May 23, 2004 - September 24, 2004
Address by President Mugabe to the U.N.
Posted: Friday, September 24, 2004
The Herald (Harare)
DOCUMENT
September 24, 2004
Address by President Mugabe on the occasion of the 59th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, New York, on Wednesday.
MR PRESIDENT, I am delighted to congratulate you (Mr Jean Ping), a distinguished son of Africa, upon your election as President of the 59th Session of the General Assembly. Indeed, at a time when the community of nations has committed itself to paying due attention to issues that relate to development in Africa, through support for Nepad and other mechanisms, your Presidency gives us the hope and confidence that our concerns and aspirations and those of others will remain high on the agenda of this august body.
Let me also express our sincere appreciation to your predecessor, Mr Julian Hunte, for the efficient and exemplary manner in which he conducted the business of the 58th Session.
Mr President, at the 58th Session, alongside others, I spoke about the need to reform the United Nations and its related bodies so as to make them more democratic. I stressed the perils inherent in the status quo, particularly, with regard to the dominance of global politics by one superpower and its closest allies.
While we welcome the current debate on enhancing the authority and role of the United Nations, we wish to stress the need to address the core issue of democratisation of international governance. Debate on the reform of the Security Council has been too long-drawn because of attempts calculated to protect those whose interests are best served by the status quo.
Ironically, it is some of the same forces that, since last year, have been raining bombs and hellfire on innocent Iraqis purportedly in the name of democracy.
Iraq today has become a vast inferno created by blatant and completely illegal and defiant acts of aggression by the United States, Britain and their allies, in the full trail of which the world has witnessed mass destruction of both human lives and property, and with them our human rights, values, morality and the norms of international law as enshrined in our Charter.
We are now being coerced to accept and believe that a new political-cum-religious doctrine has arisen, namely that "There is but one political god, George W. Bush, and Tony Blair is his prophet". Mr President, the UN Charter remains the only most sacred document and proponent of the relations of our nations. Anything else is political heresy!
Mr President, we note that the Secretary-General has placed before the General Assembly, the Report of the Panel of Eminent Persons of the United Nations Civil Society Relations. While civil society makes a significant contribution to the work of the United Nations, we hope any arrangements that will eventually be agreed upon will recognise that the United Nations remains an inter-state and inter-governmental body. It is also our expectation that the conclusions of the debate will recognise the different levels of development of civil society in different parts of the world.
Mr President, as we prepare for the mid-term review of the implementation of the Millennium Declaration in September 2005, it is apparent that many developing countries, including my own country, Zimbabwe, may be unable to meet goals and targets set, as our sub-region of Southern Africa has over recent years experienced extended and successive periods of inclement weather, principally droughts, that wreaked havoc upon our economies and, accordingly, diminished our capacity to achieve the Millennium Declaration targets.
The situation, particularly with regards to the health and education sectors, has also been worsened by the brain drain and the devastating effects of the HIV and Aids pandemic.
Mr President, in this regard, Zimbabwe welcomes the continuing efforts by this community of nations to find solutions to the scourge of HIV and Aids that has ravaged our people and economies. At the national level, we have taken measures, within our limited means, to combat the pandemic. We are also co-ordinating our efforts at the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) level.
Regrettably, we continue to see the unfortunate and futile tendency to use assistance in this area as reward for political compliance and malleability, making it unavailable to countries whose governments are deemed "inconvenient". Let it be realised that the pandemic does not respect boundaries, and these self-serving, selective approaches will have little or no meaningful results.
Zimbabwe has also had to withstand unprovoked, declared and undeclared sanctions, imposed by Britain and its allies who are bent on bringing down our legitimately elected Government.
Mr Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, has arrogantly and unashamedly announced in his Parliament that his government was working with Zimbabwe's opposition party to bring about regime change. Once again, the lawless nature of this man who, along his Washington master, believes he is God-ordained to rule our world, has shown itself.
Regime change is an inalienable right of our Zimbabwean people who, through their sovereign vote, can make and unmake our governments. In any case, we reject completely the pretended assertions of democracy by our former colonial masters, whose undemocratic regimes we taught the lesson of one man or one woman one vote through our armed liberation struggles.
Here in the United States, as we look at the situation from Africa, we remain aware of the plight of the Black, that is Afro-American of both yesterday and today and of the semi-slave and half-citizen status that has been his burden. Have the Black in the USA got equal political, social and economic rights and status as their white counterparts? When shall we ever have a Black, Afro-American President of the United States? Never, ever, why?
I wish to take this opportunity to express the appreciation of my Government and that of the people of Zimbabwe for the humanitarian assistance we received from the international community during our period of need. Without such support, we would not have been able to avert a major catastrophe.
I am pleased to inform you Mr President that we have, in spite of the sanctions and evil wishes of Britain and its allies, now emerged from that difficult phase.
We had a relatively good agricultural season this year and our Land Reform Programme has begun to make a significant contribution towards the turnaround of our economy.
Despite the partial drought at the beginning of the season, we have managed this year to realise a good harvest, certainly, one good enough to ensure that we meet our food requirements until the next season.
We plead with the IMF to stop its strange political mouthings, lies and fabrications about our situation. Our own regional organisations know the truth about Zimbabwe and can the IMF listen to them, please and be for once clean.
Mr President, my Government is determined to eliminate corruption and its corrosive effects on national development efforts. After signing the International Convention against Corruption in November last year, we have put in place legal and administrative measures that have already arrested a growing and deliberate tendency to circumvent normal business practices, particularly in the financial services sector.
Our efforts have, however, experienced some setbacks as some countries, particularly in the developed West, provide safe havens for fugitive economic saboteurs from our country.
Mr President, in March next year, Zimbabwe will be holding its sixth democratic parliamentary elections since Independence in 1980. These elections, like others before them, will be conducted in accordance with our national laws, and the Sadc Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections recently adopted by our sub-region.
We do not need any lessons from the Netherlands and its imperial allies in the European Union. Zimbabwe will, indeed, welcome to these elections those observers whose sole and undivided purpose will be to observe the process and not to meddle in the politics of the country.
Mr President, the fight against international terrorism has exposed the duplicity and insincerity of erstwhile leading democracies and human rights monitors with regard to the question of the observance of human rights. We have seen established international conventions being thrown to the dogs, and resolutions of the General Assembly and other UN bodies on this issue come to naught.
We are seriously concerned that the United Nations, the pre-eminent instrument for the maintenance of international peace and security, watched helplessly while Iraq was being unlawfully attacked and plundered by the US and UK-led so-called coalition of the willing. Such belligerent gun-slinging diplomacy and illegitimate territorial occupation of the State of Iraq are blemishes on the fair play image of the UN.
While the sadistic scenes from Abu Ghraib remain vivid in our minds, other places in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay have provided useful samples of the Western concept of respect for human rights. Let me say once again that the West should spare us their lessons on human rights. They do not have the moral authority to speak about anyway, let alone, parade themselves, as torchbearers of human rights.
Mr President, Zimbabwe remains deeply concerned about the situation in the Middle East. We continue to be revulsed by a situation where the collective decisions and authority of the United Nations are disregarded with impunity on account of big brother support.
We demand an immediate lifting of all restrictions illegally imposed on the Palestinian people, which have seen President Yasser Arafat remain a virtual prisoner of foreign occupation.
We welcome the recent opinion given by the International Court of Justice that found the construction of the Israeli wall to be in contravention of international law, and the subsequent General Assembly Resolution that demanded the immediate halt to that monstrosity.
Mr President, as you are aware, the African Union earlier this year established its own Peace and Security Council to seek and promote African solutions to African problems.
Already, the Council is seized with the matter of the crisis in western Sudan. These efforts need the support of the international community.
Let me conclude, Mr President, by assuring you of my country's support during the period you will preside over the work of this Session of the General Assembly.
I also wish to reiterate my country's commitment to positively contribute to the fulfilment of the aims and purpose of the United Nations.
I thank you.
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How new Africa made fools of the white mischief-makers
Posted: Sunday, August 29, 2004
By Raymond Whitaker and Paul Lashmar
From The Independent (UK)
August 29th, 2004
The days when white mercenaries could walk into small African countries and take them over appear to be gone. The coup plot against Equatorial Guinea, with its cast of old Etonians, adventurers and shady money men, failed because of its leaders' incompetence - and because of a new spirit of co-operation among Africans.
"Things have changed in Africa over the past few years," said a friend of Simon Mann, the old Etonian now awaiting sentence in Zimbabwe for attempting to buy arms illegally. "The days are gone when you could recruit a bunch of moustaches, load up some ammunition and take over a country - especially if you are a white man."
Mr Mann says the weapons were for a mine security operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo; the Zimbabweans and others say they were for a coup in the oil-rich state of Equatorial Guinea. But the truth of his friend's words are evident as the 51-year-old former SAS officer sits in Chikurubi prison near Harare, facing a heavy sentence at his next hearing on 10 September.
In Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, Nick du Toit, Mr Mann's associate, is on trial for his life. And under house arrest behind heavy iron gates in Constantia, one of Cape Town's smartest suburbs, Sir Mark Thatcher is contemplating his future.
The indulged son of Baroness Thatcher got out of several scrapes when his mother was Prime Minister, but there is nothing she can do to extricate him from his most serious trouble yet. The businessman, also 51, has been charged under South Africa's Foreign Military Assistance Act with involvement in financing the coup plot, and faces up to 15 years in jail if convicted. Although he is unlikely to be extradited to Equatorial Guinea - no extradition treaty exists between the two countries, and South Africa, like Britain, refuses to send suspects to states that retain the death penalty - legal officers from there may be allowed to question him in Cape Town.
According to legal statements by Mr Mann and Mr du Toit, a force of mercenaries recruited in South Africa were to fly to Zimbabwe, pick up arms and ammunition and fly on to Equatorial Guinea. In return for $1.8m (£1m) and lucrative contracts, they would help to depose President Teodoro Obiang Nguema and replace him with Severo Moto, an exiled opposition politician based in Madrid. If he was not killed in the operation, President Obiang was to have been flown to Spain.
But how could the politics of a small, sweaty African microstate have entangled such a varied cast of characters? These include not only Lady Thatcher's son but some of her closest former aides, such as Lord Archer, whose friend, the Lebanese-born, British-based oil trader Ely Calil, is named by Mr Mann as the chief sponsor of the coup. (Both Lord Archer and Mr Calil have denied any prior knowledge or involvement.) Add in ex-special forces operatives from Britain and South Africa, not to mention two African dictators - President Obiang and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe - and the story begins to resemble a Frederick Forsyth thriller, a post-modernist Dogs of War in which the "natives" actually win.
And that, an Independent on Sunday investigation shows, is the point. Not only does the affair resurrect the era when white mercenaries attempted to overturn regimes across Africa, it brings back half-forgotten figures from the 1980s in Britain, when a class of deal-makers and influence-peddlers operated in the shadow of the seemingly unconquerable Iron Lady, seeking to turn her grip on the British electorate to profit.
When his mother took power Mark Thatcher was 26, with an undistinguished career at school and in business. There was little reason to expect that 25 years later he would be worth an estimated £60m, with mansions in Cape Town and Texas and a network of business contacts around the world.
Like others, Sir Mark (who inherited a baronetcy when his father, Sir Denis, died last year) did well out of his connection to one of the most internationally admired British Prime Ministers of recent times. But the questions and controversies arising from his use of the Thatcher name drove him first to the United States and then to South Africa. There he made friends with Simon Mann - who owns a luxury homestead in Hout Bay, another up-market Cape Town enclave - Nick du Toit and other former military men using their expertise to make money out of Africa's chronic instability.
Mr Mann appears to be the only person who really knows where all the pieces of this jigsaw fit, who was really behind the coup plot and who is on the mythical "wonga list" of investors. But the whole affair would never have acquired such international notoriety if it were not for the letter he smuggled out of prison.
"Please!" read the intercepted note to his advisers. "It is essential that we get properly organised." It urges them to make maximum efforts to contact "Smelly" - taken to refer to Mr Calil - and "Scratcher", a nickname for Sir Mark. It also names David Hart, presumed to be the same businessman who helped Lady Thatcher break the 1984-85 miners' strike. Mann writes: "What will get us out is MAJOR CLOUT ... once we get into a real trial scenario we are f****d."
On a page torn from a magazine, Mr Mann tells his team to chase up expected "project funds" from investors including "Scratcher" who has the figure "200" in brackets. This has been interpreted as meaning that Sir Mark had promised a sum of $200,000, but gives no indication that it was intended for any illegal activity, and indeed implies that no money was ever actually handed over.
Among the four people to whom the note was addressed are Nigel Morgan, like Mr Mann a former Guards officer, and James Kershaw, a 24-year-old who has worked for both men. Mr Kershaw, who is said to have handled money transfers for Mr Mann's company, Logo, is expected to testify against Sir Mark, according to the Scorpions, the elite anti-corruption unit that arrested him on Wednesday. His evidence may be crucial: despite voluminous paperwork connected with the coup attempt, there have been no reports of any document that carries Sir Mark's name.
But whatever their past friendship, "Scratcher" must be ruing the day he ever met Simon Mann. The former secret soldier is a throwback to the days of empire, a British public schoolboy adventurer prepared to interfere in the Byzantine politics of third world countries. "He is very English, a romantic, tremendously good company," said the film director Paul Greengrass. In his first and only role as a professional actor, Mr Mann played the part of Colonel Derek Wilford, commander of the paratroopers in Londonderry in Greengrass's gritty television reconstruction of Bloody Sunday.
After Eton and Sandhurst, the 19-year-old Mr Mann joined the Scots Guards in 1972, but his daredevil instincts soon drew him to the SAS. A troop commander in 22 SAS, specialising in intelligence and counter-terrorism, he served in Cyprus, Germany, Norway, Canada, central America and Northern Ireland before leaving the Army in 1985.
Although he began by selling supposedly hack-proof computer software, like many SAS veterans he also operated in the security business, reportedly providing bodyguards to wealthy Arabs to protect their Scottish estates from poachers. He remained part of 23 SAS, the Territorial Army section, and briefly returned to the colours on the staff of General Sir Peter de la Billiere during the first Gulf War in 1991.
Security consulting in the Gulf area followed, but his connection with Africa predominated. He was hired by Eben Barlow, a South African, to help run Executive Outcomes, the first of the many private military companies now operating around the globe. Both men rapidly became rich, most notably from a series of security deals in Angola, where Executive Outcomes not only protected oil and diamond fields, but trained Angolan troops and fought Unita rebels. The company also helped the Sierra Leone government fight off rebels in the mid-1990s.
All this gained Mr Mann not only a mansion in Cape Town but Inchmery, a 20-acre riverside estate in Hampshire that once belonged to the Rothschilds. Until recently it was rented out to Dame Marjorie Scardino, chief executive of the Pearson group, owners of the Financial Times. Mr Mann, now a dual citizen of Britain and South Africa, bought the estate through a company registered in the offshore tax haven of Guernsey.
But why should a man past 50, who had earned enough to live in style without ever working again, have become involved in such a hair-raising caper as the Equatorial Guinea plot appears to have been? According to his friends, it was the drug of adventure. One said he had been warned by the British as well as the South African authorities that he should "hang up his boots", but the ex-SAS man seems to have ignored the advice.
What is perhaps most surprising about the attempted coup is its incompetence. A planeload of obvious mercenaries leaves South Africa, no longer a country which encourages such activity, then lands in Zimbabwe. If the receiving officials were supposed to have been bribed, it had not been done effectively, but in any case the Zimbabweans appeared to have been warned in advance. It took little time after that to arrest the alleged advance guard in Equatorial Guinea, where Mr du Toit is on trial with seven other South Africans, six Armenians and four local citizens. But the greatest folly was the lack of security. Mr Mann's 66 fellow defendants in Zimbabwe, including the 64 men who were travelling on South African passports when their plane was seized, were acquitted on the arms charge, with the magistrate accepting their plea that they did not know where they were going. It would seem, however, that half of South Africa did. Rumours of the impending coup attempt were circulating in Cape Town, Johannesburg and London well in advance.
The paper trail linked to the plot was so extensive that some observers at first believed that they had been faked to make a case. But Mr Mann, it seems, wanted contracts signed for every part of this dubious scheme. Mr du Toit was even required to sign a company-to-company contract to perform his part of the coup. Why the former SAS officer might have wanted such a document is a mystery: it could hardly have been produced in court in the event of a dispute.
That the plot fell apart so damagingly is hardly surprising, given how wide knowledge of it went in Britain as well as South Africa. "What Simon Mann appears not to have realised is that there is much greater co-ordination among African countries, including intelligence co-operation, to put a stop to coups," said one source. "Nigeria, the regional power, stepped in recently to reverse a coup in Sao Tomé, and was ready to do the same in Equatorial Guinea. The fact that the operation was penetrated by South African intelligence prevented a lot of bloodshed."
Britain, as well as South Africa, has changed, but Mr Mann and his friends seemed equally oblivious to that. Gone are the days when operators such as Sir James Goldsmith and John Aspinall, both now dead, sought to convince a Conservative government that Britain's interests as well as their own would be served by backing such Africans as Angola's Jonas Savimbi, also deceased, and South Africa's Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
The two African leaders were promoted as the Christian, anti-Communist alternative to the likes of Nelson Mandela, whom Lady Thatcher once described as a terrorist. But the Conservatives are no longer in power, and Mr Mandela has been welcomed here on a state visit as president of a free, democratic South Africa - facts which appear to have been overlooked by the heedless coup plotters.
The hapless Nick du Toit, a former South African special officer and member of Executive Outcomes, stands to come off worst. He confessed to his role within a day of arrest in Malabo, and has continued to help identify other plotters since. Despite President Obiang's claim that he is not seeking the death penalty, the prosecutor in the Malabo court has called for the execution of those found guilty. The verdicts are expected by the end of this week.
Unless Zimbabwe goes back on its decision not to extradite him to Equatorial Guinea, Mr Mann will fare better, even if he receives the maximum sentence of 10 years. He could well be extradited back to South Africa to face further charges, but some believe that with his rich and influential friends, he could receive a discreet pardon in a year or two, once the dust has settled. He could even be in line for a healthy cheque from Hollywood.
As for Mark Thatcher, he is fighting back. His circle is claiming that much disinformation has been spread to implicate him and distract attention from the real culprits. But his past is troubled, and the proceedings against him are likely to be protracted and messy. Clearing his name could require every ounce of his much-touted influence.
The making of Mark
Sir Mark Thatcher never seemed to have anything going for him but his name and his mother's uncritical love.
He is famously charmless and not noted for his academic prowess. He left Harrow School with three O-levels, and left his first job, at the City firm Touche Ross, after failing his accountancy exams three times. But when it comes to exploiting the opportunities afforded by the Thatcher surname, he has graduated cum laude.
Mark and his twin sister, Carol, with whom relations are frosty, were 26 when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. Various failed ventures lay behind him, including an attempt to break into motor racing, but it was not until he went missing on a rally in the Sahara in 1982, causing his mother much public anguish, that his activities came to public attention.
Two years later, it was reported that he had gained a commission on a £300m deal won by the Cementation construction company after Lady Thatcher had recommended it to the Sultan of Oman. It was a factor in his departure for the US, and he has not lived in Britain since.
In Dallas, Mark met his wife Diane, from a super-rich Texas family, but controversy continued to dog him. He was accused of exploiting his mother's name to gain a £12m commission on the giant al-Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia, and hit legal troubles in the US, including a charge, later dropped, of alleged underpayment of taxes.
In 1995, Sir Mark moved to Cape Town with his family, although Diane and the two children are reported to spend lengthy periods in Texas, where they are now to attend school. Apart from a money-lending scheme to local policemen which collapsed amid rancour, his business activities in South Africa have attracted little attention - until now. But he will always have the Thatcher name, with its lustre enhanced on the death of his father last year by an inherited title. Once again, the family has helped.
© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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US seeks 'coalition' to force Zim regime change
Posted: Wednesday, August 25, 2004
By Basildon Peta
From The Independent, UK
August 25, 2004
THE United States has called for the building of a "coalition of the willing" to push for regime change to end the crisis in Zimbabwe.
The new American ambassador to South Africa, Jendayi Frazer, said quiet diplomacy pursued by South Africa and other African countries in its dealings with the Zimbabwe president needed a review because there was no evidence it was working. She said her country would be willing to be part of a coalition if invited.
The US could not act on its own, "put the boot on the ground" and give President Robert Mugabe 48 hours to go as requested by beleaguered Zimbaweans but the US would be willing to work in a coalition with other countries to return Zimbabwe to democracy.
Ms Frazer, in a meeting with journalists in Johannesburg yesterday, said: "There is clearly a crisis in Zimbabwe and everyone needs to state that fact. The economy is in a free fall. There is a continuing repressive environment. There needs to be a return to democracy."
She said the US believed that South Africa could play a positive role in returning Zimbabwe to democracy and that it had the means to do so. "It [South Africa] has the most leverage probably of any other country in the sub-region and should therefore take a leadership role," said Ms Frazer, a protege of President George Bush's national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Ms Frazer's expression of a more aggressive US line towards the Mugabe regime came the day before the British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, arrives in South Africa for series of bilateral meetings with the Mbeki government during which he intends to raise the question of Zimbabwe.
The International Parliamentary Union (IPU) released a report yesterday accusing the regime of doing nothing to stop its violent youth militias from persecuting and torturing parliamentarians of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
The report was released after the IPU's three-month mission to Zimbabwe. Mr Mugabe has approved new legislation that will ban foreign non-governmental organisations working in the human rights field in Zimbabwe and the banning of foreign funding to Zimbabwean NGOs. Churches have warned the proposed law would hinder their efforts to feed hungry Zimbabweans.
Ms Frazer said it was particularly important to have Zimbabwe returned to democracy because the New Partnership for Africa Development talked about Africa's responsibility for democratic governance across the continent. "The African Union (AU) and South Africa had already accepted the responsibility to promote democracy and they should do so specifically in the case of Zimbabwe," she said.
She noted that repression in Zimbabwe had worsened and was making it impossible for the opposition to operate ahead of elections next year.
"So we have got to re-look at the approach, that South Africa is taking in terms of quiet diplomacy ... It's not evident that it's working at this point
"We have always talked about building coalitions of the willing and I, for one, believe that the coalitions of the willing are going to be the new force in global affairs ..."
Instead of quiet diplomacy, Ms Frazer suggested an open admission by regional countries that there is a crisis in Zimbabwe. That was an important first step followed by pressure to force Mr Mugabe to return the country to democracy.
The anti-Western bashing that was carried out by SADC leaders at their summit in Mauritius last week would not help change President Mugabe, she said. The Tanzanian President, Benjamin Mkapa, had lashed out at the West saying it cannot lecture democracy to African countries which it oppressed through a policy of colonialism in the first place.
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Mugabe voted history's third-greatest African
Posted: Wednesday, August 25, 2004
London - Zimbabwe's controversial President Robert Mugabe was voted the third-greatest African of all time, topped only by South Africa's Nelson Mandela and former Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah, in a survey for New African magazine announced Wednesday.
Mugabe, widely criticised outside Zimbabwe for stifling dissent and crippling the economy of his once prosperous southern African nation, was an "interesting" choice because "a high-profile campaign in the media has painted him in bad light", the New African wrote.
The London-based magazine said responses flooded in after the survey was launched last December to nominate the top 100 most influential Africans or people of African descent.
Heroes of independence movements in Africa and African-American figures in the United States figure prominently on the list.
Patrice Lumumba, Congo's first post-colonial prime minister, ranks sixth, followed by US civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
Pele, the legendary Brazilian soccer star, comes in 17th, followed by Jamaican reggae singer Bob Marley, numbering among those called "Diasporans" by New African.
Full Article : iol.co.za
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Globalization and Racialization
Posted: Monday, August 16, 2004
by Manning Marable
August 13, 2004
In 1900, the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, predicted that the "problem of the twentieth century" would be the "problem of the color line," the unequal relationship between the lighter vs. darker races of humankind. Although Du Bois was primarily focused on the racial contradiction of the United States, he was fully aware that the processes of what we call "racialization" today – the construction of racially unequal social hierarchies characterized by dominant and subordinate social relations between groups – was an international and global problem. Du Bois's color line included not just the racially segregated, Jim Crow South and the racial oppression of South Africa; but also included British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese colonial domination in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean among indigenous populations.
Building on Du Bois's insights, we can therefore say that the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of global apartheid: the racialized division and stratification of resources, wealth, and power that separates Europe, North America, and Japan from the billions of mostly black, brown, indigenous, undocumented immigrant and poor people across the planet. The term apartheid, as most of you know, comes from the former white minority regime of South Africa. It is an Afrikaans word meaning "apartness" or "separation." Apartheid was based on the concept of "herrenvolk," a "master race," who was destined to rule non-Europeans. Under global apartheid today, the racist logic of herrenvolk, the master race, still exists, embedded in the patterns of unequal economic exchange that penalizes African, south Asian, Caribbean, and poor nations by predatory policies of structural adjustment and loan payments to multinational banks.
Inside the United States, the processes of global apartheid are best represented by what I call the New Racial Domain or the NRD. This New Racial Domain is different from other earlier forms of racial domination, such as slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and ghettoization, or strict residential segregation, in several critical respects. These earlier racial formations or domains were grounded or based primarily, if not exclusively, in the political economy of U.S. capitalism. Anti-racist or oppositional movements that blacks, other people of color and white anti-racists built were largely predicated upon the confines or realities of domestic markets and the policies of the U.S. nation-state. Meaningful social reforms such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were debated almost entirely within the context of America's expanding, domestic economy, and a background of Keynesian, welfare state public policies.
The political economy of the "New Racial Domain," by contrast, is driven and largely determined by the forces of transnational capitalism, and the public policies of state neoliberalism. From the vantagepoint of the most oppressed U.S. populations, the New Racial Domain rests on an unholy trinity, or deadly triad, of structural barriers to a decent life. These oppressive structures are mass unemployment, mass incarceration, and mass disfranchisement. Each factor directly feeds and accelerates the others, creating an ever-widening circle of social disadvantage, poverty, and civil death, touching the lives of tens of millions of U.S. people.
The process begins at the point of production. For decades, U.S. corporations have been outsourcing millions of better-paying jobs outside the country. The class warfare against unions has led to a steep decline in the percentage of U.S. workers.
Within whole U.S. urban neighborhoods losing virtually their entire economic manufacturing and industrial employment, and with neoliberal social policies in place cutting job training programs, welfare, and public housing, millions of Americans now exist in conditions that exceed the devastation of the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 2004, in New York's Central Harlem community, 50 percent of all black male adults were currently unemployed. When one considers that this figure does not count those black males who are in the military, or inside prisons, its truly amazing and depressing.
This July, labor researchers at Harvard University found that one-quarter (25 percent) of the nation's entire population of black male adults were jobless for the entire year during 2002. What these nightmarish statistics mean, is that for most low- to middle-income African Americans, joblessness and underemployment (e.g., working part-time, or sporadically) is now the norm; having a real job with benefits is now the exception. Who belongs to unions, dropping from 30 percent in the 1960s down to barely 13 percent today. With the onset of global capitalism, the new jobs being generated for the most part lack the health benefits, pensions, and wages that manufacturing and industrial employment once offered.
Neoliberal social policies, adopted and implemented by Democrats and Republicans alike, have compounded the problem. After the 1996 welfare act, the social safety net was largely pulled apart. As the Bush administration took power in 2001, chronic joblessness spread to African-American workers, especially in the manufacturing sector. By early 2004, in cities such as New York, fully one-half of all black male adults were outside of the paid labor force. As of January 2004, the number of families on public assistance had fallen to 2 million, down from five million families on welfare in 1995. New regulations and restrictions intimidate thousands of poor people from requesting public assistance.
Mass unemployment inevitably feeds mass incarceration. About one-third of all prisoners were unemployed at the time of their arrests, and others averaged less than $20,000 annual incomes in the year prior to their incarceration. When the Attica prison insurrection occurred in upstate New York in 1971, there were only 12,500 prisoners in New York State's correctional facilities, and about 300,000 prisoners nationwide. By 2001, New York State held over 71,000 women and men in its prisons; nationally, 2.1 million were imprisoned. Today about five to six million Americans are arrested annually, and roughly one in five Americans possess a criminal record.
Mandatory-minimum sentencing laws adopted in the 1980s and 1990s in many states stripped judges of their discretionary powers in sentencing, imposing draconian terms on first-time and non-violent offenders. Parole has been made more restrictive as well, and in 1995 Pell grant subsidies supporting educational programs for prisoners were ended. For those fortunate enough to successfully navigate the criminal justice bureaucracy and emerge from incarceration, they discover that both the federal law and state governments explicitly prohibit the employment of convicted ex-felons in hundreds of vocations. The cycle of unemployment frequently starts again.
The greatest victims of these racialized processes of unequal justice, of course, are African-American and Latino young people. In April 2000, utilizing national and state data compiled by the FBI, the Justice Department and six leading foundations issued a comprehensive study that documented vast racial disparities at every level of the juvenile justice process. African Americans under age eighteen constitute 15 percent of their national age group, yet they currently represent 26 percent of all those who are arrested. After entering the criminal-justice system, white and black juveniles with the same records are treated in radically different ways. According to the Justice Department's study, among white youth offenders, 66 percent are referred to juvenile courts, while only 31 percent of the African-American youth are taken there. Blacks make up 44 percent of those detained in juvenile jails, 46 percent of all those tried in adult criminal courts, as well as 58 percent of all juveniles who are warehoused in prisons.
Mass incarceration, of course, breeds mass political disfranchisement. Nearly 5 million Americans cannot vote. In seven states, former prisoners convicted of a felony lose their voting rights for life. In the majority of states, individuals on parole and probation cannot vote. About 15 percent of all African-American males nationally are either permanently or currently disfranchised. In Mississippi, one-third of all black men are unable to vote for the remainder of their lives. In Florida, 818,000 residents cannot vote for life.
Even temporary disfranchisement fosters a disruption of civic engagement and involvement in public affairs. This can lead to "civil death," the destruction of the capacity for collective agency and resistance. This process of depolitization undermines even grassroots, non-electoral-oriented organizing. The deadly triangle of the New Racial Domain constantly and continuously grows unchecked.
Not too far in the distance lies the social consequence of these policies: an unequal, two-tiered, uncivil society, characterized by a governing hierarchy of middle- to upper-class "citizens" who own nearly all private property and financial assets, and a vast subaltern of quasi- or subcitizens encumbered beneath the cruel weight of permanent unemployment, discriminatory courts and sentencing procedures, dehumanized prisons, voting disfranchisement, residential segregation, and the elimination of most public services for the poor. The later group is virtually excluded from any influence in a national public policy. Institutions that once provided space for upward mobility and resistance for working people such as unions have been largely dismantled. Integral to all of this is racism, sometimes openly vicious and unambiguous, but much more frequently presented in race neutral, color-blind language. This is the NRD of globalization.
The anti-globalization struggle must confront this New Racial Domain with something more substantial than tired ruminations about "black and white, unite and fight." The seismic shifts have created new continents of social inequality, transcending nation-states and the traditional boundaries of race and ethnicity. What is necessary is an original and creative approach that breaks with comfortable dogmas of all types, while advancing openly a politics of civic advocacy and democratic empowerment for those most brutally oppressed and exploited. I am not suggesting here that the anti-globalization movement play a "vanguard" role for global social change. In the tradition of C.L.R. James, I am convinced that the oppressed, on their own terms, ultimately will create new approaches and organizations to fight for justice that we now can scarcely imagine. Rather, it is our political and moral obligation to provide the critical support necessary for social struggles and resistance that is already being waged on the ground today. Examples of that resistance are in every city and most communities across the country.
The New Racial Domain's reliance on extreme force and the continued expansion of the prison system reshapes how law enforcement is being carried out even in small- to medium-sized towns and cities all over America. The terrible dynamic unleashed against prisoners of social control has expanded into the normal apparatuses and uses of policing itself. There are now, for example, approximately 600,000 police officers and 1.5 million private security guards in the United States. Increasingly, however, black and poor communities are being "policed" by special paramilitary units, often called SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams. The U.S. has more than 30,000 such heavily armed, military trained police units. SWAT-team mobilizations, or "call outs," increased 400 percent between 1980 and 1995. These trends reveal the makings of what may constitute a "National Security State" — the exercising of state power without democratic controls, checks and balances, a state where policing is employed to carry out the disfranchisement of its own citizens.
The trend toward a National Security State has been pushed actively by the Bush regime, which is aggressively pressuring universities to suppress dissent and to curtail traditional academic freedoms. In early March 2004, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control stopped 70 American scientists and physicians from traveling to Cuba to attend an international symposium on "coma and death." Some of the scholars received warning letters from the Treasury Department, promising severe criminal or civil penalties if they violated the embargo against Cuba. In late 2003, the Treasury Department issued a warning to U.S. publishers that they would have to obtain "special licenses to edit papers" written by scholars and scientific researchers currently living in Cuba, Libya, Iran, or Sudan. All violators, even including the editors and officers of professional associations sponsoring scholarly journals, potentially may be subjected to fines up to $500,000 and prison sentences up to ten years. After widespread criticism, the Treasury Department was forced to moderate its policy.
In February 2004, U.S. army officials visited the University of Texas at Austin, demanding the names of "Middle Eastern-looking" individuals attending an academic conference on the treatment of women under traditional Islamic law. Subsequently it was learned that two U.S. army attorneys working with the army's Intelligence and Security Commission had actually attended the conference without identifying themselves.
How do we build resistance to the New Racial Domain, in the age of globalized capitialism? It should surprise no one that the resistance is already occurring, on the ground, in thousands of venues. In local neighborhoods, people fighting against police brutality, mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, and for prisoners' rights; in the fight for a living wage, to expand unionization and workers' rights; in the struggles of working women for day care for their children, health care, public transportation, and decent housing. These practical struggles of daily life are really the care of what constitutes day-to-day resistance. Building capacities of hope and resistance on the ground develops our ability to challenge the system in more fundamental, direct ways.
The recently successful "Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride," highlighting the plight of undocumented workers who enter the U.S., represents an excellent model that links the oppressive situation of new immigrants with the historic struggles of the Civil Rights Movement forty-five years ago to overthrow Jim Crow. Many sincere, white anti-globalization activists need to learn more about the historic Black Freedom Movement, and the successful models of resistance – from selective buying campaigns or economic boycotts, to rent strikes, to civil disobedience – which that movement established. You are not inventing models of social justice activism and resistance: others have come before you. The task is to learn from the strengths and weaknesses of those models, incorporating their anti-racist vision into the heart of what we do to resist global capitalism and the nation-security state.
The anti-globalization movement must be, first and foremost, a worldwide, pluralistic anti-racist movement, with its absolutely central goal of destroying global apartheid and the reactionary residue of white supremacy and ethnic chauvinism. But to build such a dynamic movement, the social composition of the anti-globalization forces must change, especially here in the United States. The anti-globalization forces are still overwhelmingly upper, middle-class, college-educated elites, who may politically sympathize with the plight of the poor and oppressed, but who do not share their lives or experiences. In the Third World, the anti-globalization movement has been more successful in achieving a broader, more balanced social class composition, with millions of workers getting actively involved.
There are, however, two broad ideological tendencies within this largely non-European, anti-globalization movement: a liberal, democratic, and populist tendency, and a radical, egalitarian tendency. Both tendencies were present throughout the 2001 Durban Conference Against Racism, and made their presence felt in the deliberations of the non-governmental organization panels and in the final conference report. They reflect two very different political strategies and tactical approaches in the global struggle against the institutional processes of racialization.
The liberal democratic tendency focuses on a discourse of rights, calling for greater civic participation, political enfranchisement, capacity building of community-based institutions, for the purposes of civic empowerment and multicultural diversity. The liberal democratic impulse seeks the reduction of societal conflict through the sponsoring of public conversations, reconciliation and multicultural civic dialogues. It seeks not a complete rejection of neoliberal economic globalization, but its constructive reform and engagement, with the goal of building democratic political cultures of human rights within market-based societies.
The radical egalitarian tendency of global anti-racists speaks a discourse about inequality and power. It seeks the abolition of poverty, the realization of universal housing, health care and educational guarantees across the non-Western world. It is less concerned about abstract rights, and more concerned about concrete results. It seeks not political assimilation in an old world order, but the construction of a new world from the bottom up. It has spoken a political language moreso in the tradition of national liberation than of the nation-state.
Both of these tendencies exist in the United States, as well as throughout the world, in varying degrees, now define the ideological spectrum within the global anti-apartheid struggle. Scholars and activists alike must contribute to the construction of a broad front bringing together both the multicultural liberal democratic and radical egalitarian currents representing globalization from below. New innovations in social protest movements will also require the development of new social theory and new ways of thinking about the relationship between structural racism and state power. Global apartheid is the great political and moral challenge of our time. It can be destroyed, but only through a collective, transnational struggle.
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No Such Place as Safe
Posted: Tuesday, July 27, 2004
By Tim Wise
I think I've figured out what it is I hate about those "racial dialogue" groups that seem to be springing up across the country nowadays.
No, it's not the standard radical critique that they tend to amount to all talk and little action: after all, our ability to act forcefully to eradicate racial inequity requires that we understand the issues at hand, and dialogue--even divorced from direct action at first--can be a helpful starting point for that kind of thing.
And no, it's not the fact that oftentimes such dialogues become watered down "diversity-fests," where participants are encouraged to more or less hold hands, sing kumbaya and feel each other's existential pain. After all, as problematic as that kind of dialogue can be, there is always the possibility that dedicated activists can push the discussion in a more thought-provoking and uncomfortable (but necessary) direction, if and when we participate in these dialogue groups; so even that isn't too big a deal.
Rather, I think the problem, for me at least--and it's one shared by a lot of people of color with whom I've discussed the subject--is something that is typically said at the outset of these dialogue sessions, even before people are introduced, and which sets a tone for the rest of the process; a tone that is antithetical to tackling the important subject matter at hand.
It's something that many readers will be instantly familiar with, provided they have participated in one of these things before: namely, it's the part where the dialogue facilitator says something to the effect of: "We want this to be a safe space, where everyone feels free to express their views without fear of being shouted down or ridiculed for their beliefs."
Although it isn't usually made explicit, this admonition about the importance of safety is almost always really about making white people feel safe. After all, people of color rarely feel safe discussing race amongst members of the dominant group, and it's pretty unlikely that a simple sentence calling for civility would change that.
Black and brown folks know that race is a touchy subject, and yet they engage in race dialogue (whether formal or informal) as a matter of survival: they have to do it, safe or not, because the alternative is to continue neglecting an issue that is far too important to their everyday lives.
The whites in these dialogue groups, on the other hand, are often tentative to a point that is almost farcical. Nervous, afraid of saying the wrong thing, and convinced that people of color will yell at them for a slip of the tongue, whites often remain in a shell when racial dialogues begin.
This is one of the reasons that facilitators often go out of their way to create "safety." They are hoping that whites will participate more honestly if only they can be guaranteed that black people won't attack them for their ignorance.
Such a concern is, of course, preposterous, coming as it does from members of the most powerful group on the planet. I mean really now, do we, as whites believe there is any group on Earth that is safer than we are? Do we honestly think that people of color are in a position to jump our asses in a controlled workshop setting? What do we think they're going to do? Knife us for God's sakes?
If you want to see this kind of white paranoia in action, sit in a room full of white folks watching the anti-bias documentary, The Color of Fear, and you'll see what I mean.
As they watch one scene in particular, where one of the black participants in a dialogue group goes off on one of the white participants (after putting up with copious amounts of conservative, "anyone can make it if they try" silliness on the part of the latter), whites recoil from the clearly agitated black man, Victor Lewis, as if they honestly expect him to jump out of the screen and strangle them where they sit.
The funny thing being that throughout the scene, the only person really at risk was Victor Lewis himself, who knew that his indignation would mark him as the "angry Negro" in the minds of most viewers.
And that's the point: even in these racial dialogue settings, whites are always the safest persons in the room. It is black and brown folks who run the risk of being seen as "too sensitive," "too emotional," or some such thing, while whites can almost always content ourselves with the belief that we are calm, level-headed and rational, no matter how absurd the things we say may be.
In other words, the white obsession with safety is the ultimate irony given the way that our racial position and privilege tends to shelter us from the harsh judgments regularly meted out against people of color. Yet we cling to it in ways that are both silly and more than a little unbecoming; indeed our search for safety, before we are even willing to discuss racism, let alone challenge it, is the ultimate expression of white privilege in many ways.
A few months ago, while attending the fifth annual White Privilege Conference, in Pella, Iowa (the perfect place for such a conference, and a wonderful event each year), this lesson was driven home with disturbing clarity.
On the final day of the conference, attendees were to be treated, depending upon one's perspective, to a luncheon keynote by Morris Dees, co-founder of (and still lead counsel for) the Southern Poverty Law Center, in Montgomery, Alabama.
The SPLC, as those at the conference knew, and as most readers will be aware, is the organization that has, for several years, engaged in pitched legal battles with assorted neo-Nazis and Klansmen, often succeeding in shutting down their operations altogether or otherwise financially crippling them. So far, so good.
And yet, for many at the conference, Dees's appearance seemed problematic.
On the one hand, there is the issue of whether or not such a person should speak at a conference on white privilege, since addressing that issue has almost nothing to do with his work or the work of his group. After all, fighting overt racists, while worthwhile, is not the same as confronting the institutional racism and structural forms of white supremacy that make a mockery of equity and justice every day, with or without burning crosses or skinheads in the picture.
Then of course there is the issue of the SPLC's own occasional duplicity: like how they send out fundraising letters to their mailing list, implying that their operations will suffer without continued financial support, even while they sit atop an endowment of over $100 million: more than enough to finance their operations forever, without another dime being raised from often cash-strapped families.
Then there's that business about "tolerance," which appears to be the Center's favorite word, as in their "teaching tolerance" materials for primary and secondary school teachers and classrooms. As many critics have noted, tolerance is a pretty weak formulation, seeing as how it means little more than putting up with someone else, allowing them to perhaps live another day, or refraining from burning down their house or church, but not much else.
But as real as these concerns were, and are, none of them were what nagged at many conference attendees this time out.
Instead, what concerned many of us was the rumor that had begun to circulate on the first day of the four day event, to the effect that Dees had required heavy security as a precondition of his appearance, including armed police officers. What's more, there would be searches of bags and backpacks coming into the venue.
Actually, I knew this was no mere rumor. Having spoken at fifty or more colleges where Dees has also made presentations, I have been told repeatedly that every time he speaks, bags are searched and he makes the same demand: No cops, no show, end of story. It is a requirement that appears as a rider of sorts in every lecture contract written for Dees, inserted either at his own insistence or that of the SPLC.
And while it is true that Dees (like many who fight racism) has had his life threatened, it is also true that people of color struggle against racism every day, having no expectation of security and feeling anything but entitled to bodyguards.
As such, many of us at the conference felt as though Dees should be confronted on his apparent sense of entitlement; his feeling that he somehow has a right to be safe as he does the work that others have to do as a matter of survival.
This challenge was not made necessary because Morris is uniquely flawed, or especially craven in his manifestations of white privilege. Indeed every white person who came to Pella for the conference had been able to take for granted that we would blend in, be accepted and welcomed, and ultimately safe, unlike people of color.
Rather, the challenge was necessary because it was, after all, a white privilege conference, and one of the principles of antiracism is to hold white allies accountable, especially when we inadvertently screw up, or fall back into old patterns that can reinforce racial hierarchy and power inequities.
Not to mention, there was something especially problematic about the fact that Dees would turn to the kinds of forces for security that often present the greatest threat to people of color: namely, cops with guns. Though most whites might feel comfortable with such folks around, it should be obvious that to people of color, the presence of police is a mixed bag, at best.
And so I asked the question.
Yet because he had been tipped off ahead of time to the question that was coming, Dees immediately became defensive upon my standing in front of the microphone, and refused to allow the proper setup for the query: the part where I was going to place his sense of entitlement within the orbit of what I and other white activists also take for granted.
Due to his pre-emption, and clear agitation, I was forced to cut to the chase. Unfortunately, this made the exchange seem more like a pissing contest between two white guys trying to "out-ally" each other, than a legitimate challenge to someone who is viewed by many as some kind of hero.
The point had been to challenge not Dees, but whites in the audience, to ask themselves what it meant that a white man doing this work would a) be able to demand protection and receive it; b) feel entitled to have that level of protection as a precondition for his doing the work, and c) think nothing of using forces which, to many people of color, are the problem, and not the solution to danger.
The point being, that this country is never safe for people of color. Its schools are not safe; its streets are not safe; its places of employment are not safe; its health care system is not safe. So why in the hell should white people feel that we have a right to something--in this case, safety--that people of color have never had?
And what does it say about us that we feel so obsessed about security that we honestly seem incapable of doing the work unless we are assured of our safety? Whether it's Morris Dees, or white folks in a workshop seeking safety to bare our souls, or cry, or some such shit.
How Dees answered the challenge, though not the point was instructive. It was as if he had never been asked the question before at all; which is frightening not for what it says about him but what it suggests about his audiences and the people with whom he has surrounded himself.
After all, how can one not see the contradictions inherent in a white man doing antiracism work being more protected than any persons of color doing the same?
Although other high profile civil rights folks, like Jesse Jackson or Julian Bond, might have occasional security around them, it is never as tight as that for Dees. Never are there eights armed officers, a personal bodyguard, and bag searches at the door. Even Louis Farrakhan surrounds himself with his own members from the Fruit of Islam, not hired guns and off-duty cops.
What white liberals must come to understand is that fighting for justice is never fully safe. Nor can it be made so; nor should safety be particularly sought.
At the same time, as whites, we are more protected in this work than any other persons on the planet. We are far less at risk, from police, from employers, from teachers, and even from crazies like the kind Dees fears, than people of color are. We should neither cower in fear that fighting racism will automatically place our lives in danger (which is another horrible message Dees's security squad implicitly sends), nor attempt to be especially protected in doing the work that needs to be done.
Checking ourselves, avoiding the replication of privilege when possible, and remaining accountable to the persons who are the targets of racism are key tenets of white antiracist ally behavior; and those of us involved in this struggle too often overlook them. Morris Dees is merely one high-profile example of the problem, though he is hardly alone.
So long as we respond defensively when challenged on this point, as long as we refuse to admit our mistakes, or to acknowledge that our actions mean more than our words, we will not deserve to be thought of as allies, we will not deserve to be keynote speakers at conferences on racism, and we most assuredly won't deserve to continue having money showered upon us and our organizations.
Tim Wise is an antiracist essayist, educator and father. He can be reached at timjwise@msn.com. His blog can be found at http://blog.zmag.org/wordwise. Hate mail, while neither appreciated nor desired, will be graded on the basis of form, content, grammar and originality.
www.zmag.org/bios/homepage.cfm?authorID=96
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Sudan's Darfur crisis and US/European concern
Posted: Wednesday, July 14, 2004
by Ayinde
Updated: July 17, 2004
Why is the U.S./Europe suddenly concerned about the racist Arab drive to kill off dark-skinned Africans in Sudan? This should be the question at the forefront of the minds of thinking people. The UN and the U.S. (both partners in crime) are aware that the entire White World policies today were built on the foundation of racism. It is the same racism that allows the U.S. and UK to lie to the world and invade Iraq without the fear that they will be charged as war criminals. Who will charge the U.S. and UK criminals? Certainly not their other European counterparts.
Look how easily France, which 'opposed' the war on Iraq, was able to join the U.S., and supported (to put it mildly) the overthrow of the democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. They did this just because he raised minimum wage, and was calling on France to pay reparations. They intend to keep Haiti as a sweatshop under the financial control of a few Whites. It matters not that they installed a Black puppet leader there. The first elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was considered unfit by a group of thugs with support from the U.S. and France. They did not care how many ordinary poor Blacks in Haiti elected their president. These racist European misleaders felt it was their decision to make.
We Black Africans, even in the West, know quite well that they get away with these abuses because other people generally do not care about Black kinky-hair Africans. They were conditioned to feel that we are incapable of organizing ourselves and managing our own economic wellbeing. When Whites want to demonstrate their paternalism over Africans, they organize these massive media charities to show they are saving the suffering helpless Blacks -- the same Blacks that both Arabs and Whites exploit, and keep in a desperate situation so they can steal or cheaply acquire labour and resources.
This takes me to my main concern. It should be made clear that the U.S. and other Europeans interest in so-called peace in Sudan, and the sudden mainstream media coverage of the racist, murderous conduct of the 'Arabs' in Sudan, is not driven by their concern for the well-being of Black Africans. As usual, it is to get control of the resources, which in this case is the oil deposits in Darfur and southern Sudan. Once again Africans are being crucified between two murdering thieves, the U.S./Europeans and the Arabs.
"Khartoum's genocidal policy in Darfur and the south is also a grab for resources. The Arab north is arid and barren, but the south is arable with vast oil deposits Khartoum covets and badly needs. In the west, in Darfur, Arabs seeking to escape the spreading desert kill and displace Africans for more productive land." - Makau Mutua
The African Union has stated that they are organizing troops to send to Sudan. This is obviously a tough issue for them to navigate. America is already running the propaganda campaign in an attempt to get to the resources first. Claiming that the AU is doing nothing is to not understand that this is a longstanding issue that the West was never interested in until this present U.S. administration's extreme drive to control all oil supplying regions. The AU will now have to quickly organize funding and troops, while they are being pressured to serve the U.S. interest in and out of Africa. We simply can look at the U.S. conduct in fueling the overthrow of the democratically elected president Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, as another example of how they are operating.
It is important that the African Union does not allow the U.S. and UK to use the racism in Sudan as a pretext to gain Black votes and sympathies, to distract from their Invasion of Iraq, and also to get control of the resources in Sudan.
Here is an important point made by Obi Nwakanma:
"Many Africans have focused singularly on the effects of the European conquest and colonisation of Africa. And Africans have often forgotten that the history of Africa is the history of double penetration: one from the East, and the other from the West."
Obi Nwakanma further explains:
"The Arabs have come to dominate the Sudan, and have consigned the indigenous Negroid population to the lowliest status, treating them as slaves, from a tradition which began as the Arabs moved into this stretch of Africa, which was once the site of Nubia, the great African civilization. Sudan has been mired in civil conflict, with the Christians rallying behind the John Garang led Sudan Peoples Liberation Army, SPLA, fighting for control of the South from the Arabs of the North.
Generally, Sudan has remained in a flux for most of its modern era. It was conquered by Egypt in 1821, which unified the northern part until the rise of the Mahdi, Muhammadu Ibn Abdalla who led a campaign of colonial resistance against the Anglo-Egyptian alliance with his party of the Ansas. This group remains the basis of the Umma party in Sudan to date led by descendants of the Mahdi."
So why the sudden U.S./European concern?
It is important to remember that greed is the root of racism.
In case there are serious Africans reading these comments, please remember that in recognizing that European countries, including the U.S., owe Africans reparations, and not charity, the Arabs should also be called upon to pay reparations.
Also read:
DAFUR: the open sore of a continent
www.vanguardngr.com/articles/2002/columns/c311072004.html
African Troops In Darfur By End Of July: AU
www.islam-online.net/English/News/2004-07/09/article01.shtml
Racism at root of Sudan's Darfur crisis
www.csmonitor.com/2004/0714/p09s02-coop.html
History Of Colonialist Intrigue In Sudan Remains Unabated
www.jihadunspun.com/intheatre_internal.php?article=9537&list=/home.php
The Crisis in Sudan:
When Ethnic Cleansing Becomes Respectable
www.counterpunch.org/smith06202004.html
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Acquisition of farms confirmed
Posted: Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Herald Reporters
THE Administrative Court has confirmed the acquisition by the Government of seven farms in Hwange district to resettle landless people in the area.
In a judgment made available yesterday, Mutare-based Administrative Court president Mr Francis Bere granted an application by the Government to acquire Railway Farm, formerly owned by Mr John Arnold Farr, and six other farms previously owned by Matetsi Farming Company (Private) Limited.
The application had been brought to court by the then Minister of Lands, Agriculture and Rural Resettlement, Cde Joseph Made, in terms of section 7 of the Land Acquisition Act to determine whether the acquisition of the farms was necessary.
Matetsi Farming Company also owns 10 other farms in Masvingo.
The company had opposed the acquisition, arguing that the acquiring authority had not complied with the requirements laid down in the Act.
But in his ruling, Mr Bere said the important issue to consider was whether the acquisition of the farms was necessary.
"In my considered view, the answer must be in the affirmative. I am more than satisfied that the applicant (Cde Made) has, by and large on a balance of probabilities, established his case and accordingly judgment is granted in favour of the applicant," he said.
In terms of section 7 (4) of the Act, the Administrative Court can grant an order for land acquisition where the acquisition relates to rural land that the acquisition is necessary for utilisation; or any other land, for settlement, for agricultural or other purposes.
Mr Bere, in his judgment, accepted the evidence on the country’s land imbalances by the district administrator for Hwange Ms Sibongani Siwela.
Ms Siwela, who is also the chairperson of the district’s land identification committee, highlighted the disparity in land allocation between the black indigenous people and white commercial farmers in that area.
She told the court that there was extreme congestion in her district where 18 people occupied one hectare compared to roughly one person per hectare for white commercial farmers.
Ms Siwela also highlighted the Government’s commitment to fully supporting the land reform programme by putting in place financial and technical assistance for the farmers.
Government had also targeted the Matetsi farms for acquisition after the discovery of the additional 10 farms owned by the company in Masvingo.
In opposing the acquisition, Matetsi Farming had said the targeted farms were of bad soils contrary to the evidence of the acquiring authority that the land was suitable for farming and cattle ranching.
Although the company acknowledged that Ms Siwela’s evidence was reasonable and fair, it argued that she did not get full facts from the Department of Agricultural Technical and Extension Services (Arex) and the company’s objections to acquire the farms.
On Mr Farr’s farm, the court found there was no clear evidence led specifically to deal with it.
Mr Tatenda Mawere of Ziumbe and Mutambanengwe represented Cde Made, while lawyers Honey and Blanckenberg represented Mr Farr and Matetsi Farming Company.
In a related matter, at least 15 law officers have been identified to represent the State during the next six months in the Administrative Court as the Government steps up efforts to clear the backlog caused by land matters.
Acting Attorney General Mr Bharat Patel told The Herald yesterday that 11 of the lawyers have been taken from various Government departments who had been working as legal advisors while four are coming from the Civil Division, a department from his office.
"These lawyers will be representing the State in the Administrative Court and they will be dispatched to Harare, Bulawayo and Mutare to help clear the matters," said Mr Patel. "Four presidents of the Administrative Court will also be stationed in those cities, although two will be in Harare, to preside over the cases and it is hoped that significant progress will be achieved.
"We will be assessing the progress and should the need arise, appoint more law officers or presidents. We will be acting accordingly and again we will also be assessing if there is need to set up the Administrative Court in more centres," he said.
The Administrative Court is supposed to either confirm or decline the acquisition of a farm as provided for by the Land Acquisition Act.
Of note, Mr Patel said, is the amendment of the Administrative Court Rule with regard to the land cases where an amendment to enable the speeding of the cases has been effected.
"The land cases will now be heard not by way of trial, but by way of an application where a case will be determined after lawyers for both sides have prepared affidavits and heads of arguments instead of oral evidence being heard in court," he said. "The affidavits will form the basis of the court hearing and this is a new procedure. The Civil Division will have to reorganise itself to cater for these changes. The amendment will apply only to land cases and not other cases. So one only hopes that there will be significant progress in the disposal of all the cases."
The Acting Attorney General also admitted that although significant inroads might be achieved through the mechanisms put in place, another bottleneck was a pending case in the Supreme Court where a white commercial farmer has challenged the constitutionality of various and pertinent sections of the Land Acquisition Act.
The case, brought by George Quinell, has a bearing on some other cases as the Supreme Court has not delivered judgment. If delivered, the ruling might chart the way forward with regard to the agrarian reform.
The farmer has raised constitutional issues where he has argued in the Supreme Court that the sections which the State was relying upon in acquiring the farm were unconstitutional.
He had also argued that the ministers who had signed letters of intent to acquire the respective farms were not duly appointed as ministers because they had not been sworn in after President Mugabe was re-elected into office in March 2002.
"The Quinell case will obviously have a bearing on some cases, but that will not stop us from dealing with the cases as we are determined to see them through by December this year," Mr Patel said.
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The Black Man's Burden
Posted: Sunday, July 4, 2004
By www.rootsie.com
We take the idea of sovereign nation states for granted. Nationalism is the religion of nationhood, and its 'uplifting' emotional rhetoric can lead us to assume that the 'sense of nation' is as integral a part of the human make-up as city-building and trade, and has been around forever and forever shall be… But consider: before World War I, there were only a handful of nations in Europe; after, there were over two dozen. The first 'nation' in Europe was England, and it likes to date its nationhood from the Glorious Revolution of 1686. France became a nation in 1789 with its own revolution, and the United States in 1791. The nation state is a very recent phenomenon, and a uniquely European construct. Its devlopment goes hand in hand with the rise of capitalism.The countries of Central and Eastern Europe were constituted a mere 40 or so years before the nations of Africa. And in case we didn't notice, Davidson reminds us that much of Europe, particularly the Balkans, is in many respects in as much of a mess as Africa. The difference lies in the magnitude of the pillage to which Africa was and still is subjected.
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Haiti After the Press Went Home
Posted: Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Chaos Upon Chaos
By LUCSON PIERRE-CHARLES
The recent disastrous floods that killed more than 2,000 people, left some 1,800 missing and 10,000 more homeless have been a tragedy of enormous proportion and unless some drastic measures are taken, this disaster could be seen as a preview of the things to strike Haiti. Such a tragedy is the consequence of years of bad policies and mismanagement inherited by the current administration. The Prime Minister's reaction to the disaster demonstrated undoubtedly that his administration is reluctant to deal with one of the most important crisis facing this impoverished nation today. He blamed deforestation for what happened and promised, among other things, to create a forest protection unit made of former soldiers of the demobilized Haitian army. Blaming deforestation as the only cause is easy but the environmental degradation is much greater than that. It is a chain-linked dilemma and until Haitians pull up their forces together, the prospect will remain grim.
The situation on the ground is dreadful. The country is in desperate need but meaningful assistance fails to materialize. Following Aristide's ouster, the United Nations called for $35 million in emergency funds from foreign donors but so far has only managed to raise about $9 million. The country is descending into chaos and to have a better understanding of what lies ahead, one needs to look no further than to the latest travel warning for Haiti issued by the Bureau of consular affairs at the State Department.
According to that statement, the "situation in Haiti remains unpredictable and potentially dangerous despite the presence of foreign security forces." This warning followed a report issued in early May by the United Nations reaching a similar conclusion.
On June 1, the U.N. troops headed by Brazil, deployed to the island in order to replace the current contingent of American, French and Canadian soldiers. According to Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira, the Brazilian general who will head the U.N. contingent, this mission will be Haiti's last chance to end decades of violence. The Prime Minister, Mr. Gérard Latortue, will certainly count on these troops to disarm all rebels and gangs. Knowing that the survival of his administration depends largely upon the presence of the foreign troops, he is appealing to the Americans – even 100 troops – to extend their mission but mindful that the last American soldier will leave at the end of June, he is shifting reliance upon the new U.N. troops by inviting them to stay until February 7, 2006 when the new President will take office. The job of this latest U.N. mission is manifold but disarmament of all factions will not be part of it. This latest transfer of command is nothing more than a window dressed opportunity designed to give this puppet administration some imaginary stability in order to run a farcical election where the winner will be drawn from the same party affiliation.
The whole mission's contingent will be around 8,000 troops but so far only Brazil has provided 1,400 troops, with Chile to send 600 and Argentina, 500. Following the return of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1994, a contingent of 20,000 Marines failed to disarm the newly disbanded army. Hence, one must wonder where this small U.N. contingent will find the necessary means to carry out such a colossal task? In order to get a glimpse of how disarmament will take place, one needs to look at a recent incident where 8 ex-soldiers decided to parade in the capital with their heavy-loaded weapons. These so-called rebels were arrested by the American-led troops. But following protest by other ex-soldiers, they were released but refused to leave the facility without their weapons. After two days of intense negotiations, the administration and the police remarkably bowed to their request and granted them three of the weapons.
This interim administration boasts itself about being technocratic and bringing tangible change to the population. But, as it is becoming clear, these technocrats have not only embarked on a regressive trend, they have set the stage for a complete turnaround toward chaos. The security apparatus is in the verge of collapsing due to the proliferation of small arms, the mere presence of the heavily armed rebels and Aristide loyalists, the increasing gang activities, the rampant rise in kidnappings and the release of 3,000 prisoners by Guy Philippe and his squads following the ouster of Mr. Aristide. Some of the rebels will be integrated into the police force despite the fact that they killed a great number of policemen and burned down police headquarters in the lead up to the coup.
In most parts of the country, they appointed themselves as mayors, police chiefs and judges. Under Mr. Aristide's leadership, the police force was often criticized for being too heavily politicized. Under this technocratic administration, the police force will consist of convicted human rights abusers, murderers, rapists, thugs and death squads who have committed some of the worst atrocities during the first coup in 1991.
Military strategists and commanders often argue that victory – or success for that matter – is measured not only by the defeat of the enemy but most importantly by what is left behind. In 1994, 20,000 Marines were sent to return a democratically elected President to his office. They left behind a disbanded army but not disarmed, which will later be used to undermine the same democracy that the Marines went to uphold in the first place. Ten years later, the U.S.-led troops will leave behind these same ex-soldiers heavily armed once again but this time in control and set to prolong the reign of abuse and impunity. They even have plans to run the country and make laws – they recently established their own political party.
In such a context, providing security and stability – put forward as a pretext for military intervention – was never a priority for the American-led coalition. It was to get rid of a democratically elected President, establish a puppet administration – disregard the constitution for instance – and lay the groundwork for the upcoming capture of the presidency by the oligarchy. Such an intervention was to ultimately show the rest of the world that this endangered island is incapable of self-governance and to highlight such dismal legacy, disarmament must take a back seat. But if history is to repeat itself, the people will somehow find ways to overcome this challenge and portray a different story.
Lucson Pierre-Charles, a native of Haiti, now lives in Maryland. Reproduced from counterpunch.com with permission from the author.
More on Us/Haiti Coup:
www.africaspeaks.com/haiti2004/
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UK accused of ballot fraud, vote-stealing
Posted: Saturday, June 12, 2004
www.herald.co.zw
BRITAIN which - together with the United States - claims to be the champion of democracy, has been hit by allegations of ballot fraud and vote-stealing.
The two Western countries condemned Zimbabwe's 2002 Presidential election and imposed sanctions against the country yet their own elections are not perfect.
In the US, President George W. Bush's victory had to be confirmed by the Supreme Court made up mainly of judges who support his Republican Party.
Police in Britain are now investigating the claims, the latest in a series of problems to hit the controversial trial of postal voting in local, London and European elections.
All-postal ballots are being tested in the North East, North West, East Midlands and Yorkshire and Humberside.
An investigation by the Times newspaper suggested a large number of voters had been intimidated into handing over blank ballot papers or forced to support a certain party.
Greater Manchester police are looking into allegations of malpractice after numerous reports of fraud, and Lancashire police are preparing to question 60 people over suspicions about 170 proxy vote applications, while officers in Tameside are also making inquiries into postal vote fraud.
In one case, an employer reportedly told his staff he would sack them all if they refused to vote Labour, the party Mr Blair heads.
Police are understood to be investigating allegations that supporters of mainstream political parties collected ballot papers door-to-door and in some instances even filled in blank papers.
Other troubles have hit the elections.
At least one local authority has said it has had to reprint nearly 250 000 ballot papers.
Another was reported to be delivering ballot packs by hand after production delays.
And in Bolton, the council is having to set up two emergency polling stations after thousands of ballot papers went undelivered.
Furthermore, two men have now been arrested in connection with an incident in Oldham two weeks ago.
A 49-year-old man was detained yesterday on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and theft of ballot papers.
The move came after a Liberal Democrat candidate was held last week after two men called at a house in Oldham and offered to look after the ballot papers for everyone at the address.
The family handed over five ballot papers.
Chief Inspector Stuart Harman of Oldham police said: "Over the last week we have received a number of allegations of election fraud, all of which are being thoroughly examined to establish if those involved have breached election protocol or broken the law.
"I hope that our response to these allegations will encourage any voters who do have any concerns to report irregularities to the police as we all work to ensure the integrity of the voting process."
A poll yesterday indicated one in seven voters in the all-postal ballot trial areas had not received ballot papers by last weekend.
However, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott defended his decision to press ahead with all-postal ballots in four English regions amid opposition Conservative Party claims of "chaos" in the voting process.
The deputy prime minister, standing in for Premier Tony Blair, who is at the Group of Eight leading industrial nations summit, said Members of Parliament should "celebrate" the fact that one million additional votes had already been cast in areas trialling all-postal ballots.
He said the scheme may have increased turnout by as much as two million by the end of tomorrow - the so-called "Super Thursday" of local, London and European elections.
But the Conservative Party deputy leader, Mr Michael Ancram, accused Mr Prescott of "breathtaking complacency".
Citing reports of electoral fraud, late delivery of ballot papers and voters who have yet to receive their voting packs, he said the government should stop "playing fast and loose" with democracy and return to the ballot box.
- Herald Reporter-The Guardian.
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Tsvangirai loses election petition
Posted: Saturday, June 12, 2004
By Fidelis Munyoro, www.herald.co.zw
THE High Court yesterday dismissed an application by MDC leader Mr Morgan Tsvangirai for the nullification of the 2002 presidential poll results.
Mr Tsvangirai had, in November last year, petitioned the High Court to nullify the election after the hearing of legal arguments without getting to factual arguments of the case.
Justice Ben Hlatshwayo dismissed the application with costs because none of the arguments brought to court by Mr Tsvangirai warranted the invalidation of the election results.
"I hereby . . . dismiss with costs the preliminary points raised by the petitioner (Tsvangirai) in that none of them on its own nor all of them collectively suffice at this stage to invalidate the election . . . dismiss with costs the relief sought by the petitioner as to the constitutional validity of section 158 of the Electoral Act (Chapter 2:01) and the Electoral Act (Modification) Notice 2002, Statutory Instrument 41D of 2002 and the declaration sought that all orders made and directions given and acts done in terms of the Electoral Act (Modification) Notice 2002, SI41D are void," ruled Justice Hlatshwayo.
He also threw out with costs the objection by the Electoral Supervisory Commission that it was improperly cited as a respondent in the case.
The ruling means a date to hear the main election petition should be set within 30 days.
Now that the legal and technical objections by Mr Tsvangirai to the conduct of the election have been dis-missed, the opposition leader would be confined to leading evidence as to the extent of the alleged violence that purportedly prevailed during the poll.
President Mugabe and the ESC were cited as respondents in the case.
Mr Tsvangirai, who was represented by a team of lawyers including Advocate Jeremy Gauntlet of South Africa - Advocate Adrian de Bourbon (now based in South Africa) and Advocate Happias Zhou with Mr Bryant Elliot as attorney - had argued that the ESC was improperly constituted.
He blamed the ESC for scuttling the electoral process and challenged the constitutionality of certain sections of the Electoral Act.
Based on that assertion, Mr Tsvangirai wanted the court to invalidate the election after hearing the legal arguments at the initial stage of the proceedings.
At the hearing of the case last year, Mr Terrence Hussein of Hussein and Ranchhod, who represented President Mugabe, described the MDC petition as the weakest he had ever seen.
He said the court would make a blunder if it decided to nullify the election.
Asked about his chances of winning the case following the preliminary ruling, Mr Hussein said he could not comment as the matter was sub judice.
After noting that the issue was still under judicial consideration and, therefore, prohibited from public discussion outside the courts, he was still confident of the final outcome, saying: "I believe that my client's presidency is secure."
Mr Tsvangirai's lawyer, Mr Elliot, said he was not in a position to comment at this stage and referred all questions to the MDC leader's spokesman, Mr William Bango, who could not be reached for comment.
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Shrill Bill Cosby and the speech that shocked black America
Posted: Tuesday, June 1, 2004
Ebonics! Weird Names! $500 Shoes!
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 26 - June 1, 2004
I never got Fat Albert. Dumb Donald wore a lampshade for a hat, Russell dressed like a bag lady, and Bucky appeared to be the victim of a back-alley orthodontist. Bill Cosby's distorted, funny-looking kids couldn't shoot fire from their hands, and they wouldn't know a weather dominator from a flux capacitor. Instead, they were a dumb and dumpy bunch who conquered the travails of life (deodorant? candy overload?) with one simple weapon—Fat Albert's formidable moral center.
I thought about that moral center last week, when Cosby ventured down to Washington and ripped into the have-nots among us. The occasion was the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Ed, and the Coz had been invited to Chocolate City by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the NAACP proper, and Howard University. The triumvirate had decided to honor Cosby for having "advanced the promise of Brown." Cosby decided to do some advancing of his own.
Full Article : villagevoice.com
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Fatal Error: The Lies of Our Times
Posted: Friday, May 28, 2004
by Amy Goodman and David Goodman
www.democracynow.org
In our new book, The Exception To the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers and the Media That Love Them, we titled one chapter "The Lies of Our Times" to examine how The New York Times coverage on Iraq and its alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction helped lead the country to war. Yesterday, The New York Times, for the first time, raised questions about its own coverage in an 1,100-word editor's note. Here is an excerpt from our section of the book on the New York Times and Iraq.
"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." -- Andrew H. Card, White House Chief of Staff speaking about the Iraq war P.R. campaign, September 6, 2002
In the midst of the buildup to war, a major scandal was unfolding at The New York Times-the paper that sets the news agenda for other media. The Times admitted that for several years a 27-year-old reporter named Jayson Blair had been conning his editors and falsifying stories. He had pretended to be places he hadn't been, fabricated quotes, and just plain lied in order to tell a sensational tale. For this, Blair was fired. But The Times went further: It ran a 7,000-word, five-page expose on the young reporter, laying bare his personal and professional escapades.
The Times said it had reached a low point in its 152-year history. I agreed. But not because of the Jayson Blair affair. It was The Times coverage of the Bush-Blair affair.
When George W. Bush and Tony Blair made their fraudulent case to attack Iraq, The Times, along with most corporate media outlets in the United States, became cheerleaders for the war. And while Jayson Blair was being crucified for his journalistic sins, veteran Times national security correspondent and best-selling author Judith Miller was filling The Times' front pages with unchallenged government propaganda. Unlike Blair's deceptions, Miller's lies provided the pretext for war. Her lies cost lives.
If only The New York Times had done the same kind of investigation of Miller's reports as it had with Jayson Blair.
The White House propaganda blitz was launched on September 7, 2002, at a Camp David press conference. British Prime Minister Tony Blair stood side by side with his co-conspirator, President George W. Bush. Together, they declared that evidence from a report published by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) showed that Iraq was "six months away" from building nuclear weapons.
"I don't know what more evidence we need," crowed Bush.
Actually, any evidence would help-there was no such IAEA report. But at the time, few mainstream American journalists questioned the leaders' outright lies. Instead, the following day, "evidence" popped up in the Sunday New York Times under the twin byline of Michael Gordon and Judith Miller. "More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction," they stated with authority, "Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today."
In a revealing example of how the story amplified administration spin, the authors included the phrase soon to be repeated by President Bush and all his top officials: "The first sign of a 'smoking gun,' [administration officials] argue, may be a mushroom cloud."
Harper's publisher John R. MacArthur, author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, knew what to make of this front-page bombshell. "In a disgraceful piece of stenography," he wrote, Gordon and Miller "inflated an administration leak into something resembling imminent Armageddon."
The Bush administration knew just what to do with the story they had fed to Gordon and Miller. The day The Times story ran, Vice President Dick Cheney made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows to advance the administration's bogus claims. On NBC's Meet the Press, Cheney declared that Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes to make enriched uranium. It didn't matter that the IAEA refuted the charge both before and after it was made. But Cheney didn't want viewers just to take his word for it. "There's a story in The New York Times this morning," he said smugly. "And I want to attribute The Times."
This was the classic disinformation two-step: the White House leaks a lie to The Times, the newspaper publishes it as a startling expose, and then the White House conveniently masquerades behind the credibility of The Times.
"What mattered," wrote MacArthur, "was the unencumbered rollout of a commercial for war."4
Judith Miller was just getting warmed up. Reporting for America's most influential newspaper, Miller continued to trumpet administration leaks and other bogus sources as the basis for eye-popping stories that backed the administration's false premises for war. "If reporters who live by their sources were obliged to die by their sources," Jack Shafer wrote later in Slate, "Miller would be stinking up her family tomb right now."
After the war, Shafer pointed out, "None of the sensational allegations about chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons given to Miller have panned out, despite the furious crisscrossing of Iraq by U.S. weapons hunters."
Did The New York Times publish corrections? Clarifications? Did heads roll? Not a chance: Judith Miller's "scoops" continued to be proudly run on the front pages.
Here are just some of the corrections The Times should have run after the year-long campaign of front-page false claims by one of its premier reporters, Judith Miller.
FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
Scoop: "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts," by Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon, September 8, 2002. The authors quote Ahmed al-Shemri (a pseudonym), who contends that he worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program before defecting in 2000. " 'All of Iraq is one large storage facility,' said Mr. Shemri, who claimed to have worked for many years at the Muthanna State Enterprise, once Iraq's chemical weapons plant." The authors quote Shemri as stating that Iraq is stockpiling "12,500 gallons of anthrax, 2,500 gallons of gas gangrene, 1,250 gallons of aflatoxin, and 2,000 gallons of botulinum throughout the country."
Oops: As UN weapons inspectors had earlier stated-and U.S. weapons inspectors confirmed in September 2003-none of these claims were true. The unnamed source is one of many Iraqi defectors who made sensational false claims that were championed by Miller and The Times.
Scoop: "White House Lists Iraq Steps to Build Banned Weapons," by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, September 13, 2002. The article quotes the White House contention that Iraq was trying to purchase aluminum pipes to assist its nuclear weapons program.
Oops: Rather than run a major story on how the United States had falsely cited the UN to back its claim that Iraq was expanding its nuclear weapons program, Miller and Gordon repeated and embellished the lie.
Contrast this with the lead paragraph of a story that ran in the British daily The Guardian on September 9: "The International Atomic Energy Agency has no evidence that Iraq is developing nuclear weapons at a former site previously destroyed by UN inspectors, despite claims made over the weekend by Tony Blair, western diplomatic sources told The Guardian yesterday." The story goes on to say that the IAEA "issued a statement insisting it had 'no new information' on Iraq's nuclear program since December 1998 when its inspectors left Iraq."
Miller's trumped-up story contributed to the climate of the time and The Times. A month later, numerous congressional representatives cited the nuclear threat as a reason for voting to authorize war.
Scoop: "U.S. Faulted Over Its Efforts to Unite Iraqi Dissidents," by Judith Miller, October 2, 2002. Quoting Ahmed Chalabi and Defense Department adviser Richard Perle, this story stated: "The INC [Iraqi National Congress] has been without question the single most important source of intelligence about Saddam Hussein."
Miller airs the INC's chief complaint: "Iraqi dissidents and administration officials complain that [the State Department and CIA] have also tried to cast doubt on information provided by defectors Mr. Chalabi's organization has brought out of Iraq."
Oops: Miller championed the cause of Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader who had been lobbying Washington for over a decade to support the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. As The Washington Post revealed, Miller wrote to Times veteran foreign correspondent John Burns, who was working in Baghdad at the time, that Chalabi "has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD [weapons of mass destruction] to our paper."
Times readers might be interested to learn the details of how Ahmed Chalabi was bought and paid for by the CIA. Chalabi heads the INC, an organization of Iraqi exiles created by the CIA in 1992 with the help of the Rendon Group, a powerful public relations firm that has worked extensively for the two Bush administrations. Between 1992 and 1996, the CIA covertly funneled $12 million to Chalabi's INC. In 1998, the Clinton administration gave Chalabi control of another $98 million of U.S. taxpayer money. Chalabi's credibility has always been questionable: He was convicted in absentia in Jordan of stealing some $500 million from a bank he established, leaving shareholders high and dry. He has been accused by Iraqi exiles of pocketing at least $4 million of CIA funds.
In the lead-up to war, the CIA dismissed Chalabi as unreliable. But he was the darling of Pentagon hawks, putting an Iraqi face on their warmongering. So the Pentagon established a new entity, the Office of Special Plans, to champion the views of discredited INC defectors who helped make its case for war.
As Howard Kurtz later asked in The Washington Post: "Could Chalabi have been using The Times to build a drumbeat that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction?"
Scoop: "C.I.A. Hunts Iraq Tie to Soviet Smallpox," by Judith Miller, December 3, 2002. The story claims that "Iraq obtained a particularly virulent strain of smallpox from a Russian scientist." The story adds later: "The information came to the American government from an informant whose identity has not been disclosed."
Smallpox was cited by President Bush as one of the "weapons of mass destruction" possessed by Iraq that justified a dangerous national inoculation program-and an invasion.
Oops: After a three-month search of Iraq, " 'Team Pox' turned up only signs to the contrary: disabled equipment that had been rendered harmless by UN inspectors, Iraqi scientists deemed credible who gave no indication they had worked with smallpox, and a laboratory thought to be back in use that was covered in cobwebs," reported the Associated Press in September 2003.
Scoop: "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert," by Judith Miller, April 21, 2003. In this front-page article, Miller quotes an American military officer who passes on the assertions of "a man who said he was an Iraqi scientist" in U.S. custody. The "scientist" claims that Iraq destroyed its WMD stockpile days before the war began, that the regime had transferred banned weapons to Syria, and that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda.
Who is the messenger for this bombshell? Miller tells us only that she "was permitted to see him from a distance at the sites where he said that material from the arms program was buried. Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried."
And then there were the terms of this disclosure: "This reporter was not permitted to interview the scientist or visit his home. Nor was she permitted to write about the discovery of the scientist for three days, and the copy was then submitted for a check by military officials. Those officials asked that details of what chemicals were uncovered be deleted." No proof. No names. No chemicals. Only a baseball cap-and the credibility of Miller and The Times-to vouch for a "scientist" who conveniently backs up key claims of the Bush administration. Miller, who was embedded with MET Alpha, a military unit searching for WMDs, pumped up her sensational assertions the next day on PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: Q: Has the unit you've been traveling with found any proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
JUDITH MILLER: Well, I think they found something more than a smoking gun. What they've found...is a silver bullet in the form of a person, an Iraqi individual, a scientist, as we've called him, who really worked on the programs, who knows them firsthand.
Q: Does this confirm in a way the insistence coming from the U.S. government that after the war, various Iraqi tongues would loosen, and there might be people who would be willing to help?
JUDITH MILLER: Yes, it clearly does.... That's what the Bush administration has finally done. They have changed the political environment, and they've enabled people like the scientists that MET Alpha has found to come forth.
Oops: The silver bullet got more tarnished as it was examined. Three months later, Miller acknowledged that the scientist was merely "a senior Iraqi military intelligence official." His explosive claims vaporized.
A final note from the Department of Corrections: The Times deeply regrets any wars or loss of life that these errors may have contributed to.
UP IN SMOKE
Tom Wolfe once wrote about a war-happy Times correspondent in Vietnam (same idea, different war): The administration was "playing [the reporter] of The New York Times like an ocarina, as if they were blowing smoke up his pipe and the finger work was just right and the song was coming forth better than they could have played it themselves." But who was playing whom? The Washington Post reported that while Miller was embedded with MET Alpha, her role in the unit's operations became so central that it became known as the "Judith Miller team." In one instance, she disagreed with a decision to relocate the unit to another area and threatened to file a critical report in The Times about the action. When she took her protest to a two-star general, the decision was reversed. One Army officer told the Post, "Judith was always issuing threats of either going to The New York Times or to the secretary of defense. There was nothing veiled about that threat."
Later, she played a starring role in a ceremony in which MET Alpha's leader was promoted. Other officers were surprised to watch as Miller pinned a new rank on the uniform of Chief Warrant Officer Richard Gonzales. He thanked her for her "contributions" to the unit. In April 2003, MET Alpha traveled to the compound of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi "at Judy's direction," where they interrogated and took custody of an Iraqi man who was on the Pentagon's wanted list-despite the fact that MET Alpha's only role was to search for WMDs. As one officer told the Post, "It's impossible to exaggerate the impact she had on the mission of this unit, and not for the better."
After a year of bogus scoops from Miller, the paper gave itself a bit of cover. Not corrections-just cover. On September 28, 2003, Times reporter Douglas Jehl surprisingly kicked the legs out from under Miller's sources. In his story headlined AGENCY BELITTLES INFORMATION GIVEN BY IRAQ DEFECTORS, Jehl revealed: An internal assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that most of the information provided by Iraqi defectors who were made available by the Iraqi National Congress was of little or no value, according to federal officials briefed on the arrangement. In addition, several Iraqi defectors introduced to American intelligence agents by the exile organization and its leader, Ahmed Chalabi, invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected unconventional weapons program, the officials said.
The Iraqi National Congress had made some of these defectors available to...The New York Times, which reported their allegations about prisoners and the country's weapons program. Poof. Up in smoke went thousands of words of what can only be called rank propaganda.
This Times confession was too little, too late. After an unnecessary war, during a brutal occupation, and several thousand lives later, The Times obliquely acknowledged that it had been recycling disinformation. Miller's reports played an invaluable role in the administration's propaganda war. They gave public legitimacy to outright lies, providing what appeared to be independent confirmation of wild speculation and false accusations. "What Miller has done over time seriously violates several Times' policies under their code of conduct for news and editorial departments," wrote William E. Jackson in Editor & Publisher. "Jayson Blair was only a fluke deviation.... Miller strikes right at the core of the regular functioning news machine."
More than that, Miller's false reporting was key to justifying a war. And The Times' unabashed servitude to the administration's war agenda did not end with Iraq.
On September 16, 2003, The Times ran a story headlined SENIOR U.S. OFFICIAL TO LEVEL WEAPONS CHARGES AGAINST SYRIA. The stunningly uncritical article was virtually an excerpt of the testimony about to be given that day by outspoken hawk John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control. The article included this curious caveat: The testimony "was provided to The New York Times by individuals who feel that the accusations against Syria have received insufficient attention." The article certainly solved that problem.
The author? Judith Miller-preparing for the next battlefront.
Reproduced from:
www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/26/1610213
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Mugabe's land reforms get thumbs up
Posted: Sunday, May 23, 2004
Delegates at a conference of southern African liberation movements have given their backing to Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean president's, stand on land reforms.
The conference in Harare has drawn representatives from South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia and Tanzania.
Black empowerment groups such as the US-based December 12 Movement and the Britain-based Black United Front also attended the meeting, hosted by the ruling Zanu(PF) party.
Mugabe says his land programme has been a success but the main opposition party and aid agencies say it has severely disrupted Zimbabwe's once-prosperous agricultural sector and contributed to famine. The conference, which is also discussing international relations, democracy and good governance, has been highly critical of Western dominance and globalisation.
Reprinted for Fair Use Only from:
www.sabcnews.com/africa/southern_africa/0,2172,78497,00.html
Copyright © 2000 - 2003 SABC
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