Nelson Mandela and the Rainbow Nation he never saw

By James N. Kariuki

In the negotiations to dismantle apartheid in the early 1990s, Mandela was admirably tough on the political front, but excessively soft on the economic side. In the end, Madiba settled for a lopsided economic deal that disinherited his people. But he wasn’t alone in doing this.

The South economy is the largest in Africa. Yet, since 2009 SA has had the distinction of beating the entire world as the most economically skewed society. This lopsidedness is not new. It grasped/gripped the attention of international social critics as far back as May 1998 when then SA Deputy President, Thabo Mbeki, stated before Parliament that SA was not a nation; it was merely two nations rolled into one.

To Mbeki, SA was a superficial synthesis of a small affluent white society whose lifestyles rivaled the superrich anywhere in the world. The other SA was comprised of black fellow citizens who were permanently locked in abject poverty without a way out. Mbeki’s statement came to be known as the ‘Two-Nations Speech’, a candid refutation of racial-economic harmony around the world.

Mbeki went on to point out that it would take a long time for the South Africa’s socio-economic fissure, a 350-year legacy of inequality, to narrow and allow the country to evolve the necessary psychological cement to form a bona fide nation. But until that happened, talk of a Rainbow Nation was premature, a mere dream deferred. And, Mbeki continued, a dream deferred festers into a rage which, ultimately, explodes. Was Mbeki forewarning of a racial confrontation? Did he have a foreboding about the impeding Marikana Massacre of August 2012 where 34 striking miners would be gunned down by police in broad daylight?

In analyzing SA’s economic inequality, social critics agree from the outset that colonialism and apartheid had much to do with it. But in the post-apartheid era, a small undercurrent of thought emerged suggesting that the country’s socio-economic woes were aggravated and perpetuated by ‘compromised negotiations’ that were spearheaded by the liberation icon, Nelson Mandela.

The compromised negotiations proposition remained relatively muted during Mandela’s lifetime presumably because few dared to stand up as Madiba’s distracters during his lifetime. After all, he was the beloved, ultimate victim of apartheid. Now in post-Mandela era, that same argument is again raising its head, vividly captured in the newly formed party, the Economic Freedom Fighters headed by the former ANC maverick, Julius Malema.

In the negotiations to dismantle apartheid in the early 1990s, the claim goes, Mandela was admirably tough on the political front, but he was excessively soft on the economic side. In the end, Madiba settled for a lopsided economic deal that disinherited his people. As one globally acclaimed analyst summed up the deal, ‘a great Faustian bargain was struck between the two races. The Whites said to the Blacks, ‘You take the crown and we will keep the jewels.’”

The economic ‘soft-to-apartheid’ logic has been articulated by prominent personalities deeply loyal to Mandela, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mandela’s former wife, Winnie. Its proponents do not necessarily accuse Mandela of deliberate wrongdoing but they do assert, at least by implication, that more could have been extracted in form of economic concessions for the dispossessed fellow Africans.

Occasionally, there have been whispers that Mandela went too far to accommodate the apartheid establishment in a manner that verged on appeasement. In return he got a ‘Sucker’s Deal’ economically. However, neither deliberate law breaking nor corruption is ever suggested. In fact, ethically and legally, Mandela’s post-apartheid leadership is generally portrayed as having been virtually impeccable.

A case could be made that Mandela’s overall soft-economic approach to the demise of apartheid was not an ad hoc matter, that it was derived from older Pan-African thought. Indeed, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah had addressed the same question of what domain should African anti-colonialism target first: political or economic power? Nkrumah responded in his capacity as the elder statesman in African nationalism by asserting, ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all things shall be added unto you.’

During the negotiations to abolish apartheid in early 1990s, was Mandela aware of Nkrumah’s ‘political kingdom first’ dictum? He would be forgiven if he was not aware. After all, he was already in prison when African nationalism took off in earnest and such debates became commonplace.

Yet, evidence suggests otherwise. In addition to his well-known photographic memory, Mandela was well read. Professor Ali Mazrui tells how he was once in a conference and, accidentally, bumped into Mandela in the hallway. Startled, Mazrui greeted the global icon and introduced himself as Ali Mazrui. Mandela responded, ‘Oh, Professor Ali Mazrui, nice to meet you! I used to read your publications when I was in prison!”

If Mandela remembered Mazrui’s name and that he had read his publications while in prison, he certainly knew of the economic-political kingdoms debate relative to African decolonization. Indeed Nkrumah’s dictum on this issue is one of his three most cited decrees ever and Mazrui has published extensively on Nkrumah. In de-emphasizing the economic front in the negotiations to abolish apartheid, was Mandela of the early 1990s acting under the spell of Nkrumah, the leading continental Pan-Africanist?

In all likelihood, Mandela of that time was preoccupied less with ideologies than the practical circumstances that surrounded him, realities that were uniquely South African. For the survival of his country, he had chosen to enlist the political kingdom first of reconciliation and nation-building. This, an attempt to build a Rainbow Nation, was indeed the only viable alternative that was open to discussions. In this sense, Mandela was not alone. He was reminiscent of Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta who also came out of a colonial jail and wrote a book clearly aimed at ‘coddling’ his former British detractors. Hence the unsurprising title of his 1968 book, Suffering without Bitterness.

Additionally, SA of the early 1990’s did not have much of an economic kingdom to offer. At that time most of the world was still too caught up in the euphoria of Mandela’s release from prison to realize that the economy of the country that Mandela was soon to govern was in shambles. For decades, SA had been the world’s number one pariah state and had been victimized for being ‘God’s forsaken country.’ Its economy was virtually wrecked by strikes and rampant violence, an atmosphere of doom, instability and uncertainty.

The mood of doom that hung over SA deteriorated immensely from the 1980s and was profoundly unattractive to foreign investors. International economic sanctions had become universal and were now biting deeply. Suddenly, these forces were boosted by the 1986 passage of the US Congressional Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act.

The divestment movement was also gaining momentum in the US and contributed further to apartheid’s economic woes. Finally, there were anti-apartheid protests in almost every Western city. It was not an exaggeration when white SA lamented of total onslaught against them. Even Christiaan Barnard, the famous first human heart transplant surgeon in the world (and an anti-apartheid activist) went to his grave believing that he fell short of the Nobel Prize in Medicine because he was a ‘white South African.’

Those economic circumstances left little room for Mandela to push immediately for remedial socio-economic programs such as nationalizations of mines and land reforms. In a realistic sense then, Mandela did not deliberately compromise his people economically in the negotiations to dismantle apartheid; the state of the economy added immensely to the compromising.

Politically, it is often forgotten that SA could have easily drifted into an unmanageable race war. On one side of the pole were millions of Blacks who had endured decades of staggering deprivation and humiliation for no fault of their own. By the early 1990s, they were surely angry and in a hurry.

At the other end of the spectrum were the whites who had always known privileged existence. In case violence erupted, to them it was a matter of do or die. Taking ‘their property’ would have been the last crossing of the red line.

Mandela committed the force of his personality to assure both sides that SA was big enough for both sides and by insisting that it belonged to all those who lived in it, a Rainbow Nation. His primary mission became to convince both sides that violence was not an option. To fellow Blacks he repeatedly said, ‘Some of us talk of revolutionary change like we are dealing with a defeated enemy, far from it.’ In other words, violence at that juncture was tantamount to racial suicide.

Simultaneously, Mandela was telling the white right- wing, ‘If you want to go to war, I must be honest and admit that we cannot stand up to you in the battlefield.…It will be a long and bitter struggle. Many people will die and the country may be reduced to ashes. But you cannot win because of our numbers. You cannot kill all of us. And you cannot win because of the international community; they will rally to our side and they will stand with us.’

Mandela did play his historical part in terminating political apartheid and bringing democracy to SA peacefully. For that he won the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize. But the task of fusing socio-economic equality into the political kingdom has turned out to be an infinitely more difficult undertaking. This year marks two decades of democracy in SA. Yet, de facto economic apartheid remains intact. South African blacks remain horrifically poor in absolute and relative terms. Indeed in 2009, SA sidelined Brazil as the most skewed society in the world.

By Thabo Mbeki’s 1989 definition, SA is still not a nation; it is remains two nations in one. How to narrow the gap between the White haves and Black have-nots, how to construct genuine fundamentals of a Rainbow Nation, eluded Mandela. Unlike Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Nelson Mandela’s SA is an incomplete revolution, a work in progress.

* James N. Kariuki is a Kenyan Professor of International Relations and an independent writer based in South Africa.

EDITORIAL

Childish Games In Syria

It did not surprise any serious watcher of Syria and the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America when on the eve of Geneva 11; some photographs claiming to be evidence of torture were released.

 This is an old trick which has been use across the world to demonise progressive regimes.

In the early 1960s, the CIA and the Ghanaian opposition got photographs of alleged victims of torture in Ghanaian jails published in the Western media.

It turned out eventually that those were photographs of Togolese prisoners.

Philip Agee,  a former Staffer of the CIA describes in details how the dirty tricks department of the CIA manufactures such lies.

The evidence is that it is some of the Arab regimes which support the Syrian rebels who paid for so-called experts to analyse the photographs.

 The timing of the release of the Photographs show very clearly that it was meant us a useless political gimmick.

These childish games in Syria are costing lives and they must end quickly.

Government Trays Minority Lead

Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu

Government has noted an allegation made by Hon. Kyei Mensa Bonsu, Minority Leader in Parliament in an interview with myjoyonline.com, to the effect that an amount of GH¢ 2.8 billion was “embezzled” or sank into the 2012 campaign of President John Dramani Mahama.

Government wishes to point out that Mr Mensa Bonsu’s claims are totally false and regrets the fact that in spite of his unimpeded access to information on the economy as Minority leader, he chose to dabble in anti-government propaganda of the most undesirable kind when attributing the budget deficit of 2012 to embezzlement during the electioneering campaign that year.

The 2013 Budget which was debated and passed by the Parliament of Ghana clearly outlined and quantified the causes of the fiscal slippage in 2012. For the avoidance of doubt we wish to reiterate that the factors that accounted for the excess deficit in 2012 are as follows:

a) Higher wages and wage arrears payments under the implementation of the Single Spine Salary Structure-GH¢ 1,909 million(or 2.6 % of GDP)

b) Shortfall in corporate income taxes from petroleum sector-GH¢ 708.2million(0.5% of GDP)

c) High interest cost burden arising from a steep rise in short term domestic interest rates-GH¢ 245million(0.3% of GDP)

d) Shortfall in grants from donors-GH¢ 389.4 million(0.5% of GDP)

e) Higher subsidies on utilities and petroleum products-GH¢ 339million(0.5% of GDP)

f) Higher spending on goods and services-GH¢ 354million(0.5% of GDP)

More importantly, Mr Kyei Mensa Bonsu is fully aware that in view of the above, government has adopted measures aimed at ensuring a reduction in the budget deficit and also to inject greater prudence in public expenditure. Notable among these measures is the implementation of the Ghana Integrated Financial Management System (GIFMIS).

While Mr Kyei Mensa Bonsu’s outburst appears to be the latest installment in a series of malicious falsehoods hurled at President Mahama and his government as a way of giving the NPP some perceived political advantage, government is unfazed and remains focused on delivering on the overwhelming mandate given it by the people of Ghana in the 2012 elections.

FELIX KWAKYE OFOSU

DEPUTY MINISTER FOR INFORMATION AND MEDIA RELATIONS

(January, 17th 2014) 

Haiti: four years on from the quake

She survived the Haitian earthquake

By Ama Biney

The people of Haiti continue to suffer the economic tremors of a post-earthquake reconstruction programme that has failed to transform the lives of the majority of the people, despite the fact that it is the people of Haiti who must not only construct the future of Haiti but also decide that future.

Does the international community remember Haiti four years since the earthquake of 12 January 2010? In reality, the euphemism of ‘international community’ means the Western world, that is, the US, UK and Europe, and certainly not the rest of the 150 countries and more that make up the UN. These Western countries were swift to make pledges of billions of dollars in aid in the immediate aftermath of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that broke out and took over 200,000 Haitian lives in a matter of 33 seconds. Yet, many of those pledges have failed to materialise to date. According to Ezili Danto, political activist, lawyer and president of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN) writing in May 2011: ‘For less than 1% of every dollar of US donor aid goes to the Haiti government… In fact 93% of USAID funds to Haiti go straight back to purchase US goods and services.’ Similarly, writer Beverly Bell states: ‘Of every dollar that the U.S. government did pay out for initial relief efforts, thirty-three cents went to the U.S. military.’ [1]

‘ORIENTALISING’ HAITI AND AFRICA

The attention span of the Western media is not only short but fickle. Moreover, when it comes to the developing world it continues to ‘orientalise’ the other. Haiti like Africa has been ‘orientalised’ in the Western mindset. Haiti is stereotyped to be a hell-hole, poor, and dysfunctional. In the discourse of ‘failed states’ Haiti is the model of one. Yet, the Western media fails to interrogate how the West is complicit in constructing the hellhole lived in by the masses of Haitian people; how the citizens of Haiti are impoverished by multinational companies ; the outsourcing of sweat shops and how the alleged ungovernability of the Haitian people is due to the dictators the West has propped up over the decades in military and economic aid, from Papa Doc to the current President Michel Martelly.
Four years since the horrifying natural disaster which was exacerbated by Hurricanes Isaac and Sandy in late August 2010 that destroyed crops across Haiti and the cholera outbreak in October of the same year, it is necessary to ask: How are Haitians faring in the earthquake aftermath and in the light of the US pledge to Haiti to ‘build back better?’ [2]
An insight into this answer is provided in a point Ezili Danto expresses in an interview with Iya Adjua, that in the immediate aftermath of the quake, the US swiftly dispatched not 20,000 medical doctors (unlike the Cubans and Venezuelans) but 20,000 American troops. [3] Unknown to many is that Haiti is ‘a swimming pool of oil,’ to paraphrase Danto, compared to Venezuela’s ‘cup of oil.’ Put differently, Haiti is fantastically rich in oil reserves which are greater than those of Venezuela. In addition, the small country possesses huge reserves in gas, copper, uranium and over $US 20 billion [4] in the gold that lured Christopher Columbus to the island in the early 16th century. 

In the immediate aftermath of the quake the Haitian government moved to hold consultations on reconstruction from 13 March – 20 March 2012 with civil society groups and the private sector, but outside the country. As Bell points out: ‘Besides the government itself, the Haitian business sector was the only one granted substantive participation in the donor meetings.’ [5] The government refused and still refuses to heed the voices of civil society groups in relation to future economic planning of the country. Bell succinctly states: ‘the grassroots was shut out from the moment the earth finished its trembling.’ [6] Furthermore, 53 organisations released a comprehensive paper outlining their demands that the status and rights of women be integral to the efforts to reconstruct a new Haiti, outlining the need for equal access to education and agricultural production be part of the new reconstruction as well as equal representation of women at all levels of the reconstruction programme. [7]

From 25 November to 1 December 2012 the UN independent expert Michel Forst produced a report entitled ‘Report of the Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights in Haiti’ in which he gave a graphic insight into the plight of the majority of Haitians. In short:
‘Eight million Haitians out of an estimated population of 10 million live without electricity. Five million cannot read or write and are in the dark both day and night. Eight Haitians out of ten are living on less than $2 a day. Two percent of Haitians control 69 percent of the country’s wealth. With a working population that is put at 4.2 million, fewer than 200,000 have regular formal work. At least 84 percent of university graduates live abroad.’ [8]
In addition to this bleak socio-economic reality, children have been traumatized by the loss of parents due to the quake and cholera. Organisations have observed that the number of ‘restavek’ (child domestic workers) has increased since March 2012. These children leave the place where they are suppose to be working to go and live on the streets and become vulnerable to sexual abuse and violence. [9] Cross-border trafficking of children into the Dominican Republic where they are sexually exploited continues. [10] As of February 2013, 360,000 people continued to live under tents on account of their homes having been destroyed in the quake. [11] [12]

SHOCKING HAITI INTO PERPETUATED EXPLOITATION

What has occurred on the economic front in Haiti, as the veteran Haitian Lavalas activist Patrick Elie argues, is that:
‘A people can’t be developed from the outside… ‘The Shock Doctrine,’ the book by Naomi Klein, shows that often imperialist countries shock another country and then, while on it’s knees, they impose their own political will while making economic profits from it. We’re facing an instance of the shock doctrine at work, even though Haiti’s earthquake wasn’t caused by the political and economic order. There are governments and sectors who want to exploit this shock to impose their own political and economic order.’ [13]

This imposition has been done in the establishment of the much touted Caracol Industrial Park (CIP) assembly plant complex in the north-eastern region of the country which has been promoted as a job-creation initiative in the post-earthquake reconstruction of Haiti. It became the pet project of the Hilary and Bill Clinton. The latter was the co-chair of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC)– the donor-dominated body overseeing reconstruction, which was begun 11 months after the disaster, costing $174 million by USAID and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The construction of the assembly plant dispossessed 366 farming families – that is around 3,250 people without consultation and notice. [14] In a breakneck speed to erect the plant, thorough environmental, hydrological and topographical reports according to IDB requirements were circumvented. Such shortcuts are considered illegal under US legislation but seem to be acceptable in a country dubbed the poorest in the Western hemisphere. [15] To date, the port that should have been constructed has not been built. There are also concerns about ground water pollution.

Approximately 1500 workers produce garments for major American retailers such as Walmart, Targets, Kohl and Old Navy. According to the Workers’ Rights Consortium who published report on such sweatshop conditions :
‘Information gathered from interviews with workers from Caracol and review of the pay stubs they are issued with their wages reveal that these workers suffer from theft of their legally-earned wages to just as great a degree as do their counterparts at these other factories, losing, on average, 34 percent of their pay. Workers at Caracol also experience a loss of wages due to underpayment of overtime work, since, as at the Port-au-Prince factories, these hours are paid at a rate based on the 200 HTG per day sub-minimum wage for trainees and transferees, rather than the 300 HTG per day legal minimum wage for regular employees.’ [16]

The CIP showcase and its Memorandum of Understanding signed by the Haitian government, Hilary Clinton and Sae-A (a South Korean firm) in 2010 permits Sae-A to a 15 year tax holiday and a four-year rent holiday on its factory facilities. [17]
Ezili Danto is forthright in pointing out: ‘Historically for Haiti, what is called foreign ‘investment’ has always meant the unscrupulous extraction of profits without regards to its consequences on the people or environment and leaving no useful gain in Haiti whatsoever. .. Foreign investment doesn’t ignite Haiti development when all capital is flown overseas, the companies pay no taxes and there’s no living wage.’ [18]

In short, reconstruction in the mantra of ‘building back better’ has been self-delusional at best to those who coined the slogan and continued exploitation of the Haitian people at its worst. This is because the Haitian people have been placed outside the misconceived development of the Haitian government and its Western partners. The concept of development upheld by the neo-colonial Haitian government that subscribes to the neoliberal economic policies of the US, Canada and Europe is entrenched in the continued belief since Haiti was marked for punitive treatment since the revolt of enslaved Africans in 1791 and in 1991 when Haitians voted for the wrong party and leader – that it is the status of a ‘leta restavek’ [19] (a child servant state) of others. This belief continues to be resisted by grassroots Haitian organisations seeking an alternative development path for Haiti. In the meantime, as Bell points out, ‘Many a corporation, lobbyist, and consultant have seen Haiti’s losses as their gain, leveraging humanitarianism for profit.’ [20]

FAILURE TO INVEST IN AGRICULTURE AND THE PEOPLE
The CIP project has been initiated alongside the continuation of a disastrous food policy by the Haitian government of Michel Martelly. Exacerbating this disaster were the hurricanes Isaac and Sandy as well as the heat-wave of August 2012 which impacted negatively on the overall situation of food security in Haiti. Some 2 million people were affected by Sandy in terms of lack of shelter, potable water and health services. Damage was done to infrastructure, roads, schools and hospitals.

However, soaring food prices existed prior to the hurricanes as there had been food ‘riots’ in Haiti (and elsewhere around the globe) in 2008. The hurricanes devastated crops and created shortages. The Haiti Support Group states:

‘As ever, Haitians are right on target directing their anger at their political leaders. In the past 30 years, it is the disastrous agricultural policy of the klas politik rather than the tireless efforts of Haiti’s peasants that has made the country a poster boy for food dependency and thus price vulnerability. [21]

The causes of Haiti’s food insecurity lie in multiple factors. Among them are the fact that past governments have failed to invest in agriculture that provides employment to over 50 percent of the population, yet in 2012 was allocated only 6 percent of the national budget. [22] Even the World Bank acknowledges that farming is of paramount social and economic importance in Haiti. Other factors include foreign imports such as rice that are cheaper and end up undercutting Haitian agricultural foodstuffs and therefore provide no incentive for Haitian farmers to engage in agricultural production. Chenet Jean-Baptiste of ITECA, a strong farming organisation in the country, states: ‘Frankly, successive Haitian governments have waged war on peasant agriculture as if it was some sort of threat rather than the basis of the nation’s survival.’ [23]

The Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat as well as Chenet Jean-Baptiste both point to the American Food and Drug Administration along with USAID insisting back in1982 that 400,000 Haitian pigs that had contracted swine flu had to be killed as they were a threat to the US hog industry. They believe, along with others, that it was this action that helped to plunge the masses of Haitians into poverty. As the former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide writes: ‘For many peasants the extermination of the Creole pigs was their first experience of globalisation. The experience looms large in the collective memory.’ [24]

In order to reduce poverty in Haiti and achieve food security in the medium to long term, it is necessary to invest in farming by giving Haitians access to land, tools, credit, training to ensure they can feed themselves and their communities. Yet, the Martelly government remains committed to neoliberal policies that make the country wholly dependent on food imports and what Aristide correctly characterises as ‘economic schizophrenia’ which is ‘the logic of global capitalism.’ [25] In short, ‘…the earthquake spawned another huge decapitalisation of the agricultural sector. What the quake itself did not destroy, a massive reverse migration to the countryside, imported foreign food aid, and a post-earthquake tsunami of funding that again largely ignored agriculture, did.’ [26]

THE FIGHT FOR JUSTICE AND THE CHOLERA OF THE UN
Alongside ignoring the centrality of agriculture to the economic security and wellbeing of the Haitian people in people-centred development plans, the international community represented by the UN has ignored and elevated impunity to the highest level by failing to accept responsibility for its introduction of the cholera disease into the country. The Haitian Ministry of Health has refused to take on the world organisation despite the fact that Haiti has not seen cholera in a hundred years. To date 8000 people have died and 700,000 have been infected.

Alongside this, many Haitians question the justification of the UN presence, officially known as the UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (or MINUSTAH) that has been present in Haiti since the 2004 ousting of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. As Edwidge Danticat and many others have pointed out, not only has the UN Stabilisation force been in Haiti for a decade, there is no war in Haiti in order for peace to be maintained. The UN is meant to fill a void, to support existing institutions and then vacate. Rather than playing a constructive role, she argues that they have played a very destructive role. [27] What really is the role of the UN in a country that sits on billion of dollars of gold, gas, uranium and has the fourth largest US embassy in the world? [28] Whose interests does the UN really serve? That of its main funders, that is, those who sit on its Security Council and wield veto power, or the rights of the vulnerable that it professes to defend? 

Hostility and resentment against the UN has increased with the cholera epidemic and then on account of sexual abuse cases carried out by some UN officials in September 2011. The UN soldiers were from Uruguay and are alleged to have been involved in a case of sexual assault of an 18-year-old man. [29] In January 2012 two new allegations of UN police abuse and sexual exploitation of children in Port-au-Prince and in the northern city of Gonnaives transpired. [31] Whilst the issue of sexual abuse has yet to be addressed neither has accountability and admission of responsibility of the cholera outbreak.

This month, the Haitian lawyer Mario Joseph launched a lawsuit in New York’s federal court to challenge the UN on the issue for 5000 Haitian claimants. ‘Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) based in Port-au-Prince of which Joseph is one of its leading lawyers, and the Boston based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, are seeking compensation for Haitians.

The indefatigable Mario Joseph was in London in January 2012 and his commitment and passion for justice were evident when he spoke to a crowded room about the introduction of cholera to Haiti and the hypocrisy and duplicity of the UN. Joseph hardly sleeps and is a thorn in the side of the Haitian ruling class that despise the Haitian people. A sense of deep-seated political injustice spurs him on. Of the UN he says: ‘There’s a huge contradiction between the values they promote and their behaviour in countries like Haiti. Imagine if this[ the cholera epidemic] had happened in the U.S. or France or Canada… Well, it wouldn’t happen there.’ [31] Moreover, he believes: ‘Justice is never going to come unless you fight for it.’ He is of course right. Fighting for political and economic justice for the people of Haiti is integral to the struggle of all peace loving and progressive peoples around the world.
*Ama Biney (Dr) is the Acting Editor-in-Chief of Pambazuka News.

French complicity in the crisis in Central African Republic

French President Francois Hollande

By Antoine Roger Lokongo

The violent political conflict in the CAR continues to claim innocent lives, cause massive displacement and destruction of property. The efforts being made to end the carnage and restore the country will not achieve much without taking into account the role of France in destabilising CAR.

By the end of 2013, ‘the White man’s burden’ was proving too heavy to bear for France. Feeling militarily and materially outstretched, Paris cried for help from other European powers to help it shoulder ‘its responsibility’ to quell violence, restore peace, order and political legitimacy in its backyards of Mali and Central African Republic, both in turmoil: the Islamists terrorists linked to Al-Qaïda in Maghreb (Aqmi)， Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria and so on, are wreaking havoc in northern Mali and Christians and Muslims are hacking each other to death in Central African Republic (CAR). Both Belgium and the United States responded positively by providing logistics and transport for the French and African troops.

France regards these countries as its backyard because CAR and other former French colonies in West and Central Africa are the constituents of the so-called ‘Françafrique’, meaning that since independence they have kept close ties with France, the former colonial power, with which they are bound not only by defense agreements but also by a common currency, the CFA franc, which was pegged to the French franc, and therefore to the French Treasury, but is now pegged to the euro. As Colette Braeckman of the Belgian daily Le Soir argued on 31 December 2013, if France abandons these former colonies, it will represent not only a resignation in humanitarian terms but also a political signal, indicating the weakening of the French position on the international level. So ‘abandon’ is not really the term here because France cannot do without Africa.
In fact, former President Jacques Chirac acknowledged in 2008 that ‘without Africa, France will slide down into the rank of a third [world] power’ (Philippe Leymarie, 2008, Manière de voir, n°79, février-mars 2008).

Chirac’s predecessor François Mitterand already prophesied in 1957 that ‘Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century’ (François Mitterrand, Présence française et abandon, 1957, Paris: Plon).

Former French foreign minister Jacques Godfrain for his part confirmed that ‘a little country [France], with a small amount of strength, we can move a planet because [of our] relations with 15 or 20 African countries...’ This is consistent with France’s ‘Françafrique’ policies, which aim to perpetuate a particular ‘special relationship’ with its former African colonies (Thabo Mbeki, ‘What the world got wrong in Côte d'Ivoire,’ Foreign Policy. April 29). So France is intervening in Africa for the sake of its own survival as a country as well as a power. It is perfectly justified to argue that it is France that is ‘a burden’ to CAR and its other former colonies in Africa, not the other way round. And so, total independence for CAR, both political and economic means the end of ‘Françafrique’.

UNITED IN FEAR OF CHINA
The reason why France counts on European support is because all the European powers are now united in their fear of China’s strong presence in Africa. As Colette Braeckman of the Belgian daily Le Soir explained on 31 December 2013, France counts on the solidarity of fellow former colonial powers (Britain, Belgium) in order not to completely give way to newcomers (Chinese but also Koreans, Turks ...) in these potentially rich and increasingly courted countries (rich in timber, agricultural, water and oil and mineral resources, including, diamond, oil and uranium in the case the Central African Republic). That is what is really at stake in France’s interventions both in Mali, Central African Republic and Ivory Coast in 2011 where Sarkozy removed Laurent Gbagbo by force and installed Alassane Ouattara. It is well known that both Ivory Coast’s Gbagbo and former president François Bozize of CAR got into trouble with the master – meaning France – because they turned to China for win-win cooperation. They were swiftly removed from power. In the case of CAR, France opted for Michel Djotodia who headed the Seleka (meaning ‘union’ in the Sango language) rebel movement which overthrew Bozize in a matter of weeks. Did France not know that Seleka was a Islamist movement from the north of CAR linked to Al-Qaïdain in Maghreb (Aqmi) and Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria at the time? Paris surely did! But those uranium deals Bozize signed with China sealed the end of his regime.

FROM ‘A WAR OF REGIME CHANGE’ TO ‘A WAR OF CORRECTION’
The Seleka rebel movement overthrew Bozize and took power in March 2013. However, Seleka men refused to be disarmed and confined in the barracks, and for months multiplied abuses against civilians, mostly Christians from the south of the country. On 13 September 2013, CAR interim President Michel Djotodia announced that the Séléka had been dissolved. The horrors perpetrated by gangs of Seleka (including Chadians, Sudanese and other ‘Soldiers Without Borders’) led to the emergence of self-defense groups, the ‘Anti-balakas’, composed of Christians, simple peasants armed with machetes, but also former supporters of ousted president François Bozizé (Colette Braeckman, Le Soir, 28 December 2013). Initially, France launched what it called ‘Operation Sangaris’ which was mainly a police operation, with well-defined objectives: to neutralize the Seleka fighters.

The French forces were operating in coordination with the Misca (UN Mission in the Central African) intervention force, which replaced FOMAC (Military force in Central Africa) composed of Chadian, Burundian and Congolese (Brazzaville) soldiers.
On 5 December 2013, while ‘Operation Sangaris’ was still in its infancy, ‘Anti-Balaka’ elements armed with machetes, launched attacks and massacred many Muslims whom they accused of supporting the Seleka from the north, predominantly Muslim too – divide and rule, the legacy of French colonialism is taking its toll. According to the weekly Jeune Afrique, it was not just retaliation, but a professional military attack coordinated by the son of former President Bozizé. More than 600 people were killed in the capital Bangui. Since then, the image of the conflict became greatly blurred : While they are saying that they are neutral, French forces are accused by Muslims of siding with Christians and French troops. Relations with interim President Michel Djotodia deteriorated to hate level (especially due to his link with Islamists when France was fighting the same Islamists in Mali). African forces meant to help restore peace were said to have different agendas. Thus Chadians were believed to protect the Seleka (among which are nationals of their country) while soldiers from Congo-Brazzaville and Burundi feel closer to the Christian populations; to the extent that an exchange of fire took place between Burundian ‘peacekeepers’ and their Chadian counterparts in Bangui. The tension was such that ultimately it was decided that Chadians had to be relocated to the north of the country (Colette Braeckman, Le Soir, 28 December 2013).

Worried that the crisis could spill over into the DRC (like it was with Rwanda in 1994, in fact the DRC has already welcomed thousands of refugees from CAR, which shares a long but porous border with CAR), Kinshasa announced the deployment of 850 troops in Central Africa to secure the border. Curiously, Rwanda which is at war with the DRC, also announced that it would provide a contingent of 800 men to the African Union (apparently Rwandan troops are going to hunt the Hutu ‘genocidists’ allegedly hiding in CAR).

More than 1,000 people have killed in a matter of days in the first weeks of 2014 and the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF says that two children were beheaded, and that ‘unprecedented levels of violence’ are being carried out on children. An estimated 935,000 people have been uprooted throughout the country (AP, 13 January 2014). 150,000 internally displaced people remain crammed for months now in makeshifts at Mpoko International Airport.

France was determined to ‘correct the mistake’ it made by backing Michel Djotodia. Since French troops’ relation with interim President Michel Djotodia deteriorated to hate level, there was no way he could continue to preside over the country. He quickly became a liability.

Both interim President Djotodia and Transitional Prime Minister Nicolas Tiangaye were forced to resign on 9 January 2014 at an extraordinary summit of leaders of the Economic Community of Central African States (CEEAC, by its French acronym) gathered in Ndjamena, the capital of Chad, at the initiative of Chadian President Idriss Déby Itno (the main backer of Djotodia). Deby had understood that France did not want Djotodia anymore.

According to Agence France Presse (AFP), Djotodia was accused by ‘the international community’ (read France) of passivity towards the sectarian violence that has turned to mass killings. A total paralysis of Bangui also alerted CAR’s neighboring countries. France, which wanted the departure of Djotodia (he has now started a long exile in Benin) asked the National Transitional Council (NTC interim parliament) - composed of 135 members appointed after the takeover by Mr Djotodia, from different political parties, the Seleka movement, civil society and public institutions – to chose a new transitional president as soon as possible.

FRANCE STILL CALLING THE SHOTS IN CAR
For the time being, CAR has ‘an acting transitional president of the republic’ Alexander Ferdinand Nguendet, the current National Transitional Council President. Mr. Nguendet has already pledged that the election would take place ‘under such conditions’ as stipulated by the Transitional Charter. So far, violence continues unabated and tension remains high.

The newly elected transitional leader will have the difficult task of pacifying the country, a totally paralyzed administration and allowing hundreds of thousands of displaced people to return to their homes. France has also indicated that it wished that general elections be held ‘before the end of 2014’. We suppose that all mining contracts Djotodia signed with whoever will probably be cancelled. It is France who is calling the shots. Not surprised! How independent are African countries? New Year, new wars in Africa. Even South Sudan, Africa’s youngest country, has not escaped from the road most travelled by its older siblings. The truth is that every ‘resource war’ in Africa has hidden hands pulling the strings behind it.

* Antoine Roger Lokongo is a journalist and Beijing University PhD candidate from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Justice in post-apartheid South Africa: Mandela’s struggle continues

By Munyonzwe Hamalengwa

In the future, South Africa will explode into a racial Armageddon unless the crimes committed under apartheid are addressed following the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that was the handwork of Nelson Mandela

Post-conflict South Africa has become an unwanted orphan of International Criminal Law. Those who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, torture, extra judicial killings, mass removals and other gross violations of human rights under apartheid have escaped with impunity both inside and outside South Africa. This article analyses how this happened and how the unfinished business will continue to bedevil the South African body-politic after Mandela. Down the road, this festering injustice will come to a head. In the future, South Africa will explode into a racial Armageddon unless the crimes committed under apartheid are addressed following the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that was the handwork of Nelson Mandela.

THE FALSE PREDICTIONS
Looking backwards from 2013 and assessing the history of South Africa after Mandela’s death, discloses that South Africa has had an ironical trajectory. Almost whatever had been predicted as would happen after the demise of South Africa never happened. Nadine Gordimer, a famous South African novelist in her novel July’s People had predicted that after the Revolution, white people would be hunted like dogs and killed. The Pan –Africanist Congress which broke away from the African National Congress in 1959 predicted that whites would be driven into the sea and proclaimed that the only good white man was a dead one. The African National Congress predicted that all those who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity would be prosecuted en mass along the lines of the Nuremberg precedent. In fact the ANC analogized apartheid to Nazism and that identification served them well. The ruling Nationalist Party created apartheid in 1948, right on the heels of the ideology of the collapsed Nazi Germany which had unleashed the Jewish extermination resulting in the Nuremberg precedent where those who have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity and peace were prosecuted, literally setting the genesis of the modern international criminal law of prosecutions. The National Party envisaged the defeat of what they called black communist terrorism and anti-Calvinist religious ethos. The whites in South Africa feared that the ANC would introduce communism.
The world expected a bloody revolution in South Africa. White exodus was predicted along with the collapse of that economic miracle in a continent of misery.

THE BONAPARTIST STATE OF SOUTH AFRICA
Ironically almost the opposite happened to everything that had been predicted and feared. There was no revolution, let alone a bloody one. The National Party became too weak to maintain its outright hegemony and the African National Congress and allied parties never became strong enough to overwhelm the apartheid government. There developed what Frederick Engels in his book ‘Dialectics of Nature’ called the interpenetration of opposites where what was expected, was replaced by its very opposite resulting in a synthesis of what Karl Marx called the Bonapartist state but without Louis Bonaparte, but instead a Nelson Mandela. Bonapartism is a state of equilibrium, a state of compromise. Because of the approximation in the equality of forces, a stalemate was reached. The result was that while the National Party wanted absolute amnesty for all those who may have committed the crime of apartheid and the African National Congress wanted wholesale prosecutions of those who had committed the crime of apartheid, both could not force the other to adopt their position because of each party’s relative weakness leading to the compromise of the conditional amnesty where all those who would wholly and truthfully confess to their crimes, would be given immunity from civil and criminal prosecutions. Those who did not come forward would be prosecuted.

CAN TRUTH BE RECONCILED WITHOUT JUSTICE?
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the vehicle through which this process of truth gathering and confessions would be managed. The Commission recommended the prosecution of hundreds of people, but not one was or has ever been prosecuted for the pure crime of apartheid as defined in the only international criminal convention that is named to depict the very practices of the regime, namely The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of Apartheid (1973). The reason is that this commission was working under the enabling legislation which stripped apartheid from its criminal anchor and only criminalized practices that were themselves criminal under the apartheid government, e.g. murder, conspiracy and so on but not practices which made apartheid a crime under international criminal law, for example the commission of war crimes in Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Zambia, England ; forced mass removals, torture, extensive extra judicial killings and disappearances, other crimes against humanity and massive human rights violations. The aforementioned compromise was responsible for the lack of prosecutions involving the pure crime of apartheid.

Given the lack of prosecutions in South Africa, could there be other avenues to achieve the same goal, that is to ensure that apartheid criminals do not enjoy impunity into perpetuity? That is, apartheid criminals should be exposed to prosecutions just like Nazi War criminals, Rwandese criminals and others have been subjected to.

Various options have been examined: reparations for the victims. The Reparations policy has not been implemented by the post-apartheid government. The Post apartheid government has given the explanation that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process was accountability enough.
A group called Khulumani had taken the reparations struggle outside its borders to the US using the ancient Alien and Tort Act of 1789. Justice Sheindlin, of the “Stop and Frisk” class action law suit fame, had given the Khulumani apartheid law suit green light to proceed but the appeal courts shot it down. Class action law suits of that nature therefore have to be fought within their national boundaries.

Another avenue that is the possible is the use of an international tribunal along the lines of the current international or hybrid tribunals of Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and other countries. However, it has to be concluded that having not prosecuted apartheid criminals in South Africa, the same government would not now surrender its sovereignty to an international tribunal. Victims of the crime of apartheid therefore continue to have no avenue to ventilate their grievances. Apartheid criminals continue to enjoy their impunity.

The International Criminal Court does not have jurisdiction over the crime of apartheid because the crimes happened before the court was created in 1998. It is almost like slavery where the succeeding generations of the beneficiaries of slavery have stated that the statute of limitations has expired. The crime of apartheid is too fresh for anyone to plead this, but time is running out.

CANADA’S EXAMPLE
Could universal jurisdiction be the answer? That is where Canada comes in because Canada has been a leading country in establishing a legislative and international framework for the prosecution of war criminals and it has prosecuted or attempted to prosecute war crimes that happened in other countries.

Canada could have prosecuted apartheid criminals during apartheid. In 1986 Canada came up with the requisite legislation to prosecute war crimes that happened elsewhere. Economic sanctions during apartheid were a useful measure of retribution against apartheid.

No country has exercised universal jurisdiction to prosecute apartheid criminals. The excuse is that Mandela designed the compromise system and it should not be disturbed. Apartheid was a perfect crime crying out for prosecution both through the exercise of domestic jurisdiction and universal jurisdiction, remains unprosecuted. It is indeed an unwanted orphan of both national and international criminal law and justice, with dire consequences in the future because of the unfinished business of reparations and prosecutions. In future Mandela’s legacy may very well be judged by the measure of justice he bestowed on South Africa.

*Munyonzwe Hamalengwa’s (Dr) has been practising law in Canada for twenty-four years