Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Michelle Chen
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Posts by Michelle Chen
The Politics of Immigrant Scapegoating: Not Just an American Pastime
01 week ago
Around the world, as long as people keep moving, politicians will continue to talk breathlessly about the immigration “crisis.” It’s a campaign trail standard in the U.S., but in Britain and Western Europe as well, political figures waste no opportunity to project voters’ deepest fears and wildest misperceptions onto whatever group of newcomers is most visible–whether they’re Egyptian, Roma or Polish.
Here in the U.S., all the GOP presidential hopefuls are racing to brandish their nativist street cred. But Mitt Romney has pulled ahead in the meme-fest coming out of South Carolina’s primary. Despite his own immigrant lineage (due to his Mormon missionary roots), Romney has checked off all the boxes: supporting E-Verify, promising to beef up border security, and smacking down the DREAM Act for undocumented students. Appealing to law-and-order types, Romney touts the endorsement of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who helped craft Arizona’s SB1070 law. (South Carolina, too, boasts an SB1070 copycat bill.)
Not to be outdone, Rick Santorum has argued that once you’ve crossed the border illegally, regardless of what you do or the family you raise thereafter, “everything you’re doing while you’re here is against the law.”
The resurgent Newt Gingrich has touted a relatively “humane” reform plan based on a vaguely defined screening process that might legalize “about 1 million” undocumented immigrants. Though the plan would expel roughly “7 or 8 or 9 million” to their home countries before they can apply to return, even this proposal was immediately decried by rivals as “amnesty.”
But immigrant-bashing isn’t just an American pastime. Although Europe’s far-right movements have generally laid low since Anders Breivik’s murderous rampage against “multiculturalism” in Norway, the hard right remains a vocal minority in several countries.
France–the country the GOP vilifies as a bastion of wine-swilling egalitarian liberals–has stepped up deportations, according to the Washington Post. President Nicolas Sarkozy, himself a descendant of immigrants*, has pushed for more deportations as he approaches a tough election. Squeezing the president even further to the right is the hardline National Front party, trumpeting a fiercely anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant platform.
Sakorzy’s government sparked international outrage last year with the so-called “burqa ban.” The criminalization of veiled Muslim women reflects a general stereotype, promoted by the political class, that Muslims are unwilling to “assimilate.”
Racial hostility has also intensified against communities of ethnic Roma, who have been systematically expelled or displaced by the government’s bulldozers.
Revealing misplaced economic anxiety, Italian conservatives have proposed to kick out immigrants who have been unemployed for six months, and their families.
British politicians play a similar tune, the UK Independent reports:
Government ministers have implied a link between immigration and joblessness. “Controlling immigration is critical or we will risk losing another generation to dependency and hopelessness,” said Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, in a speech last July.
The Coalition has imposed a cap on immigration from outside the European Union and has pledged to reduce net migration to “the tens of thousands” a year by the end of this parliament in 2015.
Nevermind a recent study by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research that shows “no link between rising immigration and rising unemployment.” But the debate rages on with yet another controversial study suggesting some correlation between native-born unemployment and “non-European” immigration.
Such political tensions are kindling for violence. Germany’s Turkish immigrant community has been shaken by neo-Nazi murders, as well as incensed at the center-right government’s perceived failure to adequately investigate the crimes. Still, Peter Grossman at Public Affairs contends that politicians’ concerns about “right wing terrorism” is really a red herring that obscures extremist elements embedded within the state. Mainstream conservatives, Grossman suggests, might just be keeping Nazi-affiliated groups around on the margins to keep the public tense, which in turn strengthens the political centrists as guarantors of stability.
But there’s a fine line between containing the ultra-right and validating them. The far-right actually picked up 6 percent of the state parliamentary vote in Mecklenburg. According to Der Spiegel, strong support has come from economically depressed rural communities, where slogans like “Criminal Foreigners Out” resonate with disaffected voters.
Switzerland’s recent election saw a surge in votes for the Swiss People’s Party, which has deployed chillingly familiar propaganda tropes, such as, according to the Associated Press, “striking posters of black boots stomping on the Swiss flag with the message ‘Stop Mass Immigration’ ” and graphics of “white sheep kicking out a black sheep or dark hands grasping for Swiss passports.”
In a 2011 essay in The Nation, author Ian Buruma observed that, in contrast to the vintage image of “neo-Fascists pining for black shirts and military marches”:
Europe’s new populists are smartly dressed modern men and women who claim to be defending our freedoms. And they are persuasive because people are afraid and resentful, blaming economic and social anxieties on “liberal elites.” But if the fears are vague and various, the focal point is Islam.
On both sides of the Atlantic, political scapegoating attests both to prevailing ignorance as well as to the political establishment’s delusions of power. Politicians exploit social frustrations by peddling the belief that passing racist laws or building higher fences can turn back a demographic process set in motion by centuries of global capitalism, war and imperialism–and save their pension in the process.
Ordinary people, however, seem to be discovering that maintaining empire is the province of officialdom, not democracy. A recent Pew study of public opinion reveals that in today’s economic climate, “conflicts between rich and poor now rank ahead of three other potential sources of group tension–between immigrants and the native born; between blacks and whites; and between young and old.”
But no savvy politician would highlight the widening gulf between the masses of poorer people on one side, and the elite seeking their votes on the other. For the would-be rulers of prosperous advanced democracies, it’s always safer to stick to the traditional dividing line between Us and Them: the border.
Michelle Chen is a regular contributor to Colorlines.com.
*This article originally incorrectly reported that Sakorzy is himself an immigrant.
It’s NAFTA x3 as Free Trade Deals Sweep Through Congress
03 months ago
One day in September, Isidro Rivera Barrera, a contract worker and labor organizer who was campaigning at an Ecopetrol refining facility in Barrancabermeja, Colombia, was reportedly gunned down outside his home. His death was met with the usual silence–just business as usual in a country with one of the world’s worst human rights records for attacks on trade unionists. But now, the hushed suffering of Colombian workers reverberates in the U.S. Capitol, which has just passed a deal to bring even more business-as-usual to Colombia.
Congress last week approved three long-pending trade deals with Panama, South Korea and Colombia. The rationale behind each of them is dubious; there’s little evidence that the agreements will lift up the U.S. economy and plenty that they could lead to massive job loss in key sectors. But free trade deals have always been less about creating jobs than exporting neoliberal ideology to the Global South, thereby accelerating poor nations’ cascade toward low labor standards, environmental exploitation and deregulation.
The new trade deals had been stalled under the Bush administration, due to concerns that they would undermine human rights and economic security in the same way the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) wreaked havoc on Mexico and the U.S. years before. But the Obama administration has picked up where its predecessor left off and finalized these corporate wish lists.
Fair-trade activists and labor groups, both in the U.S. and in the civil societies of “partner” nations, warn that the new deals will only exacerbate the inequities that landed the global economy in the ongoing crisis: lax labor standards and unfettered corporate greed, along with a blank check to abuse the environment and trample indigenous people’s land rights. Buoyed by the momentum of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a diverse coalition of groups gave one last push to block the deals in the final days before the vote. But hammering lawmakers with phone calls and emails didn’t shake bipartisan dedication to the pacts.
The three deals collectively represent the spectrum of grievances that advocates have raised about free trade at home and abroad.
The Panama deal, according to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, would do little to improve economic conditions, but would promote development under a regime known for “unhesitating corruption,” nested in an infamous offshore tax haven for corporate cronies.
The Colombia deal, meanwhile, has been denounced by human rights advocates and labor unions for having prettily worded, but deeply inadequate labor protections. Just as the ink was drying on the deal, Colombian trade unionists took to the streets to protest exploitative working conditions under multinational bosses in Puerto Gaitán, and Colombia’s government faced international condemnations for failing to address a long-standing epidemic of retaliatory attacks on labor activists.
“It is anti-social for any nation to adopt a free trade agreement with Colombia so long as that government continues to allow impunity for the cowards who commit cold blooded murder on trade unionists,” Dick Blin of the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions, which has campaigned on the Ecopetrol case, told Colorlines.com.
But what might be deemed “anti-social” from a human rights standpoint can pass for “international partnership” in Washington. The South Korea trade deal, which is expected to encourage more offshoring of U.S.-based jobs while eroding consumer and labor protections, illustrates the curious ethical calculations that guide global commerce. As the legislation neared approval, the administration opened a loophole specifically for U.S. manufacturers to export cars that fall short of South Korea’s emissions standards, effectively offshoring American pollution to a country with more progressive environmental policy.
Environmental activists have in fact argued broadly that the trade deals would usher in environmentally destructive development–take, for instance, palm oil plantations, which could displace Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities.
As fair trade activists revamp their campaigns in the wake of last week’s congressional vote, many have aligned themselves with the various Occupation movements that have sprung up around the country. Sukjong Hong of Korean Americans for Fair Trade, who works with Occupy Wall Street’s nascent Trade Justice Working Group, explains:
We know that the votes were conducted quickly, without much fanfare or public debate, and they took place a year before the 2012 elections so that voters will forget–but we want them to know we will not forget. Obama broke his promise as a presidential candidate to review and repeal the NAFTA trade model and his own opposition to the U.S.-Colombia trade deal because of human rights issues.
Still, a substantial minority of House members did vote against the free trade deals. Arthur Stamoulis of Citizens Trade Campaign said this suggests that even in Congress, skepticism about mantra-like promotion of free trade has grown, though not by enough:
Despite [the movement's success in] convincing more than two-thirds of House Democrats to stand with working constituents and vote against these pacts, the decision by so many freshmen Republicans to collude with the White House on passing these job-killing agreements was impossible to overcome…. The so-called Tea Party Republicans and President Obama both abandoned their bases to curry favor with corporate offshorers, tax evaders and Wall Street executives.
And as we’ve reported before, the administration is already greasing the skids for an even broader trade deal, a NAFTA-style deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would stretch from Chile to Vietnam.
Meanwhile, concrete ideas to reform free trade systems generally get little attention in the Beltway. But Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown’s proposed TRADE Act, would allow lawmakers to revise existing deals and establish stronger safeguards for labor, environment and other social issues in future trade pacts.
The threadbare protections that politicians have touted in existing trade deals have proven useless in fighting sweatshops. Jeff Ballinger at Labor Notes details what real safeguards would look like:
We know that including labor rights language in trade deals hasn’t stopped global corporations from exploiting workers and whitewashing their records with “social responsibility” baloney. So what can? Strong unions, pressure groups of consumers, and truly independent factory monitors are an imperfect–but far better–combination to hold them accountable.
The grassroots uprisings that have erupted around the globe this year show that real change happens when ordinary people are willing to look horizontally for solutions, reaching outside the establishment to engage peers and neighbors in reshaping the status quo.
“Really, it’s all about grassroots education and movement building,” says Stamoulis of the Citizens Trade Campaign. “Nobody said taking on some of the most powerful economic interests in world history would be easy. We’re in this for the long haul.”
Michelle Chen is a regular contributor to Colorlines.com.
Africa and the International Criminal Court: Is Global Justice Blind?
04 months ago
When several prominent Kenyans appear before the International Criminal Court in the coming days, they’ll be judged by a legal standard that no one, in theory, should be above. But to critics, the court itself isn’t above politics that too often get in the way of real justice.
The cases center on six men from Kenya’s two main rival factions, who allegedly helped orchestrate an outbreak of post-election violence. For weeks, the country was awash in killings, rapes and the displacement of some half a million people, and then months of tense silence. Many Kenyans are hopeful that the International Criminal Court (ICC) might cut through the country’s “culture of impunity.” Others fear the court will only exercise the cultural impunity of Western powers.
The ICC itself is a recent invention–based on the 2002 protocol known as the Rome Statute (joined by 118 countries, not including the U.S.). But the institution is rooted in a legacy of international courts dating back decades, from the post-World War II Nuremburg Trials to post-conflict tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. It’s still evolving. So far, the court has yielded only a handful of cases and trials. One of the most notorious suspects, President Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan, remains “at large.” In part this is due to the ICC’s limited jurisdiction, as a court of last resort for issues that governments fail to address through their own institutions. ICC trials, based on investigations that can be initiated by the prosecutor or by the United Nations Security Council, focus on “those accused of the gravest crimes.”
That doesn’t guarantee justice for victims, of course, but it does at least get people talking about what it might look like. Last year, Kenya’s fragile coalition government (a fusion of the two factions that clashed in 2007) launched a new constitution to help push the country beyond the conflicts that shattered Kenya’s image as a bastion of stability in the region.
Today, Kenyans wonder whether outside intervention through the ICC would solidify national unity or reopen half-healed wounds.
The ICC issue has reignited domestic political tensions ahead of the 2012 elections, imperiling the presidential prospects of Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Kenya’s first President Jomo Kenyatta. Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo charges that Kenyatta and two other high-profile allies of President Mwai Kibaki, conspired to stoke factional and ethnic violence after the election, including brutal police crackdowns as well as attacks by members of the Kikuyu Mungiki sect against supporters of Prime Minister Raila Odinga. (Three suspects on Odinga’s side also face ICC charges.)
Kenyatta, for his part, has denounced the allegations as a “pack of lies.” Earlier this year, the Kenyan government even sought to block the entire ICC process from moving forward, though the attempt at a legal end-run ultimately failed, according to Human Rights Watch.
Kenyans in the street are divided. In a BBC report last December, an interviewee voiced well-founded skepticism: “The work of the ICC is partial and if they are not going to raise the standards, they have no business investigating people. Whether by design or default, politics can be read all over the work of this court.”
But Patrick Gathara, a Kenyan political cartoonist and activist, told Colorlines.com that a flawed process could still serve a higher purpose:
The court is itself set up to achieve political purposes and is therefore open to criticisms of bias and selective prosecutions. While these are legitimate concerns, we should not lose sight of the fact that the court does try real cases and deal with real crimes; and that some justice (however selective) is better than none. …
[The ICC] targets African countries and “rogue” states simply because the powers that be (read: the West) will not countenance their citizens or their allies being subject to international processes…. International justice, like most other international systems, is an evolving concept and therefore we should consolidate whatever advances have been made while at the same time seeking to extend them.
The Kenyan government is getting even more mixed reviews. According to one monitoring report published earlier this year, opinion surveys show that despite reforms following the 2007 conflicts:
Politicians are widely viewed as sponsors of illegal armed groups that took part in the violence, and which transformed into extortion gangs. Up to 42 percent of respondents in the survey think these illegal groups will emerge and play a political role before 2012. Failure to prosecute political and civil crimes has eroded public confidence in the government’s ability and willingness to fight impunity. It has slowed the momentum of citizen advocacy for prosecution or other forms of accountability.
According to surveys, a slight majority of Kenyans favored an ICC trial in the Hague for the six suspects; about a third preferred a “local tribunal.”
Applying a global standard of equal justice seems near impossible for crimes that stem from vast inequalities in wealth and power, particularly when judgement shades into issues of race and gender. The court’s critics see imperialism behind its seemingly disproportionate fixation on, and demonization of, the leaders of African countries (Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Darfur and Central African Republic in addition to Kenya). And when it operates alongside a global war on terror (the leaders of which have somehow, curiously, evaded the long arm of the law), a court without boundaries seems the very picture of neoliberal impunity.
After the ICC issued a warrant against Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi earlier this year, the head of the African Union lashed out at the court for imposing Western-centric “double standards,” reported the New York Times:
The African Union’s chairman, Jean Ping, told reporters that the court was “discriminatory” and focused on crimes committed in Africa but ignored those committed by Western powers, including in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
“With this in mind, we recommend that the member states do not cooperate with the execution of this arrest warrant,” the motion said.
Its scope may be narrow, but the ICC dockets are hardly stuffed with frivolous charges. They’re replete with chronically overlooked cases of rape, mass murder and other atrocities. The injustice lies in the ongoing human rights violations that take place outside the Hague every day, sometimes under regimes that the ICC is already probing. Indeed, Human Rights Watch criticized the ICC as well for inconsistent case selection–not necessarily because of political or racial bias, but because investigations had often overlooked major crimes and perpetrators.
Gender-related violence is another potential blind spot, particularly in the case of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, a DRC rebel now on trial for crimes related to child soldiers. Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice recently expressed outrage at “the absence of charges for gender-based crimes in the case against the leader of a militia group widely known to have committed rape, sexual enslavement, and other forms of sexualised violence.”
More than 60 years ago, in the wake of the Holocaust, the Nuremburg trials seeded a vision for some form of universal justice. Now, the ICC still falls well short of that goal, but it has widened the road to global justice and complicated it along the way. Recently, some have speculated that Palestine’s pursuit of full statehood status at the U.N. might open opportunities to bring Israel to the Hague. Imagine the state birthed from the ashes of genocide finally being held to account for atrocities committed in its own name.
José Ayala Lasso, former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights once warned us, “A person stands a better chance of being tried and judged for killing one human being than for killing 100,000.” Though the International Criminal Court hasn’t corrected that imbalance, it has tipped the scales of justice just slightly, toward a collective moral gravity.
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This will be my last Global Justice column. Thanks. It’s been real. You can keep following my work at a freshly launched project that links artists and writers with immigration issues, WordStrike. And you can catch me at In These Times, WBAI’s Asia Pacific Forum, or on the Twitters @meeshellchen.
As U.N. Debates Palestinian Statehood, Palestinian People Still Ignored
04 months ago
Depending on which part of the world you occupy, the United Nations is either a well-meaning but inept political body, or a place where humanitarian ideals go to die. Either way, this week’s General Assembly gathering has revealed that the U.N.’s founding principles often ring hollow in the cavernous hall where officials convene to talk about the world’s problems–and do as little as possible to fix them. Still, this year could be a pivot point for one of the most intractable conflicts on the world stage.
In an unprecedented political gambit, the Palestinian Authority has sought full United Nations recognition and membership as a state. The Palestinians are, essentially, trying to use the same mechanism that established Israel back in 1947. Their own statehood bid, which could have not only symbolic but also legal implications for Palestine’s international standing, has support in the majority of the General Assembly.
It is nonetheless dead on arrival, since the U.S., as a member of the Security Council, has vowed to veto the measure if it comes up for a vote. The Obama administration is reportedly working frantically to convince Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas not to go through with plans to formally submit the request after his speech today. Israel has warned (with both diplomatic and military threats) that approving the bid would fatally disrupt the already moribund “peace process.”
However things unfold from here, the Palestinian Authority has set in motion a diplomatic frenzy that has at least momentarily reinvigorated the debate over their basic right to live free of occupation. On balance, critical observers say the statehood push is a calculated exercise in blind hope. Middle East chronicler Robert Fisk offered a pessimistic assessment, but acknowledged that the campaign to concretize Palestine’s “fantasy state” could fundamentally alter the political landscape:
This vote at the UN–General Assembly or Security Council, in one sense it hardly matters–is going to divide the West–Americans from Europeans and scores of other nations–and it is going to divide the Arabs from the Americans. It is going to crack open the divisions in the European Union; between eastern and western Europeans, between Germany and France (the former supporting Israel for all the usual historical reasons, the latter sickened by the suffering of the Palestinians) and, of course, between Israel and the EU.
Fisk argues that though the statehood campaign may be doomed, the silver lining will be the exposure of the hypocrisy of the U.S.-Israel alliance, despite President Obama’s claims of restoring the international image of the U.S.:
In the new Middle East, amid the Arab Awakening and the revolt of free peoples for dignity and freedom, this UN vote–passed in the General Assembly, vetoed by America if it goes to the Security Council–constitutes a kind of hinge; not just a page turning, but the failure of empire.
But the statehood application at issue isn’t just a matter of Palestine versus empire. Plenty of Palestinians, in fact, don’t want the fate of their nation decided by a political class that they feel doesn’t speak for them. Many activists fear it will only buttress existing imperialist structures and enable the Palestinian Authority, whose legitimacy as a ruling body has been questioned, to consolidate its power and undercut grassroots resistance movements.
The activist coalition U.S. Palestinian Community Network, which recently rallied at the U.N. against the statehood bid, argues in a statement of opposition:
this initiative in no way protects nor advances our inalienable, and internationally recognized, rights–fundamental of which are our right to return to the homes and properties from which we were forcibly expelled, our right to self-determination, and our right to resist the settler colonial regime that has occupied our land for more than 63 years. The Palestinian people, wherever they are, hold these rights. They are non-negotiable. No one can barter them away for false promises of “peace” and “stability.”
Reports from the front lines of the occupation reveal deep ambivalence toward the issue, steeped in fear that the plans for statehood status would marginalize many ordinary Palestinians’ aspirations for true independence and sovereignty.
Sami Abu Zuhrim, spokesperson for Hamas in Gaza (rival to Abbas’s Fatah party) told Electronic Intifada that the initiative could undercut Palestinians’ right to return, arguing, “I do not believe that the Palestinian people want a seat at the U.N., but rather they want freedom and self-determination on their own land.”
The same report quoted Iman Qaddada, a university student from Gaza City: “Will a UN recognition of a Palestinian state on 1967 border lines allow us to take care of our Palestinian brothers and sisters in neighboring Arab countries like Jordan and Syria?”
Reflecting the sharp divisions pervading both the land of Palestine as well as its politics, blogger Rana Baker drew an analogy with an apartheid-era political trope:
The state they want me to embrace is one disconnected and disjointed by a racist wall. A state on less than 22% of historic Palestine through which illegal settlements snake and swallow up water and other natural resources. Something that one can call a bantustan. Indeed, something I, we, the majority of Palestinians, cannot afford.
At Al Jazeera, political scholar Joseph Massad predicts that whatever the outcome of the statehood bid, Israel and the Palestinian political elite both stand to gain. The effort wouldn’t resolve issues of borders and human rights violations, nor would it resolve a key legal problem–which is not a lack of international recognition, per se, but the political barriers the U.S. deploys to stonewall legitimate efforts by Palestinians to raise grievances through international law:
The unending “peace process” will continue with more stringent conditions and an angry US, upset at the PA challenge, will go back to exactly where the PA is today, if not to a weaker position. President Obama and future US administrations will continue to push for PA and Arab recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state” that has the right to discriminate by law against non-Jews in exchange for an ever-deferred recognition of a Palestinian Bantustan as an “economically viable” Palestinian state–a place where Palestinian neoliberal businessmen can make profits off international aid and investment.
Either outcome will keep the Palestinian people colonised, discriminated against, oppressed, and exiled. This entire brouhaha over the UN vote is ultimately about which of the two scenarios is better for Israeli interests. The Palestinian people and their interests are not even part of this equation.
Keep in mind that all this gamesmanship is taking place at the United Nations, the institution that was supposed to stand apart from from ugly geopolitical conflicts and compel nations to face common humanitarian challenges together. It’s doubly ironic that as the General Assembly gets entangled in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the world is barely noticing that some groups have gathered at the U.N. to try to rekindle that original vision–at a meeting of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, a decade-old initiative “to eliminate all forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.” (More irony: Israeli groups have also denounced the Durban process as anti-semitic because it has opened a channel for debating Palestinian self-determination.)
The voices behind the Durban Declaration, representing the displaced and disenfranchised, shouldn’t expect to get a full and fair hearing before a political body that sounds increasingly like an echo chamber for superpowers. Whether they’re in New York or Palestine, the unheard again find themselves shouting at the wall; they might as well take it back to the streets.
Political Power Struggle Overshadows South Africa’s Broken Promise
04 months ago
It’s been more than two decades since South Africa overthrew apartheid rule, but ordinary South Africans today live under a different, subtler form of oppression–governed by those who came to power as their liberators.
The crisis that has gripped the regime of the African National Congress (ANC) lately is not the country’s crippling poverty, its festering corruption nor its threadbare infrastructure. All eyes are on Julius Malema, the leader of the ANC Youth League, who has been found guilty on charges of “hate speech” in a disciplinary case brought under the country’s Equality Act. His offense was singing a racially charged old anti-apartheid anthem “Shoot the Boer,” but the verdict reflects general anxiety about the young firebrand’s role in the party. He has angered and embarrassed party higher-ups with remarks attacking South Africa’s ally Botswana and calling for the nationalization of mines and other industries. At the same time, the ANC leadership’s retaliation against Malema has sparked protests among followers who see him as a sort of folk hero who embodies widespread public disgust with ANC rule.
Some call the Malema controversy a “battle for the ANC’s soul,” between the establishment, represented by President Jacob Zuma, and the militant populism that Malema has stirred up. But Malema is a shrewd political player himself, embedded in a political class consumed by corporate cronyism. Some activists view him simply as an opportunist within the regime, and his call for nationalization as a self-serving rhetorical tactic to empower his faction and business allies. The grassroots Unemployed People’s (Shack Dwellers) Movement recently dismissed Malema as a “demagogue,” a product of a society in turmoil, not a force to deal with the nation’s institutional decay.
Pedro Tabensky, a philosophy professor at Rhodes University, told Colorlines that the political ambitions and business connections on both sides of the rivalry indicate that its about power, not ideology:
I think at bottom the Zuma/Malema war is expressive of a party that is in general terms no longer committed to its forming ideals.
It’s been almost 20 years since the advent of democracy and the ANC has done almost nothing for the poor in this time. And the more the poor start to raise their voices the more they are met with a state that shows itself over and over again to have no interest in their plight. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the ANC to hide behind rhetoric. Years go by and the mismatch between rhetoric and concrete emancipation becomes ever more apparent.
Many South Africans are justifiably incensed that the post-apartheid leadership has followed the path of its predecessor in many aspects, systematically exploiting the country’s poor and its natural resources at the expense of democracy. Within the ANC, Malema has capitalized on the public’s disillusionment. Yet the anger in the townships isn’t about aligning with one faction or the other, but about the profound hypocrisy underlying South Africa’s image as a model post-colonial democracy.
Leonard Gentle, director of the South Africa-based think tank International Labour Research and Information Group, says the Malema controversy is a platform for ANC factions to spar in the lead-up to the 2012 party elections, while restraining real political debate. He acknowledges in a commentary that even if Malema’s message is “sheer opportunism,” the gagging of Malema and the ANC Youth League reveals the white domination and class barriers that still striate the public sphere.
And what is their crime? Calling for nationalisation, defying the decisions of the parent body, accusing whites of stealing the land, and trying to open up the succession debate in the ruling party….
The right of the ANCYL to openly promote their views and to campaign for their choice of ANC leaders should be defended by all democrats and should not be compromised by this association with Malema….
What holds back public debate in South Africa is the dead weight of white entitlement in the media, both print and television. Anything faintly redistributive is simply attacked. Any acknowledgment of the violence of apartheid is simply “dragging us backwards.” Any reference to the liberation struggle is stigmatised as racist by association.
While the ANC focuses on Malema’s political transgressions, a more pernicious crime thrives throughout all corners of South African society. Since apartheid’s fall, aggressive economic liberalization and privatization of government institutions have aggravated myriad forms of social inequality.
Social data from recent years show that apartheid-era divisions have remained intact even if explicit segregation has been abolished. Educational disparities have persisted, with a “newly wealthy non-white population” joining whites within a tiny elite. Access to healthcare services and facilities remains harshly stratified between richer and poorer communities, partially due to unequal funding systems. The government has suppressed protests with brutality that recalls the crackdowns of an earlier era, leaving citizens to wonder what actual progress has been made since the ANC took power.
Against this backdrop of oppression, the fact that the ANC’s crackdown on Malema has invoked the country’s landmark civil rights law reflects a skewed sense of social priorities. Activists on the ground have condemned both Zuma and Malema for exploiting or betraying the legacy of Nelson Mandela and the original ANC of the anti-apartheid struggle.
With the ANC consumed by internecine warfare, some grassroots movements have declared independence from the old guard as well as from Malema’s faction, and their direct actions often parallel movements unfolding across the Global South. Last February in Grahamstown, public outrage exploded at the authorities’ failure to address sexual violence and poor housing conditions, staging the occupation of government offices and road blockades. After the police cracked down, the Unemployed People’s Movement issued a statement declaring the sit-in “our own little Tahrir Square” and argued, “It is incredible that our demand for justice is taken as violence while the way that we are supposed to live without jobs, houses or toilets or basic safety is taken as normal.”
S’bu Zikode, founder of the Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers) Movement, a campaign for “the militant poor in post-apartheid South Africa,” said during a recent visit to New Zealand:
We held our first free elections in 1994. Nelson Mandela promised jobs, security, education, a rainbow nation where all people would get fair, even treatment, and respect.
What’s happened is that the oppressed have become the oppressors. A huge gap has opened between the poor and the rich; it’s no longer a battle for justice based on colour, it’s now social class and money.
The ANC has staked its legitimacy on its vaunted history for nearly a generation now, but in today’s South Africa, their political inheritance is all but spent. The country’s democratic project, a revolutionary work in progress, now falls to a generation of activists who must build on, not ride on, the legacy of their founding struggle.
In a Precarious Revolution, Libya’s Endgame Is Only Beginning
04 months ago
Across Tripoli, revolutionaries have perched themselves on a dangerous dream. Author Khaled Darwish reflected in a recent New York Times dispatch from the capital’s battered streets:
I heard that Al Sarim Street was full of the bodies of the dead, including women and children who had fallen to snipers’ bullets and were left in the street because no one dared approach. … A few days ago, we were almost killed by one of these snipers who shot at us and then sped off. I found myself prostrate, then crawling until my glasses broke. This is how Colonel Qaddafi wants us to be: crawling. But no more: We have grown wings.
But elsewhere in the city, thousands have been languishing indefinitely in makeshift prisons, captives of a rebel government still grasping to establish control. Masses of dark-skinned people, many of them African migrant workers, have evidently been rounded up on vague suspicions of working as pro-Qaddafi mercenaries. Their bleak captivity, despite their protestations of innocence, suggest that even at a moment of supposed national liberation, some remain trapped in an oppressive past.
The new Libya now straddles these two contrasting scenes, its freedom struggle ruptured by infighting and pressure from foreign forces that have their own designs for the country’s future. Yet viewed from a wide angle, the revolution has cracked open a window for a new political vision, spanning the full spectrum of peril and promise that Libyans have long been denied.
Hijacking a Revolution?
Some tout Libya’s revolt as a vindication of what has been called President Obama’s strategy of “leading from behind.” To others, though, Libya’s armed uprising breaks ominously from the narrative of the Arab Spring–the ideal of youth-led, largely secular and nonviolent pro-democracy movements. Rightfully skeptical of the pretext of “responsibility to protect,” critics on the left are wary that oil-hungry Western powers simply want to replace Qaddafi’s reign with another government friendly to their interests. (Not long ago, the dictator was apparently a trusted ally in War on Terror, doling out brutality in partnership with Washington.)
The debate rages on about whether the emergent transitional authority will institute democracy, return to a non-democratic regime or just plunge the fractious country into all-out civil war. But amid the chaos, it’s clear that many, many Libyans want to see some kind of systemic change, though the trajectory of change will be steered by volatile internal and external struggles.
In an interview with the Real News Network’s Paul Jay, Hamid Dabashi, a Columbia University Islamic cultural scholar and ardent critic of U.S. foreign policy, took a nuanced view of Libya’s precarious future, distinguishing between enabling empire and supporting revolution:
Dabashi: The democratic uprising began before the U.N. resolution. NATO, U.S. and [the] U.N. resolution, they are riding on a democratic uprising of Libya. So we have to keep in mind that the initial site of this democratic uprising is perfectly legitimate, and the fact that the United States, NATO are using this situation to create a military foothold for themselves should not detract from the fundamental fact of the Libyan revolutionary uprising.
Paul Jay: When you say “not detract,” what does that mean? I mean people outside either have to oppose or support the NATO intervention, don’t they?
Dabashi: Well, in a very simple compound sentence, you support a democratic uprising and you oppose the NATO intervention.
Yet that simple sentence has complex inflections in the emergent post-Qaddafi Libya: already we see evidence of atrocities committed on both sides of the vicious battle, a resurgence of violent racism against black Africans, mysteriously looted munitions warehouses, and clashes within a fragile coalition of factions ranging from pro-democracy dissidents to Islamists to aggrieved tribal fighters.
It’s not a huge imaginative leap to compare Libya with a litany of other questionable NATO- and U.S.-led humanitarian interventions: the most disturbing recent examples are massive violence and instability in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the pre-9/11 era, Kosovo in the Balkans. John Feffer, an analyst with the D.C.-based think tank Institute for Policy Studies, told Colorlines that in a geopolitical arena that offers no good choices:
One could argue that the alternatives are even worse, as in the case of Rwanda when there was no military intervention…. So we’re basically comparing bad situations and worse situations, or in some cases worse situations and worse situations. But nevertheless, humanitarian intervention has not racked up a particularly successful track record.
But Feffer added that “it is possible that the Libyan scenario will prove to be one of the better cases,” if indigenous forces and organizations can move quickly to empower civil society and shift international support toward reconstruction.
Commentator Dan Hind sketched out a best-case scenario in which Libya protects itself from foreign manipulation by drawing on solidarity from regional pro-democracy allies:
Those of us outside Libya who wish the country well cannot do very much, but we can do something. We can pay attention. The democrats who brought down Ben Ali and Mubarak can offer solidarity and advice. Iraq’s oil workers have learned valuable lessons about the tactics of the Western powers in their brave campaign to protect their country’s assets from a foreign takeover. The demonstrators in Europe and the United States can weaken the forces of unaccountable power in their own countries by supporting democracy and natural justice in Libya.
Guarding a Movement
So the war to oust Gaddafi may well have been partially co-opted by outside agendas–and activists are right to be cynical about the U.S. and Europe’s selective military involvement in popular uprisings. But the spirit of the rebellion itself hasn’t yet been stolen, and at least some Libyans have proven their willingness to defend it at all costs. Yes, the idea of a NATO-backed revolution sullies the hope for autonomous grassroots movements taking flight. But if the core of the revolution manages to survive the mess, academic and social critic Mahmood Mamdani contends that other dictators in the region will find themselves on much shakier ground:
Whereas the fall of Mubarak and Ben Ali directed our attention to internal social forces, the fall of Gaddafi has brought a new equation to the forefront: the connection between internal opposition and external governments. Even if those who cheer focus on the former and those who mourn are preoccupied with the latter, none can deny that the change in Tripoli would have been unlikely without a confluence of external intervention and internal revolt.
Foreign humanitarian interventions, particularly those that serve as a smokescreen for neo-imperialism, can never substitute for popular resistance–and indeed, often militate against it. As the country works to heal from war and generations of oppression, the survival of the Libyan revolution’s roots–spawned in a real indigenous movement for justice–will depend on whether activists have the strength to defend it on the ground level. Navigating that terrain means rediscovering the core of the struggle across the region. It’s the realization that genuine mass movements can’t be contained from the inside nor from the outside, neither by dictators nor by Washington’s post-9/11 military and economic hegemony.
However flawed the mechanics of Libya’s revolution have proven so far, the engine of people power can still relaunch itself. And now that the rebellion has moved past the old regime, it’s time for another hollow empire to get out of the way.
Labor Day Showdown: Can Advocates Stop ‘NAFTA of the Pacific’?
05 months ago
This Labor Day, the Pacific Rim will wash into the Midwest’s flagship city, and activists will confront the tides of global commerce with a demand for global economic justice.
At trade talks in Chicago, the Obama administration will work with other officials to develop a trade agreement that will incorporate Vietnam, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, Chile and Peru. Labor, environmental and human rights groups will gather in the city to warn that the structure, and guiding ideology, of the emerging trade deal could expand a model of free-marketeering that has displaced masses of workers across the globe and granted multinationals unprecedented powers to flout national and international laws.
The provisions of the Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement or Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are still under wraps. But the general outline seems to mimic the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and similar pacts that have brought political and economic turmoil to rich and poor countries alike. The new negotiations are also taking place amid political friction over pending trade deals with South Korea and Colombia, which have run into opposition over concerns about labor abuses abroad and offshoring of U.S. jobs. Yet the White House continues to push free trade as a path toward the country’s economic revitalization.
So on Monday, activists with Stand Up! Chicago and other groups hope to get ahead of political deal-making by demanding that any new trade deal give greater priority to environmental, labor, and health concerns. The ongoing trade talks offer a tiny opening for advocates to put forward ideas for making trade less hostile to ordinary people. In a way, they’re taking the Obama administration on its own word, because the TPP has been billed as a “21st century” trade pact that will presumably improve on previous trade agreements.
Of course, that could just be the tepidly liberal spin on a deal that is shaping up to be the “NAFTA of the Pacific,” as activists call it: a pact that coddles corporate interests like sweatshop manufacturers, pharmaceutical makers, and agribusinesses seeking to eliminate any barriers to profit.
Manuel Perez-Rocha, an analyst with the D.C.-based think tank Institute for Policy Studies, says that free trade deals tend to use “investment” and “growth” as a pretext for ruthless exploitation. The agreements “push wages lower and dislocate production with the ensuing loss of jobs,” says Perez-Rocha, adding that “the prospects for the TPP are very bleak and workers everywhere must resist it.”
Some Pacific Trade Partners seem to have no qualms about tying free markets with oppressive political systems. The Vietnamese government, for instance, has complemented U.S.-friendly development policies with measures to quash collective bargaining and independent labor organizing, along with general suppression of political dissent and organizing through Internet censorship, according to research by the International Trade Union Confederation.
The tiny, oil-rich regime of Brunei has faced wide criticism for failing to adhere to international labor rights conventions on unionization and non-discrimination, and for enabling the systematic abuse of foreign laborers, who fill many of Brunei’s lowest-paid low-skill jobs, like domestic work.
The very process of the trade negotiations, though, is structured to prevent basic issues, ranging from union rights to climate change, from even coming up for discussion. The Citizens Trade Campaign explains in its briefing on the TPP:
Executives from hundreds of corporations that have been named as official trade advisors have access to the texts and talks. Members of Congress, journalists and the people whose lives will be most affected, however, have no ability to see what our negotiators are bargaining for–and bargaining away–until a deal is done and it is effectively too late for changes.
What has so far come to public light from the negotiations doesn’t look promising. A recently leaked document on prospective intellectual-property provisions of the TPP suggested, to the outrage of health advocates, that the agreement could tighten patent restrictions and constrain access to critical HIV/AIDS medications in the Pacific region.
Not surprisingly, this general disregard for civil society is reflected in elaborate trade protocols that allow companies to circumvent regulation. Public Citizen has documented many “investor-state” arbitration suits filed under NAFTA and younger cousin the Central America FTA. In one such case, a foreign investor has tried to block action by the Peruvian government over the company’s alleged failure to carry out a clean-up of a heavily polluted metal smelter site in La Oroya. An $800 million investor-state claim argued the government’s action violated the company’s right to “fair and equitable treatment” under the Peru Trade Promotion Agreement.
And what about the administration’s claims that more free trade means more jobs for a stagnant economy? Those promises did not bear out in the years following NAFTA’s implementation, which labor analysts associate with major job losses in key manufacturing sectors (not to mention economic havoc and agricultural devastation in Mexico, which in turn fueled the immigration crisis north of the border).
Even from a business standpoint, activists note that, since the U.S. already does brisk business in the Pacific Rim, the TPP isn’t likely to bring a major boost to exports or multinational investment. Arthur Stamoulis, executive director of Citizens Trade Campaign, speculated that the Pacific free trade plans aim primarily to set a precedent for corporate impunity:
Clearly, Wall Street wants more financial deregulation and sees this agreement as a mechanism to get it. Beyond that though is the obvious interest in big corporations being able to shift jobs around the globe to wherever labor is the most exploited and environmental regulations are the weakest. A free trade agreement with Vietnam and Malaysia and Brunei would make it easier for corporations to do so, driving down wages and benefits for most working people, not only in Chicago or the United States, but everywhere. It’s a cycle that has to stop.
But there’s still time at least to try to turn the Pacific trade dialogue away from the status quo and toward a concept of globalization that actually strengthens protections for economic sovereignty, sustainability and decent work. Some fair-trade groups have campaigned for the TRADE Act, which would set a baseline for labor, human rights, and regulatory protections in future trade deals. Public Citizen, the Institute for Policy Studies and other advocacy groups have published a model framework for protecting the public interest in transnational investment and commerce. At the core is a broad public protection exemption written into trade deals that would keep corporations from taking legal action against a nation’s safeguards for the environment, labor, or health and safety in the name of “free trade.” By shielding essential regulations from arbitrary corporate attacks, the coalition argues, the measure would “[shift] the burden of proof for defending their public interest laws away from governments.”
But currently, that burden of defending the public interest falls on the shoulders of grassroots groups, while officials rush to crack open free markets in the Global South. Perhaps the most activists can do this Labor Day is rally in Chicago’s streets as negotiators meet in virtual secrecy to pen what may be the economic fate of millions across three continents. If the officials inside refuse to listen, then maybe the people outside will.
To Stop Corruption, Fight the Power, Not the People
05 months ago
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and in a world where the gap between the powerful and powerless grows wider each day, corruption in political and economic institutions spreads much faster than shame.
Political power is abused wherever it exists–with scandals ranging from political graft in India to white collar crime on Wall Street to bribery of government regulators in China. Nonetheless, some communities seem especially vulnerable to the cycle of corruption, repression and impunity. And lately, we’ve seen many of them getting fed up with living under regimes that have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Corruption has been one of the major issues driving the unrest across the Middle East and North Africa, and it has catalyzed a Gandhi-esque movement in the streets of New Delhi.
Indian activist Anna Hazare has inspired huge demonstrations in support of his hunger strike to promote a strict, controversial anti-corruption measure known as the Jan Lokpal bill. The government’s recent crackdown on Hazare only steeled protesters’ resolve under the slogan “India is Anna, Anna is India.”
Yet not all have been swept up in Hazare fever. Author and activist Arundhati Roy boldly challenged the public framing of the corruption issue, arguing it has been whitewashed by a bourgeois, nationalistic political class.In a commentary in The Hindu, she describes the obsession with the Lokpal bill, which would institute a “draconian” bureaucracy to monitor officials, as a well-managed charade, designed to absorb popular grievances into a more palatable but no less hierarchical concept of “accountability”:
Is corruption just a matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority? Imagine, for example, a city of shopping malls, on whose streets hawking has been banned. A hawker pays the local beat cop and the man from the municipality a small bribe to break the law and sell her wares to those who cannot afford the prices in the malls. Is that such a terrible thing? In future will she have to pay the Lokpal representative too? Does the solution to the problems faced by ordinary people lie in addressing the structural inequality, or in creating yet another power structure that people will have to defer to?
Rukshana Nanayakkara, senior programme coordinator for South Asia with the watchdog group Transparency International, told Colorlines that although the Indian and Arab uprisings may voice the outrage of citizens who feel “helpless and hopeless” about their rulers, their protests won’t necessarily articulate a solution:
While it is an important task to highlight corruption issues or to drive a grassroots movement based on this to overcome barriers to bring change, the real impact would lie within systemic changes and sustained ethical environments.
We can agree that corruption is bad, but can’t agree on what corruption really is. And when those who already have power are allowed to define and regulate corrupt practices, they’re empowered to permit the most dangerous form of impunity–the kind that is ingrained in the very edifice of the state.
Corruption Near and Far
Corruption may be a universal scourge, but media portrayals and civil society surveys suggest that the problem is especially acute in the Global South, which in turn invites facile “cultural” explanations for greed and graft (pointing to, say, gift-giving traditions or inborn backwardness and tribalism of sub-Saharan Africa).
Yet North and South are both plagued by breakdowns of institutional integrity. The banking collapse and everyday machinations of government reveal that the malaise reaches up to the highest offices in Washington. Indeed, much of the dirty money that floods into the Global South trickles down from above, according to a Transparency International paper:
The North also carries part of the responsibility for the situation in the South due to its role as the bribe-payer. After all, it is largely Northern corporate interests that supply the bribe payments. Until recently, governments of the North not only tolerated these corrupt practices, but they even rewarded them with tax deductibility.
The public’s mental map of official immorality around the world reflects political blindspots: we tend to indict obvious crimes without interrogating structures and historical inequities.
“Corruption in the Global South is much talked about as it is part of day-to-day lives of people, as opposed to grand level corruption, which is normally opaque and harder to uncover,” Nanayakkara noted. At the same time, Transparency International says public perceptions of corruption are rising in affluent countries, in part due to the financial crisis.
But official transgressions do cut especially deep in impoverished communities, where rules are slackened to attract private investment or “development aid.” In the Haiti earthquake, for example, Transparency International observed that the extreme death toll could be traced in part to “alleged corruption in the construction of public buildings, including schools and hospitals.” And in the aftermath, suspicions of profiteering continue to swirl around the reconstruction process, now being directed by a shaky national government and the corporate-friendly coffers of the Haiti Interim Recovery Commission.
Environmental disasters can aggravate government malfeasance. Activists warn that policy responses to climate change may create unprecedented opportunities for exploitation and profiteering, particularly in much-hyped development projects for green energy and forest preservation.
The idea of corruption as culturally endemic offers convenient justification for outside intervention in poor countries. In an analysis of public myths about corruption, development scholars Ed Brown, Jon Cloke and Mohammad Sohail argued, “rather than seeing corruption as a complex socio-political phenomenon linked to global processes and specific national cultural and political economies, the issue is often reduced to a kind of political backwardness which needs ‘treatment.’ ”
The potential side effects of this medicine have manifested in neoliberal financial interventions like the IMF restructuring plans that pauperized Haiti and stoked chaos in Greece. The authors point out that so-called “anti-corruption programmes” imposed by free-market experts sometimes aggravate economic damage and ironically end up reaffirming stereotypes of poor countries as innately incompetent.
Symptoms and Causes
Sometimes the popular fixation on officials’ ethical transgressions distracts from the political malaise of which they are a symptom. And political elites are wise to this. In the U.S., the right evokes the canard of “waste, fraud and abuse” to militate against any form of income redistribution by blaming the economic hardship that “deserving” citizens face on imaginary “welfare queens,” patients who use too much Medicaid, civil servants collecting extra disability pay, and other social parasites.
Is corruption just the cost of doing business in a society that traffics in injustice? A recent public opinion study suggests people’s lack of trust in government institutions isn’t just tied to perceptions of official malfeasance, but the degree of social inequality they experience, along with the perceived failure of policymakers to address it.
The rebellions unfolding in North Africa, the Middle East and India reflect righteous resentment at rulers who have made careers out of betraying public trust. Of course, ultimately, Indian officials may fail again to police themselves, and the Arab Spring uprisings may be hijacked by new political orders that just rebrand old patterns of tyranny and kleptocracy. Whatever emerges from the unrest, fundamental inequalities will still reign, as long as entrenched hierarchies remain intact and governance hinges on tiers of privilege.
Our disgust with rotten politicians and Wall Street kingpins is in part anger at their impunity, but maybe there’s a streak of latent jealousy, a dog-eat-doggedness that pervades any competitive capitalist society. Still, even if humans are hard wired to exploit, we’re also hard wired to keep trying to harness power, however naïvely we deploy legislation and revolutionary rhetoric. In the debate over fixing crooked leaders, the definition of corruption often leaves out the root: not the people who misuse authority, but an excess of power itself.
After the Riots, "Broken" Britain Grows Still More Fractured
05 months ago
In the aftermath of the riots, politicians have promised to rebuild Britain’s “broken society.” But their eagerness to restore order threatens to tear apart an already fractured urban landscape.
Speaking at a youth club in Witney, Oxfordshire, Prime Minister David Cameron played on public panic to declare war on the unruly elements that flared up in the riots. Dismissing the notion that race or class issues factored into the unrest, he instead blamed a “moral breakdown” of family structure and social values, and “people without proper boundaries.” But the audience (some of whom heckled the Prime Minister) didn’t need to be schooled about boundaries, as they’ve seen the limits of their future prospects grow narrower by the day.
A local teen quoted by Reuters didn’t see Cameron’s Britain in his community: “He wants people to get in touch with families, but for some, their families aren’t there, and the youth centre is the only place where they can talk to people…. But he’s shutting all the youth centres.”
The scene encapsulated the government’s myopic reaction to the disturbances. Cameron has declared a full-scale “fightback.” This includes plans to “hand police, local authorities and the courts sweeping powers to mete out severe punishments to those involved in the unrest,” and perhaps even crowd-control tactics like water cannons, according to the AP. There is talk of imposing curfews or controlling communications technology to prevent rioters from coordinating actions (an eerie echo of crackdowns on social media and youth gatherings in San Francisco and Philadelphia).
Stung by criticism about an inadequate police response, Cameron also called for a “concerted, all-out war on gangs and gang culture.” And he’s getting coached by American “supercop” William Bratton, an advocate of the much-maligned “broken windows” strategy that deploys zero tolerance on everything from graffiti to squeegee men.
English courts are working overtime to churn out swift retribution for hundreds charged with riot-related offenses. Extreme jail sentences have been imposed for infractions like stealing bottled water and sending an incendiary Facebook message–in sharp contrast to the relative impunity that scandalized officials and disgraced corporate giants have enjoyed in recent months.
Meanwhile, lost amid all the racialized, anti-youth invective is the story of youth on the margins of that tattered society, whose voices go ignored until they explode in collective rebellion.
Waiting to Happen
The tragedy of the riots was in part their predictability: the spark that ignited the chaos was a clash between police and youth in Tottenham, a racially mixed London enclave where another historic anti-police uprising took place in the 1980s. Following a peaceful protest demanding justice for Mark Duggan, a young black man who died in a police shooting, officers reportedly assaulted a young girl. Instantly a generation of simmering resentment boiled over, clearly fueled by the patterns of racial bias in aggressive police stops and searches.
Zita Holbourne of BARAC UK, a national racial-justice coalition that campaigns against budget cuts, told Colorlines that while communities like Tottenham are saturated with an overbearing police presence, other public institutions, like support programs for youth who need education or jobs, are vanishing:
Essentially, there is almost nothing for young people. Where are they going to go? What are they going to do? So you end up with them building up anger and frustration, hopelessness … and you can see that Tottenham was waiting to happen. Whether it was Tottenham or somewhere else, it was waiting to happen.”
Garrisoned Communities
The government has beefed up its crackdown by encouraging communities to police themselves. The BBC reported that in police in Manchester had tried to shame families into submission with “shop a looter” advertisements by encouraging parents to turn in children suspected of wrongdoing.
And if police can’t force parents to snitch on their kids, then they can always resort to collective punishment. A convenient statute allows for the eviction of public housing residents who break the law, according to the AP:
Currently, authorities can boot out residents who commit offenses in their own neighborhood only–and evict about 3,000 of Britain’s 8 million public housing tenants each year. If the new plans are approved, it won’t matter where a person has committed their crime.
Eric Pickles, Britain’s Communities Secretary, acknowledged the policy could leave some people homeless.
“That may sound a little harsh, but I just don’t think it’s time to pussyfoot around,” Pickles told BBC television. “They’ve done their best to destroy neighborhoods. Frankly, I don’t feel sympathetic towards them.”
So vulnerable kids, along with their struggling families, may soon be forced out onto the same streets that got them in trouble in the first place. Whatever moral lesson the authorities are trying to teach, it’s not the one they should have learned from Tottenham.
The Post-Race Riot
Cameron and other politicians have stressed the participants included people of many racial backgrounds and that “these riots were not about poverty: that insults the millions of people who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like this.”
It’s true that the destruction cut across racial or socioeconomic lines. Many “normal” middle-class folks joined in the rioting, and some of the heaviest damage was suffered by working-class communities of color. One of the most poignant examples is the three young Pakistanis killed by a hit-and-run while guarding their Birmingham neighborhood. Yet erasing race and class elements from the public conversation only deepens the political establishment’s willful blindness.
The law enforcement crackdowns, combined with stringent budget cuts, will have a disproportionate impact on the poor and people of color (people who are more likely to depend on public services, live in public housing, or get entangled in the criminal justice system). As they try to recover, the gulf between the day-to-day injustices surrounding them, and victor’s justice being touted by officials, will continue to widen.
Tottenham youth worker Symeon Brown commented on CNN, “A moral judgment is easy: ‘They are wrong, people are suffering, they are selfish, they are thugs,’ but we are using a system that these boys do not comply with.”
You won’t find the most troubling “moral breakdown” in London among its youth. It reveals itself in every humiliating police search, every shuttered youth club, every corruption scandal ingrained in a political structure that walls off ordinary people.
Repairing the Cracks
On England’s scorched streets, communities seeking to rebuild face a crossroads.
In many cases, the riots catalyzed grassroots solidarity. Communities immediately mobilized “across ethnic and racial lines” in self-defense,
reported Judy Beishon of the UK Socialist Party:
Sikh men in Southall organised to defend mosques and Hindu temples as well as Sikh temples. Turkish, Kurdish and Bangladeshi shopkeepers mobilised in Hackney to defend major streets and premises.
It was also the case that after the riots, in many areas a mass of people turned out onto the streets to help clear up the mess and restore things to normal and donations poured in to help those who had lost homes and small businesses.
At the same time, activists fear that the far-right will capitalize on public fears by using neighborhood recovery efforts as a political platform.
Referring to reports of the white-supremacist English Defence League partaking in “vigilante” patrols and local clean-up initiatives, Holbourne said, “They’re talking about, ‘They’re cleaning up the street’ as in ‘cleaning up Britain.’ And when they’re saying ‘cleaning up Britain,’ they [mean] cleaning up Britain from black people. They’re using it as an opportunity to spread racial hatred.”
If the fear sparked by the riots leads to even more criminalization of youth and people of color, then Britain may end up broken beyond repair. But the embattled streets could also clear the way for a paradigm shift. Communities might start to question the state and think past some of those those “proper boundaries” that hemmed them in before. And then a broken society might really figure out how to put itself back together again.
Famine Devastates Somalia in the Shadow of U.S. Domination
05 months ago
The famine in Somalia is a human tragedy on an unimaginable scale. But the loss of life depicted in the news reports masks other losses: there is the loss of shame–by the warring factions whose violent appetites continue to ravage the country from within; and there’s the loss of perspective by the geopolitical forces that have cynically stoked civil war under the banner of “fighting terror”; and there’s the loss of hope among the ordinary people caught in the crossfire.
The United Nations’ declaration of famine in Somalia highlighted a desperate need for international assistance, but also exposed how aid money fits into Washington’s political arsenal.
Early on, various international aid agencies waffled over the logistics of serving areas controlled by the militant group al-Shabaab. Not only was there fear that militias could disrupt or endanger the aid missions; under a much-maligned State Department policy, the US government could potentially prosecute groups that engaged with Shabaab for providing “material benefit” to terrorists. Last week the State Department eased its restrictions under mounting public pressure. But according to the Huffington Post, many NGOs are still confused and fearful of getting ensanred in the counter-terrorism dragnet.
While al-Shabaab has posed a real threat in some areas, the more fundamental barriers to effective assistance are not the creation of any insurgent group. For years, U.S. domination of the region has fueled unrest as well as cynicism toward international intervention.
Long before this famine was declared, in 2009, CNN reported that the White House was holding aid agencies hostage to the war on terror:
Kiki Gbeho, head of office for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Somalia, said the United States is reviewing whether its aid helps fund Al-Shabaab.
The U.N. office, in a report issued in September, said the U.S. delay in reaching a decision on humanitarian funding “is already impacting on many agencies and their programmes.”
The United Nations estimates that 60 percent of the people it needs to reach with emergency assistance live in areas controlled by Al-Shabaab.
“According to humanitarian principles, we have to serve people and need to deal with those in charge,” Gbeho said.
The counterterrorism card may not play the same way this time. The recent abrupt withdrawal of Shabaab forces from Mogadishu could open new avenues for humanitarian aid distribution. On the other hand, the fighters could simply be shifting toward guerrilla tactics, and the capital remains exposed to abuse and deprivation at the hands of the notoriously dysfunctional transitional regime.
Regardless of the current security situation, a bigger crisis driving the famine is a dismal cycle of war and international intervention–in which humanitarian acts serve as political cover, according to columnist and analyst Rasna Warah at Kenya’s Daily Nation:
Aid to governments often has the net effect of suppressing local economies and initiatives. In Somalia, for instance, [author and former aid worker Michael Maren] noted that food production was suppressed by food aid, as farmers had no incentive to grow their own food. Aid also makes governments less accountable to their own people….
Donor aid also reduces countries’ sovereignty. Aid is the most effective (and cost-effective) way in which foreign donor countries control other countries without being labelled as colonialists. It leads to bizarre situations where a donor country — and even more alarmingly, an international aid agency — sets government policy for a poor country, while presidents, ministers and permanent secretaries look on helplessly.
Yet the connection between international aid–which could be vital in situations like the famine–and the problems that have rendered Somalia a so-called “failed state” isn’t necessarily a neo-imperialist plot as much as it is a reflection of a geopolitical status quo that Washington has imposed on the region since the early 1990s.
A Famished Country and a Well-Fed War
Humanitarian aid was a pretext for U.S. military intervention in 1992 under the first Bush administration. After a hasty withdrawal under Clinton following the “Black Hawk down” incident, the U.S. continued to loom large in Somalia, eventually supporting an invasion by Ethiopia in 2006. Today, the Obama administration maintains its presence in the Horn of Africa through counter-terrorism operations (along with a crackdown on “piracy” along the coast), typically in cooperation with the Transitional Federal Government and the African Union-led AMISOM forces.
Abdi Aynte, a Somali-American independent political analyst, told Colorlines that U.S. foreign policy has impeded the emergence of an independent legitimate government:
Somalia’s fundamental problem is statelessness, or the absence of state institutions. To mitigate this, the international community, US included, can help Somalis rebuild such institutions. Unfortunately, the US is currently employing what it calls “a dual track policy” which, among other things, encourages “local actors” (read: clans, groups, anyone) who controls a piece of land to engage directly with the US. This goes diametrically the opposite to building strong central state institutions. This effectively balkanizes Somalia. And the policy has had a deleterious impact on Somalia’s statehood.
Certainly, no country’s foreign policy can ever be devoid of politics. But the sheer enormity of the U.S. presence in the region means Washington’s mission to “stabilize” Somalia further erodes the institutional foundation of the country it purports to be rescuing.
Thinking Outside Disaster
Though food donations are trickling into Somalia, corruption and external manipulation continue to bleed Somali society dry. Abdi Samatar, a geography professor at the University of Minnesota specializing in the Horn of Africa, said that Somalia’s future will require “the reconstruction project of a government that’s free and that’s accountable to its people,” which he called “the best defense against terrorists, or famine, for that matter. And that’s what the world needs to focus on, beyond the famine.”
Somalia could still benefit from international assistance, he added–perhaps through partnership with regional powers like South Africa–but Somali-led political movements must be at the helm of the recovery. Referring to the Arab Spring uprisings, Samatar predicted that in the coming months, “I’m quite hopeful that once we see breathing space, the people will march. And whether it will be more peaceful than places like Syria and elsewhere, it’s open to speculation at this stage.”
Though the media scarcely pays attention to them, those elements do exist in Somalia. Several years ago, civil society groups experienced a brief peace and worked relatively freely after the Islamic Courts Union ousted CIA-backed militants. (The moment of stability soon evaporated amid the Ethiopian invasion.)
More recently, networks of civil society groups have partnered to establish a formal dialogue with the transitional government as well as with European officials. Representatives of these organizations issued a list of demands to the U.N. Security Council in May, calling for an international commitment to immediate humanitarian needs while respecting “a Somali-led and consensus-based transitional process.”
Women-led groups are a striking example of Somalis making vital but unrecognized contributions to rebuilding the country. Though women lead the majority of local organizations handling humanitarian assistance, they are all but invisible in the political leadership, according to Khadija O. Ali, a former member of the Somali Transitional National Parliament, argues in Foreign Policy in Focus that despite the acute impact of conflict and poverty on women and children, “with continued, systemic UN and Western support, the Somali Transitional Federal Government continues to exclude women from all decision-making arenas.” The marginalization of gender issues, she added, is another sign that the international actors are propping up “business as usual” at the expense of democracy in Somalia.
When this crisis passes, the U.S. will still cast a long shadow over Somalia’s future. But as the country’s tragedy plays out on the world stage this summer, it might expose the failed foreign policy agenda behind the “failed state”–and give Somalis the space they need to build toward actual justice.
As Samatar put it, “a government that is at peace with itself is also at peace with the world. A government that’s at peace with its people also can provide for help for its people when they need it desperately, like this famine.”