December 24, 2001 - February 23, 2002
Bush imposes travel sanctions on Zimbabwe
Posted: Saturday, February 23, 2002
George W Bush has imposed limited travel sanctions on Zimbabwe.
He cites a "continued failure" by President Robert Mugabe to maintain democratic rule in the African country. MORE
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'What will I be wanting in Europe?': Mugabe
Posted: Thursday, February 21, 2002
ZIMBABWE'S President Robert Mugabe has said he can resist European Union (EU) sanctions slapped on him and his close associates. "They are saying that they are placing sanctions on leaders so that they don't come to Europe? What is Europe?" MORE
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'What will I be wanting in Europe?': Mugabe
Posted: Thursday, February 21, 2002
ZIMBABWE'S President Robert Mugabe has said he can resist European Union (EU) sanctions slapped on him and his close associates.
"They are saying that they are placing sanctions on leaders so that they don't come to Europe? What is Europe?" Mugabe was quoted as saying by the state daily The Herald on Thursday.
"What will I be wanting in Europe? We can visit other countries in Asia and Africa," Mugabe told a rally in the remote district of Nkayi, 600 kilometres west of the capital.
Mugabe was targeted on Monday by European Union sanctions, which include a freeze on the overseas assets of the president and 19 top officials, as well as a ban on travel to the 15-nation bloc.
President Mugabe has of late been forming close relations with such Asian nations as Malaysia and Thailand, while in Africa his closest ally is Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi.
The EU sanctions include an arms embargo against Zimbabwe.
Mugabe said the sanctions would not deter him from his controversial scheme of taking land from whites giving it to landless blacks.
"We must be prepared to withstand these actions by Britain and its allies," he said.
Britain, the former colonial power, has led a vigorous campaign against Mugabe in recent years following serious differences over the land reform scheme.
"I won't go back (on the land exercise). Blair can bleat, he can cry, He can do anything, go into tantrums but I will not move. The government will not move," he said.
Meanwhile, the Zimbabwean government has lifted the accreditation ban it slapped on South African journalists intending to cover the upcoming presidential elections, the Independent Newspapers group said on Thursday.
"We are delighted at this," said Alan Dunn, the editor of the Independent News Network (INN). INN is part of the Independent Newspapers group which owns 14 titles in South Africa.
Dunn said he was informed by Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad about the decision to lift the ban.
Journalists from the Independent Newspapers group, the Sunday Times and Beeld were told earlier this week that their applications to cover the elections were turned down.
The new press rules in Zimbabwe dictate that foreign journalists must obtain permission from that government before covering the presidential election and the preceding campaign. - Sapa, AFP
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EU impose targeted sanctions on Zimbabwe
Posted: Tuesday, February 19, 2002
Jack Straw immediately sought to widen the international pressure on Mr Mugabe by calling on the United States to join an EU embargo, which imposes an immediate travel ban on the ailing president and his inner circle and the freezing of their overseas assets. MORE
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For Black History Month, Remember The True MLK
Posted: Monday, February 18, 2002
by Tim Wise, Alternet February 15, 2002
As we find ourselves in the midst of Black History Month -- a brief respite from the much whiter version of history we learn and celebrate the rest of the year -- and having recently commemorated another Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, perhaps it would do us well to reflect on the vision of this man, whom so many claim as their hero, but whose message so few seem truly to understand.
This year, as with the previous ten, I once again had the pleasure of addressing a number of audiences during January MLK-related events on campuses and in communities across the country. Much of my presentation was the same as always, focused on reminding the audience of the substantial unfinished business in the ongoing fight against racism. But there was also at least one significant difference. This year, the U.S. is at war, having been engaged in bombing one of the poorest nations on Earth since October.
Given Dr. King's commitment to non-violence, even in the face of attack by others, I felt obliged to mention the likely opposition to said bombing that would have been part of King's current message were he still alive. King, after all, understood terrorism and faced it down regularly. Yet he did so without resort to arms, knowing that rarely if ever has true peace, security or justice been won at gunpoint.
Those who would claim that fanatical racists were (or are) any less dangerous than Osama bin Laden and his minions, never fished black bodies out of rivers in Mississippi, nor picked up the pieces of bombed out churches. They have forgotten the swollen face of Emmett Till, the bullet-ridden car of Viola Liuzzo, or what Billie Holiday called the "strange fruit" found hanging from tree limbs, surrounded by conscience-numbed whites, admiring their craft the way others might gaze upon paintings in the Louvre.
The fact that Dr. King in his last years had come to the painful recognition that his own government "was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" was worth mentioning, or so I thought.
Needless to say, many in my audiences felt otherwise. Although virtually all the persons of color responded to such remarks with agreement, for most whites, the mention of Dr. King's anti-militarism and condemnations of his own nation's actions abroad was more than they could handle. Many were angry, and some wrote letters in protest to those who had brought in such a speaker as myself to say such scandalous things.
They wanted the safe Dr. King. The pleasant Dr. King. The Dr. King who they seem to think would pat them on the head for breaking bread at a banquet dinner with black people. The Dr. King who they seem to think sought nothing more than a good, spirited chorus of Kumbaya, or perhaps a burger at the Woolworth's counter. In short, they wanted the Dr. King spoken of by their President: a man who had been too busy drinking with his Deke buddies at Yale to have personally lent his voice to the fight against racism, but who thinks nothing of invoking the good Doctor's name now.
That particular Dr. King -- the one with whom the nation's frat-boy in chief is more comfortable -- is one who, to listen to the President's speech about him, might as well have died in 1963. For Bush mentioned not one word of King's activities, nor quoted him at all from any speech or writing in the last five years of his life -- and with good reason. For it was during those years that King raised serious questions about the moral propriety of capitalism, and insisted, "any nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
For much of white America, accepting Dr. King and celebrating him is something they seek to do on their own terms, not his. They accept part of the man, and part of his message, but not all of it. They certainly don't wish to acknowledge King's decided lack of support for nationalistic patriotism the likes of which we have seen since September 11. To wit, his claim in December of 1967 that "our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation. This means we must develop a world perspective."
Of course, rejecting the totality of King's vision is nothing new for whites, most of whom never did like the Reverend all that much. In 1963, two-thirds of whites polled said that King and the movement were pushing for too much, too soon. Now, of course, white America embraces the King of 1963, because he seems so safe and ecumenical. And with the luxury of thirty-four years in the grave, they needn't worry that he will be correcting them for their conditional support anytime soon.
But even accolades for the early King are hardly rooted in a clear understanding of what the man stood for. For most whites, all they know of King is the "I Have A Dream" speech, and even then not all of it, but rather one line, taken out of context and interpreted as a simple plea for color-blindness.
It is that Dr. King whom conservatives, for example, have convinced themselves would have opposed affirmative action programs: another myth that whites in my holiday audiences weren't too happy to hear exploded.
A few weeks ago, I delivered an MLK day address at Dakota State University. Afterward, an irate math professor who hadn't attended the talk, but watched a portion of it on the internet, e-mailed the staff member who had sponsored my visit to complain. After the staffer relayed the professor's comments to me, I engaged him in a few rounds of e-banter. Among his concerns, was my statement that King would have supported affirmative action, and even reparations for the history of slavery and Jim Crow: a position he insisted was not at all certain, and which he sought to rebut via an archived discussion board post from David Horowitz, the resident gasbag at FrontPageMag.
Horowitz, who relies on financial support from the kind of right-wing conservatives who despised King and actively opposed the civil rights movement, claims that King detested any programs of "racial preferences" and would have been a sworn enemy of affirmative action. Of course, David also claims to be a true apostle of King, even while proudly displaying links for websites that allow one to slap cartoon likenesses of Hillary Clinton and Osama bin Laden: so the fact that he utterly miscomprehends the man he claims to consider a hero should come as no surprise. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that Horowitz recently referred to me as "intellectual scum," but that I will refrain from returning the insult, seeing as how such an ad hominem would hardly apply to David, unless preceded by the modifier, "anti."
Of course, even Horowitz can read, as can Dinesh D'Souza, Clint Bolick, Shelby Steele, and any number of other conservative writers, all of whom have made the same claims about King's color-blind approach to civil rights, and what they insist would be his certain opposition to color-conscious remedies for discrimination, like affirmative action. Given the basic literacy that one assumes attaches to all of these fine folks, their continued repetition of the King-as-opponent-of-affirmative-action ruse demonstrates a nearly mind-boggling display of bad faith and intentional subterfuge.
For King himself was clear, as much as some would deny it. In 1961, after visiting India, King praised that nation's "preferential" policies that had been put in place to provide opportunity to those at the bottom of the caste system, and in a 1963 article in Newsweek, King actually suggested it might be necessary to have something akin to "discrimination in reverse" as a form of national "atonement" for the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.
The most direct articulation of his views on the subject are found in his 1963 classic, Why We Can't Wait. Therein, King discussed the subject of "compensatory treatment," and explained:
Whenever this issue is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.
In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? King argued:
A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.
Furthermore, King was clear as to what that "something special" might entail. In 1965, during an interview with Playboy, King stated his support for billions of dollars of direct aid to black America -- and not only the poorest of the poor -- even though some might consider it "preferential treatment." As King explained:
For two centuries the Negro was enslaved and robbed of any wages: potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America's wealth could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation.
Also at this time, King helped lead "Operation Breadbasket," which threatened consumer boycotts against private employers who didn't hire blacks in rough proportion to their numbers in the community population. Such an effort went even further than affirmative action, since such programs don't require proportional representation in any workplace or school -- only good faith efforts, aimed at meeting what are considered reasonable goals for improved representation. And yet folks like Horowitz blast these kinds of pressure tactics against corporations as "shakedowns" when utilized by Jesse Jackson or the NAACP.
For some, however, no amount of evidence will suffice. My detractor from the Dakota State Math Department -- whose e-mail also included strangely out-of-place remarks about U2 being the only band worth listening to -- found my use of quotes from Dr. King irrelevant, and actually derided them by implying that quotes from someone don't actually indicate what they think: an interesting and counterintuitive kind of thing for a logician such as teaches math to say.
Of course, one can choose to disagree with King, and current supporters of affirmative action and reparations. Many do, and those debates can and should be joined openly and honestly. Certainly it is not automatically the case that simply because Dr. King supported such efforts, that such programs are ipso facto desirable. But regardless of one's conclusion about the legitimacy of affirmative action, or reparations, it seems only fair to insist that one present King's views honestly and not attempt to use his words for purposes he would have found unacceptable. If David Horowitz and his ilk wish to oppose affirmative action, so be it. But if they are desperate for a posthumous spokesperson, they will have to make do with the likes of George Wallace. Dr. King is already taken.
Tim Wise is a Nashville-based writer, lecturer and antiracism activist. He can be reached at tjwise@mindspring.com.
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EU agonises over Mugabe sanctions
Posted: Monday, February 18, 2002
by Ian Black and Andrew Meldrum
European Union foreign ministers face a tough decision today over whether to slap sanctions on Zimbabwe after President Robert Mugabe's government expelled the head of the EU election observer mission. MORE
• EU Withdraws Observers From Zimbabwe
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OAU Endorses Mugabe's Rejection of Foreign Observers
Posted: Sunday, February 17, 2002
South African Press Association (Johannesburg)
February 15, 2002
Posted to the web February 16, 2002
Lusaka
Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Secretary General Amara Essy on Friday endorsed Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's rejection of foreign election observer teams, saying western countries do not invite African states to monitor elections in their countries.
A Sapa correspondent reported from Zambia that Essy told journalists at Lusaka's international airport that elections were an internal affair of any sovereign state and must be respected.
"I am not happy to see observers from outside. They do not ask or invite us to go to the (United States) or Europe to monitor elections there, or to check whether their elections were free and fair," Essy said.
He said that the western countries should not force themselves to monitor elections in other countries.
"I hope this will not continue in the next decade," he chided.
Essy said that Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa had acted within reason when he rejected the European Union (EU) report on his country's December 27, 2001 general polls.
An EU election observer mission said that the poll results announced as official by the Electoral Commission of Zambia were not true and did not represent the true wishes of the Zambian people.
Both the EU mission and the US-based Carter Centre have expressed grave concern over the legitimacy of the Mwanawasa government, while Britain, jointly with the US, has spearheaded political and economic sanctions against Mugabe's government.
The Zambian government has since accused the EU observer team of creating despondency and interfering in the country's internal affairs. Relations between the two have soured.
Essy confirmed that the Zimbabwean government had formally invited the continental body to monitor presidential polls in that country next month. He said the OAU observer team would be headed by former Liberian president Amassou Yere.
Essy was in Zambia for a one day visit and would hold talks with Mwanawasa, the current OAU chairperson, on among other things, the various conflict spots on the continent and the transition process of the OAU into the African Union.
Reprinted from:
http://allafrica.com/stories/200202160072.html
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US and UK name Zimbabwe's targeted leaders
Posted: Saturday, February 2, 2002
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe heads an initial list of 20 Zimbabwean leaders—three of whom have since died—whose assets the United Kingdom and the United States are seeking to identify and seize under a process of targeted sanctions, The Standard has confirmed. MORE
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Zimbabwe passes repressive media bill
Posted: Thursday, January 31, 2002
by Andrew Meldrum
Zimbabwe's parliament yesterday pressed ahead with the passage of a highly restrictive press bill in preparation for the March presidential election in which President Robert Mugabe faces an uphill battle. MORE
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Commonwealth foreign ministers rejected British-led calls
Posted: Wednesday, January 30, 2002
• Zimbabwe suspension rejected by ministers
Commonwealth foreign ministers rejected British-led calls on Wednesday for Zimbabwe's suspension from the organization as Harare arrested three journalists for protesting against a tough new media bill MORE
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Out of Africa
Posted: Sunday, January 20, 2002
By Evy Potochny, rps.psu.edu
Jan 2002
Modern humans are thought to have originated in Africa. From there bands of hominids migrated first to the Middle East, then throughout Europe and into Asia.
But exactly who moved away? A single population of already-evolved Homo sapiens? Or did several groups of more primitive humans migrate separately, then evolve independently into the modern variety?
Evolutionary geneticists struggle with this question, scrutinizing DNA samples from around the world for tell-tale variations. Until recently, they have relied heavily on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Now, new studies using nuclear DNA are changing the debate.
Mitochondrial DNA is found outside the cell nucleus in the organelles that produce a cell’s energy. MtDNA is useful to geneticists, explains Sarah Tishkoff, because it is plentiful (hundreds of copies of the mitochondrial genome exist in each cell), it does not recombine (portions of the mother’s DNA are not exchanged with the father’s), and it mutates quickly (so there is a lot of genetic variation to compare).
“But mtDNA only tells us half the story,” adds Tishkoff, who did postdoctoral research in genetics at Penn State. Only the mother passes on mtDNA to her progeny; the father’s contribution is lost.
The amount of genetic material in the nucleus is immense compared to what is in the mitochondria: some 80,000 genes versus only a few. And each gene can exist in several versions, or alleles. That is, there can be subtle changes in the sequence of A,C,T, and G, the four bases that make up DNA, without changing the gene’s function. For instance, a two-base sequence like TG might be repeated five times in a row (TGTGTGTGTG) — or six times, or four — without affecting the gene’s function. These “short tandem repeats” tend to mutate a lot. But that’s good: mutations are useful for comparing populations over time. TG repeated five times would be considered one allele, while TG repeated six times would be another allele. Tishkoff also looks at alleles caused by less frequent types of mutations — alterations by insertion or deletion of a DNA section several hundred bases long.
For one study, Tishkoff selected three human genes: CD4, which produces a cell-surface protein that enables HIV to enter and infect certain immune cells; DM, which causes myotonic dystrophy, a neuromuscular disease; and PLAT, short for tissue plasminogen activator locus, a gene involved in tissue remodeling and destruction.
Tishkoff compared these genes in DNA samples donated by collaborators from 45 different populations worldwide, including Europe, the Pacific islands, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East — making hers one of the largest data sets on human nuclear variation.
She found that while non-African populations were relatively similar genetically, the variations among African populations differed widely. In the CD4 gene, for instance, Tishkoff found only three major variants in populations outside of Africa. Among African samples, it was common to have 24 variations within a single population.
This lack of genetic diversity in non-Africans suggests that they are more closely related than the African populations, and that their differences evolved over a much shorter period of time. “The only variants that made it out of Africa,” says Tishkoff, “have both a characteristic deletion and a repeat of six on the chromosome with the CD4 gene.”
By calculating how much time it would have taken for these and the other mutations to accumulate, Tishkoff estimates the migration out of Africa occurred approximately 130,000 years ago, rather than over 300,000 years ago, as was previously thought. “In the non-African populations,” she explains, “there’s only been enough time for a few shuffled sets of genes to arise.”
Taken together, Tishkoff’s results provide strong new evidence that modern humans descended fairly recently from a single ancestral population, one that was already fully modern when it left its African home.
Sarah Tishkoff, Ph.D., completed her post-doctoral research fellowship in genetics and is currently an assistant professor of biology at the University of Maryland. Her adviser was Andrew Clark, Ph.D., professor of biology, the Eberly College of Science, 208 Mueller Bldg., University Park, PA 16802; 814-863-3891; c92@psu.edu. Kenneth Kidd of Yale University and Trefor Jenkins of the University of the Witwatersand, South Africa, collaborated on this study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and a Burroughs-Wellcome Fund Career Award.
http://www.rps.psu.edu/0101/africa.html
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Morgan Tsvangirai's gaffe
Posted: Wednesday, January 16, 2002
scrutator
www.africaonline.co.zw
Thursday 17 January, 2002
IT was obvious that the ZANU PF election directorate -- and through the latter, also the ZBC and the state-related print media -- would capitalize on what, by any standards, must be the biggest gaffe on the part of a politician aspiring for the top job in any country.
But we are still to confirm to what extent this reflects on the nature of the MDC itself as an organization composed of a variety of forces and political aspirations, and whether Morgan Tsvangirai's call for sanctions against his own country represents more the views of the Rhodesians that constitute a major factor in the opposition movement and less that of the patriots in the latter.
What is worse is that Morgan Tsvangirai's call for South Africa to impose sanctions against Zimbabwe is in strong contrast to the position of both our southern neighbour and the former colonial power. In the very same broadcast in which Tsvangirai was elaborating on how South Africa could easily impose such sanctions, the British Foreign Office reiterated its earlier position that it could not favour such a policy since this would hurt the majority of the Zimbabwean population. Likewise, Tsvangirai's statement this week has only provoked the South African authorities into yet another reiteration that they are opposed to the policy of sanctions, in favour of 'quiet diplomacy'.
Reliable sources at our disposal confirm that the South African, British and European Union officials on the Zimbabwe desks are acutely embarrassed at Tsvangirai's gaffe.
"If only he had limited himself to smart sanctions as some of us in the EU have consistently done!", exclaims one of my colleagues in Brussels.
Indeed, for most Zimbabweans the threat of sanctions has been so remote until Morgan Tsvangirai brought the danger to their very door step this week. Such were his words during the BBC interview on Monday this week: "The threat to undermine the elections by the military, by President Mugabe himself, should actually send shock waves to South Africa and say, under those circumstances, we are going to cut fuel, we are going to cut transport links.
"Those kind of measures, even if they are implemented at a low level, send the right signals" As I stated earlier, it is a shame for Tsvangirai that even the neighbour he is calling upon to take such drastic action against his own country should seek to educate the opposition leader about both pan-Africanism and the folly of sanctions. As South Africa's Deputy Foreign Minister, Aziz Pahad, stated when reiterating that his country would never opt for sanctions against its neighbour, which is its major trading partner in the region, "we've been working at this for a long time, trying to convince people, that what is called (for is) quiet diplomacy.
"Calls for sanctions are misplaced. Effectively sanctions have been applied on Zimbabwe. All foreign aid has been terminated. There is effectively no new development aid. Investment has been frozen and exports from Zimbabwe have been dropped, I think.
"Sanctions are not the way to go" I am surprised that there are doubts in some quarters -- including our own parliament -- that Tsvangirai indeed uttered those words, including even a suggestion that he might have been quoted out of context. No! Morgan Tsvangirai was merely expressing a view-point shared by a large section of those who constitute the leadership and policy management of the MDC. Significantly, the latter factor excludes the majority of the rank and file membership, including a number of the black members of the national executive of the MDC.
For, even before the extent of Tsvangirai's gaffe became self-evident as the state-related media -- and Jonathan Moyo himself -- went to town, sections of the foreign media, particularly those based in Harare and associated with the MDC's policy management affairs, were boasting that "The presidential candidate of the Movement for Democratic Change opposition, Morgan Tsvangirai, called on the (SADC) meeting to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe, saying that two years of 'softly-softly' diplomacy had failed to curb Mugabe's abuses".
"The MDC wants the overseas bank accounts of Mr. Mugabe, his cabinet and leaders of his party, ZANU PF, frozen immediately, and a petrol, transport and electricity blockade to be imposed by South Africa", wrote Andrew Meldrum and Chris McGreal in Tuesday's Guardian, extrapolating in their own fashion, beyond what Morgan Tsvangirai actually said in his interview, but reflecting a policy position that is quite dominant in the upper echelons of MDC with a large Rhodesian contingent.
To be fair, Morgan's words during that BBC interview were less his own than those of his Rhodesian and/or Anglo-Saxon advisers. This was a theme borne out of desperation on the part of people, perhaps not him, who now want to see the whole house brought down. For, to be fair to Morgan, he would otherwise be aware of the difference between opposing and/or seeking to win office on the one hand, and reducing Zimbabwe into a bowl of hunger, civil war and internecine conflict on the other. Sadly, he had to be reminded of all this by a Zimbabwean public which, while critical about the government of the day, is largely patriotic, nationalist and, therefore, defensive of the national interest and their economic welfare and social security.
This is why Zimbabweans in general but also those observers of the current situation in this country need to be more discerning, if they, too, are not to fall prey to the dilemma which Morgan Tsvangirai created for himself this week.
For, the perception of the Zimbabwean situation which has become increasingly dominant at home and abroad is that established and developed upon by the Rhodesian element operating mainly from South Africa but also as representatives of such British media as The Daily Telegraph. This is the Zimbabwe according to Rhodesian eyes! Even the SABC Morning edition the other day broadcast a piece from Peta Thornicroft, described as a 'foreign correspondent from the London Daily Telegraph'. The point is that such white Zimbabweans as Peta Thornicroft have an axe to grind quite different from that which Morgan Tsvangirai or any other black Zimbabwean would have, even if some of my compatriots in the MDC would want to argue otherwise.
Therefore, it would help a great deal if the MDC began to disaggregate itself into the various segments that constitute it, so that those of us genuinely interested in an organic opposition that would further the cause of democracy can identify with that nationalist element within that organization.
Reprinted for Fair Use Only from:
www.africaonline.co.zw/mirror/stage/archive/020117/perspectives22352.html
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Racism, Murder and Lies in Rwanda
Posted: Thursday, January 10, 2002
by Christopher Black [6 September 2001], Emperors Clothes
Last weekend a world conference on racism took place in Durban, South Africa at the request of the General Assembly of the United Nations. The following demonstrates that even those who set up this conference are guilty of racism.
On the 22nd of August a letter was sent to Adama Dieng, the Registrar of the UN's International Criminal Tribunal For Rwanda (ICTR), the sister tribunal to the one in the Hague. The ICTR sits at Arusha, Tanzania.
Voice of the Forgotten
The letter was written by the prisoners at the ICTR, every one a Hutu, in the name of common humanity and the moral well-being of men and women presumed to be innocent and in the name of equality of treatment and common justice.
Following this introductory note is a translation of that letter from the original French.
The letter demonstrates clearly the racism that drives the lies and propaganda against the Hutus, condemned as "genocidaires," and whose only crime was to defend their small country against a foreign invasion by Tutsis from outside Rwanda with the backing of the United States, Britain, Belgium, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and the United Nations itself.
This invasion had the objective of restoring the tyranny of minority Tutsi rule while reducing the majority Hutu people to serfdom and a life of terror and that was supported by the great powers in order to take control of all of central Africa and its vast and incalculable resources.
The propaganda against the Hutus is racist to the core and is generated by the Tutsi claim to be a superior race, more white than the "primitive" Hutus, a Bantu people, and it fits nicely with the racist attitudes of the Americans, British and Belgians who took part in the invasion and helped murder the Presidents of both Rwanda and Burundi on April 6, 1994.
Rwanda and Yugoslavia: Eery Similarities
It is time the world woke up to the truth about the war in central Africa and the events of April through July of 1994. These events parallel the attacks on Yugoslavia and the accusations of genocide against the Serbs and other Slavs. Moreover, these events had the same objectives, used the same strategies and tactics and were planned and controlled by the same Great Powers. Their lust for control of the world knows no bounds. They are willing to murder millions so they can make billions.
One of the greatest tragedies in the world since the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews took place in Rwanda in 1994.
In the West we are told that this tragedy involved genocide by Hutus against Tutsis and that the U.S. and other Western powers sinned by failing to intervene. Many people, including some on the Left, denounced the supposed Western failure to intervene, arguing that it demonstrates indifference to the suffering of Black Africans.
The Truth Turned Upside Down
Those of us who have defended Hutu leaders before the ICTR have accumulated massive evidence that paints an entirely different picture.
The violence started with a series of raids against Hutus in Rwanda, conducted by the so-called Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a U.S.-sponsored, Tutsi paramilitary organization. These raids occurred during the period 1990-1993. The raids were repelled; even so, they gave the RPF valuable information about the government's capacity to defend Rwanda. Based on this information, the U.S.-backed forces successfully invaded northern Rwanda in 1993, driving a million people from their homes. This massive campaign of terror, directed against civilians, is never mentioned in the Western media.
The second stage of violence was launched on April 6, 1994. At that time, the invading Tutsi RPF shot down the airplane carrying the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, both Hutus. The main victims of the widespread fighting that followed were Hutus and moderate Tutsis.
The western-backed Tutsi invaders of Rwanda murdered between one and a half and two million Hutus in the four months between April 6 and July 4, 1994 and have murdered more than two million more since then by attacking Hutu refugees in the Congo.
It is a tragedy made more macabre by the Tutsi claim that their Hutu victims were really Tutsis, a claim they use to justify their dictatorial stranglehold on the people of that beautiful country by portraying themselves as the victims. This macabre reversal of the truth is supported by various intellectuals, NGOs and western governments who easily fall into the racist trap of believing the lies of the Tutsi regime in Rwanda, and the lies of the Americans who, while actively involved in the murder of millions, claim to have had no involvement and to add insult to injury, 'admit' the lie that they were negligent in not taking steps to stop the war and the killing when in fact they were the sponsors.
This is the letter from the prisoners of Washington's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda:
***********************
Letter to the ICTR
***********************
"Mr. Adama Djeng
Registrar, ICTR
Arusha, Tanzania
Object: Facilitation of family visits to the detainees.
We would like to call to your attention our request made on several occasions that the Registrar of the ICTR facilitate the visits of the families of the detainees in the UN Detention Facility. On May 26, 1999 in a meeting with your predecessor, Mr. Okali, we made the request to facilitate such visits and to reduce the formalities and permit meetings between the families in complete privacy and intimacy. By our letter of March 27, 2000 we asked that a suitable location be designated for such visits taking into consideration the social dimension, and the human dignity of the visitors and their moral well being.
In her report presented to the 55th session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, the president of the Tribunal affirmed in paragraph 101, f of the report that "The construction of a room for the members of the families making visits to the detainees is on the way to completion: One whole year has passed since then and we still have not seen even the foundation laid. We beg you to take steps to commence this project announced by the President of the Tribunal before the General Assembly.
However, our principal preoccupation is not only with respect to the location of such visits, but more with respect to the principle of family visits. While at The Hague the detainees of the United Nations receive assistance permitting their families to visit and facilities are provided for that purpose, nothing has been done to the present time to provide the benefit of the same facilities to the detainees of the United Nations here in Arusha, a deficiency that can only be called discriminatory.
The members of our families are dispersed throughout the world. Some still have not received even the protection of the High Commission for Refugees, which continues to refuse to recognize them as refugees. We feel that the Registrar of the ICTR should assist the detainees to be in contact with their families especially if one takes into account that certain prisoners have spent 5 years in prison in Arusha without the benefit of one visit. It is in this context that the request is made to arrange assistance for the expenses of the trip and stay in Arusha and for periodic visits with a view to allowing the detainees to remain in contact with their families.
For those family members who don't have travel documents we feel that the Registrar could make arrangements with their countries of residence, the Tanzanian authorities and the transportation companies.
We believe finally that this question of the visits of family be made the object of a written regulation, especially for the detainees already condemned and who could be transferred to other places of detention.
In the hope for a rapid and favourable response, we ask you to accept the assurance of our highest consideration.
Cc - Kofi Anan, Secretary-General of the United Nations at New York, The President of the ICTR, Arusha, Tanzania
All defense counsel
International Red Cross International Observer of Prisons,
40 rue de Hauteville,
Paris
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The Myth of Western Aid and the Silent War
Posted: Tuesday, January 1, 2002
www.wakeupmag.co.uk
"Who decides that a hue and cry must be made about one kind of atrocity while another gets away unpublicised? Who sets the agenda which sees imprisonment and torture as human rights violations while torture and death by starvation are not? And what gives some countries the right to become international arbiters, ignoring the blood on their own hands?… It's time for people who care about human rights to adopt a new cause: the Third World person's right to exist. Our people are under fire from global terrorism of a terminal new order. Many have already been wiped off the face of the earth."
- MARI MARCEL THEKAEKARA, Tamil Nadu State, India.
"Never before in history have the poor financed the rich on such a massive scale and paid so dearly for their servitude as today."
- JOHN PILGER
As the twentieth century draws to a close, the world is guilty of a colossal failure of compassion for its poorest people. Today, more than a thousand million people live in extreme poverty. A quarter of the world's people are starving. One in three children are being denied adequate food, education and health care. More than half a million children die each year as a result of austerity programmes imposed by the West on the Third World. Every three seconds a child under five dies due to poverty. In the time it took you to read that last sentence, another child's life was lost due to policies that Western governments have decided to enforce on the rest of the world.
1998 marked 50 years of the global trading system which was set up under the 1948 General Agreement On Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). While the bankers and leaders of the world's richest countries toasted the "success" of this economic system at the 1998 Ministerial Conference in Geneva, the people of the Third World saw little cause for celebration. Not only is this global economic system directly responsible for the starvation of millions throughout the Third World - it can be said that it actually depends on the impoverishment of these people. There is no more apt description for such a deliberate and calculated agenda than genocide.
Up to the mid 1970s, the worst excesses of the capitalist system were held in check by democratic national governments and strong unions. Big business was forced by legislation, regulations and labour contracts to share its profits, at least on some minimal basis, with workers, consumers and the state.
Over the past two decades, however, all these external constraints have been disposed of. Globalisation, free trade, deregulation and the conversion of nearly all political parties to the free market agenda have combined to subvert democracy and disempower unions. Unchallenged, corporate domination has quickly spread across the planet, causing disparities and inequalities on an unsurpassed scale. Poverty, crime, violence, ethnic conflict and environmental destruction have escalated as a result.
Inequality is on the increase. In 1960 the ratio of the world's richest 20% of the population to the poorest 20% was 30 to 1. In 1993 that ratio had doubled to 61 to 1. Today, a citizen of the richest country is over 500 times better off than one from the poorest. The gap between rich and poor countries has never been so vast.
THE ORIGINS OF THE THIRD WORLD DEBT CRISIS
The impoverishment of the Third World can be traced back to the 1960s when the US government spent more money than it earned. To make up for this, Washington printed more dollars. Thus, the world's stocks of dollars fell in value. This was bad news for the major oil-producing countries of OPEC, whose oil was priced in dollars. The money they made from exports now bought less. So in 1973 they hiked their prices, making huge sums of money which they deposited in Western banks. Meanwhile, the world was plunged into a recession. As interest rates plummeted, the banks were faced with an international financial crisis. They lent the money out fast, to stop the slide, and turned to the Third World, whose economies were doing well but who wanted to maintain development and meet the rising costs of oil. The banks lent lavishly, eager to make use of their surplus capital, offering loans by the barrowload at very low interest rates to the leaders of any developing country they could find, without much thought about how the money would be used or whether the recipients had the capacity to repay it.
In the end, little of the money benefited the poor. The money was almost entirely wasted; roughly a quarter of it went on increased oil bills; a quarter on misconceived large-scale development schemes such as dams, many of which proved of little value; a quarter on the military (often to shore up oppressive regimes); and a quarter went into the private banks of corrupt leaders.
The world's economic system is in fact based on debt. Every country in the world is in the red, even the richest and most successful. Most of the money is owed to multinational banks and financial institutions. Rich countries can survive periods of high indebtedness if there is confidence and investment in their economies, but poorer countries are crippled by their foreign debts. Some now owe more to the West than their total Gross National Product (GNP). The five countries with the biggest debt burdens (as a percentage of GNP) are: Cote d'Ivoire (338.9%), Guinea-Bissau (340.7%), Mozambique (450.4%), Congo (454.2%) and Nicaragua (a staggering 800.6%).
At the current rates of interest, it is a mathematical impossibility for most Third World countries to pay off their debt. Many have had to agree to the process known as "structural adjustment" by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - the two main financial institutions of the West - who have insisted on these countries' conversion to free-market economics.
By the mid 1970s, Third World countries, encouraged by the West to grow cash crops, suddenly found that they weren't getting the prices they were used to for raw materials like copper, coffee, tea, cotton, and cocoa. Too many countries - advised by the West - were producing the same crops, so prices fell. Then interest rates began to rise, pushed further by an increase in US interest rates, and oil prices rose again. Third World countries were now earning less than ever for their exports while paying more than ever on their loans and imports. They had to borrow money just to pay off the interest. Debts piled up and the repayments mounted ever more as the commodity prices that most developing countries depended on sank through the floor (by mid 1987, they were at their lowest level for 50 years).
New loans by the World Bank and IMF have only added to the burden. Since 1980 debt to the World Bank has increased five times; in effect the poorest countries became bankrupt. The oldest human rights organisation in the world, the Anti-Slavery Society, has declared that debt is "contemporary slavery" and interest payments a form of national bondage.
IN THE GRIP OF THE WORLD BANK
The World Bank is run from Washington by a hierarchy of rich shareholders from the developed countries, and it is under the constant influence and manipulation of the United States. Loans from the World Bank and the IMF come with draconian conditions aimed at diverting the borrower's resources away from meeting domestic needs and towards fulfilling the Bank's corporate agenda. Elected governments have been forced to impose very strict economic policies, known as Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) which have opened their markets to "free trade" - a euphemism for exploitation by transnational corporations (TNCs).
SAPs supposedly consist of measures designed to help a country repay its debts by earning more hard cash, but in most countries SAPs have worsened the economic situation and the poor have been hit the hardest. SAPs have particularly affected the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, whose economies are already the poorest in the world. In 1980 sub-Saharan Africa owed the West $60 billion. By 1997, after the introduction of structural adjustment, this had risen to $219 billion - $357 for every man, woman and child in the region, much more than a year's wage for many.
In the eyes of the people running the World Bank and the IMF, services that are "public" (i.e. those that people don't pay for directly, such as health, education, welfare, transport services, etc.) are deemed to be an unfair subsidy by the government. The private provision of services (which people do have to pay for) is looked on much more favourably. Other areas, such as clean air, reasonable conditions of work and health and safety considerations, are deemed irrelevant to trade.
Under the terms of the World Bank and IMF's structural adjustment programmes, the governments of poor countries are forced to cut spending on health, education, social services and welfare; to devalue the national currency; to cut back on food subsidies; to cut jobs and wages for workers in government industries and services; and to take over small subsistence farms growing staple foods and replace them with large-scale export crop farms. The SAPs also demand lower taxes on high income earners, privatisation of public industries (including their sale to foreign investors) and lower tariffs on imports. Third World nations have been forced by the IMF and World Bank to sell off state-owned enterprises at bargain basement prices. In 1990, more than 7O countries had privatisation programmes in place and sold off state firms worth $185 billion.
The results are lucrative for the West but socially disastrous for the poor countries, who have sunk deeper into recession, with mass unemployment, starvation and ill health. Millions of people in the developing world are trapped into a life of poverty and misery with little hope of improving their quality of life. Nonetheless, IMF loans are withheld if a country does not accept the terms of the West's plans. If ordinary people oppose these policies, the Bank and IMF are quite prepared to tacitly support violent suppression of demonstrations or protests. Thousands of people have been arrested or injured in protests in more than 30 countries implementing SAPs.
STRUCTURALLY ADJUSTING THE POOR
As the poor countries have been forced to relax foreign investment restrictions, Western transnational corporations have expanded investment in the Third World and there has been an exodus of Western industries to low wage Third World countries. In 1991, nearly 30 countries made it easier for multinationals to invest and corporate investment jumped from 19% of total foreign investment in 1990 to 30% in 1992.
The dependence on exports has made these countries vulnerable to the vagaries of the global market and has benefited only foreign investors and domestic elites. Most corporate investment goes to the rich world; of the $150 billion of direct foreign investment in 1991, more than two thirds went to the industrialised nations of the West.
Spending on healthcare has fallen drastically in many of the world's poorest countries since structural adjustment was introduced. In Zimbabwe, for example, spending per head on healthcare has fallen by a third since 1990 when a Structural Adjustment Programme was introduced. In Uganda, £2 per head is spent on healthcare, compared with £11.50 per head on debt repayments. After decades of falling numbers, the number of children who die before the age of five has risen in many indebted countries, including Zimbabwe, Zambia, Nicaragua, Chile and Jamaica. Diseases once thought to be eradicated, such as tuberculosis, yaws and yellow fever, are making a comeback as treatment and vaccination decline.
Massive job losses have also followed structural adjustment. Throughout the Third World, unemployment has gone up by 400% to 100 million. In Zambia, Tanzania and Ghana, over 20% of the working population are unemployed. In Mexico, Costa Rica and Bolivia, average wages have fallen by a third since 1980. Wages in most African countries have fallen by 50-60% since the early 1980s.
Many Western economists have seen the fallacy of SAPs. Hans Singer, a development specialist, stated: "The results of structural adjustment have been poor, indeed negative. The social costs have been enormous…. Growth has not happened, debt has not disappeared and investment has fallen."
SAPs demand that countries increase their export crops - and as many poorer countries are encouraged to grow the same crops, they cause a glut on the international market and prices fall, resulting in even lower wages for the workers on plantations and farms. Mexico first grew maize as a staple crop thousands of years ago, but today, thanks to World Bank/IMF economic policies, it has to import 20% of this staple food from the USA. The IMF encouraged Mexico to replace its vital food crops with cash crops like strawberries and exotic fruits. The IMF also made sure that any trade protection for the country's agricultural goods was lifted, so Mexico's export crops now compete with those from the USA, which are highly subsidised and use all available techniques to improve their quality. In such a one-sided fight, Mexico is the inevitable loser; almost 20% of Mexicans have no cash income; more than a third of the population make less than the minimum wage of $3 a day.
Since 1972, the Philippines' national debt has risen from $2.7 billion to $29 billion. Much of this was the result of secret and often fraudulent deals by the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and the World Bank. The Bank and the IMF quietly approved of Marcos and worked to keep him in power. According to internal World Bank documents, the martial law imposed by Marcos in 1972 made possible the "economic reforms that opened up the economy to the influx of foreign capital". Within two years, during which democratic institutions in the country were trampled on, World Bank loans to the Philippines increased fivefold. Since 1972 the World Bank poured more than $7.5 billion into the Philippines; during that time the growth rate fell and poverty rose by a third.
Marcos is believed to have looted some $15 billion from the Philippines' economy. In 1976, in return for $4.5 billion the IMF had given to him, Marcos built a number of luxury hotels to accommodate the World Bankers for their annual conference in Manila. Marcos sent the bill to the city authorities, who passed it on in municipal taxes. The poor of Manila are still paying it off. In 1981, US vice-president George Bush raised his glass to Marcos and said, "We love you sir… we love your adherence to democratic principles and democratic processes."
IMF structural adjustment of the Philippines led to the establishment of 'Export Processing Zones' in areas where food was once grown in abundance. This means that virtually all the forests will be lost within a few years. The IMF is currently demanding further reductions in public spending, a freeze on wages and new taxes. The Philippines' National Economic Development Authority estimated that as a result, 50,000 workers will lose their jobs in 1999. The Department of Health estimated that 399,000 children would be denied milk and vitamins, and 103,000 tuberculosis sufferers would be denied medical treatment.
The implication is clear: as a direct result of World Bank/IMF policies, tens of thousands of Filipino children will die - silently and unnecessarily. The Institute of Policy Studies in Washington has calculated that one child dies every hour because debt repayments consume vital services like health care.
Mozambique is another country that has paid a heavy price for the debt burden forced on it by the World Bank. During the 1980s the newly independent country of Mozambique helped the African National Congress in neighbouring South Africa to fight for majority black rule. South Africa's apartheid state fought back brutally, waging a war against Mozambique that did an incredible $25 billion in damage; a million people died and a third of all Mozambicans were forced to flee their homes. South African-backed Renamo guerrillas attacked factories, railways, bridges and other social facilities, crippling the economy.
They destroyed half the country's schools and hospitals - even massacring patients as they lay in their beds. The crisis was made worse because the United States and the West backed the apartheid South African forces as a bastion against Communism during the Cold War. When apartheid ended, South Africa stopped waging war on Mozambique but the country had been forced to borrow huge amounts of money for importing oil, food, clothing and arms for defence. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Mozambican government decided it had no option but to make a sudden and complete U-turn. It turned straight into a market economy dictated by the IMF, with strict monetary control, free trade and privatisation.
The IMF demanded that the Mozambican government reduce its spending, while insisting that it could not decrease the repayments of its debts. By 1992 the debt had mounted to more than $7 billion. Since then, Russia and many European countries have cancelled some of this debt, but $5 billion remains. Civil service salaries were slashed and nurses and teachers slipped below the poverty line. Some 100,000 workers - 25 per cent of the industrial workforce - lost their jobs as a result of privatisation. Each year, Mozambique is supposed to pay $350 million in interest on the outstanding debt, plus some repayments of the debt itself. In reality, Mozambique can only afford to pay less than a third of this - and the unpaid money is added onto the total debt. The country is caught in a trap from which it can never escape.
In 1976 Switzerland was 52 times richer than Mozambique; in 1997 it was 508 times richer. Mozambique is the poorest country in the world today.
Mozambique is not alone. All of Africa is caught in a similar trap caused by wars, falling export prices and other IMF-imposed policies. The people of DR Congo, for example, are now expected to repay $13 billion which was lent to ex-president Mobutu, who was supported as an anti-Communist ally by the West, despite their knowing that he would use the money to build palaces and filter the money into Swiss banks. Within the next two years, half the population of Indonesia will join the millions in sub-Saharan Africa who live below the poverty line.
India too has started along the road of structural adjustment, despite the disastrous results evident in Asian, African and Latin American countries. In 1991-2, a financial crisis persuaded the Indian government to borrow money from the World Bank/IMF. In return for the loan, the government promised to implement an ultra-liberal economic programme. By May 1993 India had, for the first time in its history, a budget which openly and unashamedly pandered to the rich.
Refrigerators, cars and colour TV sets became cheaper. A top-of-the-line colour TV had its price slashed by 2,500 rupees ($80) and advertisements now urge the rich to buy their second TV for the kids' bedrooms. But ration rice, the absolute basic food necessity in India, became more expensive, forcing the poorest to buy less food for their families.
In the railways, banks and steel manufacturing industries, the workforce was cut by 25% in just over two years under SAPs. During the same time, the number of unemployed in the cities increased by 4 million. Out of the active rural population of 400 million, there are now 110 million unemployed. Government figures estimate that 40% of India's population live below the poverty line.
India's poor face a chronic protein deficiency anyway because their diet consists of bulk rice and little else. Now that they have less rice, a heavy toll is being taken on their health, especially women and children. After five years' of health education, and of trying to encourage people to eat dal pulses (the only protein available to the poor), the price of dal has become prohibitive. Community health programmes are seeing children under five who have just made it out of malnutrition slipping back because their parents are buying less food. Ailments such as measles, diarrhoea and chest infections, which can be easily warded off by healthy children are wiping out malnourished children.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been made homeless all over India by flooding caused by World Bank dams and irrigation schemes, which have ignored the environmental impact. World Bank-sponsored hydro-electric projects have flooded over three million people off their land.
"If UN members can impose sanctions on Iraq and South Africa, environmental pollution and wasteful consumption are no less an act of war and a violation of the human rights of the people of the south."- MANEKA GANDHI, former Minister of State for Environment and Forests in India
"Debt is tearing down schools, clinics and hospitals and the effects are no less devastating than war."
- Dr ADABAYO ADEDEJI, former Under Secretary General of the UN
In China the Xiaolangdi Dam Project has relied heavily on World Bank loans, despite the fact that many independent experts have made it clear that the dam will have serious environmental consequences. The World Bank is equally unconcerned that hundreds of thousands of people are being forced out of their homes and resettled elsewhere, where they are suffering a serious drop in living standards, education and employment opportunities. The World Bank is also helping to fund a major water transfer project in Shanxi province in China. In return for the loan, the Bank insists that the Shanxi government must "commercialise" the water supply. The result will be that even something as basic as water will become too expensive for many poor farmers.
The current IMF loan programme for Ecuador has no less than 167 demands, which include the following: the country's government must raise the price of cooking gas by 80%. It must eliminate 26,000 jobs and halve real wages for the remaining workers by 50% in four steps in months specified by the IMF. It must transfer ownership of its biggest water system to foreign operators by July 2001 and it must grant BP's Arco subsidiary the right to build and own an oil pipeline over the Andes.
As Lobster magazine eloquently put it, "the only meaningful difference between the American international loan-sharking operation run by the IMF and US armed forces and the street level gangster version is this: the gangsters don't go round preaching to their victims that the beating and expropriation is going to be good for them."
In 1997 the European commission and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) completed a devastating report about the destruction of tropical forests in developing countries, which named Third world governments, multinational companies, the World Bank and IMF of involvement in a conspiracy which threatened to destroy much of the remaining virgin primary forests in the Caribbean rim, central Africa and Pacific within five to ten years, due to the expansion of unsustainable logging operations.
The report named companies prepared to bribe and bully their way to lucrative logging concessions and blamed the IMF and World Bank for inducing countries to sell their forests for a quick cash return to pay off debts to the West. However, the report was suppressed for three years by the European commission, who were fearful of the repercussions if they named names and a second version of the report was printed with the names taken out - but even this was watered down.
The report stated: "Many of the countries are suffering severe economic difficulties with large foreign debts, high inflation and unemployment. In the majority of countries, decision making is controlled by a small group of powerful people or clans within the government that look at primary forests of their country as a short-term source of personal revenue, not as a productive ecosystem which can generate social, economic and ecological benefits on the long term for the entire country and its people."
The Solomon Islands, Papua new Guinea, Cameroon and Belize were all named as suffering large scale corruption and the report blamed the main donors to these countries - the World Bank, Japan, the EU, France, Germany, the UK and the US - for failing to enforce their own rules to promote forest conservation and responsible management. In fact the World Bank and IMF made things worse by imposing monetary reform on these countries, urging them to allow multinational companies and the selling of their forests for cash to pay back debts.
REAPING THE PROFITS
Structural adjustment programmes do benefit some - rich landowners, business tycoons, bankers, financiers, shareholders and heads of foreign multinational corporations. It is ordinary people and their children who pay for these peoples' luxuries.
Transnational corporations now have almost total control over the process of globalisation. Two thirds of international trade is accounted for by just 500 corporations; the ten largest TNCs have a total income greater than 100 of the world's poorest countries.
TNCs and banks have no national loyalty; they can be located anywhere and can operate effectively at any distance. They are unanswerable to no-one but their investors and shareholders, who are interested exclusively in making profit. At present, there is no government or regulatory body to monitor or tax their overall behaviour. The result is that these corporations enjoy vast economic power without accountability or concern for social justice.
In theory, both the World Bank and the IMF are overseen by a Board of Governors, consisting of one governor for each member country; in practice, authority is delegated to a Board of 24 full-time executive directors. The World Bank says that "most of the decisions are made by consensus"; this is a consensus that always goes along with the aims of the ruling classes of the seven richest governments in the world (Canada, Italy, Japan, France, UK, Germany and the US), known collectively as the G-7 (now called the G-8 with the participation of Russia)
The top three beneficiaries of foreign investment in the Third World are France (reaping $138 billion a year), Britain ($199 billion) and the United States (raking in a massive $477 billion).
Western countries are the sole beneficiaries of the free trade- promoting "Uruguay Round" of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). As a result of this, the poorest countries will lose $600 million a year to the West and sub-Saharan Africa will lose $1,200 million.
Meanwhile, the number of poor countries catching up with the industrialised states, in per capita terms, has fallen by three quarters in the past quarter century. In other words, poverty has never risen so fast.
The 6,000 employees of the World Bank enjoy a lifestyle a world removed from the penury of the people they are exploiting. Middle-ranking civil servants of the Bank earn 300 times the income of half of humanity, with perks including first-class air travel and deluxe hotel accommodation, costing over $50 million a year.
In October 1991, the World Bank held its annual conference in Bangkok. A few weeks before the conference began, a small town of people living beside the railway tracks along the route from the airport was bulldozed, including homes, a kindergarten and a school. The poor people were moved to wasteland well out of sight of the World Bankers. Each was given £90 as "removal expenses". They had no electricity and running water, and the army demanded its tents back once the conference was over.
A vast conference centre, with gilded lacquer and other adornments was built for the occasion. A three-star chef was flown in from Paris, accompanied by turkeys from the famous Bresse region. Belgian caviar was flown in from Iran, smoked salmon from Norway and prime rib from the US. Following the seminar on the conversion of socialism to capitalism and "the lessons learned", the delegates enjoyed a party featuring a display of gems consisting of an 89-karat diamond, a 100-karat emerald and a 336-karat opal. In a country where children routinely die from malnutrition and preventable diseases and where low wages, child labour, prostitution and illegal sweatshops support the "growing" economy" advocated by the World Bank, the poor ended up paying for this extravagance.
"Whose side are we on in the Third World War: the present war against the Third World, the war against the poor, the silent scandalous sacrifice of the children who perish in sight of images of luxury and excess?"
- JEREMY SEABROOK
"Inequality is an evil both in itself and because it is a cause of poverty. One of the chief reasons why the poor are very poor is that the rich are very rich."
- DOUGLAS JAY
THE MYTH OF AID
For all their expositions of magnanimity, the world's richest governments are not committed to eradicating global poverty. In 1998 total aid to poor countries from member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was cut to the lowest level since 1950, to an average of only 0.22% of total GNP. The UN has set the target for overseas aid to 0.7% of a country's GNP. Only the Netherlands and Sweden currently meet this target and the US aid budget is the lowest of all Total aid from OECD countries fell by $3.8 billion in 1996, a decline of 4.2% in real terms from 1995.
There is little indication that this decline will be reversed. A 1997/98 Reality of Aid report condemned the fact that insufficient aid was being channelled to where it was most needed. While the poorest countries received a smaller share of aid, wealthier countries in Central and Eastern Europe enjoyed a 10% increase in aid.
"Aid can and does work, especially when it reaches people living in poverty, and when it focuses on things like education, health and clean water. Instead, governments, especially the G8, are focusing on new markets in developing countries where they can make a profit, and letting the least developed countries fall by the wayside."
- SABINA SINISCALCHI, chair of Eurostep
The great myth about aid is that Western banks lend money to Third World governments to help them develop their countries. In fact the majority of aid is not spent on direct poverty alleviation; most is tied to trade deals or debt repayments. In 1997 debt-service payments from sub-Saharan Africa amounted to 80% of aid. By making such loans, the West creams off huge amounts of interest paid by the poor countries. If indebted governments threaten to break off interest repayments, they are starved of further loans.
During the period 1983-90 for instance, the poor countries paid £98,000 million to the rich countries. That's a net figure, after taking into account new loans and all aid. It works out at about £1.4 million per hour. In 1995 alone, the poorest countries paid $1 billion more to the IMF than they received from it. The four main high street banks in the UK - Lloyds, Natwest, Midland and Barclays - have done very nicely out of this, making substantial profits from Third World debts, while collecting over £1 billion in tax relief on loans that are still current.
In 1985 Live Aid raised £50 million for the starving people of Ethiopia. That year the country had to pay £65 million in interest payments on loans from Western banks. At the same time 40 million tons of grain - enough to feed the starving ten times over - were stockpiled in Europe at a cost of £5 billion a year. Overall during the l980s, the Third World sent to the West $220 billion MORE than was sent to them in any form.
THE HYPOCRISY OF THE WEST
While decrying the lack of funds for foreign aid and famine relief, Western governments have never found money short when it comes to financing war. The World Bank found over $62 million to pay for bombs dropped by American B52 aircraft on Iraq during the Gulf War; this was the equivalent of Oxfam's entire budget for the year. £105 million was found to replace five British Tornado aircraft which crashed or were shot down during the war. This would have brought enough grain to feed for one month all the 20 million people likely to starve in Africa this year. And £3 million was found to train one Tornado pilot. This would have provided 25,000 Eritrean families with enough seeds and tools to recover from the current drought. In 1990 the British government gave to famine relief in Africa about the equivalent of two days' British military operations in the Gulf War. The next year the figure was even less.
Each cruise missile dropped in the 1999 Balkans crisis cost $1 million; the cost to NATO of bombing Kosovo and Serbia for four months was over $150 billion. Just a tenth of this sum would have provided massive economic regeneration of the region with a much greater chance of a lasting peace which protects the rights of the Kosovar Albanians.
The annual running costs to the British government (paid for by taxpayers) of the Trident nuclear submarine programme amounts to £1,500 million every year for the next 30 years.
Poverty is one of the root causes of violence. Many of the poorest countries in the world are currently engaged in, or emerging from conflict. Protracted war inevitably leads to highly militarised societies. But far from seeking to steer these countries towards peace, Western governments have a vested interest in maintaining the global arms trade. War provides lucrative markets for arms dealers.
Many Third World countries have become deeply indebted because of high military spending. In order to purchase arms, poor countries cut public expenditures in health and education and borrow foreign exchange. The poor become poorer and conflict becomes more widespread. This sets up a vicious circle of debt, underdevelopment and conflict. It has been estimated that between 1960 and 1987, Third World governments borrowed around $400 billion to fund arms imports from the West.
The British government has supposedly committed itself to the halving of global poverty by the year 2015 through the promotion of pro-poor bilateral aid programmes and by reform of the stringent conditions for debt repayments. Yet the British government's enthusiastic support for the arms trade undermines many of the goals of its debt and development agendas. Britain now sells almost a quarter of the world's arms, actively promoting the sales of its weapons to the Third World with extensive export credits to subsidise arms sales. In 1993/4, 50% of all export credits provided by the Department of Trade and Industry were for arms sales. In time, these credits became further debts for poor countries.
The Western banking system is at the heart of the global arms trade. Without the support of Midland bank, who underwrote the sale, the export of British Hawk ground-attack aircraft to Indonesia would not have been so straightforward; without the investments of pension funds and insurance firms, British Aerospace and other major arms traders would not have quite such a healthy turnover.
In 1997, 73% of the exports of major conventional weapons from the West were to developing countries, and 87% of the world's arms were supplied by member governments of the UN Security Council.
"The damage done to us now and in the future by a system that fills our heads with artificial needs so that we forget our real needs - how accurately can it be assessed? Can the mutation of the human soul be measured? The spread of violence, the debasement of daily life? The West is living the euphoria of victory. The collapse of the East served up the vindication: in the East it was worse. Was it worse? Rather, I think, one should ask whether it was essentially different. In the West: justice sacrificed in the name of freedom on the altar of the god of productivity. In the East: freedom sacrificed in the name of justice on the altar of the god of productivity. In the South, we still have to ask ourselves if that god deserves our lives."
- EDUARDO GALLEANO
THE IMPACT OF THE DEBT CRISIS ON ALL OF US
The debt crisis does not just affect people living in poor countries, but also those in developed countries. Many of the results of Third World debt boomerang back to hurt the West because taxpayers here have paid for billions of dollars in tax relief for unpaid debt to Western banks.
The unsustainable exploitation of Third World countries' natural resources has caused massive environmental destruction, contributing to increases in the greenhouse effect and global warming. Many ill-conceived development projects, such as large dam projects, power plants and charcoal-driven industries, began in Third World countries under structural adjustment programmes; apart from failing to help the poor, these have also caused serious environmental damage. According to the 1998 United Nations Human Development Report, environmentally-damaging industrial activities have been subsidised to the tune of over $170 billion every year. $710 billion is 14 times what is required to eradicate poverty in the world.
As Third World debts have mounted, environmental conservation programmes have been axed. It is the world's poorest countries who are chopping down their forests the fastest. Brazil is one of the world's largest debtors, owing $112 billion to the West; it is cutting a staggering 50,000 sq. km of forest every year.
In 1985 the Brazilian rubber-tapper Chico Mendes sent a letter to the World Bank protesting about the suffering caused to the Uru Eu Wau Indians in the north-west of Brazil as a result of a $300 million World Bank funding of a main road through the state of Rondonia as part of a development scheme. This had destroyed small communities of Indians and rubber tappers and led to large-scale clearance of the rainforests. The letter brought world-wide attention to Mendes as an impassioned environmental campaigner and defender of the "people of the forest". He was murdered by a landowner in December 1987. The World Bank's projects in Brazil continue today.
Thailand too faces an environmental disaster, with its great forests wiped out by uncontrollable logging and profiteering. In its report, The World Bank and the Environment 1993, the World Bank itself timidly acknowledged that for many of its projects, consultations with affected populations and local non-governmental organisations "have been limited at best".
Workers in the West are losing out on earnings from many factory and farm produced goods because it is so much cheaper to import them from the Third World. At the same time they are unable to export equipment and other manufactured goods to former trading partners in the Third World because those countries have no money to buy them - so jobs are also lost in the West. Before the debt crisis, Europe sold about a fifth of its exports to the Third World, particularly Africa. By 1990, it was only a tenth.
Struggling to repay debts, many poor countries have turned to the lucrative drugs trade to raise foreign capital. For instance, Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, with the highest child mortality rate on the continent. The country has to spend half of its export income on paying its debt. It is estimated that no less than 40% of Bolivia's workforce depend on the drugs trade for a living.
THE NEW AGENDA
An astonishing 70% of all international trade is now controlled by just 500 corporations. The state of the world is increasingly being determined by the shadowy figures in the boardrooms of these corporations, rather than by elected governments. Without any major media exposure or democratic accountability, the World Bank and IMF have quietly finalised their most destructive treaty to date. This is called the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI). The U.S. has been at the origin of MAI and is pushing to have this agreement adopted as quickly as possible by the rich industrialised countries of the OECD. MAI has so far received very little public attention but it is a devil's pact that will further enforce the dominance of transnational corporations over the entire planet and its dwindling resources, while bulldozing human rights and the fate of the poor. The MAI gives TNCs expansive new rights and powers (without any responsibilities) while burdening countries with new obligations to the corporations.
Amongst the MAI's agendas are:
Governments are required to give foreign investors access to all economic sectors. It abolishes the rights of all citizens and governments to control the entry, conditions, behaviour and operations of TNCs in their country.
If governments refuse to allow TNCs to do as they wish (for instance, by banning a corporation's products because they are dangerous), the government will have to pay stiff penalties.
TNCs will be given further powers to take law-suits against governments to protect their interests. For instance, a US corporation which has been barred by the Canadian government from selling its gasoline additive in Canada because it is harmful to people's health, is suing the Canadian government for $350 million in estimated lost revenues on the sale of the product in Canada.
The MAI attempts to bypass international standards, social security measures, and environmental laws. Under the MAI, foreign investors' rights are given legal priority over other countries' laws. The adverse social, economic and environmental consequences of the activities of TNCs, which occur now, even when they are subject to government legislation, will be greatly magnified. The power of democratically elected national or local governments to regulate TNCs and protect local people and their environment will be removed by this treaty.
In short, the MAI puts into practice the ideology that the entire natural and social diversity of the world are resources to be freely controlled and exploited by global corporations. The effects will be catastrophic.
WALLPAPERING THE PROBLEM
The right-wing ideologues who defend and run the global economic system see nothing wrong with it. For them, it is a process of weeding out the weak and the unfit. They have no compassion for people in other countries who suffer due to their policies; in their view, those who can't cope or compete don't deserve to survive. This is the rationale of the New World Order, the global economy.
The World Bank and the IMF have long been adamant that any cancellation of Third World debt is completely impossible. However the recognition that much of this debt is totally unpayable finally caused the Bank to agree, for the first time ever, that some debts could be cancelled. In 1996 the Bank agreed the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, ostensibly intended to cancel a portion of some poor countries' debts. However, despite the Bank declaring that HIPC would "free budgetary resources" and allow poorer countries to "broaden the scope of their health and development efforts", it has turned out to be a cruel hoax.
In April 1998 Mozambique was by far the biggest beneficiary of HIPC, with over $2 billion of its debts supposedly "cancelled." This, however, turned out to be nothing more than an accounting trick. The World Bank and IMF agreed to cancel only that part of the debt that Mozambique was not paying in any case - that part which was being "rolled over" each year. HIPC only cancelled the uncollectable debt. After HIPC, the country is still paying back $100 million a year; just $10 million less than the $110 million it has been able to pay. Each day Mozambique's government pays just $100,000 for the country's entire health service; each day it pays $275,000 in debt repayment. The World Bank has lent Mozambique an extra $25 million a year for health, but this has merely forced the country into deeper debt.
Conservative foreign office minister Douglas Hurd once stated that Britain "will not give aid to any country unless the market dominates its economy". New Labour has readily adopted the Tories' mantle of free market economics at all costs. While Tony Blair's new Clause IV enthuses about "the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition", Blair's Trade and Industry secretary Stephen Byers recently declared that "wealth creation is now more important than the redistribution of wealth" and went on to tell his audience in the City of London that "Government should not hinder entrepreneurs but work to ensure the market functions properly and contributes to creating a strong, just and fair society."
One of the beneficiaries of the kind of strong, just and fair society created by the market was Paula Duarte, a seventy-three-year-old pensioner living in downtown Buenos Aires. When the Argentine government bowed to World Bank pressure and slashed pensions in the spring of 1992, Paula began looking desperately for work. On August 20, still unemployed, she hanged herself with a nylon cord from a tree outside the University of Buenos Aires Law School. In her purse were just two pesos.
Paula Duarte's suicide was one of many among Argentine's pensioners. The World bank had insisted on a draconian reduction of social security benefits "to restore business confidence" and stabilise the shaky Argentine economy. The government of President Carlos Menem cut payments for most of Argentine's three million pensioners to just $150 a month - less than half the minimum needed for food and shelter. As neighbourhoods set up emergency food programmes, the Menem government tried to downplay their plight. Economy Minister Domingo Carvallo told pensioners they should get jobs (even though unemployment stood at record levels) or seek aid from their children. When a journalist asked Menem to explain why so many old people were taking their lives, he replied: "I am the President of the Republic, not a psychologist!"
When 32 residents of a government-run home for the elderly died of malnutrition, a storm of public criticism led to the resignation of the health minister, Mathilde Svatetz, a protégé of Carvallo's. But the cutbacks have continued.
Throughout the Third World millions of people are dying as a direct result of such blinkered belief in the absolute importance and infallibility of unfettered market forces. The mantra of free-trade is repeated endlessly by the leaders of Western governments as if they are God-given, incontrovertible truths. They argue that when all barriers are removed, the economy will function at a height of efficiency and benefit all. This is a folly of the most idiotic, blinkered kind. The introduction of free market economics to the Third World has resulted only in the greatest inequality between the rich and the poor in human history.
Menem and Carvallo were not the first Latin American leaders to be pressured by the World Bank to cut pensions. That distinction went to General Augusto Pinochet, the military dictator of Chile, back in 1981. When the World Bank and the IMF demanded that pensions be slashed, he did so. Peter Munk, chief executive of Horsham Corporation, one of the West's major investors in the Chilean free market, exuberantly praised General Pinochet at the company's shareholders meeting, for having turned Chile into one of the highest "profit per capita" countries in the world. His enthusiasm was not mirrored by the half of all Chilean workers who were suffering cuts so deep that they were getting pensions below the poverty line.
Encouraged by its "success" in Chile, the World Bank launched a world-wide campaign for lower pensions as part of its push to cut back public programmes and privatise public services. World Bank teams demanded access to the pension administrations of half a dozen Latin American countries in the mid-1980s and sharply criticised the existing systems. World Bank experts such as William McGeevy argued that with increasing numbers of older citizens, Third World governments simply couldn't afford to offer them adequate pensions; that was a luxury that only the richest countries could now afford. As a result of such demands, Latin America's 14 million pensioners received, on average, less than half the sum needed for "minimum necessities".
Pension cutbacks have now spread well beyond Latin America. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, pensioners have been selling their home furniture to buy bread, due largely to the "shock therapy" reforms imposed by the World bank and the IMF. China, with 100 million older citizens, is now at the top of the Bank's priority list for pension cuts.
Despite Tony Blair berating the Tories while in opposition for their mishandling of the economy, once in office, Blair took great delight in appointing three former Tory ministers to sit on a new government economic body - the British-Mexican Business Network, which aims to promote foreign trade with Mexico. No Labour member will sit on this body. The three Tories appointed by Blair are: ex-chancellor Kenneth Clarke, Lord Walker the former Welsh secretary and Lord Garel Jones, the former Foreign Office Minister. Clarke is deputy chairman of British American Tobacco, which has investments worth $1.7 billion in Mexico; Lord Walker is a director of financiers Dresdner-Kleinwort Benson; while Lord Garel Jones is a director of the Union Bank of Switzerland. Downing Street insisted that the three were chosen for their business expertise, apparently oblivious to any conflict of interests that the three might have in playing such a critical role in Mexico's economic affairs. Tony Blair's definition of "business expertise" appears to include the plundering of Third World countries such as Mexico.
If Blair and the other leaders of Western governments took the time to witness the reality of the effects of the free market, they would see that the gross inequalities between rich and poor countries are now worsening. Today, 20% of the world's population accounts for 86% of consumption. Westerners spend $37 billion a year on pet food and perfumes. In its 1998 Human Development Report, the UN says that amount would provide education, food, health care, water and sanitation for all those now deprived of those basics - with $9 billion to spare. Children in the Third World are starving to death so that their counterparts in the West can consume up to 20 times more resources "freely".
FIGHTING BACK
More people are becoming aware of the cracks in the system of global finance. Coalitions between movements such as the Campaign Against the Arms Trade and the Jubilee 2000 campaign for a one-off cancellation of the backlog of unpayable Third World debt by the year 2000 are mobilising public support. In May 1998 at the annual G8 summit at Birmingham, England, the leaders of the world's seven richest countries found their conference hall surrounded by 70,000 protesters holding hands to form a human chain calling for the cancellation of Third World debt. In June 1999, Jubilee 2000 organised hundreds of thousands of campaigners in over 20 countries to highlight the issue of debt relief before the G8 summit in Cologne, where a petition signed by 12 million people was delivered to the leaders of the G8 countries.
There have been many demonstrations throughout the Third World against World Bank/IMF-imposed policies. In South Korea, the biggest strike in the country's history forced the government to repeal part of a new labour law that was originally passed through the Korean parliament in secret. The strike terrified many of Asia's business and government leaders who were worried about similar protests taking place in their own countries.
Such international grassroots protests have had a dramatic effect in forcing the G8 leaders to discuss new initiatives on debt, and the World Bank itself has conceded that its structural adjustment programmes are harmful to the poor. Under pressure from intense international protests in the run-up to the G8 summit in Cologne, the Bank announced a $50 billion deal of debt relief. However, this was another of the Bank's con tricks; half of this figure did not represent actual money for the countries concerned but simply wrote off debts which were never going to be repaid and on which they were not meeting the annual interest bills.
Despite President Clinton's public proclamation that no country should be left with a "burden that keeps it from meeting its peoples' basic human needs", behind the closed doors of the G8 summit, the US showed its determination to link any debt relief to strict compliance with even more stringent economic "reform" programmes, while the World Bank insisted that Third World countries adhere to a further three years of SAPs before they get any debt relief.
Toronto, London, Naples, Lyon, Cologne, Okinawa - the annual world summits attended by the leaders of the G8 countries since 1988 to solve the problems of third-world debt have been little more than expensive talking shops full of empty words and promises while no significant progress on debt reduction has yet to take place.
Barely $15 billion of the $100 billion that rich nations promised to wipe off debts last year has actually been cancelled. The last G8 summit meeting at Okinawa in Japan was the most expensive ever, costing an astonishing £500 million, a sum big enough to have saved an entire African country. In fact Japan spent more on hosting the leaders of the world's seven richest nations for one weekend than it has contributed so far to the cause of cancelling third world debt. Amongst the entertainments lavished on the delegates were parades and song-and-dance troupes by a thousand artists and musicians performing on a floating stage on the shoreline. There was even an official G8 summit theme song called Never End. For those in the third world crippled by debt, the title could hardly be more appropriate.
Jubilee 2000 campaigns now exist in 38 countries, North and South, but a lot more campaigning is needed to convince the leaders of the West of the need for change. They must be made to view the world not just in terms of "markets", but in terms of ethical considerations and the social consequences. They must accept moral responsibility for the suffering and deaths their policies have caused throughout the Third World.
The West is not richer than the Third World because it is intrinsically "better" or more efficient; its riches are a direct result (in fact dependent upon) the exploitation of the Third World. The leaders of the West must be made to realise that their wealth should carry with it social obligations and that there is no "acceptable" level of poverty or hunger. And Third World starvation should be placed on the human rights agenda.
The idea of "social credit" is enjoying a renaissance among radical and green economists. Under the current system, private sector banks have been allowed a virtual monopoly over the creation of credit. Social credit seeks to counter economic globalisation by securing control over the institutions of finance by local communities, enabling socially-aware and economically responsible policies to be put into effect. The replacement of money lending with investment and the redistribution of wealth may not be acceptable to the West, but it is crucial to a development of the Third World which combines economic growth with political stability and ecological sustainability.
According to World Bank figures, developing countries owed $1.9 TRILLION to the West in 1996. The gap between rich and poor has never been so big in all the world's history, and the need for radical change has never been so great. Reforming the world's economic system may seem impossible. It is easy to say that nothing can be done; those who argue that there is no alternative to the current system say that there will always be poverty; that some people are born into it and there will always be inequalities; that there just aren't the resources or capital available to eradicate poverty world-wide. These are lies.
The world has all the resources and finances to deliver the basic needs of all its people, if only there was the collective will. Jubilee 2000 has calculated that it would cost each taxpayer in Britain just £2 per head to cancel debts owed directly to Britain by the poorest countries. And a mere 16% of the amount allocated to military spending in the developing world could provide basic health care and education for everyone in the world.
The 358 richest people in the world own, between them, more than the annual income of the poorest 45% of the world's population, some 2.5 billion people. These billionaires have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion. Just 4% of this wealth - $60 billion - would be enough for basic education, healthcare, adequate food, safe water and sanitation for all the world's people.
In 1998 the world's top six working billionaires were (in ascending order): media magnate Rupert Murdoch (net worth $5.3 billion); business tycoon Francois Pinault (net worth $6.6 billion); computer software owner Hasso Plattner (net worth $6.9 billion); oil, gas and real estate owner Philip F. Anscutz (net worth $8.8.billion); investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz (net worth $13.3 billion); and computer magnate Bill Gates (net worth $51 billion). A 1998 United Nations study noted that the combined income of these six men could wipe out poverty from the face of the earth and provide basic social services for the quarter of the world who live in severe need.
The top 358 billionaires are worth the combined income of 45%
of the planet's population, the 2.5 billion people on the bottom.
"The only effectual weapons are the facts, figures and arguments
that discredit the corporate agenda and reveal progressive alternatives.
If they - and the means of disseminating them - continue to lie rusting from disuse.… it won't be long before the New World Order is here to stay."
- ED FINN
"Our tragedy lies in the richness of the available alternatives and the fact that so few of them are ever seriously explored."
- TOM ATHANASIOU on free trade and global poverty.
"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."
- LAWRENCE SUMMERS, chief economist of the World Bank, in an internal memo, 12th December 1991
THE HAVES AND THE HAVE-NOTS: THE NORTH-SOUTH DIVIDE
IN THE NORTH:
Live one quarter of the world's people who consume 80% of the world's resources and pump out 80% of the world's greenhouse gases
IN THE SOUTH:
Live three quarters of the world's people who consume just 20% of the world's resources with average incomes 18 times lower than those in the north
Reproduced from:
http://www.wakeupmag.co.uk/
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Zimbabwe: Whites condemn Mugabe
Posted: Monday, December 24, 2001
( Ayinde )
I am now watching this White woman on BBC cable, who is relating how she is leading a group that is fighting for their rights to live in peace in Zimbabwe.
It is amazing to hear how she condemns Mugabe for passing laws to legitimize what he wants to do.
The bias, hypocritical BBC interviewer cannot even pose proper questions to this silly mindless female who thinks that the only rule of law are those set down by the British.
But hearing this female articulate how he is passing laws to legitimize what he wants to do would have been humorous if we were not addressing serious issues. These hypocrites pretend they cannot reflect and see that their occupation of Lands in Africa was illegal and staying there illegally over time does not make it legal. They cannot see that Britain and the rest of Europe and America continually pass laws in an attempt to legitimize their crimes.
In fact the debt to African Zimbabweans is far greater than they imagine and cannot simply be repaid with land reform only.
But this is the power of European Bias Media; they convey what they want to viewers without putting things in a proper historical context.
I am posting a link for another view...
Why Mugabe is right ... and these are the facts
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( razmarcus )
The same hypocrisy is seen in South Africa. The World must understand: AFRICA for the AFRICANS!!!!
Some may argue but Idi Aimeen, gave the white racist usurpers 72 hours to get the raas claat out of the country to free up the land!!!!
Point Blank it is the Black man's land. To even debate and consider negotiating with Facist Nazis like De Klerk and those other SA murderers and these whites in Zimbabwe is an insult and disgrace to those millions of Africans who died under the treacherous colonial wickedness of these
human parasites!!!! They have no right to the land based upon their heinous crimes against African Humanity.
If anything they should be facing African Military tribunals and be charged with the crimes they are guilty of as conspirators, co-conspirators and beneficiaries of terrorist crimes against Humanity.
Africa must stand to drive these parasites from the contintent. "And some will say, not all of them are bad, see look we bring medicine to help you" as they kill off the African race with their genicide plan with AIDS and Ebola.
By their fruits you shall know them.....
More fire
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( Akinkawon )
That is what I was trying to tell you on the other Message Board.
BBC has been waging its own war on Mugabe for a long time. They try to sell the image that all was well in Zimbabwe before the Mugabe reform program. But for those who know the history, they did not peacefully hand over power in that country, they fought to maintain White control over all the major assets of that country and White businesses remained profitable because of another racist policy in trade. They would pay their white businessmen far more than they would pay African businessmen. So there is an appearance that when businesses are in Black hands they are not as successful.
Most Africans having been reduced to subsistence farming and not having access to business connections especially in the European markets will find it very hard to remain viable once the European Markets can source products and strike better deals with other countries.
Most times they play Black traders against one another by offering a particular trader more in the hope that they could devastate another larger trader and farmer who would eventually be forced to sell back to Whites. These Whites suddenly get better prices.
Today Cadbury chocolate buys cocoa from Africa but under a trading policy these African Countries are not allowed to manufacture chocolate. So, they sell the cocoa cheap to London Cadbury and import chocolate in Africa. This happens with many other products e.g. twine.
There is much written about these colonial practices that are still present today. The colonial system is maintained by the desperation of a people whose values are tied to European tastes and Greed (a desperate form of greed).
There is no way out for African Businesses unless they are prepared to first get better informed about these global practices of exploitation and are willing to develop products based on the need of other African states. Also they must invest in Education that could give the people better values that are tied to them and not Europe based on desperation and media imagery.
We often speak of the past colonial era without remembering that for many the mental chains of slavery have not been removed and as such most people are remote controlled.
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( Jeff )
Greets
I have reasoned with an African Brother from Zimbabwe and he said that in that country, there are two classes: the have, and the have-nots. He feels that Mugabe is using the have-nots for his own political purposes. He points out that the farms that have been taken over are not being used for farming, thus hurting the economy of the country.
Just because a man's skin is darker, doesn't make him a saint. Time to stop living in a utopia....
Peace
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( Gman )
Yeah man I agree with you, Mugabe is no revolutionary. I too know some people from Zimbabwe (who are by no means supportive of the white farmers)and none a dem like Mugabe. He has broken up strikes with force of arms, and used tribalism to divide the people, Shona vs. Ndebele. However I have no sympathy whatsoever for those white farmers, the land most definitely needs to be taken back from them tiefin' scoundrels and if some or all a dem get deaded in the process me don't care. Cos they didn't care about the Africans when they was hunting InI down like animals a couple decades ago.
But you know you gotta ask why Mugabe waited so long to make this move. I feel he's doing the right thing for the wrong reasons (to shore up his popularity with rural landless people who have so far seen little or no benefit from his regime). And it's true, what is the use of taking over land if you're not going to use it for constructive purposes? And how you gonna attack the African people who only work for these white farmers because there's no other jobs?
Definitely run out dem invaders, but don't put uncritical trust in leaders like Mugabe, membah we don't wanna get tricked by mercenaries whether white or black. Living in Guyana under Burnham I get to see first-hand how hypocritical certain people are when using words like "socialism" and "black power". Often these words are just a mask for people's power-hungry intentions, the same way words like "democracy" are a mask for the capitalist's t'iefing intentions.
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( Ayinde )
EVERY WHITE PERSON who did not fight to correct the Zimbabwe injustice and did not hand over all, ALL what they profited from that crime against humanity are 100,000,000 times worst than Mugabe.
It does not matter if people speak to all the Blacks in Zimbabwe, if Blacks did not push to get the lands back to the indigenous peoples and their descendents then they are already enslaved and are part of the problem. We will work to educate them. But no White can get me to have more than basic sympathies for them. If they did not contribute to the insults they would not be victims today.
Next: Every white person and to a lesser extent every African person who do not fight for reparations to be paid for slavery are part of the problem. If Blacks profited from Slavery, show us their profits so we can claim that also. But we understand their complicity.
I not buying this we are all one family and lets forget the past nonsense.
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( Jeff )
Greets
You wrote: I not buying this we are all one family and lets forget the past nonsense.
Forget family....that's human con-cepts....we're talking down to the nitty-gritty....all is one...but yes, the past cannot be forgotten, but I refuse to let any more dishonesty and politricks, black or white, impede the work that needs to be done for all Humanity. What about the Asians? They are fighting amongst themselves. (China and Tibet) Ever see a Chicano tell a Mexican to speak English? Or how about the schism between Africans, Jamaicans, and Black Americans? Is this just more ego? (yep) When can anyone in the Human Race say that no one has suffered something along the way? (some more than others...and THAT needs to be dealt with by all of us)
Deal with the reality of the history of this bullshit democracy? Yes!
Fight for Human rights? Yes!
Learn about the past? Yes, of course! And LEARN FROM IT.
But I refuse to be plagued by WHITE GUILT for the crimes of many people of the Cauacasian race.
Come to my house, any color my Brother and Sister, be Good and Kind, and full of Respect, and it's mi casa su casa.....
God is looking at us ALL and wondering when we are gonna get it straight.
Peace and Love
Jeff
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( Jeff )
BTW
Blame that one single Portugese man, and that one single Ashanti king for all the past four hundred years.
The Portugese wanted to build an alliance with the Ethiopian Prester John against the "infadel" Muslims, and the Ashanti king wanted those guns that would aquire more land.
Ego=Devil, and the devil doesn't knwo the difference between black and white (or japanese against Chinese, or Chinese against Tibetans, or the Ashanti against the Zulu, or the Irish Protestants against the Catholic...etc etc etc...)
Heaven Help Us All
Jeff
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( Ayinde )
Yes, I am blaming the Whites and every fool who buys White false values and greed.
I am blaming greed and especially Whites who feel they know what is good for African people. I am no slave and no one is oppresses me. But that do not stop the White Economic power system from continually trying and working on the minds of the less fortunate and making it harder for them to wake up. It's not a fair battle.
Don't get me wrong, I have White friends but only the kind who promote African awareness and contribute towards Africans doing the Work. Not some who want to be in the front like if them saving Black people.
I not talking about any Asians here. That is White schemes. Every time we talk about payback they keep bringing up every other people and way-out claim trying to confuse the issue.
Mugabe is bad but every White in Zimbabwe who sat there and did not push the issue for correction is far worst. When reparations are paid and stupid Whites stop trying to dictate to people about what they should do with their own money and land, I will be the first to show more Whites how to live like family. Whites don't get this family thing yet. They have words but no idea of the rules of engagement.
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( Gman )
Respect Ayinde. I agree with the I on most points but I have a couple comments.
The reason I posted my comments about Mugabe, was not to minimize the responsibility of the whites for all the suffering in Zimbabwe. But I feel everyone who posts on this board (well maybe a few exceptions) already knows the atrocities the settlers committed, and agrees that they should be driven off the land they stole, and that no tears should be shed for their blood, like Benjamin Zephaniah said awhile back about the Boers dem. So we done agree on that. But especially here in America I see most of the pan-African kinda groups give totally uncritical support for Mugabe and hold him up as a real revolutionary. I don't feel that's the case so me have to point that out. It's a simplistic "settlers bad, ZANU good" concept that doesn't do justice to the reality of the situation and doesn't take into account the many AFRICAN people Mugabe has had killed or imprisoned.
The white settlers have to go, dead or alive, and the land returned to the poor people of Zimbabwe, regardless of their political party allegiance or lack thereof. But now the big division between Black Zimbabweans is Mugabe's ZANU party vs. the MDC (so-called democracy movement party). The way I see it, MDC was trying to attract a lot of urban dwellers who was sick of Mugabe's regime, both poor people and their unions, and the petit bourgeouis, and whites as well. So dem have 3 groups of people who join them for 3 different reasons, but we done know who is really pulling their strings, they are the party that is going to invite in all the multinational corporations and so forth, abandon any kind of pretense of socialism, make Zimbabwe safe for investments. We know that is what they are about but a lot of urban poor people is a part of it because they are sick of Mugabe's repression and believe they will be allowed to have a true voice in society under the MDC. If the MDC comes into power, they will see how mistaken they were. But when Mugabe comes and starts cracking down and beating and killing people for attending a meeting or writing an article in a newspaper or peacefully assembling, all that is doing is driving more people into MDC's fold. ZANU is now desperate to hold onto power and they are using the rural landless the same way MDC is using the urban poor- promising them a better life. But is only the people can give themselves a better life, not no political party, them only want to use ya.
So I say, support the land reclamations- that is bigger than Mugabe anyway, that is the voice of the people. But watch out for Mugabe, MDC and all their ilk. Not all who claim to be revolutionary, truly are.
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( Ayinde )
I am seeing you clearly.
I also will not support driving Whites out by any means but if some people do, I understand.
But I will never condemn Mugabe in front of Whites who do not push the reparations issue. I don't care if they say they love Blacks or they are Rastafarians. Until these main issues are settled I am not putting down Mugabe. From now until their doomsday or change of heart I remain firm. When I see Whites openly calling for reparations to be paid then I may join them.
The new white thing is to accuse Africans who push for land return and reparations of blaming Whites.
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( Jeff )
Greets
This is kind of long, sorry....I am glad we are all Reasoning straight and not pretensiously, Respect.
I have mixed feelings for reperations, and that is because who pays who back? Do I pay for something my ancestors were never a part of?(looked into it, my family lineage, and that's when I found out that my grandpa actually desegregated a church in Texas and had to move to Colorado because of it)I am a poor, white family man, and 'ol Jesse Jackson and all his offspirng are way way ahead of me on the pay-thing, why should he get my daughter's money because I don't choose to go into politricks and make all the money he did? Does the poor, reservation-living Indians pay for what the Cherokee Nation did with slaves? Does the Ashanti tribes, and offspring thereof also pay back for their role in it? I would be all for it, if not for the many compexities. If black businesses got money, would they be honest with it? Money is money, black or white, and the love of money corrupts, straight and simple.
And whose land is it anyways? Don't we all live on stolen land? Before the white man came along, Africans were all over each other for land, just like the Europeans, and Asians, and Native Americans.....just more devil ego. You can't honestly tell me that Shaka had anything to do with the revolt against the British....he was on his own trip, BIG EGO, he actually liked the British army for their military strength...he wanted that strength. Why, so he could conquer more land? Nobody's perfect it seems....absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And yes, I do care about the struggle for Africans around the globe. I care about the struggle for what the whole Human Race is going through right now.
Is money that important? Or is the Human Race and our survival on this planet more important? Why did all the Spiritual Messengers come with nothing but the clothes on their back? Ever see a rich prophet? Yep, money is good, but the love of money, and power for that matter, corrupts like nothing else....
Just Reasoning, I am not upset...I Thank You and have Much Respect for our getting together and telling it straight. I like real people here on the Net...too many people fakin' it. :-)
Peace and Love Brother
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( Akinkawon )
While I know the way of peace and divinity, none shall enter unless they know the way of the warrior. The warriors fight the battles here on earth for right understanding and right actions to the afflicted then they may graduate.
All who claim to know the way of peace and have not known the way of the warrior are frauds. They are the enemies within that lure the unsuspected away from the path.
How can a man claim to be one with all mankind and leave out the legacy of Earthly inequities? All of Europe was built on the backs of Slaves while many of the descendents of these earlier victims are now subjected to the absurdities of racial prejudice and gender discrimination. Those who have unconsciously accepted the 'profits' of this unjust system must first become conscious of it. They must work for a restoration of dignity and rights of belonging to the disadvantaged. Many impoverished people do not have the luxury of traveling to, and or settling where they wish. They do not have the mental comfort to even associate comfortably with other Blacks. They live under the scourge of False White Superiority superimposed over the Greatness of their ancestors. They have been nurtured on illusions.
Every White today receives far more consideration than a Black man or Woman and this evil blinds many to the built in inequities in the systems that disenfranchises so many.
Today the 'Arabs' and 'Palestinians' who were initially Black are now getting little experiences of what Africans in the West have long experienced. They are now getting a taste of what they have also done and continue to do to African people in their region.
Do we all live on stolen land?
Think of this for a minute and you may discover that while many live on land that was stolen from more indigenous Africans and Indians, the idea that a mortal can own and possess land is European and it is from that false notion of ownership and entitlement they took from many, and killed and displaced many more. Those who were dragged unto lands where people were forcefully removed are not thieves but victims of thieves.
Many may live on stolen land but the thieves were those who thought it was theirs to possess in the first place and it is necessary to address this wrong by recognizing that a debt is owed to the descendents of the people who by direct lineage were entitled to settle and roam as they please. Today all are forced to recognize land, as property and no African should continue claiming that land is free for all unless he or she has that land to so declare.
Yes Jeff, as I told you before, once you were the recipient of the benefits of White Superiority you are guilty by association and have inherited the sins of your forefather.
You have the attention of Whites and it is your responsibility to carry these truths to them and to bring resources/money to the table to further the process of enlightenment. You can set up your own school if you wish but you will receive no graces from enlightenment unless the dignity to all Blacks are restored and until they have all had a chance to taste material freedom, (which is short lived).
Being White, you can get the attention of White media and you can take to them the works of Great Africans for them to promotion. It is a sin for you to sit around with Blacks and remain materially poor while in many ways you can earn far more than Blacks with equal skills and you can bring this money for people like me to show you how to use it for good. Lean not on your own misunderstanding of trying to determine what Africans should do or not do with what is owed to them. It is a debt to be paid and the people can do as they wish with their money. Many will waste resources for they have learned the White ways of material excesses and adoration.
These are the lessons that were taken to Africa, while the young and brilliant were dragged off as slaves with the aid of some Africans who were already corrupted by European false values.
Do not confuse yourself with generalizations to mask the issues and to detract from the essence of this discourse which points to right actions for the liberation of you.
But please speak your mind and bring all the White counterarguments to the discussion so that more Africans can learn how to deal with Western Spin doctoring.
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( IsisRastafari )
Blessed Love I's!
I am very glad to see this reasoning taking place and wanted to jump in and add my Iditations to the reasoning, for truelly it is more than past time that this reasoning needs to be massively, for only through repairing the past can InI move foward into the future, having built upon Truth and Right as the Foundation.
InI as white people do have a Collective Responsibility that must be upheld. I also am a "poor" white whose family, as far as I have been able to trace, had not hands in slavery, but still I feel this needs to be looked at in the Collective, InI know that the affects of slavery are still with InI today and also racism is alive and well today, re: preferential treatment in how our communities are alocated funds, public services, housing, racial profiling by police, landlords, employers, not to mention in the inequity of the justice system, now granted reparations may not fix these ills, but it is a step...the movement of reparations is also encompassing re-education of the masses. Also with the mentality of white supremecy it was used to secure the 'future' for whites in general, by putting whites above others in all aspects of life. That was done for all whites to feel supreme, even though InI don't accept and adhear to this, it is still something that is here and available to whites. It was still done for whites even if InI don't accept it, with this being put on InI plate since birth, InI have been thus given the responsibility to change it, and that is reparations to I.
No InI may not have money, and I think that when reparations are issued in the form of $, it will be from tax dollars that InI will pay, as it looks that the one who will be alocating funds will be the governments. For Surely InI can sight that reparations will be a positive step! InI tax dollars pay for pure evil, look at the defense budget and what it is used for. I dont feel it is up to InI whites to worry about how the funds are used....for I don't tell no one how to run them lives. So to I like anything, the Good that is brought about by reparations out weighs any adverse effects that may be.
Also there has been reparations by Ghana a prime example for InI to sight, now those in Ghana may not even be descendants of the Ashanti Tribe, their family may not have played a part in slavery, still them stand up for the inequity that has been committed........
FIHANKRA ~On December 9th, 1994 a Historical ceremony was conducted In Ghana, West Africa to Atone for the participation of those past traditional rulers who helped to sustain the trans-atlantic slave trade, first initiated by European powers in the 15th Century. The Atonement ceremony consisted of the customary purification of a carved stool (seat) and specifically prepared skin of an animal. Stool and Skin were customarily named Fihankra, which literally translated means: When Leaving Home Good-byes could not be said. At this time there is a Ghana Law expected to be passed giving dual citzinship to Africans of Diaspora and Ghanians who gave up their African Citzenship for American citzinship will be able to get back their Ghana citzenship, and I also hear of land being set a side...the contact bredren is
Nana Kwadwo O. Akpan
Chief and Custodian of the Stool and Skin of Fihankra
fihankra@africaonline.com.gh
So I sight it is just a diversion to contemplate what others will do to make right, when InI have In InI hands the ability to make right even if it is classified as "small" still good for the advancement of the Whole.
No I, money is not important ultimatly, "Life is worth more than Silver and Gold...." (so why do InI worry about how it will be spent by those recieving reparations) Money now-a-days can even buy life, and it does affect the freedom InI have in life. Some of us as white people also encounter the oppression of money, but this is a reflection of the matrix of the system, and the issue needs to be looked at piece by piece of the whole, there is more opportunities for white people as a whole in babylon, economics is another form of slavery, and for blacks this is a two-edge sword living in babylon. Slavery has not been addressed in no real form in babylon by whites, it hasnt been that long ago, for ones to forget it like they have, where I live in the south, once blacks were freed from slavery with little to nothing, many couldnt afford anything but to stay where they were and sharecrop or move to the cities projects, not too long ago at all actually within the last generation, and then from there to find a job in the city, yah right, to get in school was an issue, the whole 'majority mind frame' is based on non-equality, and this is massive non-comparable to anything else in the view of the collective communities, black and white.....the mentality is still present. Yes Ultimatley it is the human race and all of we's survival.....One Body....head, arms, shoulders, back, legs, etc....all parts need to be treated right for the body as a whole to prosper. I feel our duty as poor white people is to re-educte ourselves and pass it on to others, that in and of itself is a form of repartions, a way of working within the body to help make it whole and healthy.
Haile I Selassie I spoke of Collective Responsibility many times, in the Aspect of Collective Responsibility of Africa, Collective Responsibility of Ethiopia, Collective Responsibility of Humanity.
One Love~True many chant One Love! But is it true love, true love doesnt have any conditions, doesn't seek anything in return for giving true love, true love gives of it self freely, true love walks over hills and vallys for the one love!
I know I have rambled on, and don't know if I made any sense, please ask me about anything I wrote, sometimes I cant find the write words to truelly express what I feel, that is why I dont post much. And bredren Jeff I want you to know I am not one of the fakers online:) I am real and the I is welcome in I gates anytime to see....
Blessed Love!
One Love!
Just-Full Ites!
I-sis
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( IsisRastafari )
Jeff....you are right, the love of money of corrupts....but the issue of reparations isn't for the pursuit of the love of the money, but of the pay that still hasn't been given for years and years of forced labor by millions of people. So in that aspect, money is important.
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( E.A.S.Tafari )
HAIL THE LIVING I HAILE SELLASSIE 1
Greetings
Who is Jeff? Where is he.We just want to know if he's living in these times.
I so glad that there is a sister to catch some of his fire. Please sister re-educate Jeff for INI ,first by asking him to walk a mile and stop grudging those blacks who have what is righfully theirs. As a matter of fact people like Jesse and the rest dont even have enough because we know that they surely worked the righteous work for what they have and have been robbed on the way by people who think that what these africans have attained is in the wrong hands.
We are also asking Jeff to visit the ghetto and projects and the prisons; take a drive in the suburbs; fly to the continent and visit the african homelands and the suburbs on the continent; take a look at the status of african people who have the wealthiest continent and are the poorest in the world; find out who is controlling all the natural resources and the economy all over the world; who are the war mongers and the gun manufacturers.If after his position is still the same, then we invite him to one of the cliffs in the Caribbean where the slave masters used to throw the runaways, the sick and the elders,into the sea to get rid of living human beings who were not of any productive use to them on the slave plantations; and from the top of one of these haunting cliffs, he can take a dive.
Our hearts have no place for the rich or poor, black or white, who dont have a sense of justice.
Jeff,if you know the bible in out we ask you to join the jesuits and watch you empire catch fire!!!!!
Yes I "true love"
Fire oh RasTafari!!!!!!
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( E.A.S.Tafari response to Akinkawon )
HAIL TO THE MOST HIGH ALMIGHTY JAH
YES I BROTHER;
The I said it for all of INI
Give thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!
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( Jeff )
Greets
Brother, I was once Rasta, for the past 12 years....Reasoned with Elders, preached Black Consciousness to my white people, etc etc....I am not as ignorant as you think I am, believe me. I have thought long and hard about these topics before many on this here internet even heard about Rasta. It almost made me laugh to read you tell Sister Isis, who I've know for a while here on the Net, to educate me, but as of late I have been trying to transcend the ego and just show compassion and love...even to the smallest of God's creatures.
Lately, I have been greatly influenced by Buddhist teachings, which point directly to the heart, and not the color of the skin. Buddha taught that it is desire, and our want of things that cause suffering. All this desire comes from ego, and the Buddha has taught that we must cease hatred and all other things that come from the ego. I, me, etc etc...we are all connected, right down to the littlest molecule, so there is no I or you or me....
Yes, I do care about the world, and ALL the past inustices of Humans. And for me the answer isn't more money which causes more corruption, but straight up Enlightment for the Human Race.
Peace
Jeff
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( Jeff )
Greets Once Again,
"It is proper to doubt. Do not be led by holy scriptures, or by mere logic or inference, or by appearences, or by the authority of religious teachers..."
-Gotama the Buddha
And that is what I do Brother....straight and simple. I don't believe in any -centric view, neither Euro or Afro....Life si way too compex for such simplifications.
Peace and Love
Happy Holy Days to All
Jeff
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( IsisRastafari )
Greetings Jeff, I don't know what the I finds so laughable about learning from another, in specific I, Can we not learn from each other? Or can't InI even learn from the "smallest of God's Creatures"? I feel only ego stops InI to be open to learning. I am no way perfect and will gladly accept any righteous rebuke or lesson the I have...so please I tell I what the real deal is...and since when does the WANT for JUSTICE cause suffering? I allways thought it was the reverse the UN-WANT for JUSTICE causes suffering.
"Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph." H.I.M. Haile I Selassie I.
In this society skin color does affect InI life experiences, InI life experiences shape InI heart.
True-Word-Sound-Power...."Straight up Enlightment for the Human Race"
Blessed Love!
I-sis
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( Jeff responds to Akinkawon )
Greets
I am on my way to LA for Christmas....and just wanted to respond to one thing, and then I will try to get abck to the general discussion.
You wrote: All of Europe was built on the backs of Slaves
I would like to point out that yes, America was built on the backs of slaves, but Europe already had great empires before slavery, and they were built on the backs on poor, white people known as serfs. How about reperations for all the poor serfs of European history?
Again, I am asking in all seriousness, and still hold firm to my views that man to man is unjust...not just white against black, but all Humans are unjust to one another, and again, from my own spiritual views, it is all due to ego.
I will get back to you again, hopefully when I get to LA.
And again, thanks for the good, honest reasonings!
Peace
Jeff
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( Akinkawon )
Yes, I mean the Europe we know today and I would go back further once we are through discussing returning lands and Reparations to Africans.
{{{ Europe already had great empires }}}
In your European view, and you are quite entitled to hold that view, Europe had great empires.
WHEN THE LION TELLS HISTORY THE HUNTER IS NO HERO.
In my African view, Europe never had a great Empire. All the European 'empires' were built on theft and murder. They were the world's greatest thieves. Many Africans tried to civilize Europeans and very few grasped a bit of what it meant to be civilized. The few that did were quickly executed or ostracized for promoting 'revolutionary' ideas.
As a White person you have the luxury of adopting any belief system you want. Today you are Rasta; tomorrow you are Buddhist and later on a Hindu. You can be anything and society would not discard you to the cesspool of the human race. They might consider you a crackpot but many material doors would remain open to you.
You are not even appreciative of the breaks you have and how much more you can do if you were not trying to escape the work here on earth. You mentioned that you used to promote African consciousness (which I doubt but I believe you thought you were). No one who understands the problems of race and gender discrimination would stop addressing it while it still affects so many people. It's like saying you used to treat cancer as if when you stopped there was no more cancer.
Whites have always exploited each other and the forced labour of the Slavs cannot be compared to chattel slavery and its legacy of racial discrimination and land deprivation.
Anyhow Europeans do not have a problem killing and compensating each other, it is the Africans they have a problem with.
I'll wait until you return before I continue….
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( Jeff )
Greets
Going to LA tomorrow instead. First, I don't have a "European" mind...I have the mind of Jeff, no -centrics....just the mind God gave me. Second, I should have not used the word "great"....trust me when I say I don't find the history of Europe very great or exciting, but I do have yto study it just as I have to study African, or Asian, or any other history. Third, you too can be a Buddhist, or Rasta or anything else....nobody makes that decision but you, and nobody controls that but you. Economoics? Yes, the power structure is everything you say it is, but spirituality is between you and God, and so don't diss what I choose spiritually, cool? (Might I give you the webpage for the Pround Black Buddhist? Yes, he's from Africa, and he CHOSE his religion)Or do you want to reason with one of my Black friends about how he isnt Rasta anymore also? Did he have a choice????
Anyways, I will leave the board and let you and others speak of what you want...the oppressed will become the oppressors...etc etc...history repeats itself. Power and money....Thats why Buddha said to drop the desires and cravings of the ego (money and power included)....only then will wars and slavery end.
Peace Ya'll
Jeff
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( E.A.S.Tafari )
PRAISES AND THANKS TO THE ALMIGHTY ONE JAH RAS TAFARI.
Greetings
INI are going to have a farewell reasoning for Jeff or maybe INI just had it.We see that is one who is retired hurt.....
wait until he comes out with his sellout biography twenty years from now when he has finally found his tower with all his donny. He is going to write of all his adventures and the things that were not so attractive in this religion and that one. He is heading to be a hero in time .. that is how these fickle people operate.They cower under the task when it becomes a reality because we are sure that his next new religion is going to expose his cowdice once more. he is going to move on like the typical rolling stone until he finds his true self. just another man (white this time) who couldnt take the light.
INI fare thee well until we meet in the land of CONSCIEINCE. we SEE THAT YOU DIDNT ACCEPT THE INVITATION TO THE HAUNTING CLIFFS IN THE CARIBBEAN.DONT MAKE THEM FOLLOW YOU.
From the hearts we wish you well in all your ventures.Carry some mariJahna in the inner coat(not coke) whenever the depression of injustice sets in and in your high just pray for those "those were not as fortunate as you" YES I IF YOU ARE SINCERE YOUR PRAYERS WILL REACH YOUR DISCOVERED GOD.WE WILL ALSO PRAY THAT YOU WILL NOT THINK BE BECOMING ANOTHER columbus.
Haaaaaa! we sighing another sigh of relief while we stack up all your past verbal contribution to what you once thought was your home.Fallcy eh!?
RUN AND CATCH YOUR SALVATION BEFORE IT BECOMES ANOTHER ILLUSION.
THERE IS NO PEACE WITHOUT JUSTICE.
TRUE LOVE IS LOVE. JAH THE MOST HIGH IS LOVE.
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( Akinkawon )
BUDDHISM: The Dalai Lama is pushing for the return of lands.
When you meet him tell him that is material things and a waste of time.
You converse like a regular European even though you believe you are different.
It don't matter what an African joins or becomes he would be plagued with the negative effects of Racial prejudice. That's my point.
There is no escaping racism; there is no choice about that.
When you join what you want you are not faced with the negative effects of Racism.
I am a practicing Buddha, and Sufi etc, but when we are finished with the return of lands and compensation to all Africans affected by Slavery and its legacy of Racial abuses we could discuss Buddhism.
To be continued.....
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