 |
| Blakk Rasta |
By Gifty Agyemang
Blakk Rasta, a Ghanaian international reggae superstar
has confirmed his participation in the concert dubbed “African Voices For
Palestine”.
The concert designed to draw attention to the plight of
Palestinians living under Israeli colonial occupation is scheduled to take
place on Friday, July 14, 2017 at the National Theatre in Accra.
It will bring together musicians from all over Africa
including Miata Fahnbuleh from Liberia, the award winning Knii Lante Blankson,
and the music maestro Amandzeba.
The concert sponsored by the Palestine Solidarity
Campaign (Ghana) was initiated by Knii Lante Blankson and Amandzeba.
Others who have confirmed their participation include
international reggae superstar, Rocky Dawuni and J. B. Back Again, leader of
Freedom Centre’s resident band.
Thousands of people from all walks of life are expected
to troop to the National Theatre to enjoy the sweet rhythms of some of Africa’s
top most musicians.
Organisers say that they would invite all former
Presidents of Ghana who have shown remarkable commitment to the cause of
Palestine.
 |
| A Palestinian youth displays the flag of Palestine |
Others to be invited will be political party leaders,
leaders of the trade unions, youth and students’ movements, women’s organisations
and progressives and Pan-African organisations.
Entrance to the event will be absolutely free.
It is expected that at least 25 musicians will be on the
bill.
Amandzeba told The Insight that “musicians must also
give back to society and standing up against colonial occupation is a just
cause”.
“I will be part of this concert because I believe in the
ideas of Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah and I am opposed to all forms of
colonialism”.
Amandzeba is scheduled to address a press conference in
Accra tomorrow morning to reveal details of the concert.
The world famous Bob Nester Marley also organised a
concert to herald the independence of Zimbabwe.
Editorial
TRUMP AND CUBA
President Donald Trump appears determined to undo all
that President Barack Obama did in the effort to normalise relations with Cuba.
Trump somehow has convinced himself that lifting
something on Cuba is a favour which can only benefit the Caribbean Island of 11
million people.
He believes that the continued imposition of sanctions
will bring Cuba to its knees and compel its leadership to abandon socialism
under which the people’s access to social services has improved tremendously.
Trump is wrong because the people of Cuba are very proud
and are not likely to bow to blackmail even from a super power.
Secondly, lifting the blockade on Cuba is also in the
best interest of the United States of America which is increasingly becoming
isolated in Latin America.
It is our hope that Donald Trump will grow wiser and
abandon the reckless path of confrontation with Cuba.
It is most unhelpful!
Local News:
MOBILE PHONES
CAN CAUSE GAS EXPLOSION
By Mercy Hededzome
Togbi Adaku, President of Liquified Petroleum Dealers
Association has warned that handling of mobile phones around gas cylinders can
cause an explosion.
He explained that the electromagnetic waves generated
by mobile phones are capable of igniting gas fumes and cause a disaster.
He therefore called on consumers to avoid the use of
mobile phones at filling stations and in the kitchen especially when a leak of
a gas cylinder is suspected.
Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) according to Togbi
Adaku, accounted for about 33% of domestic fires in the country describing it
as a “worrying situation” and called on domestic LPG user to ensure that safety
is not compromised.
He called for regular inspection at home and at gas
filling station and advised attendants not to fill gas cylinders when the least
leakage is suspected.
Togbi Adaku was speaking at the launch of a week long
programme organised by the Association of Oil Marketing Companies to put in
place concrete action to ensure the development and practice of environmental
safety in Ghana and the enforcement petroleum safety at retail outlets and in
homes where petroleum products are used.
The Deputy Minister of Energy Dr. Mohammed Amin Adams
commended the association for putting in place measures to ensure environmental
safety and pledged the support of government for the organization. He called on
the members of the Association to train their staff at their various fuel
stations to ensure professionalism.
Adding his voice to the safety campaign the Minister
noted that even though authorities such as the NPA has technical inspectors
that constantly inspect facilities in the petroleum product chain, inspectors
rarely visited people’s homes to see if consumers were using petroleum products
appropriately and therefore called on domestic users of the products to ensure precautionary
measures in the home.
Africa:
African labour and social militancy, Marxist framing and revolutionary
movement-building
By Patrick Bond
It is a great period to be a revolutionary activist in
Africa. Yet the sense of stop-start progress and regress in so many sites of
struggle reflects in part how poorly the working-class, poor, progressive
middle class, social movements and other democrats have made alliances. The
African uprising against neoliberalism hasn’t yet generated a firm ideology. In
this case the best strategy would be a critical yet non-dogmatic engagement
with the various emerging forces on the left.
This year is the 100th anniversary of the
Bolshevik’s victory in Russia. It set the standard, at least initially (before
Joseph Stalin took over in the mid-1920s), for a party of workers and other
oppressed people capturing state power. At least briefly, it confirmed the
potential for shop-floor and grassroots base-building even within a repressive
national regime (the Czar), then a jumping of scale to participation in an
intermediate semi-democratic state (the Mensheviks), and then national economic
control and massive international influence.
Crucially, the 1917 events in Russia were guided at
the critical moment by a revolutionary party, which reaped the whirlwind
because it had a clear ideology, a vanguard of advanced cadres and steely
leadership (especially Lenin and Trotsky) able to grasp the opportunities. The
vast masses of unorganised peasants, the small half-hearted middle class and
the army and police did not prevent the proletariat’s victory, notwithstanding
being outnumbered and immature compared to the huge working classes elsewhere
in Europe.
After its rapid degeneration, the Soviet Union’s
errors were explained as due either to a democracy deficit and stifling
bureaucracy (as a chastened former defender, SA Communist Party leader Joe
Slovo argued in 1990) or (as Pallo Jordan famously rebutted a month later)
to the “class character of the Soviet model” which crushed workers’ and
society’s self-emancipation. The gaping difference in those narratives endures
today.
Meanwhile, contemporary power exercised by shopfloor
and grassroots activists in Africa is typically under-rated. There are various
ways to measure this power, including police statistics, journalistic accounts
and business executive surveys. For example, the world’s protest activity is
recorded in the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), initiated by George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland
Security, drawing upon millions of media reports. Latest data
from November 2016 (not typical because of Donald Trump’s election and India’s
currency controversy) show Africa well represented: hot spots included Tunisia,
Libya, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and South
Africa.
Additional sources of ‘Big Data’ on social unrest
include the US military’s Minerva programme, which has a project – Armed
Conflict Location and Event Data (Acled) – tracking
Africa’s violent riots and protests. Compared to 2011, when North African
(‘Arab Spring’) protests reflected a dramatic increase on prior years, many
more protests across Africa were recorded five years
later. While 2016 appeared to have slightly fewer than 2015, there is no
question that in most places on the continent, the rate of protesting was far
higher than at the peak of the commodity super-cycle in 2011.
Another dataset – based on subjective impressions not
objective event reports – is the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual survey of
14 000 business executives in 138 countries that informs its Global
Competitiveness Report. One survey question relates to labour-employee
relations, and whether these are “generally confrontational or generally
cooperative” on a scale of 1-7. In the 2016-17 report, the WEF found the most
cooperative labour movements were in Norway, Switzerland, Singapore, Denmark
and Sweden (scoring above 6.1).
The least cooperative was, for the fourth year in a
row, the South African proletariat (with 2.5). Other African countries with
very militant workforces are Chad (3.5), Tunisia (3.6), Liberia (3.7),
Mozambique (3.7), Morocco (3.7), Lesotho (3.7), Ethiopia (3.8), Tanzania (3.8),
Algeria (3.8), Burundi (3.8), and Zimbabwe (4.0). These dozen were in the top
30 countries in terms of labour militancy. The most placid African workforces
were found in Rwanda (5.3) at 18thmost cooperative, Mauritius (4.8) and Uganda
(4.6). In general, African workers are the least cooperative of any aggregated
in the world’s continents.
At a time mainstream observers have memed, “Africa
Rising!”, surely a better term is that Africans are
uprising against Africa Rising mythology. This uprising is by no
means a revolutionary situation, nor even a sustained rebellion. One of the
main reasons is the failure of protesters to become a movement, one with a
coherent ideology to face the problems of their times with the stamina and
insight required.
 |
| Franz Fanon |
Frantz Fanon himself complained in Toward
the African Revolution, “For my part the deeper I enter into the cultures
and the political circles, the surer I am that the great danger that
threatens Africa is the absence of ideology.” Amilcar Cabral agreed: “The ideological
deficiency within the national liberation movements, not to say the total lack
of ideology – reflecting as this does an ignorance of the historical reality
which these movements claim to transform – makes for one of the greatest
weaknesses in our struggle against imperialism, if not the greatest weakness of
all.”
Was Numsa’s insurgency just a ‘moment’ – or a future
movement?
Within South Africa, the largest union – with
330 000 members confirmed at its December 2016 congress – remains the
National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa). What many observers
have remarked upon – often critically (e.g. most writers in this
week’s Pambazuka News) – is Numsa’s intense rhetorical militancy, in the
wake of its bruising battle with labour nationalists and Communists affiliated
to the African National Congress (ANC), as well as with “Middle Class
Marxists.”
To put the fierce exchanges between various fractions
of the South African Marxist left into context, consider some recent history.
Although there are many targets of its ire ranging from white monopoly capital
to the independent left intelligentsia, Numsa’s most decisive war has been with
former comrades in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and its
intellectual guide, the SA Communist Party (SACP), which began in earnest
during the last Numsa congress, in December 2013. My own overwhelming
impression from that event was how 1400 delegates (mostly shop-stewards) drove
the union rapidly leftwards, to the point of formally calling for President
Jacob Zuma to resign.
It was an extraordinary U-turn, given Numsa’s strong
support for Zuma to replace President Thabo Mbeki in 2006-08. Like many in the
Cosatu-SACP circuit, the expectation was that in exchange for that support,
Numsa would benefit from a radical leftward turn in macro-economic policy and
much greater state subsidies to improve working people’s livelihoods.
As some of us grimly predicted, however, Zuma
dutifully stuck with the neo-liberal project and inevitably broke working-class
and Communist hearts. Inevitably, anti-Zuma grumbling reached the point of
active protest. And so it is not surprising to hear Zuma’s desperation ‘talk
left’ gimmicks, such as last November in Pietermaritzburg when he described the
BRICS as an apparent distracting tactic: “It is a small group but very
powerful. [The West] did not like BRICS. China is going to be number one
economy leader… [Western countries] want to dismantle this BRICS. We have had
seven votes of no confidence in South Africa. In Brazil, the president was
removed.” (The following week in Parliament, Zuma was asked during the
president’s Question Time by an opposition legislator: “Which Western countries
were you referring to? How did they plan on dismantling BRICS? And what will
the effect of their actions be on our economic diplomacy with these Western
countries over the next decade?” Zuma replied, according to the Hansard,
“I’ve forgotten the names of these countries. [Laughter.] How can he think I’m
going to remember here? He he he he.”)
My sense in December 2013 was that a key reason for
Numsa’s revolt against the Alliance was the still-strong memory of the August
2012 Marikana massacre of 34 platinum mineworkers who demanded a living wage of
$1520/month. Numsa delegates were literally stunned into silence when they
viewed Rehad Desai’s film “Miners Shot Down,” which later won the Emmy Award
for Best International Documentary.
The seeds of this radicalisation were sewn when Irvin
Jim became leader in 2008. Like any good union, Numsa has had to direct
enormous resources into the bread-and-butter activities of member support that
any force in organised labour must promote before doing serious politics. While
there are always setbacks along these lines, Numsa has nevertheless made
remarkable steps away from labour corporatism – the Alliance that has served
workers so poorly since 1994 – and towards independent militancy. Since 2008,
Numsa leaders and cadres have:
·
restored
the internal Numsa left’s strength (after the union’s self-destructive Mbekite
era under Silumko Nondwangu’s leadership);
·
pushed
forceful new arguments into the public sphere about the character of the ANC
neoliberal bloc’s long-term (transMandela-Mbeki-Zuma) class betrayal;
·
helped
identify where SACP and Cosatu forces were most weak in defending the ANC, and
thereby opened a healthy debate culminating in the 2013 Numsa special congress
where the first call to toss out Zuma was made;
·
survived
what many feared might be a serious (and KwaZulu-Natal-centric ethnicist)
challenge by former Numsa president Cedric Gina’s new metalworkers’ union;
·
won
a five-week national metals strike in 2014 and coped with massive
deindustrialisation pressures ever since, as the prices of aluminium and steel
hit rock bottom and as dumping became a fatal threat to the main smelters;
·
built
up membership to today’s 330 000;
·
pushed
the political contradictions to break-point within Cosatu by 2015, resulting in
not just Numsa’s expulsion but also the firing of the extremely popular general
secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, who leaned too far left for other Cosatu leaders’
comfort;
·
put
members on the street in fairly big numbers (e.g. around 30 000 protesting
corruption just over a year ago, in spite of a clumsy breakdown in alliances
with other groups in the more liberal reaches of civil society);
·
maintained
member – and broader proletarian – discontent with the class character of
specific rulers, including Zuma, Ramaphosa, Gordhan and Patel (even though the
latter two were at the 2016 congress unsuccessfully attempting to sweet-talk
Numsa), so as not to be co-opted into playing a role (again) in the 2017 ANC
electoral congress’ internecine battles (as is Cosatu on behalf of Ramaphosa);
·
knit
together Cosatu dissidents into a rough bloc (at peak having nine unions) and
then set up a process for the announcement (May 2016) and launch (sometime this
year) of a new workers’ federation; and
·
quite
realistically opened the door for a new workers’ party (and this is just a
partial list.)
The latter two soon-to-be accomplishments – a new
federation under the leadership of Vavi and a potential workers party – are the
main projects on the horizon. The United Front project rose briefly in 2013-14
and then crashed by 2016 (for important reasons that this article cannot
properly integrate), alienating many logical allies and losing respected staff
in the process, as well.
And although Vavi represents a broad, open-minded
socialist current that spans from NDR to radical civil society, Numsa has
recently emphasised a definition of its own particular ‘line’ regarding a
National Democratic Revolution. That line, with its category of a
“Marxist-Leninist trade union” prior to a vanguardist workers’ party, is
dismissed as “rigid Marxism-Leninism!” by independent-left intellectuals, to
which Numsa ideologues reply: “useless petit-bourgeois radical-chic parasites!”
or words to that effect. This is the extent to which certain ships are passing
in the South African night.
But if we are frank, Numsa has a massive vessel
plowing through choppy waves above deep, torturous currents in unchartered
waters, and the left intelligentsia occupies a dinghy limited to well-known
shallows. (The latter site is where someone like me typically splashes, as
conditions haven’t matured yet in South Africa to play anything much more than
what becomes a substitutionist or worse, ventriloquist function, instead of
what can be termed a properly
“scholactivist” role.)
However, what if by the time of the 2019 election the
Numsa vanguard finds a way to run alongside (parallel) or in direct coalition
(or even merger) with the country’s main leftist party, the Economic Freedom
Fighters (EFF)? Recall that after its formation in 2013, the EFF went from 6%
of the vote in the 2014 election to 8% of the vote in the municipal poll of
2016, enough to throw the ANC out of the Johannesburg and Pretoria city
councils, as the EFF coalesced with the centre-right Democratic Alliance. (This
unhappy marriage could result in divorce before 2019, probably amidst EFF and
ANC contestation over an inevitable upturn in township ‘service delivery’
protests.)
With the ANC down from its 2004 high of 69% in a
national election to its 2016 low of 54% in the municipal poll, it is quite
conceivable that in narrow electoral terms, enormous potential exists for a
left party to play a decisive role in national politics, as did the EFF in
Johannesburg and Pretoria municipalities. However, if the self-declared
Marxist-Leninist leaders of both Numsa and the EFF ever find each other in
coalition, could what is termed the ‘Numsa moment’ become a
Numsa-EFF movement?
This scenario is not looked on favourably by many on
the independent left, because of a general concern that EFF leader Julius
Malema – whose record of ANC patronage in Limpopo Province still chills leftist
spines – will take the EFF’s 10+% voting share in 2019 back into the
ANC in the event that (as in August 2016 in Joburg and Tshwane) he becomes
a kingmaker. This scenario assumes the ANC vote falls below 50% and that all
opposition parties gang up to deny the ruling party any further national
spoils. Malema told an audience last year that if such an opportunity arises in
2019, he might first destroy the ANC then rebuild it in alliance with the EFF.
But if it is either Cyril Ramaphosa, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma or Zweli Mkhize
running the ANC, that hijack won’t be easy to sustain.
In such a scenario, the antidote would be a workers’
party ally or influence on the EFF, to prevent regeneration of neoliberal
nationalism with new elites. This is what some in Numsa would argue is their
historical role, once the petit-bourgeois radicalism of the EFF peaks and
retreats into populism – a stance for which I hope they will be proved wrong.
But we really have no way to judge ahead of 2019 given the unpredictable
character of left politics in South Africa. If matters were more predictable,
I’ll conclude, the conditions for much stronger movement building – a “United Resistance” of left forces, as it’s now being termed in the United States against
Trump fascism – would have already generated a bottom-up communism, instead of
the residual Capital-C Communism that still dominates in so many terrains
of real politik.
The deep roots and fragile surface of South African communism
To illustrate the conundrum – and by way of further
vital context – think too what it means to have fought these battles first and
foremost, as did key Numsa leaders, in the Eastern Cape Communist Party
tradition. Bearing that in mind, the M-L rhetoric makes sense, because it
appears to be the case that:
·
the
SACP-within-the-ANC is in its dying days (with continual rumours of Party
leaders in the Cabinet suffering a forthcoming purge, and with the youth
putting walk-out pressure on the party bosses), and
·
Cosatu’s
failures on nearly all policy and political fronts could take several important
member unions to the brink not only of demanding that Zuma be replaced as
president (he probably won’t be before 2019) but also of breaking the Alliance
within a year or so.
If these are the most proximate political processes
looming, then the Numsa rhetoric might be seen not as M-L dogmatism, but
instead as careful positioning to capture a great many cadres who are now
finally giving up on the ANC. (Some Numsa shopstewards already moved into the
EFF in the last election.)
The Numsa political push into the hearts and minds of
a prestigious liberation movement is something that in Zimbabwe was tried – and
that failed – in the case of the Movement for Democratic Change, which also
began as a workers’ party (in January 1999 at the Chitungwiza Working People’s
Convention) but quickly moved to the right. To pull at the ANC from the left
using its own NDR language may well be successful, as an alternative to the
political alienation faced by so many working-class activists whose mass
political experience is grounded in traditional loyalty to the ANC.
Numsa’s historic role, in my view, is to continually remind a huge ANC NDR-supporting constituency that there is a logical explanation for SACP-Cosatu failures within the Alliance: namely, that the Party and labour leaders became fat-cats indistinguishable from the bosses. (This is a fate some observers accuse Numsa leaders of reproducing, too, with the ‘social distance’ between leadership and workers still vast, just as is the distance between Numsa workers – many of whom have struggled hard for five-digit monthly salaries – and the poorest South Africans.) So the Numsa rhetoric is quite clear.
Its simple
message is that the NDR and two-stage revolution were correct as
conceptualisation and strategy, but that the wrong people were given the
task of implementation, because the ANC, Cosatu and SACP together grew far too
comfortable maintaining the neoliberal nationalist status quo.
Now, that line of argument may not readily appeal to most Pambazuka readers considering these sentences, fair enough. Still, bear in mind that the NDR tune remains especially appealing to those who still consider the ANC’s pre-1994 populist nationalism to be South Africa’s most prestigious political project. Even though we are nearly 23 years past ‘liberation,’ this tradition retains deep roots. And it is likely that, with its new leadership (probably either Dlamini-Zuma or Ramaphosa), the ANC can continue to maintain its 50%+ majority in the next election and beyond.
So while some readers may have big problems in principle and theory with the NDR argument and the sell-out thesis, still, it is hard to dispute in empirical terms. The ‘first stage’ – the ‘political kingdom’ – was substantively reached in 1994. A ‘second stage’ – economic justice – is long overdue. And the persuasiveness of the SA comprador class – ranging across the main intra-ANC divide (i.e., from the Zuma-Gupta ‘Zupta’ patronage machine to the neoliberal Treasury bloc) – represents the main barrier to the revolution’s second stage.
With South Africa in a profound state of crisis, it is tragic that in spite of Numsa and EFF efforts as well as SACP-Cosatu anti-capitalist rhetoric, only two narratives dominate the political space: first, Zupta and second, neoliberal good-governance. Hence, breaking through with tried and tested NDR-speak might well work, and leaders like Malema, Jim and Vavi certainly know their constituencies far better than I do.
To address the left intelligentsia, have those middle-class Marxists (like me) made profound errors that could distract Numsa from gathering its strength? Of course. Every initiative by South Africa’s far left has failed to attract working-class membership, much less leadership. Unlike the North African cases in 2011, the mix of that intelligentsia, progressive NGOs, social movements, frustrated citizens and creative labour activists in South Africa have not found anything like the mass support of EFF and Numsa.
It may not be the 2019 election, but in South Africa
there will be a point when looking beyond the rhetorical battleground and the
immediate cadre-gathering becomes far more important than the current
conjuncture. At a time much closer to a crunch moment, when alliances are
really vital to make, might the masses from Numsa workplaces take to the
streets in combination – not contradiction – with the left movements’ regroupment
trajectory?
After all, what an excellent period to be an activist (or like me, an armchair academic) promoting justice in South Africa:
·
Numsa
hasn’t folded to repression and divide-and-conquer and still holds up the
strongest class challenge to capitalist power; the Food and Allied Workers
Union walked away from Cosatu, and the Association of Mineworkers and
Construction Union wasn’t beat back into oblivion during the 2014-16 mining
crisis;
·
the
working class as a whole is still considered the world’s most militant at a
time SA inequality has soared and the capitalist class is considered (by
PricewaterhouseCoopers) to be the world’s most corrupt;
·
the
EFF have grown stronger and less politically erratic;
·
the
new terrain of Gauteng urban politics (where EFF and ANC will likely compete to
support – if not catalyse – community protests) will get very interesting as
contradictions continue to emerge;
·
communities
continue protesting at very high rates over service non-delivery or excessive
pricing or politicians’ arrogance, notwithstanding the state’s ever-stronger
repressive and surveillance techniques;
·
although
student movement momentum recently faltered after a spectacular 2015 national
debut, they have lots more potential for future mobilisations and alliances;
and
·
social
movements, the Right2Know coalition, women, LGBTI activists, Equal Education,
Treatment Action Campaign and other protesters make their voices heard and
often win important battles along the way.
For 2017, can the infrastructure supporting all of
this (even including support structures inhabited by obscure academics and
others reading this) expand at the rate needed, so as to move forward as
quickly as reality will demand?
 |
| Karl Marx |
Conclusion: a
whirlwind to catch
The African uprisings since 2011 have taught
progressives that in the pro-democracy and social justice scenarios of mass
demonstrations that made several countries so fertile for a change of state
power – Gambia (2017), Burkina Faso (2014), Senegal (2012) and Tunisia (2011),
for example – the moment of change comes without warning. There is typically a
build-up in social grievances and an explosion. The aftermath includes a
profound threat of counter-revolution, which in Burkina Faso was repelled in
2015, but which in Egypt and Libya have been successful in suppressing
democratic, progressive social movements since 2011 (in both cases with Western
imperial aid and arms to the counter-revolution).
Will South Africa find itself, as Moeletsi Mbeki predicted, facing “Tunisia
Day” – a kind of joyous (yet threatening to elites) uprising such as January
2011 – as early as 2020? Can Africans update the threat, to encompass the
extraordinary advances that have become evident in post-dictator regimes, or in
sites like South Africa itself where the overthrow of (Moeletsi’s brother)
Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS-denialist policies in 2004 raised life expectancy from 52 to
62 thanks to nearly four million people getting medicines for free?
The sense of stop-start progress and regress in so
many sites, including South Africa, reflects in part how poorly the
working-class, poor, progressive middle class, social movements and other
democrats have made alliances. The Africans uprising against the
neoliberal Africa Rising strategy of export- and resource-dependency, hasn’t
yet generated a firm ideology. Such an ideology was much more apparent when in
the 1960s-70s the phrase “self-reliance” accompanied much leftist discourse.
The Lagos Plan of Action even reflected this ideological approach.
It may be that an eco-socialism associated with Ubuntu
philosophy and deglobalising economies will emerge. It may be that some
uniquely South African version of the Marxist-Leninist framing will come from
Numsa. Nothing can be readily predicted in the current conjuncture. The only
strategy it seems to me worth following is a non-dogmatic appreciation of the
various forces, so that whatever principles, analysis, strategies, tactics and alliances
that do emerge on the left can be treated with both respect and comradely
critique.
The debate over Numsa may not yet have arrived at that
healthier stage of inquiry, but at least there is a debate and an inquiry – the
first steps to reclaiming some sort of profound ideological breakthrough so
that the pessimism of the Fanon and Cabral warnings becomes a genuine
Afro-optimism worthy of the ongoing struggles by so many African activists.
* Patrick Bond is Professor of Political Economy,
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Source: Pambazuka
Indigenous Peoples
of the Amazon Share Message with the World
By Forest Peoples
Programme
We, the traditional authorities and elected leaders of
the Uitoto, Muinane, Andoque and Nonuya peoples of the Middle Rio Caquetá
region of the Colombian Amazon are in Bogotá between the 25th and 28th of April
to represent our peoples and our Traditional Association of Indigenous
Authorities – the Regional Indigenous Council of Middle Amazonas (CRIMA) in
meetings with different State institutions and international agencies. We
self-identify ourselves as the “People of the Centre” and heirs of the Green
Territory of Life in the Amazon rainforest.
We are here to demand guarantees for our rights and to
share concerns regarding forest, climate change and biodiversity projects that
affect our territory, including the National Parks Department’s Heart of the
Amazon Project supported by the World Bank and Global Environment Facility, and
the Vision Amazonia Programme funded by the UK, Germany and Norway. We wish to
express concerns that these programmes are undermining our principles of
consent and participation and are applying processes that are not appropriate
for our way of thinking and decision making.
Asserting our rights: Under our Law of Origin,
and in accordance with our uses and customs, we have maintained a respectful
relationship with our territory and the natural world. Before colonisation, our
ancestors lived well. More than a century ago the cauchería came to exploit,
enslave and displace our peoples, and almost exterminated us. We are the
survivors of that genocide. We have since been reconstructing our society by
building our malocas (ceremonial houses) and practising our ritual dances using
the Word of Life and the wisdom of our elders. Since the 1970’s, our Cabildos
(Councils) and Traditional Association of Indigenous Authorities have
undertaken collective actions to legally securing our territory and to claim
our rights.
Messages of the
People of the Centre
To the Colombian government: We are not here to
ask for projects. We want the national government to fully recognise our
autonomy and our rights to govern our territory. We wish to see our
applications for the extension of Reserves of Monochoa, Puerto Sábalo-Los Monos
and Aduche properly processed and titled in favour of our communities to
consolidate the Territory of Life belonging to the People of the Centre. In
addition, we seek the formation and legal registration of an Indigenous
Territorial Entity under our full jurisdiction in order to manage, administer
and preserve our traditional territory and forests and maintain our way of
life.
To international institutions: We inform the
World Bank, the Global Environment Facility, donor governments and cooperation
agencies of Germany, the United Kingdom and Norway, that they must reach agreements
directly with us, as our ancestors did. They did not talk to outsiders by means
of third parties. We don’t want to have the interference of intermediaries such
as NGOs and environmental funds: we seek a direct relationship between
programmes, international donors and our traditional authorities. We demand
that we are recognised and respected as environmental authorities in our own
territory, with our own indigenous system of territorial ordering. We demand
that the agencies respect our rights to own, manage and control our territory.
To this end, we seek formal steps to develop and implement a Safeguard Plan for
our peoples.
To the world: These demands are not just our
concerns. Many other peoples in the Amazon and the world have similar claims
and proposals for protecting peoples’ rights and sustaining the forests. When
we say that we manage our territory and have our own government we are not
talking about nature as an object or natural resource, but rather as a space
with natural beings with whom we relate guided by our Word of Life and mutual
respect. We want to let the world know what “territory” means to us. This week
we will share the teachings of the Muinane people about our care of territory.
The Uitoto, Andoque and Nonuya peoples have been working in the same direction
in documenting our ways of managing and preserving the rainforests. We want to
invite all the Peoples of the Centre, America and other parts of the world to
join us in this effort to defend life and territory.
Contacts:
Hernando Castro, Regional Indigenous Council of Middle Amazonas: hecasu68@yahoo.es
Tom Griffiths, FPP: tom@forestpeoples.org
Camilla Capasso, FPP: camilla@forestpeoples.org
Source: Global Research
Russia:
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| Yuri Gagarin |
Yuri Gagarin: The
winner of US-Soviet space race
When Gagarin was flying into space, no one even hoped
that the cosmonaut would ever return.
On April 12th, 1961 the Soviet Union achieved an
incredible accomplishment: the USSR left the USA behind in the most prestigious
race of all. Soviet citizen Yuri Gagarin became the first man, who orbited
planet Earth in a manned spacecraft and returned home.
The date of April 12th is celebrated as the
Cosmonautics Day in Russia. However, very few people know that only tragic
events on the Baukonur spaceport in October of 1960 delayed the launching of a
manned spaceship till April. Yuri Gagarin was supposed to fly into space in
December. The launching of the Vostok spacecraft should have taken place on
December 1960, according to the decree issued by the Central Committee of the
Communist Party and the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR, dated October 11th,
1960, the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper wrote.
A horrible accident occurred on the Baikonur launching
pad about two weeks after the Soviet government issued the above-mentioned
decree. A space rocket exploded during the launching: the powerful explosion
burnt 268 people alive, including Soviet Marshall Nedelin.
Yuri Gagarin's heroic deed still evokes great respect
all across the globe, even when US shuttle return to Earth in the form of
fragments. When Gagarin was flying into space, the probability of a successful
space launch was estimated at only 50 percent. Soviet specialists conducted six
preliminary launches – three rockets blew up as a result of the tests. Sergei
Korolyov, the director of the Soviet space program, set the date of the seventh
launch with man on board the spaceship on April 12th, 1961. The USA was working
on the launch of its own – it was slated for May 2nd the same year.
There were other variants of the Soviet space project:
it was particularly suggested that Yuri Gagarin, the father of two daughters, should
be replaced by Gherman Titov, who had no children, the Moskovsky
Komsomolets wrote.
When Yuri Gagarin was leaving Earth, no one was sure
if he was ever coming back to the planet. The Soviet news agency, Tass,
prepared three national messages at once, just to be on the safe side. The
first message was about the successful completion of the first manned space
flight in history (which was eventually announced for the whole world later).
The second message said that the spaceship did not enter the orbit, whereas the
third message established the fact of death of the Soviet cosmonaut.
The accident risk was rather high for the Soviet
spaceship. The Vostok's orbit was situated very close to the upper layer of the
Earth atmosphere. If the engines of the spacecraft had stopped operating, it
would have landed on the planet because of the “friction” against the
atmosphere. In this case, however, the spacecraft would be flying for about a
week and there would be no guarantee that the cosmonaut would survive the emergent
landing. The food and air stock on board the spacecraft was enough for ten
days, though.
The probability of a psychological breakdown was high
too. Gagarin was not allowed to turn the radio transmitter off: the cosmonaut
was talking to the Mission Control throughout 108 minutes of his flight. When
Gagarin returned to planet Earth, he became the national hero of the USSR and a
globally recognized person.
It is worth mentioning that Russia is taking great
efforts in projects connected with the International Space Station as well.
American astronauts say that Russia saves the ISS when it launches Progress and
Soyuz rockets. US astronaut Michael Fincke said that he never forgets to give
Russia credit during his lectures for American students.
Pravda.Ru
Middle East:
ISRAELI MINISTER
CALLS FOR ASSASSINATION OF ASSAD AND ALLIES
 |
| President Assad with soldiers |
An Israeli minister has bluntly called for Syrian
leader Bashar Assad to be assassinated after unsourced media reports claimed
Damascus was using a “crematorium” to cover-up mass killings. He said the
“serpent’s head” in Tehran should be dealt with next.
“The reality whereby Syria executes people,
intentionally uses chemical weapons to hurt them and, now, in the most recent
move of extremism, is burning their bodies – this has not been seen in the
world in 70 years,” said Israeli Housing Minister Yoav Galant, as cited by
Haaretz.
“We are
crossing a red line and, in my view, the time has come to assassinate
Assad,” he continued.
“And when we finish with the tail of the serpent, we
will reach the head of the serpent, which can be found in Tehran, and we will
deal with it, too,” he said.
What appears to be the first recorded Israeli threat
to assassinate Syrian President Bashar Assad came after the US Department of
State alleged, without presenting any hard evidence, that the Syrian government
is using “a crematorium” outside Damascus to burn the bodies of
people killed by the government.
Earlier on Tuesday, Galant told Israeli Army Radio
that Assad’s rule has been the worst since Nazi Germany. “What is
happening in Syria is defined as genocide, under all its
classifications,” he said on Army Radio, according to Jerusalem Post.
Galant, a retired IDF general, added that Israel wants to see Assad and his
Alawite government ousted from power and replaced by a “moderate Sunni
ruler.”
Some previous attempts to compare Assad’s government
to the Nazi regime have been met with public outcry. White House spokesman Sean
Spicer, who claimed that Hitler’s death squads hadn’t used chemical agents
during the Holocaust “in the way that Assad used them” sparked
outrage in the US and beyond.
Certain journalists have used the Assad-Hitler
comparison when covering claims that Syrian forces have used chemical weapons,
but those remarks were dismissed by the public.
Assad, a UK-educated doctor, has been in power since
the 1999 passing of his father, Syria’s long-time president, Hafez Assad. Syria
is one of the few Arab countries where the president is elected through a
nationwide vote.
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