For the past two weeks, the intensified violence in Darfur, Western Sudan, the restrictions imposed on humanitarian aid to 1.4 million people, and the expulsion of senior aid officials from two of the most renowned international humanitarian organisations are the dire result of the past and present failure of the United Nations Security Council, the United States, the international community and the African states.

By refusing to act on the extensive documented evidence of the atrocities, war crimes and human right abuses committed against the black African civilian population of Darfur, the United Nations Security Council has dried its crocodile tears on the empty slogan of “Never Again” that it proclaimed six months ago when commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, and turned its back on the people of Darfur. None of its resolutions on Darfur has made any impact on Khartoum in stopping the violence and the ethnic cleansing in the region. In addition, the United Nations has not put any pressure on Khartoum to fulfil its commitments stipulated in the Joint Communiqué jointly signed with the UN Secretary General in July 2004, regarding the “immediate disarming of the Janjaweed and other armed outlaw groups”.

Have we forgotten the Resolution on the armed conflict in Darfur adopted by more than 100 African human rights organisations during the 34th Session of the African Commission on Human and People's Rights, at Banjul (Gambia)? That was only a year ago, in November 2003.

It is true that collective decision-making is all very well but what do you do when the culprit is part of the collective? When Sudan, for example, sits on the African Union's Peace and Security Council as it debates alleged atrocities by Sudan government-backed militias and then comes to frustrate the efforts of that same Peace and Security Council to monitor the cease-fire in Darfur?

Could it be possible that because we, Africans, do not agree with the policies of Washington, London or Paris, we are ready to sacrifice the lives of our own people and hence reject any human rights resolution condemning an African state? This is exactly what happened at the UN General Assembly in Nairobi ten days ago. A draft resolution which could have denounced the killings and the ethnic cleansing that is still taking place in Darfur was frustrated by developing countries including almost all Islamic and African states. Is Africa saying to Sudan “Maalesh (never mind, in Arabic) - do not “fully and unconditionally respect your obligations under the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights as well as other regional and international human rights treaties to which you, Sudan are a State Party”.

The African Summit held in Tripoli (Libya) in October 2004 was claimed to be 'an important step to settle the crisis peacefully' and part of “relentless efforts” to settle the Darfur crisis in order to introduce the best model in facing other African problems. “Global support will be more effective and useful than threatening sanctions." It is said that it is Khartoum's legitimate right to solve its internal crises and no one can contest the Sudanese government's prerogative to deal with issues pertaining to its national security. Yet, time and again, the Sudanese government has proved its inability to finding a peaceful solution to the Darfur problem. Khartoum has made many promises to international visitors, to African leaders, to the UN, but has delivered nothing. It has failed - one would even say “refused” - to rein in the Janjaweed militias that it has unleashed against the black African population of Darfur. It has systematically stopped and restricted the humanitarian efforts. It has expelled aid workers. It has bombed and killed its own citizens. It has blocked all regional and international mediation efforts to solve the crisis.

Whenever confronted with real facts on the ground, the Sudanese government officials are always prompt to deny, reject, accuse, condemn and blame others, yet they have not found a proper answer to the Darfur crisis. When last July, the UN Security Council passed a first resolution condemning the atrocities perpetrated against the people of Darfur, Khartoum was angry. Later in September, the Sudanese vice-president was fuming when the UN Security Council passed yet another resolution on the violence in Darfur. As extraordinary as it may appear, Khartoum is always “right” while the African Union, the United Nations, the international community, the humanitarian organisations, the media and the people of Darfur are always “wrong”.

The Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail says that the African Union (AU) has not fulfilled its commitment towards Darfur, particularly regarding the expansion of forces it promised to send to help in monitoring the ceasefire and protecting civilians. Yet, only a few weeks ago, Khartoum not only imposed “restrictions” on the African Union troops, but also was refusing to allow the same AU troops to fly into Darfur. The Sudanese government's onslaught on the AU does not stop there. Nageeb al-Khair Abdel-Wahab, State Minister at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Sudan, has labelled the recent AU report on the renewed clashes in Darfur as “unfair and imbalanced” whereas the report holds all the warring parties - the government, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) - responsible for violating the security and humanitarian protocols signed in Abuja, Nigeria (October 21 to November 10, 2004).

Though western mediators acknowledge that the issues in Darfur “need to be worked out” they fail to understand that these are not “manageable” disputes that can be handled “as they arise”. Time and again, analysts have made it clear that the issues at stake, not only in Darfur or in the South, but in Sudan in its entirety, are related to “structural” matters and to how Sudan can be governed and not who is to govern Sudan. The viable solution to be found needs to be “proactive” and long term so to avoid the recurrence of the problems. A “reactive” and short-term solution would only solve the problem “temporarily”. Sudan has been mis-governed since independence by interest groups and political ideologues that are today trying to keep their hegemony despite and against all common sense. Whether it comes under internal pressure from opposition parties or it concedes to pressure from the international community, Khartoum's position in dealing with its problems is unlikely to change. The government of Hassan El Beshir is determined to maintain its hold on power at any cost and force its policies on the Sudanese people by all means, except national dialogue. Let's be serious. Khartoum is not interested in global support.

Human rights activists, observers, analysts and US officials have all condemned the extremely weak and meaningless United Nations Security Council resolution (Nairobi). Now, Khartoum and the militias it has armed have “carte blanche” to continue their vicious treatment of the black African people of Darfur with impunity. They can kill, burn, rape, displace people, usurp their land and propagate racial hatred in the province.

* Eva Dadrian is an independent broadcaster and Political and Country Risk Analyst for print and broadcast media, who currently works as a consultant for Arab African Affairs (London) and writes on a regular basis for AFRICA ANALYSIS (London), for Al Ahram HEBDO Echos Economiques and Al Ahram WEEKLY (Cairo) and contributes to Africa Service BBC WS (London).

* Please send comments to

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

We in South Africa needed the support of the international community in our efforts to end the vicious system of racial oppression called apartheid.

We had to have eloquent advocates to tell the world our story and persuade it to come to our assistance. Today we are free and democratic striving to be non-racial and non-sexist. We won a spectacular victory over the awfulness of apartheid a victory that is unthinkable without the support of the international community referred to earlier.

We had none more articulate and with all the credibility and integrity so indispensable than Dennis Brutus to plead our cause. He was quite outstanding and we South Africans owe an immense debt of gratitude.

I join many, many of our compatriots and our friends in the international community as we salute him when he celebrates his 80th birthday. Many happy returns and God's richest blessings broer! Thank you for having been such a stalwart. We owe much to you.

God bless you.

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Fatima Meer, Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban

Denis, we thank you for your 80 glamorous years, a considerable part of them spent leading us in our fight against the injustices that was and still is unleashed upon us. We know your disappointments and we salute you and applaud you for bringing them to our notice. I hope you are spared some score more years to correct the ways that still remain. I am with you in the fight that still remains and I need your commitment and your energy and your integrity. Live on wonderful soldier, live on for South Africa, for all those who continue to be oppressed and deprived and impoverished throughout the world. Live on Denis in spirit, if not in body. Live on, dearest compatriot.

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Sean Jacobs, New York University, New York

Vir Dennis Brutus. Waar ek vandaan kom is jy nou al 'n wyse ou man, maar jy laat die laaities moeg lyk. Regte Suid-Afrikaners eer jou.

>>>>>>>>>>

Trevor Ngwane, Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, Johannesburg

unkonka wefusi
umakad' ebona
inkunzi emidwayidwayi
okudala beyidwanguza
yehlula izinhlamvu zamaphoyisa ezomoya
yehlula amaBhunu esiqhingini
igagu umlom' omnandi
umlomo ishoba lokuziphungela
mfoka Bhaduza uthembeni na?
ngoba ozakweni bomzabalazo
sebephenduke amambuka
badla izambane likampondo
kodwa indima singakayiphethi
elikaMthaniya kaNdaba lisaphethwe zinyoni
mana njalo qabane lamaqabane
nwele zimhlophe
isina muva liyabukwa
oMandela bagiya bakushiya enkundleni
kanti baphosisile umgidi awukapheli
umzabalazo usaqhubeka
ithemba alisobe labulala
Dennis Brutus
uyiqhawe lamaqhawe
uyingonyama
mana njalo
ukhule uze ukhokhobe
ubambelele ngezindonga

>>>>>>>>>>>

Center for Economic Justice, Washington/Alburquerque/Johannesburg

What makes Dennis Brutus so unique as an activist and as a human being, is that he has been an inspiration and a source of spiritual strength to so many of us worldwide who are struggling to make the world a just place, including all of us at the Center for Economic Justice. Struggling for justice and humanity is hard work; it is full of setbacks, heartbreak, and loss. It is precisely at the hardest points in our struggle that we think of Dennis. We are inspired by how he keeps doing the most important work in the world with a smile and with kind words for everyone. We are amazed at how strong his spirit is after everything that he has seen and suffered through, especially the betrayal of the hopes of the South African people by persons he had always regarded as comrades. We love you, Dennis!

>>>>>>>>>>

Dale Mckinley, Anti-Privatisation Forum, Johannesburg

Comrade Dennis - 80 years young and still going strong, still fanning the flames of resistance, still sharing your words of wisdom and creativity and still a revolutionary. You have taken the words of Che and put them into your heart and into practice - "If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine". You are a true comrade.

>>>>>>>>>>

Firoze Manji, Fahamu, Oxford

Dennis - is it really 80 years? How much we have gained in those years, and sadly how much have we lost. But the best was that those years produced fighters such as you who have held up the flag in Africa and for Africa. You are an example to us all. Keep fighting - onwards to the next 80 years!

>>>>>>>>>>

Jann Turner, Johannesburg

I would love to wish Dennis Brutus a happy birthday. Sunday the 28th of November happens to be a very important day for me too - I turn 40. I'm exactly half his age and I would be proud to accomplish half of what he has done in his life in my own time on this earth.

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Bill Fletcher, TransAfrica Forum, Washington

Dennis Brutus stands as a tribune of the dispossessed. His willingness to speak out on all cases of injustice, and side with the oppressed makes him the type of person we all wish to emulate. His perseverance, dedication and eloquence have made him not only a hero for the South African freedom struggle, but for all those who struggle for social justice.

>>>>>>>>>>

Njoki Njoroge Njehu & Soren Ambrose, Washington & Nairobi

We offer our heartfelt 80th Birthday greetings to Dennis Brutus. We celebrate you - friend, leader, courageous, poet, internationalist, outrageous, inspirational, unbowed, joyful, unrelenting, always responsive, committed, dignified, revolutionary, fighter for freedom and justice, stalwart for solidarity, and much more. Dennis Brutus, PRESENTE!

We celebrated Dennis' 75th Birthday in Seattle, a few days before the historic collapse of the WTO Ministerial - what a wonderful Birthday present for Dennis?! We are delighted and proud to say that the 50 Years Is Enough Network has already co-hosted, not one but two celebrations, of Dennis' 80th birthday. Both occasions doubled as fundraisers, as Dennis continues to multi-task and to do everything in his power -- including just having a birthday -- to support and build the movements for global justice, and in particular the 50 Years Is Enough Network. Dennis has a created a legacy to be proud of, that is inspiring, and a catalyst for creating that "other possible world."

As we prepare to move back to Africa, we are proud to call Dennis our great friend, a true Mzalendo (combatant/patriot in Kiswahili) for justice, and a brother in the struggle for true liberation for Africa and the world. Where there is struggle, there you will find Dennis. So Dennis, we invite you to Kenya to celebrate your 81st Birthday with those in the struggles there - we will organize appropriate fora for the celebration. Happy Birthday Dennis! And a happy celebration to all those able to be with him as he appropriately marks the occasion in South Africa. Many, many, happy returns. We love you, Dennis! Viva Dennis Viva!!

>>>>>>>>>>

Tony Blair's Commission for Africa will have little effect unless it tackles global apartheid. So long as global rules are made by a minority, any progress in Africa could be wiped out overnight by changes in currency, trading conditions or security as a result of decisions or neglect by the world's most powerful bodies. Unless Africans have an equal and effective voice in global decision-making, the Commission's work will be forgotten.

All other questions are window dressing.

This Commission would not be necessary if rich countries had been committed to the UN Economic Commission for Africa, founded 1958; the UN Programme for Action for African Economic Recovery and Development initiated in 1986; the Global Coalition for Africa founded in 1990, or the UN Initiative for Africa, launched in 1996. Indeed, the Commission could save money simply by updating the UN Action Plan for African, published in 1991.

The treatment of Africa and its position in global decision-making is in some respects worse than the treatment of the majority in South Africa under apartheid. Although the West condemns racism, and includes Africans and people of African descent at the highest levels of governance, the structures of global decision-making systematically prevent Africa from having an effective say in the economic and political rules which govern their affairs. As a result, African states are often treated like Bantustans, clients of Western powers, and the needs of their people are neglected.

One example of minority rule in global governance is the UN Security Council: 80% of the permanent members are white, representing less than 10% of the world population, and 60% are European. As a result, the Security Council has failed to protect Africans from the scourge of war.

The International Community would not have tolerated genocide in Rwanda if Africa had had a veto in the Security Council. The World Bank and IMF would have done more about aids, debt, famine or declining currencies and commodity prices if Africa had the same votes compared to the US. Nor would Africa have faced steep tariff barriers and dumping if it had the same clout in the WTO as Europe. The G8 would not have let Africa get into its current state if it had been a member.

How the major powers and institutions of global governance allocate and implement budgets, appoint top officials and influence national policies can encourage corruption and make it impossible for citizens to hold governments to account. As the Commission says, transparency can be a powerful mechanism both for enhancing overall delivery by government and the participation of excluded groups. But few global institutions or Africa Desks in the foreign ministries of the rich world are open and transparent.

Giving African nations an equitable and effective say in the major institutions of global governance would address one of the central questions raised by the Commission: if Africa had a veto on the Security Council, IMF, World Bank, WTO, and Bank of International Settlements, it would quickly become a domestic issue for rich countries. They would soon find the political will to make a lasting commitment to Africa's development.

If the Commission is serious about enabling Africa to solve its problems, it will:
- Review Africa's representation on the major institutions of international decision-making
- Advocate equitable representation and powers for Africa in these bodies
- Draw up principles of transparency, accountability, democracy and equitable decision-making for all institutions of global governance, as advocated by the One World Trust.

There are opportunities for reform. This week a UN High-Level Panel will recommend fairer representation for Africa and other Developing Countries on the UN Security Council.

The G8 member states have the power to propose a new global settlement on the basis of our common humanity, in which international decision-making is based on equity, transparency, democracy and accountability. If it does so, the issues facing Africa will remain the common concern of the world. If it does not, the Blair report will join the Pearson Report, the Brandt Report and many other reports in the footnotes of history, as business as usual resumes.

* Titus Alexander is founder of Charter 99 and author of "Unravelling Global Apartheid" (Polity Press/Blackwell, 1996)

* If you agree with these arguments, tell the Commission and give them specific examples about the way in which global apartheid and Africa's position in international decision-making causes harm or hinders progress. If you disagree, join the dialogue at Pambazuka News! Send your comments to

The Commission is holding a series of meetings with Africans throughout the Continent, starting this week, on 1 December, in Dakar, Senegal. Commissioners will also travel to Nairobi (6 Dec); Douala (8 Dec); Lusaka (10 Dec) and Alexandria (14 Dec). These meetings will enable representatives from every African country to comment on the Commission's work, and allow Commissioners to collect new material for their report. The meetings are being organised in partnership with LEAD International www.amref.org/speakforafrica.htm and the Southern African Regional Poverty Network http://www.commissionforafrica.org/getting_involved/consultationdocument.htm

Prepare comments in the form of a brief summary followed by up to 750 words.
Where your submission relates to a particular thematic section of the document, please indicate this in the summary.

Submissions should be sent to the Secretariat to the Commission for Africa by e-mail: [email][email protected]

Mark the Subject 'Submission October-December Consultation' followed by your name or the name of your organisation. http://www.commissionforafrica.org/getting_involved/GettingInvolved.htm

* If you or your organisation has made a submission to the Commission for Africa, please send your contribution to Pambazuka News and we will include it in the newsletter. Send to

Imagine for a moment that every single woman on the African continent was guaranteed an absolute right to peace and that the mechanisms existed for her to enforce that right should it be violated. It's a quantum leap of the imagination from a situation where millions of women are vulnerable to armed conflict, where rape is routinely used as a weapon of war by armed groups, where women suffer disproportionately from the effects of poverty, HIV/AIDS, discriminatory gender practices and other forms of oppression.

Make no mistake, we're a long, long way away from a situation where the rights of women are considered to be set in stone. Recently the Security Council considered the first Secretary-General's report on the state of implementation of Resolution 1325, which concluded that “thus far, the international community has not been able to prevent acts of violence against women from occurring during armed conflict.” Amnesty International pointed out at the time: “We are currently witnessing horrific levels of gender-based violence committed with impunity against women and girls in many conflict-affected countries.”

So in such a seemingly hopeless situation why bother with the host of international protocols, treaties and the like? Aren't they just idealistic statements that are never meant to be achieved, rhetoric for the politicians to sign as evidence of their hard work? We all know that the real balance of international power mitigates against the lofty ideals they contain ever being achieved. Perhaps this is the realistic viewpoint and there is no point in getting over-excited about the remote possibility that one day all women - and by implication all men - might one day live in peace.

And yet it must be possible to make that leap, it must be possible to somehow close the gulf, the disconnect between the reality and the paperwork. The thing is it’s not even in the realm of imagination anymore: The Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa specifically guarantees women a right to peace. The Protocol goes further by guaranteeing the rights of refugees, by demanding that states reduce expenditure on guns and bombs, by calling for women to be present at the peace table and for states to introduce concrete measures to end violence against women. Once enough African countries ratify the protocol before the African Union, states will be obligated to enact legislation which gives voice to the rights outlined in the protocol. It is a long, long road, but it is possible to see a situation where those seemingly idealistic rights could be enforced.

What's the point of all this for the average citizen? Today is the start of 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, an international campaign originating from the first Women's Global Leadership Institute in 1991. The dates November 25, International Day Against Violence Against Women, and December 10, International Human Rights Day, were chosen in order to symbolically link violence against women and human rights and to emphasize that such violence is a violation of human rights. This 16-day period also highlights other significant dates including December 1, which is World AIDS Day.

The 16 Days Campaign has been used as an organizing strategy by individuals and groups around the world to call for the elimination of all forms of violence against women by raising awareness about gender-based violence as a human rights issue at the local, national, regional and international levels; strengthening local work around violence against women; establishing a clear link between local and international work to end violence against women; providing a forum in which organizers can develop and share new and effective strategies; demonstrating the solidarity of women around the world organizing against violence against women; and creating tools to pressure governments to implement promises made to eliminate violence against women.

There's so much that can be done to close the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Find out what's happing in your area in relation to the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence. Join in. Sign our petition calling for the ratification of the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa that will be presented to African heads of state at an African Union summit in January. Tell them its important. Pambazuka News will be carrying editorials to highlight key dates during the 16 days. This week we have an article to mark International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and our lead editorial is about World Aids Day. Next week we will have more articles relevant to the 16 days. The week after we will have an editorial on Human Rights day. Read the editorials. We’ll also be carrying a special section for news about the 16 days. Send us your news.

And if you absolutely can't find it in yourself to do something - anything - to support the rights of women just sit back and imagine for a moment that every single woman on the African continent was guaranteed an absolute right to peace and what a difference that would make. Maybe that will move you to something.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

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Violence against women increases their vulnerability to HIV infection - meaning that if HIV prevention activities are to succeed they need to occur alongside other efforts that reduce violence against women and girls.

This is according to the just released UNAIDS Aids Epidemic Update 2004 that reports on the latest developments in the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. "We will not be able to stop this epidemic unless we put women at the heart of the response to Aids," UNAids' executive director, Peter Piot, reportedly said at the launch of the report.

The report shows that the total number of people living with HIV globally rose to an estimated 39.4 million in 2004, while the epidemic killed 3.1 million people in the past year. Sub-Saharan Africa is the worst-affected region, with 25.4 million people living with HIV at the end of 2004, compared to 24.4 million in 2002.

The report states that the AIDS epidemic is affecting women and girls in increasing numbers: "Women and girls make up almost 57% of all people infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, where a striking 76% of young people (aged 15-24 years) living with HIV are female."

Released just before International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and the start of 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence on November 25, the report notes that one of the main causes of this disproportionate impact on women is violence, citing evidence from Rwanda, Tanzania and South Africa to highlight the link.

The Rwanda study quoted showed that HIV-positive women were more likely to have experienced a history of physical and sexual violence at the hands of male partners than were women without HIV. In Tanzania among women younger than 30 years in one Tanzanian city, HIV-positive women were more likely to have experienced physical or sexual violence. Meanwhile, at antenatal clinics in Soweto, South Africa, HIV infection was found to be more common in women who had been physically abused by their partners than in those who were not.

"Violence against women and girls is not a private matter, but a violation of basic human rights with significant economic and social consequences for families, communities and nations," said the report, which called for laws against such violence to be formulated and adopted, and for law enforcement structures to be adapted and officials trained to ensure such laws are implemented.

This backs up previous calls for women's rights to be given more attention in the fight against the epidemic and broader demands for women's rights to be enforced in Africa. For example, The Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa spells out key policies to protect the rights of women, but so far has only been ratified by four African countries, with 15 ratifications needed for it come into force.

The UNAIDS report said that while a recent UNICEF survey found that up to 50% of young women in high-prevalence countries did not know the basic facts about AIDS, the vulnerability of women and girls to HIV infection was not only about ignorance but also stemmed from "their pervasive disempowerment".

"The plight of women and children in the face of AIDS underlines the need for realistic strategies that address the interplay between inequality - particularly gender inequality - and HIV."

Efforts to reverse the AIDS epidemic were unlikely to be successful until prevention efforts took into these inequalities that impacted on behaviour and choices. "If prevention efforts are to succeed in the long-run, they need to address the interplay between gender and socioeconomic inequality and vulnerability to HIV. Prevention activities need to take into account the unequal terms on which most women have to conduct their lives."

* Compiled by Pambazuka News from the report and other news items. For the full report, visit: http://www.unaids.org/wad2004/EPIupdate2004_html_en/epi04_00_en.htm

* Please send comments to [email protected]

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Background

That women and men enjoy the same rights and dignity has been confirmed by regional and international conventions and declarations including the United Nation’s (UN) Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. The African Union (AU) has, in addition, reiterated its commitment to the same ideals through the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (The Charter) and recently, in specific terms, in the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on Rights of Women in Africa (The Protocol). As we mark the “16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence”, November 25-December 10, 2004, it is important to look at how the Protocol, once it comes into force, will address gender-based violence in Africa.

Substantive norms of international law are defined in relation to men’s experience, and stated in terms of discrete violations of rights in the public realm. In addition, inattention to rights of particular interest to women in the international human rights discourse has resulted in neglect, and pervasive denial, of the rights of women in particular in the private sphere. Gender specific abuses of human rights such as gender-based violence have been widely perceived as women’s issues rather than as human rights concerns.

For instance, human rights guarantees in the legally binding United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) such as those to the right of life, to bodily integrity, and to be free from torture, cruel and degrading treatment, have not been interpreted to include such acts as domestic violence, rape, female genital mutilation, forced sterilization, forced childbirth, and numerous other forms in which violence against women and girls is manifested.

The provisions of the AU’s Charter are not adequate to address the rights of women. For example, while Article 18 prohibits discrimination against women, it does so only in the context of the family. In addition, explicit provisions guaranteeing the right of consent to marriage and equality of spouses during and after marriage are absent. These omissions are compounded by the fact that the Charter places emphasis on traditional African values and traditions without addressing concerns that many customary practices, such as female genital mutilation, violence against women, forced marriage, and wife inheritance, can be harmful or life threatening to women. By ignoring critical issues such as custom and marriage, the Charter inadequately defends women’s human rights. Thus the need for the Protocol to address African women’s concerns on gender-based violence as listed below.

Gender-Based Violence: African Women’s Concerns:
- Lack of understanding of gender-based violence and its root cause - unequal power relations between men and women, with efforts to address the issue very often being reactive, focusing on symptoms and consequences, not causes;
- Lack of legally binding international recognition of reproductive and sexual rights. The efforts have yet to achieve international recognition beyond Declarations, which only constitute ‘soft international law’ and are not legally binding. This is due to strong resistance from conservative states and religious organisations;
- Lack of states’ commitment to the application of national, regional and international instruments and agreements, which guarantee the protection, prevention and promotion of human rights. Most countries in Africa have not brought their domestic laws into conformity with their provisions;
- Lack of qualitative and quantitative research on women’s human rights issues in Africa and documentation of women’s human rights abuses, particularly in the private arena, such as rape, sexual harassment;
- The big gap between the provisions of the law and practice. Laws are not systematically enforced due to lack of gender sensitive enforcement agencies and procedures, making the rights inaccessible to the majority of women;
- Multiplicity of legal systems in Africa, and the conflict between civil, customary and religious laws, constitute a major challenge to the protection of women’s rights. Thus abuses on the rights of women, especially by private individuals remain endemic in spite of the law;
- The private/public dichotomy that is detrimental to women continues to exist. In most African countries, the same constitutional provisions that guarantee gender equality allow exceptions in the so-called “private law” areas of customary law, personal law and family law. Serious violations of women’s human rights such as gender-based violence and provisions that discriminate against them are found in that private sphere;
- Gender-based violence in Africa is on the increase due to poverty and conflict. Forms of violence include femicides, acid attacks, ritual murders, gang rapes, abduction, girl-child slavery, ritual rapes, military sexual slavery, cultism in tertiary institutions, trafficking in women and girls, mistreatment of widows;
- In conflict situations, gender-based abuses are not an accident of war, they constitute a deliberate strategy designed to intimidate or undermine and inflict deep and lasting damage on entire communities;
- Lack of efforts to reduce problems faced by women in refugee camps including lack of physical security and privacy, sexual exploitation, physical and mental illness, including HIV/AIDS;
- Vulnerability of refugee women and girls, particularly those with inadequate documentation or single and unaccompanied, to physical and sexual abuse during flight, on arrival in refugee camps and in the country of ultimate settlement. This gender dimension is not given consideration in humanitarian programmes;
- Women in Africa still remain vulnerable to harmful traditional practices and customs, many of which expose them to HIV/AIDS that has been devastating the continent.

Linking the Protocol to the Elimination of Gender-Based Violence in Africa

At the UN and AU levels, there have been efforts to address gender-based violence as discussed below:
- In 1993, the Declaration and Programme of Action of the World Conference on Human Rights at Vienna emphasized, “The human rights of women and of the girl child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of the universal human rights”. It also emphasized that elimination of gender-based violence is a human-rights obligation upon states. This was the first attempt to address the marginalisation of women’s human rights from the work of the mainstream human rights bodies;
- The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1993 locates violence against women within the framework of violation of human rights obligations, categorizing it as an issue of inequality and discrimination against women, and sets out strategies that member states and United Nations agencies should employ to eliminate its occurrence;
- The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action with respect to gender-based violence calls for governments’ condemnation of gender-based violence and due diligence in the prevention, investigation and punishment of acts of gender-based violence, implementation of existing international standards with respect to violence against women, and the support of international mechanisms in that regard;
- Appointment of Special Rapporteurs on violence against women and women rights at the UN and AU respectively;
- The AU in 2003 adopted the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa to address African women’s human rights concerns.

The Protocol primarily complements the Charter and international human rights conventions by focusing on concrete actions and goals to grant women rights. It further domesticates CEDAW and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action in the African context. The Protocol integrates legal and policy actions to comprehensively address gender-based violence. It further provides a legal mechanism for redress through the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights for violations of rights enshrined within it.

On gender-based violence, Articles 2, 3, 4, 5, 8,10, 11 and 13 of the Protocol are dedicated to concrete actions for State Parties. The Articles focus on: elimination of discrimination against women, right to dignity, the rights to life, integrity and security of the person, right to peace, right to justice and equal protection before the law, protection of women in armed conflict, economic and social welfare rights and elimination of harmful practices. Thus the Protocol offers Member States of the AU a comprehensive mechanism to implement legal and policy actions to eliminate gender-based violence according to regional and international human rights instruments they have already acceded to. Below are some of the legal and policy actions that have been recommended to governments to eliminate gender-based violence and as compared below, the Protocol has integrated all of them. They include to:

- harmonise national laws and constitutions in line with regional and international commitments and standards to avoid inconsistencies. Article 8 (f);
- establishment and support services to respond to the needs of survivors of gender-based violence and girls and assist towards full recovery and reintegration into society, including legal aid, economic support and livelihood assistance. Article 2 (2) (e) and (f). Article 5 (c). Article 8 (b);
- implement national legislation and policies prohibiting harmful customary or traditional practices and all other harmful practices that violate women’s and girls’ human rights. Article 2 (b) Article 5 (b) and d;
- ensure that women are safe at work by supporting measures that promote the creation of a workplace environment free from sexual harassment or other violence and ensure all employers to put in place policies designed to eliminate and deal effectively with harassment of women whenever it occurs in the workplace. Article 13 (c);
- research, document and disseminate information on women’s human rights violations to policy makers and all other stakeholders. The research should focus on root causes including external factors, extent, causes and data and statistics on its economic and social costs its consequences. Article 4 (2) c. Article 5 (a);
- introduce legal literacy programmes to make women aware of their rights and methods of seeking protection under the law. Article 8 (c);
- encourage, support and implement measures aimed at increasing the knowledge and understanding of gender-based violence and other violations of women’s human rights, through gender analysis and gender sensitive training for personnel in the administration of justice, law enforcement agencies, security, social and health care services and ensure their accountability. Article 4 (2) b. Article 8 (c);
- introduce participatory educational programmes on human rights, conflict resolution and gender equality, for women and men of all ages, beginning with boys and girls. Article 8 (c);
- formulate comprehensive and multidisciplinary and co-ordinated national plans, programmes or strategies, which will be widely disseminated, to eliminate violence against women and girls and provide targets for implementation and effective enforcement and monitoring mechanisms. Article 5 (a) Article 2 (2). Article 26, Article 27;
- enact and implement laws against trafficking in persons. They should also develop strong and effective national, regional and international co-operation to prevent and eliminate trafficking in women and girls, particularly for purposes of economic and sexual exploitation including prostitution. Article 2 (2) g;
- introduce public awareness and advocacy strategies seeking to make gender-based violence a critical concern to everyone. Article 2 (2);
- encourage promotion of media portrayals of women and men as cooperative and full partners. The notions that male violence against women is a natural expression of masculinity and that women are helpless and subordinate to men require constant challenge and not reinforcement. Article 13 (m);
- ensure that women particularly those who bear the brunt of conflict, are an integral and meaningful part of every peace process. They should be involved in all conflict prevention, resolution, and management efforts at all levels as provided for in the UN Security Council Resolution 1325. Article 10. Article 11;
- direct special attention to the long-term health needs of women affected by armed conflict. These include the psychological needs arising from trauma and the effects of violations of reproductive rights and HIV/AIDS infection. Article 2 (2) k. Article 10;
- recognize the interconnection of forms of gender-based violence with other forms of discrimination and introduce broad efforts aimed at increasing women's economic and social autonomy Article 2 (c) and (e). Article 13;

Conclusion

Gender-based violence is a crosscutting and complex phenomenon that needs to be tackled on all fronts. The Protocol provides a comprehensive mechanism for addressing gender-based violence in Africa. However, African women cannot access and use it for the full enjoyment, promotion and protection of their human rights, as it has not entered into force. It requires 15 ratifications to enter into force. However, only 4 member states of the AU have ratified it. Therefore, there is need to ensure that we remind all Member States of the AU to ratify it during the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence in accordance with the commitment they made in the AU Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa, 2004, to ratify it by the end of this year. To end impunity on the violation of African women’s human rights through gender-based violence, it is time for our leaders to walk the talk and ratify the Protocol.

* Mary Wandia is the Advocacy Officer with The African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) E-mail: [email][email protected]

* Please send comments to [email protected]

>>>>>Sign up for women’s rights: http://www.pambazuka.org/petition/alerts.php

“People with HIV/AIDS and their advocates strongly condemn the decision by the United States to block new funding for HIV/AIDS programs around the world through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and its systematic attempts to undermine the work of the World Health Organization and its efforts to ensure that 3 million people in the developing world receive HIV treatment by the end of 2005.

The suspension, proposed by the United States, of new funding for HIV, TB and malaria programs by the Global Fund, will lead to the loss of countless numbers of lives and to thousands of new infections. While we recognize there have been some problems in the disbursement of grants and implementation of programs through the Global Fund, this is not an excuse for suspending new grants to countries that desperately need this support. A fifth round of funding by the Global Fund would provide vital resources to nations around the world confronting these pandemics.

We also condemn the US government’s attacks and those by right-wing think tanks associated with the Administration on the World Health Organization and its prequalification process for evaluating antiretroviral drugs. While there have been specific problems with the dossiers submitted by some of the manufacturers of generic AIDS drugs to the WHO, these problems were recognized and are being handled by the agency. We urge the US government to work with the WHO to strengthen its prequalification program rather than setting up its own regulatory process for these drugs at the US Food and Drug Administration as well as duplicative supply and procurement programs in the developing world.

With these events taken together, we believe that the US government is seeking to draw control of global AIDS programs under its own leadership rather than supporting multilateral responses through the WHO and the Global Fund. The United States cannot go it alone in the fight against AIDS and must work in cooperation with the global community. It should not abuse its power in setting the agenda in the fight against this disease, particularly when it has championed abstinence-only prevention programs that do not work and expensive brand-name drugs that are unsustainable solutions for the developing world.”

Contact: [email protected]

AFRICA: US, JAPAN AND FRANCE UNITING TO CURTAIL FIGHT AGAINST AIDS
Global AIDS Alliance

US, Japan and France Uniting to Curtail Fight Against AIDS

Contact: David Bryden, 202-296-0260 ext 211 or 202-549-3664 mobile

Washington, Nov 16 -- Despite naming AIDS one of six top priorities for his second term, President Bush is taking steps this week to cripple the Global Fund. The Fund, based in Geneva, has the broadest impact and uses the most collaborative and need-driven approach of any international health initiative.

This week the Global Fund's Board, chaired by Secretary Tommy Thompson, will meet week in Tanzania (Nov 17-19) and decide whether to proceed with additional grantmaking. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan will attend the meeting, along with five African Presidents including the Chair of the Africa Union, President Obasanjo.

AIDS advocates consider the meeting a “make-it-or-break-it” meeting for the Fund. Contributions are not keeping pace with the Fund’s needs, which are escalating in 2005 and 2006. The impact of a cancellation of grantmaking on the fight against global disease would be “catastrophic,” according to the Fund’s Director. “The Bush Administration will be sentencing many people to death in Africa, in Asia, in the Caribbean, in Latin America, and in Eastern Europe,” stated noted South African AIDS advocate Zackie Achmat.

Since re-election, the President has intensified efforts to roll back the level of next year’s US contributions to the Fund. Using misleading claims about the Fund's track record, the Administration hopes to persuade Congress to reverse an earlier approved level that was based in part on emergency funding. Congress is now finalizing the Omnibus Spending Bill, and the White House is weighing in with behind-the-scenes negotiations to undercut the Fund.

Also, according to leaked White House talking points, the President is strongly backing a proposal that would essentially stall the Fund at its current level of grantmaking, just as the world is trying to reach a target of getting 3 million people on AIDS treatment by the end of next year. The Administration is lobbying other members of the Board of the Global Fund to support the cancellation of grantmaking for the forseeable future, and this idea has gained considerable momentum. The Fund was supposed to reach a level of annual grantmaking of $7 billion by 2007.

"The President is undermining the positive legacy he hopes to leave on AIDS," stated Dr. Paul Zeitz, Executive Director of the Global AIDS Alliance. "Far from beginning a fresh start in his second term, President Bush still pursues his ill-informed vendetta against the Fund. Sadly, Japan, France and other Board members seem ready to back this incredibly shortsighted policy. Yet, proceeding with plans for next year’s grantmaking would actually help create the pressure needed to get additional contributions. The Fund needs to be strong not only to fight AIDS but also to fill major gaps in the funding of programs to fight Tb and malaria."

Even before the election, the White House was attacking the Fund. On September 21 the White House sent staffers to distribute misleading and inflammatory information about the Fund to Congressional appropriators, the very day President Bush was highlighting his “support” for the Fund in a speech at the UN.

Besides funding issues, this week’s meeting will also consider whether or not to commit to minimum requirements for civil society participation. The Fund's 400-person Partnership Forum backed the requirements at its July meeting.

“It is critically important that the Board require grantees to live up to basic standards of participation from civic groups, including people living with AIDS,” stated Zeitz.

BACKGROUND:

TANZANIA: BUSH ADMINISTRATION PROPOSES GLOBAL FUND DELAY

Health officials in the Bush administration are urging board members of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to delay the distribution of a fifth round of grants because of funding shortages, the New York Times reports. However, people attending the Global Fund's board meeting in Arusha, Tanzania, this week said on Tuesday that the fund "appears likely" to go ahead with a new round of grants, according to the Financial Times. Board members will have to "balance the clear need for increased funding" for programs against the fund's "current resource constraints," according to a Global Fund release.

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=26778

On the same day that the documentary Farenheit 9/11 was released in the run-up to the recent US elections, a lesser-known film also made its debut. Entitled “George W. Bush: Faith in the White House” the documentary targeted a Christian evangelical audience.

A review of the film from the San Francisco chronicle states: “One thing the documentary makes unmistakably clear: Christianity is the guiding metaphor of the Bush administration. If, in Christianity, a sinner can find salvation through faith in Jesus, in America, the idea goes, a citizen can find salvation - from terrorism and a disordered, alarming world - only through faith in Bush. Within this construct, reliance on facts and expressions of doubt are forms of heresy. Blind faith is what's demanded by this president, as God’s instrument on earth.”

The film quotes a representative of the 30-million strong National Association of Evangelicals, regular white house visitor Ted Haggard, assuring viewers that in 100 years, President Bush will be remembered in the Islamic world as “a great liberator.”

The point is that many outside the US might not realise that white evangelicals accounted for a large percentage of Bush’s vote in the 2000 elections and that the mobilisation of this vote was seen as crucial to his re-election campaign.

Bush has been forthright in his courting of the evangelical vote. For example, in remarks via satellite to the National Association of Evangelicals Convention in March, Bush said: “America is a nation with a mission. We’re called to fight terrorism around the world, and we're waging that fight. As freedom’s home and freedom’s defender, we are called to expand the realm of human liberty. And by our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than 50 million people have been liberated from tyranny, and they are reclaiming their dignity as free people. Our nation can take great pride in these achievements. Yet I know that liberty is not America’s gift to the world - liberty and freedom are God’s gift to every man and woman who lives in this world.”

The evangelical lobby has exerted an influence not only over domestic US policy in relation to abortion and gay marriages, but also on the Bush Administration’s foreign policy. The ‘global gag rule’, for example, blocks US funding for foreign family planning agencies if they provide abortion services or lobby to make or keep abortion legal in their own country.

This lobby group is obviously not the only determinate of foreign policy, but its influence has grown and is expected to be stronger with the re-election of Bush. Initially motivated to exert influence on foreign policy through a desire to stop religious persecution abroad, its focus under the Bush administration has expanded, especially after 9/11 when the cause of religious freedom came to be more closely associated with national security.

Sudan provides a good example of how the evangelical lobby group have exerted influence over US foreign policy. Sometime soon after Bush was elected as president in 2000 a coalition of religious groups visited the White House and met with a political adviser of the president. According to a report in the New York Times, the issue of concern to the mainly evangelical groups was violence between Muslims and Christians in Sudan. The evangelicals wanted the combating of religious persecution abroad to be a major focus of American foreign policy and in Sudan they saw an opportunity to pursue this agenda. The White House was receptive to the lobbying and Sudan moved up the foreign policy agenda, resulting in US involvement in peace negotiations between the Khartoum government and the South. More recently, the evangelicals have also been involved in pressing for US involvement in Darfur.

In an August 2 2004 letter by the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 30 million Christian conservatives, after the US congress had declared the situation in Sudan genocide, the organisation commended Bush for “fostering democracy, religious freedom and human rights”, but warned that: “Your Administration’s goal - to redefine our national interest not as power but as values, and to identify one supreme value, what John Kennedy called ‘the success of liberty’ - could be jeopardized by not taking a strong enough position on Sudan’s genocidal behaviour.”

The increasing role of the evangelical lobby on American foreign policy and its involvement in Sudan goes some way to explaining why the crisis in the DRC, where estimates put the number of dead due to war at over three million, has received scant attention compared to Sudan. It raises questions about the extent to which Sudan has been used as a platform for the evangelical lobby to pursue the “supreme value” – religious freedom as it marries with the cause of national security. It also raises questions about future US foreign policy towards countries in Africa where there is an apparent easy dichotomy of Christian vs Muslim and a corresponding need to fight the “war on terror” on foreign ground. How much influence the evangelical lobby exerts in Africa over the next four years – and the consequences of that influence - remains to be seen.

* Patrick Burnett works for Fahamu. He has never been to the US and is not an expert in US foreign policy.

* Please send comments to

LINKS:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1026-08.htm
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040311-1.html
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/gag/
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1026-08.htm

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N1515553.htm

With the success of George W. Bush in securing a second term by a clear majority, it is perhaps an opportune moment to reflect upon the impact of his administration upon US foreign policy from a specifically South-centric perspective focused upon the Third World i.e. Asia, Africa, the Pacific and Latin & South America. Such a review of US foreign policy will highlight the huge chasm that exists between American perceptions of its moral leadership of the world and the contrary view of the vast majority of the Third World which questions whether the US has exercised moral global leadership, and if it did, whether any remnants of this legitimacy remains. This huge disconnect between the way America perceives its role in the world and how the majority of the world perceives its actions in the international arena, particularly in the Muslim World, poses a major threat to world peace and multilateral cooperation.

Historical Context

The Allied victory in World War II resulted in the emergence of the Cold War with the global division of power between the West lead by the US and the Communist Bloc lead by the Soviet Union. During the two decades of the 1950s and 1960s, while the North was locked in the battle for global supremacy between the capitalist west and the communist east, the Third World experienced the most momentous period of its collective history since the advent of European colonialism some two centuries earlier. This was, of course, the era of decolonization when most of Africa, Asia and the Pacific threw off the yoke of European colonialism and achieved independence. These newly independent countries were admitted into the community of nations to find themselves faced with a global political landscape characterized by competition between the East/West blocs for global supremacy.

This intense rivalry presented the emerging nations of the Third World with a Hobbesian choice between the US and the USSR as sponsor, principal aid giver, arms supplier and protector with the other, perforce, as adversary. The rash of coups d'etat and armed insurrections in many African and Asian countries during the 1960s and 1970s was, in large part, a direct result of this superpower rivalry which exploited intra and inter-country conflicts and disputes to advance their respective geo-political interests. The Third World rapidly became a chessboard upon which Washington and Moscow could compete vigorously without having to come into actual, direct conflict with each other, thereby avoiding the nuclear nightmare of mutually assured destruction (MAD - that most apropos of acronyms).

From a Third World perspective, both superpowers filtered their policy towards the developing world through the prism of their own self interest which was firmly rooted in their geo-political rivalry. They both wanted the support of the newly independent ex-colonies in their struggle for global dominance, but if this support was not forthcoming voluntarily, then it would be coerced through inducements, threats, coups d'etat and naked military force. The foreign policy pronouncements of both superpowers at international forums were couched in terms of freedom, self-determination, human rights and justice, but these were no more than fig leaves behind which were hidden the ugly truths of superpower domination and control.

The Collapse of Communism & The Rise of the Hyperpower

The collapse of the Soviet bloc as a competitor to the US-lead West in the middle 1980s, heralded a new era in global politics the likes of which had not been seen since the 19th century - namely a new world order in which the economic, military and technological power of one nation is so overwhelming in comparison to all others that there is no restraint upon its exercise of that power, save those that it chooses to accept.

Some simple facts demonstrate this towering dominance of American power, e.g. in 2001 the defense budget of the US, at some US$350 billion, exceeded the aggregate of the next ten highest national defense budgets (including countries such as China, UK, Russia, France); in economic terms the US accounts for some 25% of global GNP, the US Dollar is the international exchange & reserve currency and the US debt and equity markets dwarf their counterparts across the globe; in the technological arena, the US leads innovation across all sectors (engineering, pharmaceutical, IT, communications and bio-chemistry) and accounts for the lion's share of global patents registered each year, while the computer, internet and communications revolutions originated in, and are lead by America.

In this context, the characterization of the US as the “hyperpower” by Jack Lange, a French Culture Minister, is not surprising but rather apt. By the 1990s, the US bestrode the world like a colossus the like of which had not been witnessed since ancient Rome or since the zenith of the British Empire during the 19th century. In this new world order, America's preternatural power makes its imprimatur essential for resolution of any international conflict, or the adoption of any international treaty or accord. It is a fact of modern diplomacy that any international initiative, accord or agreement, be it concerned with trade, economic development, dispute mediation or any other matter, will not succeed if it does not have the support of the US.

Many in the Third World were apprehensive at this American global hegemony, since they feared unchecked US power. However, these fears seemed unfounded as Bush Senior carefully built up the largest alliance of nations ever seen to evict Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, and then observed international law (and the realpolitik of maintaining his coalition) by not invading Iraq. Bush Senior's next projection of American power was into Somalia for the noble and humanitarian cause of feeding starving people who were being preyed upon by local warlords after the collapse of Siyad Barre's dictatorship. As the American & UN mission in Somalia metamorphosed from a purely humanitarian one into a political one of 'nation-building', it inevitably became enmeshed in the internecine war between the various warlords, leading eventually to their ignominious withdrawal. By the time Bill Clinton came to power, the fears of many in the Third World regarding America's unconstrained power had been allayed, if not put to rest. The US interventions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo skirted international law by not securing UN Security Council approval, but were supported by its allies and approved of by the great majority of world opinion since the aims were laudably humanitarian and not self-serving. Under Clinton the US maintained the active role in mediating the Middle East dispute pursued under the previous Bush administration.

9/11 & the Rise of 'Pax Americana'

From the beginning, the George W. Bush administration signaled its departure from the broad foreign policy perspective common to the Clinton and Bush Senior administrations. The administration spurned the Kyoto Protocol on global warming - the only major industrial power to do so. Meanwhile President Bush voiced the new bellicosity of his foreign policy by labeling Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the “axis of evil”. The choice of three Third World countries (including an Iraq already debilitated by over a decade of sanctions), which could not conceivably pose the kind of threat to the US and the West that the Soviet Union had done, as the betes noir of US foreign policy seemed somewhat excessive.

Thus, it became apparent that the Bush administration foreign policy perspective presented a definitive break with the US foreign policy paradigm since the Reagan administration. This was an assertive administration that chose to project US power in the international arena at the expense of multilateral cooperation. It was in this context that the attacks of 11 September 2001 took place. The horror that the motley group of nihilist zealots perpetrated upon the US, and indeed upon the entire world, that day must rank as the most pivotal, single political act committed by a non-state actor since the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. The assassination of Ferdinand plunged Europe into the Great War, and the attack on New York and Washington DC launched the Iraq War and the rise of the American Empire.

In response to the attack on the US, the Bush administration has adopted a new foreign policy perspective characterized by preemption, unilateral action and repudiation of the sanction of international law (e.g. treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay prison), imperial diktat brooking no disagreement, only acquiescence (e.g. the edict 'you're with us or with the terrorists'). The Bush administration has made the qualitative shift in its foreign policy from aggressive pursuit of US national interests, to imperial dictum whereby allies are 'invited' to join America in whatever action it proposes, while foes are confronted head on diplomatically and militarily. There is no dialogue, merely a presentation of a 'take it or else' proposition to friend and foe alike.

This strategy has unnerved many of America's traditional allies, principally Western Europe with the exception of Britain and Italy, as well as its traditional adversaries, i.e. Russia and China, who all worry that American military adventurism will result in a major dislocation of global stability. The failure to transform the stunning US military victory in Iraq into an equally successful transition to a stable, representative and, above all, functioning state is a savagely eloquent testament to the limits of imperial power. The belligerent stance of the US to other countries in the region that are not bending to its will, namely Syria and Iran, is an ominous portent of what is to come for these future targets of America's imperial policy.

Conclusion

The claim of American moral global leadership based upon the legitimacy of its foreign policy either in the past or at present is a non-sequitur that does not bear serious consideration. The fact is that the collapse of the Soviet bloc presented a golden opportunity for the world to develop, for the first time, an international political order governed by respect between nations and peoples underpinned by the rule of law. The leadership of America, as the world's hyperpower, is absolutely vital to this undertaking since it alone can ensure its success not only by the force of its example, but also by bringing its formidable powers to bear upon transgressors. During the 12 years of the Bush Senior and Clinton administrations, it seemed that, however hesitantly, the US was waking up to this responsibility to provide wise and thoughtful leadership in a world made increasingly smaller and yet more fractious by the divergent pulls of technological progress and identity.

The Bush administration's response to the first attack on US soil since Pearl Harbour has been to seek to impose a Pax Americana upon an increasingly obdurate world. America has chosen to force imperial dictum upon its enemies and allies alike, in the mistaken belief that through the application of its unparalleled military might it can make America safe from the world. This resort to militarist imperialism will inevitably fail since the world of the 21st century is not amenable to such crude constructs in the international political arena. One cannot help but wonder why, at the dawn of the 21st century, that the lessons of the 20th regarding the limits of imperial power and the futility of imposing political structures and leaders upon vanquished and/or weaker nations have to be learnt yet again, and at such horrendous human and material cost.

* This article was submitted to Pambazuka News by the author, a Somalilander who grew up in Europe and presently works in Saudi Arabia. Egal has a BA (Economics & Politics) from Warwick University and an MA (Area Studies [African Development]) from London University. He is currently Director of Finance & Business Development for a business group in Saudi Arabia.

* Please send comments to

Africa has just emerged from a review of the progress made ten years after the Beijing Conference on women whose theme was equality, peace and development. This November, the world will commence the 16 days campaign against gender-based violence, an annual event that remains more relevant today especially with the reality of conflict, wars and political violence, which seem to accompany most elections in Africa. Violence against women and especially sexual violence remains a gross violation of rights of women irrespective of the global regional and national commitments made to address this issue. Women continue to organize and advocate for concrete and lasting solutions to eliminating gender based and sexual violence.

Around 100 women met recently in Kigali as policy makers, leaders, experts, citizens, daughters, mothers, sisters, care -givers, innovators and survivors of violence. They also met as problem-solvers, decision-makers, and real contributors of real solutions to the challenges facing the great lakes region. This was the Regional Women’s Meeting of the International Conference of the Great Lakes Region, organized and facilitated under the auspices of the United Nations and the Africa Union, this October 2004. Representing the core countries of Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia, women’s voices echoed over and over again the dominant concern of sexual violence against women and especially the use of rape as a weapon of war.

Against the backdrop of the search for solutions were horrific stories of rape and sexual abuse of women and girls in Darfur, Northern Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo. The stories of rape as part of the genocide experience took on a magnified, almost tangible presence with a journey to the Kigali Genocide Museum. “Not only are we raped, infected with HIV & AIDS and ripped of our livelihoods, we remain with limited platform for sharing such experiences,” a woman delegate from DRC lamented. The stories of the abuse of refugee women in Tanzania, Kenya and Zambia formed parts of a terrible story that needed telling over and over.

At the centre of the experience-sharing, the search for long standing solutions underlined a resolve of commitment and action to ensure that zero-tolerance for sexual violence and rape must be embraced as a key element of peace and security, and in this context that the African Union Gender Equality Declaration and Protocol on Women’s Rights in Africa Declaration as well as the Security Council Resolution 1325 must be implemented with immediacy. The women called on the member states to accelerate ratification of the Protocol to the African Charter on Women’s Rights in Africa as a critical step towards implementation.

The direct relationship between insecurity, sexual violence and HIV & AIDS vulnerability and risk for women and girls grounded in systemic gender inequalities; and the power dynamics between men and women’s levels of control of arms and economic resources resonated with many in the region. The illegal exploitation of the region’s natural resources and the attendant insecurities it creates for the ordinary citizenry, and especially women, went to the depth of the issues at hand.

Women of the Great Lakes Region asserted their place in economic development and reconstruction of their families, communities and nations. They claimed their right to ownership and control over productive resources and especially land, property and income. This, the women argued is an issue of right, but also a long term solution towards provision of the capacities, resources and opportunities necessary for women’s empowerment.

In their Kigali Declaration (Editors note: Read the Kigali Declaration in the Women and Gender section of this edition.), the women appreciated the positive steps taken in increasing the number of women in decision making, with some of the countries almost reaching the AU threshold of gender parity, and several implementing affirmative action policies. However, women's role in the peace and security sector, as well as in the strategic institutions of economic governance, remains almost negligible. It is by having women and gender sensitive men at the negotiating table, in the demobilization commissions, the border commissions, conflict early warning institutions and others, that the issues of sexual violence and especially rape will be responded to with the seriousness it deserves - as a gross violation of human rights, a crime against humanity and a destructive force to whole societies. Women are asking for sexual violence, HIV & AIDS, and representation of women in decision making to be engrained in the Summit Declaration of Principles due to be adopted November during the Heads of State and Summit meeting in Tanzania.

The women of the Great Lakes in their wisdom, their creative energies and innovation affirmed their commitment to engage, influence, act, effectively participate, share, network and contribute towards a violent free, peaceful and secure region where the dignity and rights of men and women, girls and boys becomes the ethos of development and reconstruction. In this great struggle for justice and rights, I stand in solidarity with the spirit of the Kigali dialogue. If substantive progress is made towards achieving the rights of women within the Beijing +10 framework, there will be substantive hope in achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

* Nyaradzai Gumbonzvanda is the Regional Programme Director for the United Nations Development Fund for Women in Eastern Africa. Contact email: [email][email protected]

* Please send comments to [email protected]

It would be hard to exaggerate the significance of land as an asset for the poor in today’s structurally adjusted, economically liberalised and globalised world. Trying to understand the many dynamics at play in today's complex post-Cold War world is not easy. As someone who since 1997 has tried to support Oxfam International staff, partners and allies engaged in land issues principally, but not exclusively, in Africa, I feel this problem acutely. What is really happening in the contexts in which we are seeking to intervene, and what are the critical links between the local, national, regional and global levels? There are never easy answers to these questions, but it is important to continue to ask them.

At the level of ideas, I find quite helpful some of the debates which have appeared in the pages of the Journal of Agrarian Change. But they do make for rather gloomy reading. In one of his many contributions, Henry Bernstein (2002, 2003, 2004) ponders pessimistically about the prospects for significant future redistributive land reform targeted at the poor. He argues that the long wave of land reform across the world beginning with the French Revolution came to an end in the 1970s, coinciding with the emergence of the phenomenon we now refer to as globalisation. The back of feudal landlordism was broken in many parts of the world, allowing the development of both industrialisation and more productive agriculture, based on capitalist relations. Industrial urbanisation took people off the land and provided new and expanding markets. But now, Bernstein argues, we live in a globalised world characterised by the search for ever cheaper and more exploitable labour.

The existence of cheap labour export processing zones (EPZs), which many governments seem proud to boast of, is an illustration of this. In the infamous maquila factories of Central America or in the clothing sweat shops of East Asia, we seem to be in a world in which human and labour rights are being put into reverse gear. The lack of bargaining power of poor people in today's global supply chains has led some NGOs to characterise this as ‘the race to the bottom’. We are all aware of the growing gap between rich and poor and the intensification of inequality in many parts of the world.

Africa's recent economic history has been almost uniformly dismal. Structural adjustment may well have been necessary to attack the bloated and unproductive bureaucracies and parastatals in many countries, but the social impact of the medicines applied has been harsh in the extreme. Zambia is one of many countries to have suffered truly radical economic decline. As someone who lived in Zambia in the 1970s and witnessed with my own eyes the rapid formation of a new urban middle class as Zambians abandoned the land in their tens of thousands for new economic opportunities in the cities, it has been deeply disturbing to return in subsequent decades to observe the rapid and demonstrable decline in people's hopes, expectations and lifestyles.

In Zambia, as in much of Africa, the huge loss of regular urban jobs has made it far harder for people to engage in economic reciprocity with rural kinfolk. Scholars such as Deborah Bryceson have written of 'de-agrarianisation' or 'de-peasantisation', to describe a process in which people adopt what in the jargon is now called ‘diversified livelihoods strategies’ in an increasingly desperate attempt to survive. In such a context, intensified by population increase and related pressure on resources, access to land as a key asset for survival has become much more important, in ways that would have seemed highly unlikely in Zambia back in the mid-1970s. As a result, conflicts over land have intensified across the continent.

The purpose of this brief, crude global sketch is to make the point that struggles over land will take different forms in different parts of the world depending on a range of important variables such as levels of economic development, political awareness and mobilisation, degrees of urbanisation and literacy, levels of education and technology, and the agricultural potential of soils - a critical factor in Africa, as Archie Mafeje (2003) has pointed out recently. In short, the local context is all important.

In South Africa the ANC Government has clearly judged (perhaps correctly) that it can afford to delay meaningful land reform because it fears no danger of peasant revolts in the foreseeable future. In countries such as Uganda and Kenya, small pressure groups including land alliances have little serious political constituency and bear no resemblance to the great Brazilian mass movement of the landless, the MST (O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra). Decades of political conflict culminated in the 1988 Constitution, which proclaimed that land in Brazil must perform a 'social function'. In other words (and this has particular resonance for the Zambian Copperbelt) that it is not politically acceptable for vast tracts of land to lie idle in the legal hands of absentee landlords, neither producing anything nor providing jobs.

Elsewhere, for example in Guatemala and Honduras, class configurations are very different and the local equivalents of the MST struggle against the outright and often violent hostility of the big landlords (and vigilantes) and their urban allies. Here the issue is further complicated by ethnicity - by the palpable hostility directed towards the indigenous people of Central America; in Honduras there is a 'popular' saying 'better be dead than have indigenous people living on my land'.

In this part of the world land activists need to be both extremely courageous and members of organised trade union or political movements. Put crudely, in parts of Central and South America such people routinely get killed for their beliefs. This does not happen in Africa. This is a fundamental difference, reflecting contrasting historical conditions. (Of course, people do regularly get killed in local level conflicts over land in Africa and this seems likely to increase as conflicts intensify over resources more generally.)

A persistent theme in much of the land advocacy work in which I and many others have been involved is that of lack of information, particularly on the part of the politically powerless. This is a state of affairs which governments in general and ministries of land in particular are often keen to perpetuate in their own interests. Extracting information from them can often be extremely difficult, though donor demands for transparency can be helpful here.

A very imaginative land campaign (Campanha Terra) in Mozambique sought to address this by translating key aspects of a potentially progressive new land law into local languages, and by using imaginative media such as comics, audio cassettes, theatre, music and posters to help raise people's awareness of their new rights. This was particularly important in a country such as Mozambique, with its high levels of illiteracy, and where the law imaginatively and unusually acknowledged peoples' historical rights to land as communities, on the basis of acknowledged occupation rather than formal written records. (Palmer 2003, Hanlon 2002).

Awareness of one's rights is nowhere more important than in the area of women's land rights. These too vary greatly across the world depending on factors such as the legal context (which is surprisingly gender progressive in Latin America) and levels of political awareness and organisation. Even between neighbouring countries realities can be very different, with women enjoying greater legal rights in Columbia and Nicaragua than in Honduras and Mexico because of greater mobilisation by and unity within women's groups.

But in Africa women face particular obstacles, often being regarded legally as minors and generally enjoying only secondary rights through their husbands, if married. Such rights are frequently ill-defined, of uncertain duration and subject to change and to maintaining good relations with others. Women often need to be married - and may remain in oppressive relationships - in order to enjoy access to or rights in land. Patriarchy remains dominant at all levels, while patrilineal traditions, combined with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, make women particularly vulnerable to loss of assets, including land, on the death of her spouse. Widows are frequently chased away by their late husband's relations and there are increasing harrowing individual tales of destitution as a result. In such a context the work of legal aid and information groups such as the women lawyers' association, FIDA, in Kenya and Uganda and the Women's Legal Centre in South Africa is particularly important.

Despite strenuous efforts by women lobbyists, including the Uganda Land Alliance, concrete gains by women have been few and far between. Awareness and support work are absolutely critical. Changing laws is important, but changing social norms is even more so (FAO/Oxfam GB 2003). Information is indeed power, but Latin American experience suggests that there is no substitute for political struggle in the fiercely contested arena of women's land rights - as elsewhere.

Land is always a deeply political issue, involving highly disputed and often very dangerous terrain, as events in Zimbabwe have illustrated all too graphically. Working on land requires adopting very long term horizons and sticking with things through thick and thin, for these are long term processes which defy quick fixes or easy final solutions. Donors, generally speaking, are unable to adopt such long-term horizons. Fashions come and go in the notoriously fickle development world, as they do in the academic world.

Contexts do differ greatly, but it is clear that the clumsy imposition of liberalisation, the rolling back of the role of the state and of the state marketing boards, grain reserves and the like, combined with manifestly unfair international trade rules, have left many poor people far more vulnerable than they were and far more dependent on access to land than ever before, while that very access is increasingly threatened in a globalising world.

In such a context, struggles for land rights continue to form a vital part of the wider fight for global justice. It is my very strong belief that continued support should be lent to support and sustain people and organisations who are engaging in fighting for land and justice for the poor. The fact that poor people are struggling against increasingly long odds in a hugely hostile global climate makes this more necessary than it has ever been. So the historic Frelimo slogan from Mozambique remains as valid today as it was back in the heady days of the Front Line States - A luta continua!

* Robin Palmer is Global Land Policy Adviser with Oxfam GB. This is a slightly shortened version of a paper presented to an Oxfam Zambia workshop on the Copperbelt in March 2004. Click on the link below for references.

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Recent years have witnessed a dramatically growing spiral in child sexual abuse and exploitation in almost all African nations south of the Sahara, to such a degree that at the July 2003 African Union Summit held in Maputo, Mozambique, 17 Southern African Campaign Against Child Abuse and Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation (SACO) member organisations, together with their international partners, tabled an urgent appeal to all African Heads of States and Governments urging them to address the plight of African children without delay.

SACO members' concerns are common to the whole of Africa. This sex industry is a new form of slavery and tied up to the world's unbalanced globalization. It is part of the US$7billion a year human trafficking trade, which, according to the US Department of State's 2004 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, already involves 143 (74.4%) of the world's 192 nations. Global intra-country trafficking in persons is estimated at between two to four million, and 600,000 to 800,000 people are estimated to be trafficked across borders each year.

Although to-date there is no concrete research to establish the exact level and extent of the problem of trafficking in children and young women for exploitation purposes in Africa, UNICEF has estimated that as many as 200,000 to 300,000 children are trafficked out of, and between West African countries every year. And although Africa continues to go on as if nothing is happening to its children and young women, the US Office to Monitor Human Trafficking has already indicated that 45 of its 54 nations (representing 83.3%) are involved in the trafficking of children and young people, especially girls and young women for commercial sexual exploitation and labour.

Research by The Movement for the Prevention and Protection Against Poverty, Destitution, Diseases and Exploitation (Mapode), a community-based, youth-at-risk focused Non Governmental Organization (NGO) which has implemented youth risky behaviour prevention and protection programs in Uganda and Zambia since 1997, indicates that Africa's receiving nations are mainly the Western Industrialized nations.

Mapode conducted two research projects, the first on trauma among prostituted women in 1998, and the other one on street girls in 2001. It has also just concluded its SACO supported study on 'Children and Young Women in Prostitution and Trafficking for Commercial Sexual Exploitation, Labour and Crime in Zambia'.

The findings of this research serve to confirm both SACO and UNICEF concerns and pose a serious challenge to child protection and the promotion of women's rights, not only in Zambia where the research was undertaken, but in Africa as a whole.

The research found that prostitution and trafficking of children and young women showed a dramatic increase. A total of 36.5% of respondents indicated that they had been trafficked, with 15% having been trafficked out, against 21.5% who said they had been trafficked in. Forty nine percent were aged between 11-18-years, 47% 19-26-years, and 3% from 27years and above.

Prostitution was found to be highly poverty driven. Sixty four percent gave their reasons for entering prostitution as poverty. Educational status was another factor: Nearly half (49.7%) had dropped out of school due to lack of funds. Interestingly, the period that 42.1% of Grades 8-9 girls dropped out of school corresponded with the decade 1990-2000, renowned for the implementation of the World Bank's Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) in Africa that resulted in Zambia's mass closures of its mining industry and huge state-owned parastatal companies that left thousands of Zambia's urban families almost destitute.

Preference for child sex was often talked about. As an 18-year-old prostitute, who operates with her 13-year old sister, said: "The men prefer the baby; she is a goldmine." Preference for unprotected sex was exceedingly high at 78%. Given the high prevalence of HIV infection in Zambia - estimated at 19.8% - each sexual encounter carries an extremely high risk. Sex charges ranged from the equivalent of US$1 to US$50 in hotels, with a preference indicated for European tourists and business executives who are believed to pay more and to be safer.

On the other hand, heath issues such as Sexually Transmitted Infections and HIV/AIDS were not priority concerns. As expressed by one prostitute: "You are telling me about AIDS. I know about it. We were 37 in our group. I am the only one remaining now! But no money no life! AIDS might come tomorrow or next year. I don't know. But hunger and rent are now - they cannot wait."

Sadly, as the Mapode research clearly demonstrates, this human trade is also gender biased. The majority of its victims are females, particularly female children.

The reason for targeting children and young women are many and varied. The 2002 ILO Global Report points out that children's childhood is their vulnerability, and that although children are generally less productive than adults, their child state makes them less assertive, and easier to abuse. They can be made to work longer hours in services such as domestic, factory, agriculture, and sex work, with little food, poor accommodation, and little or no benefits.

Legal Protections at local, sub regional and regional levels are for now non existent. For instance, whereas Zambia has ratified the two African Human Rights Charters and most UN Conventions, it has not domesticated them in its laws, and has not ratified the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children. Although Article 18 of the African Charter on Human and People's Rights prohibits discrimination against women in the context of the family, it does not include explicit provisions guaranteeing the right of consent and equality in marriage, a situation that leaves room for exploitation and injustice to women and their children.

Urgent action is needed to end this 'second slavery' and the following conclusions and recommendations offer a starting point:
- Prostituting and trafficking of a person for exploitation degrades and erodes a person's humanity physically, morally, mentally, psychologically, and spiritually.
- Public awareness, interventions and legal protections are either limited or non-existent at local, sub regional and regional levels since protective regional and international laws have not been incorporated into domestic law. Only three SADC countries of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa have ratified the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of Child (CRC) to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children.
- Combating trafficking will be very difficult unless all SADC and AU nations form a united front. Africa must unite to declare this modern slavery a crime against humanity.

* Merab Kambamu Kiremire (Mrs,), a Development Worker with over 30 years working experience in community-related programs and projects is the Initiator and Director of MAPODE which operates in Zambia and Uganda. She was a FAWE Laureate 1997, and Africa Gender Institute (AGI) Rockefeller Associate 2004, University of Cape Town (UCT). She coordinated MAPODE research on Children and Young Women in Prostitution and Trafficking for Commercial Sexual Exploitation, Labour and Crime in Zambia in 2002, with financial assistance from Terre des Hommes of Germany.

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Recent trends seem to suggest a shift away from strengthening of regional cooperation not only but also in Southern Africa. But such regionalism has been hitherto a declared priority on development agendas. Hampering factors presently include political differences such as the controversy over Zimbabwe. It escalated into a sharp division of views also among the member countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It is hardly an exaggeration to state that the inability to agree on a common approach has an almost paralysing effect. The following analysis is however concentrating on socio-economic factors of concern, which divide the region further instead of bringing it closer together.

Strategic shift towards NEPAD The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) seems to emerge increasingly as a type of mega-NGO to channel aid-funds into developmental projects, which at best claim but in reality fail to be driven by a desire towards enhanced regional collaboration. The programmes and policies funded under NEPAD are implemented mainly by countries and not by regional bodies. Hence NEPAD in effect more undermines than strengthens an agency such as SADC (or any other regional institution). This is a trend notwithstanding the fact that NEPAD attributes substantial relevance to regional bodies when identifying ways and means to achieve the defined socio-economic goals. NEPAD claims that its agenda is "based on national and regional priorities and development plans", which ought to be prepared "through participatory processes involving the people". So far, however, no visible signs in the SADC would indicate that the collective (multilateral) efforts aim at a united approach of the region in its relations with the outside world. Nor does NEPAD so far translate its noble aims into practical steps for implementation. The blue print emphasises sub-regional and regional approaches even under a separate sub heading. It stresses "the need for African countries to pool their resources and enhance regional development and economic integration … to improve international competitiveness". But the crux of the matter lies there: the emphasis on international competitiveness comes at the expenses of strengthening the local economy and the local people. Instead, integration in Africa should as a priority meet the socio-economic and environmental needs of its citizenries and not seek to turn even more into an export platform. NEPAD claims further to enhance the provision of essential regional goods as well as the promotion of intra-African trade and investments, with another focus on "rationalising the institutional framework for economic integration". But again, such an approach neglects the local/internal in favour of the global/external orientation. The implementation of NEPAD will hence most likely have the adverse effect and assist in an increased outward orientation of a regional bloc at the expenses of internal consolidation. It is interesting to note in this context, that notwithstanding the decisive role of South Africa within NEPAD, SADC has so far hardly acknowledged and certainly not embraced the initiative.

Divisive Free Trade Agreements The Free Trade Agreement between the European Union and South Africa (EU-SA FTA) negotiated since the mid-1990s, had a similarly divisive effect on the Southern African region by entering into a preferential trade relation with one country and thereby enhancing differences within the region resulting from existing conflicts of interest among the national economies. South Africa herself, the monetary zone, the South African Customs Union (SACU) and SADC are already not in harmony at any time and less so given the effects of the FTA on regional economic matters. Hence the EU intervention adds more friction. The new Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) negotiated between the countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands (ACP states) on the one hand and the EU on the other hand not only seek to replace the previous Cotonou Agreement by means of sub-regional separate negotiations but also aim towards compatibility between EU-ACP trade relations and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). They are hence dependent upon the settlement of the Doha Development Agenda's controversial and yet unresolved issues. Interesting enough, the draft European Constitution makes no reference to cooperation with ACP states. It is only fair to assume that the EU enlargement shifts interest even further away from the neighbouring continent towards more collaboration closer to Brussels. In addition, the negotiations by the EU aim at separate accords with each region, and no country may negotiate in more than one bloc. As such, SADC is reduced to seven member countries (half of the 14 SADC states) under the EPA negotiations. It is not far fetched to see that there is an in build conflict between regionalism as it exists and the negotiations of new multilateral processes. Countries might differ over the advantages between benefits from the continued protection of regional arrangements or the creation of individual preferential access within other trade agreements. But if regionalism is considered as a problem or obstacle towards further global harmonisation under the WTO, it stands little chances of being a viable point of departure for strengthening in particular the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in the South within the global trade arrangements. Instead, the predictable outcome of the current negotiations under the WTO related agreements will be a shrinking of "development space". To avoid such in-egalitarian pseudo-partnerships, a shift in balance from the drive to homogenize trading commitments to other states towards granting states reasonable scope to choose appropriate levels of national protection is required. A development strategy would therefore have to operate in a zone where both internal as well as external integration reinforce than rather undermine each other. Instead, issues of internal integration (including issues of regional integration) have largely dropped out of the development agenda as the gospel of the free trade paradigm dominates the discourse.

EU and US as partners? The same limiting effects can be expected from the Free Trade Agreement between SACU and the USA. The SACU-US FTA seems to promise nothing different from the US-American African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which tends to separate and divide instead of bringing African economies and interests closer. The benefits from AGOA differ among African countries according to their resources. Ironically, within those countries having been allocated a LDC status under AGOA (receiving additional preferential treatment), external capital (from mainly East Asian countries) has managed to exploit the opportunities created for supplying the US market under preferential tax regimes with cheap textiles from these countries. The by and large unqualified and underpaid workforce in the local sweatshops is hardly reaping any benefits from the super exploitation. Nor does the fiscus in these states, as initial investments and running costs for operations are substantially subsidised with public revenue instead of providing any tax income from the profits generated. Such recent trends indicate towards less than more regional cooperation and integration, at least in macro-economic terms along the official membership in such bodies like SADC. The political and security interests might provide with increased support by the G8 (the group of 8 most industrialised countries of the Northern hemisphere) the strengthening of initiatives towards closer regional collaboration in reducing armed conflicts and securing more stability. Such stability continues however to be perceived as regime security, in contrast to a concept of human security. The latter would give primacy to human rights in favour of the citizens and not preference to the governments in power Even if there would be achievements in this direction, the multidimensionality and heterogeneity of a region like Southern Africa is likely to persist and may eventually increase. This does not prevent external support towards further positive regional interdependence. But this requires more than merely the opening up to the global economy. More so, it would have to re-visit matters of regional economic collaboration and seek involvement of the majority of the African population in these countries. - The current initiatives by the EU and the US under the WTO offer little to no promise to contribute to such a desirable tendency, neither in SADC nor elsewhere.

* Henning Melber is Research Director at The Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala/Sweden and has been Director of the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek between 1992 and 2000.

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This is the second part of Gerry Caplan's "The Genocide Problem: 'Never Again' All Over Again" published in Pambazuka News 177 last week.

The Genocide Specialists From the first, I had thought my report should put the Rwandan genocide into some historical context, and I began reading in the field of genocide generally. Before long, I had come face to face with the burgeoning world of genocide studies. This subculture, I soon discovered, is quite separate from that of high-profile Holocaust studies. While some specialists in "other" genocides are also students of the Holocaust, for a long time only a handful of Holocaust specialists were prepared to accept experts in comparative genocides as their kin. According to New York City College Professor Henry Huttenbach, a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany, most Holocaust specialists still demand that the genocide of the Jews be treated as qualitatively different from - really a greater catastrophe than - the genocide of others. And "any whiff of comparison was automatically condemned as a form of denial, revisionism, trivialization, etc." This is an enormously emotional and divisive issue, but the evidence surely corroborates Huttenbach's assertion. In his intellectually thrilling and morally courageous study, The Holocaust in American Life, University of Chicago historian Peter Novick introduces the concept of "the Olympics of victimization," a fierce competition for primacy among the world's victims that the Jews are determined to win. Largely, they have succeeded. Even a good number, though not all, of my newly discovered genocide studies family share the view that the Holocaust - always with a capital "H" - is at the farthest point of the genocide continuum.

In 1999, when I began working on Rwanda, the world of non-Holocaust genocide studies was just beginning to flourish. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn's The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies in 1990 was way ahead of the curve. It was Rwanda and Srebrenica that really set things off. The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) had been organized in 1994. In 1999, Huttenbach founded the Journal of Genocide Studies, the first of its kind not exclusively dedicated to the Holocaust. The same year, a two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide appeared. In 2002, a thick and engrossing collection of essays appeared called Pioneers of Genocide Studies - imagine: pioneers already! - and Samantha Power won the Pulitzer Prize for her exceptional study A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Imagine: humanity had inflicted on itself an entire era of genocide, and we were living through it.

The field was taking off. In June, 2003, I was among two hundred people attending the IAGS conference in Galway, Ireland. There were forty-four intriguing panels to choose from, so many I couldn't even attend all the Rwanda sessions let alone those on Burundi, Srebrenica, Armenia, the Third World and the Holocaust, the Herero of southwestern Africa, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Korea, Bangladesh, Assyria, the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, Cambodia, genocide prevention, genocide denial, comparative genocide, genocide art, genocide and children, survivors, truth commissions, the problem of reconciliation, the problem of reparations, the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunals of Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and even more.

Size is relative, of course. This small, tight world of genocide mavens is some-thing of a movable feast really: I keep meeting them at other conferences, in London, northern England, Stockholm, Lund, Washington, Toronto, and Rwanda itself. Their hero is Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish lawyer who coined the word "genocide" and was the driving force behind the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. They know by rote the convention's key clauses and even its wildly optimistic title: "The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide." And they know the politics. After long, acrimonious negotiations that included early intimations of Cold War hostilities, the General Assembly agreed soon after World War II that genocide would be defined as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."

From these few words spill a host of complications. How do you prove intent? Exactly how many victims are necessary to constitute a "part"? What about "politicide," the word invented to describe attempts to eliminate political opponents, the stock-in-trade of both governments proudly promising to introduce "socialism" - Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia - and those defending the "free world" against "socialism" - U.S.-backed military dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia, the apartheid government in South Africa. What's the difference between mass murder, pogroms, or large-scale massacres and genocide, and why does it matter? And - the central conundrum - how can we know whether a conflict will escalate into a genocide until it actually does?

Then there are the bedeviling practical issues. What are the consequences of a determination that genocide is being carried out? Countries that ratify the convention "undertake to prevent and to punish" genocide perpetrators, and are entitled to call on the UN "to take such action under the Charter of the UN as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide." That's all. There's no call for direct military intervention. So, de-spite the apparent angst by the Clinton administration in 1994 that if it recognized Rwanda as a genocide it would be obliged to dispatch U.S. troops, many authorities agree that a strongly worded resolution at the Security Council would fulfill the obligations of the convention - even if the genocide continued.

These issues have been debated at interminable length by the cognoscenti, who mostly agree about the flaws of the 1948 convention and disagree about attempts to amend it. As a result, like it or not, it will remain unamended, unsatisfactory as it clearly is, while the new International Criminal Court and the rest of us make do as best we can. And we will continue to disagree on what is and what is not a genocide. Some well-regarded scholars argue there have been as many as fifty such calamities since the world vowed "Never Again" after Hitler's defeat in 1945. Others say that only four really meet the criteria set out in the UN Convention: the extermination of the Hereros, the Armenians, the Jews, and the Tutsi. It's more than a merely pedantic academic debate. But it will never be resolved. Genocide specialists seem to hold, simultaneously, two quite separate big ideas: that under certain circumstances all humans are capable of perpetrating unspeakable crimes against humanity; and that the only sound motive for being a "genocide freak" - as one of them wryly calls the group - is to figure out how to prevent its recurrence. Intuitively, the two may seem to be in conflict. After all, the record indisputably shows that humans have used violent means to resolve disputes ever since our species first evolved. How can we prevent genocide - or violence between humans of any kind - since humans are clearly hardwired to resort to force under any number of circumstances? To activists, however, the resolution of this dialectic is obvious: we must learn to predict the onslaught of genocide and have the capacity to nip it in the bud.

It came as no surprise to me that so many well-known, highly reputable genocide scholars subscribe to the old insight memorably articulated by Walt Kelly's sweet comic book character, Pogo Possum: "We have met the enemy and he is us." You can't study this subject without wondering about yourself. And we all do. Most of the two dozen men and women who are the "pioneers of genocide studies" explicitly believe that they themselves are potentially capable of the most atrocious behaviour imaginable. In the words of scholar and author Eric Markusen, "the vast majority of perpetrators, accomplices and bystanders to genocidal violence are not sadists or psychopaths, but are psychologically normal according to standard means of assessing mental health and illness." Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli and one of the Holocaust scholars, told me that genocidal attitudes now exist among both Palestinians and Israelis. This is not a man to use such language loosely. As for Rwanda, hundreds of thousands of Hutu were actively involved in the genocide. Most of them were ordinary Rwandans. What possible reason is there to believe they were fundamentally different from me? Or you?

But genocide scholars believe - hope? pray? - that our capacity for evil can be constrained. Perhaps the driving passion of genocide scholarship is to learn from the past to prevent recurrences in the future. As the presentations at the Galway conference amply demonstrated, these are scholar/activists who make no pretense to scholarly detachment. It's not that they eschew solid academic research; on the contrary, most take it very seriously and some are very good at it. But many openly pursue their academic work for activist ends. Virtually all of them are committed either to the prevention of future genocides or to having the world offer appropriate recognition to their own special genocide. A good number are committed to both. Indeed, there is now a Genocide Watch and a full-blown International Campaign to End Genocide supported by twenty-four active member organizations.

Why should this be? After all, you won't find all of the innumerable students of war marching with the peace movement, and no one expects them to. They're scholars for the sake of scholarship - or, perhaps, for publication. But I'd confidently say that all experts in the Armenian genocide have as their overriding purpose getting the world to recognize the 1915 genocide inflicted by the Turks. What drives them mad is the continuing success of Ankara in pressuring the governments of Germany, Britain, the U.S., and - in an unnerving triumph of realpolitik over the solidarity of victims - Israel, to refuse to officially recognize the genocide of the Armenians.

The personal is political in genocide studies. Most authorities on the Armenian genocide are Armenians, descendants of the genocide's victims or survivors. Here, of course, is the key to their militancy and activism. Similarly, most of the pioneers of Holocaust and genocide studies, and the founders of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the Journal of Genocide Studies, have been Jewish - survivors, relatives of survivors, or child refugees. Another perceptible group, small but influential, focus on genocide scholarship from a Christian perspective; that is, genocide as the ultimate violation of the laws of God. This, needless to say, is not the bellicose Christianity that so many Americans now seem to embrace.

So Galway wasn't just another academic conference, a talk shop where the arcane and obscure so often reign. This was a coming together of people who had consciously steeped themselves in the most terrible calamities humans have wrought on each other. Many had been touched directly by a genocide. All had a cause, most of them worthy ones. Just about every imaginable horror show of the past century was flagged in those few days.

Yet every single person at that conference was aware that "Never Again" had proved to be one of the greatest broken promises in history; as any genocide maven will aggressively tell you, "Again and Again" is the more accurate phrase. The very reason the genocide prevention movement is thriving is because the phenomenon itself is thriving. Look at the last decade alone. Bosnia and Rwanda. Serbs and Kosovars. Chechnya and East Timor. Nuclear threats, inherently genocidal, between Pakistan and India. Sierra Leone, with its child militias and child amputees. Potential genocide in the Ivory Coast. Burundi on a knife's edge. Rwanda enigmatic and unpredictable. The ongoing calamity in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. And the latest test case: the disaster in Darfur in western Sudan.

If crimes against humanity continue - and they do, as I write - it's not because specialists in genocide aren't trying to prevent them. The question is how to do so. Most of these "preventionists" argue for an early warning system that would allow experts to predict when a genocide is likely, so that the world can be informed and take appropriate action. For the last couple of years, some advocated for a "genocide prevention focal point" to be set up permanently at the UN, and as his contribution to the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced something very much like that. The premise is straightforward: through empirical and scientific observation of conflicts, we can isolate the variables and causal mechanisms at work and predict future genocides before they occur. With this information, we can then intervene and prevent the tragedy.

Once again, complications arise. There's no more reason for genocide scholars to agree on everything than for genocide victims to do so. Not everyone agrees on which conflicts in the past have been "real" genocides. Not every-one agrees on the variables and stages that lead to genocide. In practice, it's usually more credible and accurate to speak of large-scale massacres and atrocities than of genocide. The Nazi genocide against the Jews didn't begin until 1941. Until it was actually launched in Rwanda, no one could be sure there'd be a genocide; but there had been anti-Tutsi pogroms galore. Already there's a heated dispute as to whether Darfur constitutes a genocide or "ethnic clean-sing." Surely there's no need to resolve this semantic dispute before intervening?

Two intertwined dilemmas remain. Without meaning to sound pretentious, I'd say that preventionists must address the question of human nature. In spite of endless "Never Again" rhetoric and unprecedented efforts to prevent genocide in the past decade or so, and in the face of the rapid growth of what has been dubbed the "genocide prevention industry," before our very eyes the phenomenon of genocide has continued and even intensified. In this sense, the work of the preventionists is a Sisyphean labour of hope and faith over reason and evidence.

Even more problematic is the premise that if we're able to forecast an imminent genocide, policymakers will then naturally jump in and end the crisis before it escalates. I don't see it: I regard it as the genocide specialists' equivalent of "the truth shall make you free" - one of life's great fallacies. Fore-knowledge of genocide might just as easily have the opposite effect. Given the track record to date, it's at least as plausible to argue that early warnings of potential genocide are most likely to help politicians distance themselves from any obligation to intervene in the conflict. In the words of Samuel Totten, a highly respected genocide scholar, developing potential early warning signals "is easy - and this is a vast understatement - compared to mobilizing the political will of the international community to act when such signals appear on the horizon." Two factors are at work here. Human nature, for politicians, is to avoid entanglements they can't control and which have little political payoff. Beyond that, the interests of the preventionists' world and the powers-that-be seem largely antithetical. Almost all of us oppose the major interventions initiated by the U.S. and Britain, while they in turn are largely indifferent to the interventions we plead for.

As I write, Darfur stands as the test. Despite a flurry of activity, at the moment the world is failing badly, the penalty, as always, being paid by those under siege. Darfur is routinely called "the new Rwanda," but I'm more taken with the differences. The massive attacks by Arab Muslim militias on African Muslim peas-ants and farmers, supported by the terrorist government in Khartoum, began in early 2003. Since then, the usual suspects among humanitarian and human rights agencies, joined by the International Campaign to End Genocide, have been demanding that action be taken. Early in 2004, with the death, rape, and refugee counts mounting, the calls for action intensified. Mainstream media coverage became widespread around April with the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. An unprecedented informal coalition emerged, including the Bush administration. Maybe it's a genocide, almost certainly it's severe ethnic cleansing, and it is without question a world-class atrocity. Everybody now agrees the situation is intolerable. This makes the situation almost more terrible than Rwanda's a decade ago. Despite everything we know, despite all the demands made on the terrorist Sudanese government by the most powerful forces on earth, nothing has changed. Verbal threats are backed by mealy-mouthed resolutions promising serious consideration of future action if the militias aren't suppressed immediately. Meanwhile, the arrival of the rainy season in May blocked sup-plies to the hundreds of thousands of displaced African refugees, and the raids continued. How many more will be added to the fifty thousand dead and the hundreds of thousands of pathetic refugees, while the world attacks with a torrent of words?

The real comparison with 1994, then, is simply inaction in the face of gross provocation. At the end of the day, no Geneva Convention on genocide, whatever its language, and no early warnings, however unmistakable, can substitute for political will among the powers-that-can. The extent of recent coverage of the Darfur tragedy suggests that media and public interest can indeed influence governments to appear to care. But garnering such interest, as Darfur plainly shows, is a long, drawn-out process, and the move from concern to action can take forever. Pessimists will not be disappointed.

For the record, none of those who betrayed Rwanda has ever faced the consequences. Not a single government has lost an election for allowing hundreds of thousands of Africans to be murdered. Not a single French politician has been held accountable for allowing the genocidaires to escape from Rwanda to Zaire/Congo, thereby setting in motion the catastrophic wars that have since plagued the African Great Lakes region. No one has been called on to resign for their actions or advice. Bill Clinton's 957-page memoir, My Life, calls Rwanda "one of my greatest regrets," and spends exactly two pages in total on the subject. This is truly the globalization of impunity.

Nor did those guilty of sins against Rwanda deign to atone by commemorating the tenth anniversary of the genocide in Kigali in April. Kofi Annan went to Geneva instead. The U.S. sent a mid-level diplomat who offered a derisory handout of a $1 million (U.S.) for orphans, widows, and aids victims. Canada's delegation consisted of a former junior cabinet minister and the ambassador to Rome who advises on things African. Among all Western nations, only the Belgians sent their prime minister to apologize and repent. The Rwandans were disappointed but philosophical; their expectations were low.

None of this can give the preventionists a single reason for optimism. It's true that the Remembering Rwanda movement achieved some success. Commemorations of the tenth anniversary occurred around the world and Rwanda got more media coverage in those ten days than during the past ten years. But even if this attention proves to be sustainable, even if the victims and the survivors and the perpetrators and the "bystanders" are all remembered, what then? We will not have changed. Darfur reminds us that, once more, "Never Again" seems beyond human nature. Too many of us like to cause harm and too few of us care enough to prevent it.

Yet we go on. Why? Maybe because if we refuse to give up, we will stumble across an answer. Maybe because it matters that the victims gain some posthumous dignity. That the survivors will know someone cares. That the perpetrators are reminded that they can run but they can't hide. That those guilty of crimes of commission or omission - the French, the Americans, the Catholics, the Brits - will remember that there is no statute of limitations on accountability, and that we will keep naming and shaming them as long as is necessary. For myself, maybe it's because Carol will be reassured that I emerged from my encounter with genocide gloomier than ever but not ready to surrender. Not yet immobilized. And no less willing than before to throw myself - with the usual modest expectations, of course - into the eternal struggle that the pursuit of social justice and equality has always demanded.

* Gerry Caplan is a Canadian-based public policy analyst and international coordinator of the "Remembering Rwanda" Project. He is also a public affairs commentator and author of "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide," the report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities To Investigate the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, appointed by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). He is presently co-editing a book on the Rwandan genocide ten years later.

* This article was first published in the October issue of The Walrus, a new Canadian general interest magazine. It is reproduced here with their permission. The Walrus magazine is available on newsstands and book stores in the US as well as Canada, with subscribers from all over the world. For more information about The Walrus:

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Ten years ago, the international community stood by as the horror of the Rwandan genocide unfolded. This summer, Western political will could have stopped the mass killings in Sudan. Why do we not act?

On a quiet Sunday in the early summer of 1999, I was recruited into the tiny but growing army of enigmatic characters who devote their lives to studying genocide. It was a phone call that did it. Stephen Lewis, my lifelong comrade-in-arms and now UN Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, was offering a chance for us to work together again, but on a subject of unprecedented gravity: unraveling the truth about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Rwanda became my obsession from that moment to this. Stephen was a member of a special seven-member International Panel of Eminent Personalities (IPEP), which had been appointed by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to investigate the genocide. Despite their genuine eminence - two were former African presidents, one a potential future president, another the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India - the panel members just didn't know what to do with the information they had been accumulating. After traveling to half a dozen nations interviewing people with links to the genocide, they didn't know what they wanted to say. They decided they needed a writer post-haste. Appropriately enough, they sought an African writer, but for various reasons none of their choices was available. Stephen mentioned me. Though I knew little of Rwanda, I had a doctorate in African history; I'd lived in several African countries; I'd co-chaired two public policy commissions in Canada; I was a writer; and I'd been involved in the struggle against white rule in Southern Africa. I suppose a combination of sheer desperation plus these credentials led to a near total stranger being brought on to take over the panel's task.

As it happens, Stephen and I had already discussed the panel at length. He was thrilled and honoured to have been appointed to it and I was wildly envious. I had gone to live in Africa for the first time as a doctoral student way back in 1964 and had kept renewing my connections over the years. So when the call came, I was willing and able, yet seriously anxious. Carol, my wife, very wise about many things (not least the secrets of my soul), proved so once again. We could cope as a family, she was confident, even if it meant I'd be absent a fair bit. But she wasn't as sanguine about me. Could I deal with the subject emotionally? Could my already dark, lugubrious, pessimistic, Hobbesian view of the world handle such intimacy with one of the most hellish events of our time? After a lifetime dedicated to various crusades for social justice, I'd become the stereotypical glass-is-half-empty guy, always able to find an ominous cloud in a deep blue sky. My gag: being a pessimist may not be fun but at least I'm rarely disappointed. Now, this new assignment raised real fears of me being traumatized into utter depression and immobilizing hopelessness. These were serious questions, but both Carol and I knew immediately they could only be answered after the event. There was no way I could resist this offer. This was history in the making. This was Africa, my life's preoccupation. This was another Holocaust, a subject that had tormented me forever. This was about the very nature of our species. I began getting my shots the next day and reported to the Panel's headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the home of the OAU, nine days later.

I signed up on the assumption that the panel members would tell me what they wanted to say, and that I'd be their pen. This was hardly my usual or favorite role but, under the circumstances, I was prepared to play it. I needed their guidance about how forthright they were prepared to be. Although no expert on Rwanda, I did know how controversial and sensitive the issues were. Since this was an OAU mission, presumably dedicated to offering an African perspective on the genocide, was the panel ready to say that there would have been no genocide at all if some Africans hadn't chosen to exterminate other Africans? How far were they prepared to go in describing the OAU's own failure to intervene effectively? Beyond Africa, were they willing to tell the truth and accuse the French government of virtual complicity in the genocide? Would they agree to condemn Rwanda's churches, above all the Roman Catholic Church, for their shameful betrayal of their flock before, during, and since the genocide? Were they prepared to say that American politicians (both Democrats and Republicans), fearful of losing votes if U.S. soldiers were killed for such a remote cause, had knowingly allowed hundreds of thousands of Rwandans to die terrible deaths? Were they going to tell the truth about the serious human rights abuses that had been committed by the largely Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front - the "good guys" in the genocide and now the government of the country?

To my astonishment, when the panel flew in to meet me in Addis Ababa, they offered no guidance at all. To this day I'm still not sure I understand it. Maybe they were paralyzed by the enormity of the topic and their responsibility. All I know is that after my very first meeting with the members, I was left to produce the report on my own, sending them drafts for approval. I was distraught. How was I to deal with all the vexing issues I had fruitlessly raised?

Waiting for the flight back to Toronto, where I would do all my reading and writing, I went for a long and dusty walk with Dr. Berharnou Abebe, the panel's research officer, a remarkable Ethiopian intellectual with whom I had immediately bonded. Berharnou grasped the situation completely. Like other non-Rwandan Africans I was to meet, he felt personally ashamed of the genocide and approached his role on the tiny panel professional staff with the utmost gravity. We walked and walked, going over the problem again and again, getting grimier and more hoarse with each polluted block. Finally, he stopped, looked at me, and said: "It is simple, Gerry. You must write not for the seven, but for the 700,000. It is their story that you must tell."

Ignoring the murky politics of both the OAU and some of the seven panelists, I accepted Berharnou's advice with a vengeance. I would give them a draft based on wherever the evidence led me.

For almost a year, I immersed myself in the topic totally. I thought of nothing else. Weekends and evenings disappeared. Somehow, I absorbed a wealth of knowledge as if by osmosis. In the end, however, the work was done and approved - even though some panel members were rather less enthusiastic than others in accepting some of my harsh, unforgiving, and thoroughly documented assessments of the French and U.S. governments, the Catholic Church, the UN Secretariat, the OAU itself, the post-genocide government in Rwanda, and just about everyone else involved in this terrible tragedy except Canadian General Romeo Dallaire. Dallaire, almost alone, emerged with his honour intact. Howard Adelman, a Rwandan expert at York University in Toronto, once wrote that Rwanda's was "the most easily prevent-able genocide imaginable," and the panel unhesitatingly accepted my suggestion that we call the three- hundred-page report "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide." What can never be forgiven is that none of those with the capacity to pre-vent it cared enough to try. The report was released in mid-2000. I don't mind saying the OAU had never seen anything like it - independent, outspoken, undiplomatic, and easily read, it was the very antithesis of the turgid bureaucratic documents the OAU normally spewed out. It was also largely ignored. Not because it pulled no punches, I'm afraid, but out of plain lack of interest. Africa's heads of state, who had authorized the report two years earlier, never bothered to discuss it at all. I was deeply disappointed by the unceremonious burial of the report, suffering from the inevitable anticlimax after such an intense experience, and finding it hard to come to grips with what I had learned. Not only was the assignment over, so, it appeared, was my time with Rwanda. Wrong again.

About a year later, it dawned on me that outside Rwanda itself, the genocide was already being forgotten. I became extremely agitated. The survivors were living as traumatized, maimed paupers. Most of the perpetrators were getting away with murder, often mass murder. The sins of commission of the French government and the Catholic Church, and the sins of omission of the American and British governments, were being completely ignored: the "globalization of impunity" I had called it in the report. Carol, once again seeing things far more clearly than I could, suggested that the tenth anniversary of the genocide in 2004, two-and-a-half years away, could be a natural occasion to renew interest in the tragedy. The result was "Remembering Rwanda," an international voluntary movement organized with no funding, largely on my Mac, with the assistance of Louise Mushikiwabo in Washington and Carole Ann Reed in Toronto, with adherents around the globe, all dedicated to ensuring that the memory of the genocide and its victims would not be buried, and that those responsible for it would not escape accountability. I had already befriended some Diaspora Rwandans who signed up immediately. They included a group of remark-able widows, particularly Esther Mujawayo in Germany and Chantal Kayetisi in New Hampshire, who had lost their husbands, among dozens of other relatives, to the genocide while they and their children miraculously survived, and who are dedicated to making sure the genocide would not be swept under history's table. Leo Kabalisa, one of life's natural gentlemen, was another; Leo, who now teaches French in a Toronto high school, counts by name fifteen members of his immediate family and eighty-two of his extended family who were murdered during the one hundred days.

Other Rwandans, though, were inevitably suspicious. In Johannesburg one night, I met with a group of Rwandan expatriates attached to the Rwandan Diaspora Global Network. I knew them through e-mail correspondence and, finding I had to be in Johannesburg on other UN business, I had asked to meet them. We had a good couple of hours, got along well, and agreed to work together. But it was obvious they couldn't quite figure out why I was doing this. What did I want? What could I get out of this? Rwandans, who have been betrayed by the outside world as much as any people on earth, are entitled to their suspicions of all outsiders.

In trying to explain my interest, I found myself, to my own surprise, telling them that I was Jewish. My family had fled Poland before the Hitler era, I said, and, probably as a result, I had great empathy with their own genocide. It was all true. Although I'm a convinced atheist, deeply at odds with those who represent themselves as the voice of Canadian Jewry, and a passionate foe of Israel's occupation of Palestine, I've always felt my Jewishness deeply. I've been fascinated with the Nazis and the Holocaust since my teen years. For decades now I've read, almost as a matter of principle, at least one book related to the Holocaust every year. Although many Jews disagree, for me the self-evident lesson of the Holocaust is a universal, not a particular, one; it is not merely that anti-Semitism must be opposed with all of our might, but that all injustice, racism, and discrimination is unacceptable and has to be com-bated. The Rwandans loved this answer. Many Tutsi regard themselves, with considerable pride, as the Jews of Africa. Most know about, and identify with, the Holocaust. Some have been to Auschwitz, others to Yad Vashem. Many are far more supportive of Israeli policies than I am. Yet my core Jewishness and our shared genocides is a bond between us.

Sometimes I learn from experience. During a visit to Kigali in 2002, I had the opportunity to address nearly one thousand Rwandans at a major assembly dedicated to reconciliation. I described the Remembering Rwanda movement and asked, before they could: Why was a white outsider, a muzungu, in the widely used Swahili term, leading this initiative? The moment I said that as a Jew I instinctively felt a close bond with Rwanda, the mood in the huge parliamentary chamber palpably changed. Suddenly, trust emerged; we understood each other. The solidarity of victims prevailed. Certainly some suspicion still existed; I could hardly blame them. But after the speech I was confronted by a hand-some, dynamic woman I didn't recognize, who abruptly embraced me. Yolande Mukagasana, a genocide survivor, had made it clear in a brief e-mail that she didn't know why I was involved in this issue, didn't trust me, and could continue the fight for the memory of the genocide's victims without me, thanks anyway. Now, she said, she knew we would be in the struggle together. Yolande, a poet and storyteller and a passionate keeper of the survivors' flame, invited me to dinner later at her small house in Kigali, now home to thirteen adopted children who were kibitzing in a room nearby. As I tried politely to continue eating, she pointed to the photos on the wall of her husband and three young children and explained in graphic detail how, ten years earlier, they had all been hunted down and murdered not far from where we sat.

Gerry Caplan is a Canadian-based public policy analyst and international coordinator of the "Remembering Rwanda" Project. He is also a public affairs commentator and author of "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide," the report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities To Investigate the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, appointed by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). He is presently co-editing a book on the Rwandan genocide ten years later.

This is the first of a two-part series entitled "The Genocide Problem: 'Never Again' All Over Again". The second part will appear in Pambazuka News 178 next week. This article was first published in the October issue of The Walrus, a new Canadian general interest magazine. It is reproduced here with the permission. The Walrus magazine is available on newsstands and book stores in Canada. For more information about The Walrus:

* Please send comments to [email protected]

On Friday, October 10 2003, before African head of states and foreign dignitaries in Kome, Chad, President Idriss Deby symbolically turned the tap that opened the flow of 225 000 barrels of oil. The $3.7 billion crown jewel project of the World Bank (WB) is the biggest foreign investment in sub-Sahara Africa. For the next 25 years, approximately 900 million barrels of oil will be pumped from 300 oil wells drilled in Doba, south of Chad, along a 1070km pipeline to Cameroon on the Atlantic coast.

WB financing, which totalled just 4 percent of the cost, was crucial to the project. The oil consortium comprising of Exxon, Petronas, and Chevron considered the participation of WB as a necessary political risk insurance, which enabled them to raise more money on international capital markets. Meanwhile, the WB embraced the project as an unparalleled opportunity for land-locked Chad to lift its 6.5 million population out of acute poverty, and for ocean-bordered Cameroon to generate much needed revenues.

Some months after Chad, the world's fifth poorest country, entered the pantheon of Africa's petro-states, it is worth taking stock of the overall project impacts now that the exploitation phase has started. Has the project broken free from the traditional gap between expectations and dismal realities of oil exploitation? Better still, has the oil been a Weapon of Mass Poverty (WMP) or a Weapon of Mass Development (WMD) to Chad and Cameroon?

The background to any petroleum project is key in determining the development outcomes. In fact, the underlying development problems associated with the extraction of black gold are not inherent in the resource itself. However, there is little disagreement on the ability of oil to ratchet up pre-existing conflict in a society; oil can become the very rationale for starting war. In this light, the socio-political environment in which WB approved the project was a potent recipe for poor development outcomes.

There is an endemic mix of corruption and civil strife in Chad and Cameroon. For instance, Chad, since independence, has been marred by a vicious cycle of conflicts and war. Besides the absence of basic ingredients for the growth of civil society, elections are shamelessly rigged, fraud is rife, and the regimes have shown a predilection to violently repress dissenting voices.

For example, villagers were coerced to give their accord to the project in consultations prior to its approval. Tales in Kome, where villagers were consulted in the presence of government forces and rebels, are all too glaring. The village chief was imprisoned for his unfavourable attitude, and the oil company representative arrived accompanied with military police. Given this background, most people were too intimidated to speak out against the project.

Given that Cameroon has consecutively crowned Transparency International's rating of the most corrupt countries in the world, it was no surprise that a bellicose climate of non- information disclosure concerning the project was the norm.

International civil society organisations in 1997 argued for the project's postponement to ensure the two countries upgrade their governance capacities. Contrarily, WB in June 2000 discounted this burgeoning corruption and civil strife in Cameroon and Chad respectively to approve the project. Shortly after, civil society partners were proved right when the Chadian government, on receiving $25 million from the project consortium as a signature bonus, admitted to have used the money in procuring arms to quell a rebel insurgence in the north of the country.

More recently, soon after the project's official inauguration last October, the government closed down the country's only independent radio station, FM Liberté, which had close ties to the country's human rights organisations. Then residents of the capital city, Ndjamena, witnessed the first public executions in more than a decade after court trails which human rights groups described as a mockery of justice. Hence, a warning signal to critical voices in the country to stay quiet.

It is worth noting that the WB's own Operations and Evaluation Department (OED) review commissioned in 2001 finds the Bank wanting on issues of governance. The review points out that while the WB is aware of the underlying causes for the underperformance of resource-rich countries, it has yet to formulate and implement viable approaches to address them. The recently released report of the WB sponsored Extractive Industry Review, primed the role of governance in shaping development outcomes of oil projects. Unequivocally, it recommended the WB to stop support for petroleum projects in areas of conflict or at high risk of conflict.

Broken livelihoods and promises

Approximately 880 km of the pipeline traverses Cameroon's fragile ecological zones. These include one of Africa's unique coastal rainforests, home to several indigenous peoples. Before the commencement of the construction phase, thousands of affected peoples living in villages and communities along the route of the pipeline were identified for eventual compensations. One hundred and fifty families were singled out for resettlement. Many village lands were expropriated, crops and plants destroyed and water sources polluted. The compensation plan, that included individual and communal compensations, was very limited in scope and inadequate to restore or improve on broken livelihoods.

Despite compensation being paid to replace agricultural land, most of the funds did not go into agricultural production or reinvestment to make provision for the future. The affected communities have been left alone with little or no skills to face the long-term impacts: funds had no impact in terms of generating new livelihoods for villagers; prices have increased due to shortage of labour and agricultural goods on the market; rural-urban exodus has increased and conflicts between locals and migrants attracted by the new found wealth have also increased.

The communal compensation plan, which had as its objective to compensate communities with social development projects, was very limited. Communities, who were supposed to identify projects themselves through consultations, were instead constrained to choose from a restrictive list of options proposed by the consortium.

The project thus raises a crucial issue: that of balancing profits with ecological and social principles in petroleum exploitation. Driven by the ethos of cost minimisation, the consortium was motivated to fast-track its operations, while time-intensive social and environmental components such as capacity building lag on. To what extent therefore can multinational corporations be constrained to synchronise the evolution of their exploitation operations with that of social and environmental safeguards?

Turning oil revenue into long-term benefits for the masses is the most contentious issue in resource-rich countries, particularly in Africa. Ultimately, this depends on the quality of public policy. The WB prides the revenue oversight mechanism in the Chad-Cameroon pipeline as an innovation to the extractive industry.

Under pressure from WB, the Chadian government decreed a petroleum management law in 1998. The law provides for the following division of the $2 billion royalties and dividends that would accrue from the project in the next 25 years: 10 percent set aside in a future generation-fund to prepare Chad for a post-oil future; the remaining 90 percent would pass through an offshore petroleum revenue account; 80 percent of which would go to five priority sectors (health, rural development, education, infrastructure, and environmental and water resources); 5 percent would go to the Doba oil producing region; and the remaining would be used by the Chadian government to tackle pressing operational needs.

To mainstream transparency, accountability, and participation, an oversight committee, comprising representatives from civil society, government, administration, and the judiciary was created to monitors the flows and approve spending from the offshore account.

Undoubtedly, this initiative is laudable. However, there are some flaws, which incapacitate it. For instance, three months after Chad started to taste the oil revenues, the committee lacked basic office facilities. In addition, the 5 percent allocated to the Doba region is inadequate. Worst of all, the allocations contained in the law can be changed by the government unilaterally after five years.

In addition, the law covers only direct revenues generated from royalties while indirect revenues such as taxes and customs duties are precluded. These could account for up to 45 percent of the total oil revenues expected over the lifetime of the project.

Conclusion

Several conclusions about petroleum development in Africa become apparent from the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project.

Firstly, oil corporations cannot be transformed into development agencies even with the best of intentions and monitoring mechanisms. Secondly, global wielders of development outcomes like the WB cannot exercise sufficient clout on the penchant for profits of oil multinationals. Thirdly, WB is incapable of respecting even its own weakening safeguard policies, which are premised on controlling damage rather than avoiding harm.

Fourthly, the embryonic neoliberal governance structures in Africa are incapable of constraining Foreign Direct Investments, which are principally attracted by ground mineral resources, to respect ecological and social principles. The flawed contention of the WB is "one cannot eat omelettes without breaking some eggs'' but the eggs are more often the poor who end up with no livelihood opportunity and become even poorer.

Finally, Public Private Partnerships (PPP), the buzz paradigm of sustainable development, are fundamentally incapable of readdressing the unequal power relations between fattening multinationals, weakening states and the World Bank.

As it turns sixty, it is time therefore to pressure the Bank to retire from financing development and environmental disasters like the pipeline. In sum, just like the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, the Chad-Cameroon pipeline is an illusive Weapon of Mass Development. It is time to send some United Nations development experts to Chad and Cameroon to uncover Weapons of Mass Poverty.

* Akong Charles Ndika is an energy policy analyst with Global Village Cameroon

Mining always seems to have had an exploitative nature, representing massive wealth for some and grinding poverty for others. Take the case of gold mining in South Africa, where under apartheid enormous profits were made by wealthy mineowners while their workers toiled underground for low wages, only to be sent home to die when they developed occupational diseases. The World Bank’s Extractive Industries Review (EIR) was supposed to change all of this, but any hope that it would fizzled out last month with a few outraged NGO press releases. Bank management had met and failed to adopt the recommendations that would have placed people over profit.

This year marks what many activists have dubbed the unhappy birthday of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. It is 60 years since the creation of these institutions in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and in that time period both have come to have a profound and controversial influence on the world. Pambazuka News is profiling a series of articles that aim to examine the role of these institutions in the context of Africa. This week in our Comment and Analysis section we carry the fifth article in this series which looks at Extractive Industries Review of the World Bank. Abdulai Darimani from Third World Network Africa explains some of the political machinations that conspired against the adoption of the review’s recommendations.

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The Extractive Industries Review (EIR) final report was particularly critical of the World Bank’s role in policy reforms in the extractive industry sector which have led to negative impacts on communities, the environment and human rights abuses and recommended that the bank radically change its approach to funding such projects and even stop supporting some.

The President of the World Bank Group Mr. James Wolfenson set up the extractive industries review (EIR) secretariat under the Chairmanship of Dr. Emil Salim, former Environment Minister of Indonesia. The EIR secretariat was tasked to assess the impacts of the World Bank Group’s intervention in the extractive industries, and to recommend its future role in the oil, gas and mining industries. The secretariat was specifically tasked to identify the negative impacts of the Bank’s operations in extractive industries; assess whether the Bank’s activities in these sectors can advance its mandate of poverty reduction through sustainable development; and recommend whether, or under what circumstances, the Bank should continue to support extractive projects.

The review, a consultative process that included regional workshops, research projects, visits to four project sites, attendance at international conferences and informal consultations with a range of rights holders, released its final report following the final consultative meeting in Mid-December 2003. The report affirmed the criticisms and concerns long expressed by African civil society and many other groups across the world.

The recommendations demanded that the Bank adopt significant reforms including doing more to reduce poverty; immediately ceasing funding for coal projects worldwide and phasing out its support for oil production by 2008; enhancing human rights protection; prior informed consent for indigenous peoples and communities affected by extractive sector activity; and an end to support for destructive mining technologies.

The report also recommended that the Bank should prepare and publish net-benefit analyses; update and fully implement the Natural Habitat Policy as a basis for clear No-Go-Zones, and should not finance any oil, gas or mining projects or activities (including through policy lending and technical assistance) that might affect existing World Heritage properties, current official protected areas, or critical natural habitats or areas planned in the future to be designated by national or local officials as protected.

Some African governments and mining industry representatives and their associations viewed these recommendations with scepticism, calling them anti-development indicators for mineral-endowed African countries. During the consultative process some governments and industry tried to water down many of the progressive recommendations. However, facts could not be beaten and African civil society and their global colleagues worked hard to retain them in the report.

In the past years, the World Bank Group (WBG) have promoted extractive sector reforms in Africa through support in trade and investment liberalisation; privatisation of state-owned companies; institution and capacity building; apparently to improve conditions for foreign direct investment in the extractive sector; and direct finances of private sector extractive industry projects through equity investments, loans and guarantees.

The World Bank affiliates have helped fund major but highly controversial private sector extractive projects in Africa. In the oil/gas sector the Bank supported the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project. In the mining sector, the Bank has supported highly-controversial projects in Zambia, and Tanzania. Former artisanal and small-scale miners from Tanzania claimed that a Canadian company and the Tanzanian authorities forced tens of thousands of villagers away from the site of the Kahama Mines in the Bulyanhulu gold tract in 1996. The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), a private guarantee arm of the World Bank Group, supported this project three years later.

Early this year, a group of African Ministers of Mines meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, expressed misgivings about the recommendations of the EIR final report. They called on the World Bank not to adopt all the recommendations of the EIR final report, which they believed could spell disaster for mineral endowed poor countries banking on mining projects in these sectors for development.

The Ministers were reported to have indicated that the EIR final report had not given sufficient consideration to the fact that the extractive industries are essential to economic growth and poverty reduction, and that for some countries the extractive industries represent a very important means of creating revenue for government programmes. The ministers also expressed concern about the precondition of WBG investment in countries that have robust and transparent governance criteria in place. They believed that a country's inability to meet WBG governance criteria should not prevent that country from gaining access to the support, both financial and structural, that is required in order to develop such governance mechanisms. Otherwise, countries that are most in need of such developmental assistance could be excluded and would either remain mired in poverty or find less desirable paths to develop their extractive potential.

Two reasons could have influenced the ministers to present this view. The first is a response in self-defence. The second is the apparent influence from industry and their home governments. For a very long time, the extractive sector in Africa has been one of the areas for endemic corruption and abuse of power. The endemic corruption in the sector benefits those in power and the rich while marginalising the poor and local communities.

The unequal distribution of benefits also explains why many governments in Africa continue to supervise the abuse of community and citizens rights, lowering of standards and net benefits of mining, oil and gas extraction on the continent. The EIR recommendations were a signal not just to the World Bank but also to all major players in extractive industries to put an end to the corruption and abuse of power. Even more so implementation of the recommendations would have set the stage for up-scaling similar recommendations for governments, which would have meant ripping governments of their dictatorial powers and minimising corruption in the sector.

The view of the African ministers was echoed by mining companies and mining industry associations, in particular the London-based International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) and the Mining Industry Associations of Southern Africa (MIASA), which groups chambers of mines from Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

These bodies argued that many of the recommendations in the EIR final report were not based on sound research and would, in fact, inhibit poverty alleviation and sustainable development. Mark Moody-Stuart, who served as a member of the EIR advisory group during the second half of last year, expressed the view that the net effect of the EIR final report’s recommendations would be a virtual disengagement of the World Bank from mining, oil and gas.

The ICMM expressed concerns at the proposed governance prerequisites for World Bank investment, which included the quality of the rule of law and the absence – or even risk–of conflict. The Council believed that these could be too demanding even for developed countries. The South African Chamber of Mines CEO Mzolisi Diliza shared the ICMM’s concerns. Writing to the World Bank President, James Wölfensohn, on behalf of MIASA, he noted that much of the content of the EIR report undermined the legitimate role of governments.

They all concluded that adopting the EIR report’s recommendations in their entirety would result in a massive reduction in foreign direct investment going to emerging markets, for which extractive-industries projects are sometimes their only available path to development. This is all industry rhetoric and manipulative tactics rooted in the narrow conception that the only path to economic development is foreign direct investment in the extractive sector. The current paradigm of mineral resource extraction does not benefit mineral endowed African countries. While foreign direct investment in extractive industries in Africa has increased over the last two decades poverty has not reduced, if at all poverty has increased in those countries.

Southern Africa is noted for its mineral potentials and its long historical association with mineral extraction, yet the region’s human development record has not improved. According to the 2003 edition of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report, an estimated 20-million people – or 19% – of the total population of the six MIASA countries live on less than a dollar a day, while 47-million people – or 44% – live on less than two dollars a day. The current paradigm of mineral resource extraction in Africa is therefore exploitative.

Why was industry so concerned about the World Bank pulling out of extractive industries when the Bank provides less than 5% of the financing required for projects in the mining, oil and gas industries? It sounds amazing how when threatened the industry suddenly became the greatest advocate of the poor when ICMM's Kathryn McPhail (who used to research for the Bank) said: “What worries us most are not the implications for the mining industry as such, but the implications for development in emerging markets”. This argument was carried on by a letter from the Equator Banks, an investment group to the World Bank that says: “We believe that the EIR has not given sufficient consideration to the fact that the extractive industries are essential to global economic growth and poverty reduction.”

Two reasons explain why industry was concerned about the EIR final report’s recommendations. First, the decision could be emulated by other financial institutions’ withdrawal from the sector, which would drastically shrink lending to industry. Secondly, and even more important, was the fear of diminishing influence of the Breton Woods institutions on host governments’ policies and practices which are critical to ensuring low standards for industry. The World Bank influences the development strategies and practices of developing countries by making them compromise their economic policies, investment regulations, and projects that benefit large transnational corporations.

The United States government is by far the most influential force in establishing the priorities of the World Bank. It can veto any significant shifts in policy and by custom appoints its president, who is usually a product of the financial sector. Given the new American imperialist offensive, under the so-called war on terror, the US has thrust Africa’s extractive resources forward as a prize to be controlled as it seeks alternative sources of oil. Along the Gulf of Guinea now referred to as the “New Persian Gulf” the United States aggressively seeks military bases. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that some African governments worked with the World Bank to roll back the progressive recommendations of the report.

Despite support for the recommendations made by the EIR gaining momentum worldwide, the Bank’s board decided in August to act on very few of the recommendations made in the report. It thus failed to change the way the Bank does business in Africa, missing an opportunity to show a genuine commitment to respecting human rights and the needs of communities affected by extractive industries. Considering the World Bank’s own vested interests, the opposition of powerful industry players, the complicity of African governments and the existing global political climate, the decision came as no great surprise.

* Abdulai Darimani is Programme Officer, Environment Unit, Third World Network-Africa. This is an edited and updated version of an article that was published in African Agenda, Issue volume 7 No.3, 2004.

* Please send comments to

Global apartheid, like globalisation, is a buzzword that has evolved to describe a new global paradigm. Put simply, global apartheid is an international system of minority rule that promotes inequalities, disparities and differential access to basic human rights, wealth and power. Global apartheid is the opposite of global democracy. People like South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki, Fidel Castro of Cuba and the scholars Ali Mazrui, Richard Falk, and Patrick Bond, among many others, have used this concept in an effort to describe the global or economic injustice of our time.

Current manifestations of global apartheid are exhibited in the dominance of bilateralism and the hegemonic behaviour of the United States, the unbalanced and undemocratic processes in the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the disproportionate power of multinational corporations and the Washington-based International Financial Institutions (IFIs).

In today's world apartheid is reflected in 'who gets what, when and how?' in the global system. Global apartheid offers explanations for the North-South polarization, the peripherization of Africa, the breakdown of WTO trade talks in Seattle (1999) and Cancún (2003), terrorism, endless conflicts and wars, problems with the free movement of labour between the South and the North, increased wealth in rich countries while resources are drained from poor countries, as well as the denial of life saving medicines and care for people living with AIDS.

Debt and Global Apartheid

Debt oppresses poor countries and it has taken on proportions so as to render its repayment almost impossible. The debt has become a self-perpetuating vicious circle where new loans are taken to pay off the interest on standing ones. It is clearer than ever that the debt is not an economic problem, but a political one, and it is as such that it must be resolved.

Global apartheid through the bondage of debt fuels cycles of poverty and plagues many poor countries in Africa. The debt issue is no longer confined to the economic and financial spheres; as is demonstrated through the application of conditionalities attached to loans and debt relief. These conditionalities were historically introduced through World Bank structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) that were 'designed to rescue debtors', but were in reality driven by the desire to assure that ailing debtor economies did everything possible to pay back their debts.

Like apartheid in South Africa, SAPs entrenched great disparities in wealth, living conditions, life expectancy and eroded national sovereignty in the majority of Sub-Saharan Africa. The introduction of conditionalities such as higher user fees in public facilities, subsidy cuts and lowering of budgetary allocations to social services has resulted in increased poverty and unemployment.

In fuelling global apartheid, the IMF and World Bank have special functions to play: they police and facilitate global apartheid while they simultaneously assist governments in adapting to the process of globalisation, helping them cushion the impacts of these policies felt by the poor. One chief economist was quoted saying “it is important to send the “ambulances” (social programs) after the “tanks” (SAPs) have rolled through a country.” If a government strays from the path of globalisation the 'seal of approval' to borrow from public and private creditors is withdrawn by IMF and World Bank, causing the governments' sources of credit to eventually dry up.

Countries that implemented SAPs became accustomed to operating under an 'external policy command', which discourages national dialogue on societal reform. This process has destroyed the 'social contract' fundamental to ensuring government policies work effectively. Like former apartheid policies in South Africa, SAPs have been imposed upon the marginalized and materially deprived citizens of the Global South, eroding the capacity to develop their own development programs.

Debt has eroded the hard earned independence of African states. A crushing debt burden hampers poverty reduction and constrains development. Africa's debt crisis absorbs resources and energies that should be used to tackle urgent social problems.

Oloko Onyango's 1993 study of Uganda reveals that technocrats in the Ministry of Planning drew up national budgets that had to be endorsed by donors before their own parliament examined them. But even then, parliament merely acted as a rubber-stamp. Since the introduction of SAPs as a way of resolving the debt crisis, independent policy-making and national economic management has diminished and narrowed considerably. Like in apartheid South Africa, in which blacks had no say in the rules that governed their country, global apartheid strips autonomy from the state and its people.

International Financial Institutions continue to put pressure on African development through their conditionalities, using development aid and loans as a lever to impose the neo-liberal paradigm of privatisation and deregulation, liberalization and increased interest rates to control inflation. Under the newer Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), set up to replace the old SAPs, they impose the same neo-liberal framework through the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF).

Studies done by AFRODAD on the PRSP process demonstrate how the IMF and the World Bank imposed their macro-economic framework on the process. This meant that the PRSPs could not be reshaped at the level of macro-economic policy as the framework was already fixed. Thus the link between PRSP and SAPs is a continued imposition of the neo-liberal macro-economic framework. Segregation in policy formulation and standards of living was a key feature of the apartheid system in South Africa. This is reflected in the current global apartheid paradigm with unrealistic IFI conditionalities, stifling African development goals, especially when now-developed countries in the North used the very strategies now prohibited for their own development process.

Many development agencies and sceptics have expressed widespread doubts regarding the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) launched in 1996 to achieve the promised objective of a “robust exit from the burden of unsustainable debts” for developing countries. Problems associated with the design and implementation of the initiative suggest that the HIPC initiative has not succeeded in providing adequate response to the Third World's debt overhang. The segregated and selective nature of apartheid is also seen in HIPC. It is interesting to observe that although Nigeria's debt stock is the largest in West Africa and the country is experiencing growing poverty, the country is not recognized as a HIPC eligible country simply because it produces oil.

Despite the many arguments against the conditionalities attached to multilateral lending and development assistance from bilateral donors, the conditions have intensified. It has become increasingly clear that there is a hidden agenda for control by those who propagate such conditionalities. This cannot be anything less than global apartheid. The whole process has been much slower than expected and the HIPC initiative is suffering from problems of under funding, excessive conditionality, inadequate debt relief and cumbersome procedures and eligibility restrictions. Creditors have not put sufficient political will, resources and serious analysis into the debt reduction operations.

Aid and Global Apartheid

Within global apartheid structures and systems, aid has always been connected to politics. During the Cold War, for example, investment flows, development efforts and humanitarian assistance tended to reflect the changing pattern of superpower alliance and competition. It has been pointed out that tying aid to politics translates into “choice less democracy.” Thus, aid is a means of inducing policies and programs favourable to the donor countries, even though promoting economic performance of recipient countries is the given rationale for doing so. According to a World Bank report, “Aid can be the midwife of good policies.”

Aid to developing nations has not always been targeted towards genuine economic development efforts. Rather, in most cases, it has been given as an instrument of control under the global apartheid system. The current aid regimes undermine governance at the national level and impose conditionalities that lead to human rights violations. Adding to this, it is reliably estimated that for every dollar given in official development aid, three go back to the rich countries in debt service payments. Under the auspice of mandating policies for the good of the countries, aid actually decreases the level of control the government has over domestic expenditure allocation (both domestic and external).

Conclusion

The world has enough resources for everyone if we find the political will to eradicate poverty and hunger as well as put human life before profits. The debt must be cancelled to free up resources for equal development in both the North and the South. Kofi Annan's 21st Century Action Plan speech summed up what it will take if we are to replace global apartheid with global democracy, when he said:

“I would go a step further and propose that, in future, we consider an entirely new approach to handling the debt problem. The main components of such an approach could include immediate cancellation of the debts owed by countries that have suffered major conflicts or natural disasters; expanding the number of countries in the HIPC scheme by allowing them to qualify on the grounds of poverty alone.”

In the name of global democracy, the international community needs to negotiate new measures that go beyond existing initiatives in order to resolve Africa's debt crisis and end global apartheid. The debt is unpayable and rescheduling will only postpone the problem. The debt bondage is the new face of colonialism or even slavery. Debt is used as an instrument of domination. It is also an instrument used to plunder and exploit indebted countries' resources. Ultimately, debt is at the heart of the unequal power relations between the North and the South.

Recommendations

1. The total cancellation of third world illegitimate debts (as proposed for Iraq by the US) is a starting point in ending global apartheid.

2. There is an urgent need to address issues of unfair trade within the World Trade Organization.

3. Europe and the United States should stop using aid as a means of neo-colonialism or advancing their selfish ambitions.

4. There is a need to treat people of different geographical locations, race and origin equally when it comes to addressing global issues.

5. America's hegemonic wings need to be curtailed to ensure that it works within the framework of the United Nations.

6. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund's role needs to be revisited and redesigned so as to make these institutions people centred and pro-poor in their economic development policies. There is need to put an end to the co-modification of human lives through imposition of neoliberal policies that value markets/ profits before people.

* Charles Mutasa is Research and Policy Analyst at the African Forum and Network on Debt and Development (AFRODAD). Please click on the link below for references to this article.

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I have had a chance to look at Farid Omar's article ‘Darfur at the Crossroads: Caught Between Western Hypocrisy and Muslim Complicity’. (Read it online at My impression is that while I can agree to some of the arguments he makes I am also in disagreement about some factual and interpretative errors in his discussion. I am going through his piece almost paragraph by paragraph in order to lay bare the discrepancies and factual inadequacies.

For a start, the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) have not been altogether silent about the genocide in Darfur, which is instigated, aided and abetted by the Khartoum government. In a recent report made by the BBC, 9th August 2004, entitled ‘Arab League backs Sudan on Darfur’, the reporter indicated that "Arab Foreign Ministers at an emergency session in Cairo backed Khartoum's measures to disarm Arab militias and punish human rights violators. They called on the UN to give Sudan more time to resolve the conflict. And Sudanese Vice-President Ali Osman Taha said he thought the UN's end of August deadline was impractical." In effect the report indicated that, "the Arab League has rejected any sanctions or international military intervention as a response to the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region." The Sudanese Vice-President Ali Osman Taha had indicated that, "We are really committed to disarm whoever is acting outside the law". But who armed the Janjaweed? He added that, "comprehensive stability was only possible if both the Arab Janjaweed militia and rebel groups disarmed."

It is possible to read into this, firstly, the indecisive and guarded complicity of the Arab League position on the tragedy of Darfur. Genocide is not something which can be given time to be reversed. The slaughter and butchery of 30 000 Furs (not Darfuris) is a matter which needs to be brought to a close immediately. In any part of the world today any extension beyond immediacy in terminating genocide would hardly be countenanced. In the present Sudanese conflict in Darfur with the Sudanese army plus the Janjaweed on one side and African nationalist rebels on the other, who are oppressors and oppressed?

Secondly, if you compare the stance of the Arab League to that of the United Nations you will notice an enormous gap in perception of the magnitude, dimensions and perceptions of the crisis. While some of us recognize in the crisis genocide and ethnic cleansing others see a question of disarming armed bandits and rebels as the heart of the matter. I am not aware of what the OIC has or has not said, but I would agree with Farid Omar that they appear to be "strangely silent". If that is the case, then that certainly amounts to implicit complicity.

I share Peter Takirambudde, Chief of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch's view that Sudan is "trying to manipulate opinion in the Arab world to hide the massive crimes it has committed against Sudanese citizens."

Magdi Abdelhadi of the BBC has observed, with regards to the Arab League's statement that "there were no surprises in the Arab League statement and Khartoum got what it wanted. The statement welcomed measures already taken by the Sudanese government to disarm the Janjaweed and bring those responsible for human rights violations in Darfur to justice. The Arab foreign ministers also pledged to assist Sudan and the international community in resolving the conflict peacefully. The statement was very much in line with a report by an Arab League's fact-finding mission to Darfur earlier this year, which largely exonerated the Sudanese government from responsibility and laid the blame on a combination of factors, including protracted drought, tribal conflict and under-development in western Sudan." Of course human rights violators should be brought to book. Human rights violations are unacceptable in the modern world, whether such violators are Americans in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Arab authorities in the Sudan, or human rights criminals in the Great Lakes area.

True enough, "While western hypocrisy on the situation in Darfur is really problematic, Muslim complicity in the Darfur mayhem is equally disturbing. The Muslim people and their allies around the world should stand up for Darfuris, denounce and expose western double standards and condemn the AL and the OIC for their inaction and failure to put pressure on Sudan to contain the crisis in Darfur." There I have no problems with Farid Omar's views. But then he goes on to say that, "The western media has presented the political and humanitarian crisis in Darfur and broader conflict in Sudan as a race or religious war. This is a false paradigm. The conflict in Sudan is not one pitting the so-called Muslim-Arab North and the so-called Christian/animist South, or between the Arab Janjaweed militia working in collusion with the Sudanese government and the Black Africans in Darfur. The people of Sudan are all Africans, be they Black-Africans or Arab-Africans." Here I have a bone to pick with Omar. Certainly the various conflicts or the various fronts of war in the Sudan are not simply racial or religious. That is the crude and distorted simplification of the issue. But, we must not forget that the Fur are Muslims just like the Arabs in the Sudan. Therefore the conflict cannot be put down to religious differences. Then, what is it?

For years the Khartoum regime of Muslim fundamentalists have also been pursuing ethnic cleansing in the Nuba Mountains of Southern Kordofan with genocidal overtones against the Nuba who are also mostly Muslims. A similar tactic has been in place there, that is, using local Arab militias working hand in glove with Sudanese army units against the Nuba. In the South of the country the conflict is of much longer standing and can be said to have commenced in August 1955, with a period of low intensity conflict between1972 and 1983. Since 1983 over two million southern Sudanese have died as a result of the war.

In the case of the war in southern Sudan the international media has too often simplified the struggle as a conflict between a Christian and animist South against a Muslim North. The real fact of the matter is that it is a struggle between Arabs and Arabized Nubians and the Africans of the Sudan whether they are Fur, Zaghawa, Messalit and other similar groups in the west or the Ingessana in the east or the Beja/Hadendowa in the Kassala area adjacent to Eritrea. Some Nubians are now rejecting Arabism. The struggle in the Sudan is an age-old struggle between the forces for the Arabization of Africans and African nationalism, which rejects Arabization.

It is not simply a question of Islam against Christians and animists. I have in the past on many occasions indicated to friends in the Southern Sudan that they have for too long allowed their position to be sold short by playing to the international media and other interests which simply defined the struggle as one between Christians and animists in confrontation with Muslims. The explosion of media attention in the wake of the emergence of the Darfur crisis has underscored the falsity of the religious explanation of the conflict. If the Fur, Messalit, Zaghawa, Ingessana and Beja are Muslims certainly the struggle of the Sudan is not a religious conflict of Muslims and non-Muslims.

The history of the Arabs in the Sudan has been part of the history of the Arabs in Africa. Arabs entered Africa in the middle of the 7th century AD and have been steadily Arabizing Africans starting with the Berbers of northern Africa who till today have to a degree been resisting Arabization.

The Sudan and Mauritania are possibly the most decisive flash points in this process. Will Africans steadily accept to be culturally Arabized or will they resist Arabization and remain culturally rooted in their histories?

This is the real question of the Sudan and Africa. I say that I believe Africans prefer to remain African and not to become Arabs. I say this without prejudice to Arabs or those Africans who have become Arabized and wish to remain so. Just as much as Arabs have the right to protect their identity, history and culture, Africans also have a similar right. Just as much as Arabs wish to see the realization of Arab unity (el watani el arabi), Africans also most fervently wish to see the unity of Africans. The Arab League with all its weaknesses represents contemporary aspirations of Arabs for Arab unity.

As I have often argued, for as long as the pursuit of this ideal is conducted democratically for the freedom of Arab peoples, the ideal deserves the support of all progressive and well meaning people. But this must not be allowed to proceed geographically, politically, economically and culturally at the expense of Africans. Where does the border of the Arab world end and who are the people beyond the borders of the Arab world? Africans need to answer this question for themselves.

Today on the maps of the Arab League the Arab world includes about a third of Africa's geographical area. There are some of us who say enough is enough. No further expansion at the expense of Africans is tolerable. The notion Arab-Africans is a term used in the Sudan to hide the realities of Arabization. It is a concept, which has become in some ways a Trojan horse for Arab expansionism in Africa. Culturally and otherwise, people will always mix and adopt new identities, but this must not become a one-way traffic to Arabization and the cultural denationalisation of Africans.

In the broad historical experience of Africans two imperialisms can be pointed to, Arab and Western imperialism. Historically, Arab imperialism in Africa is older than western imperialism by a millennium. The day Africans realize that Arabs are not Africans and Africans are not Arabs but that the two peoples must live together in peace and with humanity towards each other their recognition of the African identity would have moved one step further and would have made a decisive conceptual move towards the ultimate achievement of African unity. The unity of Africa embraces historically, culturally and psychologically more directly the African Diaspora than the Arab north of Africa. In this sense, the African Diaspora is central to Pan-Africanism and African unity.

In a manuscript I am currently writing I have made the point that, if we want to maintain the rigour of the logic of the Diaspora link, we must, as Africans, define our reality on a historical and cultural basis. In this respect, geography is only useful in as far as it helps us to understand the historical and social process. We can therefore hardly define the reality of contemporary Africa as a geographical expression; that is, Africans as all who live on the continent of Africa. The argument has a resounding and irresistible flip-side, which is that, all who do not live on the continent or not born on the continent, are not Africans. This is the distorted logic, which pushes out the African Diaspora. We must not equate citizenship with nationality or cultural identity. A state may have people of different nationalities.

I do not agree that the so-called "race and religious analogy of the conflict is part of the ideological ploy of U.S. imperialism to generate anti-Arab hostility among African-Americans and Black Africans, to win support of African-Americans and Black African Christians for the US neo-Conservatives/Christian right project against Arab and Muslim Africans, and in particular against Sudanese Muslims. It is also aimed at undermining the long standing Afro-Arab solidarity that has historically striven against the forces of western imperialism, colonialism, apartheid and the occupation in Palestine."

Of course western imperialism must be denounced but so also must the Arabization of Africans be fought. It is ridiculous to bracket African-Americans with US neo-conservatives in this way. It is at best disingenuous and at worst mischievous. The point, which the Darfur crisis has forcefully brought home to many Africans in the Diaspora, is the fact that ultimately the definition and identity of Africans cannot be based on colour. In the Sudan it is not possible to differentiate African from Arab on the basis of colour and I am sure that with television available worldwide many Africans in the Diaspora who have for centuries been faced with white racism find it difficult to digest the fact that most Arabs in the Sudan have black faces. The point I have elsewhere made is that amongst Arabs colours range from black to blonde. The same is true for Jews. In years to come this may be more clearly true for Europeans.

Ultimately what defines an African from an Arab are cultural and historical belongings, not nature but nurture, not biology but rather culture. The black colour which is common for most Africans happens to be a miraculous bonus, in the sense that whereas most other major peoples of the world have other attributes they share as groups based on culture, religion, language, history and geography, mixed to different degrees, in the case of Africans in the absence of clearly unifying language and religion, colour has become a most useful blessing which makes most Africans recognizable from a good distance. But, in the future increasingly there will be many Africans who are not necessarily black. This is the way the world is moving and this is the future of humanity.

From my viewpoint, part of the tragedy of Darfur is that African nationalism in the Sudan has been conveniently split between what is going on in the west, south, east and northeast. Africans have so far failed to find sufficient ground to realize that they are all fighting the same war. The Arabist rulers in Khartoum have been clever at creating convenient and tactical truces, and thereby silencing and truncating the Southerner's struggle from the Fur, Ingessana, Nuba and Beja. This amounts to success for the policy of divide and rule, which has been in the past used to such consummation by successive Arabist regimes in Khartoum, who fear and deny the predominant African character of the Sudan. What al Bashir and the Khartoum clique fear most, is that the Arabist minority may lose control of the Sudan; that the African majority may exert its preponderant character.

It is most doubtful if the Arab League, in its present form, would readily accept a thoroughly democratic solution to the national question in the Sudan. But Africans are waking up. Sooner or later the African character of the Sudan as a democratic expression of the society will triumph.

I am happy with Farid Omar's philosophically inclusive sense of humanity. But, I fear the persistence of the confusion of Arab and African on the continent and beyond. This confusion, on this specific matter, appears to be more prevalent among Africans than non-Africans. We still do not seem to know or understand who we are. I hope we do not go into another major Pan-African meeting/congress with this confusion. If this happens, we would not have made any real headway since the last one. Let us not try to foist an African identity on people who do not want to be so regarded and who reject the African identity; who continue to despise and enslave Africans. I agree with Farid Omar when he says that, "the root causes of the Sudanese conflict are primarily political and can be located in totalitarian tendencies that have overtime, suppressed the evolution of popular democracy." While this diagnosis is right the point has to be seen in relationship to the long history of oppression, slavery, war, ethnic cleansing and now genocide.

The suggestion that external forces have fanned the Sudanese conflict is grossly exaggerated and misplaced. Blaming the conflict on American arms and money and right-wing evangelical groups in the US does not do credit to the Africans of the Sudan. The Africans of the Sudan are a group oppressed by the minority Arab elite in the country. As for the territorial integrity and national sovereignty of the Sudan, we must remember that the Sudan as it is geographically represented today is like all African states an artificial creation of European powers. The British were anxious to control the whole of the Nile Basin in order to supply Egypt with its lifeline, the Nile waters.

Omar's contention that "the Sudanese government either has no interest in resolving the crisis or lacks the capacity to do so", is spot on. As for the AU I agree with Farid Omar that the about "300 Peace Monitors it has deployed in Darfur is grossly inadequate." Again Farid Omar's observation is pertinent when he writes that, "Like the Arab League and Organization of Islamic Conference, the Muslim and Arab media have also maintained a strange silence.” In sharp contrast to events in the Middle East, coverage on the horrific Darfuri scene by Al-Jazeera and other leading Arab Satellite Televisions such as the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya is dismally marginal. Failure by Muslim and Arab media to adequately cover the grisly events in Darfur smacks of complicity.

Africans need to read the lessons right in this behaviour and attitude of the Arab media. The simple truth about all the wars in the Afro-Arab borderlands is that, at best we should be able to nationally coexist in peace. But if we cannot live together in peace, then we must go our separate ways without rancour, pain and mutual torment. The members of the global community have fortunately agreed as standing international protocol, since the Treaty of Versailles, that in our times, nations and peoples have the right to self-determination.

This protocol applies equally well to the African people of the Sudan.

* Kwesi Kwaa Prah is Director of the Centre for the Advanced Studies of African Societies. This article has been used with permission of the author.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

When the United Nations (UN) Security Council passed a July 30 resolution on Sudan demanding that the Khartoum Government halt killings in Darfur within one month or face economic and diplomatic action, aid agencies slammed the decision as providing more time for killings and rape by militias known as the Janjaweed. Nearly one month later figures indicate that there are currently 2.2 million conflict-affected people in Darfur and Eastern Chad. And as the UN deadline to the Khartoum government rolls to a close on August 30, activity by the Janjaweed is reportedly on the increase in West Darfur.

It now appears unlikely that strong UN action will be taken against Khartoum and that instead support will be given to the African Union’s efforts to solve the crisis. Sudanese government and rebel leaders are currently meeting under AU auspices in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, in an attempt to reach a political settlement and end the violence. The AU already has 80 observers in Darfur, protected by 150 Rwandan troops. However, an AU plan to send nearly 2,000 peacekeepers to monitor the region was rejected on Monday by a senior Sudanese official.

It may be that intervention under the auspices of the AU will be the favoured approach, because broader international action in Darfur through the UN is more complicated than it seems. One reason for this is that although Darfur is a charged topic in the United States ahead of the elections in that country, the most powerful member of the UN Security Council has been stung by its intervention in Iraq. It is unlikely that the US, even driven by the prospects of lucrative oil contracts, would risk an intervention in Sudan while it is embroiled in a disastrous occupation in Iraq. In any case, a “humanitarian intervention” in Sudan led by the US would be farcical while more than 100 000 of their troops are terrorising Iraq.

The US position is further complicated by the contention that the US has only become interested in the Darfur crisis because it threatens a peace deal between the Government of Sudan and the Southern People’s Liberation Army that would have opened up Washington’s access to Sudan’s plentiful oil supplies in the south of the country. Lastly, theories are circulating that the US supports the Darfur rebels against the Khartoum government because it is not sufficiently pro-American. All these factors leave the US hopelessly compromised with regards their credibility in leading an international intervention that is purely aimed at ending the conflict and does not contain insidious connotations related to political and economic ambitions. That this complicates an international response is to say nothing of other factors that might impact on the UN Security Council, such as the largely supportive role that the Arab League has lent Khartoum.

But whatever the UN decision on August 30, criticism remains as to the inadequacy of efforts to date. Part of the reason why it seems like attempts to end the crisis have been half-hearted is that genocide inevitable develops its own myths. The result is that it appears as if a particular situation has spun out of control and is too complicated for immediate action. In this scenario, the various parties are doing all that they can to rescue a seemingly irredeemable situation. But it is important to engage in an unmasking of myths because often they serve to perpetuate genocide.

The first myth to uncover is an obvious one. This is that the increased media attention of the last few months mirrors the timeline of the crisis and that therefore the time for response has been too short to yield results. In fact, the Darfur crisis played itself out throughout last year, so that in October, Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) noted that tens of thousands of people who had fled from Darfur in western Sudan to neighbouring Chad were “invisible” to the humanitarian community, receiving practically no assistance.

The myth that the Darfur conflict is a crisis of the last few months is central to the failure of the international community because it shows that the early warning signs were ignored - or that at the time the conflict did not carry the political relevancy needed for international action. What has been opted for now is a kind of genocide crisis management, with a strong sense that more time is needed and that diplomatic ventures must be allowed to run their course. But both the international community and the Government of Sudan have known about the crisis in Darfur for far longer than it has been in the media spotlight. How much more time exactly would they like? How many more people must die?

This is linked to the idea that genocide somehow ‘just happens’. In reality, genocide has its own social, economic and political aspects. It has been argued that in Africa, the legacy of colonialism, economic problems and inequalities mean that governments or powerful groups can promote differences and conflict as a mechanism of power rather than addressing the root causes of desperation.

Another area that needs to be challenged is that of the “peace process”. There is a sense that once a “peace process” is underway or the perpetrators engaged in diplomacy, then whatever crisis that is underway is about to be solved. But this, as the organisation Genocide Watch points out, often obscures the fact that genocide is not conflict but rather one-sided violence of one group against another. Therefore it is the “genocidal nature of the government in Khartoum” that needs to be confronted. A peace process will not necessary result in a solution. Often, the “peace process” - and this would also apply to other diplomatic efforts - can work to distract attention from genocide or result in the international community being more lenient towards a perpetrating regime.

Often, genocide is characterised as an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy. In Sudan, it has been argued that what is happening there is a result of a kind of clash of civilisations between ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’. But as Alex de Waal has pointed out, this obscures a “complicated reality”. “Darfur's Arabs are black, indigenous, African and Muslim, just like Darfur's non-Arabs, hailing from the Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa and many smaller tribes.”

The ‘African’ versus ‘Arab’ theory may act to obscure the original causes of the conflict such as conflicts over resources, especially water and land. It may also work to obscure the historical causes of conflict, such as the fact that Sudan was a colonial construct arbitrarily created, in which the British entrenched divisions between a wealthy North and the rest of the country. Understanding complicated historical and political factors is important in understanding why the Darfur crisis has developed and is crucial in any solution.

In conclusion, the shameful response of the international community to the Rwandan genocide should have resulted in lessons being learnt on how to deal with similar crisis situations. But not even the obvious reminders presented by the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide in April helped to move the world from genocide crisis management to genocide prevention. That these lessons have not been learnt indicates that those institutions responsible for protecting international human rights standards have not been made accountable for the decisions that they make with regards the lives of those who suffer as a result of inaction, nor have they been able to move towards clear decision-making that is based not on the interests of the powerful but in the interests of ordinary people who suffer most at the hands of violence.

* Patrick Burnett works for Fahamu. Please send comments to

Reference URLs:
http://www.usaid.gov/locations/sub-saharan_africa/sudan/darfur.html

http://www.genocidewatch.org/Never%20Again.htm
http://allafrica.com/stories/200408021131.html
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/comment/0,11538,1285443,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4449674,00.html