Anything Prose

Year 2004: Commemorate or Celebrate LIBERATION ?

Mbeki Haitian Trip Raises Issues

From South Africa, this article that is so hard to read with its local references to the running polemic against the South African government of Mbeki, has a jewel at its core. It is something to remember next month during festivities for Black History month:

The politics of personal ambition are indeed the politics of celebration. But the politics of liberation, of setbacks unflinchingly undertaken and eventually overcome: these are the politics of commemoration.

It is the idea of commemoration, not the small change of celebration, that links our 10th anniversary of democracy with the devastated 200th Haitian anniversary, both equally momentous within our diaspora. Both anniversaries are ours; neither is foreign to us, however foreign one or both may be to careerist politicians.

James's Toussaint (L'Ouverture) wanted a viable free republic, not martyrdom or futile defiance. But as a lone anti-slavery republic, with no liberated allies such as today's India or Brazil, with no G-22 group of nations and no United Nations, a free Haiti could only go down, in self-devastating defiance, to defeat and American interference -- most recently when Clinton's gunboats propped up Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1994.

Insult and Injury in Lusaka

Clarke Profile: White Zambian Writer Facing Deportation

follow-up on previous post on Anything Prose

In the 40-odd years since, Clarke has worked as a teacher, an administrator, and finally, in his 50s, a journalist. "My dear wife didn't want to go to Britain, which is a terribly racist place. I could see her point. It was far better for me to be a white man in Zambia than for her to be a black woman in Britain. This opinion has held quite well for 35 years; I may now have to reconsider."

In spite of recent improvements, and benefiting hugely from comparison to Zimbabwe to the south, Zambia is not a happy place.

This is why, when the president made a pre-Christmas address congratulating his government on another excellent year, Clarke felt moved to protest. Out of a population of 10 million, more than a million people have HIV; 80% live below the poverty line and life expectancy at birth hovers around 35. "It left people a bit gobsmacked," says Clarke. "I thought that if there was a lot of prosperity somewhere, perhaps we would find it in the Mfuwe gamepark." The column sent up the government as a pack of duplicitous jungle animals, taking the Zambian people for fools.

"Just as the [humans] are becoming thinner," he wrote, in the voice of the elephant president, "so we in the game park are becoming fatter. As hospitals fall down in the rest of the country, so we are building veterinary clinics all over Mfuwe ... by closing schools, we now have the funds to send our monkeys abroad to Harvard. They are studying for MBAs, degrees in Manipulating Budget Allocations."

LIBERIA: LURD Commanders Falling Out -- as 'Always Before'

LIBERIA: LURD commanders want leader replaced by his wife - OCHA IRIN

Forty commanders of Liberia's main rebel group, the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) have signed a statement calling for the replacement of LURD chairman Sekou Damate Conneh by his influential wife, Aisha Keita Conneh.

Diplomats say she has a great deal of influence with Guinean President Lansana Conte, who for the past four years has been LURD's main backer. She is reputed to be Conte's personal fortune teller.

(Thanks to mostlyafrica.blogspot.com for this link.)

Cathy Buckle Posts from Zimbabwe

The March Backwards
Saturday, 8th November 2003

Dear Family and Friends,

A Canadian friend and passionate believer in democracy recently gave me a subscription to the Guardian Weekly and what a delight it is to be able to read "real news" from the "real world" every week.

Recently there was a report on how the lives of subsistence farmers in Kenya are being dramatically improved thanks to research into how chemical signals from different grasses attract parasitic wasps.The wasps then eat maize borer moths and the result is a dramatic increase in crop yields. The added bonus comes from the grasses which started the process as they then provide lush grazing for dairy cows which produce more and better milk. Reports such as this one shouldn't bring tears to my eyes but they do because with every passing day Zimbabwe is not only being left behind but is also racing back to the dark ages.

Just three years and ten months ago, before our political madness began, Zimbabwe was also involved in amazing research which was going to change the face of agriculture and dramatically improve lives. Companion growing and intercropping was becoming a widespread practice. Massive field trials were being conducted into minimum or zero tillage to improve yields and boost soil quality. Farmers were growing huge fields of flowers for their essential, healing and aromatic oils.

Others were growing crops like castor beans whose oil is used in the chemical and plastics industries and others a bushy shrub whose oil was set to replace diesel as a fuel source for motor vehicles. All of this has now gone. The farmers are forbidden from the lands on which the crops were grown and the specialists, scientists, engineers and technicians have left or are leaving the country as the entire economic structure of Zimbabwe falls apart. Decades of painstaking research and huge advances in agricultural diversity have now been completely destroyed and largely replaced by primitive scratch farming which is now almost the only thing to see on Zimbabwe's looted and seized farms.

Agriculture is not the only thing going backwards in Zimbabwe and lately the march into the past seems to have accelerated into almost every aspect of day to day living. We now have a huge crisis with water in some of our towns and cities. This morning our one and only propaganda radio station read out a list of suburbs in the capital city which are going to be subjected to regular 24 hour periods without water because there isn't enough clean water to meet the demands.

In Marondera our water in the last fortnight has alternated between clear, milky and dark brown and there is no one in authority able to offer an explanation or solution. Night after night our town is being hit by men who go street by street disconnecting and stealing water meters. On the night mine was stolen, 12 others in surrounding streets also went. The roads were awash from broken pipes and over a month later our town council have still done nothing whatsoever to even effect temporary repairs. Our mains water pipes are still joined together by desperate householders with bits of garden hosepipe and rubber strapping.

(See also Cathy's commentary in her Saturday, 15th November, 2003
letter explaining why the Mugabe government subsidized the squatters and veterans to remain on her farm.)

In those 7 months I saw at first hand what was going on. There was not a shadow of doubt in my mind then that our land had been squatted not because we were white but because a political party was desperate to stay in power and that we were merely scapegoats.

France's Heart of Darkness: The ELF Story.

Submerging Markets: First World Criminals, Third World Crimes - Part 2: France's Heart of Darkness: The ELF Story.

by James S. Henry

Loik Le Floch-Prigent and 22 other former executives of France’s Elf Aquitaine, plus seven other accessories, were sentenced by a French court (last year).

From our standpoint, the key fact is that these secret funds had originally been created in order to pay up to $130 million of bribes a year to senior officials in African countries like Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon, Angola, Guinea, and the Congo, as well as in Venezuela, Russia, Taiwan, Central Asia, China, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.

Significantly, this extraordinary global corruption eventually “blew back” to France itself, where, according to Le Floch-Prigent, Elf paid at least €5 -€20 million in bribes per year to France’s leading politicians, ministers, and political parties -- not only Gaullist parties like Chirac’s RPR/UMP party, and former Interior Minister Charles Pasqua’s RPF, but also the Socialists and other parties.

Even after this extraordinary 9-year trial, we still lack much of the detail on precisely where all this payola went.

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Daily Trust - Declare Lake Chad disaster zone – Community urges FG

Daily Trust - Declare Lake Chad disaster zone – Community urges FG

Kyari Tijjani, said although the Lake Chad was one of the greatest lakes in Africa after Lakes Victoria, Tanganyika and Malawi, its recession had over the years led to a serious drop in fish catches by Borno fishermen "from 230,000 metric tonnes per annum in the early 60s to less than 50,000 metric tonnes in recent times."

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Democracy: Burial Set for 2004

M Golby - Out2Lunch, Into the Lake of Fire

The content of this blog is radical-bite culture. The links, however, are standard Western white liberal - of the better bouquet variety, with real body . . .

With Bob Mugabe's threats to withdraw a suspended Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth, thereby pitting African states against their Commonwealth fellows, the power of tyranny is showing its hand. Across the Atlantic, George Bush's unashamed use of presidential privilege, taxpayers' money, pre-nomination Democratic Party in-fighting, and others' misfortune for selfish ends shows how easy it is for those who have attained power to cement their positions.

Occupying different sectors of the geopolitical spectrum, Mugabe and Bush might do the world a favour by showing democracy up for the joke it has become. While Bush represents powerful, private U.S. military-industrial interests, Mugabe is a self-made man, running his country as a Mom and Pop store for personal gain. Bush, an executive, has shareholders to whom he must answer. Bob deals with family. Both, however, are in it for the money and, where large sums are involved, people die. It was ever thus.

Ivory Coast a Test for France-Afrique

click - the Background file opens locally on your browser -

Referee Role for France in Africa Not the Crowning Glory of Neo-colonialism
--- But France is Not About to Quit the Continent any Time Soon

http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/4276085.html

President Jacques Chirac is determined to quash conflict in Ivory Coast and its glittering port city, Abidjan, not only to protect French interests but also to help stabilize an unruly continent.

In real terms, Paris is still the most important African capital more than 40 years after Charles de Gaulle granted independence to colonies stretching from Senegal to the Republic of Congo.

ZIMB MDC to 'force Mugabe to talk'

http://www.news24.com/News24/Africa/Zimbabwe/0,,2-11-259_1461972,00.html

Sent by: wdh
Dec 20 2003 03:56:41:420PM

Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has promised to create a "broad alliance" that will force the government to negotiate.

Harare - Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai on Saturday promised to create a "broad alliance" with other pro-democracy organisations that he said next year would force President Robert Mugabe's government to negotiate a settlement to the country's crisis.

At the same time, his Movement for Democratic Change said in an official report to the party's annual conference in Harare that informal talks with Mugabe 's ruling Zanu-PF party had so far "yielded nothing" and that the two parties "are as far apart as the North and South Poles are."

Tsvangirai told about 1 000 enthusiastic delegates that the conference would produce "resolutions to ensure that a broad alliance of democratic forces is born.

"The alliance will engage the regime in 2002. The alliance will intensify the pressure on the regime and force it to come to the negotiating table."

He did not elaborate, but MDC spokesperson Paul Themba Nyathi said Tsvangirai was referring to forming a coalition with civil rights groups, like the country's powerful labour, church and human rights organisations.

"In the past, organisations like the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (the national labour movement) have gone out on their own. We have to seek to synchronise and consolidate our struggles," he said.

The conference was held under the theme, "courage and hope overcome fear," an attempt to rally what is seen as sliding morale in the party after four years of unrelenting repression meant to destroy the party.

'A foreign occupying force'

Tsvangirai described the government as "a regime that behaves like a foreign occupying force."

"We have been brutalised, tortured, raped and murdered by a regime that was supposed to protect us. The people have been under siege," he said.

The MDC holds nearly half of the 120 elected seats in parliament, won in the face of bloody intimidation and rigging, and controls the councils of nearly all the country's urban areas.

Tsvangirai also made a point of trying to improve relations with South African president Thabo Mbeki, now seen as one of the few international figures with sufficient rapport with Mugabe to broker negotiations to try and end the country's crisis.

In a visit on Thursday, Mbeki talked with Mugabe for about three hours, but held only a 45-minute unscheduled "courtesy call" with Tsvangirai.

"We urge President Mbeki to continue with his efforts," Tsvangirai said on Saturday.

"We understand the difficulty he faces. Mugabe has misled him all this time, and he has betrayed the trust of President Mbeki."

However, the party's report on the issue of dialogue between the MDC and Zanu-PF also indirectly slammed Mbeki, who this week declared that the two parties were making considerable progress in talks.

"Reports from some sections that the parties are negotiating and are close to some agreement are completely without foundation," it said.

Museveni is Africa's Model - US Officer

http://allafrica.com/stories/200312190426.html

( rjp intro -- Some commentators say that the US gave arms and military assistance to Uganda and the Tutsi forces under Kagami -- even before the 1994 genocide. This, it is claimed, was why the genocide was not stopped through international intervention.

Articles like the one below, lend some credence to the conclusion that Uganda's Museveni and the US State Dept ( Pentagon as well) have been currying favor with pliable strongmen in the region for some time. If it is paying off in through mutual allegiance, the downside is inaction when Rwanda and Congo burn.

Plumbing the profound depths of the most recent abandonment by Western powers of any role in reducing the carnage of civilian populations requires that we start documenting the play of economic and strategic interests behind such policies. )
New Vision (Kampala)

Posted to the web December 19, 2003
John Kakande

Kampala (Uganda)
PRESIDENT Yoweri Museveni is the type of leader Africa needs in order to implement necessary micro-economic reforms to enhance trade, a senior US government official has said.
US Agency for International Develop-ment (USAID) administrator Andrew Natsios told an international trade forum that there were still African leaders adamantly opposed to reforms intended to "deregulate business and create an enticing investor climate."

"Natsios singled out President Yoweri Museveni as the type of leader Africa needs now in order to take full advantage of important benefits under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), America's first-ever trade pact with the continent," the Washington File, an official US government bulletin said yesterday.
Natsios was recently speaking at the third annual US-Sub-Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation (AGOA) Forum.
Trade, finance and foreign ministers of 37 African nations attended the meeting held at the Loy Henderson Auditorium in the State Department.
Natsios told the ministers to emulate Uganda by placing the focus on micro-economic reforms to deregulate business and create a more enticing investor climate in their countries.