There is presently a hearty debate in Britain on the timetable for a referendum on Scottish independence or, more correctly, the restoration of Scottish independence. Prime Minister David Cameron prefers an early vote, presumably in the next 18 months, with two ‘straightforward’ questions on whether the Scots want independence or wish to continue to be part of Britain as it has been in the past 300 years. Cameron also wishes that the outcome of the referendum is ‘legally binding’, quite an unprecedented position to take as referendums in Britain in the past have had an ‘advisory’ or ‘consultative’ status. Finally, he wants the minimum age of 18 for participants. In contrast, Alex Salmond, the leader of the pro-independence Scottish Nationalist Party and Scotland’s first minister, insists that, thanks to SNP’s majority victory in last May’s elections to the Edinburgh Holyrood assembly, his party has the ‘mandate for the Scottish parliament to organise the referendum [on its own]… It must be a referendum built in Scotland and decided by Scottish people…’ Salmond adds that he will schedule the poll in the autumn of 2014 and besides the ‘yes’/‘no’ choices favoured by Cameron, he wouldn’t rule out a third, more nuanced proto-independence choice for voters (the so-called dev-max or ‘devolution-maximum’) which calls for enhanced financial powers for Scotland, derived from existing devolved provisions – that is, just short of total sovereignty as these new powers won’t affect defence and foreign affairs! For poll participation, Salmond prefers an age limit of 16 rather than Cameron’s 18.
Quite clearly, the differences between both leaders on this important subject are merely procedural and not on the substantive issue of the rights of Scots, as a people, to decide their future. Despite the oft-quoted, if irreverent lines from Robert Burns, the Scottish national poet, alluding to the deteriorating Scottish economic situation at the time (caused by the so-called Darién scheme) which contributed to its parliamentarians voting for union with England, formally inaugurated in 1707 (‘We are bought and sold for English gold. Such a parcel of rogues in a nation’), Scotland has not been ‘worse off’ in the United Kingdom enterprise. On the contrary, Scots and their country were enriched exponentially by this union. Some scholars have dubbed the vast lands of the world that Britain conquered during its 350 years march across the globe the ‘Scottish empire’, rather than ‘British empire’, to underscore this Scottish unprecedented triumph.
And they are not so far off the mark in that characterisation! Scottish financiers and merchants, enslavers, enslaved-plantation owners, tobacco, sugar and cotton growers and the like (in the Americas), along with their English counterparts, were already immersed in reaping the gargantuan fortune wreaked from the hegemonic control of African enslavement they now shared with England. This was occasioned by the two states’ previous century’s dramatic displacement of the central role played hitherto in this holocaust by Portugal and Spain. Huge profits from African enslavement were ploughed back into Scottish sociocultural and financial institutions and cities to power the gestating industrial revolution (especially in the Glasgow conurbation) and the Scottish age of enlightenment, that very much revered heritage in the country’s national narrative. Such was the staggering outcome of this Scottish (and English) transformation that Christopher Hill, the distinguished specialist on this epoch of British history, has observed that, prior to the mid-17th century, these states were still ‘cultural and scientific backwater’ but soon, into the following century, they had become ‘centre of world science’.
POUNCING ON OPPORTUNITIES
Buoyed by these phenomenal strides in societal fortunes and outlook, the one million Scots, a sixth of the population of the new merger-state relation, pounced on the opportunities thrown up by union with England with much aplomb: Scottish military forces with their specialised fighting units, who in the past fought for English global expansionism, henceforth had a greater stake to defend and conquer ever new seas and lands in continent after continent for the union; Scottish emigration, especially to north America, soared; Scottish conquest administrators prominently policed the union’s empire – from the east’s Asian frontiers through Africa to the west’s outstretches of the Americas and, lastly, its leading intellectuals (philosophers, scientists, political-economists, writers) simultaneously valorised the thrust and goals of union and conquest. Not a few of the latter would join counterparts in England and elsewhere to particularly offer the ‘requisite’ cultural/scientific/literary rationalisation for African enslavement/holocaust and map out the presumed hermeneutical canvass of the cardinal codifiers of European world racism as an ideology.
When pro-independence ‘colonists’ in north America in the later part of the 18th century revolted against the union crown, significant sectors of Scottish émigrés (including their Ulster-Scot cousins) and institutions strongly supported freedom for the United States – a position that would obviously have appeared paradoxical for obvious reasons. One-third of delegates who signed the US independence document were of Scottish descent and 75 per cent of all US presidents since the founding of the republic are of Scottish ancestry.
STATE IS TRANSIENT; PEOPLE ENDURE
Given the trajectory of what many would feel is an illustrious history sketched above, it could appear that Scots are perhaps the most unlikely people to wish to break from Britain. Interestingly, most opinion polls conducted in Scotland show that majority of Scots do not currently want a restoration of their country’s independence. Ironically, a most recent of these polls shows that more English and Welsh respondents (from two of the four constituent nations in the union) than the Scots themselves want the Scots to ‘go’! So, a principal reason that Alex Salmond is working towards a ‘delayed’ referendum date (last quarter of 2014) is to have more time to campaign to garner a majority vote outcome from across a Scottish population still sceptical of the restoration-of-independence for their country. Salmond wants to appeal to younger Scots (hence his intention to lower the minimum deciding voting age to 16), where disposition for independence is much greater than the older population. 2014 also presents Salmond with three ‘opportunity chords’ to play for in the independence drive: commemorating the 700th anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn in which the Scots defeated England, Scottish hosting of the Commonwealth games, and Scottish hosting of the Ryder Cup (golf).
Prime Minister Cameron is very much aware of the Scottish success story in the UK-union and also that a majority of Scots would vote for continuing stay in the union if a referendum on the subject were held presently. The latter particularly explains Cameron’s desire for an early poll. Yet despite being first minister of the union who undoubtedly wishes to preserve the union, Cameron accepts the rights of Scots to decide freely on this subject. It is their right. But this right is not only restricted to the Scots or to the English or to the Welsh or to only peoples in Europe… It is, in fact, a universal right that every people enjoy. Every people.
This right to self-determination for every people is inalienable and is guaranteed by the United Nations. No people is exempt from exercising this right. As everyone expects, Cameron has not come out demonising Scots for ‘daring’ to wish to leave the union; no, Cameron wouldn’t do this because he respects the rights of Scots to exercise their right to self-determination. As everyone expects, surely, Cameron has not come out with the dreadful thoughts of wishing any harm to Scots for wanting to exercise their inalienable rights to self-determination as one James Harold Wilson, who once lived and worked from the same London address that Cameron inhabits today, declared when the Igbo of south-west-central Africa exercised this right between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970.
The Igbo had exercised their right to independence from the Nigeria-union (created by UK-union in 1914!) when this Nigeria-union unleashed the genocide against them with the active participation of key constituent nations (in the union) such as the Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba and Kanuri. 3.1 million Igbo or a quarter of their population were murdered. UK-union supported the genocide politically, diplomatically and militarily – London’s calculated ‘punishment’ for the Igbo-lead role (in the 1940s-1960) to terminate the UK-union-occupation of its Nigeria-union lucre. As the slaughtering of the Igbo intensified especially in those catastrophic months of 1968/1969, James Harold Wilson was totally unfazed when he informed Clyde Ferguson (United States State Department special coordinator for relief to Biafra) that he, James Harold Wilson, ‘would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took’ the Nigeria-union to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide. Such is the grotesquely expressed diminution of African life made by a supposedly leading politician of the world of the 1960s – barely 20 years after the deplorable perpetration of the Jewish genocide.
As the final tally of the murder of the Igbo demonstrates, James Harold Wilson probably had the perverted satisfaction of having his Nigeria-union genocidists perform far in excess of his grim target. Unlike the Igbo, the Scots, pointedly, never faced any pogrom or genocide by the UK-union or organised by any of the other constituent nations of the union (English, Welsh, Irish) during these past 300 years. Finally, as everyone expects, unfailingly, Cameron has not dabbled into some nonsense of the assumed ‘inviolability’ or ‘indivisibility’ of the UK-union in respect to the rights of Scots to self-determination, two oft-repeated vulgarities with reference to the Nigeria-union that the same James Harold Wilson trumpeted with much relish as the Nigeria-union genocidists slaughtered and slaughtered the Igbo during those 44 months of certain death.
What the debate on the 5 million Scots and Scotland has clearly demonstrated is that the people, the nation, is deemed superior to the state. This is the case of any people in the world vis-à-vis the state. This position is correct for all peoples and nations irrespective of race, continent, region, religion/belief system, etc. The people, the nation is enduring; the state is transient. The state is therefore not some ‘gift’ from someone else; definitely not from any conquerors, nor even from gods, but relationships painstakingly formulated and constructed by a discernible group of human beings that inhabit an ascertainable geo-historical territorial expanse on Earth to pursue worldviews and interests envisioned and formulated by these same human beings.
In Africa, where the contemporary state was created and imposed by the European conquest over decades/centuries as instruments to expropriate and despoil Africa in perpetuity, the goal of organically articulated African-created and owned states to radically transform depressing African fortunes is imperative. In the aggressively genocidist-states such as the Nigeria-union, the Sudan-union and Democratic Republic of the Congo-union, this task is even more pressing.
EVEN 1000 STATES…
The Igbo, with a population of 50 million and whose homeland has been under occupation by the Nigeria-union since 13 January 1970, are arguably the world’s most brutally targeted and most viciously murdered of peoples presently. Nigeria is now firmly the obligatory haematophagous monster in Africa whose raison d’être appears to be to murder the Igbo most routinely and ritualistically. Since losing 3.1 million during the genocide, tens of thousands of Igbo have been murdered by this monster during the course of the following years, signposted here by the eerie columns that chart the contours of the killing fields: 1980 … 1982 … 1985 … 1991 … 1993 … 1994 … 1999 … 2000 … 2001 … 2002 … 2004 … 2005 … 2006 … 2007 … 2008 … 2009 … 2010 … 2011 … 2012.
According to the recently published research (December 2011) by the International Society for Civil Liberties & the Rule Of Law, a human rights organisation based in Onicha, 90 per cent of the 54,000 people murdered in Nigeria-union by the state/quasi-state operatives and agents since 1999 are Igbo. Since last Christmas Day, the Boko Haram islamist insurgent group spearheads these murders. At least 90 per cent of people murdered by the Boko Haram across swathes of lands in north/northcentral Nigeria in the past 23 days are Igbo.
The Boko Haram now issues its threats to murder Igbo people almost habitually, on a daily basis, and, true to its words, executes its mission most ruthlessly, most remorselessly. After each of its outrages, Boko Haram acknowledges responsibility and does this most dispassionately… The regime in Abuja appears cruelly powerless to protect Igbo people emplaced within the jurisdiction of the supposedly sovereign state it controls with the well-known consequences in international law that this shocking relegation of responsibility entails. Regime-head Goodluck Jonathan says as much in a recent astonishing radio and television broadcast to his country and the world: ‘Boko Haram is everywhere in the executive arm of [my] government, in the legislative arm of [my] government and even in the judiciary. Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security and in the judiciary. Some continue to dip their hands and eat with you and you won’t even know the person who will point a gun at you or plant a bomb behind your house’.
The Nigeria-union has, since 1945, gained considerable notoriety for consistently evolving new levers and institutions and processes within itself to murder the Igbo. Following from Jonathan’s proclamation, it is conceivable that right there closeted in his regime, there are operatives deeply complicit in the ongoing murder of the Igbo. No doubt, Jonathan cannot but elaborate further on this broadcast to a restless, eagerly awaiting world. Not since 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 (Phase-I and Phase-II of the Igbo genocide) has Igbo life in the Nigeria-union Malebogle acquired such a gripping existential emergency…
The right of Africans to form their own state, away from the extant, murderous European-created state, is the corpus of my ‘The Biafra War, Nigeria and the Aftermath’, the second of the two books on the Igbo genocide I published in 1990. In the concluding pages of this book I note the following:
‘Either in peace, or war, the existence of the European post-colonial state is inimical to the interests of African peoples. It is a state that cannot provide the fundamental needs of Africans … The African humanity is presently gripped in a grave crisis for survival. It is now time that it abandoned the contrived post-colonial state in order to survive … African nations, [namely] Igbo, Wolof, Yoruba, Asante, Baganda, Bakongo, Bambara, etc., etc … remain the basis for the regeneration of Africa’s development … [and] the sites of the continent’s intellectual and other cultural creativity … What is being stressed here is that African peoples, themselves, must decide on the … issue of sovereignty … even if the outcome were to lead to 1000 states … For the future survival of the African humanity, let no more Africans have to die for the defence of, or for upholding the territorial frontier of any post-colonial state. No precious life should be wasted for its preservation.’
Twenty-two years on, these words remain crucially pivotal in focusing our minds on the very survival of the Igbo and all other African peoples. The Igbo and all others who have lived through the terror of the post-(European)conquest state must abandon it at once to survive and advance towards the construction of higher levels of civilisation. They have no other choice. Each and every constituent African people or nation can build this civilisation outside the existing genocide state of enthralled and degenerative union. Let Africa’s constituent peoples or nations unleash a dazzling contest of creativity and progress, a continuing mutual bombardment and sharing of ideas and streams of possibilities, akin to what the world has seen in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere in the past 40 years – not mass murdering … mass murdering … mass murdering … pillaging … pillaging … pillaging … nihilism … nihilism … nihilism … Most surely, now is the time to embark on this beginning.
Read more on Rights for Scots, rights for Igbos By Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe…
There are times when something outrageous happens, such as the illegal arrest of 150-200 Congolese in Yeoville (Johannesburg january 21-22), that persons of conscience are not sure that they got the information correctly. In the land that invented apartheid, could it be that something more pernicious than apartheid is being born? This is being written with many questions in mind, but also fully conscious that, given the whole history of Africa, over the past 500 years, knowing what happened during that history requires something that challenges one’s conscience to rise to the level of the outrages that have been inflicted collectively, systematically, with greater and greater impunity to humanity on the continent of its birth. Enough is enough says this conscience.
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We are heading for a new load of advice from the self-appointed “World Economic Forum”, still having fresh in mind their utter inability to come to grips with the September 2008 manifestation of the world economic crisis when they met three years ago. So, what are they going to talk about now?
Read more on Davos: The 1% World by Johan Galtung…
Two very significant and interconnected events happened this week in Liberia – President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was inaugurated for a second term with a subdued opposition attending the ceremonies, and former Liberian President Charles Taylor was implicated in a Boston Globe article for serving as a CIA informant beginning in the early 1980s and spanning many decades.
The church was not as overfilled as it used to be for midnight mass on Christmas eve. But the ritual unfolded as it has done for centuries, around John 3:16 “little bible”, “For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that anyone who believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”. And the priest spoke about two parallel Christmases, one spiritual, of the bible, and one material with gifts, food, and licores.
Read more on Who Was Jesus? By Prof Johan Galtung…
When I was asked by Dr. Keithley Woolward to address the question of Fanon’s contemporary relevance, I was reminded of a blurb on the back of my recent book Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo which reads, ‘This is not another meditation on Fanon’s continued relevance. Instead, it is an inquiry into how Fanon, the revolutionary, might think and act in the face of contemporary social crisis.’ My comments today should be considered in that spirit. ‘Relevance’ — from a Latin word ‘relevare’, to lift, from ‘lavare’, to raise, levitate — to levitate a living Fanon who died in the USA nearly 50 years ago this coming Tuesday in cognizance of his own injunction articulated in the opening sentence from his essay ‘On national culture’: ‘Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it’ (1968 206). The challenge was laid down at the opening of this year of Fanon’s 50th (as well as the 50th anniversary of his ‘The Wretched of the Earth’) which began with revolution — or at least a series of revolts and resistance across the region, known as the Arab Spring.
Fanon begins ‘The Wretched’, as you know, writing of decolonisation as a program of complete disorder, an overturning of order — often against the odds — willed collectively from the bottom up. Without time or space for a transition, there is an absolute replacement of one ‘species’ by another (1968: 35). In a period of radical change such absolutes appear quite normal, when, in spite of everything thrown against it, ideas jump across frontiers and people begin again ‘to make history’ (1968: 69-71). In short, once the mind of the oppressed experiences freedom in and through collective actions, its reason becomes a force of revolution. As the Egyptians said of 25 January: ‘When we stopped being afraid we knew we would win. We will not again allow ourselves to be scared of a government. This is the revolution in our country, the revolution in our minds.’ What started with Tunisia and then Tahrir Square has become a new global revolt, spreading to Spain and the Indignados (indignants) movement, to Athens and the massive and continuous demonstrations against vicious structural adjustment, to the urban revolt in England, to the massive student mobilisation to end education for profit in Chile, to the ‘occupy’ movement of the 99 percent.
And yet, as the revolts inevitably face new repression, elite compromises and political manoeuvrings, Fanonian questions — echoed across the postcolonial world — become more and more timely. (How can the revolution hold onto its epistemological moment, the rationality of revolt?) Surely the question is not whether Fanon is relevant, but why is Fanon relevant now?
CONTEXTS AND GEOGRAPHIES
In the penultimate chapter of ‘Frantz Fanon: A Portrait’, Alice Cherki notes that Blida Psychiatric Hospital in Algiers still bears his name, that Fanon has a boulevard and a high school for girls named after him, though young people have no idea who he is. After independence in Algeria, Fanon was quite quickly marginalised. A new constitution identified the nation with Islam and that women were actively dissuaded from playing any part in public life did not jibe with Fanon’s vision of politics.
Fanon was dead before Algeria gained its independence, yet ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ chapter of ‘The Wretched’ (based on his reflections on his West African experiences as well as his concerns about the Algerian revolution) is a fairly accurate portrayal of what Algeria became with oil money playing an enormously important role in pacifying the population and paying for a bloated and ubiquitous security force.
To speak about relevance, then, is also to speak about historic context. Fanon was recruited into the FLN during the battle of Algiers. Although a committed anti-colonialist he had not moved to Algeria to join a revolution but to take up the job as director of psychiatry at Blida-Joinville Hospital. It was a job he wanted and he put enormous energy into fighting to reform how psychiatry was practiced in the hospital. He created space — both practical and intellectual (reading groups) for himself and his colleagues — to institute a kind of Tosquellean [1] inspired institutional sociotherapy to humanise the asylum where the patient would become ‘a subject in his or her liberation’ and the doctor an ‘equal partner in the fight for freedom’ (Cherki 36). In a sense, that would become Fanon’s political philosophy. The Algerian war of national liberation — declared a year after he arrived — politicised him and radicalised him, as he began to see and treat its effects in the hospital and in his work. He was asked by the FLN to use his skills as a therapist to treat those who had been tortured. He began to clandestinely treat the tortured while treating the torturer as part of his hospital work. Indeed his comments in ‘L’An cinq de la revolution Algérienne’ (‘Year Five of the Algerian revolution’ published as ‘A Dying Colonialism’ in English) bear this experience out not only on his withering critique of the medical profession involved in torture but also in his desire to find the human being behind the coloniser, believing that liberation would put an end to the colonised and the coloniser (1967c, 24) and his condemnation (though understanding) of those who have thrown themselves into revolutionary action with ‘physiological brutality that centuries of oppression give rise to and feed’ (1967c, 25). At Blida the situation became untenable and he simply couldn’t continue. As he wrote in his letter of resignation, how could he treat mental illness in a society that drives people to a desperate solution? Such a society, he added, needs to be replaced (1967b, 53). With the authorities closing in on the hospital, which was suspected as a hotbed of support for the FLN, he resigned before he was picked up and began to work full time for the revolution.
This was part of Fanon’s context.
At the same time it was not surprising that, when the opportunity arose, Fanon would join a revolutionary movement, or as Glissant put it (1999 25), to act on his ideas. [2] And yet, at the same time it was not only acting on ideas but that for Fanon ideas were always influenced by practice and also transformative. One can see in ‘Black Skin White Masks’ that he was in a sense already a revolutionary, and given the chance he would ‘take part in a revolution’, as Jean Ayme put it (quoted in Cherki 2006:94). But at the time Fanon was a revolutionary who was not deeply political. Fanon had been introduced to Ayme, a psychiatrist, anti-colonist activist and Trotskyist, in September 1956 when he had given his paper at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists. And in Ayme’s Paris apartment, in early 1957 — where he stayed before leaving to join the FLN in Tunis — he spent his time reading about revolutionary politics.
He had been recruited into the FLN by Ramdane Abane, the Kabylian leader of the FLN who became Fanon’s mentor. Abane, who has an airport named after him in Kabylia, had been a key figure in the 1956 FLN conference Soummam which had criticised the militarisation of the revolution, insisting on a collective political control, and put forward a vision of a future Algeria that remained Fanon’s. They both believed in the ‘revolutionary dismantling of the colonial state’ (Cherki 105). The principle adopted as the Soummam platform was a vision of the future Algeria as a secular democratic society with the ‘primacy of citizenship over identities (Arab, Amazigh, Muslim, [Jewish] Christian, European, etc.)’ (Abane 2011): ‘in the new society that is being built,’ Fanon wrote in italics in Year 5, ‘there are only Algerians. From the outset, therefore, every individual living in Algeria is an Algerian … We want an Algeria open to all, in which every kind of genius can grow’ (Fanon, 1967c 152, 32).
Abane was liquidated by the FLN at the turn of 1958. Fanon died before Algeria gained its independence in 1962 and was quickly marginalized, then dismissed as irrelevant and out of touch for not understanding the power of Islam (a charge that has been repeated for 50 years). In France, the story was similar. ‘Les damnés de la terre’ was criticised as romantic and Fanon dismissed as an interloper to the Algerian revolution. The book only sold a few thousand copies.
Translated into English in 1963 by an African-American poet, Constance Farrington, ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ was published in 1965 in the United States, going through innumerable printings and becoming a best seller in the revolutionary year of 1968 when it was subtitled ‘a handbook for the Black revolution’.
As Kathleen Cleaver puts it in ‘The Black Panther Party Reconsidered’, ‘The Wretched of the Earth became essential reading for Black revolutionaries in America and profoundly influenced their thinking. Fanon’s analysis seemed to explain and to justify the spontaneous violence ravaging across the country, and linked the incipient insurrections to the rise of a revolutionary movement’ (1998: 214). The colonial world that Fanon wrote about ‘bore a striking resemblance,’ she added, ‘to the world that American blacks lived’ (1998: 215). Of course the influence had been mutual since the descriptions of Black American life by writers such as Richard Wright played an important role in the development of Fanon’s ‘Black Skin White Masks’. For Cleaver, what was especially relevant to the Black Panthers ‘was Fanon’s analysis of colonialism and the necessity of violence’ (1998 216). And associating Algeria with Fanon, some Panthers fled to Algeria in the late 1960s. Thus it was through the Panthers that Fanon returned momentarily to Algeria, but noticeably shorn of his internal critique of the liberation movements and post-independence and thereby reduced to just another anti-colonial figure. Yet just as Eldridge Cleaver was opening the First Pan African Cultural Festival in 1969, Fanon had made his way across the Limpopo into the heart of settler colonial Africa — apartheid South Africa. As well as Black Power, Black theology writers provided an importantly link between Fanon and Biko and Fanon became essential for the development of Black Consciousness in South Africa; a movement that was explicitly a praxis oriented philosophy in outlook which became a crucial turning point in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle.
My recent work on Fanonian Practices in South Africa can be understood in terms of thinking about Fanon’s relevance. It begins with Biko’s engagement with Fanon. Biko, who has a hospital named after him in Pretoria, was murdered in 1977 and argued in a Fanonian vein in the early 1970s that it was possible to create a ‘capitalist black society, black middle class,’ in South Africa, and ‘succeed in putting across to the world a pretty convincing, integrated picture, with still 70 percent of the population being underdogs.’ You see, hospitals, airports, roads and so on, can be renamed after revolutionaries, yet it turns out that not much changes for the bulk of the people. Now nearly 40 years after Biko’s statement, Fanon’s ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ — an essay written from within the Algerian revolution — which provides a forecast for the post-independent nation, a keen analysis of the dreadful cost of its failure, is an uncanny portrait of post-apartheid South Africa.
So the second moment of Fanonian practice is a critique of contemporary postcolonial reality. In other words, the lasting value of employing Fanon’s critical insights and method. The source is not only ‘The Wretched’ where he calls the national bourgeoisie ‘unabashedly … antinational,’ opting, he adds, for an ‘abhorrent path of a conventional bourgeoisie, a bourgeois that is dismally, inanely and cynically bourgeois,’ but also ‘Black Skin White Masks’, which concludes with a critique of bourgeois life as sterile and suffocating. In the Antilles there have been struggles for freedom, he argues, but too often they have been conducted in terms and values given by the white master and creating profoundly ambivalent situations and neurotic symptoms described in ‘Black Skin’.
Fanon left the Antilles to study in France, but after his World War Two experiences he already no longer believed in the French mission and profoundly disapproved of Césaire’s support for assimilation. Just recently I was reading Richard Wright’s collection, ‘White Man Listen’, published in 1957, specifically an essay ‘The psychological reactions of oppressed people’ as it articulates with ‘Black Skin White Masks’, specifically Fanon and Wright’s critique of Mannoni. [3] The book is interestingly dedicated to Eric Williams and to ‘the Westernised and tragic elite of Asia, Africa and the West Indies — men who are distrusted, misunderstood, maligned by left and right.’ Fanon wrote about these elites in ‘Black Skin’ and in ‘The Wretched’. Indeed they remain crucial to the post-independence situation, but in a review of the book in El Moudjahid in 1959 he was critical of Wright’s book because of its singular focus on the tragedy of these elites while real life and death struggles were taking place across the continent (see Cherki 159).
THE REALITY OF THE NATION
The damnation of the world’s majority inscribed in the Manichean geographies so well described by Fanon in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ does not end with the negotiated settlement and the withdrawal of formal colonial rule. The violence that orders colonialism, the violence that follows the colonised home and enters every pore of their body, is reconfigured in the contemporary world of razor wire transit camps and detention zones, in rural pauperisation and in the shanty towns and shack settlements. It is the silent scream of much of the world’s population, who appear most of the time without solidarity, without agency, without speech. Beyond the gated citadels, beyond the zones of tourism, in the zone of often bare existence, there seems no way out. And yet, at a moment like ours in 2011, there is all of a sudden made absolutely clear the rationality of rebellion. So, the shocking relevance of a Fanonian political will.
Yet more than a simple us-and-them, the ‘we’ for Fanon was always a creative ‘we,’ a ‘we’ of political action and praxis, thinking and reasoning. Indeed this was not only his critique of colonialism but also of the neo-colonial afterlife. ‘Colonialism is not a thinking machine,’ Fanon argues, but all too often its aftermath, the new nation, is mired in the same mindlessness, indeed a stupidity created by the national bourgeoisie’s will to power often mediated by crude force against the very people who made liberation possible. In contrast, Fanon’s ‘we,’ for example, is wonderfully articulated in Walcott’s poem, ‘the Schooner Flight’: ‘Either I’m nobody or I’m a nation.’ It is the nobodies, the damned, the impoverished and landless who for Fanon become the source, the basis, the truth of the ‘reality of the nation’ (the first title of ‘A Dying Colonialism’). As anti-eviction activists in South Africa say, ‘we are poor but not poor in mind’ and collectively ‘we think our own struggles.’
The articulation of these movements with Fanon, is the third element of Fanonian practices. Since this notion of truth has created some concern among scholars, let me try to explain it, for it can’t be understood without a notion of how social change creates a radical mutation in consciousness, as Fanon puts it.
In other words, in a period of social change what is now obvious seemed just a few months ago outrageous. Who could have imagined great political changes such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or the end of apartheid? Below these rather grand events are the local and grassroots movements that open up space for thinking that seem not only outside the realm of the possible but that also include voices that are often unheard.
This week a UN conference on climate change is taking place in Durban, South Africa. The poor, who experience the full force of extreme weather and have to spend their time dealing with its effects, are not invited. A couple of days ago I received an article by Reverend Mavuso of the Rural Network in South Africa, an organisation of poor and landless rural people and part of the poor people’s alliance, that reminded me of Fanon’s critique of tourism, which he viewed as a quintessential postcolonial industry with the nationalist elites becoming the ‘organizers of parties.’ This is not just a Caribbean experience; it has become the experience of post-apartheid South Africa with private game parks and Safaris taking over land.
Presented to the world as ‘eco-tourism’, Mavuso (2011) writes, ‘game farming and the tourism industry are evicting the poor, ‘rob[ing us of our] … land … and replac[ing us] … with animals’ (my emphasis). In post-apartheid South Africa, thousands are evicted with the promise of jobs but the jobs turn out to be few poorly paid domestic workers or security guards.
In short, in contrast to exclusive global conferences, a truly humanist environmentalism begins with the needs and experiences of the poor. It is an epistemological challenge, a shift in the geography of reason.
Fanon argues in the conclusion to ‘The Wretched’ that we have to work out new concepts. Where will those new concepts come from? How is political education developed? What is it for? Fifty years after ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ I am suggesting that we consider the maturity of the struggle that is expressed in the rationality of the rebellions. For Fanon, to engage this reason is not synonymous with systematising ‘indigenous knowledge’ or culture. It is the rebellion — which is at the same time always for Fanon a mental liberation — that encourages nuance and encourages radical intellectuals engaged in and with these movements to work out new concepts in a non-technical and non-professional language. Often in defiance to those (intellectuals and militants) who consider thinking a hindrance to action, the ‘opening of minds’ and imagination is encouraged.
‘We imagine cities where politicians, policy makers, engineers and urban planners think with us and not for us,’ argues S’bu Zikode, the former president of Abahlali baseMjondolo, expressing the right to the city in the most concrete terms. Abahlali baseMjondolo — part of the subtitle of ‘Fanonian Practices’, which translates as people who live in shacks, is an organisation of about 30,000 shack dwellers in South Africa that was created six years ago after the residents of one shack community realised that land that had been promised was being cleared for other buildings. The organization is decentralized, autonomous, self-reliant and deeply democratic. What is interesting about Abahlali now six years after its self-organization is its thinking born of experience and discussion in what they call the ‘university of the shacks.’ They call it living learning. Press statements are written collectively; and quite in contrast to technical education, learning is a collective and living thing that always needs to be nurtured. Their idea of ‘citizenship’ (including all who live in the shacks in democratic decision making regardless of ancestry, ethnicity, gender, age, etc.) connects with Fanon’s political notion of citizenship formed in the social struggle. So when Zikode speaks of imagination, it is one produced collectively by long discussions in the shack settlements. ‘We imagine cities where the social value of land is put before its commercial value,’ he continues. ‘We imagine cities where shack settlements are all offered the option of participatory upgrades and where people will only move elsewhere when that is their free choice. We imagine the quick improvement of local living conditions by the provision of water, electricity, paths, stairs and roads while housing is being discussed, planned and built. We imagine cities without evictions, without state violence being used to disconnect people from electricity and water and without any repression of organisations and movements. We imagine cities without the transit camps that have become the permanent alternative housing solution for many poor people since the declaration of the Millennium Development Goals by the United Nations. We reject, completely, the way in which the Millennium Development Goals have reduced the measure of progress to the numbers of ‘housing opportunities delivered’ when in fact progress should be measured in terms of people’s dignity as this is understood by the people themselves’ (Zikode 2011).
Such imaginings come from thinking and discussions that jibe with Fanon’s notion of political education. He presents what he calls the militant who wants to take shortcuts in the name of getting things done not only as anti-intellectual but atrocious, inhuman and sterile. Instead, he insists the search for truth is the ‘responsibility of the community’ (2004, 139). In ‘The Wretched’, Fanon speaks of the meeting, of this coming together, as the practical and ethical foundation of the liberated society, as ‘a liturgical act’ (un acte liturgique [2002, 185]); liturgical acts which ‘are privileged occasions given to a human being to listen and to speak … and put forward new ideas …’ (1968 195).
Again at the local level, in ‘The Wretched’ Fanon gives the seemingly banal example of lentil production during the liberation struggle, writing of the creation of production/consumption committees among the peasants and FLN which he says encouraged theoretical questions about the accumulation of capital: ‘In the regions where we were able to conduct these enlightening experiments,’ he argues, ‘we witnessed the edification of man through revolutionary beginnings’ because people began to realize that ‘one works more with one’s brain and ones heart than with one’s muscles’ (2004, 133; see 1968, 292).
Talking of the political economy of food he adds: ‘We did not have any technicians or planners coming from big Western universities; but in these liberated regions the daily ration went up to the hitherto unheard-of figure of 3,200 calories. [But t]he people were not content with [this] …. They started asking themselves theoretical questions: for example, why did certain districts never see an orange before the war of liberation, while thousands of tons are exported every year abroad? Why were grapes unknown to a great many Algerians whereas the European peoples enjoyed them by the million? Today, the people have a very clear notion of what belongs to them.’
This type of shift in cognition represents a shift in epistemology.
EDUCATION FOR LIBERATION?
The mandate for the College of the Bahamas is to ‘foster the intellectual development of students and the wider community by encouraging critical analysis and independent thought’ and the meeting today is considered part of the project to attain university through contributing to that discussion. Yet critical and independent thought can never be guaranteed and certainly can’t be assured by a university. In this final section of my presentation I want to consider the problematic of a university in the post-colony as it articulates with movements and thinking outside of it.
Real grassroots social movements open up new spaces for thinking. Yet on the other hand the global university of the 21st century not only often looks elsewhere but actively seeks to suppress these spaces. The quest to be ‘world class,’ such as that which the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal announces, is couched by the term excellence seen through a neo-colonial prism of donors and global elites. At best the new movements become researched — the paradigms often developed by the World Bank or other funding agencies — they are never allowed to ask theoretical questions. It is a neo-colonial arrangement.
Recognising that the colonised intellectual committed to social change is fundamentally alienated from the people, Fanon suggests a methodology that fundamentally challenges the elitism, internalised values and ways of thinking they have imbibed. Perhaps the same, often depending on context, can be said of the postcolonial intellectual. In ‘Black Skin White Masks’, for example, Fanon argues that this alienation and neurosis is quite normal; that is to say a product of books, newspapers, schools, and their texts, advertisements, films, radio — what we might call hegemonic culture. How then do we go about creating space for a critical humanities as a consciously decolonizing project (by decolonizing I do not simply mean the formal end of colonialism but, following Fanon, the form and content of pedagogies and practices devoted to the decolonization of the mind)? Since such a conception runs counter to the university in the global market place that judges itself in those terms, what is to be done within the situation and places we find ourselves? Also on what philosophic ground and from what principle do we ask the question? Certainly, we cannot take the existence of a public sphere, of public intellectuals, and any claim of intellectual autonomy as either guaranteed or unproblematic.
For Fanon education is always political education. In practice all education is political and education is political in all its forms of socialization and in its disciplines. In other words education helps us organize our lives, helps us think and act, help us think and create images of justice. Fanon means something different by political education. Just as for Fanon culture has to become a fighting culture, education has to become about total liberation. De-colonial education has to be a total critique and a transformative experiential process. Indeed this notion of education as transformative is often recognized on the private level in the rhetoric of individual entrepreneurship that often powers the discourse of the university’s value, but the issue for a de-colonial national education is an education that helps create a social consciousness and a social individual. Fanon is not concerned with educating the power elites to lead but to promote self-confidence among the mass of people, to teach the masses, as he puts it, that everything depends on them. This is not simply a version of community or adult education and certainly not of a hyperdermic notion of conscientization. Let me give an example that focuses less on content than form. In ‘Year 5 of the Algerian Revolution’ (‘A Dying Colonialism’) Fanon has an essay on the radio, ‘the voice of Algeria.’ What becomes clear is the importance of the form of the meeting. He describes a room of people listening to the radio, and the militant — namely the teacher — is among them, but (jammed by the French) there is only white noise on the radio. After a long discussion the participants agree about what has taken place; the teacher becomes an informed discussant, not a director. The form of the classroom is a democratic space, and the result is in a sense the point that political education is about self-empowerment as social individuals. It is a new collectivity, a new solidarity. The reference to the voice of Algeria is simply an example that helps to emphasize the processes at stake. The wider issue of the politics of pedagogy and curriculum must include the geography of the postcolonial university, its buildings, its gates, its barriers, its classrooms and all its spatial set ups. Colonialism, Fanon argues, is totalitarian. It inhabits every relationship and every space. The university produces and reproduces reification and thus has to be thoroughly reconsidered. But that reconsideration doesn’t come in one fell swoop; it is a process and a praxis, but one that also must include its philosophy and its raison d’être.
This is not a call to the barricades even if it is a call to ideological combat to have one’s ears open, to not confine new development in a priori categories. In other words, a de-colonial praxis would have to begin from the movement from practice not simply where the people dwell in those thousands of revolts taking place across the country but in their self-organization. Ideological combat, or a fighting culture, as Fanon explains in ‘The Wretched’, is quite simply engaged intellectual work. In other words, and this is obvious, it is not about intellectuals going to the rural areas to pick up a scythe and be with the people. I am not saying that that can’t be done, but that is not intellectual work, and it certainly does not challenge the division between mental and manual labour. So to conclude, what makes possible the intellectual capacity to see into the reasons for popular action, or in short, the rationality of revolt?
In the revolutionary moment of the anti-colonial struggle Fanon writes of the ‘honest intellectual,’ who, committed to social change, enters what he calls an ‘occult zone,’ engaging the notion of the transformation of reality with a real sense of uncertainty while also coming to understand what is humanly possible. This zone is a space that is being shaped by a movement which, he says, in ‘On National Culture,’ is beginning to call everything into question (1968, 227). ‘The zone of hidden fluctuation’ (2004, 163) or ‘occult instability’ (1968, 227) [C’est dans ce lieu de déséquilibre occulte 2002 215] ‘where the people dwell’ is not a ghostly movement but corporeally alive. If honest intellectuals feel the instability of it, it is because they cannot really take a living role, that is to say a disalienated role, in this movement unless they recognise the extent of their alienation from it (1968, 226). But the intellectual’s role need not be a mysterious one. Rather it can be quite practical, grounded in a sharing of reason where trust is implicit. This of course means that the intellectual must give up the position of privilege and begin to comprehend that the ‘workless,’ ‘less than human’ and ‘useless’ people do think concretely in terms of social transformation (see 1968 127). After all this new zone of movement and self-movement — what one might also call a radical zone of dialectical leaps in thought and activity (see James 1980) — is a space where souls ‘are crystallized and perceptions and lives transfigured’ (translation altered 227; 2004,163). Fanon’s language is almost transcendental here, and one may argue that such heavenly ‘authenticity’ born of this revolutionary moment seems as impossible as the idea of the excluded, the uncounted and unaccountable, the damned of the earth, upsetting the household arrangements of the here and now, creating a genuine moment (and zone) or community where trust and the sharing of reason is implicit. Fanon is not speaking of some heavenly space of some future afterlife; he locates the space very much in the contingent now and that is being lived, quite practically and unstably, in the present. This ramshackle movement from practice as a form of theory (see Dunayevskaya 1988), that is to say as both force and reason, is inherently uncertain and also, at the same time, unexceptional. It challenges reason as it is commonly accepted (instrumental, technical or even the professionally ‘critical’) and decenters it, moving it closer to the reason or reasoning of so many of those who have been considered unreasonable, but who in a dialectical logic are implicitly proposing a new humanism.
One of the challenges of Fanonian Practices in South Africa, from Biko to Abahlali is epistemological; it is to think of thinking from the underside, if you will. The struggle school is a struggle, as Richard Pithouse puts it. And let’s be clear sometimes that school comes into contradiction with the university system and can have dire costs both in terms of employment and in terms of threats of violence. Fanon talks about ‘snatching’ knowledge from the colonial universities; he is also aware of the great sacrifices that this can entail. In ‘The Wretched’ he makes a point to distinguish between the hobnobbing postcolonial intelligentsia and the honest intellectual who abhors careerism, distrusts the race for positions, and who is still committed to fundamental change even if he or she presently does not see its possibility.
What if the vaunted position of ‘intellectual’ does not require a degree from a ‘world class’ institution? The public intellectual without a university accreditation is becoming almost unthinkable. But to be relevant the national university has to be transformative, self-critical and also open to the experiences and minds of the common people who have been often excluded; not simply an accrediting agency for service industries, the university instead must be dedicated to the growth of every kind of genius.
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* This was a keynote address delivered at the Critical Caribbean Symposium Series ‘50 Years Later: Frantz Fanon’s Legacy to the Caribbean and the Bahamas,’ Friday 2, December 2011 at The College of the Bahamas. It was first published in Thinking Africa.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Abane, Beläid. 2011 in Nigel C. Gibson, editor, Living Fanon. New York: Palgrave
2. Cherki, Alice. 2006. Fanon: A Portrait. Ithaca: Cornell University Press
Cleaver, Kathleen, Neal. 1998. “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party” in Charles E. Jones eds. The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Baltimore MD: Black Classic Press
3. Dunayevskaya. Raya. 1988. Marxism and Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press
4. Fanon, Frantz. 2002. Les damnés de la terre. Paris: La Découverte, 2002.
5. __________. 1967a. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by Lars Markman. New York: Grove.
6. __________. 1967b. Toward the African Revolution. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove.
7. __________. 1967c. A Dying Colonialism. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove.
8. __________. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove.
9. __________. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove.
10. Glissant, E 1999. Caribbean Discourses: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999.
11. James, C.L.R. 1980. Notes on Dialectics London: Allison and Busby.
Reverend Mavuso. 2011. “Climate Change and Global Warming are perpetuated by the capitalists to oppress the poor to make profit”.
12. Wright, Richard. 1956. “The Neuroses of Conquest,” The Nation, October 20. pp. 33-331
13. Wright, Richard. 1995. White Man Listen. New York: Harper Collins.
Zikode, S’bu. 2011. “Upgrades v Evictions,” September 29 at abalhali.org.
END NOTES
[1] Fanon studied and practiced with Tosquelles before leaving France for Algiers. Tosquelles who was carrying out a revolution in psychiatry at Saint Alban and was an anticolonialist grew up in Catalonia and had been an active anti-stalinist during the Spanish civil war.
[2] Glissant writes that “it is difficult for a French Caribbean individual to be the brother, friend, or quite simply the associate or fellow countryman of Fanon. Because, of all the French Caribbean intellectuals, he is the only one to have acted on his ideas, through his involvement in the Algerian struggle” (1999 25). Fanon made a “complete break” and yet Martinican intellectuals have failed to recognize him almost at all. He adds that they could not find in Fanon a figure who “awakened (in the deepest sense of the word) the peoples of the contemporary world” (1999 69).
[3] Wright’s review of the English translation of Mannoni’s book (which was published in 1956) in The Nation (Oct 20, 1956) was similar to Fanon’s critique in Black Skin White Masks. Titled “The Neuroses of Conquest,” Wright praised Mannoni’s book for focusing on the psychology of the “restless” Europeans who set out for world “that would permit free play for their repressed instincts” but he criticized Mannoni for creating the impression that the Madagascar “natives are somehow the White man’s Burden.” Like Fanon’s alienated Black, the native, Wright argues, vainly attempts “to embrace the world of white faces that rejects it” and in reaction to this rejection ”seeks refuge in tradition. But he concludes “but it is too late” there is “haven in neither.”
Read more on 50 years later: Fanon’s legacy written by Nigel C Gibson….
At the same moment when the Libyan adventure backfired with the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) retreating from taking credit for the end of the Gaddafi regime, the US government announced the deployment of 100 troops to Uganda to assist the government of Yoweri Museveni to track down the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Later the same month in October 2011, there was news that the Kenyan army had been deployed into Somalia in pursuit of armed Somalians known as Al-Shabaab (‘The Youth’) that Kenya blames for a series of kidnappings on its soil. It was also revealed that France would be supporting the Kenyan invasion in Somalia. Sensitive to the future relationship with Africans who want peace, the spokespersons for AFRICOM have been ‘leading from behind’ in this Kenyan operation. In this article, I argue that of the US-supported ventures in Africa, the foray into Somalia represents a heightened threat to peace and reconstruction in Africa, especially East Africa. I will argue that this Western-supported incursion is more against the Kenyan people than against the forces of Al-Shabaab, or whatever name that will be given to the musical chairs of military entrepreneurs in Somalia.
In the past 20 years, the US support for militarism in the Horn of Africa has destabilised this region of Africa. Since independence in 1963, Kenya has been the cockpit of imperial ventures in Africa. This was because the radical traditions of Kenya from the period of the Land and Freedom Army had to be contained. After three periods of containment using force, non-governmental organisations and sowing divisions among the progressives, the awakening in Africa pointed to the vibrancy and potential for people-centred change in Kenya. Thus, the security planners in Western states were not going to wait to be surprised by a Tahrir Square uprising in Kenya.
This process of remilitarisation will fail in Africa, just as support for Mobutism and support for apartheid failed decades earlier. The challenge for peace and social justice forces in North America and Europe is to take the question of the militarisation of Africa to the forefront of the struggles against the one per cent, and link the issues of militarism more closely to the banking industry and its private military contractors.
I will start with the six points that highlighted the catastrophic failure of AFRICOM in Libya, retrace the failure of the Operation Lightning Thunder of 2008 and then examine the fear of revolutionary uprisings in Kenya. The conclusion will retrace the intellectual and political crisis within the US ruling circles in this depression, and explore why the current remilitarisation of Africa is being opposed fiercely in Africa and will influence the present movement for peace and social justice in North America and Western Europe.
CATASTROPHIC FAILURE IN LIBYA
When Seumas Milne from UK newspaper the Guardian wrote, ‘If the Libyan war was about saving lives, it was a catastrophic failure,’ he was communicating a conclusion that had been echoed in newspapers and by analysts all over the world. From Asia, writers were linking the role of AFRICOM to the new power grab in Africa while there was massive opposition from Africa. In studying the catastrophic failures, I will briefly list the top six.
a) The first point that has been made by numerous writers that far from protecting lives in Libya, far more lives were lost from the NATO intervention. Seumas Milne wrote: ‘What is now known, however, is that while the death toll in Libya when NATO intervened was perhaps around 1,000-2,000 (judging by UN estimates), eight months later it is probably more than ten times that figure. Estimates of the numbers of dead over the last eight months – as NATO leaders vetoed ceasefires and negotiations – range from 10,000 up to 50,000. The National Transitional Council puts the losses at 30,000 dead and 50,000 wounded.’
b) The second major point of the NATO led quagmire in Libya is the destruction of the society. The rubble of former cities and towns is a testament to the unlimited bombing. Sirte, in particular has been completely destroyed.
c) The third point refers to the crimes of war committed by NATO and NATO supported troops. NATO and their surrogates committed atrocities and the execution of prisoners constitute a crime under the laws of war. There is no statute of limitation for crimes of war.
d) Fourthly, the banks and the financial institutions are involved in the financialisation of energy ‘markets.’ The extent to which the Gaddafi regime was linked to Goldman Sachs and the opaque world of commodity financial contracts is yet to fully emerge. The Libyan Investment Authority lost billions of dollars and the peoples of Libya will have great difficulty unfreezing their assets that were frozen by western countries and the banks that are now plunging the world into a depression.
e) The now exposed role of Qatar troops and other forces on the ground when the UN mandate explicitly precluded ground troops.
f) The support for conservative Islamists who want to roll back the rights of women and the gains of the people of Libya.
Once the multiple layers of failures began to be documented around the world, the euphoric rhetoric about NATO success in Libya receded as General Carter Ham (head of AFRICOM) hid behind, while Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen flew to Libya in a self-congratulatory one day visit to hail the ‘success’ of the NATO mission to assist the National Transitional Council.
While some senators in the USA were posturing about the NATO victory, the Obama White House was embarrassed by the exposure of the discussion about the assassination of Gaddafi while he was in the hands of the ‘National Security Council’ forces. General Carter Ham who at the start of the Operation in March Libya was willing to take credit for the bombing of Tripoli was shy to have a full discussion on Libya. Carter Ham spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CISS) in October to present a public relations effort in relation to the new deployment in Central Africa.
While in March, Carter Ham was willing to be on the international news celebrating the role of AFRICOM in Libya, even before the execution of Gaddafi, Carter Ham was trying to shift attention from the on-going war crimes in Libya to speak of ‘threats to stability, security challenges and crises all over the continent.’ The more tuned-in policymakers who attended grasped that Ham was clutching at straws and that no mention was made or attempt offered at setting out what the structural or underlying root causes of the ‘threats to stability and security challenges’ all over Africa actually are.
Carter Ham reproduced the same ideas about security and how to help client states in Africa protect US interests. The criteria that AFRICOM continues to use to determine where it will look to offer ‘assistance’ to confront threats and address security challenges includes: (a) dictators and constitutional democrats who will seek AFRICOM’s assistance to remain in power, (b) emphasis on the East African region as a strategic area for projection of force, (c) the importance of Uganda and East Africa for future US planning, and (d) the usual justification for militarism, that of fighting Al Qaeda in Somalia.
What was not stated was that the goal of the United States in Africa was to pre-empt other revolutionary uprisings of the type and scale that removed the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt.
ASSISTING MUSEVENI TO STAY IN POWER IN UGANDA
Less than two weeks after this public relations exercise at the CISS, newspapers in the USA announced that AFRICOM will send two combat teams of about 100 to Africa (Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo,) to help fight against the Lord’s Resistance Army.
This deployment brings out the desperate efforts of Museveni to remain in power after 25 years. This ‘assistance’ of the US military to Museveni is not new. In 2008, there was a much-publicised operation by the US military to assist the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) to wipe out the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). This operation ended in a failure and reinforced the alienation of the people of Northern Uganda from the Museveni regime. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by this war that has been waged so that the Ugandan society can be partially militarised. Even a usual pro-interventionist ‘humanitarian’ NGO such as the Enough Project criticised the Uganda and US governments over the past operation of 2008-2009. The Enough Project described the operation as ‘poorly executed’ and ‘operationally flawed’.
Peace activists in East Africa have for decades exposed the use of the war in the North of Uganda for the Museveni regime to stay in power and promote self-enrichment. Those sections of the Ugandan society who had any progressive leanings left the Museveni regime and those military personnel with any integrity died under dubious circumstances. Major Reuben Ikondere and Noble Mayombo were two members of the UPDF who had progressive Pan-Africanist leanings. They lost their lives at young ages. Other progressives who had joined the National Resistance Movement (NRM) in opposition to dictatorship slowly left Museveni. The most outstanding of this group were the former underground forces from Kitwe who had been the liberating force inside of Uganda during the era of dictatorship and other militarists.
The Museveni government spurned efforts by elders from all across East Africa who wanted a negotiated solution to the fighting in order to isolate the LRA’s Joseph Kony and his murderous bands. While the brutal atrocities of this group were well-known, there were elders in Acholi land with links to elders in the region who were capable of isolating Kony. Just as the US military benefited from keeping Osama Bin Laden alive as a threat, so the Museveni regime holds this scare of the Kony bands over the people of Uganda.
More significantly, the Museveni government is seeking external support from the conservative factions in the United States as the region of the Great Lakes becomes a major target for increased oil exploration and production. In what is now being called the largest onshore oil discovery in sub-Saharan Africa in 20 years, UK-based oil exploration and production company Tullow Oil discovered reserves of nearly two billion barrels of oil in rural western Uganda, with the largest finds in the Lake Albert Basin. Subsequent press reports exposed the reality that drilling will yield ‘several billion’ barrels of oil; at least 15 major strikes by various oil companies have been made throughout Great Rift Valley since Tullow’s discovery.
As many readers of Pambazuka know, where there is oil, there is the US Africa Command.
MUSEVENI AND COUNTER- REVOLUTION IN EAST AFRICA
Yoweri Museveni was part of the Dar es Salaam School. He associated himself with the ideals of liberation in order to gain support from Julius Nyerere. Soon after coming to power in 1986, Museveni ingratiated himself with the Washington decision-makers in the military and financial institutions. This service became manifest over the years from the alliance with western mining companies in the plunder of the resources of the Congo and the derailment of full liberation in Kenya. This derailment has continued from the period of Mwakenya and continued up to the recent struggles over elections in Kenya in 2008. Museveni was ready to do everything to keep the Kibaki group in power. Probably, one of the areas that the Uganda leadership has to answer for is the circumstances surrounding the helicopter crash that took the life of John Garang of the Sudan People’s Liberation Front (SPLM).
Opposition to Museveni has been growing inside the society and in the military. After changing the constitution to become eligible to run for president beyond a mandatory two terms, there has been heightened opposition to the Museveni administration. The opposition has devised numerous means to oppose this government with the latest being the ‘Walk to Work’ campaign. Opposition has also grown inside the military with senior commanders calling for a complete withdrawal from Somalia. These calls inside the military came after the massive bombing in Kampala in July 2010 that took over 74 lives. The Somalia group Al-Shabbab claimed responsibility for this bombing.
INTERVENING TO THWART THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT OF KENYA AND KENYANS
It was long ago in Tanzania when Walter Rodney said to me that of the three countries of the then East African Federation, the radical forces in Kenya were the ones with the deepest roots in their society. Walter Rodney had written a short article on Mau Mau in East Africa where he explored the influence of the war of liberation in Kenya on the rest of East Africa. The British understood these radical traditions in Kenya and for over 50 years have been working to destabilise the progressive sections of Kenyan society. Working in alliance with other European imperial experts and the United States, the British worked assiduously to diminish the influence of radical ideas in the Kenyan body politics. This included targeted assassinations and the politicisation of ethnicity and regionalism. Yet, this effort never completely succeeded and the call for the exposure of the crimes of the British in Kenya has recently been through the British legal system with a ruling on the criminal actions that require reparative justice.
The second wave of counter-revolution in Kenya came from the period of the nationalistic government of Daniel Arap Moi. Western military and counter-insurgency forces used military and non-military means to isolate those Kenyans who opposed dictatorship. Up to today, the full history of Mwakenya has not been written and it is a requirement for the healing and truth telling inside Kenya. One of the tools deployed by imperial forces was the massive non-governmental funding which gave Kenya notoriety as the headquarters for many international non-governmental agencies in Africa. John Le Carré has written one fictional account of the criminal world of some of these organisations in the book, ‘The Constant Gardener’. In interviews Le Carré has said that the truth was even more bizarre than the fiction.
Non-governmental organisations and imperial forces could not hold back the tide of opposition to exploitation and the impulse for democracy burned inside the people of Kenya. The cabal that held on to political power turned Kenya into a regional base for international capital with surpluses gleaned from Southern Sudan, Eastern DRC, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Somalia and from Kenya itself. Every major scheme for plunder and money laundering in this region passed through the financial institutions that exploded in Nairobi in the past two decades. So lucrative was this position as regional power brokers that the cabal could not countenance leaving power after the elections in December 2007. These barons of finance in East Africa conjured complicated fraud and theft schemes. Scandals of corruption became so numerous that the populace became immune to the barrage of information of innovative methods of theft that were being practiced. Back issues of the Kenya Law Review have complete information of the level of fraud and theft in the banking sector. When the elections were stolen in January 2008, the western forces organised a ‘government of national unity’ to keep the cabal in power. Corruption in Kenya had gone beyond the question of law enforcement and became interwoven with the struggles for democratic rights.
Since the establishment of the government of National Unity with the victors suborned as junior partners, the conditions of the people of Kenya have deteriorated with the increases in prices, shortages of food and groups calling for an Unga Revolution. Novel forms of organising were being fashioned at the grassroots and these new techniques came to the fore in the effort to write a new constitution for Kenya. The grassroots organising is also calling for those responsible for the killings in 2008 to be brought to justice. However much Kenyans oppose the International Criminal Court (ICC), there is a call for an end to the levels of impunity enjoyed by the ruling plutocrats in Kenya since 1963.
KENYA AND THE WAR ON TERROR
From the period of the launch of the War on Terror, the people of Kenya have been used as political football. Every document relating to the war on terror starts off with the experience of the bombings of the US Embassies in Nairobi and Mombasa in 1998. Yet, the US never fully took on the interconnections of the bombings and a wider world of extremists until the events of 11 September 2011 in the USA. From that period the state apparatus of Kenya became more deeply integrated with the US military deployment in the Horn and the Indian Ocean.
It is now well documented how there was collusion between the US government and the government of Kenya to arrest and illegally ‘render’ Kenyan citizens. These issues of kidnapping and ‘rendering’ Kenyan citizens remain one of the issues of the vibrant human rights lobby in Kenya. But, the War on Terror served to destabilise one of the most vibrant communities in Nairobi, the Eastleigh constituency. This is an area of Nairobi where hundreds of thousands of ethnic Somalis reside. This constituency was the scene of electoral manipulation and for three years there was no real representative in this constituency. Less than three months after the election brought a representative that vowed to bring the people of this area of Nairobi together, we have this deployment into Somalia to track down ‘terrorists.’ Kenyan citizens of Somali extraction are being criminalised as the escalation of war and repression take root in Kenya.
KENYA’S DEPLOYMENT INTO SOMALIA
In the same week when President Obama announced that US AFRICOM forces would be assisting the Museveni government to track down terrorists, the army of Kenya moved into Southern Somalia to pursue those that the media label as ‘Islamist militants.’
While the western media dubbed this war as ‘Kenya’s first major military war on foreign soil’, this intervention has been an extension of a low intensity war that has gone on at the Kenyan border since Somalia became the base for western destabilisation of the Horn of Africa. Many Somalis opposed this intervention just as they have opposed other foreign intervention in their country since 1991. In an attempt to keep this opposition from Somalia out of the international media there were press reports that the intervention by Kenyan military forces was requested and welcomed by the US-backed Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Mogadishu. Somali government spokesman Abdirahman Omar Osman said: ‘The governments of Kenya and Somalia are now cooperating in the fight against al Shabaab, which is an enemy of both countries.’
These statements do not hide the reality that all previous incursions by foreign forces have been resisted by the people of Somalia. From the time of the first major deployment of UN United Nations Operation in Somalia, or UNOSOM, nationalist elements opposed external military intervention. This phase of external involvement came to a screeching halt after the Black Hawk Down humiliation in October 1993 when US army rangers sent to hunt down Aideed were killed in Mogadishu. After the traumatic experiences of the US soldiers in the so-called Operation Restore Hope of 1993, the experience of Somalia has been trumpeted as an example of how ‘failed states’ provide the breeding ground for terrorism in Africa. Yet, when the people of Somalia moved to stabilise their political situation, the US colluded with the government of Ethiopia to invade Somalia on the grounds that the Union of Islamic Courts was harbouring terrorists. Abdi Samatar, among others, had penetrated the hype behind the Union of Islamic Courts to outline how the fabrication of terrorism supported the US military presence in the Horn.
Kenyans can now reflect of the changing alliances of the US military inside Somalia before and after the Ethiopians were defeated by nationalist elements. Abdi Samatar has written extensively on the ebb and flow of the fabrication of terrorism and I have earlier drawn from his work. It is again apt to reinforce what Samatar has said of the US counter-terrorism efforts in the Horn. In his argument on how the US fabricated terrorism in the Horn of Africa Samatar wrote:
‘The hallmark of America’s bankrupt policy is the conspicuous gulf between its democratic rhetoric and its support for thugs, warlords, tyrants, and venal politicians in the Horn of Africa and elsewhere. In the minds of most people in the region American foreign policy and practice has become synonymous with dictatorship and arrogance, and most people believe that those are the core values of the America government. Consequently, the US government has lost the hearts and minds of the Muslim people all over. America’s gifts to the Somali people in the last few years have been warlords, an Ethiopian invasion, and an authoritarian, sectarian and incompetent regime.’
It is this incompetent regime that has been protected by pliant elements from African states that are allies of the USA. The people of Kenya had witnessed the invasion of Ethiopia and the withdrawal of the Ethiopian troops and how the political leadership in Ethiopia manipulated the Somalia issue to gain support from western powers.
KENYAN INVASION: WHAT ARE THE GOALS?
The government of Kenya has declared that it will end its military campaign against Al-Shabaab in Somalia when it is satisfied it has stripped the group of its capacity to attack across the border. If one goes by the experience of the past 18 years, then this statement can be read that Kenya will be in for a long-term deployment to Somalia.
The corollary to this is the reality that Kenya and its cities will be spaces of war, security clampdown and general destabilisation of the population. Since the Kenyan foray, there have been two grenade attacks at a bar and a bus terminal that killed one person and wounded more than 20 people in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. These attacks have already affected the tourism industry, one of the most important sources of revenue for the government of Kenya.
MILITARISM AND THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION IN KENYA
The deployment of Kenyan troops to Somalia was not discussed openly by the Kenyan Parliament. Those who collaborated with the government of Kenya to organise this deployment in Somalia are looking way beyond the issue of Somalia. The more important question is the matter of democratic participation on Kenya. Those who have studied wars in Africa, especially counter-insurgency wars, know that these wars have their own dynamic. One such dynamic is that invading armies get bogged down. The more the army is bogged down, the more there are demands for more resources for fighting to get the job done. Wars are not cheap and precisely the moment when the labour of the Kenyan working people was being devalued, this deployment of troops is demanding extra resources from the Kenyan Treasury. At the same time while resources are diverted to war, revenues from the tourism industry will diminish in the face of the general climate of insecurity that will prevail. This week, Mohamed Najib Balala, the Minister of Tourism sought to reassure foreign tour operators that it is still safe for tourists to visit Kenya, but international news of grenades being thrown into bars do not provide good publicity for the tourism industry.
The longer Kenyan troops remain in Somalia, the more there is a danger of the society being sucked into a long term commitment to fight in a way that demands states of emergencies inside of Kenya itself.
Terrorism of all kinds must be opposed and extremists must be isolated. However, the record of the US in the Horn of Africa is that isolation of extremist elements is the furthest thing from the defence planners in Washington who are seeking new places for the deployment of US military resources in the wake of the withdrawal from Iraq. Jeremy Scahill has documented the musical chairs of the military entrepreneurs in Somalia and how these entrepreneurs have been able to shift their alliances according to the whims of the US counter-terror experts who are now working with the Kenyan military. In his article entitled ‘Blowback in Somalia’, Scahill drew a picture of the various militarists who were enemies of the US in one moment and allies of the US in another moment. He concluded his analysis in this way:
‘In any case, the Shabab’s meteoric rise in Somalia, and the legacy of terror it has wrought, is blowback sparked by a decade of disastrous US policy that ultimately strengthened the very threat it was officially intended to crush. In the end, the greatest beneficiaries of US policy are the warlords, including those who once counted the Shabab among their allies and friends. “They are not fighting for a cause,” says Ahmed Nur Mohamed, the Mogadishu mayor. “And the conflict will start tomorrow, when we defeat Shabab. These militias are based on clan and warlordism and all these things. They don’t want a system. They want to keep that turf as a fixed post—then, whenever the government becomes weak, they want to say, “We control here.”’
Al Shabab has always benefitted from foreign intervention and the Kenyan foray into Somalia will provide these military entrepreneurs the political legitimacy to argue that they are opposing foreign invaders.
However, from the point of view of this commentary, the more long-term consequence will be the efforts to torpedo the efforts of the people of Kenya to end 48 years of kleptocratic rule where the state is run like a criminal syndicate. If the popular and democratic forces are not organised to demand a full withdrawal from Somalia, the danger is that this deployment will cascade into repression leading to a postponement or cancellation of the elections scheduled for December 2012.
AFRICOM FOLLOWS THE TRADITION OF US FAILED ENTERPRISES IN AFRICA
The present remilitarisation of Africa is being opposed in Africa by those who support peace. Museveni of Uganda and the militarist faction of the Kenyan leadership have been working hard to push the African Union to be completely subordinated to the demands of US military crusaders. On top of the confusion wreaked by the international media, the peace and justice forces internationally have not been engaged sufficiently on the question of the remilitarisation of Africa. Last week Bill Fletcher, Carl Bloice and Jamal Rogers called upon the progressive sections of the African American community to oppose this remilitarisation. In this article, they asked in relation to the Obama Foreign Policy in Africa, where is the outcry?
‘It is no rhetorical flourish to say that the foreign policy of the Obama administration, far from representing a qualitative break with that of the Bush administration, has proven in most spheres to be continuality.’
I want to join my voice to the call by these progressive forces to raise the opposition to the new vigour of imperialism in Africa. Additionally, I want to elevate the opposition to the Obama administration’s remilitarisation of Africa. This call is for the peace movement to put on their marching boots just as when the previous generation opposed the US military in their support for Mobutu and apartheid.
From this record, it is clear that at every moment of African agency to break from colonial forms of plunder, the USA was willing and ready to intervene on the side of the exploiters. The most dramatic intervention came at the period decolonisation when the government of the United States conspired to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and derail the self-determination project in Africa. In every region of Africa, progressive and anti-imperialist leaders were executed and puppets maintained in power.
The second period of militaristic deployment was after the African peoples gave notice of plans for economic integration under the Lagos Plan of Action in 1980. The political leadership of the USA responded with the entrenchment of Structural Adjustment Programmes on the economic front and the establishment of the US Central Command on the military front.
Most recently, at precisely the moment when the peoples of Africa seek to strengthen the African Union by setting an agenda for the Union of the People’s of Africa, the militarists have intensified the interventionist thrust into Africa. In every instance, the commitment for peace and justice won out over repression and destruction. The previous efforts at military control of Africa failed. The alliance between peace forces in Africa and beyond will ensure that this new round of the scramble for Africa will be resisted and ultimately, defeated. This is one more reason for the work to unify Africa and work for the demilitarisation of Africa.
In their testimonies before the US House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this year, the representatives from the Department of Defense and the Department of State went to great lengths to outline how US Africa Command was now a force for ‘diplomacy, development and defense.’ Africans have understood these Orwellian doublespeak of the intellectually bankrupt US policymakers who repeat the same arguments that were repeated when the US was supporting Mobutu as a stabiliser in Africa. This writer joins the call of those who are calling for the disbanding of the US Africa Command and for the people of Africa to rise up to oppose dictators and religious extremists who manipulate religion for military purposes. The root cause of the ‘threats to stability and security challenges’ all over Africa stem from the exploitation and plunder of Africa.
Since the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States, numerous constituencies have experienced some measure of social uplift as they have exercised their political strength in compelling the administration to advance their interests. This reality prevails, as the Hispanic community, ever politically cognizant of Obama’s campaign promises ensuring his commitment to the body’s general prosperity, observed the 2009 nomination and installment of Justice Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court.
Latino Americans would further realize a social triumph, as this population in the late spring and summer months of last year asserted their increasing political might in pressuring the White House to maneuver on behalf the collective in halting Arizona’s veiled efforts to establish an apartheid state in its attempt to enact Arizona Senate Bill 1070.
Not only have Hispanic Americans utilized their political capital in prompting the Obama Administration to function as a proponent for measures that would ensure greater degrees of group wealth but so too has another population.
The gay community in December of last year witnessed the culmination of an enormous protracted effort to force the federal government to end what they and many others believed to be a human rights violation. The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — the United States military’s policy rendering gay and lesbian armed service members unable to divulge their sexual orientation absent penalty — served as an enormous step in the gay community’s fight for an equitable standing within American society.
In the face of these monumental victories experienced by the Hispanic and gay communities in imposing their political will on the Obama administration to act as an advocate in forwarding each group’s agenda, the president’s most loyal constituents have yet to collectively enter into such interactions with the Head of State – even though their needs are the greatest. The reason for this circumstance may perhaps exist as a product of an aged African American conviction.
The African-American community has long functioned as an integral force behind the Democratic Party and even more so as a stalwart supporter of the institution’s latest lead official, President Obama. It is a population however, that has historically experienced enormous suffering, not withstanding its current condition which further serves to extend this troubled legacy.
A Black populace devastated more than any other by the country’s economic crisis as reflected by a 16% unemployment rate – approximately twice that of white Americans.
A community whose youth ever increasingly attend monumentally failing public schools – such institutions serving as no more than temporary holding facilities before nearly a third of its male populations drift into the tide of the prison industrial complex.
A constituency that comprises only 13% of the nation’s population however accounts for nearly half of all newly documented HIV/AIDS cases.
A people perpetually made the victim of state-sponsored terrorism, as signified by the merciless slayings of its members to include Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell and Oscar Grant — among scores of others — via law enforcement officials sworn to protect all segments of society.
A body perennially abused by an extraordinarily racist criminal justice system, as reflected most recently in the improper and callous execution of Troy Davis.
A collection of citizens however, that served as a vital and stable electoral force which if not for their efforts, the president would have never escaped the 2008 Democratic primaries; a precursor to Obama’s ultimate victory during the general election. Additionally, this group is one whose support the incumbent will need to rely heavily on in his bid for reelection.
In light of this paradoxical circumstance in which an overwhelmingly distressed people have refused to collectively register a single demand upon an elected official, partially of the same race and considerably indebted to them, an explanation as to why such a conundrum exists begs expression.
The answer to this unfortunate and enormously problematic riddle finds its origins in the vestiges of the past – a turbulent history which for the African American signifies considerable oppression.
The history of the African American bespeaks the unparalleled experience of centuries of chattel slavery followed by decades of forced segregation. These institutions served to render Black America’s capacity to exercise its natural rights a mere aspiration.
Additional destabilizing factors such as the assassinations of this group’s leaders — Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Dr. King etc… — functioned to further render this population vulnerable to the will of a larger White society determined to maintain an unbalanced social order predicated on the false notion of their own superiority.
Finally, the crack epidemic along with the current proliferation of a genocidal music in the form of “gangsta rap” have effectively reduced much of Black America to a society in which visions anchored in promise increasingly surrender to conceptions founded in despair.
However, with hope among many Black Americans a fading commodity, a man of unquestionable intellect and oratorical prowess would emerge. A man of African descent who would inspire an entire race — as well as international community — to fathom what most believed an impossibility.
A then-Illinois Junior Senator, Barack Obama, would ascend from obscurity and command the attention of the world in becoming the United States’ first African-American president, the very land in which incalculable crimes against humanity were committed against the race to which he in part belongs. This is a population of Black Americans who have for so long endured and fought against an unrelenting current of racial persecution, however all the while have held on to an intrinsic belief a better day would come.
It is within this context, millions of African Americans have witnessed the rise of Barack Obama, largely believing this figure to exist as the personification of the long-held promise perpetually denied them. Resultantly, the Black masses enamored by the very being of President Obama, have essentially exalted this leader to the status of quasi-deity and have subsequently served as the figurative buffer between him and any force that would seek to compromise the executive’s standing.
Manifestly, Americans of African descent have resolved themselves to collectively enact no measure that would in any manner place political pressure on this charismatic figure to the extent his administration would have to address the dire condition of the group.
This sociopolitical arrangement serves as an inherently disadvantageous position, however one in which African Americans as a function of ethnic pride commixed with confusion have embraced.
Those public figures such as Glen Ford and Dr. Cornel West — among others — who have directed justifiable criticism toward the Obama administration for its refusal to specifically address the destitute standing of Black America have often felt the scorn of those who comprise these legions of White House supporters.
This circumstance stands in light of the fact both thinkers have for years championed Black issues. Moreover, this development illustrates the extent to which the African-American masses desire to remain obedient to an inimical arrangement that by definition serves to place the interests of an elected official above those of the collective.
The African-American community has found a hero it presently celebrates. In so doing the group has chosen largely to sacrifice its own immediate needs in adulation for a public official who has never asked for such favor, offered no specific relief to the body and has even chastised some of its other political leaders.
If the African-American community is to elevate itself from the depths of social anguish an extraordinary transformation must occur.
This people must transition from the status of jubilant but uncritical Obama admirers to a class of constituents, which holds its admiration for this individual, subordinate to its concern for the welfare of the group.
The failure of such an occurrence to evolve will only function to further entrench this people in the abyss of social indigence while its members cling to the illusion of an image they so believe represents freedom.
The Black masses must find the political will to place demands upon their cherished leader for it is through this enactment pieces of the dream may be realized.
Read more on Black America and Obama: The Cost of Silence Written by Frederick Alexander Meade…
Sources: Global Research, appeared on September 20, 2011
"There is no tomorrow" under a NATO sponsored Al Qaeda rebellion.
While a "pro-democracy" rebel government has been instated, the country has been destroyed.
If there was any uncertainty about the real mission of the United States, France, Britain and other members of NATO in Libya, these doubts were clarified with the nature of the military campaign against the people of Libya that had been orchestrated under the mandate of the United Nations Security Council. It was a new kind of war, using third party forces in order to silence the global peace forces who were opposed to further military intervention. A robust propaganda and disinformation campaign by the corporate media covered up the real content of what was happening. The economic crisis inside the Eurozone was too deep, however, and some of the members of NATO were hesitant about this recolonisation of Africa. France was desperate to get in on the act of intensifying the exploitation of African resources. France had not been a big player in Libya (a former colony of Italy) which until recently was Africa’s fourth-largest oil producer, and possessing one of the continent’s largest oil reserves of some 44 billion barrels – more than Nigeria or Algeria. France was also aware that Libya sits on the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer, an immensely vast underground sea of fresh water. The government of Libya had invested US$25 billion in the Great Man-made River Project, a complex 4,000km long water pipeline buried beneath the desert that could transport two million cubic metres of water a day
The energetic activities of Nicolas Sarkozy in guiding the military intervention took centre stage, while the US military could claim to ‘lead from behind.’ When France called a celebratory conference of ambassadors to rally them for the new imperial vision, Mr Sarkozy said Libya proved ‘a strong contrast’ to past European weakness, and justified his decision to integrate France into NATO’s military command in 2009. The nature of this war organised from the air with proxy armies and private military contractors showed the way for dictatorships like Qatar and Saudi Arabia to fight for ‘democracy.’
This intervention clarified for many African military forces that their alliance with the United States and France will not spare them when it is in the interest of the NATO forces to dispense with former allies. Muammar Gaddafi had enabled the imperial forces by financing their governments, purchasing junk as weaponry and cooperating with their intelligence agencies. The news about the cooperation of Gaddafi with British and US intelligence services along with their collaboration in relation to ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (translated as torture), the exchange of information and the secret transfers of opponents and ‘terror’ suspects should clarify to all that Muammar Gaddafi was no anti-imperialist. More damaging has been the most recent news of the regime’s collaboration with human traffickers to use African immigrants as political football in his conflict with Europe. When the rebels were at the gates of Tripoli, the Gaddafi government worked with human traffickers to release African migrants who wanted to go to Europe. Hundreds left Libya then and drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. (See ‘Gaddafi planned to flood Europe with migrants as final revenge’).
But the crux of the matter of the relationship between Africa and Libya can now be seen in the killing of Africans in Libya on the grounds that they were and are mercenaries. These racist actions by the so-called ‘rebels’ were reported from the start of this ‘humanitarian’ intervention but at the point when these hodge-podge forces entered Tripoli, there was fresh evidence of the wanton killings of black Africans. Africans who escaped the pogroms reported the killings and this information had been in the public domain for months. Now it seems the world is paying attention after Amnesty International put out a report that Africans are being killed in racist attacks. So pronounced have been these racist killings that liberal organs such as the New York Times had to write an editorial on the killings. There has been no word from the United States or the information section of the AFRICOM. Though there have been with small stories in the British press, when British prime minister David Cameron, French president Nicolas Sarkozy and other NATO celebrants made their flying victory visit to Libya, they were silent on these racist attacks against black Africans as they shuttled between Tripoli and Benghazi trying to iron out how to cut French oil companies into the restructuring of the oil industry in Libya.
The African Union has condemned the racist attacks and maintained that political negotiations are still necessary. Jean Ping, chairperson of the Commission of the African Union, decried the attacks on black Africans and reiterated the reasons why the African Union wanted to see an inclusive government in Libya. Jean Ping declared, the ‘Blacks are being killed. Blacks are having their throats slit. Blacks are accused of being mercenaries. Do you think it’s normal in a country that’s a third black that blacks are confused with mercenaries?’
Ping continued, ‘There are mercenaries in Libya, many of them are black, but there are not only blacks and not all blacks there are mercenaries. Sometimes, when they are white, they call them “technical advisors”.’
This reminder, that Libya is in Africa and that a third of the country is black is for those forces who are celebrating the success of a NATO mission to protect Africans which has ended up killing Africans. Africans do not consider the NATO mission a success. In fact, this has been a disaster for peace and reconstruction in Africa. The Russians and Chinese do not consider this operation a success but the leaders of Africa and the leaders of the BRICS societies have awoken too late to the new form of imperial intervention using Global NATO.
The one positive impact of this new imperial adventure is to send alarm bells among all of the military forces in Africa aligned to the West. The other impact is to alert the popular forces to the reality that governments with big armies are literally ‘paper tigers.’ Proper organising, political education, and disciplined activity by the working people can shift the international balance of power and rid Africa of other long serving despots. There is a new scramble for Africa and the progressive forces will have to learn the lessons from the new multilateral imperial interventions that are now being planned by Global NATO.
GLOBAL NATO AND THE INTERVENTION IN LIBYA
The history of NATO and the history of Libya are intertwined in many ways. It was two years after the formation of the North American Treaty Organization that Libya became independent in 1951. However, for the Europeans the strategic importance of Libya during the Second World War and the memory of the siege of Tobruk were too fresh in their minds for NATO to give up Libya entirely. The compromise was that NATO and the US would maintain a military presence. The US established a base called Wheelus Air Base in Libya. This base was called a ‘Little America’ until the US was asked to leave after Gaddafi seized power in 1969. The US had been scheming to get back into Libya since then. For a short while Gaddafi was supported as an anti-communist stalwart, but later he became a useful nuisance shifting as friend and foe over the years. As the US fabricated the myth of al Qaeda in the Maghreb, cooperation was extended to this leader but Gaddafi was opposed to the establishment of US and French military bases in Africa. Now we are informed through the military gossip sheet Stars and Stripes that NATO is considering the establishment of an air squadron in Africa to assist African governments. This is how it was reported in ‘Stars and Stripes’ (29 August 2011).
‘While not formally assigned to AFRICOM, the squadron has been formed to conduct missions primarily in Africa, with a focus on building the air mobility capacity of African militaries.’
The next question that was posed by peace activists was whether this was a prelude for the building of another AFRICOM and NATO facility in Africa.
NATO had been formed as an alliance ostensibly to defend Western Europe against the Soviet Union. Charles De Gaulle had pulled France out of this alliance in 1966 after it became clear that this military alliance was dominated by the USA and Britain (supporting their military industries). Usually, when an alliance is formed for a specific purpose such as halting the spread of communism, that alliance is folded when the mission is complete. Hence, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was expected that the mission of NATO would be scaled down.
Instead, NATO has expanded seeking to encircle Russia by expanding its membership to include former members of the Warsaw Pact countries. For over 79 days NATO bombed Kosovo in 1999 as it gave itself a new mission to expand US military power right up to the doorstep of Moscow. Gingerly, NATO expanded under President Clinton from 12 members to 16, then to 19, then to 26 by 2004, and by 2009 to 28 members. Despite vocal opposition from Russia, the discussion of expanding NATO proceeded to develop the idea of Global NATO.
After Charles De Gaulle had left NATO in 1966, Nicolas Sarkozy rejoined in 2009. France had been working within Europe to challenge the dollar and the US on a global scale but after the reactions about ‘freedom fries’ during the Iraq war, French military planners retreated and decided to throw their lot in with the crusaders in Washington. This new posture towards the crusaders and neoconservatives in the USA was also a nod to the growing strength of the Jean-Marie le Pen and the National Front type organisations in France and Europe.
Using the War on Terror and the wars in Afghanistan as the justification, the rationale of the militarists for a global role of NATO began to take shape and the idea of NATO was debated in military journals. One of the writers on this concept was Ivo Daalder, the US ambassador to NATO. This was an ambassador who had understood the long history of financial and military cooperation between the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. In an era when capital was truly transnational, and the hedge fund managers and oil companies had no loyalty to a particular country, international capitalists wanted a new military force, mobile and well equipped for the new scramble for African resources.
In one such musing by the new defence specialists is the thinking that, ‘The concept of a Global NATO is used above all in connection with two leitmotifs – on the one hand the idea of the alliance becoming a global strategic actor (functional globalization) and on the other the notion of a NATO whose membership is in principle global (institutional globalization). The two dimensions can, however, scarcely be separated from one another but instead are intertwined.’
This discussion under the idea of the ‘institutional globalization of NATO’ maintained that the security threats to capitalism were global and that NATO should consider itself as a ‘concert of democracies’ keeping order internationally. Within these journals the idea was floated that NATO should be expanded to include Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and possibly Brazil.
After encircling Russia the clear posture was for the encirclement of China.
The rationale was simply that the ‘operational level of NATO is the entire globe.’ In 2002, NATO had declared, ‘to carry out the full range of its missions, NATO must be able to field forces that can move quickly to wherever they are needed, sustain operations over distance and time, and achieve their objectives.’
Despite these lofty positions of the strategic planners, NATO was bogged down in Afghanistan. The prolonged crisis of capitalism inside the Western world meant that citizens had no appetite for an expanded imperial role, until Gaddafi gave NATO the excuse to seek to operationalise the idea of Global NATO by promising to kill the citizens of Benghazi who he called rats and vermin.
ENTER SARKOZY – THE NEW SAVIOUR OF NATO
After the embarrassment of the support for the genocidaires in Rwanda in 1994, the French military establishment had taken a low profile and sought to gain respectability for its military interventions in Africa by seeking international mandates. For over forty years France had intervened militarily in Africa, because Africa was central to its entire military strategy. Without the wealth of Africa, France would be a minor power with as much influence as Austria. French imperialism was particularly aggressive in Africa. When the United States decided to compete with France by establishing the Africa Crisis Response Initiative (a precursor to the US Africa Command), France objected. Soon, the French understood the hegemonic intentions of Rumsfeld and Cheney so the French cooperated in operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all the while seething that Rwanda had left the umbrella of francophonie. By the time of the establishment of the US Africa Command, France was cooperating fully with the United States while stepping up its cultural and commercial presence in Africa.
One golden opportunity for France to put the image of defenders of genocidaires behind them came in Cote D ‘Ivorie when France sought a UN mandate to maintain its military forces in that country, a force that had occupied that African country for 40 years. In 2011, Laurent Gbagbo became another enabler of overt French intervention by his intransigence over vacating the presidency. Sarkozy eagerly went in to ‘restore democracy.’
As the self-declared gendarme of Europe, France was taken aback by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in January. The French offered support for the leader of Tunisia, Ben Ali but the removal was too swift and soon after the Egyptian revolution changed the military balance in world politics. NATO panicked and Sarkozy took the initiative to mobilise for the intervention in Libya when Gaddafi gave the Europeans the opening by his wild statements. The Egyptian revolution had far reaching consequences for Israel and for Europe. The Libyan intervention served many purposes, gaining more unlimited access to oil and water in Libya while standing poised to stab the Egyptian revolution in the back.
For decades, France had mooted the idea of a Mediterranean Union to extend the power of France in North Africa. France had worked closely with the monarchy in Morocco to block the independence of Western Sahara and coveted the wealth of the region. More importantly, French oil companies had been left behind after Gaddafi opened up the petroleum sector of Libya for western firms. Italian, British and US oil majors were competing with Russian, Chinese, Indian and Turkish interests. German industrial and financial power was stronger in Libya than French. Sarkozy wanted to change all of that when faced with the most serious banking crisis in France.
When the February 17 uprisings erupted in Libya, French intelligence was alert and Sarkozy mobilised the British and later the US Africa Command to intervene using the UN formulation of Responsibility to Protect, under the cover of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973. China, Russia and Brazil acted irresponsibly, by either abstaining in the vote or sanctioning the vote with their silence. South Africa and Nigeria (under heavy pressure from the Obama White House) voted for the resolution to establish a no-fly zone. South Africa later backtracked opposing the bombing of Libya claiming that the NATO forces had gone beyond the mandate of the UN Security Council Resolution. Better late than never, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of South Africa maintained a principled position and led the position that the roadmap of the African Union was the only way forward for a resolution of the internal political problems in Libya. But France and Britain were salivating over a re-division of the oil resources of Libya.
This intervention was under the umbrella of the UN and so this was another foray of Global NATO. Yet, most NATO members understood the reasons for Sarkozy’s energy. Of the 28 members of NATO, the majority refused to participate in this attack. The Prime Minister of Poland declared that the attack on Libya was for oil. There were only eight members (Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, Norway, Spain, UK and the United States) that participated in this operation (called United Protector). The members could not even agree on a command structure so the US put up the Africa Command as the Front and called their operation, Operation Odyssey Dawn. The French called their action, Opération Harmattan. The British called their involvement Operation Ellamy while the Canadians termed theirs, Operation Mobile.
The Germans understood the double-dealing of Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany even pulled its crews out of NATO support aircraft. Turkey was opposed to the NATO operation and the dysfunction of this operation became evident after one month. Recriminations started between these ‘partners’ with some members claiming that others were not pulling their weight. Space does not allow for a full examination of the thousands of sorties of NATO in Libya after seven months. The full day-to-day roster of their military and naval operations to oust Gaddafi is in the public domain on the internet. African popular leaders can read the day-to-day strategic operations to see the full weakness of NATO. The Chinese have written on the dysfunction of NATO and one writer An Huihou wrote that the operation in Libya was ‘Not a real success for NATO.’ This Chinese writer called for negotiations but the Chinese political leadership publicly support the roadmap of the African Union. More importantly, while the Chinese pulled their citizens out of Libya, there was not even a word of protest from China over the killing of Africans in Africa when the imperial forces were using a UN mandate called Responsibility to Protect. In order to pacify the Chinese leadership, the energetic Sarkozy had a flying visit to Beijing, promising that Chinese contracts would be honoured.
We will have to revisit this aspect of the war at another moment, but for this submission it is important to understand the new forms of intervention.
A NEW KIND OF IMPERIAL INTERVENTION
It must be stated that the mobilisation of the international peace forces against NATO has always been a consideration for the planning of Operation United Protector. It is now time to place the opposition to militarism with clear focus on the private military corporations who act outside of the law. Inside the United States, the then Defense Secretary, Robert Gates told West Point cadets in March that, ‘In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined’. The Pentagon was afraid of being bogged down and although the peace movement had the Obama administration on the defensive, some sections this movement did not distance itself from Gaddafi while they condemned the killing of innocent civilians by NATO jets.
European workers, faced with the double dip recession where the banks were calling on the governments to impose austerity measures, were lukewarm toward the Libyan operation, so the invaders had to find a novel way for intervening. This intervention then took the form of bombings by NATO, on the ground special forces from the French and British commandos with air and ground support from Qatar.
On 4 September 2011, the New York Times reported the coordination in this way, ‘The United States provided intelligence, refueling and more precision bombing than Paris or London want to acknowledge. Inevitably, then, NATO air power and technology, combined with British, French and Qatari “trainers” working “secretly” with the rebels on the ground, have defeated the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.’ Other newspaper accounts reported that ‘former soldiers from an elite British commando unit, the Special Air Service, and other private contractors from Western countries were on the ground in the Libyan city of Misrata.’
The Guardian in England said contractors were helping NATO identify possible targets in the heavily contested city and passing this information, as well as information about the movements of Gaddafi’s forces, to a NATO command centre in Naples, Italy. The newspaper reported that ‘a group of six armed Westerners had been filmed by the Al Jazeera TV network talking to rebels in Misrata; the men fled after realizing they were being filmed.’
Initially, the United States Africa Command took credit for the NATO operations in Libya, but when it seemed as if the entire operation was bogged down, there were efforts to bring in Special Forces and private security personnel using Qatar as the front and paymaster. Indeed, the use of fronts such as the Emir of Qatar pointed to a new form of global militarism. Blackwater, (now called Xe) the US private military firm for hire, had moved to establish its headquarters in the Emirates, specifically Abu Dhabi. In a detailed article in the New York Times entitled, ‘Blackwater World Wide’, we were given one window into the various front companies of Blackwater and the integrated nature of the CIA/Blackwater operations. We were then told that Blackwater did not want to recruit Muslims because Muslims would be reluctant to kill other Muslims. When the rebels entered Tripoli, the same talking heads in Washington that were opposed to the intervention were now praising this new kind of cooperation between the US military and Global NATO
Future researchers on the ‘special operators on the ground’ in Libya will be able to list the names of the Private Military Contractors who were involved in this war. When the leaders of the National Transitional Council needed money to pay the private contractors and to bribe regional leaders, the Global Nato diplomats promptly called for the unfreezing of the assets of Libya, even while the African Union was protesting the killing of black Africans.
LESSONS FOR PROGRESSIVE AFRICANS
In less than three weeks, the General Assembly of the United Nations will meet and the leaders of Global NATO will seek to silence the members of the African Union. The African Union has been lobbying the Group of 77 as they seek to bring to the attention of the world the reality that the UN Security Council mandate of responsibility to protect did not extend to black Africans. Even at this late moment, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in South Africa is correct to stick to the call for the African Union roadmap. Experience elsewhere in Burundi and Uganda after wars of intervention showed that it is only the long-term and pedantic work for peace that can end the fighting. There must be negotiations with an international peacekeeping force that excludes the eight NATO countries that violated the mandate of the Security Council. The National Transitional Council is deeply divided and negotiations will be needed so that they do not kill each other as they already started to do when they killed Abdel-Fattah Younis, the general who had defected from Gaddafi to the Benghazi side. It is only a matter of time before it becomes clear how Abdelhakim Belhadj (sometimes written Belhaj) of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), graduated from detention at Guantanamo Bay to be one of the ‘rebel’ leaders and leader of the Tripoli Military Council. Anyone who followed the US destabilisation of Somalia can understand how those who are one day called the worst terrorists are the next day the best allies of the USA.
Ultimately, it is not in the interests of Global NATO for the fighting to end in Libya insofar as the lack of clarity on the future of the Egyptian revolution will require imperial forces to stab the revolution in the back. This is where Qatar and Saudi Arabia have proven their use for the western ‘concert of democracies.’ Qatar in Libya and Saudi Arabia in Bahrain have shown the world that the intervention of the West was not for humanitarian reasons.
Muammar Gaddafi had enabled the imperial intervention by his close collaboration with their intelligence agencies. These intelligence forces used their closeness to fight and remove his family from power after 42 years. During the initial stages of the integrated Qatar/special forces/private military contractors assault on Tripoli, the spokesperson for Gaddafi boasted that the regime had 65,000 armed personnel ready to defend Tripoli. Yet, when the Special Forces of NATO and Qatar showed up in Tripoli, the Gaddafi forces were nowhere to be seen. This is because the ‘paramilitary forces of Libya under Gaddafi were better at internal repression than in dealing with foreign threats. Libya had a number of paramilitary forces and security services. They acted as a means of controlling the power of the regular military and providing Gaddafi and his family with security.’ Gaddafi was a leader with billions of dollars who did not know how to buy weapons and maintain them. Thus when a real war emerged, Gaddafi who had been spending about a billion dollars per year on weapons was full of bluster but had no real army. Western military analysts had studied Gaddafi very closely and had told anyone who wanted to read that,
‘Libya had to keep many of its aircraft and over 1000 of its tanks in storage. Its other army equipment purchases require far more manpower than its small active army and low quality reserves can provide. Its overall ration of weapons to manpower is absurd, and Libya has compounded its problems by buying a wide diversity of equipment types that make it all but impossible to create an effective training and support base.’
The same military analysts who were writing on the absurdity of the military planning and arms purchases of Gaddafi came from countries that were competing to sell Gaddafi new weapons. Today we are told that the National Transitional Council needs new weapons.
In another offering it will be necessary to fully examine the lessons of the NATO intervention for the African freedom struggle. It will be necessary, then, to sum up the Gaddafi role in Africa and the African Union. Until that time, it is sufficient to say that the operations of Global NATO has awakened many leaders to the reality of the ways in which third parties and private military forces will be used to invade Africa. Even the former president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo has had to speak out forcefully against NATO in Libya. While these leaders are speaking, the rank and file in Africa are paying attention to the fact that France, Britain and the USA will go to all lengths to invade Africa in the new scramble for resources. General Carter Ham of AFRICOM has already travelled to Nigeria to enact the drama on the stage that had been set up by former US ambassador to Nigeria, John Campbell who predicted that Nigeria will break up within 16 years. General Carter Ham urged partnership between the government of Nigeria and AFRICOM knowing full well that such a partnership would be to fulfil the wishes of those who do not want to see the unity and peace of Nigeria and Africa.
China, Russia, Brazil and India will have to make a choice. They will either be integrated into the spoils of the current scramble for land, oil water and seeds or will join with the people of Africa to democratise the United Nations and support the forces of peace and reconstruction. China has sent one signal by becoming the principal paymaster for Europe becoming the stopgap for the crisis in the Eurozone.
Africans may believe in Ubuntu but they will never forget. The day will arise when the idea of Responsibility to Protect will be used by a democratised United Nations.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS
* Horace Campbell is professor of African-American studies and political science at Syracuse University. He is the author of ‘Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA’. Seewww.horacecampbell.net.
Comment les humains sont-ils arrivés à cette situation où un système organisateur d’un mode de vie, d’un mode de penser, est en voie de liquider la seule force capable de faire front et, pourquoi pas, de renverser ce processus d’usurpation ? Comment l’inconscience du capital forgée pendant des siècles est-elle parvenue à contrôler et, finalement, soumettre la conscience de l’humanité à ses ordres ? Comment est-on arrivé à une forme de dictature plus forte que toute puissance militaire, nucléaire? Comment, finalement, un mode de penser, d’organiser les rapports économiques est parvenu à se présenter comme créateur de richesses, alors que dès le début de son existence, il a toujours été fondamentalement destructeur, prédateur ? Cet essai ne pourra pas répondre à toutes ces questions. L’objectif est d’attirer l’attention sur un processus de destruction qui, tout en détruisant, se présente systématiquement en son contraire. Et cela, en apparence du moins, avec l’acceptation parfois consciente, parfois inconsciente de l’humanité. Très longue et complexe histoire, les quelques paragraphes qui suivent ne peuvent qu’en effleurer la surface. Cependant, le pressentiment d’urgence oblige, au moins, d’en prendre la dimension, car il y va de la survie de l’espèce humaine.
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The celebration of Human Rights Day across the world will be meaningless without interrogating the significance of peoples’ rights in relationship to human livelihood and peaceful co-existence among humans and between humans and planet earth in the 21st century. Such interrogation should be geared towards unravelling the implications of new phenomena for our collective humanity in the 21st century. These phenomena include the Western conception of human rights based on exclusions and hierarchies, biotechnology and robotics revolution, genetic perdition and cloning, capitalist plundering of the earth, as well as the dehumanisation of human beings by neo-liberal capitalism.
Following the devastating war associated with the capitalist depression of 1929-1945, an international organisation, the United Nations, was formed with a mandate to promote world peace. There were four salient objectives outlined in the UN Charter: 1) to maintain world peace and security; 2) to protect the fundamental human rights and uphold the dignity and equality of all humans; 3) to create a forum for cooperation in solving international problems and in providing respect for international law; and 4) to promote freedom, advance human progress and achieve better standards of living.
In 1948, the UN agreed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which codified a common universal standard for the upholding of human dignity. Today, 10 December 2010, 62 years after the declaration, it is important for all people to reflect deeply on the meaning of human dignity in the 21st century. We want to remind our readers that the challenges of the moment demand that, in tandem with the ideals of Ubuntu, we elevate the new principle of the collective rights of human beings in the 21st century. The principle of Ubuntu which is now emerging as a core organising principle links humans to each other, to nature, and to the universe. It is this concept of shared humanity that we want to reflect on today so that we can promote an inclusive concept of peace, human dignity, and human rights.
THE UN DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
The idea of an international organisation such as the League of Nations had been shattered by military aggression, racism and xenophobia in Europe. Just as the US is now making mockery of the UN Charter, so the Germans and the Italians scuttled the idea of respect for national sovereignty and mutual respect. Africans remember vividly the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the use of chemical and biological weapons against Africans by the fascist Benito Mussolini of Italy. The attempt to create an international organisation to settle disputes among nations took shape only after the debacles of fascism, war, capitalist depression, the Nazi Holocaust, and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The genocide and mass killings of the Second World War had emanated from the genocidal mindset that had been celebrated as ‘development and progress.’ During the carnage of war the international momentum for peace gained force in the UN Charter, the Convention on Genocide, and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR). Despite the limitations of the implementation of the core elements of this declaration, it is important to state that oppressed peoples recognised the UDHR as a mobilising tool for the expansion of human and people’s rights. In the present environment of torture and the so-called global war on terror, the onslaught of austerity measures against people’s economic and cultural rights, and the general conflation of human rights with the rights of capitalists, it is important to expose the hollowness of Western human rights campaigns. Hence, we want to restate the importance of all the articles of the UDHR, but especially articles 1, 5, 22, and 25.
NO ONE SHALL BE SUBJECTED TO TORTURE
Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.’ Yet, capitalist torture is visited upon the majority of the citizens of the planet. Capitalist torture stretches from the sweatshops of Asia and the illegal mining fields of Eastern Congo to the toxic environmental pollution in the Niger Delta and the cancer alleys of New Orleans, as well as the threat of human incineration and denial of livelihood through global warming and biological colonisation of peoples of the Third World. To quote the former Irish president Mary Robinson, climate change now constitutes ‘the biggest human rights issue of the 21st century.’ International institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and their capitalist allies lobby against the collective rights of working people as much as they do against governments’ collective will to solve such pressing problems as global warming. They align with governments to violate labour laws and prevent environmental protection that could guarantee ordinary people’s rights to habitable environments.
This torture is supported by an information war to insure that citizens are dumbed down so that they do not get up and stand up for their rights. The right to information as a basic right is now being highlighted by the intense campaign against Wikileaks. This campaign against information freedom and democratic access to information underlines the vulnerability of the ruling classes and the reality that they are now retreating from the basic liberal principles of the system of capitalism. In order to maintain this social system, a vast military machinery has been deployed by the USA to prop up dictators and torturers around the world. This international support for torture and inhuman treatment has meant that the leaders of the USA openly celebrate torturing humans. In his book, ‘Decision Point’, former US President George W. Bush boasted of giving orders for water boarding. Water boarding is torture. Torture is a violation of international law. But George W. Bush was simply giving voice to the opposition of the principles of the rights of human beings. It is the same US government that spends millions of dollars hypocritically promoting human rights and fighting terrorism.
This celebration of the dispensation of torture and inhuman treatment in the 21st century by the same government that had violated Africans’ human and people’s rights in the name of fighting communism in the 20th century underlines the reason why all of the governments of Africa (except one) oppose the establishment of the US Africa Command. This hypocrisy of the US must be denounced on this international day for human rights.
Western concept of human rights and democracy has been premised on the liberal concept of property rights, which for centuries included the right to own, dehumanise, and exploit fellow human beings. In the United States the liberal agenda of the rights of individuals has been to reinforce and extend the right of absolute private property. This meant that those who had the right to absolute private property could dehumanise others and designate them less than human. It was for this reason that the USA designated African peoples as three-fifths of human. It required a major war for the US constitution to recognise Africans as full humans.
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’ This article no doubt was framed with the understanding of the Western concept of property rights which had legalised enslavement and claimed slaves were not equal humans with their European slave holders. The slave holders owned and commercialised the rights of enslaved persons, including their right to life. This is not only a question of the past. Those who want to patent life forms in the 21st century seek to give the right over life to profit-driven corporations. As sought by the intellectual property rights regime of the World Trade Organization, just about everything will be made into a commodity and corporations should have the right to patent life forms. There will be a new hierarchy of humans. In this context, select individuals and corporations would exercise the right to own the abstract and biological properties of things, such as genetic materials. They would monopolise the right to exclude others humans from freely using the products of the corporations’ patented genetic materials.
Digital technology now permeates the world with major implications for the concept of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written before the era when biotechnology rapidly moved from a purely academic field for research to a corporate forum. This year, Craig Venter announced that he had produced ‘synthetic’ life. For more than two decades the legal infrastructure of the USA has been preparing humans for this moment when capitalists could play God. In 1987, the Patents and Trademark Office (PTO) of the USA laid the basis for transnational corporations to grab new powers when the PTO decided to reverse its position regarding patenting and issued a ruling that all genetically engineered multi-cellular organisms (including animals) could be patented. The ruling excluded human beings however, due to the fact that the 13th amendment forbids human slavery. But the invention of ‘artificial’ life raises new issues for our common humanity. Jeremy Rifkin had reflected on this challenge when he noted, ‘genetically altered human embryos and fetuses as well as human genes, cell lines, tissues, and organs are potentially patentable, leaving open the possibility of patenting all of the separate parts, if not the whole, of a human being.’
Thus, the international human rights day should be seen as an opportunity to strengthen the articles of UDHR and all local and international legal tools that could be used to confront the challenges posed by property rights rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Samir Amin in his book, ‘The Liberal Virus’, demonstrates how the intellectual property rights regime, especially in the field of agriculture could lead to the decimation of a billion poor people. This magnitude of this challenge reinforces the question of what constitutes human rights in the 21st century.
EVERYONE HAS A RIGHT TO SOCIAL SECURITY
Article 22 of the UDHR states that: ‘Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.’ Though this article was not gender sensitive enough as evident in the use of ‘his’ in reference to men and women, the main point we want to highlight here is that the economic and social-cultural dimensions of rights are as important as the political rights. But in the dominant Western conception of human rights, the individual rights of capitalists to accumulate wealth (at the expense of the economic, social, and cultural wellbeing of human beings) are touted as though those were the essence of the totality of human dignity, peace, and freedom. This is especially evident in this era of capitalist depression when austerity measures are being imposed by the IMF, undermining the rights of workers and ordinary people to defend their socio-economic wellbeing. Today, the right to organise by women, students, workers, ordinary folks, and same gender loving persons remain core elements of international human rights agitation. One part of the commitment that could be made on this day of the celebration of international human rights is to study and expose these capitalist corporations instead of diverting attention through window-dressed studies on poverty alleviation that do not get to the roots of the problem.
At this juncture, we want to highlight article 25 of the UDHR. The first part of this article states that: ‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.’ Only the effects of the austerity measures as a response to the crumbling capitalist mode of economic organisation/re-organisation say it all: article 25 cannot be realised under the present mode of economic organisation. Realising the social and economic rights of humans requires a new social system in the 21st century.
The ruling classes are vulnerable on so many fronts, so they want people to forget the articles of the UDHR. The task of organising, educating, and mobilising people to this reality is becoming urgent but is confronted with the sophisticated propaganda machine that has been deployed by the generals and high priests of capitalism who make people fight against their own economic and social rights through the demonisation of the ideas of social collectivism.
EXTENDING RIGHTS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
In Africa, working people supported the UDHR as a document to use for mobilisation. In 1948, when this document was written, most African countries were under colonial rule. In the process of achieving their independence, Africans wrote their own Charter on Human and People’s Rights. Throughout the anti-colonial struggles, African intellectuals and human rights activists refused to accept the Western concept of human rights that excluded the question of self determination. These activists exposed the intellectual deformity that was manifest in the international campaign of powers that supported apartheid while championing human rights.
The African Charter on Human and People’s Rights which came into force in 1986 recognised that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not cover people’s collective rights, especially the right to self determination. The limitations of the UDHR were even clearer in terms of the rights of women. In 1979 the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was instituted as an attempt to repair one of the limitations of the UDHR. Thirty-one years after this convention, the US remains a non-signatory to it. The reproductive rights of women and their right to bodily integrity have taken the question of human rights beyond the state, church, patriarchal family forms, and conservative women. The battles over reproductive rights have brought into focus the fact that human rights cannot be separated from the rights of women and the right to healthcare. This is even more so in the context of the debate over the provision of universal health care in the United States. The healthcare industry and their allied politicians have so commercialised healthcare that not only was government intervention to provide universal healthcare coverage for tens of millions uninsured Americans denied, the over 200 million citizens who have health insurance are tied up in rigorous procedural complications designed to deny them access to the coverage they pay for while maximising profits for the health insurance companies. It is on the question of the reproductive rights of women that religious fundamentalists have now emerged as negative forces in the struggle for human rights. These fundamentalists mobilise ideas about tradition to reinforce patriarchal domination over women. The oppression of women is also linked to the oppression of same gender loving persons. Even some of the leading human rights advocates in Africa have been silent on the extreme anti-human statements that have been propounded by so-called ‘radical’ leaders in Africa. Within the rank of religious organisations, the most profound work is needed to challenge the anti-human position of those who would oppress same gender loving persons. Human rights in the 21st century must be extended to protect all human beings against all forms of torture and dehumanisation, whether in the name of religion and tradition or through the invisible hands of capitalism and neo-liberalism.
UBUNTU AND 21ST CENTURY HUMAN RIGHTS CHALLENGES
Those who organised for the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights worked hard to oppose dictatorship yesterday. Today, the new tasks require new thinking and new forms of organising. The task of re-humanisation and healing are linked to new modes of thinking and new forms of consciousness. At the time of the 1948 human rights declaration, Western governments gave themselves the prerogative to decide who is human and what is right. This was most evident in South Africa, where in the same 1948; the principles of apartheid were entrenched. Since the end of formal apartheid in 1994, international capitalism has sought to entrench a new global apartheid based on the kind of class structure that defends 1 or 2 per cent of the population. The towering challenges that confront humanity in the 21st century – environmental crisis, the crises of the capitalist mode of economic organisation, militarisation of the earth, and crises arising from the binary and hierarchical conception of human being – are now enough to take the veil of Western ideation of human and property rights off the face of our collective humanity. One of the central ideas I put forward in my book, ‘Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics’, is that a new concept of social collectivism (Ubuntu) must be the basis of economic, social, and political organisation if humans are to survive the challenges of the 21st century. As we celebrate international human rights day, we want to reiterate here that we cannot separate the question of human rights and Ubuntu – our linked humanity and our peaceful coexistence with planet earth – in the 21st century if we must have international peace and security.
Read more on Human rights, livelihoods and Ubuntu for the 21st century by Horace Campbell…
On Christmas Day 2009, a court in Beijing convicted Liu Xiaobo of “inciting subversion of state power” and sentenced him to 11 years in prison and two additional years of deprivation of political rights. The verdict cited as evidence passages from six essays Liu published online between 2005 and 2007 and his role in drafting Charter 08, an online petition for democratic reform issued on December 9; 2008 which has since been co-signed by some 10,000 persons, mostly Chinese in China. This December 2010, Liu Xiaobo will receive the Nobel Prize for Peace, though his presence at the ceremony in Oslo is in doubt.
Read more on The New Age Sun Rises in the East…
Written by Frederick Alexander Meade
In the many months since the 2008 presidential election, an increasing number of those within the African-American community have begun to question whether the electing of the United States first African-American President, Barack Obama, has functioned to yield any significant results in regard to remedying the abject condition of many of the group’s members.
Read more on A Third Party Choice For African-Americans And Others Marginalized…
KAMPALA, UGANDA – Four years after the government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA, rebels signed a cessation of hostilities agreement, many of the 1.8 million internally displaced people, IDPs, have begun to consider returning home.
Read more on Urban IDPs in Uganda Lack Services, Assistance by Beatrice Lamwaka…
A call to foes
who plug their ears hoping
not to hear their conscience’s call
for fidelity
solidarity
with Haiti
A call to friends
Wringing their hands
Waiting to follow the brave
Sufficiently outraged
To risk everything
To make humanity
one
healed
in Haiti
Only the bridge of Beauty will be strong enough for crossing from the bank of Darkness to the side of Light - Nicholas Roerich
The United Nations General Assembly in resolution A/RES.62/90 has proclaimed the year 2010 as the International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures “to promote universal respect for, and observation and protection of, all human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Cultures encompass not only the arts and humanities but also different ways of living together, value systems and traditions. Thus 2010 should provide real opportunities for dialogue among cultures. It is true that to an unprecedented degree people are meeting together in congresses, conferences and universities all over the globe. However, in themselves, such meetings are not dialogue and do not necessarily lead to rapprochement of cultures. There is a need to reach a deeper level. Reaching such deeper levels takes patience, tolerance, the ability to take a longer-range view, and creativity. Thus we are pleased to present the creative efforts of individuals who have helped to create bridges of understanding among cultures.
Read more on The Bridge of Beauty and Understanding By Rene Waldow…
Source: International Journal of Socialist Renewal
Marilyn Langlois, board member of the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund, interviewed by Amanda Zivcic, for Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal and Green Left Weekly.
Appeared on March 1, 2010
Read more on Haiti needs solidarity, not charity…