Dewa Mavhinga makes a case for the resignation of the Zimbabwean police chief who has vowed to only salute Mugabe

Utterances and statements emerging from Zimbabwe's uniformed forces, starting with Rt Major General Paradzayi Zimondi, Head of Prisons, to the effect that they will not accept or salute either opposition Movement for Democratic Change Presidential candidate Morgan Tsvangirai or Independent and former ruling party minister Simba Makoni (should they win the Presidential election on 29 March) cannot go unchallenged. Police Commissioner-General Augustine Chihuri and Army General Constantine Chiwenga are also on record saying they will not accept Robert Mugabe losing to what they derisively termed 'puppets'. There is no room for such misguided utterances in Zimbabwe; these men of uniform must resign with immediate effect.

Zimbabweans will not be held to ransom by a bunch of men who should know that it is highly unprofessional for the army, police and prisons to delve in political matters or to attempt to influence the vote by spreading fear, alarm and despondence. Political engagement and discourse is for civilians and civilians alone, it is a fundamental right of the people of Zimbabwe to determine through the ballot who they wish to lead them; the uniformed forces must be reminded that this is none of their business. The uniformed forces belong to the people of Zimbabwe and have an obligation to respect democratic political processes and must swear allegiance to whomsoever Zimbabweans chose as leader.

It must be stated clearly that it is treasonous and shameful for the leadership of uniformed forces to issue such irresponsible statements threatening to return to war if President Mugabe loses elections; it is shameful for government of Zimbabwe to remain silent and not condemn outright such utterances; worst of all, it is shameful and unacceptable that SADC and international community should remain silent in the face of these treasonous statements which are obviously meant to sway and compel voters to vote for a value system that is unmarketable and can only be forced down the throats of the masses. Effectively, Chihuri, Chiwenga and Zimondi have become Zanu PF campaign agents, poor ones at that, as they only know the language of threats. It is very strange that, in the face of all these unconstitutional, frivolous and inflammatory utterances, South African President Thabo Mbeki still has the audacity to express hope that Zimbabwe elections will be free and fair. One wonders what benchmarks Mbeki is applying to elections in Zimbabwe; they are certainly not the SADC guidelines, standards and norms for the conduct of free and fair elections.

How can elections in Zimbabwe be possibly be credible, free and fair when the electorate is threatened with war should they vote out Mugabe? Enough is enough, we cannot accept mortgaging Zimbabwe's future to a few cronies who selfishly cling to the past and are keen to destroy Zimbabwe for selfish personal interests. In a new Zimbabwe there will be no place for unqualified and unprofessional people in our uniformed forces, people will hold office on the basis of merit and merit alone, so let beneficiaries of political patronage beware. This old guard in army, police and prisons must know that it is now time for professional uniformed forces who are not in any way part of political formations and that should either Morgan Tsvangirai or Simba Makoni win in the coming elections, if they do not wish to salute they must simply resign and go home. Already they have outlived their usefulness in these institutions and must be replaced in order to take our uniformed forces back to values of impartiality, patriotism, professionalism and allegiance to Zimbabwe's constitutional values. Chihuri, Chiwenga and Zimondi cannot masquerade as kingmakers and godfathers of Zimbabwean politics, they must confine themselves to their terms of engagement which categorically exclude meddling in political affairs of the country.

The rank and file in the army, police and prisons must also reject these patently partisan and unprofessional utterances and be patriotic enough to resist illegal orders to vote for Mugabe. Soldiers, Police officers and prison officers have a right to vote, their vote must be a secret and a personal choice and not an order from anyone. I am hopeful and positive that the views expressed by these cronies are views of a tiny minority in Zimbabwe and do not reflect the views of masses inside and outside uniformed forces who love peace and democracy and are equally fed up with a diet of starvation and rantings of little men allergic to democracy and good governance. As a patriotic Zimbabwean, it is my sincere hope and trust, and my prayer that sense will prevail over madness.

*Dewa Mavhinga is a Zimbabwean Human Rights Lawyer.

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

African governments have often praised Chinese investment as the panacea for their infrastructure sectors. Zambia’s experience demonstrates that it is not, writes Peter Bosshard. A Chinese hydropower project on the Kafue River has brought up the whole conundrum of financial problems, environmental impacts, hydro dependency and delays that is typical for large dams.

What happens when white feminism intersects with questions or race and class? How has Race and Gender being used to derail the Obama campaign? Linda Burham tackles these questions and much more

The Clinton campaign can do all the distancing it wants from Geraldine Ferraro’s chronic foot-in-mouth syndrome, but this is not the first time Obama has been cast as the beneficiary of affirmative action.

Here’s Erica Jong, more than a month ago, on the same issue. After allowing that “Obama is smart and attractive. Maybe he’ll be president some day,” she goes on to say: “Obama is also a token – of our incomplete progress toward an interracial society. I have nothing against him except his inexperience. Many black voters agree. They understand tokenism and condescension.”

Right now, black female voter that I am, I’m most definitely understanding the condescension – and righteous indignation – of white liberal feminists who believe Obama skipped ahead of them in line. I’m also understanding the sheer frustration of women who were headed towards an easy coronation, but then got sideswiped and stalled by an upstart prince.

It appears that all the mainstream, high-profile feminists got the same talking-points memo from the Clinton campaign. Ferraro, pit bull that she is, was just a little more raw in her delivery. If you didn’t get the memo, here are the talking points.

- Though the Democrats are blessed with an embarrassment of riches, with a black man and a woman contending for the nomination, Clinton is unequivocally the only one prepared for the rigors of the presidency.

- Obama is all fluff, no substance, glib and attractive, but also a cocksure, ageist upstart.

- Given the depths of Obama’s inexperience, his present popularity can only be explained by the reverse discrimination effect: he’s unfairly benefiting from his status as a black man.

- Older white women are supporting Clinton because they recognize bottom-line competence, know how to vote in their own best interests, grow more radical with age, and are ready to make history.

- White men are supporting Obama because of their latent or blatant sexism. They’re confused by the unfamiliar choices presented them, and more freaked out by the prospect of a woman in the White House than they are by the prospect of the first African American president.

- Maybe Obama will be a candidate to consider once he’s more politically seasoned, i.e., after eight years of Clinton.

- Sexism is the most pervasive and persistent form of discrimination.

- Racism is on the run, nearly vanquished save a few remnants.

From Gloria Steinem to Robin Morgan to Geraldine Ferraro to Erica Jong, they’re all playing the same tune. Now we can’t blame the women for fighting hard for their candidate, but it is disappointing, to say the very least, that in heralding Clinton as the proper choice for every feminist and all women they have also managed to dredge up some of the least attractive features of liberal feminism.

For nearly forty years feminists have wrangled over how to integrate issues of race, class, sexual orientation and other markers of inequality into a coherent, powerful gender analysis. Women of color insist on the complex relationship between racism and sexism and the central significance of racism in the lives of people of color. White feminists nod their heads, “Yes, of course, we understand, we’re with you on that.” Then comes the crunch, when the content of your feminism actually matters – as it does in this campaign – and they revert to the primacy of sexism over all other forms of discrimination and oppression. All the tendencies that got feminism tagged as a white, middle-class women’s thing are, brutally, back in play.

There’s a lot of twisting and turning going on in the effort to explain Obama’s viability. If he’s so completely inexperienced, why are people coming out to vote for him in record numbers? Must be that racism is dead but sexism isn’t. Must be that he’s an affirmative action baby. Must be that people are mesmerized, charmed and bewitched by his silver tongue. Must be that people are voting with their hearts for hope instead of with their heads for hard-headed competence.

In fact, it must be anything except that he’s knit together a coalition the existence of which most political actors could not have predicted, much less activated. Except that his politics and presentation of self have motivated millions of new voters and re-energized previously disaffected millions more in ways that her politics and presentation of self have not. Except that voters have weighed his experience and hers and concluded that she’s not bringing appreciably more to the table than he is. Except that she’s pegged her vaunted experience to her White House years and a fair share of voters (raise your hands y’all) were not enthralled with the policies of the Clinton presidency.

It’s just not such a terribly long walk from the Clinton campaign’s insistence on Obama’s lack of experience and complete unreadiness to lead to the notion that he’s gotten as far as he has not on his own merits, but as a result of the workings of some pro-brother bias. That is, to put it baldly, the playing field is tilted in favor of the minority candidate who, despite his thin resume, has managed to leapfrog over the more qualified white candidate. There’s a reason this reminds you of every reverse discrimination complainant from Allan Bakke forward. It undermines the legitimacy of affirmative remedies for identifiable, quantifiable discriminatory practices while simultaneously denigrating the qualifications of people of color in high places, whether they got there by means of affirmative action or not.

Then there’s the basic categorical confusion. Let’s go back to that historic juncture, wherein a black man and a woman are close contenders for their party’s nomination. If his race is noteworthy, Obama the black man (regardless of how many ways his blackness has been interpreted), then so too is hers. [For those of you who believe we’re living in a post-racialist society, if you haven’t tuned out already, you’ll probably want to skip the rest of this piece.] This is a contest between a black man and a white woman. Voters orient themselves toward Obama along a broad spectrum of racial attitudes ranging from, “Of course I’m voting for the brother” to “I’d never in a million years cast my vote for an African American.” And everything in between.

The point is, most sane people recognize that Obama’s race matters. Well then, how is it that Clinton’s doesn’t? If Obama’s blackness is a positive incentive for some voters, a liability for others and a source of confusion and ambivalence for still others, how is it that Clinton’s whiteness is a big fat neutral. Is it not at least theoretically possible that some voters are positively inclined toward Clinton because she is white?

There is a brand of feminism, amply critiqued but still very much alive, that focuses on gender bias while consistently downplaying the salience of race. And the easiest way to avoid acknowledging that whiteness comes with its privileges is to avoid acknowledging it at all. Whiteness as default, normative, unworthy of note. Clinton the woman; Obama the black man. In fact, Obama as doubly favored, as a man and, with reverse discrimination and tokenism in play, as an African American. Clinton, meanwhile, is hobbled by her gender and, since her whiteness is unacknowledged, neither advantaged nor disadvantaged by her race. This is the topsy-turvy world we’re being asked to accept as reality.

I, for one, am going to take a pass on delusion. In Mississippi, though Obama took the state, 70 percent of white Democatic voters chose Clinton over Obama. In South Carolina, Obama took over 75 percent of the black vote but only 15 percent of the over-60 white vote, with similar results in Alabama. Isn’t is possible that at least some of those white voters would prefer to see a white person in the White House, regardless of gender, than an African American? And isn’t it possible that whiteness is an element of Clinton’s appeal in Ohio, Texas and, potentially, Pennsylvania, states in which Reagan Democrats (and Nixon Democrats before them) were won over to the Republican Party, at least in part, on the basis of frankly racist appeals? As long as Clinton’s whiteness is unacknowledged, so too are the dynamics that work to her advantage in this campaign.

The deep disappointment in the voting behavior of Obama-supporting men (read white men; see above) while officially chalked up to misogyny, has, in the argument of some feminists, crept uncomfortably close to a howl of anger at racial betrayal. In a Chicago Tribune article entitled “Sexism, not Racism, Thriving,” a clearly frustrated Frida Ghitis claims “We may be winning the war against racism, but sexism is putting up quite a fight….Women are voting for Clinton and blacks are voting for Obama…. If we look for someone who looks like us, for whom should a white man vote?... White men are giving their vote to Obama over Clinton [i].”

Let us grant without argument that many men, and a good number of women as well, would prefer to see a man in the White House than a woman. Is this evidence that sexism is alive and well? Indeed it is. But, as our own political processes constantly remind us, voting behavior is more than a little complex. Perhaps white men should be excoriated for their persistent sexism; perhaps we should be celebrating their transcendence of a century’s-long resistance to placing African Americans, men or women, in positions of power.

Would it be better, and for whom, if white men were to line up with white women and, as the saying goes, “vote their race?” Could this be what liberal feminists are advocating? Is Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the house?

It ought to be possible to point to the prevalence of sexism and misogyny, and their impact on Clinton’s campaign, without downplaying the longstanding, ongoing, pervasive impact of racism in the U.S. But this is not the path they have chosen. In order to bolster their case for Clinton’s relative disadvantage in the primary campaign, explain the white male vote in places like Iowa, Virginia, and Utah, and encourage white women to seize the historic moment, they impose a ranking order between racism and sexism, with sexism at the top, and insist on the declining significance of race.

Gloria Steinem: “Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life…. Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women [ii].”

Those of us who witnessed the response to Hurricane Katrina; who check in occasionally on the racial demographics of the incarcerated; who are aware of the racial divide in income and, more significantly, wealth; who recognize that the public schools grow ever more segregated while the push-out rate for Black and Latino students rises ever higher; who track the relative scarcity of African Americans in professional schools, as well as in a whole range of professions; who know that the infant mortality rate for black babies outstrips the rate for white babies by two to one; who watch the dynamics of gentrification, dislocation and homelessness – we are not convinced that racism is an insignificant remnant. And we’re hard pressed to understand why this argument should be any more tolerated when it comes from liberal feminists than when it comes from the more frankly racist right wing. Since I’m not running for president I can be blunt. The denial of the significance of racism is a deep and abiding form of the thing itself.

Much has been made of the gender tightrope Clinton must walk. She can’t seem too soft or too hard. She has to look attractive and expect that her hairdo, pantsuits, cleavage and ankles are all fair game for commentary. Tears will be relentlessly analyzed. She will be judged in ways that men never are. All of this is true, and an indication of how very far we have to go.

But, interestingly, Clinton can and does directly associate her campaign with a potential blow against gender discrimination. Obama cannot do the same with regard to race. Clinton regularly posits winning the presidency, breaking through that highest and hardest glass ceiling, as she puts it, as an historic win for women, more than 50 percent of the population.

Obama, meanwhile, does not have the latitude to explicitly associate his campaign with the interests of African Americans or an anti-racist agenda. Part of this is simply about the numbers. But there’s much more at work here. While Clinton has been walking her tightrope, Obama has been busy threading the very narrowest of needles. There may be dozens of ways for a white man to campaign for the presidency and, if our common history, both recent and remote, is any guide, just about any kind of white man can become president, as long as he has the cash and the connections.

Not so for the black man. At issue are not only his politics and his campaign craft, but also, crucially, how he inhabits his black manhood. (Now, up until a few months ago I couldn’t have imagined that there was any way for a Black man to become a serious contender – to thread the needle – so we’re all learning as we go here.) White folks, in general, don’t want to see any chips on the shoulders or any psychic scars on the soul. There isn’t a black male in America over the age of 10 who doesn’t have a few chips and scars, but letting them show is a major deal breaker in the halls of power. So props to Obama for a fine acting job.

There’s a bargain that white voters have struck with Obama, and here, in brief, is what it is:

“You can be black, and we’re happy to congratulate ourselves on voting for a black man, as long as you’re black in a way that doesn’t upset us, scare us, make us feel guilty, or make us feel too white.” Obama is holding up his side of the bargain, either because he’s temperamentally inclined to do so or because he’s carefully calculated what it takes to win over white voters, or some combination of the two. But the quality of his blackness is nonetheless an issue. This is the meaning of the insistence that Obama distance himself from his pastor, Reverend Wright, and from Minister Farrakhan. Way too many chips and scars. Way too little regard for what white folks think. And way too much attachment to the African American community. So, if Obama himself can’t be tagged as too black for prime time, maybe he’s too black by association.

Further, while Obama has assiduously courted the black vote, he hasn’t done so with an explicitly anti-racist message and he certainly hasn’t posited the African-American community as the core of his coalition. Why? Because to do so would sink his campaign like a hundred weight stone. This, in part, is the difference between the Jackson campaign, which built a disruptive, progressive coalition with Black voters and anti-racist politics at its core, and Obama’s liberal coalition that is inclusive of and reliant upon black voters without centralizing their concerns in a way that would scare off white voters. Jackson ran as a direct challenge to the status quo, implementing an inside-outside strategy without the burden of expecting a win. Obama’s first principle is viability, and he threads his needle accordingly.

It’s more than a little interesting that liberal feminists, so highly attuned to the ways in which gender frames how Clinton can run, are blissfully (willfully?) ignorant of how race and racism shape the Obama campaign. Black racial solidarity still reads as a threat in a way that gender solidarity does not.

One last talking point before we close: the voting behavior of white women. Every national election cycle we’re treated to lots of commentary about the gender gap and its meaning. More eligible women vote than do eligible men and women are somewhat more likely to cast their votes for Democrats than for Republicans. Clinton is undeniably running strongly among white women Democrats, especially those over the age of 50. Should we be reading this as further evidence that the older women voters get, the more radical they become, as Morgan and Steinem contend? [Steinem: “Iowa women over 50 and 60, who disproportionately supported Senator Clinton, proved once again that women are the one group that grows more radical with age.” Robin Morgan: “Older women are the one group that doesn’t grow more conservative with age…”]

The two party lockdown ensures that there’s no real way to register radicalism in presidential primaries or national elections. So let’s assume that those voting Democratic are somewhat more radical than those voting Republican. In the 2004 presidential election 55 percent of white women gave their votes to George W. Bush; 62 percent of white men did the same. A significant gender gap.

Meanwhile, 90 percent of African American women and a slightly smaller proportion of African American men voted for John Kerry. In the 2000 presidential election an astounding 94 percent of African American women voted Democratic. I can’t do the math, but I suspect that if you were to subtract the overwhelmingly Democratic votes of African American women the gender gap would narrow considerably.

Younger voters from 18-29 years old cast 54 percent of their votes for the Democratic candidate in 2004. Exactly the same percentage of voters 60 and over cast them for Bush.

I just don’t see the evidence that older white women constitute a hotbed of radicalism, or even consistent liberalism. Had they followed the lead of African American women in 2000 and 2004 we all would have been spared a whole lot of grief.

Liberal feminists have every right to spend down their political capital on behalf of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hard choices have to made; political debts have to be paid. But it will not count as progress if a Clinton win is purchased at the cost of deepening the racial divide. It is inexcusable to support a candidate in the name of feminism while deploying racist argumentation, minimizing the existence and impact of racism, and denying the advantages of inhabiting the racial space called “white.” It will not be excused. Nor will it be forgotten.

*Linda Burnham is the co-founder and former Executive Director of the Women of Color Resource Center.

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/355/46809obama.jpgIn a nuanced article that borrows from various disciplines such as philosophy and physics, Horace Campbell argues that Barrack Obama would only be trapped by a conservative and anti-people social and economic system if those "who are being drawn into the audacity of hope do not build their own political movement and political organization." He argues that only "only a bottom up movement can prevent Barack Obama from becoming a racial decoy for the Wall Street forces."

INTRODUCTION

The new force of the youth has now made itself felt in US presidential politics in 2008. This force is manifest in the tremendous outpouring of the collectivities of different races, classes, genders, sexual orientation and ages coming forward to support the candidacy of Barack Obama. Barack Obama was born of an African father from Kenya and a mother of European extraction from Kansas in the heartland of the United States. Obama is drawing on both heritages and is campaigning to make a break with the binary categories that perpetuates divisions and the politics of exclusion. This break is a fundamental concept in fractal theory and opens up questions of the laws of unintended consequences in politics. It is the combination of the new energy and light that emerges from the Barrack Obama campaign that sparks questions on the need for a new framework for analyzing politics. This is the framework based on truth, justice, peace and a new mode of politics. In South Africa, the term emerged to point to the ways that in which we share a common humanity.

This short statement will argue that after nearly thirty years of traditional republican and democratic politics there is a desire for hope. It is hope that goes beyond the audacity of the campaign of Obama or the kind of balancing which is inscribed in his book, The Audacity of Hope.

This hope cannot be quantified and this absence of quantification bears positive and negative possibilities. The positive possibilities can emerge from the intentionality of those forces who can build on the new self organizing tools for self emancipation and for moving the politics of this society to a new level. Without the involvement of a new constituency in politics, the Barack Obama campaign can only go so far to ignite the imagination of the youth but this fire will burn out if there are no self similar processes being developed in spaces of peace, spaces of hope and non racialized spaces.

Even if Obama were to be elected to be the President of the United States, the conditions/realities for the overwhelming majority of the citizens (especially blacks, browns, and First nation peoples) will not change overnight. The economic recession, the joblessness of millions and the massive military machine will expose whether this election discourse on change can be transformed into setting in motion a new mobilization of popular forces to struggle for a new mode of politics and economics. In the conclusion we will note that though Obama is no revolutionary, he is caught in a revolutionary moment and his message of hope has tapped into the desire for peace, reconstruction and justice…

Barack Obama is campaigning on the basis of change. In this campaign, his ideas may not be totally formed in relation to the fundamental questions facing the society, but what is clear is that his movement has tapped into a force, energy force that at this moment is unstoppable. The same youths who have grown up in the era of the information revolution and the platforms such as Face book/ My Space are using new social networking techniques that baffle the political pundits reared in the universities that taught the physics of Isaac Newton and the derivative mechanical concepts of Adam Smith and John Locke. Polling and the laws of predictability that emanate from this mechanical era has fallen short of grasping the new energy as thousands of new actors and actresses surge on to the stage of politics to identify with the break from the old politics of fear and so called War on Terror.

Millions are no longer deterred by the fear mongering of the Bush/Cheney leadership or the imagery of Islamic peoples as terrorists. Decent Christians are now seeking the gospel of peace and love instead of hate and religious fundamentalism.

UBUNTU AND THE AUDACITY OF HOPE

Barack Obama is opposed to the hierarchies of the whites over blacks and browns and uses his own life as a metaphor for calling on citizens to come together to save the planet earth. Obama has gone on record to register his opposition to the structured existence that places humans as atomized individuals without responsibility to family or society. Atomized individuals are open to manipulation by the media and are open to the Hobbesian thinking that society must be based on conflict and confrontation or ‘war of every man against every man.’ This manipulation is one form of psychological warfare against the citizens of the United States…

The idea of change that echoes from the Obama campaign has been calling for citizens to place themselves at the center and to empower themselves, firstly with their positive thinking, “Yes we can,” and more importantly by organizing to intervene in the political process. In response to this call, a cross section of the citizens of the United States from Iowa to Nebraska, from Idaho to Georgia and from Washington to Louisiana have come forward to seek the new ideas of twenty first century change. In the process there are new constituencies that have found their voice. This has led to a level of spontaneity that one could see in the muchwatched video- Yes we can.

Can the old media and the old ideas blunt the quantum leap in the consciousness of the youth that is taking place at the moment? This is the question that emerges from the discourse of the political talking heads on the same television stations that were enthusiastic cheer leaders for the illegal war against the peoples of Iraq.

These political commentators who were brought up to reproduce the misinformation of the media that tormented young people and led them into depression and isolation cannot fully understand the call of the Obama campaign to the youth that the change must begin in the youth themselves and that that have to believe in their capacity for change.

The political pundits of the mainstream media have been in the main brought up within the context of the hierarchies of Newtonian physics have been confounded by the bottom up, responsive, plural and holistic message of the Yes we can campaign.

These hierarchies have been at the base of the faulty democratic traditions of the United States that did not recognize native peoples as humans and rendered African Americans as three fifths of a human being. The same democratic tradition did not recognize women as citizens. Obama is not calling for this deformed reference to be the basis for change, he is exhorting all classes and all ages to be part of the solution, by drawing from a different tradition, the progressive traditions that sought to enrich and enlarge the meaning of democracy…

The unique experiences that Obama learnt when he was an organizer on the South Side of Chicago taught him the humility to listen to the ordinary person and it is this methodical organizing like the repetition of self similarity that one can discern in the organizational skills of Obama. The political victories in Idaho, Nebraska, the Virgin Islands and Missouri followed the scaling pattern of Obama that built up a profile in every district and in every part of the country so that he could not be pigeon-holed. After the land slide victory in South Carolina, Bill Clinton sought to compare Obama to Jesse Jackson and to limit his appeal to African Americans citizens. But the citizens of Washington State, Missouri, Louisiana and Maine voted with their heads and their hearts in response to new organizing thrust that is making the quantum leap in US politics a possibility. This leap has been reinforced by the nested loops of new social networks wired through the spaces of the information revolution.

After these victories the momentum began to build and citizens in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia signaled that they were another link in the chain of this momentous political intervention. Young people have organized themselves into new formations and have been energized by the promise that Obama would want to move in a new direction. In the past forty years the established parties benefited from the demobilization of the youth and unlike most liberal democratic states the numbers of citizens voting in the USA has been consistently below the numbers of other western democracies. Apathy and withdrawal from the system have been the outcome of the absence of realistic alternatives for the majority of the poor in the United States. This absence of participation by the youth has benefited the corporations and special interests to the point where there had been no incentive for the two parties to remove the restrictions that deter young people from participating in politics. The advent of Barack Obama is generating the long sought after alternative, hence the unprecedented turnout for the caucuses and primaries…

New experiences are being created in the midst of a new kind of political campaign that builds on these networks. The traditional media (newspapers, radio and Television stations) and the campaign of the Clintons have made clear statements about the organizational experience of the team around Hilary Clinton (Madeline Albright, Richard Holbrooke, Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton etc). Yet, it is this same experience rooted in the mechanistic hierarchies of Newtonian physics that is becoming the albatross of the political campaign of Hilary Clinton. Her experiences are very similar to the leader of the Republican Party, John McCain. John McCain is proud of his support for the wars against the peoples of Iraq and the merchants of death. Hilary Clinton has sought to demonstrate to the club of militarists that she would oil the war machinery while millions are without basic jobs.

Without fresh ideas when US citizens wanted a clean break with the militarism that brought the quagmire and fiasco in Iraq, Hilary Clinton could not understand that she had to tell the people that she was wrong in supporting the unjust war in Iraq. This is politics of truth that is now needed in the society. But from the position of Hilary Clinton on a possible military strike against Iran and more importantly, her base in the constituency of the financial speculators of New York State exposed the fact that thought she is campaigning to change conditions for women, she has not broken with the militarists of the society. Decency would require that Hilary Clinton rewrite her texts on her responses to war and genocide during the Presidency of Bill Clinton. In this campaign her character has emerged especially in the case of the primary in Florida. Hilary Clinton’s willingness to claim a victory in Florida when she had said she would not brought out her true character to all peoples, black and white, women and men…

The Obama campaign has been able to draw on the organizational capacities of those who want to turn truth into a political force so that the society can turn from war to peace. This is the basic force behind the momentum of Barrack Obama and his experiences of Chicago has been able to translate this (peace thrust) in order to build up the electoral profile, bringing new teams in every part of the country and creating new training spaces for the energetic to donate, participate and learn the possibilities for change. Yet, because of the limitations of the electoral system that mitigates against direct participation of the citizen beyond voting, it is urgent that those who have understood the need for a new politics build new organizations at new sites of politics.

This new urgency is especially the case in the peace movement that has been unable to build on to the aspirations of the masses of the people for justice. Five years after the illegal occupation of Iraq, the activists for peace yearn for new forms of expression and hence there is a slow learning curve that demonstrations without follow up will only frustrate those who want new organizations. In 2003 at the start of the war against the peoples of Iraq there were millions of peoples on the streets.

Yet the established leadership of the peace movement was not able to take the question of the illegal war to the court of international opinion to that the immorality of the war could be brought before the International Criminal Court in The Hague…

Momentum means that when a person or object is moving, regardless of what it is - the harder it is to stop that person or object. When one consider "momentum" in terms of politics, this means that if a presidential candidate, such as Obama, sees and/or experiences a gain and/or surge in his message of peace, hope and change with millions singing, Yes we can, there could be nothing, not even bullets that can intervene in this momentum. This is the basis for a possible quantum leap in US politics to bring a new mode of politics for the 21st Century.

Obama is not a revolutionary but he has been caught up in a revolutionary moment in world history. The electoral campaign of Obama is riding on a wave of peace and change desired by ordinary Americans. There are limitations to the electoral project insofar as the task of restructuring US society is a gigantic one that cannot be done overnight. Obama may not be the solution, but is a small step in the direction of making the break with the old binary conceptions that dominated enlightenment thinking. It is the laws of unintended consequences that will emanate from this break that can lead to a new direction with the new positive bottom up organizing for transformation to a democratic society where all can live in peace.

A clear understanding of the nature of US politics and limitation of the structures of the in-built conservativsim of the system means that Barrack Obama would only be trapped by this social system if those who are being drawn into the audacity of hope do not build their own political movement and political organization. It is only a bottom up movement hat can prevent Barack Obama from becoming a racial decoy for the Wall Street forces. Self mobilization, self organization and emancipatory ideas will create new spaces so that the political space will be expanded beyond the media, the lobbyists and the ritual spaces of the White House, Congress and the Senate Chambers. Safe and clean neighborhoods, children who are reared to respect all human beings and a society that support repair of the planet earth awaits these new self organizing forces.

The campaign of Barack Obama is the story of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. These are the people who are participating because they believe that politics can mean something again. It is apt to conclude with the words of Martin Luther King Jr.:

“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism.”

* Horace Campbell is Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University.

** Extracted by the author from "Barack Obama, Fractals And Momentum In Politics”

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

For those wishing to watch/listen to Obama's speech, you can do so at:

Dear All,

We are approaching one of the most important moments in our fight for a strong Optional Protocol. TheUN Open-Ended Working Group on an Optional Protocol to the ICESCR is meeting for its final session from 31 March to 4 April 2008. We are hoping that the Working Group can conclude its negotiations and submit a final version of the Protocol to the Human Rights Council for adoption. After being approved by the Council, the text of the Optional Protocol will be sent to the UN General Assembly for adoption and opened up for ratification by states.

The Optional Protocol will make it possible for individual, groups or organizations acting on their behalf to seek justice at the international level for violations of economic, social and cultural rights by submitting complaints to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The adoption of the Optional Protocol will also provide support to efforts to get greater recognition of economic, social and cultural rights in domestic law and before courts, and will strengthen our monitoring role, as civil society organizations.

Some states however are continuing to push for the adoption of a so called ‘à la carte’ Optional Protocol, under which states would be able to treat the ICESCR as a menu of rights and specify which rights they would be willing to accept complaints on. As the majority of states support a comprehensive instrument that covers all levels of rights and obligations in the ICESCR, the few states who are not willing to accept such an instrument have to be lobbied to change or reserve their position. Some states are also pushing for the inclusion of additional admissibility criteria such as the requirement that a complainant demonstrates that he/she has suffered “significant disadvantage” and to set a very high threshold for the Committee to find a violation. There is a risk that this small group of states may be able to prevent the Working Group from completing its work at this session or that a much weaker text will be adopted, which would make it harder for victims to access remedies.

The NGO Coalition for the Optional Protocol on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has prepared an appeal (attached with this e-mail) that will be sent to Austria, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom to lobby them to change or reserve their position.  It is essential for the success of our lobbying that we can demonstrate that this appeal and the Optional Protocol have wide support. We would therefore request you to sign on to this appeal either as an individual or an organisation.

If you are willing to sign it, please send an email back to [email protected], indicating your support by March 13, 2008. The next session will start at the end of the month and we must convince governments to change their positions before that.

We hope you will seriously consider being part of this initiative as well as taking further action in the next and crucial steps for the adoption of the Optional Protocol.

We are writing to you to announce a writers' conference in Ghana, July 3rd-18th of this year. We hope to get the word out. The flier is attached here.

SABLE in London, U.K. and KwaniTrust in Nairobi, Kenya are two of many organizations that we are partnering with internationally.

We will be based at the New York University Campus in Accra, Ghana. We will waive the conference for any applicant based on the African continent or charge a nominal amount, depending on a given applicant's financial circumstances and need. We want to encourage any writer interested in coming to the conference to apply for travel funds, monies to cover the airfare.

We are especially anxious to get the word out to writers in South Africa and the United Kingdom.

Information about our organization and the 2008 conference is available at The web site will be updated next week

Mr. Bropleh is a wise man [A Cultural Paradigm for Liberia's Reconstruction, There is a saying that a person does not know where they are going until they know from where they’ve come. Personal and national pride comes from truly knowing oneself and one's history. We lose our uniqueness, our flavor, when our culture is diluted to a point where it’s non-recognizable. How do you stand out when you've become like everyone esle? What do we teach our children about Liberian History when we don't know it ourselves? Here's to hoping that the current/future leadership and educators guide the young minds in the history, art, and culture that produce national pride and thereby, self pride.

Yav Katshung Joseph argues that as truth commissions multiply around the world it is important to look at their relationship to prosecutions and justice in an immediate and historical sense. Are TRC's designed to generate more truth, more justice, reparations, and genuine institutional reform? Or are they designed to undermine the State’s and society’s legal, ethical and political obligations to their people?

INTRODUCTION

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/354/46719truth.jpgTruth commissions have been multiplying rapidly around the world and gaining increasing attention in recent years. They are proposed for different reasons and driven by diverse motives. They can be used firstly, for the purpose of national reconciliation and in the interests of the society; secondly, sometimes they can be used to avoid accountability or prosecution and merely to shield an offender from justice. Following recent outbreaks of violence in the aftermath of Kenya's presidential election last December, stakeholders continue to make strides toward peace. Parties have agreed among other things to a Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, which will be established through an Act of Parliament. The Commission will inquire into human rights violations, including those committed by the state, groups, or individuals. This includes but is not limited to politically motivated violence, assassinations, community displacements, settlements, and evictions. It will also inquiry into major economic crimes, in particular grand corruption, historical land injustices, and the illegal or irregular acquisition of land, especially as these relate to conflict or violence. Other historical injustices shall also be investigated. The commission will primarily focus on events dating back to independence, December 12, 1963 up to February 28, 2008. However, it will as necessary look at antecedents to this date in order to understand the nature, root causes, or context that led to such violations, violence, or crimes. This gives us opportunity to share views on adequate truth commissions and their relationship with prosecutions.

TENSIONS BETWEEN TRUTH COMMISSIONS AND PROSECUTIONS

Very often, when a country wishes to move from dictatorship to democracy or from war to peace, various ways may be tried and these include trials in an international or national court of law and non-punitive approaches such as truth commissions. Thus, “…a country’s decisions about how to deal with its past should depend on many things: the type of dictatorship or war endured, the type of crimes committed, the level of societal complicity, the nation’s political culture and history, the conditions necessary for dictatorship to reoccur, the abruptness of the transition, and the new democratic government’s power and resources [1].” One may adds the “interests” of the country.

Different countries have chosen widely different strategies to deal with the past including prosecutions in one hand and, truth commissions and other non-punitive approaches, in the other. Although justice is crucial after violations of human rights, it may not be possible or practical. International tribunals are useful, but they are not the full solution. They are hugely expensive and can try only a small group of perpetrators, the most “responsible”. Ironically, many times, those who are tried are not the most responsible but the most “available” in the country. Therefore, justice becomes extremely selective and seems to be the way of granting de facto amnesty to those who fled the country and those responsible. Then come the necessity of other non-judicial mechanisms such as truth commissions not as a panacea for all the challenges of transition, or an alternative, but as a complement way to be used by broken societies, in order to bring the benefits of justice to the victims and to the political culture.

However, this is challenging and there are always tensions between the requirements of the criminal justice system and those of non-punitive approaches to gross and systematic human rights violations. Rightly, Charles Villa-Vicencio pointed out that, “the tension between justice and reconciliation and revenge, prosecution and amnesty is grounded as much in principled debate as in a tug-of-war between deep emotions, unresolved memories and uncertain futures. It is a tension that is best not collapsed into an attempted neat synthesis of a complex set of contradictions. The contradictions need to be sustained. The demands of the one side need to impact on the other. It is through honest encounter that opposing groups stand the best chance of knowing that they need one another. It is then that new possibilities begin to be imagined-and sometimes realised [2].

DOMESTIC TRUTH COMMISSIONS AND PROSECUTIONS: REACHING FORWARD

Truth Commissions are established to officially investigate and provide an accurate record of the broader pattern of abuses committed during repression, civil war and unjust periods. There have been more than thirty truth commissions worldwide, including in Sierra Leone, DRC, Morocco, and more importantly South Africa. “Truth commissions today”, according to Jose Alvarez, Professor of International Law at Columbia University, “are inescapable tools in establishing the truth of past crimes and a means for victim recompense and instruments to promote peace and reconciliation.”

Most recently, the United Nations Secretary-General’s report on “The rule of law and transitional justice in conflict and post-conflict societies” praised them as “a potentially valuable complementary tool in the quest for justice and reconciliation” and in “restoring public trust in national institutions of governance [3]”. The increased interest in truth commissions is, in part, a reflection of the limited success in judicial approaches to accountability, and the obvious need for other measures to recognise past wrongs and confront, punish or reform those persons and institutions that were responsible for violations. Successful prosecutions of perpetrators of massive atrocities have been few, as under-resourced and often politically compromised judicial systems struggle to confront politically contentious crimes. With an eye on building a human rights culture for the future, many new governments have turned to mechanisms outside the judicial system to confront, as well as learn from the horrific crimes of the past [4].

However, a truth commission should at the same time never be allowed to circumvent international human rights law or, more specifically, to ignore the punitive demands of the criminal justice.

Related to the South African case, where there was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) with a possibility to grant a conditional amnesty [5] in exchange of a full disclosure and shown remorse, could we say according to the Rome Statute that, the TRC decisions or proceedings were taken for the purpose of shielding the person concerned from criminal responsibility?

One should take into account and acknowledge that the South African TRC was democratic and genuine. The purpose was not to shift or to hide someone or a group from prosecution. It was in the interest of peace, reconciliation, etc. In my view and for many others, the South African TRC was not there to shield perpetrators but to seek the truth for national reconciliation. South Africa acted in good faith; the TRC was established by the best efforts of negotiators to end violations of human rights. This is justice, to my view and I may say in the interests of the entire country/society, not in the interest of prosecuting some few and not others, and still walk free as if they were granted de facto amnesty.

Emphasising this argument, Juan Mendez, stated that:

“In most parts of the world, the South African example stands out as an attempt to achieve reconciliation and forgiveness without impunity. Others decry the fact that most perpetrators of the worst crimes of apartheid did evade justice. In my view, however, the South African exercise with truth, justice and reconciliation is notable for its insistence on hearing the victims, consulting with all members of society, allowing participation by all stakeholders, and conducting the exercise in complete transparency. It is in this sense that the South African example continues to inspire all those who decide to turn a page in a country’s history without forgetting the plight of those who suffered [6].”

Therefore, we may pause with Naomi Roht-Arriaza that, if perpetrators appear before an independent and democratic truth commission that hears applications for conditional and accountable amnesty, they should not face prosecution by the ICC. In this case, amnesty (conditional) is granted for the purpose of domestic reconciliation and not to shield him/her/(the perpetrator) from criminal prosecution [7]. However, can all truth commissions have the same purpose of not shielding perpetrators? It is important to draw the line in order to avoid some contradictions between truth commissions and prosecutions. The next point will deal with that.

THE QUESTION OF ADEQUATE TRUTH COMMISSIONS IN ORDER TO COMPLY WITH INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS

We should ask ourselves if all truth commissions should be considered as genuine and serve the interests of the country. As we may know, in some countries the purpose of a truth commission may be not genuine and reasonable. This is challenging and it will be useful to deal at the case-by-case level. Rightly, Professor James Crawford of the University of Cambridge has said in relation to Article 17 of the Rome Statute:

“I think there is a question about truth commissions, because you can’t say a priori which ones are a reasonable response to the situation, and which ones are a cover-up. It’s going to require extreme care by the prosecutor. There may be some problem there with the capacity to subvert those processes if they are reasonable, and we’ll just have to hope that the institutions within the court take a sensible view about it. But complementarity extends to covering internal processes which don’t necessarily involve prosecutions of individuals, so there’s no reason why the principle of complementarity ought not to cover an appropriately constituted truth commission [8]."

Moreover, Charles Villa-Vicencio, talking about truth commissions states that: “… They demand fewer resources than courts and, if designed properly, can provide some accountability [9].” Using the words such as “if designed properly”, meant that we may find some not properly designed and therefore, the need for benchmarks in order to comply with international law. Can we say that the South African TRC was able to provide accountability and was consistent with international law?

Despite some few critiques, the South African TRC is internationally recognised, and has been favourably endorsed by numerous international human rights organisations and commentators. The TRC was passed pursuant to a valid Act of Parliament and imposes a form of public procedure and accountability for the actions of perpetrators. It was the country's decision in favour of peace. This is not impunity because there was political consensus in South Africa that getting as much of the truth out as possible and having fewer, but more effective prosecutions, was a just result. Given that, this was what the majority of the public wanted, that is not impunity.

In this line, speaking on the relationship between the prosecutorial mandate of the ICC and the amnesty administered by the South African TRC, the Secretary-General of the United Nations has observed:

“The purpose of the clause in the Statute (which allows the Court to intervene where the state is ‘unwilling or unable’ to exercise jurisdiction) is to ensure that mass-murderers and other arch-criminals cannot shelter behind a State run by themselves or their cronies, or take advantage of a general breakdown of law and order. No one should imagine that it would apply to a case like South Africa’s, where the regime and the conflict which caused the crimes have come to an end, and the victims have inherited power.

It is inconceivable that, in such a case, the Court would seek to substitute its judgement for that of a whole nation which is seeking the best way to put a traumatic past behind it and build a better future [10]”.

As noted, the South African TRC has been recognized and even endorsed as a valid means of dealing with crimes arising out of apartheid [11]. Moreover, state practice [12], international jurisprudence [13] and authors [14] confirm that the Rome Statute does not preclude a state from utilizing amnesty as an effective means of prosecution. However, what about the Congolese TRC?

In assessing if the Congolese TRC met some minimal requirements to approach legitimacy under international law, one can point out that the Congolese TRC was not created and operated transparently in order to sustain democratic legitimacy. There was a clear lack of citizen involvement in the creation and functioning of the TRC, and openness to ensure domestic legitimacy. There was no endorsement of the TRC and its work as a mechanism of transitional justice. Moreover, there are many critiques because commissioners came from different factions, and were not chosen by means of a process, which tried to ensure a democratic spirit and practice, and transparency. Therefore, it seems that the purpose of such a commission, was to be a “Truth Omission” instead of a “Truth Commission” and cannot encounter support by the international community [15].

In order for truth commissions to merit international legitimacy, Professor Crawford suggested that one possible test would be whether the procedure in question had been freely ratified by the successor regime, “so it’s not just a way that the generals can sign their amnesty on the way out of the door [16].” And for that, Charles Villa-Vicencio [17] helps us by saying that truth commissions needs at a minimum to incorporate the following:

- There needs to be convincing evidence that the majority of citizens endorse the provision as a mechanism of transitional justice;
- The disclosure of as much truth as possible concerning the gross violations of human rights;
- Accountability of those responsible for gross violations of human rights, recognising that this need not to be in the form of retributive sentencing by the state;
- A mechanism needs to be put in place to provide a form of relief or reparation to victims whose rights are suspended by a qualified amnesty provision;
- The suspension of prosecutions in a transitionary situation should not be a pretext for the abrogation of other requirements of international law;
- A forum in which victims and survivors may tell their stories and questions;
- Prosecutions should remain an option both during and after the TRC against those perpetrators who did not adequately participate in the process.

Although we agreed with Charles on these criteria, the last one seems not to be consistent. Truth commissions are not alternative to prosecutions, all are two sides of the same coin and should be used complementarily but sequencing for their success. Saying that “prosecutions should remain an option both during and after the TRC against those perpetrators who did not adequately participate in the process” seems to be too simplistic and could undermine the entire effort to heal the wounds of the nation and to fight against impunity.

In addition to satisfying the above minimum criteria for international legitimacy, a Truth commission should also be created and operated transparently in order to sustain democratic legitimacy. Citizen involvement in the creation of a truth commission, and openness to media coverage of its operations, are necessary to ensure domestic legitimacy [18]. And Juan Mendez put it clearly by saying:

“There are two conditions of legitimacy that we should insist upon for any program of transitional justice. First, transitional justice policy should be developed as part of an open, democratic debate, which includes consultation with and participation of the relevant stakeholders and full transparency of decisions. If decisions about how to reckon with the past are adopted exclusively by the parties to a conflict, without appropriate consultations with the victims of abuse or with society at large, the result will almost always generate dissatisfaction and rejection. Second, transitional justice policy should be contemplated in as comprehensive and holistic an approach as possible. This is not only because there will always be an ‘impunity gap’, meaning that many cases of abuse will not be resolved by trials, thus generating the need for a broader treatment of the universe of violations. It is also because the emerging principles in international law … establish that the obligations of the State are four-fold: to prosecute perpetrators, to unearth the truth, to offer reparations to victims, and to reform abusive public institutions [19].

CONCLUSION

In many transition periods two methods are used to establish record of grave human rights crimes following a conflict/war: prosecutions at national or international level and truth commissions with various names, which investigate situations and submits reports. Both of these two methods are not sufficient and therefore, the need to complement each other.

There is a growing demand for transitional justice mechanisms such as truth commissions, around the world. The problem however, it is to test if all those mechanisms imply good faith. Is the effort designed to generate more truth, more justice, reparations, and genuine institutional reform? If so, they are welcome. If the objective is to evade the State’s and society’s legal, ethical and political obligations to their people, they should be rejected. The answer should be found in the design of the process itself, but also in the degree of participation, consultation, and transparency that surrounds them (e.g. of South Africa).

Moreover, we should start by avoiding seeing truth commissions as an alternative to prosecutions. Even if many of them have been accompanied by grants of amnesty to the major perpetrators of human rights crimes, viewing truth commissions, as substitute for prosecutions is not a right way and can lead to contradictions. Therefore, we should try to consider truth commissions as complementary to national and international prosecutions, not to substitute them. They are two sides of the same coin: transitional justice. However, the processes must be sequenced in a way that one does not affect the effectiveness of the other. Accordingly, Scharf has said, “a country should not rush ahead with prosecutions at the cost of political instability and social upheaval or that every single perpetrator must be brought to justice, an impossible task in most countries that have experienced widespread human rights abuses. By documenting abuses and preserving evidence, a truth commission can enable a country to delay prosecutions until the international community has acted, or the new government is secure enough to take such action against members of the former regime [20].”

Furthermore, it may be useful to examine the utility of conducting prosecutions after Truth commissions as a means of uncovering more “truth” that was not revealed through the process. Because, like in the South African case, if those people who did not apply for amnesty or those whom the amnesty was refused, do not face trials, someone could say that there is de facto amnesty and therefore, the purpose of a TRC was just to shield some perpetrators. In this hypothesis, the process will violate the international law and will not be in the interest of justice (society as a whole). So, we should look on the possibilities to trials for those persons in order to avoid impunity, contradictions and allow the roots of a just society to take hold.

*Yav Katshung Joseph is a Human Rights lawyer and. Lecturer at the Faculty of Law, University of Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo.

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

Footnotes are available at the URL shown below

the Center for Citizens’ Participation in the AU (CCP-AU)is seeking to recruit a coordinator to be based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The deadline for applications is 18 March 2008.

Dear Friends, May the spirit of International Day in Solidarity with the Haitian People continue to spread!
If the more than 10,000 people killed in the 18 months that followed the February 29, 2004 coup d’état could speak, what would they say? Would they join voices with the young women raped and sexually assaulted since the coup?

The inaugural conference within the CODESRIA initiative on African History is planned to hold in Nairobi, Kenya, from 13 – 15 August, 2008. The theme around which it is proposed to organise the conference is: Re-Reading the History and Historiography of Domination and Resistance in Africa. The choice of this theme for the inaugural conference has been informed by a number of considerations, five of which are outlined in this conference announcement.

The suffering of the women in the Congo, particularly in the east of the country has long reached biblical proportions, yet and still the silence continues throughout the global community. Hundreds of thousands of women have been violently raped, mutilated and terrorized by a host of culprits (Rebel Groups, Rwandan Soldiers, Congolese Soldiers, civilian population and even the United Nations).

President Robert Mugabe has signed a law requiring all foreign companies operating in Zimbabwe to give majority equity to black Zimbabweans, a move analysts see as the final nail in the coffin of the country's economy. More than 200 British and South African firms that have invested heavily in Zimbabwe will be affected, including Lever Brothers, Barclays Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Standard Bank, Stanbic Bank, Impala Platinum, Angloplat, Mettalon Gold, Rio Tinto, Edcon, Merchant Bank of Central Africa and several enterprises owned by Anglo American.

SAA has been branded a human rights violator for failing to provide adequate boarding equipment for disabled passengers at airports. The SA Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) revealed that disabled passengers were transported to and from SAA aircraft in adapted catering vehicles and manually loaded on to and off planes. On Sunday, a group of disabled people were forced to crawl out of the plane or be carried out at OR Tambo International Airport.

More women are working than ever before, but they are also more likely than men to get low-productivity, low-paid and vulnerable jobs, with no social protection, basic rights nor voice at work according to a new report by the International Labour Office (ILO) issued for International Women’s Day.

Is the Uganda government set to become an efficient deliverer of services to the 28 million Ugandans out there? At least this is what the nationals are supposed to believe if the benefits that accrue from the completion of the first phase of the National Data Backbone is anything to go by.

The swelling numbers of Darfur refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in eastern Chad is seriously straining the capacity of both the arid local environment and the region’s basic infrastructure, a United Nations aid official said today, warning that the humanitarian situation remained extremely precarious.

Violence against officials and members of the opposition has intensified, despite the arrival of a regional observer team in Harare on Wednesday. At least 5 supporters of the Tsvangirai MDC were hospitalised on Wednesday after they were attacked by a gang of youths known to be ZANU-PF members in Mbare high-density suburb of Harare. One of the victims, Simba Maringwa, is reported to be in intensive care battling for his life.

Just days after handing over millions of US dollars worth of agricultural equipment, buses and generators at his weekend rallies, Robert Mugabe has announced large salary increases for civil servants, including teachers. According to the state-controlled Herald newspaper, Mugabe announced the increases while addressing a rally at a school in Inyathi, Matabeleland North on Tuesday.

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and Chadian President Idriss Deby signed a peace agreement on Thursday designed to end cross-border rebel attacks in a region which includes Sudan's conflict-ravaged Darfur area. The signing, witnessed by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) head Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, also aims to revive a string of past pacts that have failed to end fighting on both sides of the Chad-Sudan border.

Lillian Akwero and her friends lived through some of Uganda's worst violence, fleeing rebel attacks in which their relatives were kidnapped or killed and villages torched. Now that their lives are about making ends meet rather than basic survival, their hope is that a deal to ensure lasting peace will not be wrecked by the International Criminal Court's arrest warrants against rebel leaders for savage atrocities

Tunisian journalist and press freedom advocate Sihem Bensedrine and husband Omar Mestiri were allegedly assaulted by police early this month when entering Tunisia from Europe. The government denies the claims, but human rights groups are persisting in their accusations.

Despite real advances in China, India, South Africa, and several Latin American and Caribbean countries, overall there has been little progress in reducing the number of victims of hunger and malnutrition around the world, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food Jean Ziegler said Tuesday.

Their makeshift shelter of branches and leaves is only 800 metres from Chad's border with the Central African Republic, but for Josephine and Veronique it could be 800 kilometres. The two women finally feel safe on this side of the border, where they have joined almost 14,000 other refugees, including some 3,000 of whom arrived over the past two weeks. Most have left Central African Republic (CAR) since mid-December to escape attacks by rebel fighters and bandits on their villages.

Botswana’s Attorney General, the Governor of the Bank of Botswana and the CEO of De Beers Botswana were greeted outside Chatham House in London this week by protesters holding blown-up photographs of Bushman women who have died due to the eviction of the Bushmen from their land.

China has had bad press regarding its involvement in sub-Saharan Africa. Its lack of aid conditionality – particularly in the field of human rights and environmental issues; its apparent disregard for transparency in the loan contraction processes and its general lack of adherence to international standards in responsible funding has caused alarm in the donor community. However although this paper largely agrees with and expands on these criticisms it also seeks to highlight the benefits of Chinese involvement.

Women who have sex with other women (WSW) were yesterday revealed to carry high prevalence of HIV in South Africa despite that it was known of them to have less HIV infection rate than gay men. Preliminary research findings about HIV testing and HIV status between South African men who have sex with other men (MSM) and WSW was presented by a New York based research scientist, Theo Sandfort, in Tshwane.

Charles Taylor celebrated his rise to power in Liberia with a ceremony involving a human sacrifice, burying a pregnant woman alive in sand, one of his former military commanders has testified. The admission came during a trial at The Hague where the former president is accused of war crimes.

A powerful cyclone has hit parts of Mozambique, killing at least seven people and forcing thousands families from their homes. The state-controlled national broadcaster said on Monday that four districts in the northern Nampula province were being battered by heavy downpours and strong winds of up to 200km per hour.

Sitting on a plastic mat in an outdoor classroom at a site for people displaced by violence outside the town of Goz Beida in southeastern Chad, Ibrahim Abdoulaye Moussa has reason to pay attention in class. "I'm in school to save my country," said the boy who is one of 180,000 displaced Chadians scattered around the vast semi-desert east of the country. "I dream of being president."

Zimbabwe's police chief says his force will not allow British and American "puppets" to take power in Zimbabwe, sending an ominous signal to opposition leaders ahead of March 29 polls, reports said on Friday. Commissioner-General Augustine Chihuri told officers at Police General Headquarters in Harare he was sending "a warning" to "puppets", echoing President Robert Mugabe's label for his opponents.

When rumours of a "gay wedding" spread through the northern Moroccan town of Ksar el Kebir, the only evidence produced was a video on YouTube of a man dancing suggestively in women's clothes. Three months later, four people are in prison accused of homosexual acts, Islamists are decrying a decline in public morals and liberals are warning that the North African kingdom risks sleep-walking into extremism.

A billboard showing traditional and religious leaders holding hands in the fight against AIDS is a common feature in Blantyre, Malawi's commercial capital, but overzealous church leaders claiming to cure HIV with prayer are now causing more harm than good. A pastor in southern Malawi recently hit the headlines when he told five HIV-positive people in his church to stop taking antiretroviral (ARV) medication because they had been treated by prayer.

Most of the roughly 50,000 people in the Amboko and Dosseye refugee camps near Goré, in the tropical forest of southern Chad, have fled across the border from neighbouring Central African Republic (CAR), but efforts to prevent and treat HIV among the camp residents are still in their infancy.

The Sigrid Rausing Trust is a UK-based human rights funding organisation, with an annual grant-making budget of approximately £18 million. It is seeking to employ an Africa Programme Officer, who will assist the Trust to increase its human rights grant-making in Sub-Saharan Africa, within its priority areas of civil and political rights, women's rights, minority rights and social and economic rights. The programme officer will be responsible for developing a strategy for grant-making in parts of the region. S/he will be the first point of contact for organisations applying for funding from the region and will be responsible for all aspects of grant-making for the portfolio. S/he will be located at our offices in London but will travel regularly to the region.
Please send a cover letter and your CV, either by email to [email][email protected]; or by mail to Diana Clarke, Sigrid Rausing Trust, Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY. Please clearly mark the application "Africa programme officer position." Deadline for receipt of applications is 2nd April 2008.

The W3C Workshop on the "Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development" aims to understand specific challenges of using mobile phones and Web technologies to deliver services to underprivileged populations of Developing Countries. People and organizations who have an interest in the role of mobile phones and the Web in social development and who wish to participate in the workshop are invited to submit position papers to the Workshop Committee (by email to [email][email protected])

Gourouza Aboubacar, Managing Editor of L’Eveil Plus, a bi-weekly independent newspaper based in Niamey was on March 6, 2008, sentenced to one month in prison without remission and fined 50,000 CFA Francs (approximately US$125) for allegedly bringing the Nigerien justice system into disrepute. The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA)’s correspondent reported that the verdict followed a complaint filed by the State Prosecutor of the Niamey Court.

Less than two weeks are left on the call of proposals for the 2008 Global Development Marketplace (DM2008) competition that seeks early-stage, innovative ideas with potential for high impact in promoting Sustainable Agriculture for Development. The submission deadline of March 21, 2008 (23:00 GMT time) is fast approaching - APPLY NOW!

The latest policy briefing from the International Crisis Group, describes how a crisis over the CPA at the end of 2007 was settled but that the underlying problems still threaten the deal which ended the generation-long civil war in which at least two million people died.

Pambazuka News is pleased to announce that one of its writers, Shailja Patel has been awarded the FannyAnn Eddy Poetry Award, from the International Research Network (IRN -Africa), for her poem, "Screaming."

FannyAnn Eddy, fearless leader of the Sierra Leone Lesbian and Gay Association, was brutally raped and murdered in 2004.

The awardees said that "Screaming" is striking because it illustrates how damage to the body is one of the many weapons patriarchy uses against those who dare assert dissident sexualities. One way of theorizing eroticism is exceptionally demonstrated through this poem.

Screaming" will appear in IRN-Africa's forthcoming collection of writing on alternatives to heteronormativity in Africa, "Outliers".

Five state agents of The Gambia, who were summoned by the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice in Abuja, Nigeria in the ongoing case of a "disappeared" Gambian journalist on March 11, 2008, defied the court's order and failed to make an appearance. The security agents had been invited by the court to clear themselves of their alleged involvement in the arrest and subsequent detention of Chief Ebrima Manneh, a former reporter of the pro-government Banjul-based Daily Observer newspaper.

MobileActive releases the first-ever comparison of do-it-yourself SMS campaign tools, designed especially for NGOs. The Guide helps NGOs get started in setting up a SMS campaign and includes a comparison of different SMS campaign software. Over the last several years, it’s become clear that mobile phones are becoming one of the most influential devices in our social, political, and civic lives. Savvy nonprofit organizations and NGOs are experimenting with using mobile phones as persuasive devices to recruit new supporters, organize groups, and advocate for causes.

APC thanks the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (“the Authority”) for the opportunity to make comment on the oral presentations on the draft regulations prescribing a list of essential facilities and matters related thereto, pursuant to Section 42(8) of the Electronic Communications Act No. 36 of 2005 (“the Act”). We fully support the introduction of these Essential Facilities Regulations because they will create conditions of open access on a non-discriminatory basis to undersea-based submarine cables.

Research for International Tobacco Control (RITC) of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is pleased to announce a Call for Letters of Intent for the African Tobacco Situational Analyses (ATSA). This competition is a joint initiative of RITC/IDRC and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The competition is administered by RITC/IDRC.