Recently, the Ugandan government’s chief negotiator said that the government would continue to respect a landmark truce with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) that expired Tuesday night (19 September 2006). Mohammed T. Yusuf argues that: “So far, both the government and the LRA have adhered to the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement. It is in that spirit that I add my voice to the call for peace, and I urge all peace lovers to join the Civil Society fraternity in their struggle for peace in northern Uganda.”

The civil war in northern Uganda has been going on for the past two decades, and has had far reaching consequences in the region. The Acholi people have been the most affected. They have been kidnapped, raped, tortured and displaced.

Be that as it may, the victims of this civil war have not received sympathy and international solidarity like the victims of other wars. The attempts in 2004 to declare the area a disaster zone did not bear fruit.

The government of Uganda has always taken the initiative when it comes to the resolution of this conflict. The present peace negotiations (the Juba Peace Talks) are a result of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of Sudan and the leadership of southern Sudan. The Juba Peace Talks have brought the Lord Resistance Army/ movement (LRA/M) and the Government of Uganda to the negotiation table.

On the 30 August 2006, I attended two very important meetings in Kampala in support of the JUBA Peace Initiatives. The first was a Stakeholders Consultative Meeting on Juba Peace Talks, between the Government’s Peace Team and representatives from the Civil Society Organizations in Uganda.

The organizers (CSOPNU, UNAU, DENIVA and the MACOMBA Link Partnership) handled the issues with sensitivity and made sure that all stakeholders participated in the process.

One of these issues was the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) indictment of the five major commanders of the LRA, including Joseph Kony and his deputy Vincent Otti. This was seen as a stumbling block to the peace process.

On a recent KFM radio talk show, Vincent Otti pointed out that the only thing preventing him from being physically present in JUBA was the ICC’s indictment. He emphasised that as long as the ICC’s indictment remained valid, he would remain in hiding. Meanwhile, the people in northern Uganda have voiced their forgiveness to the entire LRA for the sake of peace in their region.

Otti admitted that he has done his fair share of wrong, and said in public that he is willing to go through the traditional conflict resolution court of the Acholi - the MOTOPUT - and ask for forgiveness if found guilty of any act.

According to Robert Kabushenga, the government is waiting for five major LRA commanders to submit proof that they will cease and desist from engaging in a destructive civil war. What makes Vincent Otti and the other four major commanders of the LRA nervous is what happened to Charles Taylor. Olusegun Obasanjo betrayed Taylor, and now that act of betrayal is indirectly affecting the Juba Peace Talks

The second issue discussed at the meeting was the role of women in the peace negotiations in Juba. It is clear that women play a great role in our societies as our mothers, and face many challenges in times of war or conflict. Therefore they should play a great role in peace making and building in this process. Women have made serious contributions in resolving conflicts in Africa and the world. The Honourable Betty Bigombe is one example of a woman who has attempted to resolve the civil war in northern Uganda.

There were continuous cautions against the presence of spoilers in the Juba Peace Initiatives, and the participants requested the chairperson of the government team to deal with them accordingly. Some of these spoilers are local people, but others from the international community. I am referring to people who pretend to love the country and the people of northern Uganda, but go behind our backs to support acts of violence.

The second meeting I attended was on Women and Conflict. This meeting brought together representatives from Women Organizations (UWONET, ISISWICCE), women refugees from Kampala, students and PADEAP partners like the Jesuit Refugee
Society, to discuss the role of women in conflict resolution.

The major issue here was the involvement of women in peace making and building. Women refugees requested that women’s groups like the UWONET, ISIS WICCE, AKINA MAMA W’AFRICA and others support them to handle better the role of peace building in their own communities.

The core of the discussion revolved around the issue of peace in the region. Participants were enthusiastic and encouraged each other to be committed to peace. I quote Bishop Baker Ochola, the Treasurer of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative:

“…Government of Uganda wants peace, the LRA wants peace, the CSOs want peace, the international community wants peace, and all stakeholders want peace. And this peace shall prevail in northern Uganda, in the whole Uganda, the Great Lakes Region, on the continent and the world at large”.

The two parties in the JUBA negotiations were commended for signing the Declaration for Cessation of Hostilities on 26th August 2006, and were given an assurance that they would receive full support in their endeavours to search for peace. The UN Under Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, Ian Eageland, also added his voice recently in support for these negotiations. He requested the Security Council to offer their full support to the JUBA Peace Talks in order to save this region from the cruel acts of war that have been going on for the past 20 years.

So far, both the government and the LRA have adhered to the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement. It is in that spirit that I add my voice to the call for peace, and I urge all peace lovers to join the Civil Society fraternity in their struggle for peace in northern Uganda. It through peace that socio-economic development can be attained in Uganda.

• Mohammed T. Yusuf is a researcher with the Centre for Democratic Research and a Political Assistant for the Pan African Movement Secretariat Kampala.
• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Like many other countries, Ghana, has taken the necessary steps to protect children from abuse and exploitation by ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) on 5th February 1990, just three months after it was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. In spite of this, the reality of children’s lives remains in stark opposition to the picture the legislation sought to draw. Afua Twum-Danso argues that Ghana must go a step further and adopt measures to protect children from abuse through advocacy, community action and awareness of children’s rights.

Ghanaians are fond of joking that their government is always one of the first, if not the first, to ratify international conventions, protocols and agreements. Therefore, they merely raise an eyebrow at the fact that the Government of Ghana was the first State Party to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) on 5th February 1990, just three months after it was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. To comply with this, the government reviewed its policies and domestic legislation quite rapidly compared with many other African countries.

The Children’s Act: In Focus

The Children’s Act led many to hope that there would be a turning point in the progress of children’s rights and welfare in the country. Yet, the yawning gap between policy and actions on the ground continues to widen. The Act, in and of itself, is a good comprehensive piece of legislation – one that, ironically, some countries look to as a best practice. Its provisions cover the protection of all children below the age of 18 in all aspects of their life.

The first part of the Act outlines the basic rights of the child, which are all in accordance with the CRC principles. These include the right to grow up with parents (unless it is not in the best interests of the child), the duties and responsibilities of parents towards a child, the right to parental property, the right to education and well being, right to social activity, right to be able to express an opinion and participate in decisions affecting his/her well-being and the right to protection from exploitative labour and torture.

Any contravention of this part of the Children’s Act is liable to a fine of not more than 5 million cedis or a term of imprisonment not beyond one year or both. Included in the second part of this section is the definition of what is meant by a child ‘in need of care and protection’, which covers children who are orphans, neglected or ill-treated, destitute, under the care of parents or guardians who are unfit to take care of the child or who is wandering and has no home and no visible means of subsistence. The second part outlines measures for the establishment and operations of Child Panels and Family Tribunals. The third part focuses on issues relating to parentage, custody, access and maintenance. The fourth part deals with adoption, and interestingly, fosterage, which for the first time is regulated. The fifth part provides some guidelines concerning child labour and apprenticeships.

The Children’s Act Viz A Viz Children’s Lives: A Stark Contrast

Despite the comprehensive nature of the Act, the reality of children’s lives eight years after its passage remains in stark opposition to the picture the legislation sought to draw. Highlighted below are a few examples of the situation of children viz à viz certain provisions of the Act.

- Although the Act stipulates that the Department of Social Welfare (DSW) is to be responsible for children ‘in need of care and protection’, thousands of children who are neglected, ill-treated, abandoned, orphaned and resort to begging on the streets remain outside the reach of DSW, mainly because people – be it children or adults – are still not reporting cases sufficiently and DSW does not have the resources or capacity to go in search of cases. Although in some cases, people rely on the extended family support system to look after such children, many people do not know to whom they must report cases. As a social worker based in one of the local DSW offices in Accra told me, ‘many people go to WAJU to report cases and then have to be referred back to us’.

- The Act clearly states that every child has ‘the right to education and well-being’. The introduction of the FCUBE (Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education) in 2005 illustrates the efforts of the government to enforce this aspect of the Act. However, many parents and children still do not know about the FCUBE and those who do, complain because they still need to provide for textbooks, shoes, uniforms, exam and printing fees etc, which costs more than the 30,000-cedi school fees that the government has taken upon itself to pay. Although substantial numbers of parents appreciate that they cannot expect the government to provide everything, they still maintain that this new deal leaves them bearing the greater weight of the financial costs of schooling, something which many cannot afford. Thus, for the poorest of the poor, the provisions of the FCUBE are not enough, meaning that a large proportion of children remain out of school and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

- The Children’s Act further stipulates that every parent has rights and responsibilities whether imposed by law or otherwise towards his child, which includes the duty to protect the child from neglect, discrimination, violence, abuse and exposure to physical and moral hazards and oppression. Although it is the belief of this writer that most Ghanaian parents want the best for their children and strive to obtain this – albeit sometimes in misguided ways – incidences of parental neglect are increasing. In interviews with over 200 children in Accra, one thing that they pointed to over and over again was the need for parents to show love to their children and pay them attention. In children’s minds, once a child has parental love and attention all else will follow, including food, shelter, medical attention, clothes and education.

The sexual abuse of children also seems to be increasing in our society – or maybe is the real increase is in reported cases of sexual abuse. In early February 2006 a 7-year-old girl in the Ashanti region of Ghana was raped? by her grandfather, a man in his late 60s, and later tested HIV positive. Approximately a week later the media reported that a 4-year-old girl had been raped? by an 81 year old man. These are just a couple of cases in a long series of abuses against children that have been reported to the police.

- The Act also stipulates that although children may be employed from the age of 15 and engage in light work from the age of 13 years (i.e. work that does not conflict with a child’s attendance at school and is not harmful to the health or development of the child), hazardous work should only be undertaken by those who are 18 years and over. This includes mining, porterage of heavy loads (i.e. kaya work), going to sea or fishing, mining and quarrying, working in manufacturing industries where chemicals are produced or used, places where machines are used, places such as bars, hotels and places of entertainment where a person may be exposed to immoral behaviour.

However, one does not need to go far to find evidence of children engaged in such work. Kayayes and kayahii (truck-pushers) can be identified at any urban market, sometimes carrying loads for those who are supposed to protect them: police officers. In the coastal areas of the Greater Accra and Central regions the use of children in fishing remains a big phenomenon. Here, people do not understand why their male children should not participate in a tradition that has been in their families for generations. This is particularly evident in Ga Mashie where fishermen are seen as warriors – a status that understandably all fathers want to pass on to their sons.

All the children that were interviewed by this writer were easily and very quickly able to identify places where children are engaged in mining and quarrying. Children could be found breaking stones at places such as Achimota and Kasoa. With regards to mining, they mentioned Boduase, Obuase and Prestea. That children are engaged in these hazardous occupations in their thousands is not hidden. In fact, you would have to be blind to miss it. Even then I wonder. Though any person who contravenes this section of the Children’s Act commits an offence and is liable to a fine of up to 10 million cedis or imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or both, these phenomena continue unabated.

Sensitisation of Communities

The reasons behind the limited implementation of the Children’s Act and hence the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) are a mixture of lack of political will, lack of awareness and public dissemination and lack of resources. Research has proven that lack of awareness and understanding of the concept of children’s rights and the CRC are directly linked to the lack of political will, which, in turn reinforces the lack of resources available to ensure the implementation of children’s rights.

Despite the centrality of public awareness of children’s rights to the implementation of the CRC and domestic legislation, most members of the public and even policy-making bodies do not know about these legal instruments. In cases where they do have knowledge of them, they do not know much about them and their contents. In fact, there are some MPs who do not even know what is in the Children’s Act, which was enacted in 1998 and which many of them voted into passage. One Assemblyman from a community within the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) desperately crying out for children’s rights related interventions, confided in me that he had not read the Children’s Act and thus, did not know what it contained.

Not only do the majority of Ghanaians not know of or have very little knowledge of the Act, but also there seems to be a great deal of confusion surrounding the very concept of children’s rights. Many believe that it means children’s rights to empowerment only and thus they reject the idea sometimes quite angrily, as it attacks the very premise on which Ghanaian cultural values are based.

In one example, a senior community leader who is very well educated, possibly abroad, said to the writer, ‘Children’s rights? We have enough problems with children here without giving them their rights’. Instead, according to him, what the community needs is to focus on providing education, clothes and food for children - not rights. And this is where the problem lies.

Rights, in the eyes of many, are linked to the empowerment of children, whereas education, food and clothing are seen as basic needs that the community must provide for children. That these are also rights is not always clear. Thus, there needs to be clarification of what is meant by children’s rights and an explanation that it could range from basic needs such as food, clothes and education to more lofty ideas like asking children for their opinion and involving them in decision making.

Child Panels

The centrality of sensitising communities about the Children’s Act notwithstanding, it is important to consider another scenario where people know the provisions of the Act and still fail to report cases of abuse and exploitation. This could be because they fear the exorbitant financial fees that go along with the bureaucracy, long waiting periods and numerous adjournments that currently make up the Ghanaian judicial process. Added to this is the fear of being ostracised from the community in cases where the abuse was perpetrated by a fellow member of the community.

Therefore, an approach which takes into consideration the traditional arbitration process whereby all interested parties to a case are brought together to discuss the issue in informal surroundings with elders from that community as arbitrators, would be a vital asset to the modern legal framework. That the Children’s Act (Act 560) makes provisions for the establishment of Child Panels at the community level is an acknowledgement of the need for a more communal and traditional approach to complement the formal judicial system.

The Child Panel provision of the Children’s Act (Act 560) addresses the establishment of a quasi-judicial body that is charged with mediating minor civil and criminal matters at the community level. It is based on the belief that many families and communities would rather seek their own way to resolve problems than engage in a costly and lengthy judicial process. It is also the only legal structure at the community level charged with the socio-legal protection of children.

Therefore, it has the potential, when fully operationalised, to absorb not only the civil issues pertaining to non-maintenance of children, child labour, parental neglect or maltreatment, truancy/failure to send a child to school, but also minor crimes committed by children such as petty theft. Child Panels also have the capacity to engage in sensitization activities relating to children’s rights, facilitate counselling support for child victims of abuse where necessary, and facilitate reconciliation between a child offender and his/her victim. By dealing with minor offences committed by children, Child Panels can assure justice is meted out to the child without recourse to the main justice system which tends to be expensive and time consuming.

The benefits to the child and the wider society are evident. Firstly, it exposes children to non-violent ways of resolving conflicts. Secondly, as the deliberations of the Child Panel and its settings are informal, it is less intimidating for children and thus more child-friendly. Thirdly, the fact that Child Panels send out invitations to attend a session instead of issuing subpoenas or warrants and the fact that it makes proposals instead of judgments ensures that parties with a vested interest will be less apprehensive of attending a session of the panel.

Finally, its approach is participatory, not only because it allows children to participate effectively in matters that affect them, but also because it asks the interested parties if they have any proposal for the settlement of the matter.

Wider societal benefits include reducing the burden on the judicial system, which is already seriously overloaded. According to DOVISSU, between January and June 2005 it handled 7150 non-criminal cases in Accra alone, which the Child Panel system could have effectively managed if it was already in operation. This would allow DOVISSU and the judicial system to focus on more serious cases such as murder, armed robbery, rape, defilement, drug and people smuggling/trafficking, which appear to be on the increase. Moreover, as Child Panels undertake mediation and restitution functions at the family and community levels, the situation whereby children are put through the formal justice system can be avoided.

Therefore, they offer alternatives to prison for children who have committed minor crimes for which a prison sentence would be too harsh and only turn the child into a hardened criminal instead of a rehabilitated, responsible member of society. Finally, the nature of Child Panels will encourage more people to report crimes and civil matters and thereby allow the country to address some of the key problems facing children in Ghana today: parental neglect and non-maintenance, the exploitation of children’s labour and failure to send children, especially girl-children, to school.

• This article was written by Afua Twum-Danso, the Child Rights Programme Manager at the Centre for Community Development Initiatives (CCDI), an NGO based in the UK. For further information on CCDI and its work on children’s rights, please contact: [email][email protected]
• Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Patrick Bond argues that the assault against the international civil society has been devastating. He writes that nearly all the major multilateral institutions have been captured by hardliners over the past couple of years. Bond postulates that it is from this standpoint that “…We can understand not only the recent debacles of global governance: the inability to expand the UN Security Council in September 2005; the breakdown of the Doha Round of World Trade Organisation negotiations in July 2006; and the planned shrinkage of Africa’s voting power within the IMF board of governors, from 4% to 2%.”

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) annual meetings just completed in Singapore were a disaster for the Third World, especially Africans who face a dramatic decline in voting shares on the IMF board, at the same time a few middle-income countries led by China recapitalise the institutions.

For civil society activists, the official welcome in Singapore may not have matched last week’s brutality by Robert Mugabe against Harare trade union leaders or Durban police against shackdwellers. But it more than confirmed Singapore’s reputation as an intolerant police state:

• the regime simply banned the arrival of dozens of social and environmental activists, including many with official Bank/IMF accreditation;
• others who got to the airport were immediately extradited;
• Singapore even asked neighbouring Indonesia to cancel a citizen’s conference critical of the Bank and IMF, held across the bay from the city-state.

Civil society activists replied with a boycott call. According to a petition by Jubilee South, the World Development Movement, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth International, Oil Watch International and several other groups, ‘Knowing full well the authoritarian character of the Singaporean Government, the Bank and IMF appear to have picked Singapore as the site because they wanted to avoid legitimate and peaceful street protests.’

True, but consider the broader context for the assault on institutions of international civil society. Nearly all the major multilateral institutions have been captured by hardliners over the past couple of years:

• the European Union chose Spanish neoconservative Rodrigo Rato as IMF managing director in mid-2004;
• the new head of UNICEF, chosen in January 2005, was George Bush’s agriculture minister Ann Veneman, although the US and Somalia are the only two out of 191 countries which refused to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child;
• for another key UN post in February 2005, the outgoing head of the World Trade Organisation, Supachai Panitchpakdi from Thailand (who mainly served US and EU interests from 2003-05), was chosen to lead the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development;
• Paul Wolfowitz was appointed by Bush to head the World Bank in March 2005;
• the European Union’s trade negotiator Pascal Lamy won the directorship of the World Trade Organisation a few weeks after that; and
• to ensure that Washington’s directives to Kofi Annan continued to be as explicit as possible, Bush appointed John Bolton as US Ambassador to the UN.

Bolton is illustrative, for he was never confirmed by the US Congress since Bush gave him the job during a mid-2005 recess. As the once-powerful, pro-apartheid former US senator Jesse Helms put it, he is ‘the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon.’

Coming from the State Department, Bolton’s main function beginning in 2001 when Bush captured the White House, was to disempower the UN. He also engineered Washington’s withdrawal from or weakening of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, a biological weapons convention protocal, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the nuclear test ban treaty, the UN conference on the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons, and the International Criminal Court.

It is in this context that we can understand not only the recent debacles of global governance: the inability to expand the UN Security Council in September 2005; the breakdown of the Doha Round of World Trade Organisation negotiations in July 2006; and the planned shrinkage of Africa’s voting power within the IMF board of governors, from 4% to 2%.

In addition, at a time of fusion between ‘neoliberalism’ (promoting US/EU corporate and especially financial interests) and ‘neoconservativism’ (promoting US petromilitary profits and religious-extremist values) as the dominant bloc in global geopolitics, we must concede the utter futility of reform proposals being advanced by some in civil society, along with some governments, like Thabo Mbeki’s.

The neolib-neocon fusion is personified by Wolfowitz, close ally of the exceptionally corrupt, brutal Indonesian dictator Suharto during the 1980s and more recently, as deputy Pentagon leader, architect of and apologist for imperial theft and US corporate patronage associated with the illegal Iraq War.

Since January this year, Wolfowitz’s Bank has a new self-declared mission: to stem project graft, whose historical costs to the 62-year old institution are conservatively estimated at $100 billion. Wolfowitz is getting plenty of press ink for his anti-corruption plan by asking its contractors and staff to declare their knowledge of backhanders. If so, an amnesty will be granted and they won’t be prosecuted.

Patricia Adams from the Toronto NGO Probe International condemns Wolfowitz’s strategy because it ‘immunises bribers from debarment, allows the Bank to cover-up its own negligence or complicity, and undermines the administration of justice in countries where it is a criminal offence to bribe a foreign official.’

Lesotho is a good example, because the Maseru government is standing up to the ‘dirty dozen’ corrupt firms and consortiums which bribed top Highlands Development Authority officials – including one now in jail, and another in charge of water for the New Partnership for Africa’s Development.

After a key US Senator, Richard Lugar, supported Lesotho, the Bank finally began some limited debarment in 2004. Pretoria is yet to follow suit (perhaps because some local giants like LTA and Concor were implicated, which would throw off 2010 infrastucture construction timing.)

Civil society groups are used to the runaround. In the case of the Bank’s ill-fated 1998-2001 World Commission on Dams (WCD), chairperson Kader Asmal despaired at the follow-up findings of the (2002-03) World Panel on Financing Infrastructure, led by former IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus. Asmal wrote: ‘For an esteemed panel to effectively write off the WCD, whose core recommendations have been endorsed by many of its member organisations, is quite remarkable and raises concerns about the value of the report. Failing to address this point effectively takes us back many years.’

Remarked activist Patrick McCully of International Rivers Network, ‘The World Bank’s singularly negative and non-committal response to the WCD Report means that the Bank will no longer be accepted as an honest broker in any further multi-stakeholder dialogues.’

Moreover, ubiquitous Bank/IMF Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (1999-present) also proved to be a dead end, according to dozens of cases considered carefully by civil society and academic researchers.

Likewise, the (1999-2003) Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative (Sapri) failed when Bank staff walked out of the process near its conclusion. Commented Richard Peet, author of a major book on the Bretton Woods Instituitons, ‘the President of the World Bank did not listen to Sapri, because he could not. For he would hear, and he even might learn, that his finest, most splendid ideas had produced the worst, most harmful effects.’

The crucial Extractive Industries Review (EIR) was similarly constructed as a multi-stakeholder project (2002-04). But the Bank was not serious about tackling problems caused by the mineral, petroleum and timber industries. According to analysts at Friends of the Earth, Environmental Defence and International Rivers, ‘One of the Bank’s most important environmental reforms of the 1990s was its more cautious approach to high-risk infrastructure and forestry projects. This policy is now being reversed.’

Specifically, the environmentalists complained, ‘The World Bank recently announced that it would re-engage in contentious water projects such as large dams in what it refers to as a “high risk/high reward” strategy. In 2002, the Bank dismissed its “risk-averse” approach to the forest sector when it approved a new forest policy. The World Bank is also considering support for new oil, mining, and gas projects in unstable and poorly governed countries, against the recommendations of its own evaluation unit.’

The EIR recommended a phasing out of all Bank fossil fuel investments in late 2003. In February 2004, SA’s then energy minister and now deputy president, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, explicitly advised the Bank to oppose the ‘green lobbyists’, and six months later the Bank board rejected the EIR’s main proposals.

Ultimately, nearly all civil society initiatives aimed at reforming the Bank and IMF have been disasters. The Civicus World Citizens Assembly withdrew from its controversial 2003-05 initiative to rebuild relations.

The boycott of Bank activities by most forces within civil society launched last week reminds of the calls to stigmatise South Africa before 1994. And why not? After all, Thabo Mbeki has popularized the term ‘global apartheid’ – and now the question is whether to polish the chains or break them.

* (On September 26, Bond – who directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society – will lead a morning discussion about the Bank and IMF in Durban at Diakonia; two additional presentations will occur on 27 September at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington from noon-2pm, and on 1 October at the Brecht Forum in New York City, noon-3pm.)

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

According to the Africa Aerospace & Defence newsletter, the AAD 2006 “… is Africa’s showcase event for general and commercial aviation, aerospace and military land, sea and air technology and services.” However, anti-war groups argue that the AAD 2006 will exhibit the largest and greatest in machinery designed for only one purpose - the killing of human beings. This is the harsh truth behind arms expos; they supply arms for countries to go to war.

In Africa, a continent that has been devastated by civil wars, a continent where military weapons have brought nothing but misery and destruction, the last thing one would expect is a weapons fair. Dubbed “Africa Aerospace & Defence 2006”, AAD 2006 is the largest weapons exhibition that has ever been organised in this continent.

As if referring to a flea market, the AAD 2006 websites states that: “Air Force Base Ysterplaat [Cape Town, South Africa], against the backdrop of Table Mountain, will provide the setting for the only exposition of its sort in Africa and will feature more than 400 exhibitors from at least 25 countries.”

The AAD website further informs readers that by taking part in this affair, “trade visitors and the media have the unique opportunity to get in on the ground floor, experiencing and participating in the renaissance of the African aerospace and defence industry.” We are expected to believe that the same military weapons that have perpetuated civil wars in the DRC, Uganda and Liberia are in actual fact what constitute the African renaissance. This would be funny if this were not a matter of life and death.

Commenting on the exhibition, the Ceasefire and Umzabalazo we Jubilee campaigns wrote: “These arms companies will exhibit the largest and greatest in machinery designed for only one purpose, the killing of human beings. Husband, fathers, son, daughter and infants will all die because of this machinery. This is the harsh truth behind arms expos; they supply arms for countries to go to war with other countries and against their own citizens.”

The Cape Town Anti-War Coalition claims that: “Many of the arms companies ‘exhibiting’ at the weapons fair are allegedly involved in dealing weapons through third party front companies with extremely poor human rights records, like America, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Angola, Eritrea, Sudan and Nigeria. This method involves direct purchases by the foreign aid recipient from a government weapons manufacturer contractor, without directly government involvement in the process. Others are involved in further impoverishing poor countries like Malawi who have no need for military equipment but who are forced by the World Bank into taking out loans to buy weapons in exchange for aid.”

According to the Small Arms Survey 2006, “Applying the doctrinal distinctions outlined…to 166 countries (all countries with a population over 400 000 that have military) permits global estimation of the number of firearms controlled by the state-sponsored armed forces of the world. Combined with formally declared military inventories, this analysis concludes that the world harbours at least 200 million official military firearms. When distributed to compensate for a statistical margin of error (plus or minus 25 percent), the range of global military firearms appears to be between 150 million and 250 million. The estimating used here for People’s War militaries are conservative, which suggest that actual global totals are more likely to be closer to the upper parameter.”

Addressing specifically the issue of small arms, the Global Policy Forum (www.globalpolicy.org) states that: “Small arms and light weapons fuel civil wars and other conflicts, causing harm to millions of people, particularly in Africa. These small weapons are only part of a larger trade that includes heavier and more lethal weaponry, but light arms are often especially baneful because they are cheap, easy to transport and can be handled by ill-trained rebel soldiers and even children. Recent UN reports show how these weapons are illicitly exported, transported with connivance of government officials in many countries and smuggled into war zones.”

To fully understand what the AAD 2006 means for ordinary Africans, one has to take into consideration the role of small arms in African civil wars. As the Global Policy Forum points out, small weapons are a part of a larger trade, like the AAD 2006.

The Small Arms Survey 2006 (SAS 2006) reports that the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) depended on small arms to keep the civil war going in Northern Uganda for the past 20 years. As a result, this led to high levels of armament among the civilian population in the region, levels exacerbated by government and military policies of arming sections of society against the LRA and other armed groups.

“The LRA’s primary weapons are Kalashnikov derivatives, and most commonly, the Chinese Type 56 assault rifle. However, the Ugandan military uses a number of weapons, and the same types are also used by the LRA. The most numerous after the Chinese Type 56 are Polish and Romanian AKM assault rifles and AK-47 assault rifles from the former Soviet Union. Some observers claim that NATO weapons, such as the Belgian FN FAL and the German G3, are also in service with some rebels, having formerly been in the arsenals of the Ugandan and Sudanese governments.” (SAS 2006)

Even with perfect case studies, such as Uganda, which illustrate that in the world today, military firearms serve one purpose and that is to terrorise and kill innocent civilians, AAD 2006 is unconvinced. The AAD 2006 newsletter claims that: “The conventional and terrorist threats to security together with increased demands for peace-support operations is prompting many African countries to revisit their defence requirement and to re-evaluate their investments in research and development and procurements.”

However, the Cape Town Anti-War Coalition points out that most of the companies who are exhibiting weapons are “responsible for the deaths of millions of civilians across Africa and the Middle Eats.” For example, Truvelo, one of the companies exhibiting weapons at the fair is “manufacturing a new assault rifle. This company is expert in manufacturing sniper guns.” Eurocipter, another exhibitor, makes 14 different military helicopters, including the “Tiger” which they supply to Israel, among other repressive regimes.

The sad reality is that the manufacturing of arms (instead of building homes for the homeless and feeding the hungry for instance) is not likely to change for a very long time. The projections by the Small Arms Survey 2006 show a world obsessed with military firearms. The SAS 2005 predicts that:

- The world’s militaries procure around 50 million small arms and light weapons over a 50-year period, or around 1 million units annually.
- Not all of this acquisition is of new stocks.
-Global production of military small arms and light weapons over a 50-year period range between 36 and 46 million weapons and averages 0.7 – 0.9 million annually.
- Production is not constant but cyclical and responds to the demands of the world’s wealthier states.
- The world’s poorer states often rely on surplus stocks displayed by wealthy state procurement programmes.
- This trade and transfer of surplus stocks to militaries across the globe could number up to 14 million units over a 50-year period.
- Some of the world’s largest procurers will launch major procurement programmes in the next 10 – 15 years.
- Global military production periodically peaks and id projected to do so in the coming 20 years as wealthy states modernise their small arms.
- Unless measures are taken to remove weapons from circulation, this peak is likely to displace yet more surplus stock to the world’s poorer states.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

It is not an over-statement to say that small arms in Africa have played the major role in every political conflict, from South, East and West Africa. Baffour Dokyi Amoa writes that “Conservative estimates indicate that there are about eight million small arms and light weapons in West Africa alone. Of the 640 million small arms circulating in the world, it is estimated that 100 million are found in Africa.”

In Africa the issue of small arms is important. It is a matter of life and death. It is not an exaggeration to say that small arms have contributed to the political disintegration of many African countries. The effects of the proliferation of small arms are felt by many Africans. In many African countries, there are no people to till arable lands, and generations waste their lives by engaging in pointless wars. Children are denied their childhood and are forced to become adults before puberty.

Despite all these, the resilience of the African people is demonstrated by the number of activists and other leaders who risk their lives for peaceful change.

Let me make it clear that my argument is not against the right of sovereign States to manufacture and/or acquire small arms for defence and security purposes within internationally accepted laws and frameworks. The objection raised by civil society to arms proliferation is not against the legal possession of guns when their possession and use does not indiscriminately violate the human rights of others. Our concern is the lack of an international framework to curb the proliferation of small arms and light weapons, which kill and maim unarmed and innocent civilians.

In most countries, where there is civil strife, small arms are trafficked through cross border illicit activities such as smuggling. Elsewhere, food for arms seems to be gaining currency.

To substantiate my argument against small arms, let me submit some statistics . [1] At present, there are about 640 million small arms in the world, one for every ten people on earth. The majority, 59% are in the hands of civilians. Further, 38% are owned by government armed forces, 2.8% by police and 0.2% by armed groups. The gun trade is worth US$4 billion a year, of which up to US$1 billion may be unauthorised or illicit. Eight million new guns are manufactured every year by at least 1,249 companies in 92 countries. Ten to 14 billion units of ammunition are manufactured every year, which is enough to kill every person in the world twice over.

It is interesting to note that illicit guns start out in the legal trade. Statistics reveal that 80% of the guns used in crime in Mexico were legally acquired in the US. Similarly, 72% of the guns used in crime in Rio de Janeiro were once legally owned in Brazil.

A thousand people a day die as a result of guns. Of these 1000 deaths, on average 560 are criminal homicides, 250 are direct war deaths; 140 are suicides, while 50 are accidents or cases of undetermined intent. Three people are wounded for every one killed. Small arms are responsible for 60-90% of the direct conflict deaths that occur each year. Tens of thousands of children are armed and are fighting in more than 20 conflicts around the world.

Conservative estimates indicate that there are about eight million small arms and light weapons in West Africa alone. Of the 640 million small arms circulating in the world, it is estimated that 100 million are found in Africa. Several regions of Africa have made and continue to make efforts to curb the proliferation of small arms, such at the West Africa Moratorium on Importation, the Exportation and Manufacture of Small Arms initiated by civil society, which has now adopted as a Convention awaiting ratification by Member States of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

To be fair, African governments are making efforts to deal with the menace caused by small arms; however, their efforts are undermined by arms brokers and governments with expansionist aspirations who push small arms into the hands of “non-state actors” for personal gain. These non-state actors usually push the same agenda from one country to another, and that is to gain control over an area with valuable mineral resource.

The international community could play a vital role in curbing the proliferation of small arms. The international community ought to challenge the small arms manufacturers and to put pressure on them to slow down with the production of small arms. The UN Review Conference on Small Arms, which was held in June 2006 in New York, did not achieve the desired results, and so much effort is still needed to secure agreement on how to curb the proliferation of small arms and light weapons.

Children and armed conflict

Children are a wonderful gift of God to humanity. Why should any one be allowed by society to abuse innocent children just to achieve callous personal ambition? Why should society look away when poor and fragile youngsters are violently forced to maim and be maimed?

The UN Security Council Resolutions 1612 should be commended. It behoves policy makers and diplomats, as well as civil society movements, to demand that the protection of children from small arms be enforced. . [2]

When children are sucked into the vortex of armed violence, society suffers the consequences far beyond the current generation. For the generation that was denied the opportunity to experience childhood and education, illiteracy limits them, low economic productivity become their way of life, and breakdown of law and order defines them.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then United Nations Secretary-General, said in his agenda for Peace in 1995: “The sources of conflict and war are pervasive and deep. To reach them will require our utmost effort to enhance respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, to promote sustainable economic and social development for wider prosperity, to alleviate distress and to curtail the existence and use of massively destructive weapons.” [3] Graça Machel’s UN Report on Impact of Armed Conflict on Children [4] noted child soldiers are an affront to humanity.

Much-needed resources for development are set aside for post war maintenance activities. For instance, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) had to launch a US$7 million emergency appeal for Liberia to put 750 000 children back in school. A programme had to be mounted to demobilise about 15 000 child soldiers in Liberia. As things stand, only 51% of school-going age children are actually attending school in Liberia. [5]

Even in peaceful countries, there are many thousands of children taking part in organized armed violence using small arms. Children patrol group territories openly armed in parts of Brazil, Colombia, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Philippines, and other places. Small arms become seen as as symbols of power, dominance, and worth. Children in such communities grow up believing that violence, especially from using small arms and light weapons, is essential for gaining power, obtaining goods and services, and establishing respect, thus perpetuating the culture of violence. [6]

Religion, Children and Armed Conflict

When people exist in a space where human beings are slaughtered like sheep, where women and young girls are raped and maimed with impunity, where children are exploited and are forcibly turned into soldiers, many turn to religion. Religion offers these people hope and religion helps these people deal with the pain of losing loved ones.

Faith-based organisations continue to provide assistance to the victims of war and to the poor according to the tenets of the religion they subscribe to. When conflict explodes and disaster strikes, it is normally religious groups that commence with humanitarian activities before the international aid groups appear on the scene.

There are several countries where faith based organisations have proven themselves by responding with such efficiency that even the UN has shown an interest in forming partnerships with these communities. Such collaboration ought to be structured, formalised and implemented globally. It is time to build strategic partnerships to fulfil the call of Graça Machel that whatever the causes, the time has come to call a halt and affirm that “attacks on children are intolerable and unacceptable.” [7]

• Baffour Dokyi Amoa is the Chairman of the West Africa Action Network on Small Arms (WAANSA) and the President of the Africa Forum on Small Arms (AFonSA)
• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

This year, Singapore is the host for the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Boards of Governors of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Wahu Kaara argues that the reason the IMF and the World Bank chose Singapore is because these institutions want to exclude the poor people of the world. Further, she argues that these institutions only exist to serve the wealthy countries, while, simultaneously, undermine the sovereignty of poor countries. “The International Financial Institution (IFI) provides loans to poor countries based on conditions that undermine state sovereignty. It is these conditions that precipitate the political and economic breakdown of some African countries.”

This September, the World Bank and IMF hold their annual meetings in Singapore. The intent, more manifest than subtle, is to exclude the poor people of the world from holding them to account. But there is growing recognition that a dominant voice from the commons is clearly underpinning a new counter-planning strategy from below.

Considering that the Global Justice Movement was an unknown feature some twenty years ago, a lot more of its values are gaining credence and acceptability in the mainstream. This is an admission of how far we have come, and where we are headed.

On October 17, a day after my 54th birthday, the world will awake to the International Day of Poverty. It is interesting how organizing around poverty issues has become fashionable in today’s society. It seems as if the goal is to create a multi billion-dollar industry whose legacy we cannot fathom. Or are we in the danger of losing sight of our engagement reasons to a point that now we are gravitating towards what has aptly been referred to as the age of “Billanthropy?”

What is becoming clearer by the day, however, is that the much touted globalization, laden with neo-liberal policies, is not working for the majority of the world population.

In February 2005, Nelson Mandela aptly captured that, “massive poverty and obscene inequality is the scourge of our times.” I must add that we don’t run from a scourge, but tackle it head-on and innovatively create measures and maneuvers to overwhelm it.

The International Financial Institutions (IFIs) provide loans to poor countries based on conditions that undermine state sovereignty. It is these conditions that precipitate the political and economic breakdown of some African countries.

The structural adjustment policies and their enhanced versions have debilitating effects on the ability to enhance growth and reap the benefits thereof. Further, forced and skewed macro-economic changes are supposed to lead to growth as per the neo-liberal fable, but concentrated, short term growth only serves to fuel inequality and inequitable forms of growth that in turn result in a burgeoning economic class and, more often, a political elite that is continuously insensitive to the majority. This is a recipe for insecurity and a breakdown in social solidarity.

The debt crises continue to grind us. As the basis of how the control and domination between the rich and more often powerful North affects the South, this is one issue that we must deal with very clearly and soberly.

The debt crisis is more of a political than economic issue. But the economic mantra becomes an easy sell so as to mystify it and shroud it in secrecy. Debt must be interrogated on the basis of its illegitimacy and odiousness.

A critical awareness is emerging that with the Gleneagles debt deal of 2005, perhaps the creditors have reached the full extent of the concessions that they are prepared to make. The emergent post-Gleneagles thinking that the debtors too must make a clear position on where they stand, becomes acute. Nigeria has blazed the repudiation trail in Africa. This must be embraced and thoroughly interrogated. Both the mid-term and long-term ramifications must be isolated to arrive at a coherent position on the way forward.

We must all embrace the paradigm shift that we are no longer talking about charity but justice, that Africa is alive and the African peoples have refused to die but, in the converse, live for Africa. Tony Blair says that we are a “scar on the conscience of the world.” But that needs to be qualified. Their world. That of excesses, exploitation, control and domination.

Our political leadership may jump into bed with those who perpetuate our misery and penury, but for how long? Even at that level it is all crumbling like the walls of Jericho. The African Union has unequivocally stated that debt cancellation is a must, that investment in public services is critical and that there is a need to develop a social policy on Africa based on rights and entitlements. These are surely groundbreaking dialogues.

The World Social Forum comes to Africa for the first time in January 2007. In Nairobi from January 20-25th, we must showcase to the world the African reality. We must be able to have new dreams. To develop new cosmologies, new metaphors devoid of violence and exploitation.

We must rehabilitate and reconstruct politics. In addition, we must ensure universal and sustainable access to the common goods of humanity and nature. We have to ensure dignity, defend diversity and guarantee expression, eliminating all forms of discrimination. By guaranteeing the rights to food, healthcare, education, housing and work, we will be building a world order based on sovereignty, self-determination and rights of peoples.

In all our different actions and engagements all across the world, this is what we should be working towards and articulating. That “Another World is Possible” but that this world is already in the making. That is the only way to reinforce the paradigm shift from charity to justice. Anything short of that and I concur with the Croatian development critic Ivan Illich: “To hell with good intentions.”

In the meantime, let’s all keep at our concerted efforts to build the collage of our different actions and challenges countering the dominant themes of run-away corporate capital fuelled globalization. While at it, see you all at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, January 20-25th 2007, as we give home to celebrate our diversity and recognition of our dignified commonwealth.

* Wahu Kaara is a Kenyan Social Campaigner, Educationist and Global Social Justice Activist. She has written and spoken extensively on justice, debt and economic matters as they affect Africa and especially Women. She is the Executive Chair of the Kenya Debt Relief Network (KENDREN) and Founder Chair of the Africa Women Economic Justice Network. She is currently immersed in the Mobilization and Planning for the World Social Forum slated for Nairobi, January 20-25th 2007.

*Kiama Kaara, is the Deputy Coordinator and Researcher at the Kenya Debt Relief Network (KENDREN). He is also the Convener of the World Social Forum Organizing Committee Youth Commission.

*Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Last year, the UK’s ‘Sunday Herald Online’ reported that “… thousands of strong, young men at the razor-wire frontiers of these half-forgotten Spanish possessions launched their most spectacular raid yet upon fortress Europe...” Sokari Ekine explains that what drives most Africans to abandon their countries of origin is poverty and civil strife. She argues that the response of most Western European countries to the problem is influenced by cultural prejudice against those from the so-called “Third World”.

It is reported that 20,000 men, women and children have reached the shores of Spain since the beginning of the year, with over 1300 arriving two weekends ago. In eight months the numbers are three times bigger compared to last year. Those that make it to the shore, often swimming the last 100 meters, arrive half dead scattered on beaches amongst the sunbathing tourists.

In an article entitled " The Canaries, The Threatened Paradise," Spanish daily El Pais wrote: “What years ago a was slow and distant dripping of pateras (wooden boats), disembarking ten, twelve Moroccans, Senegalese, Guineanos or Gambians on beaches of Fuerteventura, has become an almost daily arrival of boats with 80, 90, the 100 or most sub-Saharans.” Arguments are breaking out between the various provincial and city governments over the numbers of migrants each is willing to accept from the two landing points, the Canaries and Andalusia. So far the number of people who have been deported to their countries of origin is about 1800.

There are layers of realities around immigration in Spain and Europe. The country has benefited from cheap Moroccan and West Africa labour on construction sites and in their agricultural sector, which has resulted in a 2.6% growth in the economy over the past 10 years. It is projected that without immigrant labour it would have fallen by 0.6% annually. Similar growth figures apply for the whole of Europe.

As long as Spain continues to reap benefits from cheap labour, the Spanish government’s rhetoric that it will not tolerate the continued arrival of migrants cannot be taken very seriously. The difference between today and a year ago can be explained in terms of numbers.

Another reality for the Spanish is that they are just waking up to the fact that Spain is the geographical space where Europe “almost kisses Africa” (Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe), or is it the other way around? The contrast between Spain and Africa is remarkable. The poverty existence of those who inhabit the latter and the wealthy existence of the Spanish is what prompts many to cross the Mediterranean in rickety launches. For some of these people, it is as if Spain is a promised land.

Some leave their own countries because of wars and endless conflicts. And it must be pointed out that for every migrant, illegal or legal, there are whole families - and in some cases communities - that survive on the reparations of those who make the crossing.

Spain and the EU are presently initiating a number of projects and policies in an attempt to slow down, and eventually stop, the migration of Africans to their shores. However, the polices being proposed are like using a rag to stop a dripping tap - cheap, temporary with no substance. This begs the question: are these policies aimed at reducing the numbers or spreading out the arrivals rather than stopping immigration altogether?

A Spanish NGO is opening a school in Senegal for 800 students. The aim is to educate both women (who make up 50% of the school population) and men. The ultimate goal of the school is to impart skills to theses young people so that they find employment in their countries of origin, rather than be compelled to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.

There are millions of young people presently trying to migrate to the North - this new policy would have to be replicated hundreds of times in countries throughout West, North and East Africa as well as South East Asia, the Middle East and beyond. The school is a positive step but the reality is that it is a bag of flour amongst a million hungry people.

In July, in a further sign of desperation, the Spanish government signed an unprecedented agreement with Senegal to allow the Guardia Civil to patrol Senegalese waters to prevent migrants from leaving their homeland. The EU is planning and funding a series of transit camps across the continent and North Africa (from Ukraine to Libya) as part of a holistic “system of control” along with the Schengen agreement, the closing of the two Spanish enclaves in Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla, that will effectively “barbed wire” Europe.

The contradiction is that many European countries such as Britain and Spain are in desperate need of increased migration due to falling birthrates and emigration of their own indigenous citizens. There are some 4 million Spanish people working abroad and only 2 million foreigners in Spain. The way around the need for migrant labour - professional, skilled and unskilled - is to present “legal” immigration in terms of economics and meeting temporary needs, whilst using asylum seekers and refugees as a way of rejecting “illegal” migration on ethnic and nationalistic grounds.

There is no doubt that Spanish and European immigration policies have a strong racial element. Are these new policies directed towards stopping African migrants, a response to the availability of cheap labour from Romania and Bulgaria? It is important to note that these two countries are soon going to be joining EU.

I do not think Spain has reached saturation point in its need for cheap labour but now African people are having to compete for jobs with Eastern European people who are also arriving in large numbers.

Obviously the lure of hard cash made in Spain drives the migrants to risk their lives (often repeatedly) to reach Europe. One of the worst tragedies started last Christmas, when about 53 Senegalese, most from the village of Casamance, left by boat from Cabo Verde to the Canaries. The boat was relatively large but had no cover or shade. There appears to have been some chaos around the departure of the boat as apparently the Spaniard in charge jumped ship at the last minute. It is reported that five of the Senegalese also left the boat and another got scared after the boat set off and jumped out and swam back to shore.

The boat is thought to have passed Mauritania but when it reached Nuadibu (Nuadhibou, Mauritania) there was a storm and the passengers lost control of the boat. They then started to call friends and family. One of the people they called was a Spanish pirate. A few hours later they were rescued by another boat which towed them to the middle of the ocean and then abandoned them. They only had 40 litres of fuel, which ran out, and, as if this was not enough, they had to cope with the storms and high seas of the Atlantic.

It is reported that there were a series of storms, with one approximately every ten days, and high winds pushed the boat towards Barbados over a four-month period. The people died of hunger and thirst with bodies being thrown overboard one by one as they died.

There are many West Africans who have been able to create a successful life in Spain and elsewhere in Europe but also many who remain impoverished and vulnerable. Interestingly, I was fortunate enough to have a chat recently with a person who arrived by boat two months ago from Mauritania and had been sent to Granada from the Canaries by the government. He had it all worked out that he would be working on a building site and would have his papers in two years. Needless to say, there is very little chance for this person to get papers in two years. Most probably, he will be exploited and got rid of when he no longer serves his purpose.

In Granada, there is a noticeable increase in the numbers of mostly Senegalese men on the streets compared to a year ago. I mentioned this to my Senegalese hair braider who has resided in Granada for the past five years. She replied, “There are too many coming today. Before we were not many. Now there are too many and there is nothing for them to do, the only source of income open to them is to sell CDs. That is not a life.”

In terms of legal rights and status, migrants can be divided into three groups: the educated elite and experts, who are subject to very few restrictions and social disadvantages; the mass of migrants who usually seek seasonal work, whose rights are severely restricted and whose situation is characterised by poor working conditions, high unemployment, and poor living conditions; and “illegal aliens” who are needed on the labour market, but are politically excluded and have no rights whatsoever.

The irony is that only 30 years ago thousands of seasonal Spanish migrants, especially from Andalusia, spent their summers working in northern Europe, Germany and France mainly picking fruit, but also working on building sites and as casual labourers, just like the Moroccans and West Africans are doing in Spain today. In those days the borders were open and skin colour was not an issue. It is interesting how far international relations have deteriorated, but most importantly, it is remarkable how the state of affairs seems to be influenced by cultural prejudice against those from the so-called “Third World”.

*Sokari Ekine produces the blog Black Looks,

*Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

In its 2006 annual report, the WHO reports that out of 57 countries, 36 countries in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from a severe shortage of health workers, such as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, lab technologists, radiographers and other frontline or support staff. Rotimi Sankore argues that the ‘brain drain’ is slowly and indirectly killing the continent.

In times of crisis and epidemics, diplomacy is a luxury the dying cannot afford, especially when millions of Africans know that an over emphasis on niceties will almost surely lead to millions more deaths.

Conventional wisdom has it that Africa is suffering from an AIDS crisis. In reality, Africa is suffering from a public health crisis, and the AIDS pandemic is the most significant symptom of that crisis, which has been worsened by the drain on Africa’s healthcare workforce to the ‘West’. The amazingly wrong political diagnosis of the challenging healthcare problems facing Africa and indeed the planet, has blunted the obvious fact that tuberculosis, malaria, a host of other preventable diseases and malnutrition still claim more African lives than the 2 million deaths attributed to HIV/AIDS annually. Combined with HIV and AIDS, these diseases are rapidly turning Africa into a continental graveyard. Yet the emphasis remains mainly on AIDS, which has been crowned the most sexy villain.

The countries with little or no health worker shortages and better health infrastructure have managed to cope better with HIV/AIDS because they are better able with preventable diseases like TB, sexually transmitted infections, sexual and reproductive rights education and malnutrition. AIDS is a problem on its own, but it is also being fed by other unresolved health problems and the lack of political will and courage. Resolving Africa’s public healthcare crisis will resolve most of the other issues and be a step towards isolating AIDS which can then be tackled more easily. The first step must be resolving the health worker shortages, which includes dealing with the “brain drain”.

2006 has been a landmark year for HIV/AIDS in terms of the number of huge international meetings and conferences organised. These include the Abuja African Union Special Summit on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in June; the UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS (UNGASS); and the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto in August.

These events reflect the huge progress that has been made in tackling HIV/AIDS. With the exception of the most backward governments and institutions, it is clearly understood by the majority that inequality in gender relations is one of the most significant factors behind heterosexual transmission.

On the other hand, these events underscore the huge failures and missed opportunities in the struggle against HIV/AIDS, the biggest yet being the comprehensive failure to resolve the human resource and health infrastructure crisis in Africa.

The problem seems to be that acknowledging, prioritising and acting on the “brain drain” problem means that governments of countries that have benefited from the “brain drain” have to take responsibility, and cease their recruitment of healthcare workers from Africa. Likewise, many African governments will also have to address their governance problems and the working conditions for healthcare workers as means to counter the “brain drain”.

United Nations population researchers conclude that unless the spread of HIV is halted or reversed, Africa will top the global AIDS death league with about 100 million deaths by 2025. This is more than double the projections for India and China of 31 million and 18 million respectively, both of which have larger populations than Africa. People aged between 16 and 45 years of age will be most affected.

It is remarkable that institutions and social movements alike focus not on the continent’s health care crises, but on anti-retroviral drugs only. Anti-retroviral drugs are useful but when there are no healthcare workers to administer them to patients, they become useless

To drive the point home, let me put it like this, no war can be fought successfully without soldiers.

In April 2006, the World Health Organisation (WHO) officially acknowledged what African intellectuals have been saying for the last three decades, that the “brain drain” from all sectors of African society, but especially from the health sector, is slowly and indirectly killing the continent.

In its 2006 annual report, the WHO reports that out of 57 countries, 36 countries in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from a severe shortage of health workers, such as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, lab technologists, radiographers and other frontline or support staff. The report noted that the richest countries are filling their shortages by draining away doctors, nurses and others from less developed countries. As a result, one in four doctors and one in twenty nurses trained in Africa, is now working in the 30 most industrialised countries. Consequently, Africa is the only continent where the absolute number of shortage of health workers (817,992) far outstrips the current stock of 590,198.

Other studies have shown that “the majority of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa also do not meet the WHO’s recommended ratio of 1 to 1,000 [doctors]. Indeed, there are fewer than 10 doctors for every 100,000 people in 24 of the 44 Sub-Saharan African countries for which the statistics are available.” (Orji, Utsimi & Uwaje in paper presented to the International eHealth Association in 2005).

In contrast, Cuba has a doctor-population ratio of 1 to 165, South Korea 1 to 337, the UK 1 to 610, the USA 1 to 358, and Italy 1 to 165 (UNDP/Human Development Report, 2004). Figures from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) state that on average, “The doctor-patient ratio is currently one per 500 in wealthy countries, and only one per 25 000 in the 25 poorest countries.”

The main factor that contributes to the low doctor-patient ratio in Africa is the “brain drain”. Quoting WHO and OECD figures amongst others, the IDRC illustrates the problem in Nigeria and South Africa. “One-third to a half of all graduating doctors in South Africa migrate to the US, UK and Canada, at a huge annual cost to South Africa (lost investment in education/training). Including all health personnel, the losses for South Africa reach US$37 million annually. This exceeds the combined (multilateral and bilateral) estimated education assistance for all purposes, not just health professional training, received by South Africa in 2000.” Alongside this, “over 21 000 Nigerian doctors are practising in the US, while there is an acute shortage of physicians in Nigeria.”

Not surprisingly, the IDRC concludes that “another reason for the deterioration of health-care systems in developing countries is the ‘brain drain’ of health professionals… which primarily benefits wealthier nations, such as the UK, the US and Canada, [and] calls into question G8 commitments to support developing countries in reaching health targets of the International and Millennium Development Goals”.

IDRC findings also reveal that “developing countries invest about US$500 million each year in training health-care professionals, who are then recruited by or otherwise move to developed countries… Meanwhile the United States, with its 130, 000 foreign physicians, saved an estimated US$26 billion in training costs for nationals… while estimates suggest that Africa spends approximately US$4 billion annually on salaries of 100 000 foreign experts (all sectors, not only health) to ‘build capacity’ and/or provide technical assistance, and incurs a loss of US$184 000 per migrating African professional”.

Dr Peter Ngatia of AMREF puts it more sharply: “Africa literally subsidises the West. It is a reverse subsidy from the poor to the rich… History is replete with instances of outflows of human resources from Africa to the rest of the world. The disgraceful and shameful slave trade epitomises this outflow, which robbed parts of the African continent of its young and strong-bodied men and women. This was followed by the colonial exploitation of the same in-fighting imperial wars that had nothing to do with Africa. The recent migration of workers, in the opinion of many, is nothing new. It is a perpetuation and perfection of what started centuries ago and has continued unabated.”

He expands by saying “According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), Africa has already lost one third of its human capital and is continuing to lose its skilled personnel at an increasing rate, with an estimated 20,000 doctors, university lecturers, engineers and other professionals leaving the continent annually since 1990. This same source estimates that there are currently 300,000 highly qualified Africans in the diaspora, 30,000 of whom have PhDs.”

Taking these factors into account, a coalition led by the US based Physicians for Human Rights, HIV Medicine Association and Association of Nurses in AIDS Care issued a 15 point plan at the July 2006 G8 summit aimed at ending Africa’s healthcare worker shortage. The statement emphasised that “G8 countries, particularly the US and UK, should reduce their reliance on health workers from abroad and seek to become self-sufficient in meeting their own health worker needs. For example, they should increase the domestic training of nurses, doctors, and other health workers. The United States should also develop a code of practice on international recruitment of health professionals, which includes not actively recruiting health workers from developing countries except in the context of an agreement with those countries that respects the right to health in those countries and is mutually beneficial.”

The British Medical Association has also cautioned that severe shortage of healthcare workers in sub-Saharan Africa because of migration to developed countries is a significant component of Africa’s AIDS crisis, and that countries like the UK must end their reliance on overseas doctors and nurses.

It is crucial to continue to stress the role of the “brain drain” in undermining African development in order to fight the myth that millions of Africans are dying of AIDS because Africa is a useless continent incapable of saving itself from anything. But stressing this is not enough. Africans must also lead from the front, or complain all the way to their graves, where only the silence of the tombstones will speak for them.

There is no doubt that Africa can rebuild its healthcare workforce both by further training and attracting some of those in the diaspora back home. The fact that a small country like Cuba, despite political and economic constraints, has a better doctor to patient ratio than most of the world’s developed countries also shows that it can be done by any country with the right healthcare priorities.

There is no human right more significant than the right to quality public health care. The infected and the deceased need first to live in order that all other rights to be significant.

This is why, as a contribution towards upholding the right to a healthy life in Africa and resolving Africa’s health care crisis, the AIDS and Public Health Program of CREDO-Africa, together with partners in Africa and around the world, are launching a campaign towards:

- That African governments make resolving the health worker shortage their number one public health care priority.
- That governments of countries that have benefited most from the “brain drain” cease such policies and examine ways to compensate Africa’s health care system for the damage their recruitment policies have done. - That the theme of the next International Aids Conference is focussed on scaling up human resources and health care infrastructure, especially in Africa.
- That all intergovernmental organisations such as UNAIDS and its key agencies focus on and act rapidly towards resolving the human resource and infrastructure shortages in Africa and the infrastructure in the next eight to 10 years.

*Sankore is Coordinator of Centre for Research Education & Development of Rights in Africa [CREDO-Africa]. He can be contacted at: [email][email protected]

*Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Over four hundred demonstrators were taken into custody after protests were staged in 34 urban centres in Zimbabwe yesterday (13 September). In this paper Maggie Makanza explores why the opposition in Zimbabwe has not been effective. She asks: “Why has the pro-democracy movement not been able to capitalise on the many reported failures of the ZANU (PF) government?” She explains that the reason the people of Zimbabwe have not revolted against the Mugabe regime is because although they agree on the need for change, they are unsure about where the MDC is taking them.

Why has the pro-democracy movement not been able to capitalise on the many reported failures of the ZANU (PF) government? Some people say all the necessary conditions needed for combustion to happen exist in Zimbabwe. All that is needed is a spark.

Most pressure for reform appears to be coming from external rather than internal forces. There have been calls for the international community to intervene and for President Thabo Mbeki to 'do something' about the Zimbabwean crisis. Such efforts as we know have not yielded any results.

If anything, positions have hardened and the situation continues to deteriorate at an alarming rate. There is something special about one who has the ability to laugh at one's situation in spite of its gravity. That person has transcended the boundaries of what others call normal and refuses provocation. Zimbabweans have that 'collective character' that the world has termed the 'great Zimbabwean mystery'. Should you ask them, how are things in Zimbabwe, the response without fail is “Zvakaoma”. Meaning, it is 'tough'. It is an abnormal response for one not to be outraged in the face of extreme provocation. Let’s explore why.

The Change Equation

The change equation tells us that change equals the degree of dissatisfaction with one's current situation, plus a compelling and attractive vision for the future. The assumption has been that if we increase the level of discomfort and suffering of the Zimbabwean people, change will inevitably come. It has not despite the fact that Zimbabweans were rated as the unhappiest lot in the world (survey in June, 2006).

While we as a nation are clearly dissatisfied with our current reality, specifically the economic situation, the forces for democratic change have failed to provide Zimbabweans with a compelling and attractive vision of the future. While people agree on the need for change, they are unsure of where the MDC is taking them.

The end state is not clear. Is it simply about a change of government or more so, a change of rulers? There has been a lack of clarity on the political position of the pro-democracy forces on key and emotive issues like the land reform programme. Discontent alone is not sufficient as a rallying point for change.

On the other hand, the ruling party ZANU (PF) had a potentially compelling and attractive vision of the future given our liberation history and the primary reason why we fought a war(s). Notice that I use the word potential, because it has not been realised. They failed to package their vision of transforming Zimbabwe and did not sufficiently share it with the masses.

The people of Zimbabwe have therefore questioned their motives for propelling the land question forward at this point in time. The poor and chaotic implementation of the Land Reform programme, shrouded in corruption and greed by officers in high places, has made it difficult for people to buy into the ZANU (PF) vision of the future.

Also, it must be noted that while it is an acknowledged fact that those of us in the Diaspora have been disenfranchised by the Mugabe regime, there is a general disengagement by Zimbabweans from active participation in politics. We are usually resigned to being armchair critics. This disengagement is evidenced in the ways external people express themselves in reference to the MDC and ZANU (PF). You hear people saying 'what the MDC should do is………or ZANU (PF) should do A, B and C to get the economy back on track'. These statements are telling. They show a clear distancing of oneself from these two major political parties.

The lack of energy and inertia to fight the regime could partly be explained by what I will term a latent support for the ZANU(PF) programmes and policies, specifically with regards to the Land Reform program and Mugabe's position on imperialism and neo-colonialism. The opposition has worked on the false assumption that no one supports ZANU(PF). This assumption has largely informed the politics of protest by the MDC and other opposition forces, which is naïve for a group fighting for democracy.

According to Machiavelli in his book “The Prince”, when you introduce a new order of things, you face resistance from those who stand to lose from a change in the status quo, and you must know that you have only a few lukewarm supporters of change who might benefit from the new order. There are a lot of people currently benefiting from the status quo. So why change something that you are benefiting from? They are working tirelessly and conspiring with the regime to make change impossible.

Democracy and governance amid poverty

The rural constituency has largely been misunderstood and underestimated. Through the arrogance of the political elite, they have often been used during elections and thereafter abandoned. They have clearly expressed their displeasure at the failed promises by the current regime to deliver. An attempt to show this displeasure was expressed in the many Parliamentary and Presidential elections since independence.

But they learned quickly. They now perceive politicians as an interruption to their serene and daily living. So, through a series of elections they have learned that this process is not beneficial to them in any way as it does not change their lives. The rural electorate have therefore decided to play games. 'Give the urbanites their votes and let them go back to Harare with minimal fuss. We will not see them for another five years'.

Voting is the power to decide. The act of giving somebody the power to decide their future assumes that one indeed has the power within their hands to make their own decision. This assumption is a complete fallacy. In a situation where poverty is rife and ignorance abounds, elections simply become a process whereby those who have access to resources abuse those who do not.

What is needed is radical change to the instruments for operationalising democracy in developing economies. The continued use of the ballot box under the present circumstances can only be described as sheer madness. Why continue to do the same thing when you know that that getting a so-called partial Electoral Commission to preside over the process is impossible? When the nature of humans is that of self-preservation and protection, why should the ruling party level the playing field?

The framework for democracy as currently conceptualised has become the source of much pain and suffering for the people of Zimbabwe. The last elections in Zimbabwe are a clear case in point. As one writer said 'it was a predictable surprise'. The results of the last election in Zimbabwe make a complete mockery of the people of Zimbabwe, but illustrate how as a developing country we have been fooled. Fooled to believe that democracy comes through an election process, that democracy comes through a box - transparent or not.

Humour and Cynicism - A Survival Strategy for Zimbabweans

The internet and the streets of Harare, Bulawayo Gweru, Mutare and the Diaspora abound with jokes and humour about the political scenario in Zimbabwe. It takes a different mindset, of defeating your enemy without fighting, hunger without starving, and diseases without allowing it to kill you. The ordinary people in Zimbabwe are challenging the premise that you have to fight hunger with food, and violence with violence. There is hope - zvichapera - it will end. This too shall come to pass.

And indeed, instead of fighting the regime, risking leg and limb, fighting that which will in time come to pass is by many seen as an exercise in futility. Many have resolved to wait and watch for the end of the regime’s time. 'It will come' you hear them say. Perhaps Zimbabweans are responding to the Mugabe regime in this way because they have weighed up their options and are indeed responding in the best way possible.

The Shona people were the first to capitulate to white rule in the 1890's, having realised that they would not win the war. They surrendered only to rise up decades later when they felt that they were much stronger. It is actually a recommended war strategy, to retreat in the face of a strong opposition. In the face of a strong enemy, you do not commit suicide, but retreat to regroup when the time is right. Perhaps.

Language plays a major role in the way people think. Our thought processes in turn influence the way we approach problems and find solutions to problems, and subsequently the way we behave. The humour used by most Zimbabweans is a way of playing with words and language to interpret the current events. In a way, the humour has developed into a second language for Zimbabweans, allowing them to talk about the painful situation without actually talking about it.

Often, the humour trivialises the issue and distances it from the person. In most cases, the humour is intellectual, creatively playing with words and abstracts from the current reality. Trivialised, reality therefore loses its power to demoralise and dehumanise its victim.

Towards collective responsibility and the building of a culture of tolerance and valuing diversity

I have often asked this question and risked losing life and limb. I know I am treading on a hornet's nest and risk assault. But I will pose the question anyway. Is Mugabe the real problem or the only problem in Zimbabwe? If Mugabe goes, will that solve our real problem?

I think Mavhaire was the first to make the 'Mugabe must go' call. If Mugabe goes, it will certainly solve the immediate economic isolation and bring back the IMF and World Bank, facilitate economic recovery and improved international relations. It will not however solve our fundamental problems as the people of Zimbabwe.

There is a culture of lack of tolerance for divergent views at all levels of society. I know of family disputes that have gone on for generations because they could not agree on certain issues or 'vakapumhana uroyi'. I know of churches that have split because the leadership did not agree on certain areas. Political parties have split because they could not tolerate different views or agree on the way forward. In the private sector, you hear very similar stories of 'camps' in the organisation. Perhaps it is the way we deal with conflict as a people.

The culture of intolerance is a big problem in Zimbabwe, as well as the lack of unity of purpose in each and every one of us. Selfishness and individualism has ruined us. There is need for us to look at ourselves in the mirror and admit that Mugabe is not the only problem in Zimbabwe. That in our own ways, we have individually and collectively contributed to the situation that we find ourselves in.

What roles can the Zimbabweans in the Diaspora play?

So, do Zimbabweans in the Diaspora have a role to play? Frankly I do not think we can play any significant role in the politics in Zimbabwe from the comfort of our adopted countries or cyberspace.

Yes, we can continue to play the role of breadwinners providing for those relatives who remain in Zimbabwe. There is no way that people can survive on the salaries that they are taking home in Zimbabwe. So how are Zimbabweans coping with the prices of goods and services, which are in no way linked to the pay cheques that people take home? The Diaspora has been sustaining and fuelling these price hikes. The Diaspora has significantly contributed to price and income distortions in Zimbabwe. The breadwinner role of the people in the Diaspora has only served to delay the process of change as it ameliorates and smothers the suffering and creates the false impression that local people are coping. That, unfortunately, is the law of unintended consequences.

Conclusion

The Zimbabwean crisis is like a big party where the invited guests come to the table and the hosts are nowhere to be seen. My call to all Zimbabweans both at home and in the Diaspora, is to come to the 'party'. Stand up and be counted. Whether you are an MDC or ZANU (PF) or whatever political persuasion you are, please show up otherwise this democracy game will remain a concept.

• This is an edited version of a paper presented at the Public Discussion forum hosted by the Zimbabwe Social Forum. Maggie Makanza is a member of the Zimbabwe Social Forum, a psychologist by training. She can be contacted at: [email][email protected]

• Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

What is the role of women in world trade?

Compared to 50 years ago, women represent an increasingly higher number of the world’s labour force, with many studies placing the number at over 50 percent. However, this doesn’t include women who work in the informal sector or the unpaid activities of women at the household level. On a broader level, women’s access to health care and education, for example, are profoundly influenced by national economic policy – meaning that if international economic best practice doesn’t take into account gender issues, then women are disadvantaged.

How does trade have an impact on women’s rights?

Trade liberalisation, which refers to the untaxed flow of goods and services between countries, has had positive and negative influences. Increasingly, the negative impacts of trade liberalisation, has made trade a central feature of advocacy work by gender activists. Women have gained jobs in the manufacturing sectors, but these jobs may not lead to positive social outcomes as women often work longer hours and are paid low wages. The opening of markets and the influx of cheaper goods have in some cases destroyed livelihoods, and it is women who have borne the brunt of these changes.

Have women’s rights been considered in international trade bodies?

The World Trade Organisation, an international rules-based and member driven organization which oversees a large number of agreements defining the "rules of trade" between its member states, has long been criticized for not including the voices of women, preferring to view trade as gender neutral. Moreover, its main decision making bodies are male-dominated. To this extent, nothing has been done to take into account or lessen the negative impact of trade liberalization on women’s rights. Despite increasingly loud voices, the WTO refuses to reform itself, has unclear rules about its decision making and operates in manner that is non-transparent.

What is the core of the problem? – Trade or the global economic system in which we conduct trade.

There is nothing wrong with trade per se; in fact the cornerstone of human society is based on trade. To human beings, trade is a tool for survival. However, a problem arises when one group of people uses trade to exploit and oppress another group of people. From a feminist standpoint, this normally happens in a patriarchal society. A patriarchal society is a society based on the belief that women are inferior to men. The global economic system is shaped and influenced by patriarchal logic. Indirectly and directly, the global economic system cultivates and encourages misogynists attitudes in traders, which nine out of ten times tend to be men.

What is the Alternative? Or, as patriarchal society puts the question: What do women want?

Women want to be treated with dignity and respect. Lots of feminists have said this before, but women want an end to sex discrimination by job definition and sex-role stereotyping in the media. Like any “normally” functioning group of people on the planet, women want equity and self-management . Women want a good economy that accomplishes central economic functions without exploitation of women, people of colour and the environment; but most importantly, women want an economy that meet people’s needs and develop their potential, to paraphrase Michael Albert.

What’s the solution to these problems?

Most governments are already signatories to a host of international agreements committing them to gender equality. These include the UN’s Beijing Platform for Action, which requires that governments correct imbalances that any policy, including economic policy, might create.

Economic policies are often fostered on countries by International Financial Institutions and donors. Officially, consultation in the implementation of these policies does take place, but in reality economic policy should be formulated through a democratic process that takes into account the voices of local people and considers the existing power relations within society.

Fact and Figures: Women’s rights and trade

- "Thirteen countries - of which Burundi, Liberia, Nigeria, Somalia and Tanzania are a few - are in the same shape or worse off today than they were in 1990. For almost 40 countries the data is insufficient to say anything, which probably reflects an even worse situation for women." - Social Watch, an NGO watchdog system (Source:

- ."...there is growing evidence that trade liberalization tends to disadvantage women, who constitute the majority of small-scale farmers in rural areas. According to the FAO, women make up about 44% of the formally documented agricultural work force in developing countries..." (Source:

Trade and human rights

Economic Partnership Agreements: Territorial conquest by economic means

Trade liberalisation, hunger and starvation

We are fatigued with charity, we know we can do it ourselves

Trade, trade and more trade: That’s the winning formulae for a fulfilled life. But what does this mean for women in the East Africa region? How are their interests reflected in trading activities? Salma Maoulidi investigates.

Trade signifies an assortment of economic activities and transactions. Trade, for many in the Global South struggling to improve their economic status, is the new salvation. It is the magic equation to economic prosperity - do more of it and your Gross Domestic Product (GDP) goes up, winning you points in economic performance.

But like all prevailing economic formulas there is a catch: for any meaningful economic gains to be registered under the present trade regime, external trading must outweigh internal trading. In practical terms this means economies import more at the expense of local production, the latter becoming more prohibitive and less competitive on account of higher production and transaction costs. Conversely, countries fetch lower returns on exports following the devaluation of local currencies, making then too weak to trade competitively on the world market; and also because goods produced locally continue to have the inferior status of “raw materials” or unprocessed goods and are of a lesser value compared to processed goods.

Why sex is a factor in the trade equation

In simple terms, this forms the basic functioning of the current trade regime. Underneath this simplicity, however, lies a complex set of relationships that fundamentally influence the terms and players in trade deals, including women. Universally the world of business is seen to be off limits to women. Just as dominant religious and cultural ideologies persistently deny women proprietary rights, the business establishment has followed suit, recognizing more readily women’s role as producers, and as consumers, but not as owners and managers of productive enterprise.

Political independence has had minimal impact on the national and global economic profile in terms of wealth distribution. During colonial times in East Africa, the trading class was composed mainly of Indians and a few Arabs, who owned the local retail and wholesale shops. The main economic activities were, however, controlled by the settler farmer and colonial administration, mostly Europeans. As corporations take over economic activities, trade monopoly is no longer solely defined by race and ethnicity. Thus the local Indian or Arab retailer in East Africa is being replaced by the Chinese retailer/wholesaler; while an expert labour force from India and other parts of South East Asia take over industries and the service sector. A few indigenous entrepreneurs claim a stake in local and regional business, but for the most part Africans form the bulk of the unskilled labour force and remain the primary consumers.

The sex composition in the business world has remained unchanged, with women registering little success in penetrating global, regional and local markets. Women in trade and economic bodies are still under-represented. In Tanzania, for example, women are underrepresented in virtually all business chambers. The local bourse has very few women traders as do local industries. Regional Trade Agreements offer business opportunities beyond national boundaries but are, for the most part, not integrative of the needs of women. Trade frameworks like NEPAD or the East African Common Markets, while seemingly progressive, are rendered ineffective by constitutional frameworks that preserve gender inequalities at national levels. In many respects, therefore, women remain objects of sale, convenient conduits for furthering materialist aims and gains. They are yet to become the subject of trade regimes and investments.

The miracle of women friendly economic programmes

In view of the persistent exclusion of women in economic enterprise and the widespread belief that economic empowerment is critical towards raising the status of women, some quarters, either pioneering individuals or development organizations, have tried to redress the imbalance of players in economic enterprise. Many implement programmes aimed at the economic upliftment of women, programmes that vary minimally in approach in that they have micro-lending or micro-credit as the basis for women’s economic empowerment.

The theory of women and economic upliftment is, however, flawed as it does not see the woman as an independent economic investor or dealer. Indeed, whereas the imperialist business model focuses on accumulation in order to achieve profit maximization through serious capital injection, prevailing notions of women and entrepreneurship limit women’s economic engagement to the micro, the small business happening outside the margins of real business.

Essentially, the very concept of micro credit is restrictive. Other than suggesting that it is insignificant, and therefore of minimal consequence, in so far as volume and risk is concerned, it does not view women as serious accumulators of capital. Rather, the concern is to give women enough to help them and their families survive. Such an outlook has affected how women engage in business, their overwhelming motivation being aiding their families, not making serious money.

Indeed, women plough back most of the earnings and profits they get from productive activities into their families instead of expanding or diversifying their businesses (a fact a number of agencies have banked on to introduce or intensify micro-credit programmes targeting women). Because women’s economic activity is mainly concerned with improving the household and family welfare it is not perceived as a serious trade venture. Perhaps if women did not assume the greater burden of caring for the household, they would dare trade for profit as some younger unattached women do. They would vie to make money for the sake of making money, and not just for survival.

The terms of engagement under which most micro lending schemes operate are also limiting in that they require women to organize in collectives - in fives or tens - to qualify for lending or credit schemes. Indubitably, it proves more profitable for lending institutions to lend money to communities of women where they can maximize their turnover irrespective of whether women are making any money from the loans: continuous recruitment and policing of group members ensure high return rates. Hence, with very little investments women become effective mediums of cash generation and multiplication.

Women as objects or subjects of trade

In many respects, therefore, women are becoming the objects of trade. Businesses target women using both traditional as well as modern techniques. Economic liberalization has seen an influx of luxury items in Tanzania, the most significant being cosmetics. Images of the modern woman championed by the media, result in the dumping of cheap beauty products such as whitening creams, the health dimension of which is yet to be assessed. The promoters and chief distributors are men, while women are the willing or beleaguered consumers. Similarly, the home, the bastion of womanhood, remains the most effective sales point, luring women with the possibilities of stocking up on the newest and cheapest home gadgets on the market.

This is not to say that women are sitting idly by, oblivious to emerging economic opportunities under traditional and new trade regimes. Women may have been excluded from active trade but they have never shied away from trade. Indeed, in a number of African countries women are revered for their trading skills. For example, food and textile markets in West Africa are dominated by women. It is now customary, even in conservative areas, to see women traders - women running shops and bars in urban and provincial centres; women fish vendors in coastal areas and the Great Lakes areas and Zanzibar; women trading in foodstuffs and cereals in Manyara and Mbeya; women hawking goods in Moshi and Arusha; and women transporters in Tanga and Dar es Salaam. There is also an increase of women participating in national and international trade fairs, many sponsoring their own participation. Increasingly women are trying to build a niche for themselves in fields previously dominated by men.

Women make up a significant percentage of the 85% of Tanzanians engaged in agriculture, the mainstay of the economy. Also they form a sizeable percentage of the self-employed population engaged in the informal sector. Because women’s economic engagement is confined to the reproductive sector - in food production or preparation, hospitality, child caring, education, beauty and hygiene, and handicrafts - areas that affirm a woman’s sexual and reproductive role, they remain excluded from more lucrative productive enterprises like large-scale farming, horticulture or industry.

Even among the fastest growing sectors of the Tanzanian economy, like mining, women are under performing. Whereas there is an association of women miners representing the interest of a sizeable population of women in mines, few are miners or dealers in gemstones or in industries associated with mining. The bulk of the female population working in mines sells food or provides sex services. Women in the tourist industry fare no better. Men dominate the most lucrative services in the sector as tour and taxi operators, travel agencies, hotel owners and managers. Women assume low raking service jobs such as telephone operators, waitresses, chambermaids, cleaners, travel agent sales persons, and flight attendants. As is the case of women in the food industry, women in the tourist industry are pushed to prostitution to supplement meager incomes.

Economic success but at what price for women?

Increasing insecurity in their personal lives may make women reluctant participants in commerce. Micro credit programmes are replete with reports of husbands who appropriate loans or earnings, exacerbating levels of poverty among women. Similarly, little attention has been paid to the great physical risk women face on account of their economic success. Necessarily, economic success does not shield women from the threat of violence. A number of women experience acts of aggression on account of their business success. A case in point involves a popular female fish trader in Arusha market, Mama Terry, who was recently robbed in her home. A close male relative jealous of her business success paid the gangsters to “fix her”. Thankfully, when they attacked she had a sizeable amount of cash, in her possession. Distracted by the loot, the thugs left without harming her. Other women are not so lucky, falling victims to both sexual and physical violence after being gang robbed.

Clearly, the terms under which women can engage in productive economic activity should not surpass social expectation. Otherwise relatives and society at large reserve the right to apply some form of sanction to neutralize a woman’s economic mobility.

It is common for youth traders, frustrated by severe economic alienation, to physically and verbally attack women they perceive as successful. They feel such women “undermine their chances” to make it in a competitive business environment.

Sadly, models of “women of substance” in trade and business continue to be scarce, even among female business graduates. Interestingly, women with business education end up teaching or overseeing less fortunate women in micro-credit and lending programmes. Few actually venture into business. Moreover, instead of being at the forefront of an emancipatory trade and economic agenda, business professionals do very little to emancipate themselves and other women from economic bondage. Rather, they serve the dominant trade framework, becoming brokers for financial interest, urging on poor and less educated women to take on loans and subscribe to economic models that keep them on a leash of economic dependency and exploitation.

A few business savvy women serve as self-appointed advocates for women’s economic justice. They exercise vigilance over global processes that dictate the terms of trade for men and women in the global south. Nevertheless, they communicate via language and process far removed from the realities of women they represent: Their discourse is too technical, aimed at policy makers and academics. Whereas these women would have provided the link between professionalism and creativity in local enterprise, or with local governments, their oppositional stance serves to alienate women further from entrepreneurship, seeing it as too complex and mystical a venture.

Ultimately, women continue to miss out on role models in the business world. They miss being groomed by women with a conceptual and practical understanding of the system. They remain confused and intimidated by the jargon and procedures that restricts their spontaneity to venture and risk. They remain ignorant of terms and processes they can take advantage of because there is little interest all round to acquaint and translate these to women. As long as women’s induction to trade in the region remains microscopic, microminimized and micromanaged they will remain at the margins of trading blocks, earning just enough for their survival and that of their families. How then can such a trade development formula realistically contribute to women’s economic empowerment?

* Salma Maoulidi, is the Executive Director of Sahiba's Sisters Foundation, a women’s development network in Tanzania whose mission is to build women’s leadership and organizational capacity.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Further reading

- Society for International Development, The State of East Africa Report 2006- Trends, Tensions and Contradictions: the Leadership Challenge, 2006

- Khadija Mohammed Hijja, Women and Tourism in Zanzibar, 2005(unpublished)

Far from being bad news for Africa, the July collapse of World Trade Organisation talks aimed at fostering a global free trade regime is actually an unexpected bonus. Out of the breakdown in negotiations should come a new trading system that is beneficial to Africa’s women, says Mohau Pheko.

The Collapse of the WTO Doha negotiations are good for Africa and women. This is an opportunity for Africa to move away from the myth that the Doha Round was a 'developmental round'. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the start, the aim of the developed countries was to push for greater market openings from the developing countries while making minimal concessions on their part. Invoking development was a cynical ploy.

The break down of the talks is a turning point for Africa to contribute to developing a multilateral trading system based on developing Africa, women's rights and sustainable development.

During July, in anticipation of the July 27-28 meeting of the World Trade Organisation's General Council, a major rescue effort was mounted to save the "Doha Round" of global trade negotiations from collapse. The most prominent of these efforts took place at the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg, where leaders of the world's most powerful economies called for a successful conclusion to the round, painting it as a “historic opportunity to generate economic growth, create potential for development, and raise living standards across the world."

The collapse of the Doha negotiations offers Africa a unique opportunity to review and reconsider the multilateral trading system as a whole, and to start with a new approach to a global trading system that will promote social and gender justice, women's empowerment and environmental sustainability. It also offers Africa some breathing space to reclaim the policy space that has been taken away in the process of negotiations.

Africa can expose the hyprocrisy of the lopsided trade in agriculture. Even if the United States had conceded to the terms of the WTO Director General's compromise on cutting its domestic support, this would still have left it with a massive US$20 billion worth of allowable subsidies. Even if the European Union had agreed to phase out its export subsidies, this would still have left it with 55 billion euros in other forms of export support. In return for such minimal concessions, the US, and EU, and other developed countries like Japan wanted radically reduced tariffs for their agricultural exports in Africa and developing country markets.

If these talks had been brought to a conclusion on such lopsided terms, it would result in African countries slashing farm tariffs while preventing them from maintaining food security. This is a recipe for massive expanded hunger and threatens to further impoverish millions of Africans.

The current deadlock was caused by developed countries, mainly the US, who were not willing or able to come up with steeper cuts in farm subsides. The collapse of the Doha negotiations creates a momentum for Africa to review the past negotiations and analyse the flaws in the WTO system in its entirety. The current neoliberal approach to the multilateral trading system subordinates the needs of African women and men to corporate-driven interests.

The bias of the Doha negotiations serves the private interests of the biggest corporations instead of benefiting the majority of Africa's people. Recent World Bank [1] and other studies such as that from the Carnegie Endowment Centre [2] highlight the fact that the current trade liberalisation agenda is not working for the majority of women and men, particularly those living in impoverished African countries, and that especially women “tend to be among the most vulnerable to adverse impacts” [3].

Trade can be a medium of development, but trade liberalisation is not a panacea to development, poverty eradication and gender equality. The time has come for Africa to take leadership and start with a new approach to a multilateral trading systems that will genuinely promote equitable, gender just and sustainable societies that benefit all women and men.

For this, international trade policy must be constrained and bound by existing international agreements that promote human rights and women's rights, ecological sustainability and human dignity and must aim to end poverty and promote well-being.

Trade policies can no longer be dictated by the interests of big corporations. Any further WTO negotiations should not undermine governments' commitments to implement domestic Bills or Rights and United Nations Conventions.

* Mohau Pheko is coordinator of the Gender and Trade Network. For Further Information: Write to: [email][email protected]

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Notes:

[1] A series of devastating reports on the potential outcomes of the Doha Round were published by the World Bank, the UN, and several think tanks including "Agricultural Trade Reform and the Doha Development Agenda", Kym Anderson and Will Martin et. al. World Bank Report, Nov.1, 2005

[2]"Winners and Losers: Impact of the Doha Round on Developing Countries", Sandra Polaski, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC, 2006

[3] "Global Overview Trade Sustainability Assessment of the Doha Development Agenda" from the EU, final draft report

Nnimmo Bassey argues for clean and renewable energy. “The truth is that Nigeria has been immersed in the murky waters of energy crisis for many years now and with current groping in the corridors of power it does not seem that there is light at the end of the tunnel,” writes Bassey.

President Olusegun Obasanjo, while inaugurating the board of Nigeria Atomic Energy Commission (NAEC) which he chairs, declared among other things that although Nigeria was “unequivocally committed to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the country cannot but embrace the global trend in the utilisation of nuclear energy for the generation of electricity."

Unless this trend is seen in the light of activities going on in Iran and South Korea, it is difficult to see new developments in the nuclear power generation sector as a popular move among nations. However, it is also thought that this commission will provide the answer to the “imminent energy crisis facing the country.”

The president must have been making a politician’s speech when he spoke about an imminent energy crisis facing the country. The truth is that Nigeria has been immersed in the murky waters of an energy crisis for many years now, and with the current groping in the corridors of power it does not seem that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

This writer fully agrees with the president that Nigeria should look for alternatives to existing oil and gas, hydro or thermal sources. But we think that looking at nuclear energy is a misstep and this thinking should be revisited and reversed.

When people think of nuclear power the pictures that come to mind are those of a cheap and clean energy option. Some analysts even suggest that nuclear energy is one of the solutions to climate change, as it would not lead to the release of greenhouse gases as fossil fuels do when they are used to generate energy. There is also the rather romantic view that the power plant would possibly be so small you could compare it to the size of an atom. In 1980, a presidential candidate in the United States of America was quoted as saying that the matter of nuclear waste ought not to worry anybody as “all the waste in a year from a nuclear plant can be stored under a desk.” (See the book, The Experts Speak, the Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky).

At present, Britain has an estimated 470,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste. This includes 2,000 cubic metres of high-level waste at Sellafield, stored in surface vaults across the country. But the lack of any long-term disposal strategy has alarmed experts, who fear an accident or terror attack, according to a recent report published in the Guardian newspaper. Three years ago, the government set up the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management to find a long-term solution to the nuclear waste problem. Their published report proposes that a concrete bunker, cut into solid rock at least 300 metres (1,000ft) underground, would be needed to store the waste. It is also reported that the ‘so-called "deep geological disposal" would require a repository that would take 35 years to build and 65 years to fill’. It sounds like this would not fit under a desk! And now the British government is currently planning to ask regions to compete to see who would provide the hole for this hazardous waste.

In return, the regions would have new projects provided as compensation. They would also be trained to act as monitors over the permanent hazard they would inevitably be exposed to. It reminds you of promises made to Niger Delta communities after their environment had been wrecked.

Cape Town’s chapter of Earthlife Africa, a South African environmental NGO, recently raised an alarm over alleged negligence by ESKOM at the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station in that country. Reports indicate that certain maintenance works may have been neglected at the power station for over ten years. The organization lamented this laxity saying “Safety at a nuclear power station is of the highest concern. The potential for accidents at nuclear power stations and the consequences of such accidents have been well illustrated by historic events at Chernobyl and inthe USA and Japan. These accidents have resulted in numerous deaths and environmental destruction as well as a legacy of radioactivity that isresponsible for illnesses and deaths until today.” Would Nigeria do better?

Conceiving of nuclear energy as clean energy is only possible if one turns a blind eye to the entire production cycle of the energy. This may be true when considering only reactor operations, but if we consider the process by which uranium is mined, transported and processed it becomes quite clear that this is not a clean energy form.

What about the uranium enrichment process, fuel fabrication, and the unavoidable long-term radioactive waste storage? Nuclear power stations may generate little greenhouse gas but their radioactive by-products are among the most toxic substances imaginable, and remain so for thousands of years. We see the dilemma for the British. Nigeria can simply not handle it.

Perhaps the president needs to take another look at nuclear power generation in Nigeria. It is still early in the day and this is the right time to retrace our steps. We need to look critically at how much we have failed as a nation at efforts to provide electricity supply through the rather conventional hydro and thermal generation systems. President Obasanjo has failed spectacularly to deliver on his first term promise on this matter. Nuclear energy is not a solution to the abysmal infrastructural deficit confronting us as a nation.

Nuclear power is basically about energy generation. Nuclear power reaches users through a power-grid system. In other words, it is not a wireless system. And if truth be told, the distribution grid in Nigeria is rather substandard. This is because of weak controls and because home owners often extend power lines to their properties with very little official oversight. This has engendered a situation where cables of diverse qualities reign in the land, and electricity transformers are often camouflaged by weeds. Thus, even if sufficient electricity power were to be generated today, we lack the infrastructure to deliver such power to users. Even if we were to have the power plants up and running in a couple of years, we are decades away from having a good enough power distribution network.

Another draw back is that there is a worldwide shortage of skilled manpower in this field. We can add to this concern the fact that we have a poor record of environmental safety and our emergency response mechanisms are still suspect. Nuclear energy is a ticking bomb and needs extreme care.

Besides, nuclear plants need to be shut down for periods of maintenance. Thus where such plants are in use, the country would still need to maintain an elaborate system of alternate plants thus adding to the overall costs outlay.

Why is Nigeria contemplating this energy system in a time when the world is concerned with developing sustainable energy and is gradually shifting away from nuclear energy? It is reported that industrialized countries such as Germany are moving towards more friendly energy sources. Indeed , a June 2006 report commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety suggests that “Europe could cut carbon emissions from electricity generation by 70 per cent and phase out nuclear power by 2050 using 'concentrating solar power' (CSP) generated in the Middle East and North Africa.”

It appears that if Nigeria pursues the nuclear energy path, she will end up with an unnecessary liability when the system is finally ready. I say this because the world would have shifted away from this unsustainable mode of energy generation.

Another matter that may not have been inserted into the decision-making matrix may be the fact that nuclear power stations require huge amounts of water for cooling the reactor’s core. Experts say that nuclear plants do not work particularly well in warm climes. In a nation where fire trucks often run dry and water hydrants are left literally dehydrated, it takes very little imagination to reach the conclusion that setting huge quantities of water aside for this purpose will only compound the water problem of the nation.

We have a penchant of saying that issues like this are of no consequence because we do not lay much stock in analyzing scenarios that indicate how we unnecessarily, but rather continuously, box ourselves into tight corners. We have a penchant of superstitiously repeating to ourselves that everything will be okay even when we are taking wrong decisions and sliding down precipitous slopes.

In addition, the nuclear industry is yet to sufficiently address any of the negative aspects of this power generation system. It is a dirty industry, it is an expensive venture and it is extremely hazardous. There is nothing to recommend it except that it may confer some sense of “power” on the nation to say that we are on the nuclear league.

Honestly, rather than waste the resources of the nation on this wild enterprise, the Nigerian government should take steps to popularize solar energy systems in the nation. Solar and wind power systems may be expensive at the onset, but these costs are quite likely to fall as the world turns more to it in the face of rising cost of fossil fuels and the harmful potential of nuclear plants.

Moreover, solar systems are safe, the energy is clean and the system is amendable to discrete small scale whereby even remote communities can be easily serviced. In fact with the demise of crude oil that will happen in a few decades, the oil giants who hold vested interests in solar power development will see the need to allow popular access as this will be the next profit spinner.

In his speech to the NAEC board, President Obasanjo pointed out that "The new policy initiative of the US Government on nuclear energy, The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership" seeks to popularise and expand the generation and use of electricity from nuclear plants around the world. It does appear to us that the government is once more buying into offshore economic policy thrusts. The entire idea is rigged to shore up an American industry that is set to face decline. It may be argued that the dream of nuclear electricity plants has been on the shelves for three decades now, but common wisdom dictates that we should let sleeping dogs lie!

Again, I regret to say that I totally disagree with the president’s thinking that nuclear power would uplift the citizenry to a state of prosperity. It will rather expose our hapless citizenry to untold dangers apart from being another uneconomic sinkhole.

The World Bank, in its internal report on climate change, categorised nuclear energy as clean energy and announced plans to support it. The document, which was leaked to an environmental NGO, shows that the Bank lays a lot of emphasis on what poor countries could do to reduce greenhouse emissions, and says little about what the huge polluters should do. Although the bank keeps harping on the need for clean and renewable energy, it has not slowed down on its continual funding of oil and gas projects. Could Nigeria’s nuclear dream have been concocted by alchemists at the World Bank?

We have already squandered borrowed resources that rightly belong to future generations. Let us not make the problem worse.

The Middle-East is on fire, and it does not look as if the political situation is going to improve anytime soon. Eva Dadrian looks at Africa’s response to the conflict. She argues that those who know how it feels like to be at the receiving end of colonialism have always criticised Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

After 34 days of fighting, more than 1,200 civilian casualties, 15,000 homes destroyed, 80 bridges and 94 roads damaged, the two-week-old cease-fire between Israel and Hezballah is holding. Apart from being a human tragedy, the recent conflict is also an environmental disaster with massive oil spills resulting from the bombing of a power plant close to Beirut.

The question now is how UNIFIL (the United Nations International Forces in Lebanon) will fully implement the UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that asks for the two Israeli prisoners held by Hezballah to be handed over to the International Red Cross, and that Israel lifts its blockade of Lebanon?

Should the cease-fire and the arrival of the peacekeeping force be considered a victory for the international community? The UN knows, like everybody else, that UN peacekeepers will never be in a position to “impose peace”, let alone become peacemakers.

But, it is expected that in the coming weeks, armed with a tougher mandate than any UN peacekeeping force has ever enjoyed before, the multinational force of some 15,000 troops from Bangladesh, Italy, Malaysia, Poland, and many others, will attempt to consolidate this cease-fire. They are also expected to help in the clearing up and to carry out humanitarian operations. But will this really happen?

According to observers, the government and the people of Lebanon are determined to implement Resolution 1701. Also, they are expecting the Israeli government to do so. However, to date Israel has been reluctant to withdraw from Lebanese territories and lift its air, land and sea blockade on Lebanon, thus hampering not only humanitarian aid in reaching the country but also delaying a full environmental damage assessment of the Lebanon coastline. Environmentalists estimate that between 11 and 40 million litres of heavy fuel oil leaked into the sea following the Israeli bombardment of Jieh coastal power station, 28km south of Beirut. The pollution is estimated to extend at least 150km (90 miles) off-shore and has hit the tourism and fishing industries hard. One UN spokesperson has been reported as saying the damage could last "up to a century". Furthermore, the oil has hit a 150km stretch of coastline extending even into Syria.

Has the war achieved anything that would make either Israel, Hezballah, Washington and others involved front line or back stage, proud? Was all this destruction the only means to secure the safe release of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, the two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezballah? Is it possible to believe that Mossad, the Israeli secret service, considered by many as the world’s “best and most efficient” in the field, would have not been capable of getting back the two kidnapped soldiers by more discreet and efficient means?

Most Israelis and many others in the region, in the Arab nations, say that the war was meant to reduce Hezballah’s growing power in Lebanon and dismantle its arsenal.

Do we need to admit that this war has had the opposite result? Not only has Israel not managed to destroy Hezballah, but Israel’s war on Lebanon has reinforced Hezballah’s aura in Lebanon and in the Arab world, thanks to the resistance and the resilience of Hezballah’s fighters. This war will go down in history as the only war fought and lost by the State of Israel since its creation. Do we need to become cynical and laugh because the two soldiers whose kidnapping is said to have sparked this conflict are still in Hezballah’s custody?

So what was really achieved by all the parties involved: Israel, Lebanon, Hezballah, Washington, Syria and Iran?

Analysts and politicians from Europe, US, Asia and Africa, have implied that the conflict between Hezballah and Israel had the potential to become a wider regional conflict. So was this meant to provoke Syria and Iran and drag them into direct confrontation with Israel? Was it to distract world public opinion from the failures in Iraq, the sectarian killings and the body bags returning home, or the failures in Afghanistan and the renewal of the old tribal conflicts there?

In fact, the entire region is at war. From the East Mediterranean shores to the borders of Pakistan (save Iran at the present time) the so-called “New Middle East” as envisaged by President Bush, Secretary of State Rice, PM Tony Blair and the like, is but conflicts, rubbles, destruction, broken lives and dismantled nations.

For argument sake, let’s transpose Israel’s action against Hezballah elsewhere in the world. For example, in Christian, white Europe imagine that Sweden, the pillar of European democracy, disagrees with the fascistic politics of the French Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen. So, the Swedish government decides to bomb Paris and destroy all the French “departments” where the Front National has its offices. It does it with an arsenal of weaponry supplied by Germany!

Or at the height of the IRA bombings in mainland Britain, London decides to bomb Dublin once and for all? Would it have been possible?

After touring Beirut’s devastated Dahiyeh district, where he was booed by the residents, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is reported to have declared that “there is a lot of work to be done” and that the UN and international community would work effectively with all parties to “ensure that we do implement the resolution to the fullest and that we have a long-term peace in this region”.

The war in Lebanon was but another chapter in the Middle East conflict. And this conflict cannot and will not be resolved unless the Israeli-Palestinian question is resolved. Is it so difficult to secure a “long-lasting peace” that we have to accept today the small token of a “long-term” peace?

For the Israeli-Arab/Israeli-Palestinian question, one should look into the issue of colonialism, exactly in the same way as one would look into the Irish question and British colonialism in Africa.

Interestingly, those who know how it feels like to be at the receiving end of colonialism have always criticised Israel’s occupation of Palestine. For years, Africans have condemned Israel’s “colonial” policies in Palestine, and the recent conflict was yet another source of debates. Further, people took to the streets. Anti-war demonstrators marched in their hundreds through the streets of Gaborone (Botswana). The African Union strongly condemned what it described as Israel's “indiscriminate bombing”. This was particularly after the bombing of Qena, which the AU said “cannot be justified under any circumstances”.

In South Africa activists often liken Israel to Apartheid South Africa. The African National Congress condemned Israel for its disproportionate military action.

African politicians were not the only protestors. Many artists, writers and media people strongly expressed their views on the issue. At this year’s Zimbabwe International Film Festival (ZIFF) Israel’s war against Lebanon took centre stage. In its programme ZIFF had included the world acclaimed documentary “Paradise Now” – which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards (Oscars) earlier this year and the winner of the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film (USA).

In complete contrast to the strong position against the war and Israel's action taken by Africa south of the Sahara, North Africa and particularly Egypt, adopted a much milder position. Precaution was the name of the game when it came to analysing and discussing the causes of the war. Most mainstream Arab political analysts avoided criticising Egypt's position and President Mubarak's condemnation of Hezbollah's kidnapping of the 2 Israeli soldiers. Pointing a finger at Washington' policies for the region and criticising president Bush's administration for the moral, financial and arms support, to Israel, Egypt remained "unstained". The Arab street had a very different position. In Cairo, protestors called for the dissolution of the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt (1978-79) labelling it as the "leach" that is "tying up Egypt's hands and feet" in any decision concerning Israel's and Washington's policy for the Middle East conflict.

In Tunisia, at the international Carthage Festival, the Tunisian artist Lotfi Bouchnaq, cancelled the final programme to replace it with patriotic songs and music in solidarity with Lebanon and the Palestinian people.

One Israeli blogger has gone so far as to write, the Palestinians are victims of “a colonial type of oppression”. Their land is confiscated, their homes bulldozed, their olive groves uprooted, their youth disturbed by 50 years of wars, killings, bombs and displacements and their sons in Israeli jails. Aren’t these the real stigmata of colonialism as practised in the past by the colonial powers?

The 50 years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have engendered resistance. Depending on the standpoint from which one views the political situation in the Middle East, Palestinians militants have become “freedom fighters” or “terrorists”. As political dialogue became a futile exercise, Palestinian militants have become “Islamic Terrorists”. However, in reality, the militants of Hamas and Hezballah are only “resisting” the occupation of their lands - Palestine for Hamas and South Lebanon for Hezballah – and refuse to accept Israel’s expansionist policy.

In the very early days of the conflict, As Safir, the Lebanese daily, published the translation of a “secret” report presented by Wayne Madison*, a journalist at the New Yorker, specialising in the political intricacies of Washington D.C. and the CIA. The report preceded an article published by the San Francisco Chronicle (July 21, 2006) under the title: ‘Israel set war plan more than a year ago, Strategy was put in motion as Hezbollah began gaining military strength in Lebanon’. Matthew Kalman, the author of this article, wrote the following: “Israel's military response by air, land and sea to what it considered a provocation last week by Hezbollah militants is unfolding according to a plan finalized more than a year ago.

In the six years since Israel ended its military occupation of southern Lebanon, it watched warily as Hezbollah built up its military presence in the region. When Hezbollah militants kidnapped two Israeli soldiers last week, the Israeli military was ready to react almost instantly”.

But the report presented by Wayne Madison has far more to reveal about the recent conflict. 1) The aggression against Lebanon was planned by key Israeli decision-makers and members of the Bush Administration during a meeting organised by the American Enterprise Institute, held at Beever-Creek-Colorado, on 17 and 18 June 2006.

2) During that meeting, US Vice-President Dick Cheney, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehoud Olmert, and Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehoud Barak, Shimon Pérès and Nathan Charansky were all present.

3) The two parties agreed on the following plan: the American Administration will provide ‘all the necessary assistance’ to Israel so that it (Israel) can put into execution Plan ‘Clear Infiltration’ formulated some 10 years ago. This plan dealt with ‘new strategies’ concerning global ‘matters of security’.

4) Clear Infiltration was in fact the “next” step to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This was to be followed by wars in Palestine, Lebanon, then Syria and Iran.

5) To put the plan into motion, two steps were foreseen: the first was to last for four years and incorporated “secret activities from the Pentagon, the White House and Mossad, inside Lebanon” These secret activities included using booby-trapped vehicles to assassinate high-ranking Lebanese officials. The objective: forcing Syrian troops to withdraw from Lebanon. The author of the report mentions three names: Elie Hobaïka, former minister who was in charge of the Lebanese Forces and who sided with the Syrians, Georges Haoui, former secretary general of the Lebanese communist party and Rafiq Hariri, former Prime minister.

Whereas the second step included bombardment and then the invasion of Lebanon, observers reckon that somehow ‘Clear Infiltration’ has succeeded: invasion and occupation of Iraq, the assassination of Rafiq Hariri and other prominent Lebanese, bombardment and invasion of Lebanon have happened. ‘Plan Clear Infiltration’ would come into completion if Israel and Washington succeeded in removing Hezballah from South Lebanon and transferring them in the same way they had planned to “transfer” the Palestinians from the West Bank.

Notes:

* Wayne Madison, first journalist to reveal and write about the horrors of Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq

* Eva Dadrian is an independent broadcaster and Political and Country Risk Analyst for print and broadcast media.

* Please send comments to

The ongoing Juba Peace Talks in Uganda between the government and the Lord’s Resistance Army are the first step in the right direction. So much is at stake: The 20 year civil war has claimed thousands of lives, the war has brought misery to the Ugandan people, and it has caused destruction and displaced millions of people in their own country. Richard Akum argues that: "If the talks break off with the commitment toward further consultation between both parties, it would have provided a window of opportunity to right the organizational, participatory and temporal frailties of the current effort. A return to arms is definitely not an enviable option"

A complex combination of time, situation and opportunity, have united to create an enabling environment for the ongoing Juba Peace Talks (JPT) between the Government of Uganda (GOU) and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Snapshots from the past 20 years reveal an asymmetric conflict which has spanned three countries - Uganda, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. These countries have witnessed egregious violations of human rights - including recorded cases of forced abduction and rape, attacks on civilian populations, the recruitment and retention of child soldiers, and the killing and displacement of millions in Northern Uganda. The current peace talks have far-reaching implications - the local and regional security depend on the JPT, and whether agencies will continue developmental projects in Uganda, as well as in the region, also depends on the peace talks.

To piece together the puzzle of Northern Uganda's peace prospects, consideration ought to be given to regional involvement in the peace talks, the level of representation of the parties to the talks, their positions on the issues, and the time frame for dialogue and agreement.

Over the past couple of years, the conflict dynamics in Northern Uganda have been altered by a number of factors which include the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement to end Sudan's 23 years Civil War in January 2005 and the unveiling of International Criminal Court arrest warrants for the LRA's Joseph Kony, Vincent Otti, Okot Odhiambo, Dominic Ongwen, Raska Lukwiya in October 2005.

Yoweri Museveni's re-election to the Ugandan presidency in February 2006 also contributed to the change of conflict dynamics that make up the two decade long civil war. It is fair to say that all these events have invariably shifted strategic decision-making choices towards the management and sustainable resolution of the conflict in Northern Uganda. Hence the high expectations, coloured by cautious optimism, surrounding the ongoing Juba Peace Talks. It would be remarkable to cap off this series of stabilizing events with a sustainable and comprehensive peace deal in Northern Uganda. However, a few pieces of the peace puzzle remain elusive.

Given the regional implications of the sustained conflict in Northern Uganda, the Juba Peace Talks need to be located within a broader regional organizational mandate. The African Union has a stake in the current peace process, given that the conflict in Northern Uganda is currently Africa's longest running cross-border intra-state conflict. Meanwhile a strong Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) presence at the peace process would show the commitment of regional actors to see a deal emerging from the ongoing talks. These organizational actors would, through their participation, provide leverage to others involved to reach consensus by providing security and monitoring guarantees where they are needed. They would also provide the bridge to trust and confidence-building between both parties. These are all intangible elements that would bolster the current effort being undertaken by the Government of South Sudan.

However, regional participation is legally complicated by the ICC warrants looming over the peace process. The warrants are blamed for Kony's skepticism to directly participate in the talks. As the argument goes, if Kony steps foot in Juba, UN forces on the ground could arrest him, given the outstanding warrants. This once again raises the long-standing contention between peace and justice. With the commitment of the international community, a just peace can be attained. Simplistically, a coordinated effort by MONUC (United Nations Mission in the Congo) and UNMIS (United Nations Mission in Sudan) forces could enforce the warrants executed by the ICC, and bring the leaders of the LRA to justice, thereby opening the way for tier-two LRA leadership to engage the GOU in peace talks.

With these structural deficiencies in the background of the ongoing talks, there remains a need to find common ground between the GOU's push for a narrow agreement which focuses on current strategic calculations, and the LRA's search for a more comprehensive agreement which addresses the root causes of the conflict. The GOU's bargaining position is strengthened by the ICC warrants on the LRA leaders. Hon. Amama Mbabazi, Ugandan Minister for Security, visited the ICC in the Hague on July12th - two days before the start of the Juba Peace Talks - but noticeably did not request a withdrawal of the ICC arrest warrants. The government's stand at the peace talks remains hinged on a narrow amnesty offer for the LRA leadership under indictment by the ICC. For the rest of the LRA fighting force, the GOU envisages for some, reintegration through a security merger with the Ugandan Peoples' Defense Forces (UPDF), and for others, resettlement into Ugandan civilian life. To this government position, Hon. Betty Akech, former Ugandan Minister for State Security, while noting previous failed talks between both parties, cautions that “the GOU should only make realistic, feasible and deliverable commitments to the LRA, not those it cannot implement because of some structural as well as legal difficulties.”

Though the LRA has denied any strategic frailty, their attempts at calling for the talks and Kony delivering his first televised interview in 20 years, are a response to the collusion of forces to bring them to the Juba Peace Talks. The LRA seeks a more expansive peace agreement including compensation for losses incurred during the conflict, a program of national reconciliation and national unity, a completely revamped national army and wealth-sharing and power-sharing agreements similar to those of the Sudanese Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). Hence beyond the acrimony accusations and counter accusations that marred their initial encounters on July 14, their positions do not seem so divergent after all. Nevertheless, the devil remains in the details of the puzzle to Northern Uganda's elusive peace.

Overall, there is a need for a peace deal that will positively alter the attitudes and behaviors that have sustained the conflict over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, institutional guarantees need to be put in place for altering structural contradictions and fostering peace with development.

The government's deadline to reach an amicable agreement between itself and the LRA, which is September 12, seems rather condensed given the 20 years of mutual mistrust, fear and uncertainty which separate the GOU and the LRA. Should the current Juba Peace Talks fail to yield peace and understanding, the GOU would consider aiming for an outright military solution by attacking LRA positions in the Garamba forest in the northeastern DRC. Meanwhile, the LRA would resort to the same guerilla tactics that have sustained them as a resilient, close-knit fighting force for the last 20 years. Such a situation would have a direct consequence on the fragile CPA under implementation in Sudan and on the concerted effort by IGAD, IGAD partners, the AU and the UN to bring peace to Sudan. The stakes are much higher than they appear on the surface, thus regional and international partners ought to get involved.

All the pieces in Uganda's peace puzzle may not come together at this point in time. However, the start of high-level talks between the main parties to the conflict is a laudable move in the right direction. If the talks break off, but with a commitment by both parties towards further consultation, it would have provided a window of opportunity to right the organizational, participatory and temporal frailties of the current effort. A return to arms is definitely not an enviable option.

* Richard Akum is a Researcher for the Peace Practitioners' Project at the University for Peace, African Program. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the perspective of the university. He can be contacted at [email][email protected]

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Last year, in November 2005, the EU and the US called for respect for human rights in Ethiopia, an end to mass arrests, the lifting of restrictions on the opposition, and the freeing of political detainees. In January 2006, the donor community halted direct budget payments to Ethiopia over concerns about its commitment to human rights This article argues that: “Until the political situation shows remarkable improvement, budget support from the donor community translates into the undermining rather than the building of democracy in Ethiopia. The donors must not reward the arrogance and rigid stance by the regime.”

The Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, appeared on BBC recently asking the donor community to give budget support to Ethiopia. Remarkably, apart from a British EU MP, the critics of the Meles government were not invited to the programme. The lack of opposition representation, when the BBC deals with the question of Ethiopia's aid dependency is a serious omission. This article therefore, is in part a response to the BBC report on this issue.

In Ethiopia today, elected opposition leaders are in jail. More than 20 journalists are in prison. Thousands of political prisoners are languishing in prisons throughout the country. It must be emphasised that they are innocent. They were arrested because they dared to contest the rigging of the election last year. They are in jail because they hold different political views. They are in jail because their conception of a democratic state, human rights and good governance contradicts that of the government. Independent observers agree that the elections were rigged. Most serious political analysts reject the regime's claim that there were no irregularities in the counting of ballots. A significant component of the international community took a symbolic step by suspending budget support to show their disquiet regarding the mishandling and subsequent excessive violence by the regime against those who protested against electoral injustice.

As a consequence, Britain, the EU and even the World Bank made a symbolic gesture by suspending budget support alleging breakdown of 'trust' (Hilary Benn) mainly because of the government crackdown on democracy, the people and the opposition. The understanding was that the political situation had to improve first before budget support could be reinstated. That seemed to be the overall donor position regarding the political situation in Ethiopia.

However, it now looks like the World Bank has found a trick to make it seem as if it is not giving budget support to the regime directly while, in reality, it is giving funds to branches of the local regional government indirectly. Budget support to the current government only helps the regime and not the poor. Aid should go directly to the people or to the programmes that yield direct benefits to the people. It should go directly to the health services, schools and other local services to the people, but not to the local government offices, which are run by one and the same political party, and its overt and covert structures of control. The World Bank is fully aware that the central and the local Government are run by one and the same party, as a number of its own studies on the budgetary flows between the centre and regions attest. The indirect aid to the Meles government agreed to by the World Bank will strengthen the government, and this is going to prove to be a further barrier on the efforts to bring about the much anticipated democratic transition in the country.

The situation has NOT changed

The crackdown continues. The elected opposition leaders are still in jail. If health and education services are suffering due to budget cuts, who is to blame for the situation? The responsibility falls entirely on the shoulders of the Government. It is not to be ruled out that the Government can tamper with these vital services to protest the donor community's just action to suspend budget support direct to its coffers. It has always been the government's position that aid be channelled directly to its coffers. We encourage the donor community to be creative by finding alternative avenues that will enable it to reach directly the people or civil society groups, especially community, faith-based and other grassroots groups, which are interested in providing communities with sanitation, water, health, education, farm support and other local needs. The donors must not give the money to the Government knowing that the regime wants to have complete control of the flow of aid in Ethiopia. Until the political situation demonstrates remarkable improvement, the current budget support by donors translates into the undermining rather than the building of democracy in Ethiopia. The donors must not reward the arrogance and rigid stance by the regime. The goal of providing monetary aid should be to empower the public, strengthen civil society, and to build an independent media and organise independent judiciary.

If Meles wants budget support desperately he should not persecute the opposition. Meles has submitted conditions to the donor community on how he should receive aid. He has asked the donor community not to take the lid of aid on and off, meaning he indirectly begs them to put the lid on rather than take it off. The current development assistance prioritises good governance, democracy, human rights as paramount for aid. Meles has been violating these values and principles - most glaringly during the election in May 2005. If the donors uphold these principles that he has violated, they should be congratulated. When they fail, they should be criticised. At the moment, it is the regime in Ethiopia that is violating these principles. It is principled not to give money to those who kill and violate the rule of law, abuse human rights and put in jail the opposition. The BBC should have invited the opposition to explain and clarify why budget support was suspended in the Ethiopian in the first place. There was no opposition representative to put the case forward. The BBC should redress this omission in the future. Generally speaking, the BBC, the donor world and others must understand that the Meles regime has structural and objective weakness that will sooner or later cripple it. Internally the Ethiopian people are against its chicanery and fraudulent actions. There is growing urban and rural resistance. Externally it has been embroiled with Somalia's Islamic Court. It has a war-like relationship with Eritrea for nearly a decade now. There are pockets of resistance sprouting for this or that reason everywhere. Regardless of what problems the opposition camp may have, the Meles regime has even bigger and more structural problems.

The opposition forces grouped around Kinjit, the new Alliance for Freedom and Democracy, have called for a national dialogue with the regime in order to change the political environment. The regime seems hell-bent on undermining national reconciliation and is determined in its belief that it can fight on all fronts as long as it can hoodwink the Bush administration as its partner in the 'global war on terror.' The regime has been blinded by its own arrogance, and appears more desperate to win back its loss of budget support by its inexhaustible willingness to assume the role of regional policeman, than to release political prisoners and create a favourable environment for a broad-based, all inclusive national dialogue and reconciliation.

The international community must hold firmly to the position by linking budget support to the immediate and unconditional release of the political prisoners in Ethiopia. Nothing is acceptable other than this. First, the prisoners must be released, and then budget support can follow. Not the other way around. We call upon the international community not to sacrifice political prisoners who have risked their lives for no other crime than trying to create a sustainable system of democratic transition. In order to bring back budget support, the pre-condition of the immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners must be a top priority.

The Struggle for Democracy Continues

At present, Ethiopians inside and outside the country are united in their desire and motivation to see the birth of a democratic transition within a united national framework in their country. Ethiopians want to achieve, at a time when their own millennium is just around the corner, the following: the structural uprooting of poverty and inequality by instituting a comprehensive, effective and capable system for fair representation in politics, fair distribution in economics, fair governance in administration, fair treatment in the eyes of an impartial legal/judicial system, and freedom, rights, justice, dignity and security for all. A lot of Ethiopians in the Diaspora have decided to act as a moral community by focusing on the larger issues of making our country achieve a major civilization shift from authoritarian and tyrannical traditions to democratic, participatory and people empowering frameworks and traditions. May 15 2005 saw a massive voter turnout serving as a guidepost and as a huge resource for effecting the transition from tyranny to democracy. Ethiopians at home and abroad united, and struggled tooth and nail to show how debased it was for that massive turnout to be marred by accusations of fraud in the post-election period. Those who remained true to their principles and fought to the end against this gross abuse of peoples' trust were thrown into jails. The donors must not finance this gross injustice by funding their jailors.

Concluding Remarks

We call on the international community not to finance injustice owing to unrelated and possible expedient reasons to the development of Ethiopian democracy. We urge the international community to stand firm against injustice. It is only by upholding such principles that a democratic renaissance in Ethiopia could come into existence. In Ethiopia, the immediate and unconditional release of the prisoners comes first. It actually brooks no delay. Withholding budget support and supporting other well-targeted boycotts are necessary to change the rigidity and arrogance of the regime. Financing its rigidity is to court injustice and not to serve justice. The international community must support the people, the opposition and especially those who are languishing in jail such as the renowned human right activist like Prof. Mesfin, the elected mayor of Africa's capital, Dr. Berhanu, elected party leaders such as engineer Hailu and judge Birtukan, journalists and civil society activists, and an unaccounted number of innumerable rural and urban young people across the breadth and depth of Ethiopia. Above all, the media and others should not exclude and must include the voice of the opposition for justice, freedom, democracy and dignity for all Ethiopians.

* Professor Mammo Muchie , Chair of NES-Scandinavian Chapter, Berhanu G. Balcha, Vice- Chair of NES-Scandinavian Chapter, Tekola Worku, Secretary of NES-Scandinavian Chapter.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Issa Shivji, on the occasion of his retirement as Professor of Law from the University of Dar Es Salaam, tackles the role of lawyers in propping up the neo-liberal system. This is an extract from the full version of his paper presented on the subject, which can be read by clicking on the link provided at the end of the article.

Neoliberalism generates a transnational legal intelligentsia to serve and oil it. Globalization globalizes corporate capital. The neoliberal elite globalizes the so-called ‘rule of law’. This is not the ‘rule of law’ embedded in liberal political values of the Enlightenment period. This is the ‘rule of law’, firmly rooted in the exigencies of the ‘rule of capital’ in the service of a corporatocracy. As Cutler says the ‘law that is being globalized is essentially American or Anglo-American in origin, promoting the values of neoliberal regulatory orders.’ Central to these values is the expansion and protection of property relations and private appropriation of surplus value.[1]

Thus the legal elite is involved as consultants to draft legislation on privatization; setting up enabling institutional frameworks in which corporate capital can function without let or hindrance. It is involved in drafting contracts to enable corporate capital to exploit underground minerals and overground bio-resources. It is involved in facilitating commodification of education and health; water and energy; customary land and traditional medicinal plants. It is involved in drafting intellectual property laws to protect modified seed plasma and herbal medicines, the knowledge of which is looted from peasants and pastoralists of the Fourth World.

Laptop consultants fly from capital city to capital city; conduct a week or two of ‘rapid rural appraisals’, churn out policy papers, make power-point presentations to stakeholder workshops, where state policies are made and endorsed.

The transnational legal intelligentsia is also divided between the First and the Fourth Worlds. The legal elite is based in the First World; the legal ‘masses’ or ‘messengers’ are based in the Fourth World. The international consultant is paid five times more than a local consultant and 10 times more than a local civil servant. Research and local analysis is done by the ‘legal messenger’; the international consultant does the power-point presentation and expounds on the norms of ‘international best practice’. A local lawyer tells me that if he wants to get a tender he has to associate with a Northern law firm. A number of local law firms are thus associated.

Consultancy gobbles up billions of dollars annually. Action Aid says almost one-fifth of total aid goes to pay consultants and so-called technical experts. Donors employ 100,000 technical experts in Africa. Tanzania pays US$500 million annually to foreign consultants more than three times what it received annually in direct foreign investment between 1994 and 1999. [2]

Consultancy is touted as one of the main functions of our University in the new Draft Charter. In the 1970s, the mission of the Faculty of Law was to produce society-conscious lawyers using the historical and socio-economic method. We did Legal Aid to assist workers, peasants, women and children. Now we are chasing the phantom of producing corporate lawyers. In terms of the Draft Charter, the University shall advance its objects ‘in close association with industry and commerce.’

Corporatisation of the university is part of the neoliberal ideological attack on critical thinking, on intellectuals who would ‘Speak Truth to Power’, to use the words of Edward Said. [3] It undermines the university as a critical site of knowledge, as a mirror of society. No doubt, temptations are great and none of us is immune.

As I approach the end of my oration, allow me to be a little nostalgic, to do a little soul-searching. At 60, I guess, you will also permit me to be a little immodest. In 1968, we in USARF, launched a cyclostyled journal called Cheche, named after Nkrumah’s The Spark and Lenin’s Iskra. Its first editors were three fine young persons, Zakia Meghji, Henry Mapolu and Karim Hirji.

The first issue carried my The Educated Barbarians. Reading it today, one feels a little embarrassed. In twelve pages it has some 20 footnotes, carrying half a page text in them with numerous quotes from Baran, Nkrumah, Fanon, De Castro and so on. No “respectable” publisher would accept it but then, at that time, we did not care. We did not write for publishing. We wrote as a part of ideological struggles. Clumsy and crude in style and somewhat mechanistic in thinking, it surely is. But The Educated Barbarians unmistakably exuberates anger, passion and commitment. We were in the period of radical nationalism called ‘socialism.’ Young people were angry at the world as it was, and intellectually committed to understand it better, and passionate to change it for the better. We discussed Fanon while we worked in cashew nut farms around the University, taught literacy classes in Mlalakuwa based on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, built our own shelters, called houses, through self-help. Comrade Joe’s (Professor Kanywanyi) stands testimony to it.

Today, perhaps, my writings may be more scholarly, more intellectually refined. I can’t say. I am not supposed to say. Only my peers are allowed to evaluate. You need to be an Ali Mazrui to self-evaluate! But whatever be the intellectual verdict on them, I can say one thing about them, and no one can prevent me from saying it, these writings are not passionate like the ‘educated barbarians’. Maybe I am more educated now, but less moved by injustice, and therefore, perhaps, more barbaric! Once, reading a draft of my article recently, my daughter quipped, ‘papa, you are not angry enough’. And it is not a matter of age; one doesn’t grow out of commitment, passion and devotion because of age! We have to look for explanation, not justification; and explanation lies elsewhere.

Neo-liberalism has taken its toll and the language of consultancy has displaced and replaced the language of conscience and commitment. As individuals, we can only agonize and gradually forget even to diagnose the ills of our society. ‘Organise, don’t agonise’, my friend Chachage says, and goes back to his desk to write Makuadi wa Soko Huria. That, too, we need to do. It is better than flying off to Johannesburg to attend another conference on how to implement the imperialist-driven NEPAD.

I don’t know if our world is better than it was thirty years ago. But I do know that neither our country nor our continent is. Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s destroyed the little achievements in education, health, life-expectancy, and literacy that we had made during the nationalist period. Neo-liberal policies of the last ten years have destroyed the small industrial sector - textiles, oil, leather, steel, farm implements, cashew nut factories – which had been built during the period of import-substitution. Most important of all, we have lost the respect, dignity and humanity and the right to think for ourselves that independence represented. The large majority of our people, workers and peasants, as the Arusha Declaration dignified them, have been transformed into ‘the nameless poor.’

Workers and peasants who were supposed to be the makers of history and motors of development have become the subject-matter of PRSPs – poverty reduction strategy papers. Private sector is the engine of growth, we are chastised day in day out, and history has ended, we are lectured. ‘Carbon’ copies of PRSPs are produced in country after country by laptop consultants. The poverty reduction strategies are a condition precedent for getting debt reduction. Meanwhile, debt rises; it used to be around US$8 billion, now it is over US$9 billion. Paying debts is like chasing a mirage! The goal-post keeps shifting.

Meanwhile, funded by millions of dollars of further aid, we hire a De Soto to tell us that we are too stupid to recognise ‘the mystery of capital’ and understand ‘why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else’. We are sitting on trillions of dollars of ‘dead capital’. We have to breath legal life into these ‘dead’ assets and lo! behold, we’ll all be as capitalist as the West. The question is who would have the trillions of dollars at the end of the process, and who would be dead. History teaches us that the trillions accumulate in capitalist Centre leaving behind the dead, the mutilated, the malnourished, the divided and the conflict ridden, in the Periphery.

In the 1980s, financed by Mahatir Mohammed of Malaysia, Mwalimu Nyerere chaired the South Commission to look into how the capitalist West rides roughshod over the Rest, (my words, their message). Among other things, it found that the world was skewed and lop-sided and divided and suffered from unequal power relations. And it found that this was the result both of the history of colonialism and the contemporary unequal world order.

In its restrained language it said: ‘The widening disparities between South and North are attributable not merely to differences in economic progress, but also to an enlargement of the North’s power vis-à-vis the rest of the world.’ [4] The South Commission found that there was a reverse process of flow of resources from the poor South to the rich North. ‘… [I]n recent years’, it said, ‘developing countries have had to make net debt-related transfers of nearly $40 billion per year to developed countries, and there is little prospect of a reversal of this perverse flow of capital from poor to rich.’ [5]

In the year 2000s, President Mkapa was appointed a member of Tony Blair’s Africa Commission on poverty. In two sentences the Commission dismissed Africa’s 50-year history thus:

Africa’s history over the last fifty years has been blighted by two areas of weakness. These have been capacity – the ability to design and deliver policies; and accountability – how well a state answers to its people. (p. 14 ) [6]

So, Africans don’t have the capacity to think and African states don’t have the capacity to design policies. They are ‘blighted’ by lack of accountability which is a code word for legendry ‘corruption’ and the so-called “bad governance”.

In the 1960s, the West Germans were asked to pack and go and take with them all their aid baggage because they were using aid to pressurize Tanzania not to accord any diplomatic status to the East Germans. Today “good governance” demands that we pass anti-terrorism laws, even at the risk of dividing our people, because that is the foreign policy of some bushy bully of the world.

Yes, indeed, the world has changed. Yes, indeed, times have changed. Yes, indeed, we have a new form of imperialism called globalisation. Yes, indeed we must change. The question is change in what direction, for whose benefit and in whose interest. Edward Said says the basic question for the intellectual is: ‘how does one speak the truth? What truth? For whom and where?’ [7] The basic question today is whether this neoliberal, Thatcherite counter-revolution is for the benefit of the masses or the narrow neo-liberal elites? No social, economic and political change can be described, let alone analysed and understood, except from the standpoint of a particular class, a particular people, a particular nation and, universally, from the standpoint of humanity. And, certainly, the present cannot be understood and changed for the better without understanding better the past. No intellectual worth her name can condone bestiality, which is what imperialism is.

For us the lawyers, the least we can do is to ask, in the paraphrased words of Edward Said: How do we lawyers address authority/power: as professional supplicants, or as its unrewarded, amateurish conscience?

* This is an extract from a paper entitled ‘Lawyers in Neoliberalism’, presented by Issa G. Shivji, Professor of Law, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on the occasion of his formal retirement. For the full paper, please click on the link below.

* Please send comments to

Notes:

[1] A. Claire Cutler, 'Historical Materialism, globalization, and law: competiting conceptions of property', in Mark Rupert and Hazel Smith eds. (2002) Historical Materialism and Globalization, London: Routledge.
[2] Action Aid International (2005), Real Aid: An Agenda for Making Aid Work, p. 22.
[3] Dr. Ali Mohamed Shein, Vice President, The Guardian, 10/06/2006.
[4] Tanzania Investment Centre, Tanzania Investor,

Months of fighting in Mogadishu has just ended, with the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) defeating warlords allegedly backed by the United States for control of the capital. In the last week, the threat of new violence has loomed with reports that Ethiopian troops have entered the country to defend its powerless government against the Islamist forces. The following article was compiled and submitted to Pambazuka News by Strategic Initiatives for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA) Network and details the difficulties faced by ordinary people trying to escape the violence.

The struggle for power in Somalia is an ongoing battle. In recent days Ethiopian troops have been sent into the country, allegedly backed by the US, to defend the town of Baidoa, seat of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), against a possible attack from the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) who took control of the capital Mogadishu last month.

The battle for the capital itself involved many months of fighting between the UIC’s militia, who have also assumed power in many areas of South Somalia, and an alliance of warlords believed to have been backed by the US. The involvement of the Islamists is only the most recent move in a series of power struggles which began following the departure of Siad Barre’s Government, overthrown in 1991. Warlords have fought between themselves ever since to succeed in governing the country.

Now, although most of the warlords have fled Mogadishu, there remains a continued threat of further conflict with the rising tension between the UIC and the TFG. Many Somalis, whose population is predominantly Muslim, are glad that the Islamists have taken control of the capital because they have brought a severe reduction in violence. However UIC control has raised alarm with the TFG (who have limited power), Ethiopia and the US. They believe that Islamic dominance will lead to Somalia becoming a safe haven for terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.

Yet while the gunbattles rage and the political struggles are fought it is the people of Somalia who continue to suffer as victims of attacks, with few job opportunities, with no stable Government and thus little access to services. Moreover, unlike its neighbour Sudan, due to the ferocity of fighting and lack of Government, the involvement of the international community in assisting Somalia has been limited. For many Somalis life has become unbearable and they have little hope for any improvement. Violence against women, including rape, is rife, there are limited police and hospitals, theft and lootings by gangs is commonplace, most children in IDP camps have had no education and many IDPs are forced to move from camp to camp.

This has driven some Somalis to take desperate measures to try to change their situation. A special report by IRIN (UN news agency) in June told the tales of the thousands of Somali people attempting to escape to the Middle East by paying middlemen to take them across the Red Sea. Many never make it past the port as their fares for the journey – their life savings – are stolen on the way to reach the boats. Others who make the treacherous voyage will have their bodies washed up on the shores of Yemen. Even those who do make it risk being deported back to Somalia. But they will try again; for Somalis life or death is a challenge they face every day.

Civil Society Forum for Peace

Two Strategic Initiatives for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA) members, the Coalition of Grassroots Women’s Organisations (COGWO) and the Peace and Human Rights Network (PHRN), have joined with other civil rights groups in Somalia to set up a Civil Society Forum which held its first planning meetings this month. The idea of the Forum came about in response to the continued conflict in Somalia, the recent deployment of Ethiopian troops and tensions between the TFG and UIC, which has led to fears of further armed confrontation.

The aim of the Forum is to strengthen the role of civil society in promoting dialogue and in achieving a peaceful resolution to the Somali conflict. The Forum will seek to develop a common agenda, strategy and vision for civil society so that organisations can work together with a comprehensive approach to achieve greater impact. It is hoped that the Forum and its participants will be able to play a crucial role mediating between the UIC and TFG as well as ensuring that community needs are addressed. The Forum also wishes to promote the establishment of a government of national unity and to prevent the collapse of the TFG. Any organisation that believes in these objectives is welcome to become a member of the Forum and further meetings will take place later this month. For more information please contact: [email][email protected]

Saving Lives through Food Distribution

SIHA member Kalsan voluntary organization recently donated 2,000kg of maize and sorghum to four refugee camps in the north of Mogadishu, Karan district, Wajeer quarter. Two hundred families, of mainly women and children, each received 10kg of the provisions. Food distribution projects like this can play a life saving role as few aid resources are available for IDPs living in the camps. However there is hope for the future. The United Nations Emergency Coordinator, Jan Egeland, recently met UIC officials to open discussions on allowing the UN and other aid agencies access to deliver badly needed supplies to Mogadishu.

A Cry for Help: Internally displaced women living in camps in Mogadishu tell their stories

RUKIO AHMED ALI comes from Bakal region of Southern Somalia. “We used to live in another IDP camp which was hit by a mortar during the recent fighting. A friend of mine, an old woman, was killed. A number of children were also killed. Others who did not manage to escape were injured. Most were people I knew and still know. I moved to this IDP camp, Tawakal, after that attack and I feel secure here now.”

On the safety issue she continues: “Whilst I do feel safe here and generally in the city too I have no idea for how long. The shooting and fighting has stopped at the moment and I am able to move around relatively easily. But I don’t have the security of a livelihood to sustain me and my family. I see my future as doomed. Look, I have nothing, no work, no home, just this shelter. Who knows what the Islamists will do. I do not know whether we will have rights under them. Remember that I am an IDP who essentially has no right, no voice and doesn’t exist. In that context, my future is bleak. But there is something I do know, this war has caused unimaginable suffering to a lot of people and it must end. Can you help, please?”

SA’IDO BARISE CEYMOY lives at AMIN NUR IDP camp in Wardhigley District in Mogadishu. She and her family were evacuated from another IDP camp known as BUR EYLON in Bay Region, South West of Mogadishu. She has two children and is 7 months pregnant. “It was terrible (referring to the recent fighting). Right now as we speak, I do not know the whereabouts of my husband. It is two months today since he disappeared. I do not know whether he was killed or what. I am very worried. I have two young children and am pregnant. I do not know how I will cope without him. Life has become a misery. This war has made me very sad and angry. It has robbed me of my husband. I live here, a miserable life. I own nothing that I can call my own: no assets and no means to earn a livelihood. The future is bleak for me and my children whose father…no one knows where he is!”

On the issue of sending her children to school she responds with a smile: “That is a good thing to do for ones’ kids, but I am not in a position to send them since I have no means to pay them through school. In any case I do not feel comfortable enough to do so since security is not yet all that good. Remember I am an IDP. To me the most important thing is to try to feed, clothe and house them. That is what is critical. Can I do that? I do not know since right now I am pregnant and cannot seek any work around the camp or outside. It is terrible. My husband was everything and now he is not here.”

MADINO ADEN BIYOOLE and her family have lived in Mogadishu for a period of 12 years. They left their home in the Bay region of Somalia because of severe drought. “Fighting has become a normal occurrence here. We hide under these makeshift huts as our only place to seek safety. However, fighting does not know IDP camps, it does not know children, it does not know women and the elderly. These people shell everywhere indiscriminately. It is terrifying especially for the kids. I thank God we are alive and together. But I don’t know for how long. I feel secure now but who knows, another fight may be coming. It is awful. It may not be over yet. Pressure must be exerted on these people to lay down their weapons and seek dialogue for the sake of peace. In Somalia life is all about risks perpetrated by power hungry people. As a woman, things are harder. As an IDP they are even worse. I am helpless and feel unworthy. Imagine what could happen if a shell hit this hut?” She begins to cry.

FATIMA AHMED MOHAMED: “I do not know where Somalia is heading. The people fighting have no compassion for us women and children. They have been fighting for so long that it has become a habit. This madness must stop and let us rebuild our lost lives. Look at this camp (Fardow). Is it a place for human beings? No sanitation, no clean water and no means to change the situation since no work is available. We live in poverty, wretched poverty. Why has God forsaken us?”

FADUMO SHEIKH ALI has lived in ISBARTIIBO IDP camp for 10 years. She originally comes from the Bay region of South Somalia. “I tell you, we have nothing: no clothes, no shelter (pointing around) and no food. I am waiting for God to help and improve my future. We live in deplorable conditions as you can see. This is made worse by war, war, war or whatever you may call it. It kills people: young, old, women, men and everyone. It does not help anyone. I feel angry, angry at those causing us so much suffering, so much trauma and above all making it difficult to have a livelihood. I need to be secure from harm, secure from hunger and secure in assets. But I do not possess any of these. Of course the fighting has stopped again but nothing has changed for me. I still eke a living from begging. Is that the life we want to live? NO! We want our leaders to give us hope not misery. We need the basic requirements of life: schools for our children, health centres for pregnant mothers and livelihoods. Maybe what I am saying is a dream. So be it. Let me dream to soothe my pain temporarily, to reduce my sadness and anger. What a world we live in! It is not a good life to live in an IDP camp. But this has become necessary because of selfishness amongst our leaders who have no souls, hearts and foresight. What a pity.”

* This article was compiled and submitted to Pambazuka News by Strategic Initiatives for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA) Network. SIHA is a network of civil society organisations from North and South Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia and Somaliland. Founded in 1995 by a collection of women's groups with the view of strengthening their capacity, SIHA has grown over the years and is now comprised of 28 member organisations.

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

It’s more than a year since the May 2005 Ethiopian elections collapsed in chaos, resulting in violence, arrests, imprisonments and a press crackdown. How can the country move forward towards elections in 2010? Now is the time for the government to dodge the election trends of other African governments. Now is the time for dialogue and tolerance, writes Erkyihun Lagere. Only if this happens can Ethiopia truly fulfill is reputation as a mosaic culture.

The parliamentary election in Ethiopia in May 2005 was unique in Ethiopian history, and can be compared to the South African elections of 1994 where all South Africans, after 40 years of segregation, went to the polling stations and queued for hours to exercise their democratic rights and put in place a Government of National Unity. It was the first in Ethiopia’s history, especially in a multi party platform, where Ethiopians became aware of and exercised their power to elect their legislators and form a government. Politicians consented not to use the barrel of the gun to access power. It was this sense of assurance that encouraged eligible Ethiopians to go to the polling stations and exercise their newly found democratic rights.

During the Communist regime, the process was manipulated, votes were rigged and members of the communist party were declared the winners at any cost. After the overthrow of the Communist Derg regime in 1991 by the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front’s (EPRDF) armed insurgency, the EPRDF’s Meles Zenawi reorganized Ethiopia’s regions along ethnic lines and constructed a political machine that has dominated Ethiopian politics for the past 15 years. Despite widespread opposition to this system among a number of ethnic groups in Ethiopia, the EPRDF and Zenawi had been able to maintain their power. However the existence of a better organized, united opposition combined with an energized electorate strongly contributed to the hope that surrounded the 2005 elections.

The May 2005 Ethiopian Elections

The May 2005 elections drew the attention of Ethiopians at home, the diaspora, and even the international community. It was the first time in Ethiopian history where the incumbent government provided facilities, gave access to government owned media and allowed the opposition to campaign “freely”. While the incumbents still enjoyed some advantages, the pre-election processes were nevertheless unprecedented in several ways:

1. It was the first [1] election that took place in a multi-party platform. According to the Associated Press, it was “the most competitive election in the country’s 3,000 year history” [2].

2. There was an open debate (discussion) in the media between the incumbent and opposition political parties.

3. All political parties condemned violence and requested their supporters to go to the polling stations and cast their vote.

4. The four major parties signed a non-violence pact.

5. It was the first election in Ethiopian history where Ethiopians went to the polls believing that they could cast votes and elect a government of their choice.

6. It was a practical demonstration of attempts to accommodate the interests of opposition political parties. The hope was perhaps best captured by Desalegn Rahamato from the Forum for Social Studies who was quoted saying: “We do not expect a miracle, certainly nobody expects the government to lose but we are hoping that the composition of parliament will change substantially so there will be more opposition.” [3]

What went wrong?

The Prime Minister’s premature announcement of EPRDF’s overwhelming victory [4] was the beginning of the rift in the political process, which subsequently led to allegations and counter allegations that increased the gap between opposition political parties and EPRDF [5]. This premature announcement challenged the power of the National Electoral Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) which was the only institution empowered to declare the election results.

The NEBE’s inability to intervene immediately to stop the incursion increased dissent, led to civil violence and forced the residents of Addis Ababa to demonstrate and express their dissatisfaction with the handling of the election results. Although the incumbent government claimed that the opposition political parties instigated and backed the civil violence – the government’s violent suppression of demonstrations also escalated and triggered more violence.

The incumbent government breached the non-violence agreement signed before the election, and violated the people’s constitutional right to peaceful demonstration and gathering. Even worse, mass arrests of students, innocent civilians and leaders of the opposition were carried out. Some of the imprisoned opposition leaders had won Parliamentary seats even in the rigged election.

The derailment of the democratic processes led to the curtailment of press freedom, the arrest of journalists and the closure of private newspapers. Further, it created tension among ethnic groups and sporadic violence in the southern part of Ethiopia that could have been exploited by politicians to orchestrate ethnic violence. In the Diaspora, the consequences were a series of demonstrations, public meetings, vigils, and lobbying of governments and donors to reconsider their relations and restrict development assistance.

Elections in Africa

Was the process in Ethiopia different from other African countries? What are the election trends in Africa? At this junction it would be useful to briefly analyze the election trends within other countries in Africa in order to shed light on the Ethiopian case.

It is a public knowledge that most African elections are marred with fraud and vote rigging. In most cases in Africa, opposition political parties claim victory in major cities while the incumbent governments do so in rural areas. In the post conflict environment of most African countries, an incumbent government rarely wins votes in metropolitan areas. The rationale being that the cities hold the enlightened members of the society (the elites, unionized labor force etc.) who are politically conscious, and rely on the often poorly provided services (water, electricity, health) of the incumbent government.

Further, they are also the immediate victims of government policies, which are designed to attract donors, and the international community to demonstrate governments commitment to good governance. Thus, the perpetually dissatisfied urban electorate demonstrate their anger through huge turn outs at polling stations to vote against the incumbent government that threatens their livelihood; though they know that their vote will not make a huge impact on the overall result. In addition, the presence of the international community and international observers predominantly in urban areas makes it more challenging for the incumbent government to rig votes in cities compared to rural areas.

However, in rural Africa with low literacy rates, difficult living conditions, and well established control mechanisms, the electorate can be coerced, bribed and manipulated to vote for the incumbent. If they vote against an incumbent that stays in power, they will be denied access to fertilizer, insecticide, veterinary care, healthcare and other essential services the government provides. For the sake of survival, the rural communities have to comply with the instructions of government officials. As mentioned earlier, the lack of transportation and hospitality infrastructure limits the number of international or even domestic observes in rural areas, making it easy to rig the vote. As an emerging democracy, Ethiopia is affected by all these factors and it should be no surprise that the incumbent EPRDF claimed victory in rural Ethiopia while losing in the big cities.

The consequences of the May 2005 election

Why did the incumbent government rush to declare its party as a winner? I think it was due to a lack of confidence in its own system. The EPRDF believed that they had won the confidences of the electorate in Addis Ababa and other metropolitan areas which in the end turned out to be woefully wrong. As the election results started to become public in the metropolitan areas the party became increasingly frustrated and insecure.

However, the EPRDF should have been conscious of the elections trend in Africa and been prepared for such an outcome: Robert Mugabe’s party ZANU-PF lost in Harare and Bulawayo, Daniel Arap Moi’s party KANU lost in Kisumu, Nairobi, Nakuru and Naivasha. By rushing to announce the result, EPRDF failed to comply with the guidelines of NEBE and this demonstrated a lack of experience in multi-party politics.

Accepting defeat was difficult and unfamiliar in the culture, and the social and political systems. With the exception of rare cases such as Ghana, Kenya, and Zambia, most incumbents in many African countries have rarely accepted defeat and handed over power to the victorious political party. This highlights a crucial issue in African politics – leaders who come to power using the barrel of the gun do not have the confidence to leave the government mansion willingly and become an “ordinary” citizen.

I can understand their fear. Such leaders, while in power, are not interested in developing a system that could provide them a means that would enable them to live as an ordinary citizen, because they do not want to leave power. It has become fashionable to amend Constitutions, extend terms of office, and stay in power for life. This alienates them from the community and they cannot assimilate back if they leave power because of injustices they committed and unlimited powers they exercised over the people. They are foreigners who would only feel secure living in exile from their homeland usually after a last minute peace deal brokered by a western government.

An important question one should ask is why it was necessary to violate the non-violence pact signed before the 2005 Ethiopian elections where the major political parties agreed “[t]o peacefully resolve our differences or other disagreements between and among ourselves”. [6] Why was it necessary to change a relatively smooth democratic process to a violent event where over 40 people lost their lives, thousands (including leaders of opposition political parties, human right activists and civil society organizations, etc.) ended up in detention camps, and freedom of press was curtailed severely.

Losing the elections in Addis Ababa, where the African Union and some international organizations have their headquarters, was an embarrassment for the EPRDF government. As the parliamentary election results continued to become public formally and informally, it became evident that while some senior government officials including the Minister of Education Genet Zewdae, speaker of the House Ato Dawit Yohannes, etc. lost their parliamentary seats in Addis, still more government officials lost in the regional towns. Thus, the EPRDF government, on the notion of maintaining order and peace in the country, banned public meetings and rallies, intimidated, harassed and retaliated against the electorate who voted against EPRDF, using excessive power and denying the people the right to express their views publicly on the results of the election.

It is worth remembering that retaliation or revenge breeds violence and creates a downward spiral of violence. Ethiopians at home and in the Diaspora witnessed and remember how revenge and retaliation spiraled into violence during the early days of the Marxist regime. Loosely translated, one of the slogans that bred violence was “the blood of one revolutionary can be matched by the blood of a thousand anarchists”. It is thirty years later now and I am sure most Ethiopians remember how the retaliatory chain of violence labeled “Red Terror” and “White Terror” wiped out thousands of young and educated Ethiopians.

More recently, Ethiopians will also recall how the EPRDF, which took power in 1991, used this terror to identify with families of the victims, win trust and confidence of Ethiopians and show the atrocities the Communist government committed against its own people. There is no justification for any group including EPRDF to use revenge (violence) as a means to solve the current problem in Ethiopia.

It has become clear that the legal system is too slow, either due to limited capacity or a lack of good will, to provide remedy for those who seek justice, especially those jailed in connection to the May 2005 elections. As all concerned Ethiopians and the international community continue to advocate for justice, it is a ripe time to plan and discuss how the democratic process should continue in Ethiopia. The parliament has only three years and ten months to finish its term and visionary people and their leaders must start preparation for the next elections, which are slated for 2010.

From the contested election results of May 2005, Ethiopians have demonstrated their ability and commitment to use the ballot box to elect leaders who can form a government that respects the rights of its citizens, and is dedicated to good governance. Every politician and even the highest organ responsible for implementing the elections recognized the power of the electorate, as indicated by the NEBE chairman’s comment that “[t]he determination of the people to exercise their democratic rights is a sure guarantee that democracy is here to stay”. [7]

If this is the principle that guides the people of Ethiopia and is the motto of the Board, then it will be appropriate to give elections another try. Opposition political parties and those who would like to participate in the next election have to develop a strategy and road map on what should be accomplished between now and the next elections. Willingness (Preparedness) to engage in dialogue should be part of strategy. Dialogue can help shed some light into what happened during the 2005 elections and provide space to identify future opportunities. Identifying lessons learned and building on that foundation is one sign of growth, and would minimize chances of similar mistakes in the future.

What can be done to reinvigorate the democratic processes in Ethiopia? It is true that innocent people have died and leaders of the opposition political parties, human rights activists, and CSO leaders are languishing in jails still waiting for justice. With this in mind, following are suggestions on how to break the stalemate, and continue building the democratic process that was halted.

Looking Forward

While the outcome of the elections strangled an emerging democratic culture and increased polarization among various groups, I would argue that it is in the best interests of Ethiopians at home, in the Diaspora, and the international community that the process be given another chance.

While some groups now contend that change can only come via the barrel of the gun, I do not see the rationale, yet, for further blood shed! As an Ethiopian, I am against all violence and do not want to see any Ethiopian take up a gun and kill another Ethiopian. We have had enough of that - violence breeds violence. We have grieved for the last forty years, exhumed graves to collect human remains, and we have been pointing figures at others who were involved in killing our innocent brothers and sisters. If we opt for violence as a means to solve the current problem in Ethiopia, this will only increase the prison population, intensify divisions among groups, create new groups of victims and result in yet another exodus of refugees. Are we ready for another round of demobilization and reintegration of ex-combatants? Have we even finished reintegrating ex-combatants from the communist regime? We have not yet fully addressed the psychosocial problems in our communities and the economy is staggering to grow. We need to break the cycle of violence. We need to reconcile, heal wounds and build a democratic society. What are the options?

1. A need to stop the zero-sum mind set

The incumbent government and opposition political parties perceive the political landscape as a small cake, each one of them determined and eager to get a bigger portion at any cost – today. They fail to look into the future or explore if there are other alternatives and opportunities. The ‘here and now’ perception should be challenged. All have to agree to expand the cake and get a good share for each and look to the opportunities in the future. In spite of the differences in their political manifestos all political parties have to invest in the future. The cycle of elections is five years and this is not a long time to wait. Looking into the future will generate options. Since more elections are coming, there are opportunities to win, “benefit” and demonstrate their talent and commitment to good governance. Therefore, there is a need for compromise and a move out of the cocoon of “all for me attitude”.

2. Need to develop a culture of dialogue and tolerance

History and experience have proved that a culture of political dialogue among Ethiopians is missing. Dialogue helps to reestablish relationships, to develop a shared vision and commitment [8] and subsequently to increase tolerance, which include among other things the ability to listen and engage. At this juncture it is appropriate to ask whether dialogue is new to Ethiopians. Among many groups in Ethiopia, there are different forms of dialogue: “afersat”, “idir”; “ikub”, “mahibir”, etc. which are used at different levels in the society, family, and community to address issues of mutual concern. Afersata, for example, is used to identify criminals, investigate crime, mediate inter group and inter community conflicts, etc. Communities under the leadership of the community elders attend a series of meetings to weed out criminals from their community. In similar ways, Idir and iquib are used to address social issues and financial needs. However, politicians do not have such a platform and fail to develop such a model in a multi-party environment to negotiate and discuss crosscutting national issues.

Among most Ethiopians, losers are not welcome and this is reflected in our culture and value system. This is inculcated in early childhood. Therefore, most of us (including politicians) who grew up in a social system that considers defeat as a disgrace can rarely accept defeat and would rather retaliate or take revenge. It is crucial to change this attitude, and teach people that accepting defeat is not the end of the world, but an opportunity to explore other possibilities, and look to the future.

Conclusion

Ethiopians at home and in the diaspora have an obligation to nurture what was planted prior to the election in May 2005. It requires gentle hands using appropriate tools that can nourish it, removing weeds that have the potential to strangle its growth, and provide good nutrients so that it continues to grow and bear fruit. If the government and opposition political parties continue to use a heavy hand, the democratic process will become stunted. Suppressing and punishing any form of political dissent will not help the democratic processes in Ethiopia to grow. A polarized approach will increase the rift among groups who are interested in taking the process forward.

It is time to remove the stigma attached to elections; another election is coming in about three years time and it is coming with new opportunities. Let us stop blaming and blackmailing others if the person expresses an opinion which is different from that of our own. Different views would provide room for growth and if all Ethiopians promoted just one ideology life would be monotonous. It is time to continue to promote our mosaic culture, and appreciate our differences. It is the drum, the kirar, the masinko, embelata, etc. which have important but distinct roles in producing the rhythm in our music.

* Erkyihun Lagere is an Ethiopian working in the field of conflict analysis and resolution for an NGO based in Europe Contact [email][email protected]

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Notes

[1] The elections in 1995 and 2000 could not be claimed to be multiparty because there was not strong opposition
[2] “Ethiopia’s governing party claims victory” Associated Press, International Herald Tribune, May 18, 2005
[3] Quoted from the BBC News website 11/05/06 ‘Election fever hits Ethiopian cities’.
[4] Ethiopia’s governing party claims a victory, International Herald Tribune, May 18, 2005
[5] See J. Abbink, Discomfiture of democracy? The 2005 election crisis in Ethiopia and its aftermath. African Affairs Volume 105, Number 419, April 2006. p.183
[6]The full text of the Ethiopia Electoral Non-Violence Pact from http://www.electionsethiopia.org/Whats%20New22.html
[7]Ethiopia PM warns of ‘hate’ poll, 6 May 2005.

As air and ground fighting continues to kill and maim in the Middle East, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed looks at the broader ramifications of the current conflict – and the ultimate price that it might extract.

Over 300 people killed, most of them civilians. 1,000 wounded. Half a million and rising displaced from their homes. A third of these Lebanese casualties, according to the UN, have been children. These estimated figures dwarf in scale the terror and tragedy that paralysed London almost around the same time last year, when 52 were killed and over 700 wounded in a coordinated bomb attack on the commuter transport system.

What's happening in Lebanon is six times the devastation, six times the agony, six times the trauma, six times the terror of the 7/7 terrorist attacks. But leaders in the UK, US and European governments don't seem to think so. They have all unanimously fumbled their fingers and mumbled meaninglessly as Israel has proceeded to respond to Hizbollah's capture of Israeli Defence Force (IDF) combatants - an action in concordance with legitimate military resistance against illegal occupation - by ruthlessly smashing civilian life and infrastructure in Beirut.

IDF operations have targeted key civilian installations, including water and sanitation systems, destroyed Lebanon's largest dairy farm and pharmeceutical plant, shelled UN posts sheltering civilians, flattened whole villages, and turned mosques, churches and houses into rubble. They have cut off roads and bridges, blocking urgently needed humanitarian assistance.

But such terrorist attacks, when targeted against the Other, no longer constitute terrorism at all; in our Orwellian world of media double-speak, they become instead laudable acts of valour. In fact, when an Israeli air strike killed 8 Canadian citizens in southern Lebanon, US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton emphasized that such deaths due to IDF operations are morally different to the deaths of Israelis due to attacks by Hizbollah. "I think it would be a mistake to ascribe moral equivalence to civilians who die as the direct result of malicious terrorist acts," he said. In contrast, Israeli military operations constituted only "self-defense", with the "the tragic and unfortunate consequence of civilian deaths."

Dead Lebanese are unworthy victims. They don't count. But Israeli lives do. The moral distinction drawn by Bolton is not in fact moral at all; it is political, a political decision to view the lives of one group of human beings as sacred, and another group as functionally irrelevant. Such "moral" distinctions are central to the legitimization of large-scale systematic violence against a particular human group.

The Beirut bombings are not the result of a fundamentally religious conflict. Israel Defence Force raids are indiscriminately murdering Lebanese and non-Lebanese Muslims, Jews and Christians. It's difficult, caught in the horror of the bloodied bodies left in the wake IDF air strikes, to remind ourselves of the context of the crisis, and its strategic trajectories. But the broad ramifications must be understood.

Israeli policy-planners have long envisaged a protracted wider regional conflict as a potentially useful way for Israel to achieve longstanding historical objectives. Israeli spokesmen have been at pains to characterize the conflict as a regional conspiracy against Israel hatched by Iran and Syria. But this obscures the fact that, although the latter indeed provide support for Hizbollah, the Lebanese resistance group remains an autonomous and outspoken organization rooted firmly in its national homeland. US and Israeli officials, however, see the drastic escalation of the conflict as an opportunity to explore the prospects for US-Israeli military expansionism.

The invasion of Iraq was, we ought to remind ourselves, merely the first stage in a rolling strategy for the reconfiguration of the Middle East whose existence is now well-documented and indisputable. Reporting for Time Magazine in February 2003, Joe Klein – a member of the Council on Foreign Relations – observed that: “Israel is very much embedded in the rationale for war with Iraq. It is part of the argument that dare not speak its name, a fantasy quietly cherished by the neo-conservative faction in the Bush administration and by many leaders of the American Jewish Community.” The US war on Iraq was intended to be the beginning of a whole new era in the Middle East, designed to “send a message to Syria and Iran about the perils of support for Islamic terrorists,” bring an end to the Palestinian problem, and shake the “wobbly Hashemite monarchy in Jordan.” We are now seeing the next stages of this "new era" in construction.

Need we also remind ourselves of the influential 1996 strategy paper authored by David Wurmser published by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) based in Jerusalem and Washington D.C.? It advised: "The battle to dominate and define Iraq is, by extension, the battle to dominate the balance of power in the Levant over the long run... The United States must support moves to challenge Syria’s position in Lebanon, to undermine Iran, to ensure Turkey’s long-term pro-Western tilt and integration into Europe, to support Jordan’s efforts in Iraq, and to understand better the dynamics of Saudi succession as they relate to its foreign policy."

The overwhelming danger is plain for all reasonable observers to see. Israel is escalating its aggression, in both diplomatic rhetoric and military conduct, against Beirut, Damascus and Tehran, knowing full-well that this is dramatically increasing the probability of a wider conflict. Tehran has loudly confirmed its solidarity with Damascus in the event of a serious Israeli assault there. As the IDF continues to terrorise Lebanon with impunity while our own governments continue to supply military and financial aid to Israel, Hizbollah is left with little option but to escalate its own responses with support from Iran and Syria. As usual, Hizbollah's responses are in turn cited by Israel as ample justification for increasing its own indiscriminate massacres of Lebanese civilians, which further aggravates and escalates Hizbollah's retaliations.

As the cycle widens and deepens, US leaders and experts increasingly blame Iran, albeit without evidence, for engineering Hizbollah's initial operation to capture the IDF soldiers. The danger that the increasing involvement of Iran and/or Syria in the conflict could be exploited by Israel to convert it into a full-scale regional war should not be underestimated. As the late Professor Israel Shahak of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wrote years ago in his Open Secrets (London: Pluto, 1997):

"The wish for peace, so often assumed as the Israeli aim, is not in my view a principle of Israeli policy, while the wish to extend Israeli domination and influence is… Israel is preparing for a war, nuclear if need be, for the sake of averting domestic change not to its liking, if it occurs in some or any Middle Eastern states... Israel clearly prepares itself to seek overtly a hegemony over the entire Middle East…without hesitating to use for the purpose all means available, including nuclear ones."

There could perhaps be no better time to heed Shahak's warning than now, when both the US and Israel, with British complicity and European duplicity, are maneuvering themselves into a position where they can legitimize the opening of multiple military confrontations with Lebanon, Iran and Syria. The nuclear implications have never been lost. Both Britain and the United States have adopted first-strike nuclear policies, and are actively pursuing tactical nuclear weapons to make such unconventional warfare strategically viable. US Vice-President Dick Cheney continues to spend most of his time in secret nuclear bunkers where he oversees the establishment and functioning of an unelected network of unknown officials, planned to immediately come into power in the event of a nuclear strike against the United States.

For the last few decades in the Middle East, armageddon has long lingered on the horizon, but in light of recent events, its shadow looms closer. Our leaders are not rational, trustworthy individuals, and we are not safe in their hands. We do not want to experience 7th July 2005 a thousand times over. So we must take action, now; which means making the voices of we, the people, heard so clearly and overwhelmingly that those who kill and support killing in our name can do so no longer.

* This article first appeared on Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (London: Duckworth, 2006,

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

* Links on the Middle East crisis

- Five Israeli myths
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1153759483.html
- Organisation of African Trade Union press release on Lebenon
http://epetition.net/julywar/index.php
- Support relieve efforts
http://www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/informes/4636.html
- Diary of Liberians in Beirut
http://itf.typepad.com/lebanon/
- Other blogs
http://lebanonupdates.blogspot.com/
http://siegeoflebanon.blogspot.com/
http://www.fromisraeltolebanon.org/