In the following article for Pambazuka News, Patrick Bond, co-author of Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society, voices his belief that political resolution between Washington and the Middle East is an impossibility. Bond’s conclusion comes following negative reactions to Barack Obama’s 19 May policy speech on North Africa and the Middle East:
Here in Palestine, disgust expressed by civil society reformers about Barack Obama’s 19 May policy speech on the Middle East and North Africa confirms that political reconciliation between Washington and fast-rising Arab democrats is impossible.
Amidst many examples, consider the longstanding US tradition of blind, self-destructive support for Israel, which Obama has just amplified. Recognising a so-called ‘Jewish state’ as a matter of US policy, he introduced a new twist that denies foundational democratic rights for 1.4 million Palestinians living within Israel. For a Harvard-trained constitutional lawyer to sink so low on behalf of Zionist discrimination is shocking.
For although Obama mentioned the ‘1967 lines’ as the basis for two states and thereby appeared to annoy arch-Zionist leader Benjamin Netanyahu, this minimalist United Nations position was amended with a huge caveat: ‘with land swaps.’
In the light of recent meetings by African Union leaders to discuss the fate of Muammar Gaddafi, and EU leaders to discuss the risis of debt, Adekeye Adebajo discusses the need for visionaries who are able to promote regional integration in Europe and Africa. He recalls to past examples – Nigerian scholar-diplomat, Adebayo Adedeji and Frenchman Jean Monnet, who in the end, he says, turned out to be Cassandras.
AS European Union (EU) leaders met in Brussels last Friday to seek solutions to the dual crises of debt and the euro, African Union (AU) leaders pondered the fate of Libya’s beleaguered autocrat, Muammar Gaddafi, who had done the most to create their organisation in 2002 and chaired the AU in 2009. Both events highlight the need for visionaries who can help revive stalling efforts to promote regional integration in Europe and Africa.
It is worth examining the life and times of two such individuals.
Nigerian scholar-diplomat, Adebayo Adedeji — the chairman of SA’s African Peer Review Mechanism process of 2006- 07 — announced his retirement from public life at the AU summit in Uganda in July last year at the age of 79, after 50 years of service to the continent. Adedeji and Frenchman Jean Monnet are widely regarded to have been the fathers of regional integration in Africa and Europe respectively. Both men came from small towns, which they escaped to attain global fame and recognition. Both were propelled to prominence and achieved professional success at an early age. Both were put in charge of reconstructing their countries after conflicts. Both were men of vision and ideas who enjoyed the trust of powerful political actors. Both were realists who used the force of superior argument and dynamic political manoeuvring to promote their goals.
Five African Union heads of state, which include Jacob Zuma, have been asked to intervene and come up with a solution to Côte d’Ivoire’s current political contest, which has two “presidents” fighting for power over the country. Adekeye Adebajo says that Gbagbo has power without legitimacy, while his contender Quattara has legitimacy without power.
THE cocoa-rich West African state of Côte d’Ivoire currently has two “presidents” contesting for power, while five African Union (AU)-appointed heads of state (including Jacob Zuma ) have been asked to deliver a solution by the end of this month. The seeds of the Ivorian crisis were sown during the autocratic rule of Felix Houphouet-Boigny between 1960 and 1993. Though he adopted an enlightened policy towards the country’s large immigrant population, the economy declined from the 1980s.
Houphouet’s heirs — Henri Konan Bedie, Gen Robert Guei and Laurent Gbagbo — instituted a xenophobic policy of Ivoirite, which discriminated against Ivorians of mixed parentage.
While staying in Tunisia in 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote that the colonial world is spatially divided between the colonisers and the colonised. Fanon said that the colonised stay in the native towns, “negro villages” and reservations and that no one cares how they live or how they die.
Today, Richard Pithouse writes on the SACSIS website, that cities are still divided between “those who count” and “those who don’t count”. The only difference is that the division is now based on wealth. Pithouse says that the refusal to accept this state of affairs any longer is the basis for the recent revolutions seen in Tunisia and Egypt.
The incident where a vendor set himself alight after police destroyed his scant worldly possessions was, according to Pithouse, a catalyst for the unrest in North Africa and the Middle East.
Life, ordinary life, is meant to follow certain rhythms. We grow, seasons change and we assume new positions in the world. When you have finished being a child you put away childish things and move on to the next stage of life. But there is a multitude of people in this world who cannot build a home, marry and care for their children and aging parents. There is a multitude of people who are growing older as they remain stuck in an exhausting limbo, perhaps just managing to scrape together the rent for a backyard shack by selling tomatoes or cell phone chargers on some street.
Mohamed Bouazizi was one person amongst that multitude. He was born in 1984 in the Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid. His father died on a Libyan construction site when Mohamed was three. He went to a one roomed village school but had to start working from the age of ten and abandoned school altogether in his late teens. In a city with an unemployment rate of 30% he couldn’t find work and began, like so many others, selling fruit and vegetables in the street. With the thousand rand that he made each month he looked after his mother, his uncle and his younger siblings. He was, incredibly, managing to pay for his sister, Samia, to study at university.
Peter Vale, author of Re-imagining the Social in South Africa, says there is a lot more to the WikiLeaks exposure than we think. So far, not much has been revealed that we did not already know. Vale’s hunch, however, is that the Americans are worried about “what will come out when jucier bits are leaked”.
According to Vale, Julian Assange has returned the debate on democracy to its “authentic roots”, namely, the citizen’s right to know, and this is an inconvenience to countries like America where “politicians argue that more state control, more secrecy and more surveillance mean more democracy”.
It has been difficult to decide what to make of WikiLeaks and the arrest, plainly on trumped up charges, of Julian Assange.
One reason for this is because most people have been led to believe states have the right to secrets and the citizen’s responsibility is to protect these. In a prefabricated way, then, the State’s secrets become the citizen’s.
But there is more here. Dominant understandings of international relations are American. So, unsurprisingly, securing the world – America’s world, really – is considered by many to be their responsibility, too. Across the world, then, law-abiding citizens have been drawn into maintaining the security of their own State and, in the wider world, securing America.
Re-imagining the Social in South Africa: Critique and Post-Apartheid Knowledge edited by Heather Jacklin, Peter Vale Book homepage
EAN: 9781869141790 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Applying an interpretive model of learned from one of Wole Soyinka’s classic plays, The Lion and the Jewel, Adekeye Adebajo asks whether Jacob Zuma can keep history’s high ground, or whether he will join Thabo Mbeki in the political wilderness:
It is often said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then as farce. The ANC’s national general council starts tomorrow in Durban – so could this aphorism come to describe contemporary South African politics?
The 2005 council marked the beginning of the end of Thabo Mbeki’s formidable hold on his party. An open revolt led to a refusal by the ANC to remove Jacob Zuma, Mbeki’s ousted deputy president, as deputy leader of the party, after corruption charges were laid against him. But with Zuma avoiding trial on graft charges and being acquitted on a rape charge, Mbeki became increasingly isolated. Two years later, Zuma deposed the self-styled philosopher-king as ANC president in Polokwane, through a coalition of “leftists” and disaffected politicians. Opposition to Mbeki’s ruthless leadership style contributed enormously to the ascendancy of his nemesis.
Thando Mgqolozana, author of A Man Who is Not a Man, speaks to Mokgaetji Shadung about traditional circumcision in the Eastern Cape. Although circumcision may be vital to the acceptance of young men in their communities, a run of “botched” procedures has made it the subject of recent debate:
The Makana district appears to have escaped some of the problems that have been associated with traditional circumcisions in other parts of the Eastern Cape.
According to Khaya Deyi*, a local professional, careful precautions are carefully put in place to ensure that the Makana district produces some of the most successful rates of initiates, known as abakhwetha.
“It is not common here in Makana to have botched circumcisions, unlike other villages in the Transkei,” says Deyi.
Peter Vale ponders a question asked worldwide: what to do with Burma? Leader of Burma’s NDL (National League for Democracy) Aung San Suu Kyi recently turned 65, while still under house arrest. It seems that in a world that’s becoming increasingly smaller – or more globalized, Burma is more isolated than ever:
NOT a stone’s throw from where we do our grocery shopping, Grahamstown’s Pepper Grove Mall, I heard the BBC describe the opening of the Summer Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea.
I say “heard” because, in those days, this country’s isolation meant that major sporting events – those which today we call “global” events – were hardly mentioned on the bulletins which passed for news as apartheid was making its last ugly stand. As a result a short-wave radio was often the only certain way of knowing what was going on – often, I might add, in the city itself!
Re-imagining the Social in South Africa: Critique and Post-Apartheid Knowledge edited by Heather Jacklin, Peter Vale Book homepage
EAN: 9781869141790 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Christopher Merrett believes that Sakhela Buhlungu’s book on COSATU, A Paradox of Victory, has come at the perfect time, as it underscores the current shifts in the wider progressive politics that COSATU leads:
A HISTORY of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) could not have appeared at a more opportune time — the Tripartite Alliance is again under strain as Zwelinzima Vavi points the finger at endemic corruption and tenderpreneurship at the highest levels of government.
Sakhela Buhlungu’s paradox is this: how did the best organised, most cohesive and democratic force in South African politics in 1990 find itself relatively marginalised 20 years later?
Ethics Consultant and author of Conscience, Martin Prozesky, says that yet another national debate on morality is not what is needed. What is required is moral action. In this article for the Mail and Guardian, he lists seven principals and numerous practical steps that South Africans can take to get going.
President Jacob Zuma has called for a national debate about morality and asked Pastor Ray McCauley to convene it. But our biggest need isn't yet more talk about morality. It is effective moral action.
Here are some ideas about fostering the necessary moral action, involving seven principles and a number of practical steps.
First, the process must be fully inclusive. It must reflect, respect and include all our value systems, secularist as well as religious. Especially important are the value systems and practices of our traditional African cultures. Although our religions must be part of the process, they have no monopoly over morality. None of us has that.
In the following article for Pambazuka News, Patrick Bond, co-author of Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society, voices his belief that political resolution between Washington and the Middle East is an impossibility. Bond’s conclusion comes following negative reactions to Barack Obama’s 19 May policy speech on North Africa and the Middle East:
