The Forum on the Participation of NGOs in the 41st Ordinary Session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, and 15th African Human Rights Book Fair will be taking place from 12 - 14 May, 2007 in Accra, Ghana.

Tajudeen reports back from a conference in South Africa on sustaing Africa's democratic movement. The conference was an opportunity to audit the state of democracy, not only in Africa, but compared with other regions of the world. It brought together the electoral commissioners of most African countries, democracy activists, scholars, representatives from the private sector, multilateral institutions and agencies, and politicians of all hues and colour.

Where did you spend 6 March 2007, Ghana’s 50th anniversary? If you were not at a celebration party, you would have joined in the national celebrations in Accra remotely through the television, radio and other media. So powerful is Ghana a metaphor of Africa’s self-confidence and indomitable desire to be free. Everywhere globally, Ghana’s anniversary of independence was a reaffirmation of the possibilities of Africa taking responsibility for its own destiny.

I would have loved to be in Accra that day, but a previous commitment to participate in a conference ‘Sustaining Africa’s Democratic Momentum’ in Johannesburg, organised by the Electoral Commission of South Africa, the African Union and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, meant I would be in the rainbow nation. But Ghana’s milestone was not far from the minds of all the conference participants. South African vice preseident, Phumile-Ngcuka, led the tributes to Ghana by appearing at the conference in a splendid Kente dress.

The anti-colonial struggles represent an historic opportunity for popular mass movement for liberty and democracy across the African continent, and among all colonised peoples, including in Asia and Latin America. The movement united in a shared quest for freedom priests and peasants, leaders and proletariat, the elite and the masses.

After independence, many countries faced the challenge of building nations out of the artificial colonial states they inherited. The alliance between the masses and the leaders fell apart, giving way to military dictatorships, one party states and other forms of authoritarian rule which provoked protests, rebellions and even revolutions.

The challenges were not only internal. Externally the Cold War, neo-colonialist policies, and the new bourgeois elite and militated against the new states. Sometimes states tried to play the powers off against one another, but mostly they became proxies and agents for the wars and agenda of others: in the looting of their countries and the degradation of their peoples.

However, African people did not remain helpless victims, continuing to struggle against dictatorship in many forms, directly and indirectly. In the past two decades Africa has seen renewal, in spite of all kinds of people (African and non African) bad mouthing the continent, paid to derive huge sums of money from Afro-pessimism.

The Jo'burg conference could not have come at a better time, coinciding with Ghana’s 50th anniversary. Ghana was the first independent black African country. South Africa was the last country on the continent to be liberated from racist minority rule. Ghana was inspiring to African nationalist struggles. Today, South Africa represents the spirit of Afro-optimism, African responsibility and leadership, despite the challenges of giving real power and prosperity to its majority population.

The conference was an opportunity to audit the state of democracy, not only in Africa, but compared with other regions of the world. It brought together the electoral commissioners of most African countries, democracy activists, scholars, representatives from the private sector, multilateral institutions and agencies, and politicians of all hues and colour. The topics discussed included: representation and participation; the role of electoral systems in enhancing or limiting participation; the role of political parties; constitutional frameworks and constitutionalism; the nexus between democracy and development; the capacity, integrity and legitimacy of electoral management bodies as umpires of the democratic space; and the role of civil society and other stakeholders, both national and international, in deepening, expanding or limiting democratic spaces.

Political parties in Africa The session that interested me the most was ‘enhancing the capacity of political parties as agents of democratisation: towards creating political parties that are democratic, representative and trusted by voters'.

Political parties are vehicles for putting forward alternative public policies in dynamic confrontation, and in competition for citizens' votes. No competitive democratic political system can endure without a viable party system. The independence struggles were led by political parties with various strategies and tactics for getting rid of colonialism. They mobilised the public who voluntarily funded, supported and voted for them. In many countries, the colonialists intervened directly or indirectly, to control, manipulate, compromise and subvert those processes. But still the nationalists won - and without writing proposals for funding to any foreign power. The masses supported and funded the struggles, and actively participated in political parties.

Today we have no political parties that present alternative policies, values, or ideologies. Instead, they resort to taking issues of the lowest common denominator such as ethnicity, region, religion or race to mobilise support. Many parties are nothing more than family businesses, or machines for rolling out voters, who can be easily discarded after the election. For instance, in Kenya, `almost no MPs are members of the party or alliance, the platform on which they ‘won’ their seats. If parties mattered, how would it be so simple to cross the carpet without apparent sanctions? If elected members can change their allegiances so capriciously, why should people vote for parties at all?

It is the ultimate privatisation of politics to have MPs who are neither accountable to a party, nor to the people who voted them. Multi-party Kenya today is closer to neighbouring Uganda’s ‘no party democracy'. Uganda is struggling to evolve into a viable multi-party democracy with a reluctant president and ruling political clique. Even in some of our much vaunted stable democracies, such as Botswana, one must question whether such stability does not derive from an environment where one party dominates? What would happen, for instance, if the ANC lost power in South Africa? At the other extreme, what would be the political implications are if Museveni were no longer President in Uganda? Would their fate not be similar to that of Ghana, once Jerry Rawlings was no longer president or presidential candidate?

Different again is a country like Nigeria with more than 40 political parties, yet no where near being truly a democratic state. Nigeria basically is a two-party country. And the irony is that neither the ruling party nor the many opposition parties make any pretense of democracy.

Hence one of the biggest challenges to democracy in Africa is trying to develop a democratic society without democrats, whether in government or opposition, at home or in the work place. Democracy is always work in progress renewed from one generation to the next. But the main engine remains political parties. Therefore citizens have a duty to form them, join them, and be active in them in order to produce leaders that will serve their interests.

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

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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What does freedom mean in an African context? Can a country be free when 75% of its budget is provided by donors? Not necessarily, but this does not mean that the achievement of Ghana’s independence in 1957 is not worth celebrating. It does mean however that there is still much work to be done.

On 6 March 2007, Ghana will celebrate its 'Golden Jubilee', frequently referred to as 'Ghana at 50'— fifty years' independence from their colonial oppressors, Britain. The ancestors have blessed me with the opportunity to bear witness to this momentous event. Although I am an African (or black) American, like many North American and Caribbean blacks, I consider the African continent to be my spiritual home. I have travelled to seven West African countries. I am a pan-African in terms of sentiment, by which I mean that I advocate the operational unity of black/African people all over the world in our individual and collective interests.

In my country of birth, the United States, black people as a group are still, in my assessment, second-class citizens. Far too many of us continue to be victimised by police brutality, a racist criminal (in)justice system, sub-standard schools, inadequate health care and housing. It is for this reason that I do not celebrate American Independence Day on 4 July 1776. I do not salute the American flag, nor do I sing the American national anthem. I protest not because I am anti-American or unpatriotic but, rather, because I am principled. The black American freedom fighter Frederick Douglass asked over a century ago, 'What to the slave is your Fourth of July?' Due, primarily, to the prodigious struggles of our ancestors, black Americans are no longer enslaved. But we are still unfree. It is from the standpoint of an unfree, so-called, African American who has travelled back-and-fourth to Ghana since 1997 that I offer my personal perspective on the significance of Ghana’s Independence Day celebrations.

Fifty years ago, Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, in his Declaration of Independence speech, exclaimed that, 'Ghana, your beloved country, is free forever!' 'Freedom', however, can be fleeting thing. Is Ghana free today? What precisely do we mean by 'freedom in Ghana? Perhaps what is, I think, most instructive and ironic and about the Ghana at 50 celebrations is that the Ghanaian government is forced to rely on western donors, most notably Britain, to fund them. It makes one wonder in what ways exactly Ghana, and by extension Africa, is truly free? And, for that matter, what can freedom mean for Ghanaians when more than 70 per cent of the central government’s budget is provided by Euro-western donors? Well for starters, and this is perhaps the most disturbing irony of all, some (but not all) Ghanaian scholars and politicians are forced to uncritically accept British interpretations of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and its consequences. True independence would mean that Africans had the freedom to interpret their past from the perspective of Africans rather than Euro-westerners (white people).

Here in Ghana it has become something of a fashion for Ghanaian analysts to compare Ghana’s progress as a nation with that of Malaysia, which also gained independence in 1957. In every instance that the comparison is raised, the Ghanaian commentator reaches the inevitable conclusion that by the Malaysian yard stick, Ghana comes up short in every major indicator of human and economic development (infant mortality, life expectancy, GDP). I have always been somewhat sceptical of the usefulness of these sorts of comparisons. After all, the post-colonial social, political, and economic challenges of Ghana and Malaysia respectively would have been very different.

If, however, one were bent on comparisons, another instructive juxtaposition would be with the first sub-Saharan nation to break free from colonialism: Sudan. That’s right Sudan. It is frequently reported that Ghana was the first sub-Saharan country to gain independence, but Sudan, having gained independence on 1 January 1956, had roughly a 14 month head start on Ghana. I suspect that this historical slight might have something do with the fact that Sudan is dominated by Afro-Arabs—or, to put it bluntly, due to its political and cultural ties with the Arab world, some folks tend not to count Sudan in the club of 'black African' nations. This perception raises all sorts of important questions about the politics of African identity. What is important to note for this purpose is that the Khartoum regime and the southern Sudanese rebels have only in the last few years negotiated a (very shaky) resolution ending what was one of the longest and most neglected conflicts on the African continent. More recently, the Darfurian region of western Sudan is in the throes of a humanitarian disaster, which some international observers are calling genocide. Consequently, the lives of ordinary Darfurians are extremely precarious as they continue to be squeezed by rebel groups on one side and nomadic militias (so-called 'Janjaweed'), allegedly backed by Khartoum, on the other.

Ghana for its part has experienced four military coups (at least one of which featured US and British intelligence agencies as co-conspirators), sporadic instances of state-sponsored violence, and a severe recession in the early 1980s. But, unlike Sudan, Ghanaians have never known the ravages and devastation of civil war. Ghana is today, despite the historical volatility of its central government and deep political divisions between the two major political parties, the National Democratic Convention (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), a relatively stable nation. While it could be proven empirically, I am of the opinion at this stability has something to do with Kwame Nkrumah’s tireless efforts to propagate pan-African nationalism.

What is incontrovertible, however, is that Ghana’s independence was an achievement of Ghanaian elites, the likes of Kwame Nkrumah and J.B. Danquah, Afro-westerners such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus and Amy Jacques Garvey, and thousands of well known and lesser known black diasporan radicals who identified with the African anti-colonial struggle. Most importantly, Ghana’s independence was accomplished by ordinary Gold Coasters (Ghanaians) who refused to abandon their dignity even when faced with the most overwhelming odds. In other words, Ghanaian independence was a pan-African accomplishment of great significance. This history, I suspect, is well known to many of the readers of this article.

What is less known is that the currents of revolutionary inspiration that fuelled the struggle against racial subordination did not flow in one direction across the Atlantic. Ghanaian independence specifically, and the African independence struggle generally, had concrete implications for the US black freedom movement. First and foremost, the example of Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah heading up an African nation and encouraging blacks of the diaspora to 'return' to the African continent invigorated the black American anti-racist struggle. Why, for example, are so few of us taught in school about Martin Luther King’s visit to Ghana in 1957 for Ghana’s independence ceremonies? Why are we never taught about the tremendous impact this experience had on King’s thinking? Why do we know so little about Malcolm X’s two visits to Ghana? Most importantly of all, why are we never taught that the US government viewed African American and continental African cooperation as a threat to 'national interests' (i.e. a threat to the interests of white elites and their non-elite and/or non-white collaborators), and took concrete steps to undermine this perceived threat?

I raise these questions because they are crucial if we are ever to be truly free and independent. Although we have made huge strides, we Africans are not yet in control of our destiny. Freedom and independence must be consistently demanded, tenaciously fought for, jealously guarded, and vigorously defended. I am not an Afro-pessimist. There is rarely a day that passes here in Ghana when I am not inspired by the graciousness, optimism, creativity, and resilience of Ghanaians. Indeed, my experiences have convinced me that, as John Kufuor, has affirmed, all is not 'doom and gloom' in Africa. Ghana and, as Kwame Nkrumah would have it, Africans generally, have much to celebrate. But there is still a massive amount of work to do. What will your contribution be?

* Brother Kwame Zulu Shabazz can be reached at: [email][email protected]

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

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Bro. K. Bangarah, in this second part of his essay, 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. He was merely an unofficial government appointee who negotiated and claimed leadership of the movement and his name in history.

Wilberforce: Government agent and bogus anti-slavery ‘leader’?

The recruitment of Wilberforce by the Prime Minister is an important clue suggesting that he may have been appointed to perform a subversive role designed to hold up the abolition process. Pitt was determined that Wilberforce, a backbencher, should be the official spokesman for the abolition society and in that role, present the abolition bill in Parliament. This is very surprising since the bill would have stood a much greater chance of success if the Prime Minister had taken it on as part of government business, headed and presented by a cabinet Minister. If he had really wanted to abolish the ‘slave trade’ he could have used the full power of his office to make it happen. The truth is that the Prime Minister’s situation was delicate as he wanted to appear to be in favour of abolition, whilst in reality being doggedly opposed to it.

Pitt was forced into giving the false impression that he favoured abolition because of the growing awareness about: (i)the barbarity, wickedness and general evil of slavery, and (ii)the large number of deaths of British seamen, soldiers and other personnel overseas. The resulting and ever growing outcry from the British public for the abolition of the ‘slave trade’ increased the pressure on him and his government to act. This then created serious problems for a government that relied heavily on the income that it received in the form of taxes from enslavers and others who profited from the human misery of enslaved Afrikan people. Pitt’s tactical response was to send in his close and trusted friend Wilberforce; so close that at one time they even lived in the same house (Howarth, 1973). Wilberforce’s role was to function as the society’s mouthpiece with the latent agenda of containing, stifling, thwarting, delaying and otherwise redirecting the pressure on government so as to stave off the abolition of slavery.

There are signs that initially Wilberforce was not quite up to the task of infiltrating and undermining the organised structures and processes developed to achieve the abolition of slavery. It evidently became necessary to coerce him into stepping more fully into the bogus leadership role ascribed to him because in 1787 Pitt found it necessary to warn Wilberforce that: ‘… if he did not bring the motion in [to the House of Commons], somebody else would …’ (James, 1963). The thought of somebody else stealing his limelight seems to have helped him overcome his reluctance.

Some readers might find it strange to think in terms of Wilberforce having operated as an under cover government spy working to subvert the abolitionist movement. However, we know that Pitt was really against the abolition of slavery because of his response to the Haitian revolution. When the world saw the Afrikan people in Haiti rise up and abolish slavery, Pitt failed to offer them either his government’s support or even its official recognition. Instead he sent 60,000 British soldiers, mostly to die, in an unsuccessful attempt to crush the Afrikan people there in order to return them back into slavery (James, 1963). Pitt’s actions must have been designed to maintain slavery, because he did not send his troops into nearby France to assist attempts to crush the revolutionary Jacobins who were fighting a similar cause.

Instead of correcting his close friend the Prime Minister and championing the cause of the Afrikan people fighting for their freedom in Haiti, Wilberforce publicly supported Pitt’s decision to send British forces into Haiti in order to fully re-instate slavery on the island. There can be little doubt that this action was specifically against the enslaved Afrikan people who were fighting for freedom. We know this because in 1792 he used the Haitian revolution as a pretext for abandoning the bill to abolish the ‘slave trade’ that had already successfully passed through the House of Commons (Hart, 1997). It was agreed that this bill would bring the slave trade’ to an end on 1 January 1796. That they should be prepared to go to such lengths is proof conclusive that both Wilberforce and Pitt were unequivocally and fundamentally opposed to the abolition of slavery. Any other utterances that they made were just anti-slavery rhetoric designed to camouflage their real agenda. It is just not possible for an honest and objective observer to consider these facts and reasonably draw any other conclusion.

In addition, there is documented evidence confirming that governments of that period in British history actively used their own under cover agents as spies against groups that they did not approve of. Afrikan anti-slavery and anti-imperialist heroes such as William Davison (Fryer, 1984) and William Cuffay (Fryer, 1984) were executed or otherwise persecuted as a direct result of the subversive activities of government sponsored undercover agent provocateurs. The Briton Arthur Thistlewood suffered a similar fate (Foot, 2002).

As will be seen, Wilberforce consistently behaved in ways that ran counter to the objective of abolishing slavery. It is his consistent pattern of blatant anti-abolitionist, blatant racist and blatant sexist behaviours that lay him open to the accusation of being a subversive government agent. It is also interesting to note that all the time William Pitt, the man who appointed him, was Prime Minister all bills to abolish the kidnapping and deportation of Afrikan people failed to make their way through Parliament. It was only after the death of Pitt in 1806 that the abolition of the slave trade bill finally made it onto the statue book.

Racist Wilberforce opposed the abolition of slavery

Another of the methods used by imperialism to propagate its lies is to create or control organisations that pretend to champion particular just causes whilst, at the same time, adopting the hidden agenda of derailing or containing that just cause. The actions of the so called ‘Abolition Society’ were consistent with that pattern in that despite its progressive sounding name, it openly boasted that it did not seek the abolition of the enslavement of Afrikan people. For instance, on 12 August 1788 just months after Wilberforce started operating as its ‘unofficial’ Parliamentary spokesman, the ‘Abolition Society’ issued its first public statement: ‘… proclaiming that the abolition of slavery was not their objective’ (Hart, 2006). The following year 1789, a Privy Council report concluded that free waged labourers were three times more productive than enslaved people (Ferguson, 1998). There was an increasing realisation that enslaved people had no purchasing power and that this was as an obvious impediment to the development of the capitalist market system of distribution and exchange (Hart, 1998).

The society appears to have been completely unmoved by the mounting sources of information and pressure supportive of the abolition of slavery. They still stubbornly refused to advocate for the abolition of slavery and on 31 January 1792 Wilberforce’s friends in the ‘Abolition Society’ issued their second public statement: ‘… proclaiming that the abolition of slavery was not their objective’ (Hart, 2006). If these actions were not enough to demonstrate the desire of Wilberforce and his friends to hold back progress towards gaining the ‘freedom’ of enslaved Afrikan people then, on 29 March 1797 the case was sealed; three years after Wilberforce officially joined, the disingenuous nature of the ‘Abolition Society’ was confirmed when it issued its third public statement: ‘… proclaiming that the abolition of slavery was not their objective’ (Hart, 2006). From the point of view of Afrikan people, this is an aspect of Wilberforce’s ‘help’ that we could have done without.

The success of the Haitian revolution and the Haitian declaration of independence in 1804 forced all of the imperialist nations to reconsider their approach to the enslavement of Afrikan people (James, 1963). All of Pitt’s and Wilberforce’s attempts to support the maintenance of slavery on that island had ended in unmitigated disaster. The experience forced them and other imperialists to accept that they could be militarily defeated by enslaved Afrikan people. It also forced them to accept that if they continued to kidnap and deport Afrikan people to the Americas that they would be adding to the military might of the already powerful enslaved Afrikan people resisting their enslavers. This in turn would lead to the inevitable demise of their European kith and kin living in and colonising those lands.

Denmark wasted no time and abolished the ‘slave trade’ in 1802 (Greenwood, 1980). Britain’s response was slower: Since the 1790s the British Parliament had developed the habit of thwarting all attempts to abolish the kidnapping and deportation of Afrikan people into enslavement. Despite their military defeats at the hands of Afrikan people in Haiti. Some sections of the British establishment refused to accept the need to abolish. Over a period they began to accept reality, Britain changed stance and a bill for the abolition of the ‘slave trade’ was, though not for the first time, approved by the House of Commons in 1804. It was however, held up by the intransigence of House of Lords (Hart, 1998).

When in 1807 the House of Lords finally capitulated under the overwhelming pressure to abolish the practice of kidnapping and deporting Afrikan people, Wilberforce attempted to put the breaks on the Afrikan liberation process by publicly denouncing the idea of emancipating enslaved Afrikan people (Williams, 1944). Following that, Wilberforce was to go on to prove just how reactionary he actually was when he and his friends delayed advocating the ‘gradual emancipation’ of enslaved Afrikan people until 1923 – 16 years (Hart, 2006). It is clear that he did not feel it necessary to consult with enslaved Afrikan people since he expressed the opinion that we were not yet: ‘… fit … to bear emancipation …’ (Martin, 1999). Wilberforce’s actions are clearly consistent with those of a person who was completely opposed to the idea of Afrikan people being freed from imperialist oppression.

Racist Wilberforce delayed the abolition of slavery

After the abolition of the ‘slave trade’ in 1807, the next logical step for those in favour of Afrikan emancipation was the immediate abolition of the institution of slavery itself. However, Wilberforce found curious ways of showing his ‘support’ for the cause of immediate abolition. In addition to openly opposing immediate abolition, he practiced behaviours which did not fall far short of those carried out by the racist fascists who controlled the abhorrent anti-human Apartheid system in South Afrika. For instance in 1816, when he claimed to be advocating for ‘equality’ and the ‘emancipation’ of Afrikan and other oppressed people, Wilberforce chaired a dinner of the friends of Afrikans and Asians Society and: ‘… the token Afrikans and Asians invited to the gathering were separated from the other guests by a screen set across the end of the room.’ (Fryer, 1984).

Wilberforce was not shy in demonstrating his apparent ‘compassion’ for enslaved Afrikan people in other ways. For instance, he advocated the idea that Afrikan people should only be whipped at night – presumable so as not to adversely affect production, which took place mainly in the day (Hochschild, 2005). Furthermore, our ‘great hero and saviour’ recommended that Afrikan people be bred like animals as a substitute to boosting our population in the Americas through the kidnapping and compulsory deportation of our people – otherwise referred to as the ‘slave trade’.

Following the rebellion of enslaved Afrikan people in Demerara in 1823, calls for the immediate abolition of slavery once again grew amongst the British public. Wilberforce and his friends had successfully held back the aspirations of those people genuinely desiring the immediate abolition of slavery until that year, but the pressure was now becoming too great. The mounting public pressure compelled Wilberforce and his friends to launch the Society for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery (SGAS) (Hart, 2006). They launched the society as a last ditch tactic to further delay the prospect of ending the institution of slavery. Since it was becoming clearer that they could not stop the progress towards abolition, they would drag it out and delay it for as long as possible. The SGAS advocated ideas and policies that would help slavery to survive for a further 100 years. Its members openly boasted that they wanted slavery to gradually: ‘… die away and to be forgotten …’ (Williams, 1944).

Wilberforce’s anti-abolition position was completely out of touch with the will of the British people and diametrically opposed to the majority of the membership of his own organisation. In May 1830 the SGAS passed a resolution for the immediate abolition of slavery against the wishes of its ‘leadership’ i.e. Wilberforce and his new side kick Buxton (Hart, 2006). This was an important catalyst in the history of the abolition movement. Wilberforce and his friends had successfully delayed, suppressed and contained the demand for the immediate freedom of enslaved Afrikan people for over 40 years. Wilberforce was clearly an enemy of Afrikan people, not a friend.

Sexist Wilberforce opposed women’s groups advocating the abolition of slavery

In Britain, women were, after the Afrikan community itself, the most radical advocates for the abolition of slavery (Martin, 1999). Whilst Wilberforce was openly advocating against the abolition of slavery, women’s groups were actively campaigning to achieve immediate abolition. One example comes via Elizabeth Heyricke who wrote a pamphlet entitled, Immediate Not Gradual Emancipation (Martin, 1999). Women were also prolific in the amassing of millions of signatures for anti-slavery petitions. More importantly, they led the mass boycott campaigns that damaged the economic interests of the plantation enslavers and their allies. Peckham Ladies Anti-Slavery Association is an example of a women’s group that contributed to the organisation of the campaign to boycott West Indian sugar (Williams, 1944).

Wilberforce actively opposed female anti-slavery associations and their role in organising boycott campaigns (Williams, 1944, p. 182). Wilberforce refused to accept women’s signatures on anti-slavery petitions (Martin, 1999). He tried to discourage and silence the political activities of women’s groups working for the anti-slavery cause. If he was genuinely in favour of the abolition of slavery, he would have thanked and encouraged the women’s groups for the sterling work that they were doing to advance the cause that he claimed to stand for. In failing to do so he was demonstrating his overt sexism and simultaneously harming the prospects of Afrikan people being freed from the bondage of imperialism. His undermining behaviour was clearly inconsistent with that of person sincerely working to achieve the abolition of slavery.

Whilst he vociferously denounced the idea of women being involved in open political activity aimed at abolishing slavery, he made no such condemnation of the public exploitation of women as prostitutes in brothels. During that period innocent Afrikan women were kidnapped, transported from their homes and held captive as sex slaves in British brothels. If he was genuinely against the enslavement of Afrikan people, he would have used his position in Parliament to help outlaw this most despicable of human abuses. However, instead of condemning this outrageous practice as a crime against the humanity of Afrikan women, he joined the exploitation process. He personally participated in systematically organised episodes of rape perpetrated against these defenceless Afrikan women, whose misfortune it was to be imprisoned in British imperialism’s brothels.

This aspect of his behaviour was brought to the attention of the public by cartoonists in the national press (Howarth, 1973). Wilberforce does not appear to have denied these public accusations, nor did he take legal action to protect his ‘good name’. He would have had some difficulty defending himself given that his secret mistress Agnes Bonte described as a ‘prostitute’ actually set up and ran a ‘top people’s’ brothel in London. She is said to have developed her liking for bondage after going on private boat trips with Wilberforce where he demonstrated the way in which Afrikan people were held in chains on the human trafficking ships of the time (Agnes Bronte 1813-1892).

Perhaps one reason why he was so openly against the abolition of slavery is that it could have led to a personal ‘loss of privileges’ on his part, by denying him his unrestricted access to the group of disempowered Afrikan women whom he used as sex toys. Wilberforce’s perverted, misogynistic and racist behaviour falls significantly short of that which should be expected of anybody posing as an ‘Afrikan liberator, hero and saviour’.

* Part 1 was published in Pambazuka News 293
* Bro. K. Bangarah is a member of the Global Afrikan Congress, based in the UK,
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org

References
1. Ferguson. James, (1998), The Story of the Caribbean People, Ian Randle Publishers, Kingston, Jamaica
2. Foot. M.R.D., (2002), Secret Lives: Lifting the Lid on the Worlds of Secret Intelligence, Oxford University Press
3. Fryer. Peter, (1984), Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, Pluto Press
4. Greenwood. R., & Hamber. S., (1980), Emancipation to Emigration, Macmillan Caribbean
5. Hart. Richard, (1998), From Occupation to Independence: A Short History of the Peoples of the English Speaking Caribbean Region, Pluto Press
6. Hart. Richard, (2006), A talk on the subject of: The Slaves Who Abolished Slavery, Centerprise Bookshop, Dalston, London, 11th October 2006
7. Hochschild. Adam, (2005), Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, Mariner Books
8. Howarth. David, (1973), The British Empire; Volume 2, BBCTV Time Life Books
9. James. C.L.R., (1963), The Black Jacobins, Vintage Books
10. Martin. Steve, (1999), Britain’s Slave Trade, Channel 4 Books
11. Schama. Simon, (2006), Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the
12. Walwin. James, (1993), Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery, Fontana Press
13. Williams. Eric, (1944), Capitalism and Slavery, Andre Deutsch

Internet References
1. A Web of English History, http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/terrace/adw03/c-eight/people/wilberf.htm
2. Agnes Bronte 1813 - 1892, http://freespace.virgin.net/pr.og/agnes.html
3. Ligali, (Monday 6th November 2006), Set All Free Deny Wilberforce Film Endorsement, http://www.ligali.org/article.php?id=563
4. The Amazing Change, http://www.theamazingchange.com/timeline.html
William Wilberforce 1759-1833, Biography, http://www.brycchancarey.com/abolition/wilberforce.htm

Using a vivid mosaic of public controversies and ethnographic vignettes, Fassin works through the controversial denials of South African president Thabo Mbeki and the precautionary policies of his health ministers within histories of apartheid, epidemics which justified segregation, and secret biological warfare plans of Project Coast, as well as wider battles over the ethical protocols of Aids testing and widening inequalities."-Michael M.J.Fischer, author of _Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice.

In this book, France's leading medical anthropologist takes on one of the most tragic stories of the global Aids crisis-the failure of the ANC government to stem the tide of the Aids epidemic in South Africa. Didier Fassin traces the deep roots of the AIDS crisis to apartheid and, before that, to the colonial period. One person in ten is infected with HIV in South Africa, and President Thabo Mbeki has initiated a global controversy by funding questionable medical research, casting doubt on the benefits of preventing mother-to-child transmission, and embracing dissidents who challenge the viral theory of Aids. Fassin contextualises Mbeki's position by sensitively exploring issues of race and genocide that surround this controversy. Basing his discussion on vivid ethnographical data collected in the townships of Johannesburg, he passionately demonstrates that the unprecedented epidemiological crisis in South Africa is a demographic catastrophe as well as a human tragedy, one that cannot be understood without reference to the social history of the country, in particular to institutionalised racial inequality as the fundamental principle of government during the past century.

On 2 March 2007, the issue of 'comfort women' was raised again by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who denied that the military had forced women into sexual slavery during World War II. He stated, 'the fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion'. Before he spoke, a group of Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers also sought to revise Yohei Kono's 1993 apology to former comfort women.

2007 marks the 30th anniversary of International Women's Day. The day has been observed since the early 1900s, a time of great expansion and turbulence in the industrialised world that saw booming population growth and the rise of radical ideologies. In 1977 the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution inviting member states to proclaim a UN Day for Women's Rights and International Peace - International Women's Day - observed on 8 March.

This important day provides an opportunity to celebrate progress made to advance women's rights and to assess remaining challenges. International Women's Day should encourage us to bring about equality for women and girls in all their diversity, and to celebrate the collective power of women past, present and future.

Women's suffering arises as a direct consequence of their gender

We should all bear in mind that many problems faced by women arise as a direct consequence of their gender. Everyday, in countries around the world, women and girls, desperate for economic opportunity, and seeking to follow their dreams of a better life, are lured from home by promises of jobs and security. Sadly, they too often find themselves turned into prostitutes, imprisoned by employers, mistreated, sexually abused and often never seen nor heard from again. While entire communities suffer the consequences of armed conflict, women and girls are particularly affected because of their status in society.

More than 1 billion people in the world today, the great majority of whom are women, live in unacceptable conditions of poverty, mostly in developing countries. Women's lives continue to be endangered by violence which is directed at them, because they are women. Violence against women knows no class, race, or age barriers. It exists across all socio-economic groups, It is a daily phenomenon in the lives of women throughout the world.

'Comfort Women', at a glance in 2007

The recent statement by Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, raising the issue of 'comfort women' strongly reinforces the suffering of women and girls today. He said that there was no evidence Japan coerced Asian women into working as sex slaves during World War II, backtracking from a landmark 1993 statement in which the government acknowledged that it set up and ran brothels for its troops. The 1993 apology was made by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, but was not approved by parliament. The recent Japanese Prime Minister’s denial came after several members of the US House of Representatives have drafted a non-binding resolution calling him to 'formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility' for using 'comfort women' during the war. Supporters want an apology similar to the one the US government gave to Japanese-Americans forced into internment camps during World War II. That apology was approved by Congress and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1988.

This development is regrettable and shows that the ghost of inequality and disrespect continues to haunt the women and women’s rights. In fact, 'comfort women' or 'military comfort women' is a euphemism for between 80,000 and 200,000 forced sex labourers, mostly from Korea and China, conscripted into military brothels in Japanese-occupied countries during World War II. Women were enslaved against their will and repeatedly raped, tortured and brutalised for months or years on end, exclusively for the benefit of Japanese military. Women were abducted or obtained by deception and in some cases, girls were purchased from destitute parents. The majority of victims were under the age of 20 and some girls were as young as 12.

The Japanese Government has vigorously defended its legal position on this issue and has persistently maintained that all issues of compensation were settled by post-war peace treaties. Japan’s apologies to the former ‘comfort women’ have been half-hearted and the government has refused to accept any legal liability. Japan’s answer to compensation has failed to meet international guidelines on reparation and compensation.

No more 'Comfort women'?

Can we say that after the World War II, there are no more comfort women? The answer is no, if we consider the number and cases of sexual abuses committed by military and paramilitary forces around the world and especially in Africa. It is even worse when 'peacekeepers' are also involved in these practices.

The experience of women during WWII is not unique. Women continue to suffer from systematic rape and assault in war and conflict. Women in Rwanda, Liberia, Somalia, Sierra-Leone, Burundi, DRC and Sudan have reported deliberate and systematic rape and abuse during conflict. These crimes are war crimes and human rights violations of grave magnitude.

Japan, other states and individuals should be taught that this system of forced sexual slavery is a crime against humanity that does not lapse with the passing of time. The denial of a just remedy for surviving former 'comfort women' is a human rights violation. Victims’ needs have to be at the core of any attempt to address past violations. So far, Japan’s actions have ignored their victims’ needs and actually compounded the initial human rights violations committed against them. It is well established in international law that where a state has committed gross violations of human rights and humanitarian law, as Japan did in the case of the 'comfort women'," the government is obliged to investigate such abuses, prosecute those responsible, provide adequate remedies to the victims and prevent future abuses.

Never again, the brutality of men at war!

These women deserve justice. It is vital that the surviving 'comfort women' as we are celebrating the International Women’s Day, are given back their dignity. Just remedy for the survivors of the comfort system will give hope to survivors and victims, as well as set a precedent for other women suffering today.

* Joseph Yav is a lecturer in law, at the Faculty of Law, University of Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo and is also the executive director of CERDH (Centre d’Etudes et de Recherche en Droits de l’Homme, Democratie et Justice Transitionnelle/Centre for Human Rights, Democracy and Transitional Justice Studies)[email protected]

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/294/kwame-nkrumah.jpg
Nii Ardey Otoo defends Nkrumah and the CPP's declaration of a one-party state in Ghana.

It is often said that Kwame Nkrumah had his faults. This statement is used to provide grounds to criticise Kwame Nkrumah's policies, which his critics are not comfortable with.

Among the so-called mistakes attributed to Nkrumah was the declaration of Ghana as a one-party state. According to imperialist propaganda, Nkrumah declared Ghana a one-party state because he wanted to rule Ghana without opposition. This propaganda has gained credence through the pronouncements of some African intellectuals, such as Professor Ali Mazrui.

The truth is that from 1951 until Nkrumah was overthrown by the American CIA, Nkrumah and the CPP won every election with overwhelming majorities. Even when the British jailed Nkrumah for three years, for publishing a so-called seditious article in the Cape Coast Daily Mail, the CPP won an overwhelming majority of the votes. Nkrumah received the largest individual poll ever recorded in the history of Ghana: 22,780 votes out of a possible 23,122. This is because Nkrumah and the CPP chose the people first, while the opposition chose themselves first.

The declaration of a one-party state by Nkrumah was not for selfish reasons, as imperialist propaganda states. According to Nkrumah, the multi-party system is divisive, and a newly independent state needs the energy and enthusiasm of all the people to move forward. In a speech to the Indian Council on World Affairs, 26 December 1958, Nkrumah said 'We, in Africa, will evolve forms of government, rather different from the traditional Western pattern, but no less democratic in their protection of the individual and his inalienable rights'. In his book, Africa Must Unite, Nkrumah wrote: 'If the will of the people is democratically expressed in an overwhelming majority for the governing party, and thereby creates a weakening of the accepted two party system, the government is obliged to respect the will of the people so expressed. We have no right to divide our mandate in defiance of the popular will of the people.'

In a speech to the National Assembly on 1 February 1966, 23 days before he was overthrown, Nkrumah warned with great alarm, 'A one-party system of government is an effective and safe instrument only when it operates in a socialist society.'

In Class Struggle in Africa, Nkrumah wrote, 'Every form of political power, whether parliamentary, multi-party, one-party, or an open military dictatorship, reflects the interest of a certain class or classes in society. In a socialist state, the government represents the workers and peasants. In a capitalist state, the government represents the exploitative class. The state then, is the expression of the domination of one class over other classes'.

Yet through subversion, lies, corruption, the IMF, World Bank, and CIA pressures, the enemies of African progress and political unification have influenced most African politicians and intellectuals by prescribing the multi-party system as the only form of political governance. Even though the effects of multi-party system have been disastrous everywhere in the developing world, any leader with a vision of an alternative form of governance, would be overthrown by the CIA. And that is what happened to Nkrumah.

Presently it is happening to Presidents Chavez in Venezuela, and Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Proper scrutiny of world political history, will lead one to discover that in the 20th century, great political strides were achieved by one-party socialist systems.

The People's Republic of China also used a one-party socialist-system to build their country from a peasant economy, to a great regional super power. It is now challenging the world's only super power in all aspects of science, technology, and business - this came about in less than 60 years.

Vietnam also used a one-party socialist system to militarily defeat both French colonialism and USA neo-colonialism in the 20th century. Cuba used a one-party socialist system to build their nation despite the embargo imposed by USA and her allies.

Kwame Nkrumah used a one-party socialist system to lead the people of Ghana in nation building. In only nine years, Nkrumah and the CPP built the most modern road network in Ghana, including the Accra-Tema Motorway. Since his overthrow, other governments have not added a single kilometre. The Akosombo hydroelectric project was also constructed under Nkrumah and the CPP government. Dr. K.A. Busia, then leader of the opposition, described the hydroelectric project as a 'communist inspired prestige undertaking'. But this dam created the Volta Lake and it is the primary source of Ghana 's electricity forty years later. Other infrastructure built under Nkrumah and the CPP provided pipe-born water, housing, schools and hospitals.

In education, Nkrumah and the CPP achieved more in nine years, than the British did in 100 years of colonial rule; and more than all the successive governments after Nkrumah and CPP. There was free and compulsory education. Free education was provided from primary to university level. Textbooks were supplied free to all pupils in primary, middle, and secondary schools. Night schools for adults, males and females, were created as part of a mass literacy campaign. The state farm corporation developed a 20 square mile rubber plantation. Soon after Nkrumah's overthrow, this valuable plantation was given to the Firestone Rubber Company of the USA . Even the prison system was improved under Nkrumah and the CPP government. Nkrumah and the CPP built the most humane prison in Ghana, Nsawam Prison, the only prison in Ghana that had recreational facilities, a church, a mosque, and a library. Today, it is overcrowded and antiquated, as all successive governments after Nkrumah have turned a blind eye to the prison situation in the country. In short, Kwame Nkrumah laid the foundations for Ghana's development in every sector of the country.

The time has come for African intellectuals, and politicians, to stop analyzing Nkrumah through the eyes of the neo-colonialists. They must assess him on his political and developmental programmes, and on his contributions to the political and economic advancement of Africa. Professor Ali Mazrui, a leading neo-colonial intellectuals, still analyzes Nkrumah through CIA propaganda. Ali Mazuri said that 'Kwame Nkrumah was one of Africa's greatest sons, but he was not one of Ghana's greatest servants'. On the contrary Kwame Nkrumah was so busy serving Ghana, he did not so much as get time to build a one-bedroom house for himself.

On the one-party system, Ali Mazrui said, 'Nkrumah's policy of trying to create one Ghana by abolishing separate parties was usurpation'. However the introduction of one-party state in Ghana was an act of Parliament. It was not a decision implemented by Nkrumah alone.

One imperialist strategy in African politics is to brainwash us into believing that unless our constitution is based on an imitation of the Western Parliamentary system, we can't engage in politics and democracy. This notion must be overturned. Our intellectuals must rid themselves of this colonial mentality. Kwame Nkrumah devoted his life's energy to Africa's political freedom and unification. His achievements are there for all to see. Militants the world over admire how he set colonialism ablaze in Africa. Nkrumah has shown us the way, and we must walk it with confidence.

Colonial powers never educate their victims (those they called subjects) in how to win freedom. But Kwame Nkrumah taught us how to do it. 'Free market', 'privatisation', 'NEPAD', 'Structural Adjustment Programme', 'Highly Indebted Poor Country', 'globalisation' are all imperialist attempts to deceive Africans to participate in our own exploitation. In Nkrumah's words: 'There are only two ways of development open to an independent African state. Either it must remain under imperialist domination via capitalism and neo-colonialism, or it must pursue a socialist path by adopting the principles of scientific socialism.'

The choice is for us. Either we chose the path of the freedom fighters, or we follow the CIA gospel preached by the neo-colonialists.

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

Uganda has just launched a government project to fight poverty. The project is locally referred to as "Bonna Bagaggawale" which literally means "let's all get rich." And to boost this rural financial scheme, government has also introduced a software system known as Loan Performer to ease the rural accounting system.

Kenya's mobile phone users last week breathed a sigh of relief following a ceiling put on interconnection charges between the duopolistic mobile operators, Safaricom and Celtel. The Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK),the country's communication industry regulator, capped the charges at Kshs 30 (43 US Cents) per minute.

There was outrage among European oil exploration companies interested in Kenya when it emerged last week that the state-owned National Oil Corporation of China — CNOOC — has quietly put out notices offering to farm out to third parties some of the oil exploration blocks granted to it by President Mwai Kibaki in April last year.

Two former top executives of the state-owned Kenya Reinsurance Corporation (Kenya Re) who were sacked recently to allow investigations into allegations of financial irregularities in the company may be forced to refund Ksh8.5 million ($121,400) to the corporation.

Thirteen years ago a secondary school in Soweto, South Africa's most populous black urban residential area, was little different from the majority of the country's schools: dilapidated, under staffed and crime ridden, with the vast majority of its students struggling to pass their exams.

An appeals court in Cairo has overturned a prison sentence for an Egyptian journalist convicted of defaming President Hosni Mubarak. Ibrahim Eissa, the editor of the weekly newspaper al-Dustour, had been sentenced to one year in prison for criticizing Mr. Mubarak. The appeals court overturned the jail term but substituted a fine of almost four thousand dollars.

There have been a large number of studies dating back to the late eighties that have looked at the correlation between male circumcision – or lack thereof – and the risk of contracting HIV. The evidence from these studies shows a relatively high reduction in the risk of infection as a result of circumcision. As is the norm, these studies have to different degrees accounted for possible confounding variables, but do not pretend to delve into the broader socio-cultural issues that attend the problem. The studies have been predominantly medical in nature, and there is still a dearth of sociological research on the subject.

In an insightful article published in the Cape Times, Professor Jonny Myers alludes to the element of cultural hegemony underlying the almost casual way in which male circumcision is being mooted. He points to the ease with which groups who have traditionally circumcised males advocate for its cooptation into the AIDS fighting arsenal. Some of the medical evidence on the benefits of circumcision has been refuted, or at least reasonably challenged over in the last few years. Among these was reduced risk of penile cancer, urinary tract infections, sexually transmitted infections, and better hygiene. Today, medical reasons for routine male circumcision are not widely accepted.

To be clear, any intervention that helps the fight against the spread of AIDS merits utmost consideration. However, the more difficult to implement the intervention, the greater the efficacy standard required for it to pass muster.

One still gets the sense of a widely held misconception that those communities that do not practise male circumcision simply ‘neglect’ to do so. In fact, one could argue that not practising male circumcision is characterised by the same level of conviction as practising it. Some communities that do not circumcise males have other rites of passage that serve the same purpose. Introducing male circumcision in populations that do not practise it will require a “de-culturization” of the procedure.

A major obstacle that has characterised the fight against AIDS has been how to change deeply entrenched behaviour. How much more difficult will this be if the behaviour in deeply entrenched in cultural practises. In Western Kenya, for example, where certain communities practise ‘wife inheritance’ it has taken a serious re-orientation of cultural beliefs to make any headway. Furthermore, this has only been successful because sexual relations as a key factor in the spread of the disease are but a peripheral and dispensable aspect of the practise.

Another key consideration is how the underlying assumption that circumcision provides a measure of protection can lead to increased risky sexual behaviour. It is debatable whether the fight against the pandemic has achieved the levels of knowledge and attitudes requisite to reasonable counter this. The most successful communication campaigns have sought to minimize this risk by combining messages, for example, condom-use with abstinence and faithfulness.

Finally, this unfolding debate provides yet another unwelcome detraction from the fact that there still remains a dire need to expand basic health services to the majority who do not have it. This is arguably the biggest factor in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Yet it seems like we are about to ask for these over-stretched and ill-equipped services to add a surgical procedure to their list!

Further Reading:

Circumcision is no silver bullet in Aids fight
(subscription)

Does Cicumcision reduce HIV risks?
http://www.fhi.org/en/RH/Pubs/Network/v20_4/NWvol20-4malecurcumsion.htm

Male circumcision: a role in HIV prevention?
http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/HIV/vincenzi/

AIDS: Male Circumcision ‘is the key’
http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/Aids_Focus/0,,2-7-659_2044924,00.html

Coming out of the closet in Nigerian society, is not for the faint-hearted; it's not even for the publicity-seeking. But in October 2004, Bisi Alimi - in a first - calmly revealed his homosexuality on live television. He did so on New Dawn, a popular talk show on the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), in an atmosphere of transparent hostility.

The Civil Union Act, which legalised same-sex marriages, 'marked the end of the Zulu nation and its way of life'. This was the feeling at the opening of a two-day conference of the heads of Zulu warriors and maidens, organised by Local Government and Traditional Affairs MEC Mike Mabuyakhulu, in Durban this month.

The implementation of the Darfur Peace Agreement is heavily behind schedule. According the UN Secretary-General’s December 2006 report on Darfur, the implementation of the security protocol is behind schedule and the power and wealth-sharing commitments remain largely unaddressed. This is according to the latest briefing by Waging Peace.

The number of people helped by UNHCR to return to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from Tanzania has hit the 25,000 mark. The UNHCR-assisted return programme for Congolese refugees in Tanzania began in October 2005, and as UNHCR reports, the challenges of sustainable reintegration are becoming greater as more and more people opt to return home.

A copy of the landmark ruling made by the Botswana High Court in the case of the Kalahari Bushmen against the Botswana government is now available online, Survival International reports. The court ruled that the Botswana government’s eviction of the Bushmen was ‘unlawful and unconstitutional’, and that they have the right to live on their ancestral land inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

Nearly two months since U.N. troops began launching heavy attacks that they say are aimed against gang members in poor neighbourhoods of Port-au-Prince, roadblocks and barbed wire remain in place and the atmosphere is grim.

An open letter demanding "an immediate halt to the deforestation of the Amazon jungle" has been released by Brazilian television stars taking part in the Globo Network series " Amazonia, de Galvez a Chico Mendes" (Amazonia, from Galvez to Chico Mendes).

Kenya's cotton industry, once one of the country's main foreign exchange earners, declined substantially following liberalization of the sector in 1991. However, efforts are now being made to address problems bedeviling the cotton sector, including a government-led campaign under the auspices of 'Kenya Vision 2030'.

South Africa's environment minister on Wednesday proposed contraception and some culling -- but no mass slaughter -- as part of a package of measures to slow rampant elephant population growth.