Jegede Ademola Oluborode looks at the Protocol on the Rights of Women in relation to medical or scientific experiments and argues that ethical and scientific standards are lowered when it comes to African women and informed consent may not be enough to protect vulnerable African women.

This article is a reflection on the provision of article 4(2)(h) of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa( Protocol on the Rights of Women) which seeks to prohibit all medical and scientific experiments on women without their informed consent. The article argues that the prohibition of all medical or scientific experiments on women without their informed consent, without more, falls short of other ethical requirements for safety in scientific and medical experimentation. This in itself is an expression of the regrettable gap which over the years has existed in major international human rights instruments, to which most African States are signatory. To this end therefore, the article suggests that along with the requirement of consent, there is a need to legally prescribe appropriate human rights standard on the performance of medical and scientific experiments. The article concludes that a re-draft of article 4 (2)(h) of the Protocol on the Rights of Women is imperative to ensure maximum legal protection for women, who by virtue of their role in the society are most vulnerable to medical and scientific exploitation.

INJUSTICES IN MEDICAL OR SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS AND WOMEN [1]

Examples of where women have been victims to medical and scientific exploitation under the pretext of research are not new. Grave atrocities were committed in the process of medical experiments carried out during the Second World War on non-consenting women and children prisoners of Nazi concentration camps [2]. During the same period in history, African women from the German South West Africa, now Namibia, were part of sterilization programmes instituted by Germany without their consent [3]. In more recent times, evidence from Nigeria implicated Pfizer International Incorporated (PII) of fraud and criminal breach of trust of its controversial drug test, popularly known as Trovan Clinical Trials, which it carried out on Nigerian citizens in Kano in 1996, which had fatal results [4].

The burden of disease, generally, including malaria, sickle cell anaemia, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, weighs heavily on Africa, where these illnesses are most prevalent. In more ways than one, the impact of these diseases has been disproportionately borne by women. While medical and scientific trials and research involving women, holds great prospects for the solution of these problems, researches and pharmaceutical companies who engage in trials can not always be trusted to function with due consideration for ethical requirements, when such requirements are not well specified and projected in the African human rights system.

It is noteworthy that due to low level of literacy in Africa, very few women who are research participants are sufficiently educated to really understand the details of studies and trials in which they are engaged [5]. The poverty and powerlessness of women often lead to their participation in clinical and scientific researches merely for inexpensive inducements, and largely due to less understanding of study risks, or for the pregnant women, under the mistaken belief that such studies will result in care for their unborn children. There are for instance, controversies which have surrounded microbicide trials carried out on women in South Africa which revealed that women in the study developed higher risk of HIV infection [6]. In 2007, the US-based reproductive health research organisation, CONRAD, also announced the premature end of trials of a cellulose sulphate-based microbicide in Nigeria, Benin and Uganda after the data safety and monitoring committee found a higher number of infections in the active group compared to the placebo group [7].

The New England Journal of Medicine carried a comment on 15 on-going clinical trials testing cheaper drug regimens to prevent maternal-foetal transmission of HIV in Africa. Some 16,000 pregnant, HIV-positive women were enrolled in the placebo-controlled trials. The problem with these trials was that it began after Zidovudine (AZT) had been found to prevent such transmission by 50% or more, and is recommended to all HIV-positive pregnant women in western countries. In other words, it was reported that, thousands of women in the trials were getting sugar pills to test the efficacy of the new regimens whereas if they had been enrolled in trials in Europe, they would have received a standard course of AZT [8]. This further underscores the point that the truth in Africa, is that very few women do enjoy the benefits of the research in which they participate.

The survival of women therefore raises the question as to whether international human rights have done enough to protect women in terms of medical and scientific experimentation and if not, whether there is the need for the African human right system to review existing legal framework with the view of addressing such gap.

INTERNATIONAL AND REGIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS INSTRUMENTS ON MEDICAL/ SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS

When international human rights instruments have discussed access to health services, it has been silent on medical and scientific experimentation. This was the case with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which only guarantees in its Article 25(1) the right of everyone to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care. Similarly, subsequent notable instrument such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in Article 12(2)(d) only urges the States to take steps to achieve full realization of the right to health by creating conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness [9]. Article 5 (d)(iv) of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination is no different when it provides for the right to public health, medical care, social security and social services [10].

Although, the need to take urgent steps to address the inequality as it affects women on a number of issues led to the adoption of the Convention on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), [11] the Convention fails to sufficiently address the issues of human rights around medical and scientific experiments in its copious provisions in Article 11(f), 12(1) and 14(2) (b) regarding improvement of access of women to health care services. This is also lacking in the 1999 General Comment of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, which interpreted the right to health under Article 12 of CEDAW as the right of women to be fully informed, by properly trained personnel, of their options in agreeing to treatment or research, including likely benefits and potential adverse effects of proposed procedures and available alternatives [12].

Article 4(2)(h) of the Protocol on the Rights of Women provides that States parties shall take appropriate and effective measures to prohibit all medical or scientific experiments on women without their informed consent. This appears progressive for Africa, considering that, with the exception to South African Constitution which has similar provision; hardly does any other African constitution have a similar provision with such safeguard [13].The Protocol is however merely re-stating article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which provides that ‘no one shall be subject without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation [14]. The inherent weakness in the foregoing efforts is that the requirement of consent, without more excludes certain elements of ethics which are fundamental in medical and scientific experiments and in so doing, deprives them of being legally determinable.

ELEMENTS AS IMPORTANT AS ‘INFORMED CONSENT’ IN MEDICAL AND SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS

The medical misdeeds at the Second World War led to the Nuremberg code in 1947, a set of principles devised to protect human subjects from unethical experimentation [15]. The Nuremberg code was a part of the judgment delivered in the so-called Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg following World War II. The principles of the code were based upon the criteria for ethical research that were elucidated by the two expert medical witnesses at the trial if human experimentation was to be justified. These are: informed consent; Results must be for the good of society; and the experiment must be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons [16].

While further reinforcing the principles at Nuremberg, the Declarations of Helsinki (1964 and 1975, with further revisions in 1983, 1989, 1996 and 2000) emphasised that in research involving human beings, the potential benefits must outweigh hazards. The Belmont Report of 1979 projected three ethical principles as relating to research on human subjects namely; respect for persons; beneficence and Justice. The principle of respect to persons connotes that individuals should be treated as autonomous agents. The principle of benevolence indicates that harm must not be occasioned; maximum benefits must be ensured while Justice signifies that there should be fair distribution of burdens and benefits of research [17].

RECENT EFFORTS AT CODIFYING RESEARCH ETHICS

The Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights (the Declaration) which regulates cell research appears to have provided for other requirements apart from informed consent. Article 5 of the Declaration recommends that attention be given to best interest the persons involved in the research, compliance with national and international research standards or guidelines, health benefit, minimal risk and minimal burden, compatibility with the protection of the individual's human rights [18]. Apart from failing to define what the national and international research standards and guidelines are, the Declaration, suffers the same setback with other declarations, which is that generally, they are not binding in international law.

In 1997, Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine was adopted by the Council of Europe (The Convention). The Convention provided extensively for ethics regarding medicine and scientific experiments. Article 16 of the Convention extensively provides for protection of a person undergoing experimentation and accommodates the ethics on Justice, Benevolence and freedom of harm which the Nuremberg Code, Helsinki Declaration Belmont Report have projected. Article 23 of the Convention allows parties to pursue judicial protection to prevent or to put a stop to an unlawful infringement of the rights and principles in the Convention at short notice [19].

Africa may not however benefit from the Convention considering that the only parties to the Convention were members of the Council of Europe. Without regional legal human rights coverage of the subject, it is unlikely that the Convention as it is presently will be of any use on African concerns on the matter of experimentation and exploitation. The need for such coverage is imperative in a globalised world where Africa remains a fertile ground for research and stands the greatest risk to be impacted by medical exploitation. That is more so considering that it is unlikely that free choice and benefits can be enjoyed by women in relation to medical and scientific experiments where standards are absent.

THE WAY FORWARD

From Universal Declaration of Human Rights through CEDAW to the Protocol on Women Rights, international human rights instruments to which most African nations are signatory are inadequate as a standard of regulating scientific and medical experiments. Most importantly, article 4(2)(h) of the Protocol on Women Rights lacks the essential components on ethics required for scientific and medical experimentation. The Protocol on Women Rights, just as the Convention on Human Rights & Biomedicine should accommodate requirements which the Nuremberg Codes, Helsinki Declaration and Belmont Report have projected in terms of respect for persons; beneficence and fairness. Achieving this will be a leap forwards as it will take the principles beyond the realms of mere ethics to the realms of active rights. It is therefore suggested that article 4(2)(h) of the Protocol on Women Rights in addition with the principle of informed consent should include the principles of beneficence and fairness. This is imperative in this age of globalisation where Africa remains a fertile ground for research and its women the most vulnerable.

*Jegede Ademola Oluborode is a legal practitioner and a human rights activist in Nigeria.

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

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Libya is getting the backing of Ukraine to build nuclear reactors. Mustafa Adam-Noble looks at the implications of an oil-rich country going nuclear and the possible impact on Libyan people.

A honeymoon is rapidly emerging between Libya and the Ukraine.

Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian President, has declared his intention to help Libya develop its use of “peaceful” nuclear energy. According to Afrique En Ligne, an online African magazine, bilateral economic projects have been emphasised by Yushschenko. They include the granting of a Libyan contract to a Ukrainian oil and gas company in return for the use of Ukrainian agricultural land by Libya. The Ukraine has also offered to build roads and railways in the North African country and has recently supplied Libya with an Antonov AN-124-100, the world’s largest cargo plane.

Such a large scale of political and economic bartering and investment is bound to raise a few eyebrows.

On the one hand, the rush for oil by the Ukrainians makes sense: Moscow’s threat of turning off Russian-Ukranian pipelines is ever-present. Libya’s need for cheaper food amid rising food prices is a very real concern, and Gaddafi can’t seem to fix agriculture domestically. However, this eager international relationship is murky and far from straightforward.

Libya is awash with corruption amongst its officials and desperation within its population. Decades of crippling policies by Gaddafi, and subsequent trade sanctions, have left the country in tatters.

Libya was an active sponsor of terrorism until only recently when, in 2003, Gaddafi admitted to bombing a Pan American flight over Lockerbie in 1998, killing 270 people. The dictator also admitted to bombing the French UTA airliner over Niger in 1989 that killed all 170 civilians on board.

The declaration of his guilt prompted the immediate lifting of UN sanctions imposed on Libya in 1992; Libya promised compensation for the victim’s relatives ($2.7 billion in instalments for those on the Lockerbie flight) and everyone ran to Libya with open arms, embracing the now reformed rogue state.

Congratulating Libya by supplying it with nuclear technology and a gigantic cargo plane hardly seems wise.

The argument for nuclear energy in Libya may not seem to make economic sense. Its population is only 5 million, but it has the largest oil reserves in Africa. However, Alan McDonald, an official with the International Atomic Energy Agency, explains that nuclear energy could be a strategic economic move for oil-rich countries. He said, “they know their oil will only become more valuable as global demand increases […] It may be more cost-effective to sell oil to Americans driving SUVs than to burn it domestically.”

It is likely that Libya has an additional, political motive for developing nuclear technology.

Iran’s uranium enrichment programme has forced the region into nuclear proliferation (recently Kuwait, Jordan and Bahrain have also begun planning nuclear plants). According to the Washington Post, 40 developing countries have recently signalled plans to develop nuclear power, which can then lead to the completion of nuclear arsenals.

Algeria and Morocco are also planning the construction of nuclear reactors. This would paint a very different picture to the current nuclear African map, with only two reactors on the whole continent (both in South Africa).

According to Igor Kriponov, writing for Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “South Africa accounts for 60 percent of all of Africa's energy production. (Africa as a whole generates only 3.1 percent of the world's electricity)”.

Using nuclear energy could help increase both Libya’s and Africa’s electricity generation without immediately polluting the environment. What you do with containers of nuclear waste is another question.

Easing fears of a world armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, Mohammed ElBaradei, director general of the IAEA, is quoted as saying in the Washington Post, “You don't really even need to have a nuclear weapon. It's enough to buy yourself an insurance policy by developing the capability, and then sit on it. Let's not kid ourselves: Ninety percent of it is insurance, a deterrence.”

Libya’s nuclear programme could thus satisfy both an economic and a political agenda. However, the possibility of an unstable tyrant like Gaddafi attaining nuclear weapons poses a serious threat. Additionally, the Ukraine’s dealings with Libya are unlikely to benefit the general Libyan economy.

Senior British businessmen now working in Libya warn that the agreements with the Ukraine are convoluted and are not based in direct foreign investment procedures. The bartered nature of the agreements decreases transparency and creates a scenario loaded with the potential for theft. Additionally, because there is now so much more money coming into a newly open Libya, corruption is getting worse. The country cannot cope well enough to bear the fruits of investment. There are no institutions or protocol, no free press, very few educated Libyans and an unreliable communications system.

Although Gaddafi has begun to allow the creation of financial institutions, with economic reform gradually building in the banking sector, development in other areas of the economy is simply not happening. Perhaps we must be patient as there are still some positive signs that internal change is possible.

In an address to Libya’s General People’s Committee, Gaddafi stated that the nationalised Libyan economy has been inefficient and wasteful of money. He emphatically said, “The traditional state is over”.

Not so fast.

It would be tempting to think that the bad times of a state-run, isolated Libya have come to an end. While Libya catches up, continued malpractice, corruption and poverty will have long term effects that would be difficult to reverse even if all sectors are eventually reformed and regulated.

Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at SOAS University in London, argues that the oil deal with the Ukraine suits the Libyans because it offers them better conditions than an agreement with, say, France or Italy. This may be true, but the benefit of working with the Ukrainians in the four very different fields of nuclear technology, oil, roads and railways must be questioned.

One senior businessman likened the Ukraine’s multi-project approach in Libya to an accountant that can provide further services as a lawyer, a writer and an acrobat. It is unlikely that each role can be done sufficiently well by one party.

These deals manifest a special relationship between Libya and the Ukraine based not on economic efficiency and competition but on favouritism.

Pitfalls also arise in the Libyan economy.

According to Eman Wahby in an article published in 2005 by the Carnegie Endowment to International Peace, “[Libya] is the top recipient of foreign investment in Africa.” But unemployment in 2008 is estimated at 30%, and has in fact increased from 25% in 2005.

This shows that the Libyan system does not benefit the masses and, coupled with Libya’s significant growth rate of 9% in 2008, demonstrates that wealth goes only to the few and the powerful.

Wahby mentions that the country had announced plans “to cut $5 billion worth of subsidies”. She adds: “For decades, the state has been subsidizing 93 percent of the value of basic commodities, notably fuel.”

It seems that Libya’s sprint towards reform will leave it out of breath as prices increase, squeezing the population beyond its means. Wahby explains that subsidy cuts in May 2005 increased fuel prices by 30 % and electricity prices by 100%, leading to price rises in other goods and services.

This is simply not sustainable.

In order to be successful, Libya’s development must be gradual, assessed and measured using foresight and rationality - characteristics Gaddafi has consistently lacked throughout his 39 years in power.

It is doubtful that the Libya-Ukraine relationship will be profitable for the Libyan population. Given Libya’s severe economic difficulties as a consequence of a totalitarian system, each decision Gaddafi makes must ultimately be questioned.

Even if Gaddafi does spend his country’s wealth on the things it most needs, it is unlikely that he will be able to improve the lives of the Libyan people.

*Mustafa Adam-Noble is a political commentator.

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

In the Congo, where tens of thousands of women are brutally raped every year, Dr. Denis Mukwege repairs their broken bodies and souls. Eve Ensler visits him and finds hope amid the horror.

I have just returned from hell. I am trying for the life of me to figure out how to communicate what I have seen and heard in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. How do I convey these stories of atrocities without your shutting down, quickly turning the page or feeling too disturbed?

How do I tell you of girls as young as nine raped by gangs of soldiers, of women whose insides were blown apart by rifle blasts and whose bodies now leak uncontrollable streams of urine and feces?

This journey was a departure for me. It began with a man, Dr. Denis Mukwege, and a conversation we had in New York City in December 2006, when he came to speak about his work helping women at Panzi Hospital in Bukavu. It began with my rusty French and his limited English. It began with the quiet anguish in his bloodshot eyes, eyes that seemed to me to be bleeding from the horrors he’d witnessed.

Something happened in this conversation that compelled me to go halfway around the world to visit the doctor, this holy man who was sewing up women as fast as the mad militiamen could rip them apart.

I am going to tell the stories of the patients he saves so that the faceless, generic, raped women of war become Alfonsine and Nadine—women with names and memories and dreams. I am going to ask you to stay with me, to open your hearts, to be as outraged and nauseated as I felt sitting in Panzi Hospital in faraway Bukavu.

Before I went to the Congo, I’d spent the past 10 years working on V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls. I’d traveled to the rape mines of the world, places like Bosnia, Afghanistan and Haiti, where rape has been used as a tool of war. But nothing I ever experienced felt as ghastly, terrifying and complete as the sexual torture and attempted destruction of the female species here. It is not too strong to call this a femicide, to say that the future of the Congo’s women is in serious jeopardy.

I learned from my trip that there are men who take their sorrow and helplessness and destroy women’s bodies—and there are others with the same feelings who devote their lives to healing and serving. I do not know all the reasons men end up in one or the other of these groups, but I do know that one good man can create many more. One good man can inspire other men to ache for women, to fight for them and protect them. One good man can win the trust of a community of raped women—and in doing so, keep their faith in humanity alive.

Dr. Mukwege picks me up at 6:30 A.M. It is a lush, clean morning. Eastern Congo, where Panzi Hospital is located, is wildly fertile. You can almost hear the vegetation growing. There are banana trees and cartoon-colored birds. And there is Lake Kivu, a vast body of water that contains enough methane to power a good portion of the sub-Sahara—yet the city of Bukavu on its banks has only sporadic electricity. This is a theme in the Congo. There are more natural resources than almost anywhere else on the planet, yet 80 percent of the people make less than a dollar a day. More rain falls than one can imagine, but for millions, clean drinking water is scarce. The earth is gorgeously abundant, and yet almost one third of the population is starving.

As we drive along the semblance of road, the doctor tells me how different things were when he was a child. “In the sixties 50,000 people lived here in Bukavu. It was a relaxed place. There were rich people who had speedy boats in the lakes. There were gorillas in the mountains.” Now there are at least a million displaced Congolese, many of whom arrive in the city daily, fleeing the numerous armed groups that have ravaged the countryside since fighting erupted in 1996. What started as a civil war to overthrow dictator Mobutu Sese Seko soon became “Africa’s first world war,” as observers have called it, with soldiers from neighboring countries joining in the mayhem. The troops have various agendas: Many are fighting for control of the region’s extraordinary mineral wealth. Others are out to grab whatever they can get.

But you have to go back further than 1996 to understand what is going on in the Congo today. This country has been tortured for more than 120 years, beginning with King Leopold II of Belgium, who “acquired” the Congo and, between 1885 and 1908, exterminated an estimated 10 million people, about half the population. The violent consequences of genocide and colonialism have had a profound impact on the psyche of the Congolese. Despite a 2003 peace agreement and recent elections, armed groups continue to terrorize the eastern half of the country. Overall the war has left nearly 4 million people dead—more than in any other conflict since World War II—and resulted in the rape of hundreds of thousands of women and girls.

In Bukavu, the people escaping the fighting walk from early morning to late at night. They walk and walk, searching for a way to buy or sell a tomato, or for a banana for their baby. It is a relentless river of humans, anxious and hungry. “People used to eat three meals a day,” says Dr. Mukwege. “Now they are lucky to eat one.”

Everyone knows the doctor, an ob-gyn. He waves and stops to inquire about this person’s health, that person’s mother. Most doctors, teachers and lawyers fled the Congo after the wars started. It never occurred to Dr. Mukwege to leave his people at their most desperate hour.

He first became aware of the epidemic of rape in 1996. “I saw women who had been raped in an extremely barbaric way,” he recalls. “First, the women were raped in front of their children, their husbands and neighbors. Second, the rapes were done by many men at the same time. Third, not only were the women raped, but their vaginas were mutilated with guns and sticks. These situations show that sex was being used as a weapon that is cheap.

“When rape is done in front of your family,” he continues, “it destroys everyone. I have seen men suffer who watched their wives raped; they are not mentally stable anymore. The children are in even worse condition. Most of the time, when a woman suffers this much violence, she is not able to bear children afterward. Clearly these rapes are not done to satisfy any sexual desire but to destroy the soul. The whole family and community are broken.”

We arrive at Panzi Hospital, a spread-out complex of about a dozen buildings. Eight years ago Dr. Mukwege created a special maternity ward here with an operating room. Panzi as a whole has 334 beds, 250 of which now hold female victims of sexual violence. The hospital and its surrounding property have become, essentially, a village of raped women. The grounds are overwhelmed with children and hunger and need. Every day at least two children here die from malnutrition. Then there are the many problems that result from severe trauma: women with nightmares and insomnia, women rejected by their husbands, women who have no interest in nurturing the babies of their rapists, women and children with nowhere to go.

It is early morning, and the hospital courtyard has been transformed into a temporary church. Women dressed in their most colorful, or perhaps only, pagne (a six-yard piece of brightly patterned cloth that can be wrapped into a dress or skirt) sit waiting for the doctor to arrive and lead the prayer service that begins each day. A dedicated staff of female nurses and social workers are there as well, dressed in their starched white jackets. There is singing, a combination of Pentecostal calls and Swahili rhythms, Sunday-morning voices calling up Jesus.

This morning service is a kind of daily gathering of strength and unity. When the women sing, everything else seems to disappear. They are with the sun, the sky, the drums, each other. They are alive in their bodies, momentarily safe and free.

As they sing, Dr. Mukwege tells me stories about the women in the chorus. Many were naked when they arrived, or starving. Many were so badly damaged he is amazed they are singing at all. He takes enormous pride in their recovery. “I will never be ashamed,” the women sing. “God gave me a new heart that I can be very strong.”

“At the beginning I used to hear patients’ stories,” Dr. Mukwege tells me. “Now I abstain.” I soon understand why. I meet Nadine (like others in this story, she agreed to be photographed, but asked that her name be changed, as she could be subject to reprisals for speaking out), who tells me a tale so horrendous it will haunt me for years to come.

When we begin talking, Nadine seems utterly disassociated from her surroundings—far away. “I’m 29,” she begins. “I am from the village of Nindja. Normally there was insecurity in our area. We would hide many nights in the bush. The soldiers found us there. They killed our village chief and his children. We were 50 women. I was with my three children and my older brother; they told him to have sex with me. He refused, so they cut his head and he died.”

Nadine’s body is trembling. It is hard to believe these words are coming out of a woman who is still alive and breathing. She tells me how one of the soldiers forced her to drink his urine and eat his feces, how the soldiers killed 10 of her friends and then murdered her children: her four-year-old and two-year-old boys and her one-year-old girl. “They flung my baby’s body on the ground like she was garbage,” Nadine says. “One after another they raped me. From that my vagina and anus were ripped apart.”

Nadine holds onto my hand as if she were drowning in a tsunami of memory. As devastated as she is, it is clear that she needs to be telling this story, needs me to listen to what she is saying. She closes her eyes and says something I cannot believe I’m hearing. “One of the soldiers cut open a pregnant woman,” she says. “It was a mature baby and they killed it. They cooked it and forced us to eat it.”

Incredibly, Nadine was the only one of the 50 women to escape. “When I got away from the soldiers, there was a man passing. He said, ‘What is that bad smell?’ It was me; because of my wounds, I couldn’t control my urine or feces. I explained what had happened. The man wept right there. He and some others brought me to the Panzi Hospital.”

She stops. Neither of us has breathed. Nadine looks at me, longing for me to make sense of what she’s related. She says, “When I got here I had no hope. But this hospital helped me so much. Whenever I thought about what happened, I became mad. I believed I would lose my mind. I asked God to kill me. Dr. Mukwege told me: Maybe God didn’t want me to lose my life.”

Nadine later tells me that the doctor was right. As she fled the slaughter, she says, she saw an infant lying on the ground next to her slain parents. Nadine rescued the girl; now having a child to care for gives her reason to keep going. “I can’t go back to my village. It’s too dangerous. But if I had a place to live I could go to school. I lost my children but I’m raising this child as my own. This girl is my future.”

I stay for a week at Panzi. Women line up to tell me their stories. They come into the interview numb, distant, glazed over, dead. They leave alive, grateful, empowered. I begin to understand that the deepest wound for them is the sense that they have been forgotten, that they are invisible and that their suffering has no meaning. The simple act of listening to them has enormous impact. The slightest touch or kindness restores their faith and energy. The strength of these women is remarkable, as is their unparalleled resiliency. Dr. Mukwege tells me I need to meet Alfonsine (her name also has been changed). “Her story really touched me,” he says. “Her body, her case is the worst I have ever seen, but she has given us all courage.”

Alfonsine is thin and poised, profoundly calm. She tells me she was walking through the forest when she encountered a lone soldier. “He followed me and then forced me to lie down. He said he would kill me. I struggled with him hard; it went on for a long time. Then he went for his rifle, pressed it on the outside of my vagina and shot his entire cartridge into me. I just heard the voice of bullets. My clothes were glued to me with blood. I passed out.”

Dr. Mukwege tells me, “I never saw such destruction. Her colon, bladder, vagina and rectum were basically gone. She had lost her mind. I was sure she wouldn’t make it. I rebuilt her bladder. Sometimes you don’t even know where you are going. There’s no map. I operated on her six times, and then I sent her to Ethiopia so they could heal the incontinence problem, and they did.”

“I was in bed when I first met Dr. Mukwege,” Alfonsine says. “He caressed my face. I lived at Panzi for six months. He helped me spiritually. He showed me how many times God makes miracles. He built me up morally.”

I look at Alfonsine’s petite body and imagine the scars beneath her humble white clothes. I imagine the reconstructed flesh, the agony she experienced after being shot. I listen carefully. I cannot detect a drop of bitterness or any desire for revenge. Instead, her attention is fixed on transforming the future. She tells me with great pride, “I am now studying to be a nurse. My first choice is to work at Panzi. It was the nurses who nurtured me day after day, who loved me back into living.”

Alfonsine has ambitions that go beyond Panzi: “I feel like a big person in my community; I can do something for my people. Women must lead our country. They know the way.”

Every day about a dozen new women arrive at Panzi Hospital. Most come for surgery to repair a fistula, a rip in their internal tissue. There are two types of fistulas seen here: One is the aftermath of brutal rape, the other the result of birth complications, something that could be prevented if there were adequate maternity health care. These obstetric fistulas are the result of abnormal tearing during the birth process. Many occur when women flee the militias while they are in labor; there is no time to give birth, and the baby dies inside. The women who make it here are the lucky ones. They limp on homemade canes made from tree branches; they trudge slowly in deep pain. Some have walked 40 miles. Because it takes so long to get to the hospital, women have no chance to receive the anti-HIV medications that must be taken within 48 hours after rape. Health experts fear that in a few years, there will be an explosion of AIDS in the Congo.

Dr. Mukwege was once the only doctor at Panzi Hospital able to perform fistula surgery; now he has trained four others. The hospital does 1,000 such operations a year.

I sit in on a typical operation in a clean, safe, but seriously underequipped operating room (nurses use torn pieces of a green dressing gown to tie the woman’s ankles to the stirrups). I am able to see the fistula—a hole in the tissue between the woman’s vaginal wall and bladder. A hole in her body. A hole in her soul. A hole where her confidence, her esteem, her spirit, her light, her urine leak out.

Because of the prevalence of fistulas, the Panzi complex is soaked in urine. The smell pervades everything. Pee spills out of women in a huge, dirt-floored hangarlike space where hundreds sit all day. Pee spills out in classrooms, leaving puddles on the floor. The women are always wet. Their legs chafe and their skin burns. There are many little girls in pee-stained dresses roaming around Panzi; shy and ashamed, they, too, are victims of rape. The week of my visit, a state agency had turned off the water for the hospital after billing Panzi $70,000 (an insane amount by Congolese standards) because it heard that the hospital, which is private, was receiving money from the West. Staff had to bring in buckets of water from the surrounding neighborhood. To have hundreds of women with fistula-caused incontinence and no water seemed like a crime upon a crime.

I can’t help wondering what happened in Dr. Mukwege’s life that compelled him to work here, sometimes 14 hours a day. “I was born in Bukavu on March 1, 1955,” he tells me. “During my young age my mother was suffering with asthma. In the night when she became ill, I was the one who would go and look for a nurse or bring her medication. We all thought she would die. Even now, each birthday she celebrates, I am so happy to see her alive.

“My father was a pastor. He was very gentle, very human. From him I got the caring to treat patients. When we would go and visit sick people together, he would pray. I would ask, ‘Why can’t you give them tablets or prescriptions?’ He said, ‘I am not a doctor.’ I decided then that prayer is not enough. People must take things into their own hands. Asking God does not change anything. He gives us the ability to say yes or no. You must use your hands, your mind. When I receive women here who are hungry, I can’t say, ‘God bless you.’ I have to give them something to eat. When someone is suffering, I can’t tell her about God, I have to treat her pain. You can’t hide yourself in religion. Not a solution.”

Dr. Mukwege began as a general practitioner, focusing on pediatrics. When he worked in a clinic in Lemera, a village south of Bukavu, he saw dreadful things happening in maternity. “Women were coming in bleeding day after day, many with severe infections. A woman had a baby and carried it dead in her vagina for a week. It was terrible. This helped me make a total engagement in a new career.”

He went back to school to study gynecology in Angers, France, and then returned to Lemera to train the staff in obstetrics and gynecology. After he moved to Bukavu he created a special maternity ward at Panzi. Women who were victims of extreme sexual violence began to arrive. The number grew every day.

Who was—and is—raping the women? The better question might be, who isn’t?

The perpetrators include the Interahamwe, the Hutu fighters who fled neighboring Rwanda in 1994 after committing genocide there; the Congolese army; a loose assortment of armed civilians; even U.N. peacekeepers. Christine Schuler Deschryver, who works for a German aid organization and is a fierce advocate for Panzi Hospital and Congolese women, says, “All of them are raping women. It is a country sport. Any person in uniform is an enemy to women.”

Many women do not even report the violations, because they are afraid of rejection by their husbands and families. Although there are laws against rape in the Congo, if a woman reports her rape and her rapist is arrested, he can pay his way out and come back and rape her again. Or murder her.

Dr. Mukwege, in contrast, is motivating a different kind of healing army. I speak with a hospital employee named Bonane. “I was in Uganda,” he says. “I saw the doctor on TV. He was explaining the atrocities. I realized these are my mothers and sisters. I was so inspired, I came here to work with him.”

Dr. Mukwege is married with five children, but his brother, Herman, tells me his family doesn’t see him much because his devotion to the women has consumed his life. Although the doctor’s energy never flags, I notice an underlying exhaustion in his face and his being, a sleepless despair that comes from dwelling constantly amid violence and cruelty. He says to me, “When you rape a woman, you destroy life and you destroy your own life. Animals don’t do this. When a pigeon has sex with another pigeon, it is kind. I am wondering how man has the power of such destruction.”

And yet, the status of women in the Congo was dismal long before the wars started. The women work all day in the field and market, carrying the Congo on their backs (sometimes up to 200 pounds in bags strapped to their foreheads). They prepare the dinner, wash the clothes, clean the house, take care of the children, have mandatory sex with their husbands. They have no power, no rights and no value. Many women I talk to ask why I am “wasting my time” with them.

I interview a man who is the keeper of a gorilla preserve. He tells me that when dangerous militias began staking out territory in the park, he went to their commanders and asked if their soldiers would work with him to protect the gorillas. In the end they all agreed. I ask him why he didn’t feel compelled to do the same for the women. The question surprised him. He had no answer.

I ask the doctor about the Congo’s leader, Joseph Kabila, who in November 2006 became the country’s first democratically elected president in 46 years and promised to be the “craftsman of peace.” Are things getting better?

Dr. Mukwege sighs. “Kabila,” he says, “has done nothing. The fighting here in the east has not stopped. During 2004 my life was threatened; I got phone calls warning me to stop my work or die. The calls have ceased, but it is still very dangerous.

“Visitors come from the international community,” he continues. “They eat sandwiches and cry, but they do not come back with help. Even President Kabila has never put his foot here. His wife was here. She wept, but she has done nothing.”

UNICEF, ECHO (the humanitarian aid office of the European Commission) and PMU (a Swedish humanitarian organization) are the major supporters of Panzi. Although the hospital can always use more money, the real need is for a political response to the violence. Barring that, Dr. Mukwege would at least like to get real protection for the women once they leave the hospital. “I patch them up and send them back home,” he says, “but there is no guarantee they will not be raped again. There have been several cases where women have come back a second time, more destroyed than the first.”

On my last day, the doctor asks me if I will lead some exercises for the women that will help alleviate their trauma. We go to the hangarlike building where 250 depressed and sick women are waiting. We begin with breathing. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. Then we attach a noise to the breath. Other noises follow. One after another, noise after noise. Then we attach a movement. There is stomping. There is punching. There is mad waving of arms. The women are up on their feet, screaming, releasing guttural sounds of sorrow, rage, terror. In a matter of minutes, I watch them go from broken, mute women to wild, laughing, ferocious beings.

In the midst of this energy, Dr. Mukwege challenges the women to a dance contest. Celebration and power explode from their bodies. A part of each woman is fierce, unbreakable. No one has killed their spirits. The doctor whispers to me, “When I see this joy, this life in the women, I know why I must come back here every day.”

The women’s frenzy builds and builds. They dance in the hot African sun. They dance in the open road. They literally dance us up a steep hill, hundreds of women and children moving in a single, radiant feminine mass.

If 250 women who have been raped, torn, starved and tortured can find the strength to dance us up a mountain, surely the rest of us can find the resources and will to guarantee their future.

*Eve Ensler is a playwright, an activist and the founder of V-Day. Her latest book is Insecure at Last. This essay first appeared in Glamour Magazine (http://www.glamour.com).

Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Emma Njoki Wamai reflects on the 2007 I6 Days of Activism Campaign and notes the positive impact on Sauti Ya Wanawake (The Voice of Women) such as strengthening the organization's relationship with the provincial administration. This has led to police and the chiefs’ working together with SYW on cases of sexual and gender based violence.

The Sauti Ya Wanawake[1] grassroots women’s movement members recount their experiences with sexual and gender based violence with an uncomfortable familiarity. In the dusty and desolate sisal plantations, national parks and the savanna grasslands in Taveta, Taita and Kinango districts in the Kenyan Coast, everyday women and children are sexually abused at an alarming rate.

In Taita, Taveta, Kwale and Kinango Districts in Kenya, sexual and gender based violence has been rampant for a long time due to retrogressive cultural practices and poverty which deprives the most vulnerable people, mostly women and children their human rights. In 2007 alone, 62 girls and women and 2 boys were defiled and raped (Children’s Department, Taita Taveta District). According to the Children’s Officer and the Sauti ya Wanawake movement[2] in the region, reported rape and defilement of children is excercabeted in the district by the complacent culture of wazee wa vigogoni[3] laxity of provincial administration, entry of illicit drugs and brews from neighbouring Tanzania. Of these 62, only 20 cases were taken to court. It is notable that these were reported cases and many other cases especially where women were violated, were not reported to the police since the perpetrators are normally relatives and fear of castigation by the community.

Coincidentally, the theme of the 2007 16 days of activism campaign, ‘Demanding Implementation, Challenging Obstacles: End Violence against Women’ could not have been more appropriate to the sisters and mothers of Taita Taveta who have watched helplessly as their children’s childhood is hurriedly ended by lurking man made beasts.

Inspired by the need to end violence against women in their communities, they sought partnership with like minded organizations such as the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) ,a non governmental organization whose vision is promoting and protecting human rights and the Canadian International Development Agency Gender Equity Support Project (CIDA-GESP) to mainstream strategic and practical gender issues in the existing pre election promises by aspiring candidates and to raise awareness on legal forms of redress such as the New Sexual Offences Act through dialogue forums and community radio stations. They also trained local village elders, local provincial administration, religious leaders, youth and women on the effects of violence against women and erected 4 information billboards in remote villages offering community members safe spaces to deposit information on violence against women and children.

Mama Dorcas Jibran, the coordinator of the Sauti Ya Wanawake says that the impact of the 16days of Activism 2007 is profound on the safety of women and children in the three districts barely 3 months later. Mama Dorcas shared these achievements of the 2007, 16 days of Activism campaign which include;

- Sustainable Partnerships. This project has strengthened Sauti ya Wanawake’s relationship with the provincial administration and as a result, Sauti ya Wanawake, police and the chiefs’ work together on cases of sexual and gender based violence. The Divisional Officer’s office (DO) has been facilitating Sauti ya Wanawake to visit remote places incase of an alarm and they have also been making follow-ups together. Mama Dorcas is currently working with the chiefs and the Councilors to establish modalities of setting up information boxes in every location.

- The grassroot women’s movement now has the capacity to articulate issues and the village representatives are called upon to advice on gender issues in churches and local development committees. For example, Mama Dorcas and Mama Emma Mailus are normally called upon by their local police posts to advice and train the police when a sex offender is arrested.

- Lastly, Sauti Ya Wanawake and the residents of Taita, Taveta and Kinango have benefited from the information billboards which are positioned in every constituency. Mama Docras Jibran has already received five cases on violence against women and children and succession issues from women and she has referred the individuals for further support to Police and the Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) Mombassa Office.

There is need for the Africa Union Members states to fully domesticate the numerous instruments and regional charters that recognize the hardships women like Mama Dorcas face.

The Convention on Elimination against All forms of Discrimination (CEDAW) is one such instrument. The African Women’s Protocol of the African peoples Human Rights Charter is another that criminalizes any violence committed against women.

The time is now!

*Emma Njoki Wamai is a Programme Associate in the Kenya Human Rights Commission

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

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Onyekachi Wambu looks at post-liberation South Africa and the contradictions of promise and reality and duly warns that the ANC government might very well be condemning South Africa to repeat Zimbabwe's mistakes.

This story has been brewing since the mid-1990s, and, as usual, we have ignored it our peril.

Despite all the 'Rainbow' dreams, everytime I have visited SA since 1992 I have been more & more worried about the real fundamentals - a very poor, and increasingly angry people, amidst great wealth which is not distributed equitably. African people are very patient but it usually takes about 10 -15 years after independence (see Zimbabwe) for people to realise that they can't eat 'freedom', and for real politics to kick in.

The economic facts in SA are this - the deal that buried apartheid in 1994, contained no redistribution of economic power. Black empowerment would only come if the economy expanded and through some mild forms of positive discrimination (BEE). Affirmative action (see what it has done for white women in the US) only really benefits a small minority of middleclass, educated, or (politically) connected Africans, just as it has done in SA. So it meant, that for the vast majority to benefit - the economy needed to expand more than 5%. At 5% it would just about absorb those coming onto the job market, not soaking up the historic apartheid unemployed.

Now watch what happened in the real world. Between 1994 - 2004 growth averaged around 3%. In 2004 it reached 4%. By 2005 (eleven years after apartheid ended) it finally reached 5% and only went beyond that in 2006 and 2007. Even then the last 3 year growth has not been pro-poor growth, but has benefited the already rich, selling commodities, etc.

Nevertheless the SA government by 2005, alongside its enormous house building, water and electrification programmes, was finally in a postition to deal with its historic unemployed and those coming onto the job market

Only it wasn't. Because at the same time over the last 13 years, 5 million new migrants had come into the country (3 million from Zimbabwe alone), many of them better educated and working for less money than native South Africans. So even the growth of the last 3 years has not really made an impact on those native unemployement figures and the anger has continued simmering.

This anger has been expressed all along since 1994 as a crime problem - I always feared what would happen eventually when a 'demagogue' would exploit it and make it 'political'. I thought when this happened, the emergent 'political' campaign to gain traction would target the whites -as in Zimbabwe. But I guess SA is different. People there can see the economic disaster in Zim, when international capital and white expertise fled, and do not want a repetition (although for how long?).

Most voters are still reluctant to punish the ANC government (which has given many a pension, houses, water, electricity) for this state of affairs. This reluctance is reinforced by the fact that there is not a viable opposition (the main ones being all nationalist/ethinic minority parties DA,Inkatha, PAC, etc).

So the mob scape-goat and attack foreigners.

Perhaps as William Gumede suggests elsewhere, it might be time for the ANC to break up and for a wing of it to become a workers party -championing the poor and another wing to represent the interests of the middle-class. Politics would then be about finding a balance that satisfies all and could then be done peacfully through votes and street protests, not through violence and killing, as in so much of Africa.

This might even be the best option, given the reluctance of Southern African liberation movements to concede legitimacy to other forces that did not 'win' the liberation war and establish the new post liberation state. Different traditions within the ANC would thus represent the different emerging interests following the national liberation phase.

The ANC need only to look over the horizon to Zimbabwe, to see a liberation party that still seeks to manage within itself, the tensions and contradictions within the nation. Having failed to do this and people went elsewhere to establish another possibility, ZANU-PF, wanting to continue monopolising power, decided not to recognise that alternative, deepening the original crisis even further.

Presideent Mbeki, having failed to heed the real meaning of the Zimbabwe crisis (how to transit from liberation to ordinary politics), might be doomed to repeat Zimbabwe. And the catalyst for the unravelling crisis in SA might be those self same Zimbabwe migrants who have fled because they cannot find a space to engage in peaceful politics back home.

*Onyekachi Wambu's lastest publication is 'Under the tree of talking - leadership for change in Africa' (2007, British Council). This article first appeared in the Africa Without Borders Forum.

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

Southern African film makers implore Southern Africa "governments, politicians and citizens to rise and send an unequivocal message to South Africa condemning these acts of violence."

We join the families who have fallen victims of this violence and offer our compassionate thoughts. Notwithstanding, we also implore our own governments, politicians and citizens to rise and send an unequivocal message to South Africa condemning these acts of violence and dissipating of innocent lives due to internal problems in South Africa.

In the last few days South African and indeed African News has been littered by deplorable acts of inhuman violence targeting many immigrants, particularly from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi. The images emanating from the streets of Johannesburg and some outlying areas are horrendous and send a lot of chills for a country that is highly acclaimed for democratic practice in the sub-region. This is a very unfortunate development and is reminiscent of the very Apartheid era that the countries and nations' of the world deplored not long ago.

For South Africa, this single act among many should be a re-awakening that things are not in the right perspective. For the poor, and sometimes desperate immigrants who have now fallen victims of violence from their once 'brothers' and 'sisters' in South Africa. Zimbabweans, and in particular, those that have sought refuge in many parts of South Africa have not done so by choice. They are victims of circumstances. They have had to live their homeland due to among other reasons, the degenerating economic and political situation in that country.

As an institution based in Zambia - a country and people, which shared the desires and supported the liberation struggles in Southern Africa - including that of both Zimbabwe and South Africa among others - it is dismaying to see such kind of anger and frustrations being directed to each other. Indeed, the circumstance leading to this are many but if we go by the kind of rationale for perpetuating this violence, the South African leadership especially the political leadership (both President Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma) should play a central role in reminding South Africa itself on the neccessity to respect and tolerate the very people who kept them in their own countries in a quest to dismantle the apartheid regime. It is their moral and legal right to be at the fore-front of persuading and encourgaging tolerance in the new South Africa. Suffice to say that this is a very unfortunate development that needs to be addressed.

We join the families who have fallen victims of this violence and offer our compassionate thoughts. Notwithstanding, we also implore our own governments, politicians and citizens to rise and send an unequivocal message to South Africa condemning these acts of violence and dissipating of innocent lives due to internal problems in South Africa. The older generation of South Africa, need to rise to the occassion and stop this violence being perpetuated by the youths. In a similar vein, let us also try to address the circumstances leading to immigrants running away from their countries. We cannot allow Zimbabwe to channell over 5 million people away from their homes seeking livelihoods in neighbouring countries when only less than thirty years ago they were triumphantically taking black leadership and power away from the Ian Smith regime.

*Abdon Yezi is a Senior Partner at the Yezi-Arts Promotions and Productions and Board Chairperson of the Southern Africa Communication for Development.

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

The Social Movements Indaba (SMI) – a co-ordinating national body of social movements, civil society and activist organizations – is organizing with its affiliated organizations and immigrant communities to roll back the groundswell of xenophobia.

In the years since its formation in 2002, the SMI has linked organizations of the poor in struggle for basic services, international solidarity and against police repression. At its last national meeting in December in Cape Town, the SMI identified xenophobia as a pervasive problem in communities and undertook to campaign against hatred of foreigners. Now that the crisis of hate crime is no longer foreboding and is terrifyingly HERE, there is no time to stall and wish we were better prepared. We are without hesitation committed to the struggles for social justice, internationalism and solidarity with all repressed people.

While the police have been deployed to try keep a lid on the pressure that has boiled over, this is no solution to the safety and security of all. As a xenophobic force in Johannesburg pre-existing the outbreak of violence, the police cannot be trusted to be more than the brute barrier between perpetrators and their targeted victims. The South African Police Services and Johannesburg Metro Police harass immigrants to solicit bribes as a matter of practice. Calling on the police to 'do their work' as president Thabo Mbeki and his government have done does not, therefore, address the issues of safety and security amongst immigrant communities. The refugee communities do not trust the police as impartial arbiters of the conflict. The police conducted a brutal raid on the Central Methodist Church on the 31st of January 2008 under the pretext of crime prevention. Criminalisation of immigrants is a smokescreen for deportation and bribery that the police has not cleared.

Long-lasting safety and security for all does not include deportation of foreign nationals, whether voluntary or not. Xenophobia's origins lie within the conditions of poverty in which the majority of south Africans live. Immigrants have been targeted for their ethnic difference and for their very similarity with their persecutors. Seen as competitors for scarce jobs and housing, south Africans have misdirected their anger at conditions of poverty that are unchanging. Their fellow brothers and sisters who are enduring the same cannot be responsible for what the economic and political system has created.

While we struggle for a change to the neo-liberal capitalist system that has created this reality, rearguard struggles for safety and security of immigrants in the country must continue. The SMI gives thanks for those humanitarian organizations, emergency services and churches that are trying to stem the tide of bloodletting and forced removals. We will organize against the creation of refugee camps and work towards the reintegration of immigrants in our communities. In working to recover our common humanity and restore calm, delegations from the SMI are meeting with community-based organizations in Alex and the inner city, and as the programme of action to roll-back the hate unfolds, the SMI will be going further afield to speak to affected communities.

The SMI is mobilizing social movements, immigrant communities, NGOs and concerned residents from poor areas around the province for a march this Saturday, the 24th of May. The march will gather at Marks Park (Empire and Hospital Road) from 9a.m., proceed through Hillbrow and stop at the Departments of Home Affairs and Housing before ending at the Library Gardens. The message marchers will be conveying is that our struggle is common and knows no borders.

— No one is illegal —

*The Social Movements Indaba includes amongst other organizations: the Anti Privatisation Forum, Jubilee South Africa, Imbawula Trust, Sounds of Edutainment, Umzabalazo we Jubilee, Lesbian and Gay Equality Project, Inner City Resource Centre, Kliptown Concerned Residents, Khanya College, Earthlife Africa (Johannesburg), Palestinian Solidarity Committee, Golden Triangle Crisis Committee, Samancor Retrenched Workers Crisis Committee, African Renaissance Civic Movement, Group of Refugees Without Voice.

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

Commemorating Malcolm X's Birthday, appraise existing African American leadership and call for a Black united front that can shake the foundation of a border-less neoliberal globalization.

"Power never takes a back step--only in the face of more power."

"Dr. King wants the same thing I want--Freedom." --Malcolm X

On what would have been Malcolm's eighty-third birthday, it is appropriate that we speak to the urgency for unity and the critical need for a functional national Black united front. Malcolm argued for unity across religious, class and ideological lines on the basis of nationality. Our movement has attempted to implement organizational expressions of his call for unity. Such vehicles like the Congress of African People (CAP), the National Black Assembly (NBA) with its Black Agenda, the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC), and the Black Radical Congress (BRC) with its Freedom Agenda have all met with varying degrees of success but with little sustainability. We have to turn the corner on building united front organizations to those that are actually sustainable--the conditions of our people demand it.

In this period of neoliberal globalization, in which we see the gutting of social-welfare programs that due to national oppression never fully provided for the needs of Black people, our communities are faced with stagnant or declining incomes, double-digit unemployment, a crisis of home foreclosures and bankruptcies. Add to these depression-like conditions the fact that Black males are facing a criminal justice system that incarcerates them at more than eight times the rate of whites. If they are not locking our young men up, they are shooting them down in cold blood with no fear of prosecution. The Sean Bell case in New York City is just the latest case in point. Moreover, there is the federal government's criminal response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the growing attacks on our communities through gentrification, the use of our youth as cannon fodder for imperialist wars, and the criminalization of our youth. This latter phenomenon is causing our community elders to fear their own children and grandchildren. It's clear that that we need an instrument of struggle to fight back.

While some may argue that there is a vacuum of leadership in our communities, we would argue that there is leadership, but it is one that has retreated from the progressive agenda of the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. As Brother Malcolm would say, "I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action." Today, through corporate and government funding from the likes of groups like Wal-Mart and regional and local developers, we have organizations doing for our people rather than empowering them to do for themselves. The result is demobilization and fragmentation within the Black Liberation Movement (BLM). The national Black community's response to Katrina is indicative of this condition.

During the Civil Rights movement, it was the program and tactics of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the left wing of that movement, which played a leading role during that period. They were not the groups that got all the press and money but they were some of the forces that set the line of march for the movement. Similarly, it was revolutionary nationalists and developing Marxists who set the direction within CAP, the National Black Political Assembly, and ALSC during the '70s.

The Achilles Heel of these young radicals was their lack of a basic united-front framework that would engage the many organizations and activists in developing programs, tactical plans and slogans to guide coalitions and campaigns. Instead, sectarian maneuvering and struggling with allies as if they were the enemy became the practice of the day, which has led to our current situation where the middle and right wings of the BLM are playing the leading roles. While we cannot ignore the role of the state in damaging these efforts, more forces having had a basic united-front approach would have allowed us to better withstand the state's penetration of our efforts.

Having correctly summed up the sectarian, undemocratic membership policies and patriarchal error of the '70s New Communist Movement, Black, Asian, Latina/o and Anglo-American leftists entered the Rainbow Coalition Presidential candidacy of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. However, the Black Left was not playing the leading role in the Jackson Campaign. It was the National Black petit bourgeoisie that was taking the lead and fighting for a more prominent role in the Democratic Party. Despite their hard work on issue development and grassroots mobilization, some of these forces, like Jackson, were seduced by their class origin to become "power brokers" for their nationality and class in the Democratic Party. Instead of creating counter-hegemonic and popular forms of organizations, they relied exclusively on the Jackson campaign organizations for their education and mobilization of the masses. So, as Jackson sought to pull the reins on the "Rainbow Challenge" in the interests of the Democratic Party, the left forces were not able to challenge Jackson's retreat from the Rainbow program.

As the Black Left entered the '90s, the increased power of neoliberal globalization; the massacre in Tiananmen Square in China; the demise of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; and the question raised at the anti-globalization protest in Seattle, "Where are the People of Color?" were indications of the fragmentation, the lack of a coherent approach to Black Liberation in the US and the overall weakness of the Left in the era of postmodern identity politics with its aversion to a guiding political narrative.

In the mid-'90s the Nation of Islam, under the leadership of Minister Louis Farrakhan and Minister Ben (Chavis) Muhammad, stepped into this vacuum of leadership in the BLM to propose the Million Man March. Held on October 16, 1995, the march attracted some 1.5 million men. Many speakers spoke in support of voter registration and Black self-help programs. They were also very critical of the Republican so-called Contract with America, which was seen as an attack on programs like welfare, Medicaid, housing programs and student aid programs. However, its male-only focus, religious overtones, and the Nation of Islam's top-down organizing style kept many Black leftists away or at arm's length. Two years later, fed up with unemployment, homelessness, teen pregnancy and Black-on-Black crime fueled by the crack epidemic ravaging our communities, several hundred thousand Black women gathered in Philadelphia on October 24 for the Million Woman March. Broader in composition and led by grassroots women from the East Coast, South and mid-West, this march was held without the slick marketing and big-name speakers at the Million Man March. This march was followed in 1998 by the million Youth March and the Million Worker March in 2004. However, a major weakness of these efforts was the lack of organizational development after the demonstrations, as well as declining numbers after the success of the Million Woman March.

The formation of the Black Radical Congress (BRC) in June 1998, drawing some 2000 participants, would break the cycle of "show up but no follow-up" associated with the Million More Marches. The BRC was inclusive of the various ideological trends in the BLM, e.g. socialists, communists, LGBT, feminists, and revolutionary Black nationalists. In the years following its formation, the BRC would develop over a dozen chapters and carry out local and national campaigns like Education Not Incarceration and Fightback against the War. It was also involved in issues like HIV/AIDS, police violence and in defense of the Charleston, SC dock workers (who had been charged with inciting to riot as they sought to defend their rights and living standards.)

However, in the last five years it has become increasingly clear that some of the initial leaders of the BRC were overextended and needed to pull back. It has also become clear that the infrastructure envisioned at the founding Congress could not be sustained with limited resources and a volunteer staff. So while it has seen a reduction in the number in chapters and Local Organizing Committees, the BRC has advanced a radical analysis on various topics through its listserve, leaflets and newsletters.

This June 20-22 the Black Radical Congress will hold its 10th anniversary congress at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. At this congress, the BRC will address such issues as the state of the Black Liberation Movement and what the BRC should look like as an organization in order to respond to the current crisis facing Black people. Other issues to be addressed are how one funds an effective organization with independence and sustainability as guiding principles. Lastly, the congress will deal with leadership and governance for the organization. Notwithstanding the good work of the BRC, it remains just another organization in the fragmented Black Liberation Movement and has not lived up to its initial hope and potential as a space that successfully and for a sustained period brought together diverse radical ideological currents within the Black Liberation Movement.

Although the devastation and neglect caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the Gulf Coast provided a golden opportunity for a united approach, this has not been realized. As Malcolm would say, "Our people have made the mistake of confusing the methods with the objectives. As long as we agree on objectives, we should never fall out with each other just because we believe in different methods, or tactics, or strategy. We have to keep in mind at all times that we are not fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as free humans in this society." Thus, there have been struggles around issues like organizing methodology, leadership accountability, patriarchy, how to promote grassroots leadership, and the role of "base building" in the context of building the Black united front on the ground in the Gulf Coast Reconstruction efforts.

This has led some of the Black left forces associated with Katrina Solidarity work to call for a Black Left Gathering on May 30-June 1 at the Sonia Hayes Stone Center at the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill. This gathering will look at the current state of the BLM, the Gulf Coast Situation, and its relationship to the overall building of a national Black united front. It will also look at the issues of the war in Iraq and its impact on the delivery of basic human services to Blacks, other people of color and the general working class.

While much of the attention of the masses is focused on the Obama campaign, we salute the Black left forces who are planning to meet to strategize on how to build unity of action of the Left and radicals of the Black Nation. Both of these motions are composed of activists and revolutionaries who have grasped Malcolm's message and are correctly summing up the errors of the movements of the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s and are in the process of trying to regroup and to rebuild a potent and effective Black Liberation Movement. In fact, Freedom Road has members working in both of these formations. We believe that these two motions need to come together in the spirit of Malcolm's call for a functional national Black united front. At the same time, we recognize that building such unity on the ground and in practice is a process rather an event. Thus, we applaud both efforts for participating in each other's events as speaker and participants.

Moreover, both gatherings will address the aftermath of Katrina and the failure to implement an adequate, democratic and rapid reconstruction. Each will examine the assaults on Black communities across the country through police murder of youth, gentrification and more. It is here that we urge that the two groups, regardless of what organizational forms they decide on for their work, combine efforts in a community-based national campaign. The "We Charge Genocide" campaign, which is up and running, presents at this moment the greatest possibility for cooperation, addresses some of the most pressing needs of our people, and can contribute in a powerful way to the rebuilding of the Black Liberation Movement.

If the Obama campaign and all that it has inspired is to have a lasting impact, it will necessitate the existence of a mass-based, viable Black Left that practices a united-front approach. If there is to be anything to build upon after the November elections, irrespective of who wins, there will need to be a strong left presence, and there will especially need to be a Black left motion that is pushing the envelope. Malcolm's orientation was toward the building of a broader and broader movement. This is as relevant today as it was in 1965. Just as relevant is the notion that if the radicals in any movement do not cohere, the forces in the middle will start to vacillate, and those on the right will gain dominance. We have seen that before, and we must not let it happen again.

*Prepared by the Nationalities Commission, Freedom Road Socialist Organization/OSCL. For more information, please visit

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

Abahlali baseMjondolo Statement on the Xenophobic Attacks

There is only one human race.

Our struggle and every real struggle is to put the human being at the centre of society, starting with the worst off.

An action can be illegal. A person cannot be illegal. A person is a person where ever they may find themselves.

If you live in a settlement you are from that settlement and you are a neighbour and a comrade in that settlement.

We condemn the attacks, the beatings, rape and murder, in Johannesburg on people born in other countries. We will fight left and right to ensure that this does not happen here in KwaZulu-Natal.

We have been warning for years that the anger of the poor can go in many directions. That warning, like our warnings about the rats and the fires and the lack of toilets, the human dumping grounds called relocation sites, the new concentration camps called transit camps and corrupt, cruel, violent and racist police, has gone unheeded.

Let us be clear. Neither poverty nor oppression justify one poor person turning on another. A poor man who turns on his wife or a poor family that turn on their neighbours must be opposed, stopped and brought to justice. But the reason why this happens in Alex and not Sandton is because people in Alex are suffering and scared for the future of their lives. They are living under the kind of stress that can damage a person. The perpetrators of these attacks must be held responsible but the people who have crowded the poor onto tiny bits of land, threatened their hold on that land with evictions and forced removals, treated them all like criminals, exploited them, repressed their struggles, pushed up the price of food and built too few houses, that are too small and too far away and then corruptly sold them must also be held responsible.

There are other truths that also need to be faced up to.

We need to be clear that the Department of Home Affairs does not treat refugees or migrants as human beings. Our members who were born in other countries tell us terrible stories about very long queues that lead only to more queues and then to disrespect, cruelty and corruption. They tell us terrible stories about police who demand bribes, tear up their papers, steal their money and send them to Lindela – a place that is even worse than a transit camp. A place that is not fit for a human being. We know that you can even be sent to Lindela if you were born in South Africa but you look 'too dark' to the police or you come from Giyani and so you don't know the word for elbow in isiZulu.

We need to be clear that in every relocation all the people without ID books are left homeless. This affects some people born in South Africa but it mostly affects people born in other countries.

We need to be clear that many politicians, and the police and the media, talk about 'illegal immigrants' as if they are all criminals. We know the damage that this does and the pain that this causes. We are also spoken about as if we are all criminals when in fact we suffer the most from crime because we have no gates or guards to protect our homes.

We need to be clear about the role of the South African government and South African companies in other countries. We need to be clear about NEPAD. We all know what Anglo-American is doing in the Congo and what our government is doing in Zimbabwe. They must also be held responsible.

We all know that South Africans were welcomed in Zimbabwe and in Zambia, even as far away as England, when they were fleeing the oppression of apartheid. In our own movement we have people who were in exile. We must welcome those who are fleeing oppression now. This obligation is doubled by the fact that our government and big companies here are supporting oppression in other countries.

People say that people born in other countries are selling mandrax. Oppose mandrax and its sellers but don't lie to yourself and say that people born in South African do not also sell mandrax or that our police do not take money from mandrax sellers. Fight for a police service that serves the people. Don't turn your suffering neighbours into enemies.

People say that people born in other countries are amagundane (rats, meaning scabs). Oppose amagundane but don't lie to yourself and say that people born in South Africa are not also amagundane. People also say that people born in other countries are willing to work for very little money bringing everyone's wages down. But we know that people are desperate and struggling to survive everywhere. Fight for strong unions that cover all sectors, even informal work. Don't turn your suffering neighbours into enemies.

People say that people born in other countries don't stand up to struggle and always run away from the police. Oppose cowardice but don't lie to yourself and say that people born in South Africa are not also cowards. Don't lie to yourself and pretend that it is the same for someone born here and someone not born here to stand up to the corrupt, violent and racist police. Fight for ID books for your neighbours so that we can all stand together for the rights of the poor. Don't turn your suffering neighbours into enemies.

People say that people born in other countries are getting houses by corruption. Oppose corruption but don't lie to yourself and say that people born in South Africa are not also buying houses from the councillors and officials in the housing department. Fight against corruption. Don't turn your suffering neighbours into enemies.

People say that people born in other countries are more successful in love because they don't have to send money home to rural areas. Oppose a poverty so bad that it even strangles love. Live for a life outside of money by fighting for an income for everyone. Don't turn your suffering neighbours into enemies.

People say that there are too many sellers on the streets and that the ones from outside must go. We need to ask ourselves why only a few companies can own so many big shops, why the police harass and steal from street traders and why the traders are being driven out of the cities. The poor man cutting hair and the poor woman selling fruit are not our enemies. Don't turn your suffering neighbours into enemies.

We all know that if this thing is not stopped a war against the Mozambicans will become a war against all the amaShangaan. A war against the Zimbabweans will become a war against the amaShona that will become a war against the amaVenda. Then people will be asking why the amaXhosa are in Durban, why the Chinese and Pakistanis are here. If this thing is not stopped what will happen to a place like Clare Estate where the people are amaXhosa, amaMpondo, amaZulu and abeSuthu; Indian and African; Muslim, Hindu and Christian; born in South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Malawai, Pakistan, Namibia, the Congo and India.

Yesterday we heard that this thing started in Warwick and in the City centre. We heard that traders had their goods stolen and that people were being checked for their complexion, a man from Ntuzuma was stopped and for being 'too black'. Tensions are high in the City centre. Last night people were running in the streets in Umbilo looking for 'amakwerkwere'. People in the tall flats were shouting down to them saying 'There are Congelese here, come up!" This thing has started in Durban. We don't know what will happen tonight.

We will do everything that we can to make sure that it goes no further. We have already decided on the following actions:

1. We will resuscitate our relations with the street traders' organisations and meet to discuss this thing with them and stay in daily contact with them.

2. We have made contact with refugee organisations and will stay in day to day contact with them. We will invite them to all our meetings and events.

3. We have made contact with senior police officers who we can trust, who are not corrupt and who wish to serve the people. They have given us their cell numbers and have promised to work with us to stop this immediately if it starts in Durban. We will ask all our people to watch for this thing and if it happens we'll be able to contact the police that we can trust immediately. They have promised to come straight away.

4. We will put this threat on the agenda of all of our meetings and events.

5. We will discuss this in every branch and in every settlement in our movement.

6. We will discuss this with our allied movements like the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign and the Landless People's Movement so that we can develop a national strategy.

7. In the coming days our members are travelling to the Northern Cape, the North West, Johannesburg and Cape Town to meet shack dwellers struggling against forced removal, corruption and lack of services. In each of these meetings we will discuss this issue.

8. We are asking all radio stations to make space for us and others to discuss this issue.

9. In the past we have not put our members born in other countries to the front because we were scared that the police would send them to Lindela. From now on we will put our members born in other countries in the front, but not with their fulll names because we still cannot trust all the police.

10. If the need arises here we will ask all our members to defend and shelter their comrades from other countries.

We hear that the political analysts are saying that the poor must be educated about xenophobia. Always the solution is to 'educate the poor'. When we get cholera we must be educated about washing our hands when in fact we need clear water. When we get burnt we must be educated about fire when in fact we need electricity. This is just a way of blaming the poor for our suffering. We want land and housing in the cities, we want to go to university, we want water and electricity – we don't want to be educated to be good at surviving poverty on our own.

The solution is not to educate the poor about xenophobia. The solution is to give the poor what they need to survive so that it becomes easier to be welcoming and generous. The solution is to stop the xenophobia at all levels of our society. Arrest the poor man who has become a murderer. But also arrest the corrupt policeman and the corrupt officials in Home Affairs. Close down Lindela and apologise for the suffering it has caused. Give papers to all the people sheltering in the police stations in Johannesburg.

It is time to ask serious questions about why it is that money and rich people can move freely around the world while everywhere the poor must confront razor wire, corrupt and violent police, queues and relocation or deportation. In South Africa some of us are moved out of the cities to rural human dumping grounds called relocation sites while others are moved all the way out of the country. Some of us are taken to transit camps and some of us are taken to Lindela. The destinations might be different but it is the same kind of oppression. Let us all educate ourselves on these questions so that we can all take action.

We want, with humility, to suggest that the people in Jo'burg move beyond making statements condemning these attacks. We suggest, with humility, that now that we are in this terrible crisis we need a living solidarity, a solidarity in action. It is time for each community and family to take in the refugees from this violence. They cannot be left in the police stations where they risk deportation. It is time for the church leaders and the political leaders and the trade union leaders to be with and live with the comrades born in other countries every day until this danger passes. Here in Durban our comrades to stand with us when the Land Invasions Unit comes to evict us or the police come to beat us. Even the priests are beaten. Now we must all stand with our comrades when their neighbours come to attack them. If this happens in the settlements here in Durban this is what we must do and what we will do.

We make the following demands to the government of South Africa:

- Close down Lindela today. Set the people free.
- Announce, today, that there will be papers for every person sheltering in your police stations.
- Ban the sale of land in the cities until all the people are housed.
- Stop all evictions and forced removals immediately.
- Do not build one more golf course estate until everyone has a house.
- Support the people of Zimbabwe, not an oppressive government that destroys the homes of the poor and uses rape and torture to control opposition.
- Arrest all corrupt people working in the police and Home Affairs.
- Announce, today, a summit between all refugee organisations and the police and Home Affairs to plan how they can be changed radically so that they begin to serve all the people living in South Africa.

*For further information please visit, or contact: S'bu Zikode: 0835470474; Zodwa Nsibande: 0828302707; Mnikelo Ndabankulu: 0797450653; Mashumi Figlan: 0795843995 Senzo (surname not given, he has no papers): 031 2691822

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

When the Government of Kenya began resettling more than 10,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) on Monday, thousands of them who have been camping at the Nakuru Agricultural Society of Kenya (ASK) show ground, some displaced persons said the Government should have reconciled them with the neighbouring communities first instead of rushing to resettle them.

Mzee Ibrahim Githatwa, 76, was among the IDPs who vowed never to go back to Keringet in Kuresoi where he had lived since the 1942 but was forcefully told to leave the premises. This is where he left when their houses were burnt in January with all the properties destroyed.

Mzee Githatwa is not only a widower, but also a father of 13 children some of whom are still depending on him. This is the man who has suffered a great deal under Moi regime and now Kibaki. During Moi he lost seven houses in the 1992 ethnic violence. Even after he could manage, together with some of his children to built five houses, they again got burnt down in January during the pos-election violence.

Even 13 farms where some of them are going to be resettled which include Sirikwa, Kiambogo, Githirika, Muthenji, Nyota, Kangawa and Lagwenda, Sasumua, Willa, Muchorwe, Karirikania, Kadonye and Nyaruai have history of violence every five years when they have general elections.

These are some of the areas that have been the scene of periodic violence since 1992. Since then fighting has not only intensified during general election years – held in 1992, 1997, 2002 and 2007 - and in 2005, when the national referendum on the country's constitution was held, but also leading to loss of properties worth million of shillings, deaths and turmoils.

The lad dispute around these areas, especially in Molo and Kuresoi is between the Kalenjin, Kikuyu and Kisii - against one another. Not forgetting that last year’s violence, in the run up to the 27 December elections intensified in affecting the Kuresoi divisions Keringet, Kuresoi, Kamara and Olenguruone as opposed to other years.

The government is forcing them back when high-ranking politicians who have been consistently implicated in organizing political violence since the 1990s have never been brought to book and continue to operate with impunity.

According to the annexes to the Ndung'u land dispute report released in 2004 the families of former presidents Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi feature prominently in the list of prominent high ranking politicians and people who matter in Kenya government as those who have grabbed public land that was recommended for repossession.

Mr Moi and five of his children, Mzee Kenyatta's widow Mama Ngina and scores of MPs, top civil servants, military officers, High Court judges and former Cabinet ministers featured in the report now and then.

Then Lands and Housing minister Amos Kimunya who releasing the report on grabbed land compiled by the Paul Ndung'u Committee without the names, can tell a lot why the issue of lad in Kenya will always remain a big problem even after forcing the displaced to go back to their disputed lands.

The report contained in the two massive volumes is measuring 10 centimetres, of which at 2,017 pages are thicker than two telephone directories. The reports were released by the Government Printer and since then no action has been taken by the government to repossess the lands.

If the government were to take action it would mean that names of all those who have been irregularly allocated public land in urban areas, settlement schemes, forests and reserves, with Moi alone owning 937 hectare farm in Narok hived off Trans Mara Forest be repossessed, then this would at least solve some of the land problems in the country.

According to the report, among President Moi's children who were illegally allocated land includes former Baringo Central MP Mr Gideon Moi and his wife Zahra, Raymond Kiprotich, Doris Choge and Jonathan Toroitich.

The problem would even be more resolved if the government were to go by the Ndungu recommendation that allocation of various parcels to Mama Ngina Kenyatta be revoked. It includes 38 hectares hived off the Kikuyu Escarpment Forest in Kiambu District in 1965, including another 36 hectares in Thika District from the same Kikuyu Escarpment forest allocated to her in 1980 for farming, which Ndungu also recommended to be reclaimed, as well as another 24 hectare parcel allocated in 1993.

Among the cabinet ministers, judges and top soldiers listed to be among beneficiaries of settlement schemes carved out of Agricultural Development Corporation farms include then minister of State William ole Ntimama (now ODM minister of Heritage), assistant minister Kipkalya Kones (now ODM minister for Roads), Court of Appeal Judge Emmanuel O'Kubasu and deputy chief of general staff, Lt Gen Nick Leshan.

Mr Ntimama who claims to be the spokesman of the Maasai communities, also human right activists, was allocated 34 acres of Moi Ndabi Farm where Mr Leshan got 233 acres. Mr Kones got 145 acres in the Agricultural Development Corporation Sirikwa scheme where the average allocations were five acres, according to the report. While Mr Justice O'Kubasu got 40 acres of ADC Jabali also in Nakuru, his land in the ADC Sirikwa scheme in Nakuru District, a public figure that got more than the average that is, Mr Justice William Tuiyot who has since died got 85 acres in the ADC Sirikwa scheme.

Other according to the report include retired Judge Mbito who was also allocated 50 acres of the ADC Zea, while a former commissioner of prisons, Mr Edward Lokopoyit got 90 acres of the land.

According to Daily Nation, December 17, 2004, story by David Okwemba ad Mburu Mwangi, former MPs Joseph Kimkung (Mt Elgon) and Jesse Maizs got 30 and 15 acres respectively in the ADC ZEA area. Former Principal Immigration Officer Henry ole Ndiema got 50 acres and a house in the same area.

A former permanent secretary, Mr William Kimalat got 80 acres of ADC Jabali, while a former top policeman Stanley Manyinya got 130 acres in the same area. Former PC Ishmael Chelang'a (since dead) got 90 acres.

Former MPs G. G. Mokku, Japheth Ekidor, Immanuel Imana, Mr David Sudi, Boaz Kaino and Francis Mutwol also benefited. Mr Kaino got 50 acres, Mr Imana 25, Mr Ekidor 20, Mr Mutwol 10 and Mr Sudi 20 from the ADC Milimani land.

The report also implicates many top soldiers and also clerics as among those listed as having been allocated the land. Most of the Moi Ndabi land was allocated by the director of lands.

Another prominent figure in the list is Kerio Central MP Nicholas Biwott who if could lose the 161 hectares in Kaptagat forest allocated to him in 1994 for the Maria Soti Education Trust was going to benefit thousands of landless people.

Other prominent politicians whom Ngungu recommended that their illegally acquired lad could be repossessed included former minister, a former head of the civil service and a former permanent secretary who stood to lose about 1,170 hectares of land hived off South Nandi Forest in 1999.

The three, Mr Henry Kosgey (the ODM chairman and minister), Dr Sally Kosgei (also ODM minister of Higher Education) and Mr Zakayo Cheruiyot were to exchange the land with farmers on a hilly terrain, even though according to the report there was conflict in the exchange as the Ngerek community, which was supposed to benefit, was left out.

The family of former Lands and Settlement minister Jackson Angaine, was expected to lose more than 900 hectares of land hived off from Mount Kenya forest in 1975 and 1977 if the recommendations were to be taken seriously by the government.

Former Limuru MP Mr Kuria Kanyingi was also named as the beneficiary of a 24 hectare farm carved out of Kiambu Forest in 1984. The report also noted that a title deed was issued for only 15 hectares to Kama Agencies in 1995. It recommends that the allocation to the MP should be revoked.

Those allocated parts of the Ngong forest and Karura Forest in the 1990s that Ndung'u Committee recommended that should all be revoked included former Mathioya MP Joseph Kamotho, former Cooperative Bank of Kenya chairman, Hosea Kiplagat, former Commissioner of Police Shedrack Kiruki and Maj-Gen Humphrey Njoroge.

Also named in the report was former Comptroller of State House John Lokorio who appeared as a beneficiary in settlement schemes in Nakuru District including the Nakuru/Olenguruone/Kiptagich extension.

Also in the same scheme is Mr Kiplagat, Mr Samson Cheramboss who once headed President Moi's security detail, former nominated MP Mr Mark Too, former Moi aide Joshua Kulei and former head of Presidential Press Service Lee Njiru.

Others named include former CID boss Mr Francis Sang, former managing director of Telkom KenyaMr Augustine Cheserem, former minister William Morogo and Eldama Ravine MP Mr Musa Sirma and his wife.

Former MD of the National Cereals and Produce Board Major (Rtd) Wilson Koitaba, former land commissioner Mr Sammy Mwaita received 10 plots and the deputy governor of the Central bank Dr Edward Sambili was allocated 7 hectares. Mr Gideon Moi and his wife got the biggest chunk of 44 hectares.

Other beneficiaries are former PS Dr Nehemiah Ng'eno, Dr Julius Rotich who had been named as one of the anti-corruption authority assistant directors, another former PS Mr Mark Bor, Cooperatives PS Mr Solomon Boit, Deputy police commissioner Mr David Kimaiyo and the chaplain of Kabarak high school Rev Jones Kaleli.

Baringo North MP William Boit, director of Motor Licensing Simon Kirgotty, director of survey Mr H. H. Nyapola, security intelligence deputy director Mr Shukri Baramade and Administration Police commandant Kinuthia Mbugua also got land illegally.

Even after former Kitale Catholic Justice and Peace Commission Director, Father Gabriel Dolan, a year later told the Government to implement the recommendations of the Ndung’u Land Report, nothing has ever happened since.

Dolan was quoted by the Standard Newspaper (March 5, 2005) as saying the Government had promised to effect the proposals by the end of February, but this did not happen.

His suggestion that the Government should restore the faith of its citizens by immediately acting on the findings of the land report landed on the deaf ears. He wanted all grabbed and illegally allocated land should be repossessed and re-distributed to the landless instead of a few people managing all the land resources in the country when the larger population is landless.

* Fr Joachim Omolo Ouko, AJ, People for Peace in Africa (PPA),

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

In last week's Pambazuka News, Ian Angus looked at . This week, he argues that alternatives to the food crisis must by their very nature be informed by alternatives to global capitalism.

"Nowhere in the world, in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and poverty on our planet."

—Fidel Castro, 1998

When food riots broke out in Haiti last month, the first country to respond was Venezuela. Within days, planes were on their way from Caracas, carrying 364 tons of badly needed food.

The people of Haiti are "suffering from the attacks of the empire's global capitalism," Venezuelan president Hugo Chàvez said. "This calls for genuine and profound solidarity from all of us. It is the least we can do for Haiti."

Venezuela's action is in the finest tradition of human solidarity. When people are hungry, we should do our best to feed them. Venezuela's example should be applauded and emulated.

But aid, however necessary, is only a stopgap. To truly address the problem of world hunger, we must understand and then change the system that causes it.

NO SHORTAGE OF FOOD

The starting point for our analysis must be this: there is no shortage of food in the world today.

Contrary to the 18th century warnings of Thomas Malthus and his modern followers, study after study shows that global food production has consistently outstripped population growth, and that there is more than enough food to feed everyone. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, enough food is produced in the world to provide over 2800 calories a day to everyone — substantially more than the minimum required for good health, and about 18% more calories per person than in the 1960s, despite a significant increase in total population.[1]

As the Food First Institute points out, "abundance, not scarcity, best describes the supply of food in the world today."[2]

Despite that, the most commonly proposed solution to world hunger is new technology to increase food production.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, aims to develop "more productive and resilient varieties of Africa's major food crops ... to enable Africa's small-scale farmers to produce larger, more diverse and reliable harvests."[3]

Similarly, the Manila-based International Rice Research Institute has initiated a public-private partnership "to increase rice production across Asia via the accelerated development and introduction of hybrid rice technologies."[4]

And the president of the World Bank promises to help developing countries gain "access to technology and science to boost yields."[5]

Scientific research is vitally important to the development of agriculture, but initiatives that assume in advance that new seeds and chemicals are needed are neither credible nor truly scientific. The fact that there is already enough food to feed the world shows that the food crisis is not a technical problem — it is a social and political problem.

Rather than asking how to increase production, our first question should be why, when so much food is available, are over 850 million people hungry and malnourished? Why do 18,000 children die of hunger every day?

WHY CAN'T THE GLOBAL FOOD INDUSTRY FEED THE HUNGRY?

The answer can be stated in one sentence. The global food industry is not organized to feed the hungry; it is organized to generate profits for corporate agribusiness.

The agribusiness giants are achieving that objective very well indeed. This year, agribusiness profits are soaring above last year's levels, while hungry people from Haiti to Egypt to Senegal were taking to the streets to protest rising food prices. These figures are for just three months at the beginning of 2008.[6]

GRAIN TRADING
- Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). Gross profit: $1.15 billion, up 55% from last year
- Cargill: Net earnings: $1.03 billion, up 86%
- Bunge. Consolidated gross profit: $867 million, up 189%.

SEEDS & HERBICIDES
- Monsanto. Gross profit: $2.23 billion, up 54%.
- Dupont Agriculture and Nutrition. Pre-tax operating income: $786 million, up 21%

FERTILIZER
- Potash Corporation. Net income: $66 million, up 185.9%
- Mosaic. Net earnings: $520.8 million, up more than 1,200%

The companies listed above, plus a few more, are the monopoly or near-monopoly buyers and sellers of agricultural products around the world. Six companies control 85% of the world trade in grain; three control 83% of cocoa; three control 80% of the banana trade.[7] ADM, Cargill and Bunge effectively control the world's corn, which means that they alone decide how much of each year's crop goes to make ethanol, sweeteners, animal feed or human food.

As the editors of Hungry for Profit write, "The enormous power exerted by the largest agribusiness/food corporations allows them essentially to control the cost of their raw materials purchased from farmers while at the same time keeping prices of food to the general public at high enough levels to ensure large profits."[8]

Over the past three decades, transnational agribusiness companies have engineered a massive restructuring of global agriculture. Directly through their own market power and indirectly through governments and the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organization, they have changed the way food is grown and distributed around the world. The changes have had wonderful effects on their profits, while simultaneously making global hunger worse and food crises inevitable.

THE ASSAULT ON TRADITIONAL FARMING

Today's food crisis doesn't stand alone: it is a manifestation of a farm crisis that has been building for decades.

As we saw in Part One of this article

As is typical of such events, the working people who are actually affected were excluded from the discussions. Outside the doors, La Vía Campesina proposed food sovereignty as an alternative to food security. Simple access to food is not enough, they argued: what's needed is access to land, water, and resources, and the people affected must have the right to know and to decide about food policies. Food is too important to be left to the global market and the manipulations of agribusiness: world hunger can only be ended by re-establishing small and mid-sized family farms as the key elements of food production.[13]

The central demand of the food sovereignty movement is that food should be treated primarily as a source of nutrition for the communities and countries where it is grown. In opposition to free-trade, agroexport policies, it urges a focus on domestic consumption and food self-sufficiency.

Contrary to the assertions of some critics, food sovereignty is not a call for economic isolationism or a return to an idealized rural past. Rather, it is a program for the defense and extension of human rights, for land reform, and for protection of the earth against capitalist ecocide. In addition to calling for food self-sufficiency and strengthening family farms, La Vía Campesina's original call for food sovereignty included these points:

- Guarantee everyone access to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food in sufficient quantity and quality to sustain a healthy life with full human dignity. * Give landless and farming people — especially women — ownership and control of the land they work and return territories to indigenous peoples.

- Ensure the care and use of natural resources, especially land, water and seeds. End dependence on chemical inputs, on cash-crop monocultures and intensive, industrialized production.

- Oppose WTO, World Bank and IMF policies that facilitate the control of multinational corporations over agriculture. Regulate and tax speculative capital and enforce a strict Code of Conduct on transnational corporations.

- End the use of food as a weapon. Stop the displacement, forced urbanization and repression of peasants.

- Guarantee peasants and small farmers, and rural women in particular, direct input into formulating agricultural policies at all levels.[14]

La Vía Campesina's demand for food sovereignty constitutes a powerful agrarian program for the 21st century. Labour and left movements worldwide should give full support to it and to the campaigns of working farmers and peasants for land reform and against the industrialization and globalization of food and farming.

STOP THE WAR ON THIRD WORLD FARMERS

Within that framework, those in the global north can and must demand that our governments stop all activities that weaken or damage Third World farming.

Stop using food for fuel. La Vía Campesina has said it simply and clearly: "Industrial agrofuels are an economic, social and environmental nonsense. Their development should be halted and agricultural production should focus on food as a priority."[15]

Cancel Third World debts. On April 30, Canada announced a special contribution of C$10 million for food relief to Haiti.[16] That's positive - but during 2008 Haiti will pay five times that much in interest on its $1.5 billion foreign debt, much of which was incurred during the imperialist-supported Duvalier dictatorships.

Haiti's situation is not unique and it is not an extreme case. The total external debt of Third World countries in 2005 was $2.7 trillion, and their debt payments that year totalled $513 billion.[17] Ending that cash drain, immediately and unconditionally, would provide essential resources to feed the hungry now and rebuild domestic farming over time.

Get the WTO out of agriculture. The regressive food policies that have been imposed on poor countries by the World Bank and IMF are codified and enforced by the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Agriculture. The AoA, as Afsar Jafri of Focus on the Global South writes, is "biased in favour of capital-intensive, corporate agribusiness-driven and export-oriented agriculture."[18] That's not surprising, since the U.S. official who drafted and then negotiated it was a former vice-president of agribusiness giant Cargill.

AoA should be abolished, and Third World countries should have the right to unilaterally cancel liberalization policies imposed through the World Bank, IMF, and WTO, as well as through bilateral free trade agreements such as NAFTA and CAFTA.

Self-Determination for the Global South. The current attempts by the U.S. to destabilize and overthrow the anti-imperialist governments of the ALBA group — Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada — continue a long history of actions by northern countries to prevent Third World countries from asserting control over their own destinies. Organizing against such interventions "in the belly of the monster" is thus a key component of the fight to win food sovereignty around the world.

More than a century ago, Karl Marx wrote that despite its support for technical improvements, "the capitalist system works against a rational agriculture ... a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system."[19]

Today's food and farm crises completely confirm that judgment. A system that puts profit ahead of human needs has driven millions of producers off the land, undermined the earth's productivity while poisoning its air and water, and condemned nearly a billion people to chronic hunger and malnutrition.

The food crisis and farm crisis are rooted in an irrational, anti-human system. To feed the world, urban and rural working people must join hands to sweep that system away.

*Ian Angus is editor of Climate and Capitalism. Part One of this article was published in Socialist Voice and in The Bullet (Socialist Project), on April 28, 2008.

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

***For further notes, please visit:

Ian Angus looks at the various forces behind the food crisis in Haiti. During previous waves of food price inflation the poor often had at least some access to food they grew themselves, or to food that was grown locally and available at locally set prices. Today, in many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, that is just not possible. Global markets now determine local prices, and often the only food available must be imported from far away. Food is not just another commodity, he argues. It is absolutely essential for human survival. The very least that humanity should expect from any government or social system is that it tries to prevent starvation, and above all that it does not promote policies that deny food to hungry people.

‘If the government cannot lower the cost of living it simply has to leave. If the police and UN troops want to shoot at us, that's OK, because in the end, if we are not killed by bullets, we'll die of hunger.’ (A demonstrator in Port-au-Prince, Haiti)

In Haiti, where most people get 22 per cent fewer calories than the minimum needed for good health, some are staving off their hunger pangs by eating ‘mud biscuits’ made by mixing clay and water with a bit of vegetable oil and salt.[1]

Meanwhile, in Canada, the federal government is currently paying $225 for each pig killed in a mass cull of breeding swine, as part of a plan to reduce hog production. Hog farmers, squeezed by low hog prices and high feed costs, have responded so enthusiastically that the kill will likely use up all the allocated funds before the programme ends in September. Some of the slaughtered hogs may be given to local food banks, but most will be destroyed or made into pet food. None will go to Haiti.

This is the brutal world of capitalist agriculture, a world where some people destroy food because prices are too low, and others literally eat dirt because food prices are too high.

Record prices for staple foods

We are in the midst of an unprecedented worldwide food price inflation that has driven prices to their highest levels in decades. The increases affect most kinds of food, but in particular the most important staples: wheat, corn, and rice.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation says that between March 2007 and March 2008 prices of cereals increased 88 per cent, oils and fats 106 per cent, and dairy 48 per cent. The FAO food price index as a whole rose 57 per cent in one year; most of the increase occurred in the past few months.

Another source, the World Bank, says that that in the 36 months ending February 2008, global wheat prices rose 181 per cent and overall global food prices increased by 83 per cent. The Bank expects most food prices to remain well above 2004 levels until at least 2015. The most popular grade of Thailand rice sold for $198 per tonne five years ago and $323 per tonne a year ago. On 24 April the price hit $1,000.

Increases are even greater on local markets. In Haiti, the market price of a 50kg bag of rice doubled in one week at the end of March. These increases are catastrophic for the 2.6 billion people around the world who live on less than US$2 a day and spend 60 to 80 per cent of their incomes on food. Hundreds of millions cannot afford to eat. This month, the hungry fought back.

Taking to the streets

On 3 April demonstrators in Haiti’s southern city of Les Cayes built barricades, stopped trucks carrying rice and distributed the food, and tried to burn a UN compound. The protests quickly spread to the capital, Port-au-Prince, where thousands marched on the presidential palace chanting ‘We are hungry!’ Many called for the withdrawal of UN troops and the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the exiled president whose government was overthrown by foreign powers in 2004.

President René Préval, who initially said that nothing could be done, has announced a 16 per cent cut in the wholesale price of rice. This is at best a stop-gap measure, since the reduction is for one month only and retailers are not obligated to cut their prices.

The actions in Haiti paralleled similar protests by hungry people in more than twenty other countries. In Burkino Faso, a two-day general strike by unions and shopkeepers demanded ‘significant and effective’ reductions in the price of rice and other staple foods. In Bangladesh, over 20,000 workers from textile factories in Fatullah went on strike to demand lower prices and higher wages. They hurled bricks and stones at police, who fired tear gas into the crowd. The Egyptian government sent thousands of troops into the Mahalla textile complex in the Nile Delta to prevent a general strike demanding higher wages, an independent union, and lower prices. Two people were killed and over 600 have been jailed. In Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, police used tear gas against women who had set up barricades, burned tires and closed major roads. Thousands marched to the President's home, chanting ‘We are hungry’, and ‘Life is too expensive, you are killing us.’ In Pakistan and Thailand, armed soldiers have been deployed to prevent the poor from seizing food from fields and warehouses.

Similar protests have taken place in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Honduras, Indonesia, Madagascar, Mauritania, Niger, Peru, Philippines, Senegal, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Zambia. On 2 April the president of the World Bank told a meeting in Washington that there are 33 countries where price hikes could cause social unrest.

A Senior Editor of Time magazine warned:
‘The idea of the starving masses driven by their desperation to take to the streets and overthrow the ancien regime has seemed impossibly quaint since capitalism triumphed so decisively in the Cold War.... And yet, the headlines of the past month suggest that skyrocketing food prices are threatening the stability of a growing number of governments around the world. .... when circumstances render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose.’[2]

What’s driving the food inflation?

Since the 1970s, food production has become increasingly globalised and concentrated. A handful of countries dominate the global trade in staple foods. 80 per cent of wheat exports come from six exporters, as does 85 per cent of rice. Three countries produce 70 per cent of exported corn. This leaves the world's poorest countries, the ones that must import food to survive, at the mercy of economic trends and policies in those few exporting countries. When the global food trade system stops delivering, it's the poor who pay the price.

For several years, the global trade in staple foods has been heading towards a crisis. Four related trends have slowed production growth and pushed prices up.

a) The end of the Green Revolution. In the 1960s and 1970s, in an effort to counter peasant discontent in south and south-east Asia, the US poured money and technical support into agricultural development in India and other countries. The ‘green revolution’ — new seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, agricultural techniques and infrastructure — led to spectacular increases in food production, particularly rice. Yield per hectare continued expanding until the 1990s.

Today, it is not fashionable for governments to help poor people grow food for other poor people, because ‘the market’ is supposed to take care of all problems. The Economist reports that ‘spending on farming as a share of total public spending in developing countries fell by half between 1980 and 2004.’[3] Subsidies and R&D money have dried up, and production growth has stalled.

As a result, in seven of the past eight years the world consumed more grain than it produced, which means that rice was being removed from the inventories that governments and dealers normally hold as insurance against bad harvests. World grain stocks are now at their lowest point ever, leaving very little cushion for bad times.

b) Climate change. Scientists say that climate change could cut food production in parts of the world by 50 per cent in the next 12 years. But that isn't just a matter for the future. Australia is normally the world's second-largest exporter of grain, but a savage multi-year drought has reduced the wheat crop by 60 per cent and rice production has been completely wiped out. In Bangladesh in November, one of the strongest cyclones in decades wiped out a million tonnes of rice and severely damaged the wheat crop, making this huge country even more dependent on imported food. Other examples abound. It is clear that the global climate crisis is already here, and that it is affecting food.

c) Agrofuels. It is now official policy in the US, Canada and Europe to convert food into fuel. US vehicles burn enough corn to cover the entire import needs of the poorest 82 countries.[4]

Ethanol and bio-diesel are very heavily subsidised, which means, inevitably, that crops like corn (maize) are being diverted out of the food chain and into gas tanks, and that new agricultural investment worldwide is being directed towards palm, soy, canola and other oil-producing plants. The demand for agrofuels increases the prices of those crops directly, and indirectly boosts the price of other grains by encouraging growers to switch to agrofuel. As Canadian hog producers have found, it also drives up the cost of producing meat, since corn is the main ingredient in North American animal feed.

d) Oil prices. The price of food is linked to the price of oil because food can be made into a substitute for oil. But rising oil prices also affect the cost of producing food. Fertiliser and pesticides are made from petroleum and natural gas. Gas and diesel fuel are used in planting, harvesting and shipping.[5] It has been estimated that 80 per cent of the costs of growing corn are fossil fuel costs, so it is no accident that food prices rise when oil prices rise.

By the end of 2007, reduced investment in third world agriculture, rising oil prices, and climate change meant that production growth was slowing and prices were rising. Good harvests and strong export growth might have staved off a crisis — but that isn't what happened. The trigger was rice, the staple food of three billion people.

Early this year, India announced that it was suspending most rice exports in order to rebuild its reserves. A few weeks later, Vietnam, whose rice crop was hit by a major insect infestation during the harvest, announced a four-month suspension of exports to ensure that enough would be available for its domestic market.

India and Vietnam together normally account for 30 per cent of all rice exports, so their announcements were enough to push the already tight global rice market over the edge. Rice buyers immediately started buying up available stocks, hoarding whatever rice they could get in the expectation of future price increases, and bidding up the price for future crops. Prices soared. By mid-April, news reports described ‘panic buying’ of rice futures on the Chicago Board of Trade, and there were rice shortages even on supermarket shelves in Canada and the US.

Why the rebellion?

There have been food price spikes before. Indeed, if we take inflation into account, global prices for staple foods were higher in the 1970s than they are today. So why has this inflationary explosion provoked mass protests around the world?

The answer is that since the 1970s the richest countries in the world, aided by the international agencies they control, have systematically undermined the poorest countries' ability to feed their populations and protect themselves in a crisis like this. Haiti is a powerful and appalling example.

Rice has been grown in Haiti for centuries, and until 20 years ago Haitian farmers produced about 170,000 tonnes of rice a year, enough to cover 95 per cent of domestic consumption. Rice farmers received no government subsidies, but, as in every other rice-producing country at the time, their access to local markets was protected by import tariffs. In 1995, as a condition of providing a desperately needed loan, the International Monetary Fund required Haiti to cut its tariff on imported rice from 35 per cent to 3 per cent, the lowest in the Caribbean. The result was a massive influx of US rice that sold for half the price of Haitian-grown rice. Thousands of rice farmers lost their lands and livelihoods, and today three-quarters of the rice eaten in Haiti comes from the US.[6]

US rice didn't take over the Haitian market because it tastes better, or because US rice growers are more efficient. It won out because rice exports are heavily subsidised by the US government. In 2003, US rice growers received $1.7 billion in government subsidies, an average of $232 per hectare of rice grown.[7] That money, most of which went to a handful of very large landowners and agribusiness corporations, allowed US exporters to sell rice at 30 to 50 per cent below their real production costs. In short, Haiti was forced to abandon government protection of domestic agriculture, and the US then used its government protection schemes to take over the market.

There have been many variations on this theme, with rich countries of the north imposing ‘liberalisation’ policies on poor and debt-ridden southern countries and then taking advantage of that liberalisation to capture the market. Government subsidies account for 30 per cent of farm revenue in the world's 30 richest countries, a total of US$280 billion a year,[8] an unbeatable advantage in a ‘free’ market where the rich write the rules. The global food trade game is rigged, and the poor have been left with reduced crops and no protections.

In addition, for several decades the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have refused to advance loans to poor countries unless they agree to ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’ (SAP) that require the loan recipients to devalue their currencies, cut taxes, privatise utilities, and reduce or eliminate support programmes for farmers. All this was done with the promise that the market would produce economic growth and prosperity. Instead, poverty increased and support for agriculture was eliminated.

‘The investment in improved agricultural input packages and extension support tapered and eventually disappeared in most rural areas of Africa under SAP. Concern for boosting smallholders' productivity was abandoned. Not only were governments rolled back, foreign aid to agriculture dwindled. World Bank funding for agriculture itself declined markedly from 32 per cent of total lending in 1976-8 to 11.7 per cent in 1997-9.’[9]

During previous waves of food price inflation the poor often had at least some access to food they grew themselves, or to food that was grown locally and available at locally set prices. Today, in many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, that is just not possible. Global markets now determine local prices, and often the only food available must be imported from far away.

Food is not just another commodity. It is absolutely essential for human survival. The very least that humanity should expect from any government or social system is that it tries to prevent starvation, and above all that it does not promote policies that deny food to hungry people.

That is why Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was absolutely correct on 24 April in describing the food crisis as ‘the greatest demonstration of the historical failure of the capitalist model.’

*Ian Angus is the editor of 'Climate and Capitalism'. This article first appeared at

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

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http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/370/48056women.jpgAs a result the terror campaign by the military and the youth militia, the most affected are women and children as 80% of Zimbabwean women live in the rural areas. This statement urges women in Africa and the world to take action against the Mugabe government.

On March 29,2009 Zimbabwe went to the polls to elect its next government until 2013.Results for the Presidential elections were announced a month later and people in Zimbabwe maintained peace. From 2 April 2008 the government organised a retribution campaign to target those who allegedly voted for the opposition and since then there has been terror in mostly rural Zimbabwe with youth militia under the command of the army and police have gone on to unleash terror in a campaign to teach the rural people how to correctly vote in the forthcoming presidential run off supposed to take place on 23 May according to the law but whose date remains unannounced

As a result the terror campaign by the military and the youth militia, the most affected are women and children as 80% of Zimbabwean women live in the rural areas. So far, over 800 homes have been burnt down, over 10 000 people have fled their homes, over 40 people have been shot dead in cold blood, over 7000 teachers have fled their schools as a number have been beaten in the eyes of parents and pupils, Doctors for human Rights report that over 2000 serious cases of physical torture and beatings have passed through their hands and a lot of those they treated have suffered serious fractures to an extent that most are permanently handicapped. The oldest victim of the post election violence is an old woman with 12 grandchildren all of them orphaned and whose son is alleged to have campaigned for the opposition. The youngest female victim is a 15 year old girl who was stripped naked together with her pregnant mother forced to lie down and beaten on the breasts and buttocks. Many women including the old have been forced to strip naked and beaten on the breasts and buttocks. 7000 teachers, a third of them women have fled their homes and several schools mostly in rural areas are closed. Several girls and women are feared raped. The youngest child seriously assaulted is only 3 years. Despite calls from all corners of the world for the violence to stop, it has become worse and we fear more and more people are getting killed and buried

Our situation is such that an estimated 5 million Zimbabweans mostly professionals and the young have left the country. An estimated 3 million are in South Africa with half being illegal immigrants facing inhuman deportations daily. Women cross border traders cross over the crocodile infested Limpopo River and many have been allegedly raped. HIV and AIDS prevalence is 60% among women and girls and their life expectancy is 34 years. Domestic violence is rife with a woman killed or left dead weekly. Unemployment is 80% and inflation is 165 000 % and the highest in the world. 95% of women of the 200 000 women made homeless and jobless by the government 2005 Operation Restore Order which demolished their homes and markets that earned them an income has left them in the open cold and in commercial sex work since then and now the same women are alleged to have voted opposition and have gone through torture.

At least 6800 girls get raped annually and with the current displacements the number is expected to treble. Most female teachers have been displaced and many have fled the country and a lot more have sought refuge in the cities. Access to the rural areas has always been a big challenge for humanitarian organisations but now that women in rural areas are held hostage by the militia and the army and the rural areas have been declared no go areas we have seen it almost impossible to assist. Women Directors of NGOs are on government hit list that seeks to arrest, detain and destroy the organisation.

Zimbabwean women in rural areas constitute women abandoned by husbands and dumped in the rural areas because of HIV status, they have gone through the war of liberation in the 1960s and 1970s and war songs by the youth militias at their doorsteps have left them semi slaved. The worst is that they have been beaten because their husbands, brothers, uncles, boyfriends ,grandsons and other male relatives allegedly campaigned for the opposition. Old grandmothers struggling to feed orphans and sickly, women who are bed ridden, orphaned HIV positive children, the poorest and weakest have been tortured, terrified, displaced from homes and the organisations that normally help them are denied access and with most of the leaders on the government hit list.

OUR URGENT APPEAL FOR ACTION TO AFRICAN WOMEN AND THE WOMEN WORLD ALL OVER THE WORLD

- First we come to you because we have exhausted all channels and have failed to get help and urgent attention .Please help us find how best we can deal with the situation and appeal to anyone you know who can help victims get immediate help like medication, safe shelter, counselling and support leaders of women’s groups with security as they are also under threat and have been victimised and most of them are on the government hit list for those to be tortured and eliminated

- Reach out to SADC and AU Countries to put in place measures to protect women and girls fleeing Zimbabwe to take refuge in neighbouring countries

- Help us to see how we can use the AU protocol for women’s rights for protection of women and girls. Zimbabwe ratified the AU protocol

- Help us get SADC and UN put in place a security and protection plan for women and girls and help demilitarise the youth militia and stop torture of ordinary citizens

- Get our case on crimes against humanity taken to the UN security council. We have all the documented evidence since the terror started in 2000 to have the perpetrators brought to book

- Mobilise female ministers and female vice Presidents to convene an urgent meeting in the region and make appeals to the Liberian President Her Excellency Ellen Johnson to help us broker peace talks in Zimbabwe with leaders of women’s groups in the continent

- Help us set up African women in solidarity with Zimbabwe women focal point persons in African countries who go to their Presidents to lobby them to come to the urgent rescue of Zimbabwean women

- Pass on this message to any networks you know and those who can assist should email [email][email protected] or [email][email protected] and we will refer you to all the women in Zimbabwe working in various areas.

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

Henning Melber looks at the possibilities for a people-centred opposition and ultimately a true liberation in Namibia and Zimbabwe, after years of misrule by the liberation movements-turned-ruling parties.

‘There is a need for a healing of the nation. The process of national healing and reconciliation is unlikely to proceed as long as society is still polarised. In addition, without also addressing past crimes, corruption, marginalisation and poverty, it is unlikely that reconciliation can be achieved.’

This insight was contained in the Kenya mission report of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). It was submitted by the APRM panel of eminent persons to the continent’s heads of state at the African Union summit in July 2006.[1] One and a half years later, Kenyan society was traumatised by the worst violence since independence and its people more divided than ever. The (allegedly orchestrated) civil war-like situation erupted over disputed election results. It showed that, beneath the surface of a seemingly peaceful society, deep-rooted antagonisms could be mobilised to unleash blind hatred and massive destruction of property and lives between people who had hitherto lived in relative peace with each other. In such circumstances an assumed socio-political stability proved to be treacherous, fragile, and prone to easy manipulation.

Many societies in Africa are confronted with similar challenges. Since the mid-1990s national reconciliation initiatives have emerged in a series of African countries. These were inspired by the widely praised Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa, which symbolised the country’s collective effort to come to terms with a past that still dominated its present and could have a lasting impact on its future. Despite all its limitations, the TRC has been widely perceived as an encouraging initiative, as a lesson in bringing skeletons out of the closet and dealing publicly with the lasting effects of violence and counter-violence. Far from solving structurally rooted historical legacies and their daily impact on the lives of ordinary citizens, or ending discrimination, or bringing to task many of the perpetrators, it brought to the fore the need to address history in the present.[2] Similar initiatives were taken in other war-torn societies marred by organised repression and mass violence, which had left festering wounds and scars among people now longing for healing and seeking a common future.

Two former settler societies neighbouring South Africa are among the countries whose governments did not follow this trend and refused to seek national reconciliation by means of public debate and transitional forms of justice and reconciliation. Zimbabwe and Namibia achieved their independence through long anti-colonial struggles led by liberation movements. In both cases the final defeat of colonialism was not achieved through the barrel of a gun (although the military dimension had an important role in forcing the colonial power to the negotiating table) but through agreements reached between the parties for change. These provided a transitional framework which limited the space for social transformation and the redistribution of wealth.

As a result of this negotiated decolonisation, the former liberation movements (Zanu PF in Zimbabwe and SWAPO in Namibia) were elected as legitimate governments in 1980 and 1990 respectively and have held absolute political power and control over the state bureaucracy since then (although, as we can currently see in Zimbabwe, not for eternity). In contrast to South Africa’s democratically elected government under the ANC, the Zimbabwean and Namibian political leadership never pursued anything similar to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Instead, they proclaimed national reconciliation as some kind of pragmatic agreement which became effective with independence. Their policy was to leave the past behind, with no public debate or dialogue over the injustices committed (although selective reference to colonial crimes was made when needed and commemorated as part of the liberation gospel).

In both societies the justification for casting this kind of official smokescreen over the colonial past was rooted to some extent in the argument that the repressive machinery of colonial occupation had been staffed and executed by many who at independence could no longer be held accountable. This was either because of an amnesty declared for those on all sides of the conflict, or because some of the worst abusers of human rights had retreated to their British or South African countries of origin. National reconciliation was defined in terms of closing the colonial chapter without seeking justice through institutionalised hearings or other forms of coming to terms with the past. The cleansing process, which to some extent was initiated and implemented in the South African TRC, was conspicuously absent. Not so, however, the collective blame placed on colonialism for all subsequent failures in post-independence nation-building and re-structuring of society, which (despite some relevant aspects) was often used as an excuse to evade responsibility for ‘good governance’.

This seemingly pragmatic (and rather self-righteous) approach denied the need and missed the opportunity to deal with failures in the ranks of the liberation movements themselves. This had never been the main issue in the TRC, but was unavoidably brought to the fore when the excesses of the apartheid regime were laid open. Even though the degree of self-critical examination of human rights violations within the ANC was rather limited (and hampered the final process of publicising the TRC report’s findings), it nevertheless became an issue for which President Nelson Mandela apologised to the victims and their families. Having been imprisoned for almost three decades since the early 1960s, Madiba was a charismatic leader and moral role model who could apologise for failures in the exiled ANC, for which he was obviously not personally responsible, nor perhaps even aware. This sign of remorse and indirect moral responsibility only added to his aura.

In contrast, both Robert Mugabe of Zanu PF and Sam Nujoma of SWAPO were active leaders in exile, deeply involved in internal power struggles. They were not only an integral part of the authoritarian hierarchy but its personification. In ultimate charge of the command structures dominating their liberation movements, they were to some degree personally accountable for the abuses and malpractice within their ranks. As heads of state they were not inclined to address such issues. Instead, past injustices on all sides would be put to rest. By doing so, however, the liberation movements sacrificed the moral high ground they had been able to occupy vis-à-vis the oppressive colonial regimes. Their own failures remained unfinished business and left festering wounds within the new post-colonial societies. The dominant mindsets emerging at independence represented more of an old order than a new one and showed the limits to liberation.[3]

In Zimbabwe, violence within and between the liberation movements escalated soon after independence in organised massacres in Matabeleland (the western part of Zimbabwe occupied mostly by Ndebele-speakers considered in large part to be supporters of the Joshua Nkomo-led ZAPU, which competed with Zanu PF for power). Between early 1983 and late 1986, an estimated 20,000 people were killed in horrific acts of barbarism carried out by the Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwe National Army, trained by North Korean military advisors. Although known and reported at the time, the massacres went largely ignored, even by the former colonial power. Described by Robert Mugabe as Gukurahundi (‘the rain that washes away the chaff before the summer rains’), this organised mass violence was a defining moment for his regime. The Catholic church in Zimbabwe was a lonely voice in revealing the scale of the atrocities.[4] Since then, the openly violent character of Mugabe’s rule has drawn worldwide attention. However, it only became a concern for the international community (represented by Western countries) when the so-called fast-track land reform process dispossessed most of the commercial farmers and portrayed the conflict (misleadingly so) as one between a remaining white settler minority and the government. This suggests a moral selectivity in Western perceptions, which the populist rhetoric of the despotic regime managed to exploit.

As part of the Namibian independence process, several hundred members of SWAPO in exile, who were accused of being South African agents, were released and repatriated in mid-1989. Known as ‘ex-detainees’, they shared their plight with the Namibian public at home. Since the early 1980s several thousand were thought to have been imprisoned, tortured and raped in camps in southern Angola. Many did not survive the ordeal; others remain missing. Ever since their return, these ex-detainees have asked for rehabilitation and an apology from SWAPO for the human rights violations committed.[5] But the liberation movement in power has applied a policy of denial, on the grounds that this would open wounds and thereby put peace and stability at risk. Moreover, SWAPO argued, the atrocities by the South African regime and its local collaborators would also need to be scrutinised in return, which would undermine national reconciliation. Instead, and similar to the official narratives cultivated by Zanu PF in Zimbabwe, SWAPO started a ‘nation-building project’ guided by what has been termed ‘patriotic history’, which cultivates the gospel of an organisation and its leaders as the morally impeccable liberators of the people.[6]

In both Zimbabwe and Namibia the former liberation movements in political power were also granted the power of defining the national interest. But the political and ideological hegemony assumed at independence is now deteriorating, with governments failing to maintain control over the one-dimensional collective identity constructed and imposed earlier on. This has been evident since the turn of the century in Zimbabwe, with the emergence of the MDC as a meaningful political opposition, suggesting that the liberation gospel has an expiry date. The coerced legitimacy of the government has been eroded, provoking intimidation, an ever-growing culture of fear, and ultimately rule based on state terror. As we know from history, these kinds of dictatorial regimes sooner or later come to an end through the same popular movements that they intimidated and oppressed for so long.

In Namibia, an opposition emerged towards the end of 2007 from within the belly of the beast. Former high-ranking SWAPO officials formed the Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP) to challenge the undisputed dominance of the former liberation movement. The next presidential and parliamentary elections, scheduled for the end of 2009, could result in SWAPO’s loss of its two-thirds majority in parliament, and hence absolute control over the country’s political and legal decision-making process. Nervousness is mounting. Leading office-bearers in the Namibian government warn of a Kenyan situation and blame the new opposition for fuelling ethnic rivalries. This is an argument which resorts to the culture of fear rather than seeks reconciliation and common ground; it names and shames others rather than identifies common denominators as Namibians. Such a knee-jerk response to political challenge also suggests an inability to deal with one’s own shortcomings and failures.

Leaders of the Namibian Lutheran churches have responded to the growing polarisation by means of a pastoral letter read out during sermons on 23 March 2008 and later published. In light of the violence that erupted between the two main rival parties, triggered by a local election campaign, the bishops of the three churches expressed their fear that the country is moving backwards rather than forwards in terms of freedom and democracy. The bishops wrote in their letter of ‘intolerance, verbal and physical attacks and counter attacks’. They warned that ‘failure to redress this situation now can lead to mass loss of lives country wide’. ‘What we say as leaders… is the seed which bears the consequential behaviour for violence and peace… Political opponents are not enemies, but participants in a democratic set-up.’[7] This is the first time since independence that the church has commented on the country’s politics in this way. Alarm bells are ringing, but Namibians still have the opportunity to learn from the sad lessons in Kenya and elsewhere – not least in neighbouring Zimbabwe, which in many respects is so close to home.

*Henning Melber is Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala, Sweden. A son of German immigrants to Namibia, he joined SWAPO in 1974. This text is a contribution to 'New Routes – A Journal of Peace Research and Action' vol. 13, no. 2, 2008, to be published by the Life & Peace Institute.

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

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In response to the recent extract from William Gumede's book "Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC" published by Zed Books (http://zedbooks.co.uk), Patrick Bond suggests that there is a need to go beyond the individual reasons and look at the structural forces that have informed Mbeki's AIDS policy such as international and domestic financial markets, pharmaceutical manufacturers and a large reserve army of labour.

With millions of South Africans dying early because of AIDS, the battle against the disease would become one of the most crucial tests of the post-apartheid government. Its systematic failure to address AIDS, and especially its ongoing sabotage of medicinal treatment for HIV+ patients, led to periodic charges of ‘genocide’ by authoritative figures such as the heads of the Medical Research Council (Malegapuru William Makgoba), SA Medical Association (Kgosi Letlape), and Pan Africanist Congress health desk (Costa Gazi), as well as leading public intellectual Sipho Seepe.

Aside from Mbeki, Pretoria’s main saboteurs were health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and trade minister Erwin; the latter two were accused by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) of culpable homicide during a March 2003 civil disobedience campaign. Even in the weeks before the 2004 election, Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang continued to practice denialism, obfuscation, delays, bureaucratic manoeuvres, and withdrawal of resources for treatment. Educational campaigns like LoveLife’s were based upon fatuous marketing to hip-hop youth, and there was virtually nothing done to combat domestic violence, rape, multiple partners and patriarchy. Across Africa more generally, the ‘ABCs’ of abstinence, being loyal and condoms were particularly ineffectual within the confines of male-dominated marriage, leading to the tragedy that young women’s infection rate was twice as high as that of men.[1]

A great deal has been written about Pretoria’s malfeasance.[2] The point of revisiting it here while documenting South Africa’s elite transition is to provide a structural explanation for the crisis. Beyond the oft-cited peculiarities of the president himself, there are three deeper reasons why local and global power relationships mean that the battle against AIDS has to date mainly been lost.[3]

One reason is the pressure exerted by international and domestic financial markets to keep Pretoria’s state budget deficit to three per cent of GDP. Recall the telling remark of the late Parks Mankahlana, Mbeki’s main spokesperson, who in March 2000 justified to Science magazine why the government refused to provide relatively inexpensive antiretrovirals (ARVs) like Nevirapine to pregnant, HIV-positive women: ‘That mother is going to die and that HIV-negative child will be an orphan. That child must be brought up. Who is going to bring the child up? It’s the state, the state. That’s resources, you see.’[4] Instead of saving lives, Mbeki’s finance ministry adopted higher priorities: slashing corporate taxes, redeploying state resources to purchase high-tech arms, and repaying roughly $25 billion of apartheid-era foreign debt and a bit more in apartheid domestic debt, which could have been declared ‘odious’ in legal terms. Local and international bankers generally approved such examples of fiscal laxity, in contrast to expanding state health spending and other social budgets, which they have explicitly not supported.

The second structural reason is the residual power of pharmaceutical manufacturers to defend their rights to ‘intellectual property’, i.e. monopoly patents on life-saving medicines. This pressure did not end in April 2001 when the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association withdrew their notorious lawsuit against the South African Medicines Act of 1997. That Act allows for parallel import or local production, via ‘compulsory licences’, of generic substitutes for brand-name antiretroviral medicines. Big Pharma’s power was felt in the debate over essential drugs for public health emergencies at the November 2001 Doha World Trade Organisation summit, and ever since.

The third structural reason for the ongoing HIV/AIDS holocaust in South Africa is the vast size of the reserve army of labour, for this feature of capitalism allows companies to replace sick workers with desperate, unemployed people instead of providing them with treatment. The latter point deserves elaboration, simply because so many lives are at immediate risk, and so much evidence has mounted that corporate South Africa’s preferred approach has been, in essence, mass murder by denial of medical benefits.

This was the initial conclusion reached after a year of study at Africa’s largest company, Anglo American Corporation. Anglo has 160,000 employees, of whom 21 per cent are estimated to be HIV-positive. Once Big Pharma appeared to retreat from its lawsuit, the company announced that it would provide antiretroviral medicines to its workforce, which meant literally tens of thousands of lives might be saved in the short term. But in June 2001, the Financial Times reported on Anglo’s ‘plans to make special payments to miners suffering from HIV/AIDS, on condition they take voluntary retirement.’ However, in addition to bribing workers to go home and die, Anglo told the Financial Times, ‘treatment of employees with antiretrovirals can be cheaper than the costs incurred by leaving them untreated.’ In August, Anglo’s vice president for medicine, Brian Brink, bragged in Business Day about a ‘strategy [which] involved offering wellness programmes, including access to antiretroviral treatment.’ According to that report, ‘The company believed that the cost of its programmes would eventually be outweighed by the benefits its received in gradual gains in productivity, [Brink] concluded. Although it was indeed a risky strategy, it was the only one Anglo could pursue in the face of such human suffering.’

Then in October 2001, Anglo simply retracted its promise, once cost-benefit analysis showed that 146,000 workers just weren’t worth saving. According to the Financial Times, Brink ‘said the company’s 14,000 senior staff would receive antiretroviral treatment as part of their medical insurance, but that the provision of drug treatment for lower income employees was too expensive.’ Brink explained the criteria for the fatal analysis: ‘[Antiretrovirals] could save on absenteeism and improved productivity. The saving you achieve can be substantial, but we really don’t know how it will stack up. We feel that the cost will be greater than the saving.’ As the Wall Street Journal recorded:
‘In a controversial move that could have wide ramifications for how companies in poor countries handle AIDS, mining giant Anglo American PLC has put on hold a feasibility study to provide AIDS drugs to its African work force, according to people familiar with the situation. When it disclosed its plans for the study a year ago, Anglo garnered wide praise because it was one of the first major corporations to reveal measures aimed at treating AIDS cases among its rank and file African employees.’[5]

A few months later Anglo changed its mind once again, as AIDS ravaged the middle layer of the workforce, and the multi-class TAC raised consciousness sufficiently high as to get trades union support for members’ treatment. Indeed, in the cases of both Anglo and Coca Cola, the other factor that appeared in 2002 was the spectre of consumer protest over the firms’ refusal to treat employees. I was reliably informed by insiders that for Anglo, the prospect of demonstrators at the August 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development dragging up many other bits of dirty laundry intimidated the company’s executives into taking pre-emptive action on the AIDS front. Coke’s main bottler in South Africa had also failed to insure two-thirds of its 4,000-strong workforce at a sufficient level to allow the HIV-positive workers access to ARVs, and was subject to international protest over African AIDS policies.

However, even though the costs of HIV/AIDS - absenteeism, declining productivity, payouts for early death - soared to as high as 25 per cent of payroll by 2003, according to the Financial Times, most employers are still hesitant to provide ARVs:

‘Untreated, HIV typically takes four to five years to manifest itself as full-blown AIDS, and companies are reluctant to pay for a risk that they cannot see… Persuading managers to part with fees [AIDS treatment programmes] today for costs that will hit company earnings years down the line has been a hard sell.’[6]

In sum, no matter the effectiveness of activism against government, Big Pharma and the corporate employers, all three structural factors are still deterrents to the provision of treatment. By late 2003, each was slightly mitigated, however, and that led to an ostensible change of policy by Pretoria. The budget deficit was projected to climb from just over one per cent of GDP during the early 2000s to nearly three per cent in 2004-05, allowing extra leeway for AIDS spending. Pharmacorps were cooperating more closely with the World Health Organisation, the Global Fund, the Clinton Foundation and governments to lower prices for Africa. Canada’s former prime minister Jean Chretien - spurred by the dynamic, outspoken UN advisor Stephen Lewis - even introduced path-breaking legislation to promote generics (although a sabotage clause was later included in the draft law to support patent rights, in turn attracting a new round of solidarity protests). And employers began waking up, in part because of the dramatic rise of AIDS-related disability claims as a percentage of all disability claims, from 18 per cent in 2001 to 31 per cent in 2002.

These factors converged in a November 2003 cabinet statement, finally endorsing a roll-out of antiretrovirals. Pretoria cited factors which included:

‘a fall in the prices of drugs over the past two years…new medicines and international and local experience in managing the utilisation of ARVs… [sufficient] health workers and scientists with skills and understanding… and the availability of fiscal resources to expand social expenditure in general, as a consequence of the prudent macro economic policies pursued by government.’

However, these factors were minor compared to intensive activist pressure, which Pretoria did not dare mention lest it encourage further protests. TAC’s victory statement was explicit: ‘The combination of the Constitutional Court decision on mother to child transmission prevention, the Stand Up for Our Lives march [of 15,000 people on parliament] in February, the civil disobedience campaign and the international protests around the world have convinced Cabinet to develop and implement an ARV roll-out plan.’

Another factor, of course, was the 2004 presidential election, which Mbeki would win easily but which would be characterised by high levels of apathy and no-vote campaigning by the Landless Peoples Movement. An AC Nielsen survey in November 2003 confirmed that Mbeki’s AIDS policy was hurting the chances of the ruling African National Congress of turning out the vote. The cabinet statement promised that ‘within a year, there will be at least one service point in every health district across the country and, within five years, one service point in every local municipality.’ In addition to medicines, the state would provide an education and community mobilisation programme, promotion of good nutrition and traditional health treatments such as herbal remedies, support for families affected by HIV and AIDS, and funds for upgrading health infrastructure. The health system was already massively overextended, with far too few essential medicines, much less ARVs, available in South Africa’s under-funded rural clinics.

As TAC was the first to concede, ARV availability could generate negative unintended consequences. One would be non-compliance with treatment regimes by poor people, and the concomitant emergence of drug-resistant strains. Another would be the black market smuggling of cheap drugs to Europe and North America which would reduce access in Africa. Another would be that, although stigmatisation would decline given the availability of hope-giving drugs, so too might the practice of safe sex. These would remain major challenges to TAC and other health-sector groups, although the Khayelitsha operation of Médecins Sans Frontières was already proving high levels of treatment compliance.

Moreover, the conflict between neo-liberalism and life, so explicit in the case of access to AIDS medicines, was severely compounded by patriarchy, traditional and modern sexual practices such as multiple partners for men, and domestic violence against women. Rape continued at scandalous levels.

But the primary contradiction involved the regime in Pretoria. In February 2004, TAC attacked President Thabo Mbeki in the wake of more government prevarication on AIDS treatment.[7] Claiming that Mbeki ‘misrepresented facts and once again caused confusion on HIV/AIDS’ on national television, TAC’s Zackie Achmat accused him of ‘denialism.’ Moreover, Pretoria had originally promised to distribute AIDS medicines to at least 50,000 people within a year, and to reach everyone in need of treatment within five years. Tshabalala-Msimang blamed slow drug procurement – Pretoria’s own fault – and the lack of qualified health personnel. TAC strategist Mark Heywood commented, ‘Many hospitals have the capacity, they just don’t have the medicines.’ The finance ministry also cut the budget dramatically for medicine purchases in February 2004.

At the same time, Tshabalala-Msimang suggested that while HIV-positive people waited for medicines, a diet of lemons, beetroot, (extremely expensive), olive oil and garlic would improve the body’s immune system. A week earlier, the minister had come under fire by the SA Medical Association, whose chairperson Dr Kgosi Letlape accused her of ‘dividing the profession when we have gone to great lengths to unite it.’ The minister unsuccessfully attempted to halt a protest march of 2,000 medics against poor conditions in public health facilities by implying that the demonstrating doctors were white, whereas black medics supported the government.

Mbeki continued supporting his minister, no matter how outrageous this became. He told the SA Broadcasting Corporation on 8 February 2004 that the major problem was inaccurate mortality statistics, which made it impossible to know whether AIDS was as fatal as claimed. According to Mbeki, his doctors informed him that diabetes is also an epidemic, and he questioned why no-one talks about diabetes. Achmat replied:

‘Drugs for treating diabetes are heavily overpriced; there should be a campaign for their reduction. But unlike HIV until November 2003, diabetes is treated in the public health sector. However, the President should be aware that according to an initial investigation into the burden of disease estimates in South Africa released in 2003 by the Medical Research Council, AIDS was responsible for 39 per cent of lost life-years in 2000 - more than the next 10 worst diseases. Diabetes is the 12th worst disease and is responsible for slightly more than one per cent of lost life-years. The two diseases are incomparable in scale.’

Achmat also ridiculed Mbeki’s claim that ‘few countries can hold a candle to South Africa’s HIV/AIDS programme.’ Achmat replied:

‘A number of developing countries do much better than South Africa when it comes to HIV prevention and treatment, often with far fewer resources. Currently, South Africa treats approximately 1,500 people in its public sector, who are not on drug trials, paying for their own medicines or being sponsored. By contrast, Brazil’s government treats over 100,000 people and has less than a quarter of South Africa’s HIV infections. Botswana is treating approximately 15,000 and Cameroon approximately 7,000 people.’

In March 2004 the need to harass Pretoria to ensure roll-out was confirmed again, when TAC was forced to threaten an urgent court interdict in order to permit the urgent acquisition of antiretroviral medicines consistent with the November 2003 cabinet decision. Tshabalala-Msimang was sufficiently threatened by yet more embarrassing court proceedings that she finally agreed, just before a deadline provided by TAC lawyers. TAC declared victory, though remarked that ‘by implementing the interim procurement mechanism and thereby avoiding a three-month delay of the treatment programme, approximately 6,000 excess deaths could be avoided.’ [8]

What is the way forward, given persistent presidential denial, state bureaucratic sabotage, and structural factors that mitigate against access to treatment? One major stumbling block would probably emerge in subsequent months and years: the nature of political alliances within South African politics. TAC had been effective in attracting support from the most forward-looking trades unions, the SA Communist Party, churches, NGO activists and technical supporters (lawyers, health workers, academics, journalists). Yet these alliances did not stray far from the ANC. Would TAC forge sufficient linkages to non-ANC communities, especially those devoted to building the new independent left? In coming years, would the myriad of problems that cause opportunistic infections, especially dirty water and air (thanks to coal/wood/paraffin), also be addressed? At a time that the South African government was disconnecting water and electricity at a lethal rate, alongside evictions for those who could not afford expensive rental and mortgage bond payments, the need to address the links between AIDS and the diseases of poverty/homelessness was obvious.

Moreover, would TAC and its allies make the case that access to ARVs is a human right and that people should not pay user-fees or partial cost-recovery for the medicines? By 2004 they were taking this position, but only in the event that people were too poor to pay for medicines. Yet means-testing of black South Africans with irregular informal incomes is notoriously difficult. In contrast, a more explicit ‘free lifeline’ strategy would parallel the demands of the water and electricity campaigners.

Nevertheless, whether or not TAC continues to tackle the three structural impediments to ARV access – neo-liberal fiscal policy, pharmacorps and corporate control of health perks - the immediate victory of November 2003 will potentially make a huge difference. For the half million South Africans who are symptomatic with AIDS or who have a CD4 blood count less than 200, there was suddenly hope. Across the world, for three million people who die each year of AIDS, and for 40 million others infected, the treatment activists and their international allies deserve a standing ovation.

* Patrick Bond directs the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. This article is an extract from his book 'Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa'.

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

For additional notes, please follow this link:

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/370/48047zim.jpg Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights issued this statement concerning escalating cases of organised violence and torture, and the intimidation of medical personnel.

Since the last report on the 25th of April, our members have reported a dramatic escalation in incidents of organised violence and torture with the number of victims documented in the post election period now standing at over 900. This figure grossly underestimates the number of victims presenting countrywide as the violence is now on such a scale that it is impossible to properly document all cases. There have been 22 confirmed deaths but at least double that number have been reported but are yet to be confirmed. It is alleged that some of those killed have been buried on the orders of state agents before documentation can take place.

There has been a dramatic increase in violence since the beginning of May. In the last 24 hours alone, 30 victims of violence have been treated for limb fractures in Harare hospitals and clinics and supplies of Plaster of Paris bandages are reported to be exhausted in most health centres.

One hospital in Harare has treated an average of 23 victims a day over the last week. On the 8th of May, there were a total 53 more seriously injured patients (13 females and 40 males) admitted to wards in 3 Harare hospitals. These included one 30 year old man on life support in the intensive care unit with severe, irreversible head injuries and a 30 year old man with severe soft tissue injuries to the buttocks and secondary renal failure, also on life support. Both of these patients died later that day. Also admitted was a 3yr old boy with trauma to his R eye from being struck with a rock and a 78 year old man with a fractured lower leg from blunt trauma. One young breast-feeding mother had bilateral fractures of her hands and was unable to hold her baby to feed her. Among the other patients, 20 had defensive, forearm or hand fractures, 5 had leg fractures and 1 fractured ribs. Fourteen patients had severe injuries to the buttocks from blunt trauma which required surgery for the removal of necrotic (dead) tissue. The perpetrators in all cases were alleged by the victims to be war veterans and Zanu PF supporters. Similar patterns of injuries are being reported from other hospitals.

As emphasised in the previous ZADHR reports, the cases documented by our members represent only a fraction of the total number countrywide. ZADHR is concerned that many victims of current violence are not receiving treatment. Numerous incidents of violence are being reported from remote rural areas where there is no access to transport and there are also widespread reports of the injured being denied treatment at health centres where staff have been intimidated and/or are acting under specific instructions from state agents not to treat victims of violence. It was reported from one district (Headlands) that medical care was being provided only if the victim had a letter from the police authorising this. Accounts have also been received of ambulances, sent to collect seriously injured victims, being turned away by war veterans. Under these circumstances, it is likely that many of those with less severe injuries are not seeking medical attention. This seems to be confirmed by increasing reports of victims presenting with complications such as wound infections or infected haematomas which are directly attributable to delayed treatment.

Doctors and nursing staff at rural hospitals are working under conditions of severe stress and many health workers have reported intimidation with some having been specifically instructed by state agents not to treat opposition supporters. These health workers, who, according to some reports are treating up to 60 victims of torture and violence a day, are emotionally traumatised and depressed. One nursing sister treating victims in a rural clinic was observed to be shaking so violently with fear that she was unable to write.

Government spokespersons have repeatedly claimed that they have not received reports of violence or of deaths from the police. However, there is evidence that the police themselves are being intimidated. ZADHR has eyewitness statements that on the 24th of April, at Mayo Police Station in Headlands District, a high-ranking police officer from Harare physically assaulted the Member in Charge, accusing him of being sympathetic to the opposition. The police post had been taking statements from victims and referring them for medical treatment. The Member in Charge was summarily transferred out of the district.

The current pattern of organized torture and violence being perpetrated by state agents in the rural areas of Zimbabwe is similar to that documented prior to the 2002 elections. However, the current violence is dramatically more intensive and unrestrained. The level of brutality and callousness exhibited by the perpetrators is unprecedented and the vicious and cowardly attacks by so called war veterans on women, children and the elderly shames the memory of all true heroes of the liberation struggle.

It has been clearly documented that much of the violence has been specifically directed against members of the opposition party, particularly those who acted as election agents or monitors in the recent elections. Villagers and school teachers from districts where the opposition predominated in the elections have also been targeted even though they have no political affiliations. Without exception, victims treated by our members have identified the perpetrators either as war veterans, armed security force members or Zanu PF youth militia or varying combinations of the three. The few acts of violence attributable to opposition members appear to have been retaliatory or defensive. It is clear from the widespread and coordinated nature of the violence and the consistent pattern of injuries inflicted, that state agents including elements of the security forces are organizing and directing this campaign of terror.

It is now obvious that the intent of the campaign is to secure victory for President Robert Mugabe in a run off election. As in the 2002 election, it may be anticipated that the violence will be halted just prior to the arrival of international election monitors, to create the illusion of a peaceful and fair election, although state agents will maintain an intimadatory presence throughout the rural areas.

ZADHR again appeals for the immediate cessation of acts of violence and for the restoration of the rule of law in Zimbabwe. To this end it calls for:

1) the immediate, large- scale deployment of teams of SADC and other credible international observers to all districts where violence is being reported.

2) attested members of the Zimbabwe Republic Police to assume sole responsibility for the enforcement of law and order, and for the protection of the law be extended to all Zimbabweans irrespective of political affiliation.

3) the immediate withdrawal of all military personnel, both regular and irregular to barracks and the arrest of those war veterans and those posing as war veterans who are instigating violence.

4) the withdrawal of uniforms and arms from all irregular police and army militia not formally attested into the service and not entitled under law to bear arms.

5) the postponement of all run off election activities until the above conditions have been achieved.

Finally, ZADHR again appeals to the international community of health workers, including the Zimbabwe Ministry of Health and Child Welfare and the Zimbabwe Medical Association to bring whatever effective pressure is within their capability to bear on the Government of Zimbabwe to stop these grotesque, cruel and shameful acts of violence, and to be prepared to actively defend their colleagues facing intimidation and physical threat.

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/370/48046camp.jpgThe National Internally Displaced Persons Network of Kenya is deeply concerned with recent moves by the Government of Kenya to forcibly close IDP camps across the country in violation of the international Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and basic human decency.

Operation "Rudi Nyumbani" seems to be based on no policy or legal framework but instead uses the force of the provincial administration to prematurely close the IDP camps. It aims at solving the problems of displacement by simply forcing people back to their homes:

1) without honoring legal obligations to compensation;

2) without providing adequate security and;

3) without allowing time for some reconciliation to take place.

The National IDP Network asks that the Government of Kenya recognize its responsibility to protect these victims of violence including many children. According to the guiding principles, which it has agreed to in the Great Lakes Pact, the government is also required, to give the displaced choices and alternatives to returning to the site of very recent trauma. By closing the camps the government is in effect forcing people to return or face starvation, disease and perhaps home in a slum.  Such scenarios are likely to breed more poverty and recruits for gangs and future violence. Few seem to remember that Mungiki was a product of the 1991-92 violence and that we are in danger of magnifying and multiplying such groups if we do not deal with both the sites of violence and the trauma and plight of the displaced in a comprehensive manner.

It should also be noted that a number of those IDPs who have agreed to be taken back to such places as Kuresoi have experienced threats, violence and no services. At least one man has committed suicide on return, and many have literally returned by foot to the camps. In Nakuru, the site of one of the largest camps the government discontinued water five days ago to the camp causing much distress and the potential outbreak of disease. Residents have been forced to send children out to collect water and tomorrow they will bury a child killed by a car on one desperate mission to collect water.  This is no way to treat victims of violence who are already traumatized.

We are asking concerned citizens and friends of Kenya to take urgent action:

- Ask the Kenya Red Cross and international partners to end any complicity in forced returns. Water must be restored to the Nakuru camp immediately. The Kenya Red Cross can be e-mailed at [email][email protected] or texted at 722-206958 or 733-333040

- Ask the Kenya National Commission for Human Rights to investigate and monitor the ongoing Resettlement and camp closures and to demand that the government recognize the Guiding Principles as the legal framework for dealing with IDPs. Commissioner Maina Kiai can be reached at [email][email protected]

- Ask the government to create an IDP policy that includes some alternatives, which could be in the form of reinstatement of salaries for displaced government employees, monetary compensation, trauma counseling and help in individual relocation choices. Some IDPs have also suggested that they enter into temporary farming arrangements on underutilized land until reconciliation and security can be restored.

- Ask the Government to recognize that some IDPs will prefer to relocate in other parts of the country including Nairobi to do business rather than return. This must be respected and the Ministry of Special Programmes must work with the Ministry of Lands to find alternatives as well as temporary farming arrangements for those who do not wish to return. Finally, urge them to restore water to the Nakuru camp immediately.

*Dr. Naomi Shaban can be texted at 722814412.

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

Netfa Freeman argues that commentaries looking at Zimbabwe should also "include an analysis of and explicit stand against US-British intervention and address why and how they are targeting Zimbabwe.

When Collin Powell gave his infamous presentation to the United Nations, “proving” Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Iraq dominated the headlines. It took some time and subsequent discoveries before many realized most of what we were fed was untrue.

Although not as elevated, today Zimbabwe has taken a high profile place in corporate media headlines. Are we getting the truth this time and can we rely on the same progressives who broke through misinformation around Iraq to do the same for us again?

This commentary is a response to the article by Bill Fletcher Jr., titled “Z” is for Zimbabwe; Turmoil & Silence as a Country Potentially Unravels [Published in Pambazuka as - Zimbabwe: Black America must not be silent;

Mr. Fletcher, also being a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where I am a program director, makes us colleagues. As I respect him for his analysis on many if not most matters, we have differences when it comes to Zimbabwe. There are several points his commentary raises that I believe omit the complexity and context of the issue.

Contrary to what is implied, many Africans (people of African descent) interpret Zimbabwean developments, not necessarily through romanticism, but with a valid rejection of imperialism’s “mania for regime change”. Too often has the public seen leaders and countries demonized simply as a prelude for this policy.

The right of anyone to criticize ZANU PF or Mugabe is valid and should be reserved without a person being condemned as an agent of the CIA or State Department. However, progressives and certainly revolutionaries must necessarily include an analysis of and explicit stand against US-British intervention. This would mean also addressing why and how they are targeting Zimbabwe. More often critics of ZANU PF and Mugabe reduce US-British positions to mere words or rhetorical condemnations when imperialism is never so passive. Not only did the US State Department admit on April 5, 2007 that it was engaged in efforts for regime change in Zimbabwe, such efforts were written into the text of the US’ hypocritical Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001.

This policy includes pervasive economic sanctions (war without guns) designed to strangle the people into submission. No matter what one’s position on ZANU PF and/or Mugabe, a position against imperialism’s immoral assault on Zimbabwe should be a matter of principle, being that “the stakes are too high.” After all, even though Saddam Hussein was widely believed a cruel dictator, progressives nevertheless oppose not only imperialism’s war on Iraq but avidly opposed the preceding US sanctions against Iraq. In Zimbabwe’s case, hardly any stand is taken against imperialism and progressives often corroborate much of the misinformation.

Specifically on Mr. Fletcher’s commentary the following are a few instances where I feel more clarifications are warranted:

Mr. Fletcher says: “We ignored the violent crushing of a rebellion in the early years of the Mugabe administration” but another side would say: “the violent crushing of a ‘violent’ rebellion.” I don't know any other way to put down a violent rebellion than through violence. I’m assuming here that Mr. Fletcher is referring to what took place in Matebeland, often referred to as a massacre in order to demonize ZANU PF. It is a situation too complex to do justice in this commentary but knowing the alternative explanation is important. Following an agreement to integrate the armed forces of ZANU, ZAPU and Rhodesians to form a Zimbabwe National Army, it was agreed that all guerrillas and Ian Smith soldiers were to surrender their weapons to the national armory.

ZAPU secretly decided not to, hiding massive arms caches on its farms and in the bushes, including armored cars and heavy artillery. After being discovered by Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organization, it is said that ZAPU failed to give a satisfactory explanation for this leading to a massive exodus of ZAPU leaders from the new government and the beginning of dissident activity in Matebeland. Shona speaking people and commercial farmers were being killed. Former ZAPU guerillas were roaming freely with guns, terrorizing people, especially in Matebeland and Midlands areas. The ZANU led government could not of course let this go on and it is said that security forces were deployed to end the dissident and banditry activity. Unfortunately people were killed along with dissidents and those who harbored them. However, what is more often mischaracterized as a massacre was more like a small-scale civil war with civilian casualties on both sides.

Subsequently, in 1987 ZAPU and ZANU leaders held talks, which culminated in a Unity Accord and is now celebrated annually on December 22nd, as ZAPU leaders were again put into the fold to form a government of national unity. It is instructive to note that the current National Chairman of ZANU is a former ZAPU leader, the National Youth Chairman is former ZAPU, the Second Vice President is former ZAPU, and the National Army Commander is former ZAPU. In fact former ZAPU members are now in control of many government and party institutions.

Mr. Fletcher says: “We ignored President Mugabe's adoption of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank formula of ‘structural adjustment.’”(ESAP) However, this ignores the context of the times and the world situation. Undoubtedly, it was a mistake to deal with the IMF and World Bank but the conditions and constraints that led to Zimbabwe's doing this were largely due to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and were felt by all countries trying to pursue an independent path. Cuba referred to these conditions as their Special Period. This also ignores that Mugabe’s government abolished the ESAP, something done nowhere else in Africa.

Mr. Fletcher says: “And, we ignored the fact that the land was not being redistributed.”

But some was. Although it represented only one third of a 162,000 household target, more than 50,000 households had been resettled by 1990. Why wasn't more land redistributed before the late 1990s?

This is explained by constraints of the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement that brokered Zimbabwe’s independence and it is critical to note that the liberation forces were encouraged to accept this agreement by fellow liberation forces in the other Front Line states. The constraints in this agreement were not the choice of Mugabe or ZANU.

Mr. Fletcher says: “Many well-intentioned supporters of Zimbabwe ignored or were oblivious to the growing protests that had swept Zimbabwe in the 1990s among workers who stood in opposition to the economic policies of structural adjustment that were impoverishing them.” I don’t know what the point is here. That instead of commending ZANU-PF, for jettisoning ESAP as soon as it could, it is better to support the opposition, which wants to cement ESAP in place?

Mr. Fletcher says: “And some of us closed our eyes to who was actually benefiting from land redistribution and who was not.” With all due respect this sounds like a version of the land going not to the landless but to Mugabe's cronies routine. I’m sorry but I can’t believe Mugabe had 134,000 cronies to dole land out to in 2002. Land audits bear out the fact that land went mainly to the landless and had reached over 250,000 families by 2006. Furthermore, not only have there been eyewitness testimonies by others, such as that of Baffour Ankomah, editor of New African who has seen things for himself but I also personally know of a youth farming cooperative started with land from this exercise. Having been there and stayed at the home of the cooperative’s chairman I attest that these youth are hardly cronies of Mugabe.

Mr. Fletcher says: “I found myself attempting to explain to them (his Zimbabwean comrades) why many African Americans were silent in the face of President Mugabe's repression.” Actually, I haven't noticed this reluctance disproportionate to any other issue. Maybe I've seen too many articles taking the standard line against Zimbabwe. I have experienced quite a bit of cynicism among most intellectual African-“Americans” about my alternative position on the issues. On the other hand I also find that the common Black person on the street has legitimate reservations about anything remotely resembling the regime change rhetoric of imperialism.

Regarding Mr. Fletcher’s position on the elections, I agree that it would have been better to announce the results even with a recount needed. Although I recognize that the MDC and Western media would have treated the initial figure as real and the recount as rigging. From that standpoint, I think I can understand why the total has not been announced. But it still may have been better to do so. The same rigging claims were going to be tossed around regardless. Statements by British officials and US make it clear that they will accept no result that does not favor the opposition. What more is the iron first and velvet glove of imperialism doing to ensure their interests in Zimbabwe? Mr. Fletcher and I agree that the stakes in Zimbabwe are higher than the mere outcome of an election but I contend that it’s one of completely embedded neo-colonialism versus the right to national self-determination and sovereignty.

Mr. Fletcher says: “Though originally planned as a labor party, the MDC became a sort of united front of opponents of President Mugabe, ranging the political spectrum from the revolutionary Left to some conservative white farmers.” There is more to this than one could gather from this summary. In December 1998, with Zimbabwe having already earned the indignation of Western governments, a plan was presented to the European Union’s Africa Working Group recommending strategies for regime change. The plan called for the formation of a political party from this spectrum of opponents in “civil society”, naming in particular, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). Prior to this, in May 1997 European trade unions had already singled out the then Secretary General of ZCTU, Morgan Tsvangirai as their presidential candidate against Robert Mugabe. It’s with this backdrop that the MDC was born.

I agree with Mr. Fletcher’s assertion, “Whether we like or dislike the MDC, or President Mugabe for that matter, holds second place to whether there is a political environment that advances genuine, grassroots democracy and debate in Zimbabwe.” Clearly, however such an environment cannot exist while foreign interests are so pervasively manipulating so much of what appears to be internal.

On January 24th, 1999 a meeting was convened at Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs to discuss the EU’s regime change policy. The theme of the meeting, led by Richard Dowden, now the Executive Director of the Royal African Society, was “Zimbabwe - Time for Mugabe to Go?” The “confiscating” of white-held land is what got a “yes” to the conference’s rhetorical question. Dowden presented four options:

1. a military coup
2. buying the opposition
3. insurrection
4. subverting Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party

A few months later, the US State Department held its version of that meeting, a seminar entitled “The Zimbabwe Crisis” to discuss its strategy for dealing with the same. Their conclusion too was that civil society and the opposition would be strengthened to foment discontent and dissent.

If we’re going to discuss Zimbabwe and what position to take on it, it’s important that the African community consider this context. While Mr. Fletcher is concerned with what he refers to as "infintile approaches" to controversy within our communities, I’m more concerned that our assessments are arrived at with plentiful and accurate context. Because, like Mr. Fletcher, I believe the stakes are much too high.

*Netfa Freeman is director of the Social Action & Leadership School for Activists (SALSA), a program of the Washington DC based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a longtime activist in the Pan-African and international human rights movements, and a co-producer/co-host for Voices With Vision, WPFW 89.3 FM, Washington DC. This article first appeared at www.blackcommentator.com

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/368/47874congo.jpgWithin the context of an elusive peace in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo and an ongoing assault by the government against the fundamental rights of the people of the Lower Congo Region, it has come to our attention that Professor Ernest Wamba dia Wamba and the Honorable Deputy Kiakwama have been targeted for assassination.

Both individuals have been actively defending the rights of the people of the Lower Congo to express themselves freely. They, like many other Congolese from other regions of the country, have condemned the wanton violence of government police forces against members of the Bundu dia Kongo (BdK), a movement for the cultural and spiritual emancipation of the Congo people. They have condemned the manner in which, since February 2008, brutal repression has led to the deaths of innocent people, including infants and older people. BdK is working to find a way for all sides to come together, so that a healing process can be initiated.

Ota Benga Alliance for Peace, Healing and Dignity calls on the DRC government to protect Wamba dia Wamba and Deputy Kiakwama from threatened assassinations.

If the information regarding the threats against the lives of Professor Wamba dia Wamba and Deputy Kiakwama is correct, we call on all those in the government who are directly and indirectly responsible for the maintenance of safety and peace for all Congolese citizens to do everything in their power to prevent the execution of such a plan.

Should the above threat against the lives of Prof Ernest Wamba dia Wamba and Honorable Kiakwama take place, we shall hold the government of the DRC responsible and accountable, and do all that is necessary to ensure that the institutions and/or individuals are brought to justice.

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

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/368/47869hospital.jpgAs the people of Equatorial Guinea continue to die from AIDS and other diseases, Agustin Velloso highlights the fact that the elite in power receive their medical care abroad. Spain, one of the country's more important trading partners, turns a blind eye to Equatorial Guinea's corrupt health-care industry.

In Madrid at the end of October 2007, President Zapatero promised to give 0.7% of GDP for development aid during workshops promoted by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and presided over by Queen Sofía. As he did so, a boy we can call Miguel, sick with AIDS in Equatorial Guinea, lay dying in his mother's arms in the hospital in Malabo, the country's capital.

One of the objectives of the AECID is to train doctors in Equatorial Guinea to treat AIDS and to advise their clinical work with AIDS patients. So one is not dealing with witchdoctors here but doctors trained by the AECID. Yet they gave Miguel an extract of tree bark rather than the internationally recognised treatment, antiretrovirals. Antiretrovirals are available in Equatorial Guinea; international agencies donate them.

The reason Miguel did not receive the right treatment is corruption by the people responsible for caring for his health. According to ASODEGUE, the Association for Democratic Solidarity with Equatorial Guinea, the prime minister called a meeting several months ago of the national coordinators of the campaign against AIDS and of international agencies working in the country. Among them were delegates from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and AECID's experts who advise Equatorial Guinea's health ministry. A niece of President Obiang also took part. She is not a doctor but a businesswoman. She presented the meeting's participants with a project to produce the bark extract (called Fagaricine) to market as an AIDS treatment. She also asked their opinion about the project.

In its January 2008 Republic of Congo WHO Office Information Bulletin, the WHO notes ‘Fagaricine is not an AIDS drug’[1]. Whatever the experts’ opinion may have been, a tragedy took place shortly afterwards when a group of patients, including Miguel, attended their routine appointments in Malabo hospital to collect their antiretrovirals. Instead, they received Fagaricine. This group of guinea pigs included children and adults and at least one expectant mother. No explanation was given; most of the people did not even know.

The group soon began to get worse. Some died. The population became concerned. Despite foreign aid and government propaganda, AIDS treatment in the country is a disaster. Fagaricine is currently no longer prescribed in Malabo hospital but it is still sold in a few pharmacies.

Meanwhile, Obiang and his circle receive their medical care abroad. Some pay astronomical bills in private clinics in the United States, while others are treated for free in Spain's public hospitals. At the same time private clinics flourish in Equatorial Guinea, but only the very well-off can afford their services. President Obiang's wife owns several of them; most have his family members as partners.

The government is unable to provide health care to the population. As opposition leader Plácido Mico noted at the National Economic Conference in November 2007 ‘the health care situation in Equatorial Guinea, a multimillionaire country, is without doubt the best example of our deep inequalities, injustices and social exclusion, as is the distribution of wealth in the country. Apart from Mongomo, no general hospital in the country permits even a straightforward x-ray.’ [2]

Equatorial Guinea is one of the main producers of oil and gas in Africa and has been a most favoured beneficiary of technical and economic aid from Spain for decades. The AECID implements its health work there ‘via various projects with one common denominator: the formation of a framework permitting the institution building of the National Health System’. One of these projects, the control of endemic diseases, is carried out for AECID by Spanish state bodies – the National Centre of Tropical Medicine and the Carlos the Third Health Institute. With formidable funding they aim ‘to achieve the training and improvement in operative capacity of local technical personnel in the Health System and in the National Programmes’[3]. The main endemic disease is AIDS.

The argument used by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation in Equatorial Guinea to justify their expenditure is that it is being used to build ‘local capacity’ for each of the ‘National Programmes’.

Tuberculosis and AIDS are allowed to get out of control while discriminatory laws are issued against people who are HIV positive, such as Presidential Decree No. 107/2006 of 20 November 2007, which ordains ‘the requirement of an HIV/AIDS test certificate in order to obtain certain public services’.

During the recent electoral campaign in Spain, María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, the Spanish government's First Vice-President and Presidency Minister, promised, alongside Miguel Angel Moratinos, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, and Leire Pajín, Secretary of State for International Cooperation, that Spain would ‘make history in the next four years’ and be ‘a leader in solidarity’. She also stressed that Spanish socialists believe in politics ‘as a means to make the world a better place’ and that, since we are the eighth biggest economy in the world ‘we have to take on the responsibility demanded by our place on the world stage’.[3]

Despite the sonorous propaganda about international aid, more resounding still is the silence about the Obiang family's corruption and the consequences of Spanish development cooperation in Equatorial Guinea.

*Agustín Velloso is professor of education sciences at the National University of Education in Madrid. This article was translated by Toni Solo, an activist living in Nicaragua.

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

*** For notes and references please click here