel the African liberation struggle. To this end, Kwame Nkrumah envisioned pan-African citizenship for all peoples of Africa.

50 years later, Ghana continues the vision of Kwame Nkrumah in its generous citizenship laws that provide for a permanent home for peoples of African descent. In 2000, Ghana introduced the Dual citizenship Act 2000 under which a citizen of Ghana may hold the citizenship of any other country in addition to his Ghanaian citizenship. A person of non-Ghanaian origin could also apply for Ghanaian citizenship by registration if s/he is an ordinary resident of Ghana, and by naturalization if s/he has made a substantial contribution to the progress or advancement in any area of national activity.

However, critics of the law point to the fact that the 2000 Act was intended to reward Ghanaians in the diaspora who have acquired another citizenship but contribute greatly to the national development of the country. In fact, following the enactment of the law, Dr. Addo-Kufuor, then acting Minister of Interior explained that Non-Resident Ghanaians had remitted US$400,000,000 annually to boost Ghana’s economy against contributions of Foreign Direct Investment, which since 1994 to 2002 had contributed US$1.6, or about US$200,000,000. Indeed the acquisition of Ghanaian citizenship by registration and naturalization is subject to ability to speak and understand an indigenous Ghanaian language.

Nevertheless, Ghana is the first African nation to provide the right to return and indefinite stay for Africans in the Diaspora. Under Section 17(1)(b) of the Immigration Law, Act 573 of 2000, the Minister may grant the 'right to abode' to a person of African descent in the diaspora with the approval of the President. Some say, this provision was aimed at tapping into the rich African Americans who have returned to Ghana since its independence and taken up residence in the country, and rewarding those who contribute to the budding tourist industry.

Despite the contestations and shortcomings, all these achievements indicate the persistence, hard work and pan-African spirit of the Ghanaian government, Ghanaian parliament, ordinary Ghanaians, and Ghanaians and other African peoples in the Diaspora. Last year, the Ghanaian Parliament responded positively to lobbying of Ghanaians in the Diaspora by passing the Representation of the People Amendment Bill, (ROPAB) granting them right to vote in national elections. In December 2008, Ghanaians in the diaspora will vote for the first time in Presidential elections through absentee ballots. Their next move is to challenge through Ghanaian courts a provision in the Citizenship Act, 2000, which prohibits Ghanaians who have acquired citizenship of another country from standing for political office in Ghana. Later this year, the same group working with Benjamin Afrifa of the Africa Federation, Inc. intends to launch an African TV station broadcasting from the US. The TV station will broadcast African diaspora affairs as well as continental affairs. Ultimately, Ghanaians hope to carry on Kwame Nkrumah’s mantle, and influence other Africans in the diaspora to engage fully in their own nations.

I hope that all African countries will follow suit by allowing us free access to our continent without visa restriction and administrative humiliation. It is true that some African countries have embraced Kwame Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism and granted citizenship to African immigrants or refugees. For instance, Tanzania granted citizenship to Burundian refugees in the early 1990s and offered long-term stay to many freedom fighters from Mozambique, South Africa and Uganda. Senegal extended citizenship to Mauritanian refugees expelled from their home country in 1989. These gestures of welcoming Africans as citizens in other African countries needs to be recognizsd and encouraged throughout Africa.

It is a pity that in most African states, we continually experience unfriendly citizenship and immigration laws in the name of 'national security'. Many countries still in fact still uphold laws inherited from colonial regimes that have either separated nations across the border or deemed Africans as strangers in our own continent. It is often easier to enter an African country carrying a European or North American passport than, say, a Ugandan passport. For instance, Senegal, which parades itself as the 'Land of Teranga' still upholds an immigration law inherited from the French that makes it hard for Africans bearing a passport from a non-ECOWAS country to enter. This is not to suggest that a Senegalese does not need a visa to enter Uganda, however, the process is less cumbersome particularly for African visitors. Why should a country that struggled to rid itself of the colonial regime still uphold colonial law as national law? Why don’t we in Africa give preferential treatment to each other as members of the African Union, similarly to how this is done in EU or the United States? Or is movement within Africa a right for only African diplomats, Europeans and North Americans?

As a start, we could abolish visa regimes for Africans in preference for regional arrangements similar to the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) and the East African Community (EAC). We could also follow the EAC arrangement and issue African Union passports to all peoples of Africa, from the African continent and the Africa diaspora. Opponents of free borders argue that people will migrate en masse from their homes/regions of economic hardship and stay indefinitely in economically well-to-do countries if borders were made more porous. However, evidence within the ECOWAS, EAC or the EU illustrates that where borders are open to community members, people move back and forth. Everyday, Ugandans, Kenyans, Guineans, Senegalese and others within the EAC and ECOWAS community move freely between the borders and return to their places of permanent residence. In fact, the greatest pan-Africanists are the border communities engaged in daily socio-economic and cultural activities across the borders, such as the Masaai along the Kenya-Tanzania border, the Peulh along the Seno-Mauritania border and the Luo on the Uganda-Sudan border.

However, a fear of one's neighbour guides immigration and citizenship policies in most of Africa. Zimbabwean traders who travel across the border to Botswana are subject to stringent entry visa restrictions and high fees even though both countries are member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). This trend, though not unique is particularly disturbing coming from Botswana whose economic development owes a lot to the huge number of African professionals who have lived and worked in Botswana for many years. Many are still denied the right to citizenship based on unfair residence laws that grant short-term stay with hardly any chance to qualify for legal permanent residence. Similarly, many Africans whose ancestors were taken as slaves to Europe and the Americas have expressed disappointment about being excluded from the new dual citizenship regimes sweeping Africa. Whereas African Presidents appeal to Africans living in the diaspora to participate in national development, incentives are provided for those 'who left on their own free will', as against those whose ancestors were sold into slavery. On the other hand, there are sentiments among Africans on the continent that it is possible to be a national without being a citizen, and the latter should be reserved for 'those left behind' who are working for national development. For instance, Oteng-Attakora, a Ghanaian writer, argues that although Ghanaians in the diaspora have family ties and their remittances may alleviate the pain of the fortunate few, they neither pay taxes nor create jobs that would contribute to national building.

Ultimately, African states should borrow a leaf from Israel, which encourages and in fact solicits all persons of Jewish heritage to immigrate to Israel and gathering a in of its exiles. The African Union could sponsor annual tour to Africa (like Israel does for the Jewish diaspora) to visit the homeland. If called upon, interested Africans of the diaspora will finance their own trips to the homeland, as evidenced by on-going return and tour trips to the Cape Coast in Ghana, Goree Island in Senegal and others. Certainly, the Africa diaspora has a role to play, not only in lobbying for political rights but also in contributing to national development and promotion of the African affairs. Until we as Africans learn to value and trust each other, we cannot demand other countries, particularly in Europe, Asia and the Americas to value us. VIVA OSAJEFO!

* Doreen Lwanga is a Pan-Africanist and a Scholar of Citizenship and Security in Africa. She can be reached at [email][email protected]

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at pambazuka.org

The generation and distribution of power (electricity) is political and economically driven. It is also surrounded by deception and falsehoods. Tristen Taylor explains why and how.

To illustrate that the energy cycle is centralised in a manner which reinforces the political domination of the few over the many, primarily through economic instruments, we now turn to South Africa and the generation and distribution of electricity.

95 per cent of electricity in South Africa is generated (and distributed) by one organisation, Eskom. The South African government owns 100 per cent of Eskom, with the Minister of Public Enterprises being the representative shareholder. In effect, this means that the South African government has total control over the conversion of energy into electricity and its subsequent distribution. Eskom generates this electricity overwhelmingly through the use of ten coal-fired power stations, producing 90 per cent of all electricity. The additional 5 per cent comes from nuclear (Koeberg) and hydro resources. This represents centralisation of energy conversion almost unheard of in human history. If we accept that the government is just one actor within our society, then it appears strange that it holds full control over one of society’s basic goods.

The South African government decides howEskom’s 208,314GWh of electricity is distributed. These are the proportions by sector: agriculture three per cent, commerce ten per cent, the transport sector two per cent. Industry is allocated a whopping 68 per cent. Residential users represent 17 per cent.

To recap - Agriculture and the business sector combined get a whopping 83 per cent of all electricity, while the citizenry must scavenge for the remaining 17 per cent. Approximately, 30 per cent of households are without electricity. And the pro-business, anti-poor bias is further illustrated in Eskom’s pricing policy. As Bryan Ashe notes:

'Soweto residents are charged 28 cents per kilowatt/hour while Sandton … residents pay 16 cents and big business pays seven cents. In rural areas, consumers are charged 48 cents per kilowatt/hour.'

How is such a distribution model justified? Mostly according to the dominant economic policy of our time, GEAR and its offspring. All of which are minor variations on the policies of the IMF and the World Bank, often termed neo-liberal economics or the Washington Consensus. The South African government gives more electricity to the business sector because, rightly or wrongly, it believes that business interests are greater than those of individual citizens, especially in a situation where demand has outstripped capacity. Given a choice between providing cheap electricity to industry and cheap electricity to the people, the Government has routinely chosen the former, as witnessed by the Alcan-Coega deal.

One may ask, if this is in the common good, this current distribution of electricity, why have so many conflicts occurred between government authorities and communities seeking access to electricity? Why do some South Africans have to make do with candles and paraffin while big business gets all the power it wants, at the price it wants?

Primarily because of the macro-economic policies adopted by our government. Incidentally, these macro-economic policies create what is currently considered a favourable investment climate for foreign capital, which is free to move anywhere it wishes (unlike people). If the government refused to create this climate, capital would not be invested and growth would not be possible, or so the argument goes. If the economic and social data are anything to go by, this macro-economic policy of the last ten years has produced an unrelenting assault upon the poor whilst facilitating fantastic levels of growth within the financial services sector. Of course, the poor and the working classes do not own shares or unit trusts. As Dale McKinley states:

'Research conducted by the Development Bank of South Africa in 2005 revealed that the number of South Africans in poverty (with the national poverty line for 2002 being benchmarked at a miserable R354 per adult per month) in all population groups increased dramatically, from 17,000,000 in 1996 to 21,000,000 in 2003…indeed, the state’s own figures for 2002 show that the poorest half of all South Africans earn just 9,7% of national income (down from 11,4% in 1995), while the richest 20% take 65% of all income.'

According to the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into a Comprehensive System of Social Security for South Africa in 2002, 55 per cent of South Africans live in poverty and 60 per cent of the poor receive no social security transfers and/or grants. Making matters even worse, the Report of the South African Cities Network (2004) revealed there was a 180 per cent increase between 1996-2001 in the number of urban households with no measurable income at all.

Further, in determining its energy position, the Government did it without seeking meaningful citizen-participation. Why should it? Why does any centralised authority have to consult with what are, after all, the end consumers of an energy chain? What can citizens do? Boycott electricity?

Access to electricity is a determining factor in one’s position within society, and the withholding of access to electricity, either through refusing to provide access or through tariffs, is an act of controlling individual access. In the power relationship between the citizenry and Eskom/the South African government, those who control the generation and distribution of electricity hold all the cards. There is very little citizens can do if the price of electricity is increased (for the poor with access, a rise in price means that their access becomes further restricted) or if supply is diverted to industry.

Put another way, the individual citizen is dependent entirely upon the government to provide him/her with a basic condition of modern life. This gives the government undue power over the circumstances of the fortunes of citizens, communities, organisations, and businesses, resulting in an insidious form of patronage. Furthermore, the total centralisation of energy conversion has enabled the government to use electricity as part of its macro-economic policy; witness the pre-paid meter wars in Soweto, the staggering numbers of disconnections (10,000,000 by 2002), preferential pricing for domestic and foreign corporations, an attempt at privatising Eskom, and a continued reliance on coal. Using only coal to generate electricity provides an effective market-subsidy to the coal mining and export companies (such as Anglo Coal and TOTAL).

For example, Anglo Coal produced 56.900,000 tons of coal in 2005 in South Africa, of which Eskom bought 34.300,000 tons. Furthermore, Anglo Coal is currently seeking new deals with Eskom for additional long-term purchasing arrangements to the tune of an additional 25,000,000 tons of coal per annum.

From global profits in excess of US$1 billion for Anglo Coal, US$439,000,000 came from South Africa. With such a huge amount of money at stake, it is in Anglo Coal’s own interest that Eskom continues its love affair with coal and, by necessity, that South Africa’s electricity generation remains centralised. TOTAL is the ninth largest oil and gas company in the world and the fourth largest coal exporter in South Africa, representing a major consolidation of local and global energy resources in private hands.

Perhaps one of the greatest and most tragic ironies of the current Eskom policy of pro-business generation and distribution of electricity is that the technology used was paid for by the citizenry as a whole, mostly through foreign and odious debt incurred during apartheid. Eskom was one of the prime beneficiaries of foreign loans during the apartheid era. For example, in 1974 Barclays participated in a US$15,000,000 Eskom Eurobond issue; in 1976 (after the Soweto uprising) Citibank, along with three other US banks and Barclays, provided credit of US$200,000,000 for Eskom. In 1980 Credit Suisse was the managing bank in loans worth CHF,000,000 million to Eskom. And so on. 16 per cent of all foreign debt in 1990 was the result of loans to Eskom. These loans became the obligation, post-1994, of the victims of apartheid to pay back via taxes. It is these same victims that are being discriminated against in Eskom’s current energy policy.

The feudal lords with their watermills were thinking small

But what does this social and economic problem have to do with the environment? In one sense, all social and economic issues are environmental. Human beings and all their artefacts are part of the global ecology. True that may be, but it sidesteps the real concern. Addressing the situation described above – that the centralised energy conversion system of South Africa is anti-poor – does not mean having to revert to traditional environmental issues such as dirty coal, global warming, renewable energy, cute and fuzzy bunnies. The answer would be to change the distribution policy of Eskom and the government, reduce cut-offs, lower residential tariffs, increase 'lifeboat' allowances, and build more transmission lines and bigger power stations.

This approach is fundamentally flawed in that it ignores two key factors. First, it ignores the fact that electricity generation (like all energy conversion systems) underscores a political power relationship. Within a centralised and tightly controlled system as South Africa’s, the citizenry already gets as much electricity as it needs, according to the system. Because the South African energy cycle is controlled entirely by an elite class, electricity is granted to non-elites in accordance with their ability to serve the elite class. By way of example, middle class individuals receive a fair amount of electricity because: 1) They provide a means of subsidisation for industry through the payment of tariffs, and a form of revenue for Eskom; 2) They need a fair amount of electricity to fulfil their roles as the technicians of the modern economy. One cannot be an effective engineer or doctor if one does not have electricity. The poor receive a more limited amount (or none at all) precisely because the system does not require them to be electricity-rich. In fact, the value of the poor for the system, besides the role of consumers, is to depress wages.

The current lack of capacity within Eskom to generate additional electricity is being addressed only because the dominant interest group (business) is demanding more and cheaper electricity. This demand is virtually unlimited, and additional increases in generating capacity (more power stations) will be absorbed and used by industry. To radically alter this equation to truly favour the poor would require a complete change of the economic and social paradigm of the economy itself. This would require a transition to a democratic socialist regime and a degree of central planning to the economy. Only after this has happened, after the power of capital has been broken, can the policy of Eskom be changed.

Any move towards a democratic socialist South Africa will not happen overnight, for such a move will be strongly (if not violently) resisted by current elite groups and capital in general, and could take generations to achieve. There is no time to wait for such a transition, both in terms of human suffering and external factors. Nor is it evident that the populace as a whole wants a socialist South Africa.

Further, even a socialist South Africa will not remove the underlying power dynamic between the citizenry and centralised energy conversion. As long as the generation and distribution of electricity remains in the hands of a single entity or the few, the entire citizenry will remain at the mercy of the few. Electricity and other forms of energy, petrol, for example, are not luxury items. An individual requires constant access to them in order simply to survive in the modern world.

The second factor, which renders much of the previous factor mute, is that external factors will force a change in the current energy cycle. Coal is not an unlimited resource, and South Africa’s coal reserves will run out. Current reserves are at about 34 billion metric tons, and by 2040 South Africa could have only 7 billion metric tons. 8 Yet these statistics are not the whole story. The demand for coal is growing on a global scale and will continue to do so, despite diminishing reserves. Simple economics means that the price of coal will keep on increasing, making coal-generated electricity increasingly expensive. There are already signs of this happening. For example, China is concerned that it does not have enough coal to fuel its industrial expansion:

'This year, China's domestic demand for coal is expected to reach 1.78 billion tons. Taken together, the four major industrial sectors of power generation, metallurgy, building materials manufacture and fertilizers will consume 1.58 billion tons, up 12.9 percent on the previous year. Meanwhile exports will exceed the 80 million ton mark. Energy expert, Han Xiaoping, says, ‘The fundamental reason for China to slash its coke export quota lies in China's deepening energy crisis. China's current coal reserves and rates of exploitation are just not sufficient to continue to sustain the rapid development of the Chinese economy.'

Shortages in coal supply will be further exacerbated by declining petroleum reserves and rising petroleum prices. As the price of oil per barrel increases, the viability of transforming coal into oil increases. This is what SASOL does, and it is a technology in which China has heavily invested in. This makes coal an even more useful resource thereby increasing demand, price and rate of extraction. This will mean greater pressure on the poor and working classes for, as energy prices increase, more and more people will be unable to afford access to energy, leading to negative social implications such as the further entrenchment of poverty, poor/minimal education, disease, and social conflict.

Recent moves in the biofuels sector (ethanol and biodiesel are now economically viable alternatives and additives to petrol and diesel) are showing a similar trajectory. The production and distribution of biofuels is rapidly becoming consolidated in a nexus of agribusiness and traditional oil companies, often with generous state subsidies. Once again, the only role for the individual in this system is as the consumer. Further, as ethanol and biodiesel become the cash crops of the 21st century, good land will be used for them, contributing to the increasing driving out of small-scale farmers to ever more marginal soil.

Simply speaking, the odds are that the coal and petroleum global economy will be abandoned or it will collapse before it can be shifted to a pro-poor approach. There is an ecological limit on our current growth trajectory and method, and this is applied to capitalist, communist, and socialist economies alike.

The other external factor that will force a change in the global energy conversion cycle is climate change. The overwhelming body of scientific evidence states that the current use of petroleum and coal is the primary reason why the climate is warming. As the climate warms, weather and oceanic patterns will change, causing massive disruption to ecologies. We can expect longer droughts, rising sea levels, increasing extinctions, reduced food supplies (especially marine food sources), and unhealthy weather. Most likely, you will be cursed to live long enough to see this happen.

Climate change is not only an environmental issue. It is a social issue, and will have profound social implications. Those with access to resources (capital) will be better equipped to deal with the negative effects of climate change; those without access to capital will suffer the most. Hurricane Katrina has been an abject lesson on how social, economic and political relationships will be played out as climate changes increase.

Just before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005, the rich and middle classes deserted the city - they simply drove or flew away. They had the access to capital required to move themselves out of harm’s way. The poor (and black) were left behind to face the storm. The white guys left town and watched the show on CNN, the black folks drowned. Welcome to the future.

In the coming decades the world will either make the transition away from a fossil fuel economy or it will suffer the negative consequences of climate change. And, because this change is imminent (assuming we don’t 'choose' to drown instead), there is a great danger that the transition towards an alternative energy system will ignore the social and economic relationships that exist in energy conversion, especially within the minerals-energy complex.

If the negative affects of global warming and air pollution are temporarily excluded from the equation, it makes no difference in terms of societal power relationships if the system for producing electricity comes from a centralised coal-based system or a centralised renewable energy (or nuclear) system. Both systems will produce the same kind of socio-economic relationships that currently exist. And the environmental movement seems to have forgotten, ignored, or is unaware of this fact. Replacing one system that bolsters domination with another that also bolsters domination does not advance the cause of human justice one bit.

The only long-term solution that will address both the environmental and human justice concerns is one that addresses the political economy of power. Moreover, addressing the political economy of power is a necessary step towards a better, brighter world for all of us.

I’ll keep my remarks on how to address the political economy of power to the generation of electricity; no alternatives for petroleum, unfortunately. To begin, we must remember that there is no shortage of energy. The only limit that exists is our ability to tap into that energy, and this is a technological problem.

Fortunately, there do exist alternative technologies - such as solar, wind, biogas - and there are also methods of using energy with greater efficiency, that have the potential to change the political economy of power. Some of these technologies will require state subsidy, others need further research and development, but neither of these two factors are prohibitive. Technologically speaking, we are close to the point of having a carbon-based paint that can be applied to a wall and generate electricity using solar radiation.

What needs to be done is to decentralise the generation of electricity to the level of municipalities, towns, villages, and, most importantly, individual households. The goal is that each household should be able to generate enough electricity for its own use, as well as generate excess electricity that can be fed back into the national grid. This goal is not impossible to achieve. The laws of physics do not prevent it, and it is not beyond current engineering capacity. This can be achieved. It is not science fiction. The technology will have to be renewable and use materials available at a local level. Wind and solar provide two potential sources for such a system, and, because they are free to all, cannot be controlled by the few.

The basis of the electricity conversion system needs to be at the grassroots level. Individual citizens and communities must have the ability not only to set their own electricity requirements but also to meet their own needs. If this can be achieved, it will provide adequate electricity and will also alter the political economy of power. No longer would communities have to beg from the State for an extra couple of kilowatts a month; the State would not be able to use electricity as a means of control and oppression, and as a vehicle for implanting its own desires. To use a slightly different terminology, the means of the production of electricity would be in the hands of the users themselves.

The social and economic implications of such a system are clear – in at least one important sector of modern life, the people would have direct and clear ownership of the electricity sector. The corrosive and dominating relationship with regard to electricity would be dissolved and replaced with a situation of community and individual level self-sufficiency, providing a basis for advances in other areas such as economics, liberty, human rights, and real education.

Quite often in the struggle for human and environmental justice, we see ourselves fighting a rearguard action while hoping to survive until some future date when things will, miraculously, be better. Salvation is at a distant point, for the conditions for change are not yet right. Current struggles often seek to enable the foundations for change, not the change itself.

Breaking the political economy of power and decentralising electricity generation needs not wait for some far off event. The time for change is now. The current system has systemically failed both the poor and the environment, and has just about reached its ecological limits. Coal and oil are running out. The continued use of fossil fuels is producing an ecological response (climate change) that is already having widespread and negative effects. A change must happen, the historical moment of change has arrived. Just as Europe and China shifted to coal as wood supplies dwindled, so Africa will shift from fossil fuels to alternative sources of energy.

For the past 250 years we have had the feudal lords and their watermills. Time for some windmills and freedom.

* Part 1 was published in Pambazuka News 293
* Tristen Taylor is the energy policy officer at Earthlife Africa Jhb. The views expressed in this work are not necessarily those of Earthlife Africa Jhb.

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org

1 David A. McDonald, “The Bell Tolls For Thee: Cost Recovery, Cutoffs, and the Affordability of Municipal Services in South Africa”, Municipal Services Project, March 2002, pg. 5
2 Bryan Ashe, “South Africa's Mammoth Electric Company Leads the Way in Utility Privatisation while Touting Sustainable Development”, 16 August 2002, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=3528 Bold added
3 Dale T. McKinley, “The Making of a Myth: South Africa’s Neo-Liberal Journey”, 22 March 2006
4 David A. McDonald, “The Bell Tolls For Thee: Cost Recovery, Cutoffs, and the Affordability of Municipal Services in South Africa”, Municipal Services Project, March 2002, pg. 3
5 Currently on hold, but which would result in a centralising of energy conversion in the hands of business, a far smaller and less accountable group than Government.
6 Brendan Ryan, “Anglo Coal pitches for Eskom”, MiningMX, 21 December 2005, http://www.miningmx.com/energy/531028.htm
7 For more on the role played by multinational banks in propping up Apartheid, see Tristen Taylor, “Funding Repression”, 2005.
8 Note estimates vary widely. Source used: http://www.mbendi.co.za/indy/ming/coal/af/sa/p0005.htm
9 Tang Fuchun, “Call for Coal Reserve in Energy Security Strategy”, China.org.cn, 17 June 2004.

I fully agree with your article on the mis-representation of Africa. Here in Canada this has been helped by General R. Dalaire's book I Shook hands with the Devil and Gilles Courtemanche's bestseller A Sunday in Kigali in which an enlightened Canadian witnesses the 'horror' of dark Africa. But there is Robin Philpott's excellent 'It didn't happen like that in Kigali' (only in French but somewhere on the web in English) . It goes way back, of course. Thanks for you good article.

November 13th, 2006
They’re coming in…pouring in
Walking up and down
Some happy, laughing and smiling
Some in pain,but trying so hard to present happy faces
Some written sorrow all over their faces
Others written regret on their appearances
They share their stories
Convincing one another with realities of living with dreadful, monsters and painful disease is all the talk you keep hearing around the room.
Some are brought by their loved ones,they can barely walk
Others are on wheelchairs,death is all keep starring from their eyes
The queues are so long, we’ve been here since the early morning
BUT,because a chance to a better life is all we’re waiting for
What else is there to do?
What else is there to achieve?
Others look frightened and scared
As for the one next to me…I salute her
She’s positively promoting to others how she lives and maintains a normal life with her smoking and boozing as if nothing's wrong.
“Its true-nothings wrong,its only that she’s infected” after all she has to live a normal life just like any other normal living being in the world.FUCK! the status! and the HIV virus ,she must be crazy!
Some you can tell just by viewing and looking at them that-Gone are those days!
Whilst, others its like “I’m a size 32 but today I’ borrowed my brother’s/sister’s size 40 pans or T’s
OH! Shameless and mercy less is this HIV/AIDS
Its been 5, 10, 13, 20…..years
You hear others installing hope to the already hopeless
How terrifying but hearing them share eases the pains to others
Others have brought their babies and children whom are also sick
and you turn to ask yourself,Where did this AIDS come from?
There are various and different smells all over the room
Its smells terrible and making one feel like vomiting
Is it the smell of pills? different crowds of sick people? or is it the filthy smell of HIV itself?

“My mother use to warn me about running around with different men BUT I never listened and now I know I’m going to die and I deserve it”

this one keeps going on.
Some of these people are in chains-maybe-emotionally but not physically “I mean”
They are being brought here by the prison warders
What a shame and pity!
Some we know each other from the township as neighbours
BUT, because we’ve bumped into each other in this place
There are no friendly and neighbourly greetings as usual.
They seem ashamed and embarrassed
Shit! this AIDS is one thing capable of causing unnecessary hate!
With all that's happening around
I wonder…
Where am I going to end?
When is my turn?
When is the virus going to take over my fighting and willing body?
When will it all go away?
BECAUSE….
As strong as I can be
It is within this solid and concrete body of mine.
And slowly but surely
I WILL GET USED TO THIS
AIDS HOSPITAL!!!

* Latifah is a victim of hate crime and as a result is HIV positive. She lives Soweto, South Africa.
* Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org

Owing to the volume of articles being submitted to Pambazuka News, and the need to highlight two key events - the 50th Anniversary of Ghana and International Women's Day - we decided to send out this week's newsletter in three parts. On 7 March 2007, we published articles relating to these events together with the second part of two important articles published last week.

On 8 March, we are publishing the second part of Pambazuka News, featuring Mahmood Mamdani's article on Darfur entitled 'The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency'. On 9 March we will publish our usual Links and Resources.

FEATURED THIS WEEK
- Mahmood Mamdani looks critically at the Save Darfur campaign and asks why those calling for the end of US intervention in Iraq are calling for intervention in Darfur
- Kwame Zulu Shabazz asks what freedom means in an African context and whether a country be free when 75% of its budget is provided by donors
- The spirit of Nkrumah and pan-Africanism still lives on in Ghana today, argues Doreen Lwanga
- Nii Ardey Otoo defends Nkrumah's declaration of a one-party state in Ghana
- The generation and distribution of power (electricity) is political and economically driven; Tristen Taylor explains why and how
- Bro. K. Bangarah argues that it was military, economic and political forces, along with the actions of a group of Afrikan activists in Britain that led to the abolition of slavery, and not William Wilberforce
- Pus Joseph Yav on International Women's Day and the brutality of men at war
BLOGS ROUND-UP
- Sokari Ekine rounds up African blogs on International Women's Day
CULTURE AND ARTS
- Latifa, a victim of hate crime, presents a poem on a day in an Aids hospital
PODCASTS
- Fikele Vilakaz talks to Pambazuka News in the first broadcast in our special series on sexuality and social justice

PAN AFRICAN POSTCARD: Tajudeen reports on the conference on sustaining Africa's democratic movement
WOMEN AND GENDER: Women’s Rights – How far to go? Joshua Ogada reviews the scene
CONFLICT AND EMERGENCIES: AU troops ambushed in Somalia
HUMAN RIGHTS: Urgent action needed on human trafficking
REFUGEES AND FORCED MIGRATION: Militia in Darfur surround camp
ELECTIONS AND GOVERNANCE: Mauritania’s elections haunted by racial imbalance
DEVELOPMENT: Somalia’s money for nothing
CORRUPTION: Burundians urged to fight graft
HEALTH AND HIV/AIDS: Outrage in Burundi over national ARV shortages
EDUCATION: Maintaining the right to youth and education
ENVIRONMENT: Fighting to preserve Central African Republic’s forests
LGBTI: Court orders release of Burundian jailed for sodomy
RACISM AND XENOPHOBIA: Somalis are easy prey
MEDIA AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION: Kenyan tabloid editor jailed
INTERNET AND TECHNOLOGY: The challenge of establishing ICTs in Africa
PLUS: e-Newsletters and Mailings Lists; Fundraising and Useful Resources; Courses, Seminars and Workshops

* Pambazuka News now has a Del.icio.us page, where you can view the various websites that we visit to keep our fingers on the pulse of Africa! Visit

The UN refugee agency has launched a US$56.1 million appeal for its operations this year to help tens of thousands of southern Sudanese refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) return home and reintegrate in their communities.

As the world marks International Women's Day, Thursday, under the theme of 'Ending Impunity for Violence Against Women and Girls', activists in Kenya claim there is much to do in ensuring that abusers are punished.

With AIDS cutting a swathe through Africa's workforce, there is an urgent need for employers to set up policies that support HIV-positive staff -- and ensure they are not victims of stigma. But, it is a need that often goes unaddressed.

It is the season for bush fires in Senegal, and there are once again concerns that vast tracts of fertile land could be set alight, and ravaged. Over 2005 and 2006 more than 400,000 hectares were affected in the course of an unusually severe series of fires. Almost a tenth of the southern Linguère region was burnt, and more than nine percent of the Bakel area. Several smaller outbreaks were also documented.

Nigeria's ruling party presidential contender, Umaru Yar'Adua, 55, says he is well enough to run in April's polls. Speaking to the BBC from Germany, where he was flown for a medical check-up, he scotched speculation that he was unfit to continue in the contest.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/294/darfur_idps.jpgThe similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?

The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans’.

A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur now. It wants the intervening forces to be placed under ‘a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel’. That intervention in Darfur should not be subject to ‘political or civilian’ considerations and that the intervening forces should have the right to shoot – to kill – without permission from distant places: these are said to be ‘humanitarian’ demands. In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has called for ‘force as a first-resort response’. What makes the situation even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as the slogan goes, ‘Out of Iraq and into Darfur.’

What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics – a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrific nature of the violence against civilians in Darfur. The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a state-connected counter-insurgency and an organised insurgency, very much like the violence in Iraq.

The insurgency and counter-insurgency in Darfur began in 2003. Both were driven by an intermeshing of domestic tensions in the context of a peace-averse international environment defined by the War on Terror. On the one hand, there was a struggle for power within the political class in Sudan, with more marginal interests in the west (following those in the south and in the east) calling for reform at the centre. On the other, there was a community-level split inside Darfur, between nomads and settled farmers, who had earlier forged a way of sharing the use of semi-arid land in the dry season. With the drought that set in towards the late 1970s, co-operation turned into an intense struggle over diminishing resources.

As the insurgency took root among the prospering peasant tribes of Darfur, the government trained and armed the poorer nomads and formed a militia – the Janjawiid – that became the vanguard of the unfolding counter-insurgency. The worst violence came from the Janjawiid, but the insurgent movements were also accused of gross violations. Anyone wanting to end the spiralling violence would have to bring about power-sharing at the state level and resource-sharing at the community level, land being the key resource.

Since its onset, two official verdicts have been delivered on the violence, the first from the US, the second from the UN. The American verdict was unambiguous: Darfur was the site of an ongoing genocide. The chain of events leading to Washington’s proclamation began with ‘a genocide alert’ from the Management Committee of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum; according to the Jerusalem Post, the alert was ‘the first ever of its kind, issued by the US Holocaust Museum’. The House of Representatives followed unanimously on 24 June 2004. The last to join the chorus was Colin Powell.

The UN Commission on Darfur was created in the aftermath of the American verdict and in response to American pressure. It was more ambiguous. In September 2004, the Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, then the chair of the African Union, visited UN headquarters in New York. Darfur had been the focal point of discussion in the African Union. All concerned were alert to the extreme political sensitivity of the issue. At a press conference at the UN on 23 September Obasanjo was asked to pronounce on the violence in Darfur: was it genocide or not? His response was very clear:

"Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and programme of a government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing. What we know is not that. What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion. That’s what we know. That does not amount to genocide from our own reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts to violence."

By October, the Security Council had established a five-person commission of inquiry on Darfur and asked it to report within three months on ‘violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law in Darfur by all parties’, and specifically to determine ‘whether or not acts of genocide have occurred’. Among the members of the commission was the chief prosecutor of South Africa’s TRC, Dumisa Ntsebeza. In its report, submitted on 25 January 2005, the commission concluded that ‘the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide . . . directly or through the militias under its control.’ But the commission did find that the government’s violence was ‘deliberately and indiscriminately directed against civilians’. Indeed, ‘even where rebels may have been present in villages, the impact of attacks on civilians shows that the use of military force was manifestly disproportionate to any threat posed by the rebels.’ These acts, the commission concluded, ‘were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, and therefore may amount to crimes against humanity’ (my emphasis). Yet, the commission insisted, they did not amount to acts of genocide: ‘The crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing . . . it would seem that those who planned and organised attacks on villages pursued the intent to drive the victims from their homes, primarily for purposes of counter-insurgency warfare.’

At the same time, the commission assigned secondary responsibility to rebel forces – namely, members of the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement – which it held ‘responsible for serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which may amount to war crimes’ (my emphasis). If the government stood accused of ‘crimes against humanity’, rebel movements were accused of ‘war crimes’. Finally, the commission identified individual perpetrators and presented the UN secretary-general with a sealed list that included ‘officials of the government of Sudan, members of militia forces, members of rebel groups and certain foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity’. The list named 51 individuals.

The commission’s findings highlighted three violations of international law: disproportionate response, conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, targeting entire groups (as opposed to identifiable individuals) but without the intention to eliminate them as groups. It is for this last reason that the commission ruled out the finding of genocide. Its less grave findings of ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’ are not unique to Darfur, but fit several other situations of extreme violence: in particular, the US occupation of Iraq, the Hema-Lendu violence in eastern Congo and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Among those in the counter-insurgency accused of war crimes were the ‘foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity’, i.e. mercenaries, presumably recruited from armed forces outside Sudan. The involvement of mercenaries in perpetrating gross violence also fits the occupation in Iraq, where some of them go by the name of ‘contractors’.

The journalist in the US most closely identified with consciousness-raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military intervention.

Kristof made six highly publicised trips to Darfur, the first in March 2004 and the sixth two years later. He began by writing of it as a case of ‘ethnic cleansing’: ‘Sudan’s Arab rulers’ had ‘forced 700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages’ (24 March 2004). Only three days later, he upped the ante: this was no longer ethnic cleansing, but genocide. ‘Right now,’ he wrote on 27 March, ‘the government of Sudan is engaged in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region.’ He continued: ‘The killings are being orchestrated by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government’ and ‘the victims are non-Arabs: blacks in the Zaghawa, Massalliet and Fur tribes.’ He estimated the death toll at a thousand a week. Two months later, on 29 May, he revised the estimates dramatically upwards, citing predictions from the US Agency for International Development to the effect that ‘at best, “only” 100,000 people will die in Darfur this year of malnutrition and disease’ but ‘if things go badly, half a million will die.’

The UN commission’s report was released on 25 February 2005. It confirmed ‘massive displacement’ of persons (‘more than a million’ internally displaced and ‘more than 200,000’ refugees in Chad) and the destruction of ‘several hundred’ villages and hamlets as ‘irrefutable facts’; but it gave no confirmed numbers for those killed. Instead, it noted rebel claims that government-allied forces had ‘allegedly killed over 70,000 persons’. Following the publication of the report, Kristof began to scale down his estimates. For the first time, on 23 February 2005, he admitted that ‘the numbers are fuzzy.’ Rather than the usual single total, he went on to give a range of figures, from a low of 70,000, which he dismissed as ‘a UN estimate’, to ‘independent estimates [that] exceed 220,000’. A warning followed: ‘and the number is rising by about ten thousand a month.’

The publication of the commission’s report had considerable effect. Internationally, it raised doubts about whether what was going on in Darfur could be termed genocide. Even US officials were unwilling to go along with the high estimates propagated by the broad alliance of organisations that subscribe to the Save Darfur campaign. The effect on American diplomacy was discernible. Three months later, on 3 May, Kristof noted with dismay that not only had ‘Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick pointedly refused to repeat the administration’s past judgment that the killings amount to genocide’: he had ‘also cited an absurdly low estimate of Darfur’s total death toll: 60,000 to 160,000’. As an alternative, Kristof cited the latest estimate of deaths from the Coalition for International Justice as ‘nearly 400,000, and rising by 500 a day’. In three months, Kristof’s estimates had gone up from 10,000 to 15,000 a month. Six months later, on 27 November, Kristof warned that ‘if aid groups pull out . . . the death toll could then rise to 100,000 a month.’ Anyone keeping a tally of the death toll in Darfur as reported in the Kristof columns would find the rise, fall and rise again very bewildering. First he projected the number of dead at 320,000 for 2004 (16 June 2004) but then gave a scaled down estimate of between 70,000 and 220,000 (23 February 2005). The number began once more to climb to ‘nearly 400,000’ (3 May 2005), only to come down yet again to 300,000 (23 April 2006). Each time figures were given with equal confidence but with no attempt to explain their basis. Did the numbers reflect an actual decline in the scale of killing in Darfur or was Kristof simply making an adjustment to the changing mood internationally?

In the 23 April column, Kristof expanded the list of perpetrators to include an external power: ‘China is now underwriting its second genocide in three decades. The first was in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the second is in Darfur, Sudan. Chinese oil purchases have financed Sudan’s pillage of Darfur, Chinese-made AK-47s have been the main weapons used to slaughter several hundred thousand people in Darfur so far and China has protected Sudan in the UN Security Council.’ In the Kristof columns, there is one area of deafening silence, to do with the fact that what is happening in Darfur is a civil war. Hardly a word is said about the insurgency, about the civilian deaths insurgents mete out, about acts that the commission characterised as ‘war crimes’. Would the logic of his 23 April column not lead one to think that those with connections to the insurgency, some of them active in the international campaign to declare Darfur the site of genocide, were also guilty of ‘underwriting’ war crimes in Darfur?

Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (‘race’) and, if not that, certainly in ‘culture’. This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer.

Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context. Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon, they fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the perpetrator. Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply evil. Where yesterday’s victims are today’s perpetrators, where victims have turned perpetrators, this attempt to find an African replay of the Holocaust not only does not work but also has perverse consequences. Whatever its analytical weaknesses, the depoliticisation of violence has given its proponents distinct political advantages.

The conflict in Darfur is highly politicised, and so is the international campaign. One of the campaign’s constant refrains has been that the ongoing genocide is racial: ‘Arabs’ are trying to eliminate ‘Africans’. But both ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ have several meanings in Sudan. There have been at least three meanings of ‘Arab’. Locally, ‘Arab’ was a pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the nomad as uncouth; regionally, it referred to someone whose primary language was Arabic. In this sense, a group could become ‘Arab’ over time. This process, known as Arabisation, was not an anomaly in the region: there was Amharisation in Ethiopia and Swahilisation on the East African coast. The third meaning of ‘Arab’ was ‘privileged and exclusive’; it was the claim of the riverine political aristocracy who had ruled Sudan since independence, and who equated Arabisation with the spread of civilisation and being Arab with descent.

‘African’, in this context, was a subaltern identity that also had the potential of being either exclusive or inclusive. The two meanings were not only contradictory but came from the experience of two different insurgencies. The inclusive meaning was more political than racial or even cultural (linguistic), in the sense that an ‘African’ was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft (linguistic) – ‘African’ as Bantu and ‘African’ as the identity of anyone who spoke a language indigenous to Africa. The racial meaning came to take a strong hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in Darfur. The Save Darfur campaign’s characterisation of the violence as ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ obscured both the fact that the violence was not one-sided and the contest over the meaning of ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: a contest that was critical precisely because it was ultimately about who belonged and who did not in the political community called Sudan. The depoliticisation, naturalisation and, ultimately, demonisation of the notion ‘Arab’, as against ‘African’, has been the deadliest effect, whether intended or not, of the Save Darfur campaign.

The depoliticisation of the conflict gave campaigners three advantages. First, they were able to occupy the moral high ground. The campaign presented itself as apolitical but moral, its concern limited only to saving lives. Second, only a single-issue campaign could bring together in a unified chorus forces that are otherwise ranged as adversaries on most important issues of the day: at one end, the Christian right and the Zionist lobby; at the other, a mainly school and university-based peace movement. Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice wrote of the Save Darfur Coalition as ‘an alliance of more than 515 faith-based, humanitarian and human rights organisations’; among the organisers of their Rally to Stop the Genocide in Washington last year were groups as diverse as the American Jewish World Service, the American Society for Muslim Advancement, the National Association of Evangelicals, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Anti-Slavery Group, Amnesty International, Christian Solidarity International, Physicians for Human Rights and the National Black Church Initiative. Surely, such a wide coalition would cease to hold together if the issue shifted to, say, Iraq.

To understand the third advantage, we have to return to the question I asked earlier: how could it be that many of those calling for an end to the American and British intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur? It’s tempting to think that the advantage of Darfur lies in its being a small, faraway place where those who drive the War on Terror do not have a vested interest. That this is hardly the case is evident if one compares the American response to Darfur to its non-response to Congo, even though the dimensions of the conflict in Congo seem to give it a mega-Darfur quality: the numbers killed are estimated in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands; the bulk of the killing, particularly in Kivu, is done by paramilitaries trained, organised and armed by neighbouring governments; and the victims on both sides – Hema and Lendu – are framed in collective rather than individual terms, to the point that one influential version defines both as racial identities and the conflict between the two as a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Given all this, how does one explain the fact that the focus of the most widespread and ambitious humanitarian movement in the US is on Darfur and not on Kivu?

Nicholas Kristof was asked this very question by a university audience: ‘When I spoke at Cornell University recently, a woman asked why I always harp on Darfur. It’s a fair question. The number of people killed in Darfur so far is modest in global terms: estimates range from 200,000 to more than 500,000. In contrast, four million people have died since 1998 as a result of the fighting in Congo, the most lethal conflict since World War Two.’ But instead of answering the question, Kristof – now writing his column rather than facing the questioner at Cornell – moved on: ‘And malaria annually kills one million to three million people – meaning that three years’ deaths in Darfur are within the margin of error of the annual global toll from malaria.’ And from there he went on to compare the deaths in Darfur to the deaths from malaria, rather than from the conflict in Congo: ‘We have a moral compass within us and its needle is moved not only by human suffering but also by human evil. That’s what makes genocide special – not just the number of deaths but the government policy behind them. And that in turn is why stopping genocide should be an even higher priority than saving lives from Aids or malaria.’ That did not explain the relative silence on Congo. Could the reason be that in the case of Congo, Hema and Lendu militias – many of them no more than child soldiers – were trained by America’s allies in the region, Rwanda and Uganda? Is that why the violence in Darfur – but not the violence in Kivu – is named as a genocide?

It seems that genocide has become a label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies. In Kristof’s words, the point is not so much ‘human suffering’ as ‘human evil’. Unlike Kivu, Darfur can be neatly integrated into the War on Terror, for Darfur gives the Warriors on Terror a valuable asset with which to demonise an enemy: a genocide perpetrated by Arabs. This was the third and most valuable advantage that Save Darfur gained from depoliticising the conflict. The more thoroughly Darfur was integrated into the War on Terror, the more the depoliticised violence in Darfur acquired a racial description, as a genocide of ‘Arabs’ killing ‘Africans’. Racial difference purportedly constituted the motive force behind the mass killings. The irony of Kristof’s columns is that they mirror the ideology of Arab supremacism in Sudan by demonising entire communities.[*]

Kristof chides Arab peoples and the Arab press for not having the moral fibre to respond to this Muslim-on-Muslim violence, presumably because it is a violence inflicted by Arab Muslims on African Muslims. In one of his early columns in 2004, he was outraged by the silence of Muslim leaders: ‘Do they care about dead Muslims only when the killers are Israelis or Americans?’ Two years later he asked: ‘And where is the Arab press? Isn’t the murder of 300,000 or more Muslims almost as offensive as a Danish cartoon?’ Six months later, Kristof pursued this line on NBC’s Today Show. Elaborating on the ‘real blind spot’ in the Muslim world, he said: ‘You are beginning to get some voices in the Muslim world . . . saying it’s appalling that you have evangelical Christians and American Jews leading an effort to protect Muslims in Sudan and in Chad.’

If many of the leading lights in the Darfur campaign are fired by moral indignation, this derives from two events: the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. After all, the seeds of the Save Darfur campaign lie in the tenth-anniversary commemoration of what happened in Rwanda. Darfur is today a metaphor for senseless violence in politics, as indeed Rwanda was a decade before. Most writing on the Rwandan genocide in the US was also done by journalists. In We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, the most widely read book on the genocide, Philip Gourevitch envisaged Rwanda as a replay of the Holocaust, with Hutu cast as perpetrators and Tutsi as victims. Again, the encounter between the two seemed to take place outside any context, as part of an eternal encounter between evil and innocence. Many of the journalists who write about Darfur have Rwanda very much in the back of their minds. In December 2004, Kristof recalled the lessons of Rwanda: ‘Early in his presidency, Mr Bush read a report about Bill Clinton’s paralysis during the Rwandan genocide and scrawled in the margin: “Not on my watch.” But in fact the same thing is happening on his watch, and I find that heartbreaking and baffling.’

With very few exceptions, the Save Darfur campaign has drawn a single lesson from Rwanda: the problem was the US failure to intervene to stop the genocide. Rwanda is the guilt that America must expiate, and to do so it must be ready to intervene, for good and against evil, even globally. That lesson is inscribed at the heart of Samantha Power’s book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. But it is the wrong lesson. The Rwandan genocide was born of a civil war which intensified when the settlement to contain it broke down. The settlement, reached at the Arusha Conference, broke down because neither the Hutu Power tendency nor the Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) had any interest in observing the power-sharing arrangement at the core of the settlement: the former because it was excluded from the settlement and the latter because it was unwilling to share power in any meaningful way.

What the humanitarian intervention lobby fails to see is that the US did intervene in Rwanda, through a proxy. That proxy was the RPF, backed up by entire units from the Uganda Army. The green light was given to the RPF, whose commanding officer, Paul Kagame, had recently returned from training in the US, just as it was lately given to the Ethiopian army in Somalia. Instead of using its resources and influence to bring about a political solution to the civil war, and then strengthen it, the US signalled to one of the parties that it could pursue victory with impunity. This unilateralism was part of what led to the disaster, and that is the real lesson of Rwanda. Applied to Darfur and Sudan, it is sobering. It means recognising that Darfur is not yet another Rwanda. Nurturing hopes of an external military intervention among those in the insurgency who aspire to victory and reinforcing the fears of those in the counter-insurgency who see it as a prelude to defeat are precisely the ways to ensure that it becomes a Rwanda. Strengthening those on both sides who stand for a political settlement to the civil war is the only realistic approach. Solidarity, not intervention, is what will bring peace to Darfur.

The dynamic of civil war in Sudan has fed on multiple sources: first, the post-independence monopoly of power enjoyed by a tiny ‘Arabised’ elite from the riverine north of Khartoum, a monopoly that has bred growing resistance among the majority, marginalised populations in the south, east and west of the country; second, the rebel movements which have in their turn bred ambitious leaders unwilling to enter into power-sharing arrangements as a prelude to peace; and, finally, external forces that continue to encourage those who are interested in retaining or obtaining a monopoly of power.

The dynamic of peace, by contrast, has fed on a series of power-sharing arrangements, first in the south and then in the east. This process has been intermittent in Darfur. African Union-organised negotiations have been successful in forging a power-sharing arrangement, but only for that arrangement to fall apart time and again. A large part of the explanation, as I suggested earlier, lies in the international context of the War on Terror, which favours parties who are averse to taking risks for peace. To reinforce the peace process must be the first commitment of all those interested in Darfur.

The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.

Footnotes

* Contrast this with the UN commission’s painstaking effort to make sense of the identities ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. The commission’s report concentrated on three related points. First, the claim that the Darfur conflict pitted ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ was facile. ‘In fact, the commission found that many Arabs in Darfur are opposed to the Janjawiid, and some Arabs are fighting with the rebels, such as certain Arab commanders and their men from the Misseriya and Rizeigat tribes. At the same time, many non-Arabs are supporting the government and serving in its army.’ Second, it has never been easy to sort different tribes into the categories ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: ‘The various tribes that have been the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Massalit and Zeghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic groups to which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Muslim). In addition, also due to the high measure of intermarriage, they can hardly be distinguished in their outward physical appearance from the members of tribes that allegedly attacked them. Apparently, the sedentary and nomadic character of the groups constitutes one of the main distinctions between them’ (emphasis mine). Finally, the commission put forward the view that political developments are driving the rapidly growing distinction between ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. On the one hand, ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ seem to have become political identities: ‘Those tribes in Darfur who support rebels have increasingly come to be identified as “African” and those supporting the government as the “Arabs”. A good example to illustrate this is that of the Gimmer, a pro-government African tribe that is seen by the African tribes opposed to the government as having been “Arabised”.’ On the other hand, this development was being promoted from the outside: ‘The Arab-African divide has also been fanned by the growing insistence on such divide in some circles and in the media.’

* Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology at Columbia University. His most recent book is Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror.

* This essay was first published by the London Review of Books on 8 March 2007 and is reproduced here with the permission of the author.

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org

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