Tag Archives: apartheid

Latest Developments, April 9

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Thatcher’s legacy
The Guardian reports on some of the ways that the news of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s death was met in South Africa, “a country where she found herself on the wrong side of history”:

“ ‘My gut reaction now is what it was at the time when she said my father was the leader of a terrorist organisation,’ [Dali Tambo, son of the African National Congress president Oliver Tambo] said. ‘I don’t think she ever got it that every day she opposed sanctions, more people were dying, and that the best thing for the assets she wanted to protect was democracy.’ ”

Publish what you pay
The Irish Times reports that the European Union has agreed on rules requiring “large companies and public-interest entities” in the extractive industries to report payments they make to governments around the world:

“The legislation, which is unlikely to enter into force before 2016, could have implications for companies such as Tullow Oil, which have a significant presence in Africa. The US introduced similar legislation last year. However, some NGOs had argued that telecommunication and construction companies should also be included in the directive.”

Arms for peace
The Associated Press reports that US President Barack Obama has issued a memo calling for the US to restart arms sales to Somalia in order to “promote world peace”:

“The move follows a decision by the U.N. Security Council, after an appeal from Somali officials, to partially suspend the arms embargo on Somalia for 12 months. The council preserved a ban on exports of a list of heavy military hardware, including surface-to-air missiles, anti-tank guided weapons and night-vision weapons.
The U.S. government has provided funds and training to African Union forces fighting al-Shabab in Somalia, and has also provided more than $133 million to Somalia since 2007 in security sector assistance, intended to help the country build up and professionalize its security forces. Obama’s memorandum on Friday opens the door for military-to-military relations, allowing the U.S. to provide equipment, training and other assistance directly to Somalia’s government and military.”

Word vs. deed
McClatchy has undertaken “the first independent evaluation of internal U.S. intelligence accounting of drone attacks,” which suggests the Obama administration is not doing what it says it is:

“Micah Zenko, an expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, a bipartisan foreign policy think tank, who closely follows the target killing program, said McClatchy’s findings indicate that the administration is ‘misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.’
The documents also show that drone operators weren’t always certain who they were killing despite the administration’s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA’s targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been ‘exceedingly rare.’
…
‘The United States has gone far beyond what the U.S. public – and perhaps even Congress – understands the government has been doing and claiming they have a legal right to do,’ said Mary Ellen O’Connell, a Notre Dame Law School professor who contends that CIA drone operations in Pakistan violate international law.”

Going home
Reuters reports that France has taken a first, small step towards pulling its troops out of Mali, though it does not intend to withdraw all of them:

“Paris aims to complete the withdrawal of 3,000 soldiers this year and will keep a permanent 1,000-strong combat force in the former colony to support a U.N. peacekeeping mission of African forces.
…
‘It’s the start of the pullout,’ [army spokesman] Thierry Burkhard said. ‘The aim is to be down to 2,000 in July.’
Burkhard said that about 100 men from a parachute regiment that had been based in Tessalit, in the foothills of the Adrar des Ifoghas mountain range, had now left Mali.”

New weapon
The New York Times reports the US Navy is deploying a prototype “laser attack weapon” to the Persian Gulf:

“The laser will not be operational until next year, but the announcement on Monday by Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, the chief of naval operations, seemed meant as a warning to Iran not to step up activity in the gulf in the next few months if tensions increase because of sanctions and the impasse in negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program. The Navy released video and still images of the laser weapon burning through a drone during a test firing.
The laser is designed to carry out a graduated scale of missions, from burning through a fast-attack boat or a drone to producing a nonlethal burst to ‘dazzle’ an adversary’s sensors and render them useless without causing any other physical damage.”

History lesson
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki urges the international community not to take sides (or at any rate, not to supply arms to one faction or another) in the Syrian conflict:

“Accordingly, we oppose all transfers of weapons, to both the government and the opposition, and we are working to ensure that our airspace and territory are not used for such transfers.
Further militarization of the conflict will only increase the suffering of civilians and strengthen radical groups, including our common enemy, al-Qaeda. We have been mystified by what appears to be the widespread belief in the United States that any outcome in Syria that removes President Bashar al-Assad from power will be better than the status quo. A Syria controlled in whole or part by al-Qaeda and its affiliates — an outcome that grows more likely by the day — would be more dangerous to both our countries than anything we’ve seen up to now. Americans should remember that an unintended consequence of arming insurgents in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets was turning the country over to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”

Unwanted help
The Telegraph reports that pop icon Madonna was stripped of her VIP status during her latest visit to Malawi, where she is involved in controversial charitable efforts:

“The country’s education minister accused Madonna of ‘exaggerating’ the extent of her charitable work in the country and a request by Madonna for an audience with President Joyce Banda was ignored.
…
‘She just came unannounced and proceeded to villages and made poor people dance for her. And immigration officials opened the VIP lounge for her just because previously she enjoyed the VIP status,’ the president told a journalist covering the visit.”

Latest Developments, March 22

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Teetering regime
Le Figaro reports on growing international concern, particularly in former colonial ruler France, over the rapid advance of rebels toward the Central African Republic’s capital Bangui:

“The situation appeared serious enough for France, which has a contingent of about 250 troops on the ground, to ask for a UN Security Council meeting on Friday night. Paris had placed its troops based in Libreville, Gabon on standby. But most of its forces are currently waging war in Mali. ‘If we are involved in CAR,’ said French President François Hollande late last year, ‘it isn’t to protect a regime. It’s to protect our citizens and interests and in no way to intervene in the internal affairs of a country.’ ” [Translated from the French.]

RIP Chinua Achebe
To mark the passing of “the grandfather of African literature,” the Africa Report reprints a Chinua Achebe interview conducted by fellow Nigerian novelist Helon Habila in 2007:

“I for one always resisted the idea that this is ‘The Achebe School’. Personally, I didn’t want a school at all, and looking back at that generation and you not being aware what it was like to grow up in a situation in which you have no literature, in which you do not belong to the stories that are told, a period in which you went to school and passed through school, and you did not hear anything about yourself throughout that period — unless you went through that, it will be difficult to understand why there was all this to-do about writing our own stories, crafting our own style and so on.
…
There are many people walking around in Britain today who do not accept that the colonial period adventure was not fair to the people on whom it was unleashed.”

End of CIDA
The Center for Global Development’s Owen Barder and Addis Ababa University’s Lucas Robinson argue that the Canadian government’s decision to merge its international development agency into the ministry of foreign affairs is an opportunity “to move the debate ‘beyond aid’ ”:

“But people from developing countries are clear that development policy must mean more than giving aid. They want to benefit more from the resources and services they supply to the world. They do not want aid as compensation for unfair global trade rules; they want the rules changed. They do not want compensation for the damage done to the environment by industrialized countries; they want the destruction of our planet to stop.
We need to look beyond the management of aid, for which their organizations are designed, to a much broader agenda and new ways of working if we are to deal with the growing array of challenges that require global solutions, including climate change, macroeconomic imbalances, inadequate financial regulation, tax avoidance, inequality, environmental degradation, dislocation, insecurity and corruption.”

Mining murder
Oxfam has condemned the kidnapping of four Guatemalan men, one of whom was subsequently found dead, who opposed a mining project owned by Canada’s Tahoe Resources:

“Local groups had organized a community consultation in which citizens cast votes in favor or against the mining project known as ‘The Escobal.’ The project is located 2.5 kilometers east of the San Jose, municipal head of San Rafael Las Flores. Its operations would impact more than 3,000 people living in the area.
After the consultation, the four leaders, known for defending the rights of local citizens, were kidnapped.”

Sweetheart deal
The Guardian reports that Shell is being accused of paying a mere $20 in annual rent for each of a pair of South African filling stations built on land obtained during apartheid:

“The Shell anomaly is being investigated by South Africa’s parliamentary oversight committee on rural development and land reform. Stone Sizani, its chairman, said: ‘It’s a huge unfairness on the part of Shell to the community there. They’re making huge sums of money from those filling stations and what they’re paying is the equivalent of an indigent family for a piece of land.’
He added: ‘Nobody can explain how Shell got such a piece of land. Even if it was done during apartheid, Shell should be feeling ashamed.’
Shell obtained permission to occupy (PTO) during the apartheid era, when black people were not permitted to obtain title deeds to land.”

Bad paint
The Cameroon Tribune reports on a study suggesting that two-thirds of new paint being sold in the central African nation contains hazardous levels of lead:

“The study, in the May issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, revealed lead concentrations are as high as 50 percent by weight in household paint being sold by Cameroon’s largest paint company, Seigneurie – a subsidiary of the U.S. Company PPG. This concentration is more than 5,000 times the allowable limit in the U.S.
…
The new study is the first one which provides the names of paint companies and the lead concentrations for all 61 paints tested.”

Drone expansion
The Washington Post reports that Niamey, the capital of Niger, is “the newest outpost in the U.S. government’s empire of drone bases”:

“Like other U.S. drone bases, the Predator operations in Niger are shrouded in secrecy. The White House announced Feb. 22 that Obama had deployed about 100 military personnel to Niger on an “intelligence collection” mission, but it did not make any explicit reference to drones.
Since then, the Defense Department has publicly acknowledged the presence of drones here but has revealed little else. The Africa Command, which oversees U.S. military missions on the continent, denied requests from a Washington Post reporter to interview American troops in Niger or to tour the military airfield where the drones are based, near Niamey’s international airport.”

Less tolerance
Le Monde reports that a new study shows that intolerance is on the rise in France and racist acts and threats increased by 23% last year:

“In all, 55 percent of people surveyed said Muslims are ‘a group on the fringes of society’ (up four points since the 2011 report) and 69 percent believe ‘there are too many immigrants in France today,’ a 10 point increase since 2011. ‘We are seeing a dangerous desensitization to racist comments,’ according to the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights.
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If ‘racism’ is ‘relatively stable’ (up two percent), anti-Muslim ‘racism’ (up 30 percent) and particularly ‘antisemitism’ (up 58 percent) have shown the biggest increases.” [Translated from the French.]

Latest Developments, March 1

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Pakistan misconceptions
The Telegraph’s Peter Osborne argues simultaneously that media reports exaggerate current levels of violence in Pakistan and that the West should acknowledge its own role in creating instability in Afghanistan’s neighbour.
“In recent years, the Nato occupation of Afghanistan has dragged Pakistan towards civil war. Consider this: suicide bombings were unknown in Pakistan before Osama bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers in September 2001. Immediately afterwards, President Bush rang President Musharraf and threatened to ‘bomb Pakistan into the stone age’ if Musharraf refused to co-operate in the so-called War on Terror.
The Pakistani leader complied, but at a terrible cost. Effectively the United States president was asking him to condemn his country to civil war by authorising attacks on Pashtun tribes who were sympathetic to the Afghan Taliban. The consequences did not take long, with the first suicide strike just six weeks later, on October 28.”

Dependency theory
The Overseas Development Institute’s Jonathan Glennie and Nora Hassanaien make the case for the continued usefulness of the currently out-of-fashion dependency theory.
“It is critical that voters in the rich world learn that their wealth is related to a historic exploitation of other parts of the world, especially when they are eventually asked to readjust their living habits and conditions in order to better accommodate the just requirements of poorer countries.
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‘Everyone is doing better,’ say the people who are doing better. But what about those who aren’t? Is their lack of progress the foundation on which the progress of others rests? To answer that question, and others, dependency theories may be needed now more than ever.”

Debt repudiation
James Boyce and Léonce Ndikumana, the authors of Africa’s Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent, suggest a number of ways to curb the “hemorrhage of Africa’s scarce resources” to other parts of the world.
“Last but not least, African countries can and should selectively repudiate odious debts incurred by past regimes where the borrowed funds were not used for the benefit of the public, and creditors knew or should have known this to be the case.
Bankers threaten that repudiation of such debts would bring new hardships as the debtor country is cut off from access to new borrowing. But with selective repudiation, legitimate creditors would have no reason to fear, as their debts would continue to be honored. Moreover, repudiation will benefit the many countries that currently pay more in debt service than they receive in new loans.
These steps would not only benefit the people of Africa today, but also strengthen future incentives for the exercise of due diligence by creditors and for responsible borrowing by governments. Banking on capital flight is a symptom of deeper defects in our international financial architecture. What’s needed, in Africa and abroad, are reforms tough enough to ensure that banks serve the people rather than fleecing them.”

GM & apartheid
The Mail & Guardian reports bankrupt auto giant General Motors has reached a settlement with South African plaintiffs over claims it supplied vehicle parts to apartheid-era police.
“There are still cases pending in the Second Circuit Court of Appeal in New York against Ford Motor Company, IBM, Daimler AG and Rheinmetall, [the plaintiffs’ lawyer Charles]Abrahams said.
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The original damages suffered and claimed for were human rights violations including assassination and murder, indiscriminate shooting, prolonged detention without trial, torture and rape (in detention). An additional damage of ‘denationalisation’ (deprivation of citizenship) was later included.”

Escaping responsibility
Yale Law School’s Oona Hathaway explains why she believes the US Supreme Court should rule that corporations can be sued in the US for human rights abuses committed overseas.
“Absent liability under the [Alien Tort] statute, corporations would often escape responsibility, even though they have made additional profit as a result of terrible abuses they directly committed or aided and abetted. There is usually no recourse available in the country where the abuses took place, often because the government participated. And lawsuits against corporate agents are usually impossible (because the agents are not within the jurisdiction of the courts) or fruitless (because the agents could never pay a judgment against them). Concluding that corporations cannot be held liable under the statute would thus mean that the victims of a modern-day I.G. Farben, the company that produced the gas for the Nazi gas chambers, would have no effective legal recourse against it.”

Future of warfare
TomDispatch.com’s Tom Engelhardt writes that all signs point toward a future where America’s “citizen’s army” has been replaced by a robot military.
“In other words, we are moving towards an ever greater outsourcing of war to things that cannot protest, cannot vote with their feet (or wings), and for whom there is no ‘home front’ or even a home at all. In a sense, we are, as we have been since 1973, heading for a form of war without anyone, citizen or otherwise, in the picture – except those on the ground, enemy and civilian alike, who will die as usual.
Of course, it may never happen this way, in part because drones are anything but perfect or wonder weapons, and in part because corporate war fought by a thoroughly professional military turns out to be staggeringly expensive to the demobilised citizen, profligate in its waste, and – by the evidence of recent history – remarkably unsuccessful. It also couldn’t be more remote from the idea of a democracy or a republic.”

Benefit corporations
PBS NewsHour reports on new laws in seven US states that redefine the role and goal of corporations.
“ ‘Existing corporate law was built for maximization of shareholder value. And so the legal innovation here is that idea that the directors and the officers of the company are now protected to be able to consider a broader set of interests,’ [said B Lab’s Andrew Kassoy].
The law protects firms that file as benefit corporations from shareholder lawsuits that could otherwise charge they didn’t maximize profits.
B Corps are legally mandated to maximize social benefits as well.”