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.

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.

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.

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.

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.