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.

Read more on Destroying a Country’s Standard of Living: What Libya Had Achieved, What has been Destroyed by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky…

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.

Read more on Global NATO and the recolonisation of Africa: Lessons from the Libyan intervention By Horace Campbell…

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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.

Read more on La lutte à mort entre l’inconscience du capital et la conscience de l’humanité By Jeacques Depelchin…

Read more on TOWARDS THE ERADICATION OF GLOBAL HUNGER AND UNDERNUTRITION: ENHANCING LOCAL UNDERSTANDING WITH THE POWER OF WORLD CLASS KNOWLEDGE, by XIN-YING REN AND FRED DUBEE…

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…

By Rene Waldow

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.

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appeared on net on the September 20, 2010

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…

www.otabenga.org

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

Read more on Haiti, Aristide, Fanmi Lavalass: Being a call to reclaim history, humanity, Africa, the commons By Jacques Depelchin…