Millennium Development Goals
Overview
Meeting the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 raises difficult challenges in many African countries. Three hundred million Africans, nearly half the region's population, still live in extreme poverty. The spread of HIV/AIDS threatens to wipe out important gains in life expectancy. The tragic events of September 11, 2001, produced negative outcomes in some countries and could have medium to long term consequences for others. Donor security concerns and the focus on terrorism may also affect aid flows to Africa, where per capita assistance has dropped by about 40 percent over the last decade. A cutback in tourist activity hit countries such as Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa.
The Millennium Development Goals identify-- and quantify-- specific gains that can be made by 2015 to improve the lives of the world's poor. The aim is to reduce poverty while improving health, education, and the environment.
The MDGs were endorsed by 189 countries at the September 2000 UN Millennium General Assembly in New York. They provide a focus for the efforts of the World Bank Group, governments, and other partners in the development community.
Each goal is to be achieved by 2015, compared to 1990 levels:
1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
• Halve the proportion of people with less than one dollar a day.
• Halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
2. Achieve universal primary education
• Ensure that boys and girls alike complete primary schooling.
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
• Eliminate gender disparity at all levels of education.
4. Reduce child mortality
• Reduce by two thirds the under-five mortality rate.
5. Improve maternal health
• Reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio.
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
• Reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS.
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
• Integrate sustainable development into country policies and reverse loss of environmental resources.
• Halve the proportion of people without access to potable water.
• Significantly improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.
8. Develop a global partnership for development
• Raise official development assistance.
• Expand market access.
• Encourage debt sustainability.
Quick Links
Millennium Development Goals website
© 2001 The World Bank Group,
By David Gough
Development is about human beings. They need four things. First is water; second is food; third is health; and fourth is education. Once a human being has water, food and health, he needs to learn about new horizons and unlock new possibilities. And there is a fifth need-peace and order. Without those, none of the four basic ones can be sustained."
- A Somali Elder
Hargeisa, Somalia-Two small boys darted out from behind the ruined building and sprinted barefoot across the dusty street before taking up positions on either side of a derelict fountain. At intervals, a cautious head would reappear as the boys traded fire from the toy guns fashioned out of sticks that each held tightly in his hand.
But their raucous imitations of gunfire were suddenly interrupted by an old man who hobbled out from behind the counter of his shop waving a stick in the air and shouting at the boys in Somali. "He is telling them to stop," said the young man drinking coffee at the next table. "He says that guns do not belong here anymore. We have chosen peace not war."
That is a common sentiment these days in Somalia, where across the breadth and length of the country people are crying out for peace. "It’s time to reject conflict," the voices say, "let’s have reconciliation and development instead." But for the people of this proud nation, ripped apart by more than a decade of civil war, the obstacles ahead are formidable. Parts of the country remain embroiled in factionalism and chaos; others are in transition between crisis and recovery, while some areas-particularly the self-declared republics of Northeast Somalia/Puntland and Northwest Somalia/Somaliland in the north of the country-have secured peace, stability and social and economic recovery.
Where there is peace, there is reconciliation and the first tentative buds of development are beginning to show. The region of Northwest Somalia/Somaliland enjoys a peace that its embryonic administration is trying to cement with the aid of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), together with other agencies of the United Nations system and other international partners.
"There’s not much development activity that we can do in some parts of Somalia given the instability, but here in the north the situation is different," said Moe Hussein, UNDP’s Field Emergency Officer. "The greater the degree of stability any particular area has, the more extensive our recovery projects can be."
UNDP’s programmes cover many parts of Somalia, although much of its activities revolve around Northwest Somalia/Somaliland, which receives approximately 40 percent of UNDP’s US$36 million four-year budget (1997-2000) for Somalia. UNDP’s mission is being met by two complementary initiatives: A Civil Protection Programme, which essentially serves to protect the peace, and a Civic Education for Peace Programme, which serves to build on that peace. UNDP recently formulated a plan to support the Civil Protection Programme that is designed to encourage good governance by focusing on legal reform, the judiciary, human rights, law enforcement and mine action.
Demobilizing the militias
A senior member of one of Somalia’s clan-based militias says he does not know how many people he killed, but he admits to seeing a lot of violence. "Looting and killing-that was the way of life. Everybody went with their clan and I went with mine."
There was no command structure in his militia and the only currency was the nozzle of a gun. Vehicles that passed through
the territory controlled by his militia were routinely stopped and ransacked.
But all that has changed said the young man, who is now a recruit at the Mandheera Police School, which is part of a project to demobilize the militia in Northwest
Somalia by integrating some of its members into the police force. The school, which was inaugurated in 1998, has trained policemen who now help to guarantee law and order in this part of Somalia. Recruits at the school, located 120 kilometres northeast of the regional capital, Hargeisa, undergo a rigorous training programme that lasts three months. It provides social education as well as basic training.
Nur Ahmed Yusuf, the training school’s commanding officer, told CHOICES that although the school serves primarily as a demobilization and police training centre, he prefers to use the term debu dadeeyn-or rehumanization. "These men would have robbed their own mothers when they were in the militias. Now peace has given them a second chance in life," he says.
Teaching the recruits to understand and respect human rights is one of the key functions of the project, which is funded by UNDP with the support of a number of donors and local authorities. So far 500 recruits have graduated and another 200 are in training.
"If Somalis are to avoid sliding back into the downward spiral of violence and abuse of law that has prevailed in this country for so long, we have to teach them to respect their neighbour," said Yusuf. "Law and order are the backbone of what we are trying to achieve here. If we have no order, then we have no society."
"In parts of the country, the Somali crisis, in essence, reflects a lack of effective governance: The Somali people cannot participate freely in exercising their right to select representative authorities and hold them accountable for their performance. Unfortunately the conflict and fragmentation prevalent in Somalia is becoming all too common in other parts of the world. In that sense, the efforts of the Somalis themselves and the response of the international community will yield valuable lessons for the future of global action," says Randolph Kent, UNDP’s Resident Representative in Somalia.
Reaching the people
It is late afternoon and most men in the northern city of Hargeisa have left their place of work and are sitting cross-legged at home or at a meeting place, in a coffee shop, or on a street corner, chewing khat-the mildly narcotic leaf that is used by Somali men. In contrast, Abdi Ibrahim, project officer for UNDP’s Civic Education for Peace Programme, is sitting on an uncomfortable wooden chair in a corner of his office poring over the pile of papers that clutter his desk. He is preparing for his job in the field for the next day.
As part of UNDP’s contribution to building a stable society, Ibrahim oversees the production of a radio soap opera entitled Geedka Nabada, which means the tree of peace. The 15-minute show airs three times a week. It tackles issues such as health, education and civic responsibility and commands a loyal following. It is broadcast by Radio Djibouti, Radio Hargeisa and Radio Galkayo, and reaches most corners of the country.
The topics of discussion played out in the drama become at times more challenging-female genital mutilation and sexually-transmitted diseases, for example. And women are encouraged to play a more decisive role in society in contrast to the traditional patriarchal structure of Somali society. But while challenging some societal norms, the programme takes advantage of others. "Somali society is very oral," says Ibrahim, "and radio is very influential here. It’s not uncommon to see 100 people listening to one radio set. With more than 60 percent of the population illiterate, radio is the most effective medium to reach people."
One middle-aged woman said that the programme had helped her explain to her elderly mother why she did not want to circumcize her young daughter. "According to our culture, all Somali women should be circumcised," said the woman, "But I regret what was done to me, and I didn’t want my daughter to go through the same pain. By asking my mother to listen to the issues on the radio, I was able to persuade her that we should leave that practice behind us."
Helping in economic recovery
Reconciliation and governance aside, one of UNDP’s main priorities in Somalia is to create a good environment for economic recovery. With the longest coastline in Africa, maritime activity has been the mainstay of the Somali economy. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), with the financial backing of UNDP, is supporting the rehabilitation of two of the major ports of Northern Somalia. UNDP is funding most of the activities of the UNCTAD project and the vocational training.
Northwestern Somalia’s pre-eminent port is Berbera and Benoni Parsons is UNCTAD’s Ports Management Specialist in Berbera, which fell into almost total disuse during the civil war. He oversees vocational training programmes for employees, from labourers to architects, and reports a dramatic increase in the number of qualified personnel now working at the facility. "We have provided high standards of training programmes which cover the whole management of the port from start to finish." Moreover, diplomas awarded by the UNCTAD school are highly regarded by the private sector, which is now employing many of the school’s graduates.
One year ago Mohamed Jibril was unemployed and his family, recently returned from a refugee camp in neighbouring Ethiopia, was destitute. But since completing an UNCTAD training programme, he has become a winch operator. "Life was very hard before this job," he said. "I was forced to do some desperate things for money-now I just have to use the skills I have learnt, learn more skills, and maybe one day I’ll become the director of the port."
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David Gough is the East Africa correspondent for The Guardian.
International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM)
newsletter, 3
http://www.isim.nl/newsletter/3/regional/12.html
REGIONAL ISSUES East Africa
LIDWIEN KAPTEIJNS
Somali Women's Songs for the First Ladies of Early Islam
When a Somali woman is about to give birth, older women often arrange a ceremony to call blessings on the mother-to-be, in which they sing sittaat2 songs of praise for the leading women of early Islam, especially Faduumo (Fatima), daughter of the Prophet. Although there is no doubt that this genre of songs is old it may even have a relationship to non-Islamic Oromo songs for the goddess of fertility scholarly references date back only to the late nineteenth century and do not include song texts.3
There are three reasons why sittaat did not receive scholarly attention during the colonial period (c. 18851960). Firstly, the Orientalist paradigm in Islamic studies gave preference to what were regarded as foundational core texts from the 'Islamic heartlands', written, of course, in Arabic by men. African women's devotional oral poetry in Somali, not Arabic, was marginal to this type of Islamic studies. Secondly, it was part of especially British colonial strategies towards Islam to promote an Islamic elite (e.g. judges) trained outside of Somaliland in Islamic centres of learning that were solidly under British rule, such as Cairo, Aden or Khartoum. By insisting on 'upgrading' local Islam, the colonizers undermined representatives of popular local Islam.4 Finally, irrespective of colonial policies towards Islam, the new educated elite in all the Somalilands (French, British, and Italian), even if undoubtedly Muslim, were deeply influenced by secular European culture and European languages. While its nationalist project included an articulation of the Somali pastoral tradition as cultural authenticity,5 older women's religious songs did not fall within its purview.
The group of sittaat singers with whom I became familiar in Djibouti in 1989, held small weekly semi-private devotional sessions in their leader's home. They also performed on special occasions, for example to call upon the Sittaat (the first ladies of Islam) to bless a woman about to give birth, or on a much larger scale, to celebrate a religious holiday (such as the Prophet's birthday). When sittaat are sung, women sit in a circle on mats on the ground, while the leader beats a round, low and wide drum with a stick. The atmosphere is festive as between songs the women pass around herbal tea, orange sherbet, coffee, popcorn (salool) and Turkish delight (xalwad), as well as bottles of perfume and incense burners. The singing always begins with praise to God, the Prophet, and the awliya (those saintly individuals of Islamic history who continue to inspire many Muslims today), including the twelfth-century founder of the Qadiriyya, c Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani.
Once the women begin to address the Sittaat, Xaawo (Eve), the 'mother of the believers', is the first to be praised.
After Eve, the sittaat address the Prophet's mother (Amina), foster-mother (Halima), wives and daughters. It is with the songs for Faduumo (Fatima) that the session reaches it climax, for these are the songs that are believed to bring about the Prophet's daughter's actual presence in the women's midst. Some women get up and dance, at times carrying incense burners with burning coal on their heads; others are overwhelmed by emotion and are lovingly covered with shawls and sprayed with perfume by friends trying to calm them.
In the sittaat Somali women explicitly assert the common bond and plight of womanhood in two ways. First, the singers address their common problems as wives, mothers and providers in the urban slums of underdeveloped and French-dominated Djibouti. Second, as women, they appeal to the women of early Islamic history, asserting the values central to their own self-image, those of good wife- and motherhood. They praise Xaawo (Eve) as humanity's first wife and mother, Khadija as the Prophet's loyal and most beloved wife, and Faduumo (Fatima) as the Prophet's only daughter (as well as wife of c Ali and mother of Hasan and Husayn).
Reinforcement of the Status Quo?
The values that the women singing the sittaat assert are mostly dominant values that appear to reinforce the status quo. They do not complain about difficult husbands, but pray for help to get along with them; they do not complain about unemployed or disobedient children, but pray that their children will not go astray. As I watched the participants in these sessions middle-aged and older women, some widows, others divorcees, many the mothers of grown (often unemployed) children, and almost all compelled to still provide for themselves as well as others one aspect struck me as an act of resistance to their status quo. For these women, however old or run down by life, insist vociferously and explicitly on their own daughterhood in relation to the Sittaat in heaven. Using metaphors such as 'teaching a child how to walk', and being allowed to hold onto their 'mothers' skirt hems', they ask their heavenly mothers for the love, care and teaching daughters receive from their mothers. By expecting and asking that the Sittaat in heaven take care of them in infinite and intimate detail in this life, on the Day of Judgement, and in paradise, Somali women challenge in song the harsh age and gender-based realities of their daily lives.
In Djibouti, Somali intellectuals and scholars such as Muhammed Abdillahi Rirash and Umar Mac allin (who introduced me to the sittaat), have begun to reverse the colonial marginalization of Islamic Somali orature and to record and preserve it as part of the Somali cultural heritage. However, as they undertook this project in the 1980s, other middle-class men (merchants, shopkeepers, teachers and civil servants) adopted a lifestyle of intensified Islamic piety and looked upon Islamist movements further East for guidance. While deeply critical of any colonial or neo-colonial Western influences, the latter share with the erstwhile Orientalists a focus upon a relative small number of foundational Islamic texts. As they have resolutely turned their backs on local Somali expressions of Islamic devotion and wisdom, they appear, for the moment at least, to have contributed to the increasing marginalization of Somali Islamic orature.
That you take and welcome us, daughter of the Prophet, for that we clamour
That you come and teach us how to walk, daughter of the Prophet, for that we clamour.
You child of the Prophet, most obedient of women, give us that for which we call upon you. [....]
Lady Faduumo, lead us with your light
Lady Faduumo, make us as you are
Lady Faduumo, give us your musk to smell
Lady Faduumo, spread your bed for us
Lady Faduumo, bring us in the presence of the good Muhammad
Lady Faduumo, help us climb your ladder
Lady Faduumo, spread your wrap as our bedding
Lady Faduumo, wrap us in your silk. [....]
Madaad, madaad,8 Faduumo, daughter of the Prophet
Give us that for which we call upon you
Ecstasy has me in its grip, my body is burning
Madaad, madaad, Faduumo, daughter of the Prophet
Give us that for which we call upon you.9
Teach us how to walk, look upon us as your children
Merciful God, don't keep Faduumo away from us
May she take us by the hand on the Day on which One is Sorrowful
Make us their [the Sittaat's] companions, Compassionate God
May we all live in one home with their mothers and daughters
May we all eat together with the Sittaat and the Prophet's family
May we come to live in paradise.
Notes
1. This article is based on Lidwien Kapteijns, 'Sittaat: Somali Women's Songs for the "Mothers of the Believers"'. Boston: African Studies Center, Boston University, Working Papers in African Studies, No. 25 (1995). See also The Marabout and the Muse, ed. Kenneth Harrow (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1996), pp. 124-141.
2. Sittaat refers both to the distinguished women of early Islam and the songs Somali women sing for them. The latter are also referred to as Xaawiyo Faduumo ('Eve and Fatima'), madaxshub ('the anointing of the head') and, especially in southern Somalia, Abbaay Sittidey or Abbaay Nebiyey.
3. For an early reference, see Leo Reinisch, Die Somali Sprache. Sudarabischen Expedition. Band I (Vienna: Alfred Holder, 1900) p. 256. Georgio Banti, 'Scrittura', in Aspetti dell' Espressione Artistica in Somalia, ed. Annarita Puglielli (Roma: Bagatto Books, 1988), pp.19-29. The latter gives a photograph of a late nineteenth-century Abbaay Sittidey text (pp.24-25), which is, however, too bastardized to deserve the name.
4. Lidwien Kapteijns, 'Islam in Ethiopia and the Horn', in The History of Islam in Africa, eds. Nehemia Levtzion and Randall Pouwels (Athens: Ohio University Press, forthcoming).
5. See Lidwien Kapteijns, Women's Voices in a Man's World: Women and the Pastoral Tradition in Northern Somali Orature, c. 1899-1980 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, forthcoming).
6. Sittaat session led by Luula Saalih, recorded by Muhammad c Abdillahi Rirash and c Umar Mac allin for Radio and Television Djibouti in 1988. The song texts, as are all texts quoted in this article, were transcribed and translated by Lidwien Kapteijns and Maryan c Umar Ali.
7. Sittaat session led by Luula Saalih, Djibouti, 2 October 1989.
8. This is an invocation often used in Sufi devotional practice.
9. Sittaat session led by c Asha Muhammad (from Hargeisa), Djibouti, 13 November 1989.
God, we begin with God's bissinka [the phrase 'in the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate']
God, we begin with my heart loving you.
God, we begin with the blessing of Prophet Muhammad
God, through the merit of Faduumo, daughter of the Prophet, we seek succour.6
Before you, [the name] 'mother' did not exist
Before you, 'mama' did not exist
Before you, respected one, people did not say 'mother'
to each other [...]
Mother, Eve, don't sleep, spread a bed of silk for us
Mother, Eve, don't sleep, weave your ropes for us.7
-----------------
LIDWIEN KAPTEIJNS. Ms. Kapteijns is Professor of African and Middle Eastern history and Chair of the History department at Wellesley College. She has published widely about Sudanese and Somali history. Her latest book (with Maryan Omar Ali) is entitled: Women's Voices in a Man's World: Women and the Pastoral Tradition in Northern Somali Orature
c. 1899-1980 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999). She also co-founded the Somali Institure for Research and Development (SIRAD), a small non-profit organization that is focused on educational outreach, truth and reconciliation, and the establishment of a documentation center for the Somali community of the greater Boston area. The title of her presentation: "Documenting for Whom? Obstacles to Documenting the Somali Community in the Greater Boston Area."
http://www.wellesley.edu/History/faculty/lkapteij.html
Monthly Review, Volume 54, Number 1 May 2002
Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the Power Politics of Bourgeois Democracy
by Patrick Bond
Since February 2000, when president Robert Mugabe suffered his first-ever national electoral defeat-over a proposed new constitution-Zimbabwe has witnessed confusing debilitating political turmoil. A decade of economic decline, characteristic of the imposition of structural adjustment across Africa, preceded the rise of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Standards of living had crashed during the 1990s, the state withdrew-or priced at prohibitive levels-many social services, and the economy deindustrialized. State and private sector corruption were rife.
In response, various urban labor and social movements-trade unions, human rights advocates, ghetto residents’ groups, militant students, church and Jubilee anti-debt campaigners, women’s organizations, community health workers, and many others-began to offer opposition. They came together in the streets during mass protests (1996-1999), then through a National Working People’s Convention (February 1999), the National Constitutional Assembly (1999-present), and the launch of the MDC (September 1999). But very quickly, what had begun as a working-class party resisting Mugabe’s neoliberalism, malgovernance, and repressive state control was hijacked by international geopolitical forces, domestic (white) business and farming interests, and the black petite bourgeoisie.
Fundraising from these sources had become crucial to the MDC’s ability to contest the June 2000 parliamentary elections. Thus the leading MDC economics spokesperson, Eddie Cross (formerly vice-chairperson of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries), was sufficiently confident in March 2000 to outline an extremist neoliberal strategy:
We are going to fast track privatisation. All fifty government parastatals will be privatised within a two-year time frame, but we are going far beyond that. We are going to privatise many of the functions of government. We are going to privatise the Central Statistical Office. We are going to privatise virtually the entire school delivery system. And you know, we have looked at the numbers and we think we can get government employment down from about 300,000 at the present time to about 75,000 in five years.
By August 2001, the opposition party’s Economic Stabilisation and Recovery Programme had codified this approach. The presence of eloquent worker representatives in the MDC leadership-including, incongruously, an International Socialist Organization of Zimbabwe member of parliament-had failed to pull the program back to the left.
But the workers would be just as badly treated by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu). With his misleading tendency to “talk left, act right,” Mugabe gave the impression to some observers that his project was genuinely anti-imperialist and capable of empowering the millions of landless rural Zimbabweans for whom he claimed to act. Tens of thousands of households were given access to the country’s white-dominated arable land during 2000-2001, led by veterans of the 1960s-1970s liberation struggle who had been generally ignored by Mugabe during the 1980s and 1990s. Once he had permitted and nurtured the land invasions in the wake of the shocking February 2000 defeat, Mugabe came to rely upon the war veterans and their followers as a paramilitary force. And yet notwithstanding the resurgence of populist rhetoric and a few material concessions from the state, poor and working people saw their incomes-and even their ability to gain access to the staple food, maize-under unprecedented threat by the time of the recent (March 9-10, 2002) presidential election.
How did Mugabe win? Most importantly, he ratcheted up state repression and rigged electoral rules against MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai. The opposition was forced to cancel more than one hundred campaign rallies due to harassment; the broadcast media were monopolized by the ruling party; hundreds of thousands of voters were intimidated and more than a million disenfranchised; more than one hundred political murders and numerous assaults took place, with MDC supporters almost always the victims; and, in short, the executive apparatus was used freely to ensure Mugabe’s reelection, allegedly by 1.69 million votes to 1.28 million for Tsvangirai.
Even when confronted with the evidence, several visiting observer missions turned blindly partisan, and credited Mugabe with having won a “legitimate” victory: the Organization of African Unity, several cabinet ministers visiting from neighboring countries through the Southern African Development Community (SADC) organization, a few other official delegations from African countries, and the important fifty-person South African delegation, under the leadership of businessman Sam Motsuenyane.
In contrast, a different set of SADC parliamentary (not ministerial-level) observers, the Commonwealth delegation led by Nigeria’s former transitional-leader general Abdulaslami Abubaker, all the official observers of European countries, and virtually all visiting civil society groups denounced the election. The views of Bush Administration officials, and Australian prime minister John Howard, were to the same effect, but without moral legitimacy. After all, George W. Bush triumphed in the 2000 election through the mass disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida, and in 2001, Howard’s xenophobic campaign secured victory with doctored photographs of boat people heading for Australia. Geopolitical pressure on Mugabe is mediated primarily through these suspect sources. But for all the Western hypocrisy, the Mugabe victory was nonetheless the product of brutal force. And the division between the observer missions did not break down cleanly along North-South, national, racial, or class lines.
The voices of dissent and anger from the urban poor and workers were louder than those of the West, even if the MDC’s fatigued and defeated leaders failed to provide the direction and confidence required. A general strike called by the trade union movement a week after Mugabe was declared the winner did not succeed, mainly due to lack of preparation and ferocious state repression (civil servants were told they would be fired if they did not come to work). At press time, a broad front of progressive civil society groups was planning to launch a medium-term strategy of ungovernability against Mugabe, who himself responded to the post-electoral climate of uncertainty, and to a decision by the Commonwealth to expel Zimbabwe for a year, by charging the main MDC leaders with treason.
Because the implications of the discredited election and the controversial aftermath are so crucial for African democracy and for the overall struggle for global justice, it is crucial to look beyond Zimbabwe’s borders for the way forward. One government stands ready and anxious to mediate an elite solution to the Zimbabwe crisis, if one can be found: South Africa. The same government has positioned itself as the main third world arbiter of globalization, in arenas such as trade, finance, aid, sustainable development, racism, non-aligned politics, and many others.
The Power of Pretoria
In 1976, Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith was summoned to meet South African premier John Vorster and U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger in Pretoria. In an uncomfortable encounter, Smith was told that his dream of delaying black majority rule in Zimbabwe for “a thousand years” was over. Accommodation with the liberation movements would be necessary, both for the sake of the West’s legitimacy in the struggle against the Soviet Union and simply because Smith’s position-defending legalized racial domination by a quarter of a million white settlers over more than six million indigenous black people, of whom fifty thousand were in the process of taking up arms, at a time of unprecedented economic crisis-was untenable.
Smith resisted the inevitable with a mix of ineffectual concessions and heightened repression, but the power that South Africa held over imports and exports was decisive. Simultaneously, guerrilla war intensified and Smith could no longer count on Pretoria’s military backing. Three years after the ultimatum from Vorster and Kissinger, Smith and his conservative black allies were forced to the Lancaster House negotiating table in London, where Zimbabwe was born. Thanks to what Smith termed “the great betrayal” by South Africa and Britain, Zanu and its allies laid down their arms and swept the first democratic election in February 1980.
A quarter of a century after that fateful meeting in Pretoria, an analogous moment reappeared in the relations between Zimbabwe and South Africa.
In Zimbabwe, thirteen million black Zimbabweans suffer under the rule of an undemocratic, exploitative elite and of a repressive state machinery serving the class interests of a few tens of thousands of well-connected bureaucrats, military, and paramilitary leaders. And this is in the context of unprecedented economic crisis.
In South Africa, meanwhile, it is not difficult to posit a similar trajectory of material decline, ruling-party political illegitimacy, and ascendant opposition, as the rand crashed by more than 50 percent over a two-year period and trade union critiques of neoliberal policies harden. A May 2001 visit to Pretoria by U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell-a Kissinger protégé in many respects-was evidence of the Republican Party’s need to raise its own questionable international standing through at least one successful African democratization project.
In this context, South African president Thabo Mbeki took advantage of the temporary Western goodwill he enjoyed to offset the overall hemorrhaging of his country and continent. Along with Abdelaziz Bouteflika from Algeria and Olusegun Obasanjo from Nigeria, and supported by Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania, he established a geopolitical and economic project that came to be known as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), launched in Abuja, Nigeria on October 23, 2001. A key justification of NEPAD: “Democratic regimes that are committed to the protection of human rights, people-centred development and market-oriented economies are on the increase.”
The dubious conflation of free markets and free politics has become an Mbeki trademark. But the simple facts of electoral theft in Tanzania, Madagascar, and Zambia during 2001, and Congo-Brazzaville in March 2002, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo’s heavy-handed smashing of labor protest in 2002, and ongoing state repression in Algeria, have already cast doubt on these “democratic regimes.” Still, of all these, Zimbabwe would be the core challenge to Nepad’s legitimacy, in no small part because the symbolism of property-rights violations against white farmers had become, for the West and for many whites in South Africa, the central question.
In mid-2001, Mbeki told the British television show Hard Talk that he had tried persuading Mugabe to reform, but that the Zimbabwean ruler “didn’t listen to me.” By November, Mbeki publicly attributed Zimbabwe’s problems to “twenty years of economic policies” (with no details-e.g., was Mugabe’s failed 1990s IMF-blessed Economic Structural Adjustment Program included?). Likewise, the African National Congress (ANC) presidential spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama blamed the Zimbabwean economic mess on too many subsidies. Mbeki’s main envoy to Zimbabwe, deputy president Jacob Zuma, was cited by a report in the country’s most widely read newspaper in late 2001:
Zuma gave a brief lecture on Zimbabwean political economics: President Robert Mugabe’s government embarked on a huge social spending spree without analysing social needs, which caused inflation to spiral. “We do not want to follow the same route,” said Zuma. “We have a responsibility to more than just the sectarian needs of the union movement. We have to serve the broader population as a whole.”
Mugabe’s “huge social spending spree” was, in reality, a brief two-year period of rising education and health expenditures, followed by systematic cutbacks and deprivation under IMF and World Bank guidance. The needs of trade unionists were as little respected as were those of any other sector of society.
What, then, does Pretoria’s interpretation and handling of the Zimbabwe crisis tell us about the prospects for Southern Africa under the guidance of a continental subhegemon whose commitment to democracy is now unveiled as dubious at best?
Lessons from Exhausted Zimbabwean Nationalism
To misread Zimbabwe’s situation so blatantly and self-servingly was not new in Pretoria. As another example that gets to the heart of the exhausted nationalist contradiction, consider the case of former ANC Land Minister Derek Hanekom, who also used Zimbabwe as a whipping boy beginning in 1997. At that stage, land hunger was causing organic land invasions (not war-veteran induced) and farmworker strikes in several areas of rural Zimbabwe. In November, of that year, Mugabe announced that the Land Designation Act would finally be implemented.
For South Africa, the specter of large-scale land reform in Zimbabwe would have been terrible for investor confidence at a time when Mbeki’s own Washington-centric structural adjustment program-the misnamed Growth, Employment, and Redistribution strategy-was already failing noticeably. Hanekom was inclined periodically to clarify that, unlike Zimbabwe, South Africa was proceeding with land reform on a willing-seller/willing-buyer basis. Hence, no white South African farmer need fear the breakdown of rural law and order, as was beginning in Zimbabwe. Of course, nor would black South African farmers gain access to land stolen from them in living memory, given Hanekom’s emphatic endorsement of the same World Bank strategy that had failed so miserably to redistribute land in Zimbabwe.
Hanekom’s political mandate, in the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Program, was to redistribute 30 percent of the good land within the first five years. By using a willing-seller/willing-buyer approach augmented with a small grant and rural credit, Hanekom virtually copied the Zimbabwe Lancaster House model intact. He even used as a policy advisor the same World Bank economist (Robert Christiansen) who had insisted that Mugabe continue substituting credit programs for genuine land reform. Hanekom ensured that the state was inactive as a land redistribution agent. Because there were practically no black, small-scale farmers who could use the tiny $1,200 state grant to acquire land individually, and because the few cases where farmers grouped their subsidies together were not given sufficient state support and failed, Hanekom’s record of land redistribution was less than 1 percent after five years. He was demoted to the backbench in parliament in 1999.
Similar lessons about exhausted Zimbabwean nationalism were being learned through trade union mobilization. Post-liberation nationalism has been in a rapid decline in Southern Africa in the face of the emergence of trade unions into political opposition, beginning with the Zambian election in September 1991. Exactly a decade later, an apparent imminent split opened between the ANC and its Congress of South African Trade Union allies (in the wake of a two-day general strike against privatization). But in Zambia, although organized labor led a post-nationalist Movement for Multiparty Democracy that won a landslide vote against longtime president Kenneth Kaunda, it did so with U.S. support. Cursed at birth, once in power it endorsed and implemented another disastrous round of neoliberalism. In Botswana and Namibia, too, the most feared opposition parties are aligned with labor, but neither have sufficient resources-material or ideological-to withstand the barrage of bourgeois pressure that would come with the kind of multiclass electoral front required to oust the ruling nationalist parties.
Despite neoliberal shrinkage of the state in the semi-periphery of world capitalism, control of the state remains crucial for overall power politics, for social reproduction, and for capital accumulation. The electoral reconsolidation of Southern African nationalism is therefore seen as vital in Pretoria.
So as Zimbabwe began to implode during the late 1990s, and as Mugabe appeared to have squandered both political popularity and the legitimacy to govern, the ANC leadership must have looked north and observed the following:
a liberation movement which won resounding electoral victories against a terribly weak opposition, but under circumstances of worsening abstentionism by, and depoliticization of, the masses;
u concomitantly, that movement’s undeniable failure to deliver a better life for most of the country’s low-income people, while material inequality soared;
rising popular alienation from, and cynicism about, nationalist politicians, as the gulf between rulers and the ruled widened inexorably and as numerous cases of corruption and malgovernance were brought to public attention;
growing economic misery as neoliberal policies were tried and failed; and the sudden rise of an opposition movement based in the trade unions, quickly backed by most of civil society, the liberal petit-bourgeoisie and the independent media-potentially leading to the election of a new, post-nationalist government.
If all such bullets were fired in Zambia a decade earlier, if the last bullet was ultimately misfired in Zimbabwe, and if all but the last bullet were also loaded in South Africa, then it was logical for ANC leaders to look out from their headquarters at Albert Luthuli House in Johannesburg-and panic. At that point, around February 2000, two options emerged: hunker down and mindlessly defend the Zanu government against its critics; or move into a “constructive engagement” mode that might serve as the basis for an “honest broker” role on some future deal-making occasion. A third option-active support Zimbabwe’s social-justice movements, so as to ensure Mugabe authorized genuinely free and fair elections-presumably did not warrant attention; no doubt for fear that the last bullet would inspire South African trade unionists to do the same, and in the near future.
The ANC leadership moved from the first (all out support for Mugabe) to the second (“honest broker”) strategy. Attempts during 2000 by ANC parliamentary leader Tony Yengeni, ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe, and other nationalist ideologues to stitch together the old boys of Southern African liberation movements into a regional grouping, and Yengeni’s own June 2000 parliamentary electoral observation mission-characterized by blatant pro-Zanu utterances-came to naught. Reality finally crept up on Pretoria: apparently the key incident that facilitated the move was the overreach by war veterans in April 2001, when for the first time they started occupations not simply of white Zimbabweans’ rural farms, but also of white South Africans’ Harare factories.
An additional, related factor may have been intensifying complaints from (white) South African investors in Zimbabwe. When foreign exchange controls were tightened, South Africans were not able to repatriate their profits and dividends. Business pressure combined with increasingly shrill anti-Zimbabwe rhetoric from white opposition leaders Marthinus van Schalkwyk and Tony Leon had to be factored into the South African domestic political situation, even if the ANC-influenced electoral-observation delegation from the South Africa Federated Chambers of Commerce endorsed the outcome.
On the other side, there were a few South African progressives who regularly supported the oppressed in Zimbabwe, including media watchdogs and trade unionists and even a few renegade politicians such as Pan Africanist Congress member of parliament Patricia de Lille, who disputed her party’s support for Mugabe, declaring the presidential vote unfree and unfair. Likewise, the South African National NGO Coalition, with strong ties to the more progressive of NGOs in Zimbabwe, dropped out of Mbeki’s “multi-stakeholder” observer team because of the limited capacity to disagree.
But ANC bias for Mugabe was the main political phenomenon. Ruling-party members of parliament termed the flawed election “a credible expression of the will of the people” and an ANC statement declared that “The will of the people of Zimbabwe has prevailed.”
Meanwhile, because of political pressure from the ANC, the Congress of South African Trade Unions had veered firmly back into the ANC fold in January 2002, withdrawing a series of planned anti-privatization strikes. As a result, they ended up endorsing Mbeki’s strategy that Zimbabweans “unite” and “join hands,” and further appealed: “The international community has an obligation to assist Zimbabweans to emerge out of their political impasse”-while “deploring” the election and ongoing attacks on trade unions and human rights.
The South African Communist Party (SACP) called on “all progressive forces on all sides in Zimbabwe to pursue a strategic convergence around a shared vision of reconstruction and development.” The SACP concluded, “[t]he resilience and commitment displayed by the people of Zimbabwe has been critical in understanding the elections as legitimate.”
The Coordination of Social Struggle
What do these diverse observations ultimately tell us, both about Pretoria’s Zimbabwe dilemma and about the broader attempt represented by Nepad to polish, not abolish, the chains of what even Mbeki has termed “global apartheid”?
The parallels between the last vicious outbursts of Mugabe’s dictatorial regime and the demise of Rhodesian colonialism during the late 1970s are striking. In both cases, the South Africans have a strong hand given Zimbabwe’s desperation and dependency-although instead of crucial military supplies serving as the key lever as in the 1970s (China is Mugabe’s preferred supplier today), Pretoria now wields more control through trade and electricity sales. But like John Vorster, Thabo Mbeki certainly does not want a full-fledged opposition victory. Avoiding full-fledged democracy in Zimbabwe appears to be in the South African rulers’ narrow interests, then and now, if merely because of the danger of the demonstration effect.
Instead, Mbeki went to Harare immediately after Mugabe’s swearing-in as president, and asked for a government of national unity in which Tsvangirai might have been given an honorary vice presidency-as F. W. de Klerk was in Nelson Mandela’s cabinet after the 1994 election. Mugabe apparently declined, and Tsvangirai was smart enough to know how quickly such a move would have discredited himself in the eyes of his mass constituency. Desperately attempting to avoid both tougher Commonwealth sanctions against Zimbabwe, and hoping to shore up support for Nepad (from which Tony Blair had reportedly threatened to withdraw), Mbeki and Obasanjo both reluctantly agreed to the one-year Commonwealth suspension, a purely symbolic gesture.
But there is a larger and longer trajectory to consider. Vorster, Kissinger, and ultimately the British managers of Zimbabwe’s transition together hoped for a typical neocolonial solution, in which property rights would be the foundation of a new constitution, willing-seller/willing-buyer land policy would allow rural social relations to be undisturbed, and nationalization of productive economic activity would be kept to a minimum. A black government would, moreover, have greater capacity to quell labor unrest, strikes, and other challenges to law and order. If a new black consuming class were to be built, this was to occur primarily through an expanded civil service rather than via an assault on those who retained economic power. Traditional modes of patriarchy would remain intact, in no small part to ensure the ongoing reproduction of labor at a very low cost. A foreign debt load would soon crush any hopes for future economic autonomy. Intensification of the inherited export-led bias would ensure the steady supply of raw materials at ever-lower prices. Indeed, after most of these provisions characterized the primary British and French decolonization experiences in Africa during the 1950s-1960s, they were won in Zimbabwe, first at Lancaster House and then in practice over the subsequent years (until the point in late 1997 that Mugabe zigzagged back towards left-sounding economic strategies and forcible land acquisition).
This broader trajectory is what must be considered in the current conjuncture, when Africa is increasingly impoverished by virtually all international economic processes. From Pretoria’s contemporary perspective, instead of neocolonialism, a related version of neoliberal neonationalism (along the lines of Nepad) is required. But Zimbabwe is the fly in the ointment. While no doubt desiring that Zanu stay in power, Mbeki needs his neighbor to act more politely, to refrain from torturing journalists and opposition party members, to speed up internal Zanu succession from the seventy-eight-year-old Mugabe (possibly to the Zanu parliamentary leader Emmerson Mnangagwa), and to begin repayment on arrears to the Bretton Woods Institutions (which by March 2002 exceeded U.S. $1.3 billion).
But a crucial difference between the two epochs remains obvious: political dynamics associated with genuine popular solidarity. The romance of Southern African liberation struggles made it logical for radical activists across the world to intensify pressure first for the liberation of the Portuguese colonies Angola and Mozambique (1975), then the former British colony Zimbabwe (1980), then Namibia (1990), and finally South Africa (1994). That kind of solidarity was colony specific. Something more universal has subsequently emerged: North-South unity of progressive activists fighting a common scourge, international neoliberalism. What is most needed, in this new context, is a set of processes that help identify and implement popular solidarity.
Identifying the material conditions that link the struggles of Zimbabwean democrats and social justice activists across the world is not difficult. An associate of the Johannesburg Institute for Global Dialogue, Rok Ajulu, gave futile advice to Pretoria’s Department of Foreign Affairs in October 2001, pinpointing neoliberalism’s false claims:
Authoritarian governance has, over the last decade, been exacerbated by the impact of globalisation and attendant market fundamentalism, namely, the idea that economic justice must be reduced to equality of opportunity and expressed through the market. The contemporary march of capital all over the world in search of consumers and markets has visited devastation in many countries. While on the one hand, economic globalisation has unleashed productive forces throughout the world, on the other it has engendered fragmentation and marginalisation. This has inevitably led to a declining resource base, triggering unmitigated contestation and conflicts over control of resources. Not surprisingly, the contemporary era of globalisation has been marked by fratricidal wars all over the continent.
Zimbabwe has been no exception, and it is against this background that the current crisis must be understood. At a broader level, the Zimbabwe crisis raises a much more fundamental and critical question and that is: how do countries at the marginal pole of the global economy engage the forces of globalisation, and what implications do such strategies suggest for democratic governance?…
The so-called ‘Zimbabwe Crisis’ is essentially the failure of a kleptocratic elite to respond constructively to generalised economic crisis.
At the fore of those who would repel both the kleptocratic elite and the generalized economic crisis associated with globalization are progressive civil society groups. From this emerging quarter have come mass demonstrations, national stayaways, surgical strikes, lawsuits, lobbying and conference resolutions, that challenge the neoliberal consensus-in Mbeki’s South Africa, in Zimbabwe, and indeed across the world. Reliance on more traditional forms of organization has proven to be a trap.
As one example, what had flowered within the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions in February 1999 as the Working People’s Convention-leading to high expectations of a Workers’ Party-quickly degenerated, within a year, into yet another motley post-nationalist, neoliberal political grouping, like so many other second-generation ruling parties.
Notwithstanding inputs by International Socialist Organization activists and a small but active support network of radical intellectuals, the MDC’s neoliberal bias disqualified it from the solidarity that had once seemed so obvious. Instead, it is up to groups like the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, Zimbabwe Urban Residents Association, Zimbabwe Council of Churches, and umbrella groups like the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development, Crisis in Zimbabwe, National Constitutional Assembly, Civic Alliance for Social and Economic Progress, and many, many others, to force the pace of democratic and redistributive change.
What, then, are the strategies for linking activists who seek post-nationalist and post-neoliberal politics? Across Africa, such solidarity is being discussed in relation to concrete and potential linkages between social justice movements of the North and South. An African People’s Consensus campaign was catalyzed by Jubilee anti-debt, church, labor, NGO, and community groups in Lusaka in May 1999 and then taken forward at a major Dakar gathering in December 2000. For the first time, this campaign linked progressive grassroots and shopfloor activists from English, French, and Portuguese-speaking areas of Africa. And, while Thabo Mbeki was gathering international elite forces for Nepad and only later checking in on African capitals, a Southern African People’s Solidarity Network, headquartered in Cape Town, held regular workshops across the region to generate analysis, establish positions, and coordinate campaigns against neoliberalism and political repression.
Inevitably, Nepad itself would be subject to criticism by progressives across Africa. According to a report on the main commission considering the issue at the Africa Social Forum meeting in Mali in January, 2002, “Most participants in the group rejected Nepad and suggested we should come up with alternatives. [It was] recommended [that we] reject the neo-liberal framework in which Nepad was drafted and discuss alternative models for development.” A fortnight later, at a New York meeting of the most active African NGOs in international financial matters, “apprehension” was expressed over “the prominence given to the Nepad…We oppose any attempt to use it to deepen Africa’s external dependence and the exploitation of its resources.”
Generally, in contrast to Nepad, these networks of social justice movements push for “deglobalization” of their nation states, and for greater regional cooperation, with the aim of reorienting domestic political economies away from the financial and trade circuits which have been so disempowering these past two decades. Ultimately a “rights-based” philosophy is emerging that stresses decommodification, women’s rights, and social-environmental harmony. The largest deficits are in the spheres of democracy and basic needs, particularly in relation to rural women, and particularly in areas whose production basis should be easy to expand-rural water/sanitation and small-scale irrigation systems, electricity, public works-without debilitating import requirements.
These are the directions for the national political-economic transformation needed for Zimbabwe and other marginalized African countries to prosper. At the regional and international levels, reduced pressure from neoliberal actors and markets, from Pretoria to Washington, will also be vital. Fortunately, the global-scale agenda is being elaborated through initiatives ranging from mass protests to more surgical activist campaigns, such as the diverse but growing slavery/colonialism reparations movement, or the World Bank Bonds Boycott, or the successful October 2000 campaign against IMF- and World Bank-imposed user-fees in health and education programs. Regional activists like the Southern African People’s Solidarity Network have much more work ahead to identify pressure points that would lesson Mbeki’s Nepad impetus.
And finally, what lessons does this confusing period in Zimbabwe’s post-independence experience provide to other third world progressive social forces? The appropriate normative formula is not the dismissal of strengthened state sovereignty as a short-medium term objective. Instead, aligned simultaneously with international popular struggle against Washington and transnational corporate headquarters, the goal must be the rekindling of nation state sovereignty, but under fundamentally different assumptions about power relations and development objectives than during the nationalist epoch. Such power relations can probably only be changed sufficiently if the masses of oppressed people contest those comprador forces who run virtually all their nation states. To do so will require the articulation of a multifaceted post-nationalist political program, grounded in post-neoliberal economic formulations.
Zimbabwe is obviously not the only situation in which to consider the challenge associated with this strategy, though it is certainly one of the crucial test-cases in coming months and years. If it is possible to generalize, the most exciting social struggles in contemporary Africa are being fought, on the one hand, by advocates of progressive politics and basic-needs development within formal and informal organizations-based in workforces, communities, women’s and youth groups, environmental clubs, and churches-and on the other, by nationalist political parties that still rule most states. These nationalist regimes most often pursue neoliberal policies, yet are still capable of deploying radical rhetoric. South Africa, too, has much to offer by way of identifying issues and establishing the basis for popular protest. The synthesis of social struggles in South Africa and Zimbabwe, Africa’s two most proletarianized countries, is long overdue.
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PATRICK BOND teaches political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is a research associate at the Alternative Information and Development Center <www.aidc.org.za>. He is author of Against Global Apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2001) and coauthored, with Masimba Manyanya, of Zimbabwe’s Plunge: Exhausted Nationalism, Neoliberalism and the Search for Social Justice (Lawrenceville, N.J.: Africa World Press and London: Merlin Press, 2002).
All material copyright ©2002 by Monthly Review
Monthly Review.February 2002, Volume 53, Number 9
New Crusade: The U.S. War on Terrorism
by Rahul Mahajan
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This essay was written for Rahul Mahajan’s new book, The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism scheduled for publication in March 2002, by Monthly Review Press.
The world changed on September 11. That’s not just media hype. The way some historians refer to 1914-1991 as the “short twentieth century,” many are now calling September 11, 2001, the real beginning of the twenty-first century. It’s too early to know whether that assessment will be borne out, but it cannot simply be dismissed.
The attacks of September 11 forever ended the idea that the United States could somehow float above the rest of the earth, of it and not of it at the same time. Americans can no longer foster the illusion that what happens to the rest of the world doesn’t affect them. It is more crucial than ever that we understand what kind of world we are living in, and what the United States has done to make it what it is.
It is not enough to say that the attacks were crimes against humanity, though they were, and that terrorism like that must be stopped, though it must. It’s also not enough to say that the hijackers were religious extremists, though they were. One must also understand the role the United States has played in promoting religious extremism, directly, as in the Afghan jihad, and indirectly, by destroying all alternatives through its ceaseless attacks on the left and by pursuing policies that foster resentment and anger.
It is of particular importance to understand its newest policies, the so-called “war on terrorism.” Of the many ways to approach it, perhaps the most straightforward is to examine the official view of the war on terrorism that has emerged and is being pushed on the public, and refuting it point by point. These are some of the main myths about that war:
The attack was like Pearl Harbor, and therefore, as in the Second World War, we had to declare war or risk destruction. The truth is that Pearl Harbor was an attack by a powerful, expansionist state that had the capacity to subjugate all of East Asia. The attacks of September 11 were committed by nineteen men, part of a series of networks that has a few thousand hard-core militants, with access to modest financial resources. Since they were hardly an immediate, all-encompassing threat, options other than war could have been explored.
This was an attack on freedom. Whatever considerations exist in the mind of Osama bin Laden or members of his network, his recently broadcast statements contain no mention of any resentment of American democracy, freedom, or the role of women. They mention specific grievances regarding U.S. policy in the Middle East: the sanctions on Iraq, maintained largely by the United States, which have killed over one million civilians; material and political support for Israel’s military occupation of Palestine and its frequent military attacks, carried out with Americ7an weapons, on practically unarmed Palestinians; and U.S. military occupation of the Gulf and support for corrupt regimes that serve the interests of U.S. corporations before those of the people. The terrorists’ own vision for the states of the Middle East is, if imaginable, even more horrific than the current reality, and would presumably involve even greater limits on freedom than are already in place. Their recruiting points, however, the issues that make them potentially relevant as a political force, have to do with U.S. domination of the region, not with the internal organization of American society.
You’re with us or you’re with the terrorists. This polarization, foisted on the world to frighten possible dissenters from America’s course of action, is the logic of tyranny, even of extermination. Anti-war protesters who condemn the terrorist attacks of September 11 along with the criminal acts of the United States in Afghanistan, and countries that do the same, don’t fit into this scheme, and certainly don’t deserve to be tarred with the same brush as the terrorists.
The war on Afghanistan was self-defense. In fact, people in Afghanistan at the time of the attack had no way of menacing the United States from afar since they have no ICBMs or long-range bombers. Someone in Afghanistan intending to attack the United States had to get there first. If there was an imminent threat, it was from terrorists already in the United States or in Europe. Thus, there was enough time to seek Security Council authorization, which is required unless one is attacking the source of an imminent threat. Instead, the U.S. deliberately chose not to seek it. The four weeks between the attack and the war that passed virtually without incident are proof that there was no immediate, overwhelming need for military action, a fundamental requirement of any claim to act in self-defense.
The Bush administration turned away from its emerging unilateralism (pulling out of the Kyoto protocols, sabotaging the ABM treaty with Russia, etc.) to a new multilateralism. This assumes that “multilateralism” means first pre-determining one’s agenda, then attempting to browbeat or bribe other countries into agreement or acquiescence. True multilateralism would involve setting up international structures that are democratic, transparent, and accountable to the people, institutions, and governments of the world and abiding by the decisions of these authorities whether favorable or not. The United States has consistently set itself against any such path. In this case, the United States refused even to seek the authority from the appropriate body in this case, the Security Council. This even though the United States could likely have gained its acquiescence by use of its standard methods of threats and bribery. It seems that the United States wishes very firmly and deliberately to claim the right of unilateral aggression.
There were four weeks of restraint as the Bush administration tried a diplomatic solution to the problem. Much of the “restraint” was simply to find time to move troops and materiel into place and to browbeat reluctant countries like Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan into providing staging areas and overflight rights. Also, there was real concern about destabilizing many allied governments in the Islamic world. No diplomatic solution was tried; the administration line was consistently “no negotiations.” They made demands no sovereign country could accept; free access of the U.S. military to sensitive sites, plus the right arbitrarily to demand that an unspecified group of people be “turned over.” They also refused to present the Taliban with evidence. In spite of all this, the Taliban was willing to negotiate delivery to a neutral third party. In fact, a deal had been worked out to have bin Laden tried in Pakistan by a tribunal which would then decide whether or not to turn him over to the United States. The U.S. government didn’t even want that. Its “diplomacy” was deliberately designed to lead to war.
Revenge was the motive for the war. Although many people felt an emotional desire for revenge, the two principal reasons for war cannot be described in these terms. The first reason is that of imperial credibility. The United States is an empire, of a different kind from the Roman or the British, but still one that holds sway over much of the world through a combination of economic and military domination. In order to remain in power, an empire must show no weakness; it must crush any threat to its control. The last half of the Vietnam War, after the U.S. government realized there would be no political victory, was fought for credibility to show other countries the price of defiance. The need was all the greater with such a devastating attack in the center of imperial power. The second reason is leverage over the oil and natural gas of Central Asia. Afghanistan is the one country that the United States could control through which a pipeline can be run from those reserves to the Indian Ocean, for the rapidly growing Asian market. The war would provide an opportunity for that, as well as a chance to set up military bases in the former Soviet republics of the region.
The war was a humanitarian intervention as well as an attempt to get the terrorists. The food drops were mere military propaganda-enough food for 37,500 people a day, if it was distributed, which it couldn’t be-and they accompanied bombing that disrupted aid programs designed to feed millions. The lack of humanitarian intent was shown later by the U.S. government’s ignoring a call by aid agencies and U.N. officials for a bombing halt so enough food could be trucked in. UNICEF estimated that because of the disruption of aid caused by the bombing and earlier the threat of bombing, as many as 100,000 more children might die in the winter. After the withdrawal of the Taliban, as much of the country collapsed into chaos and bandits started looting aid stores, the United States held up for almost a month proposals for a peacekeeping force, and didn’t even pressure the Northern Alliance to restore order and facilitate aid, as aid workers were unable to reach at least one million people in desperate need.
The war was conducted by surgical strikes, minimizing collateral damage. There’s no such thing as a surgical strike-the most precise weapons miss 20-30 percent of the time, and only 60 percent of the ordnance dropped on Afghanistan has been precision-guided. The United States has also used such devastating weapons as cluster bombs and daisy cutters, which by their nature are indiscriminate, so “collateral damage” cannot be controlled. Also, U.S. bombing campaigns generally deliberately target civilian infrastructure. In this case, there are reports of power stations, telephone exchanges, and even a major dam being destroyed, with potentially catastrophic effects. Totaling up all reports, including those from the foreign press, Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire estimated the number of civilians killed directly by bombs and bullets as of December 6, 2001 to be 3,767, a number he feels is, if anything, an underestimation. This is already greater than the number of innocents who died in the attacks on September 11, and it doesn’t include the likely greater number who have died of indirect effects.
It was a war of civilization against barbarism. As if the above weren’t enough, at the siege of Kunduz, where thousands of foreign fighters were trapped along with many thousands of Afghan Taliban fighters, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did everything short of calling for the foreigners to be killed. Later, a group of foreigners imprisoned in a fort and convinced they were going to be killed staged a rebellion. The fort was bombed and strafed by U.S. planes, even though later reports indicate that perhaps hundreds of the prisoners had their hands bound-this is almost certainly a war crime. At the same time, government officials and media pundits began calling for Osama bin Laden to be killed even if he surrendered.
It was a war against terrorism. The Northern Alliance, which the United States has put in power over most of Afghanistan, is a bunch of terrorists, known for torture, killing civilians, and raping women. The United States harbors many terrorists, like Emanuel Constant of Haiti, a number of Cubans, and Henry Kissinger. It still runs its own terrorist training camp, the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. It still supports Israeli state terrorism against the Palestinians. And it is committing state terrorism itself, by recklessly endangering civilians for its political goals.
The administration’s primary motive has been to ensure the security of Americans. The war has greatly increased the risks to Americans. By creating a tremendous pool of anger in the Muslim world, it is the ultimate recruiting vehicle for bin Laden, who is seen as a hero by many now, though he was ignored before. It was not even the best way to catch bin Laden, as pointed out above. Other measures decrease security as well. Calls to increase the scope of CIA operations and involve them more with criminals and terrorists seem to ignore the fact that it was just such CIA meddling that helped create the international Islamic extremist movement. Bush administration calls to sell weapons to countries that violate human rights destabilize the world. And missile defense, which would not have helped at all with an attack like this even if it was technically feasible, threatens to set off a new arms race. On the homefront, corporate profits and the ideology of free enterprise were more important to the administration than increasing security through the nationalization of airport security personnel, even though corporations have been found to be using convicted felons and paying barely over minimum wage, thus ensuring low motivation and incompetence. The profits of Bayer, the maker of Cipro, used to treat anthrax, were more important than ensuring a reasonably-priced supply of Cipro for people in case of a large-scale anthrax attack.
The attacks of September 11 united us together in a noble enterprise. Although many people did come together, the Bush administration tried to use that idea of unity to subvert democracy, even calling for Congress to give the president trade promotion authority (the right to present trade agreements “as is,” so Congress can approve or disapprove but not amend) as part of the “war on terrorism.” In the end, there was no unity; airline corporations were bailed out, while laid-off airline employees got nothing; the Republicans tried to give corporations a huge tax break in their economic stimulus package, while no provision was made to counter surging unemployment; and legislative aides on Capitol Hill got vastly better treatment during the anthrax scare than did postal workers.
This whole enterprise has also shed light on some longer-standing myths we hold about ourselves:
All sectors of society have an abiding commitment to civil liberties and due process of law. The USA PATRIOT Act allows law enforcement far greater power, including the right to search your house without notification. It can effectively deprive noncitizens of basic rights like habeas corpus. Attorney-client privilege has been breached in some cases. Many people have been held incommunicado for months in the ongoing investigation. Bush has even authorized the use of military tribunals, which can use secret evidence, convict on very low standards of evidence, and deny a defendant the right to choose a lawyer. The FBI has even considered sending detainees to other countries to be tortured. Although there is significant opposition to these threats to civil liberties and due process, it is not as yet very widespread.
We’ve made tremendous progress on racism. A majority of Americans now approve of racial profiling. There was a huge upsurge in hate crimes after September 11. And many people have openly expressed appallingly racist and even genocidal sentiments. Calls to nuke entire countries have been made. Although there is now a small group of (mostly younger) people largely free of racist sentiments, for the majority, the progress has mainly been in learning how to hide their racism.
We honor dissent and the right to free speech. Public discourse was characterized by an extreme overreaction to the small number of people who spoke against war. Several journalists have been fired, and many people subjected to death threats and other harassment. A right-wing foundation has brought out a report criticizing academia for not rallying round the flag even though the number of dissenters in academia were few and far between. With the constant demonization of dissent and misrepresentation of dissenters by elite institutions, it’s not surprising that much of the populace has gone the same way-a recent CBS/NYT poll found 38 percent saying anti-war “marches and rallies” should not be allowed.
We have the freest and most independent media in the world. From the first hours, the mass media outdid any other sector of society in calling for blood. They showed, as they always do in wartime, a tremendous subservience to the government, with almost no dissenting points of view expressed. When they did criticize government officials, it was almost always for not bombing enough. Most seriously, there was tremendous self-censorship. Numerous critical issues were covered hardly at all: the fact that a deal for extradition of bin Laden had been worked out; the fact that the United States had planned war against Afghanistan since before the attacks; the connection of oil with the war; and more. Worst was the persistent lack of attention to civilian casualties. Only a few incidents were even reported, and those were dismissed by constant repetition of Pentagon claims that they were “propaganda.” As a result, many think that a handful of civilians were killed, whereas the truth is that thousands were. The government, not satisfied with this level of subservience, imposed unprecedented restrictions, not allowing any press pools until the end of November, allowing virtually no interviews with soldiers, and keeping the press from reporting even well known information. Some of the foreign press, whose reportage could not be controlled by such means, was treated more harshly. The U.S. government asked Qatar to censor al-Jazeera and later bombed its office in Kabul, as well as bombing civilian Afghan radio repeatedly, a war crime. The U.S. press also ridiculed and misrepresented the anti-war movement, insinuating that it had only slogans, not analysis; that it did not condemn the terrorist attacks; and, worst, that its solution was to “do nothing.”
In fact, that was perhaps the biggest myth of the whole enterprise-that there was no other alternative, so we must either wreak destruction on Afghanistan or do nothing. Repeated efforts by the anti-war movement to indicate the foundations of a real solution-a genuine international investigation based on cooperation with not just governments but people, based on a dramatic change in U.S. policy in the Middle East to win over the “hearts and minds” of people there-were to little avail.
These myths made a real difference. Although the majority of Americans have supported the supposed war on terrorism, their support has been based on a misunderstanding of how the war was being conducted, how much “collateral damage” there was, and what alternatives were possible.
To have any chance of dealing with the problem of international terrorism, we must change the role of the United States in the world. In an essay entitled “The War Comes Home,” published on the Web the day after the attacks, I wrote, “The main practitioner of attacks that either deliberately target civilians, or are so indiscriminate that it makes no difference, is no shadowy Middle Eastern terrorist, but our own government.” These attacks run the gamut from direct bombing, as the United States has done in Iraq (on numerous occasions), Serbia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and other countries in the past ten years alone, to denying people access to the basic necessities of life. From the sanctions on Iraq, which have for years involved denying basic medical care to millions, to efforts to keep South Africa from providing affordable AIDS drugs to its citizens, the United States has killed countless civilians.
There is always a justification, as there is for any killing anywhere; for the sanctions on Iraq, it is the security of Iraq’s neighbors, and for denying AIDS drugs, it is the need to maintain corporate profits. For the terrorists who attacked on September 11, it was the need to oppose U.S.-sanctioned murder and oppression in their part of the world. If “terrorism” is to be given an unbiased definition, it must involve the killing of noncombatants for political purposes, no matter who does it or what noble goals they proclaim.
When Madeleine Albright, then Secretary of State, went on 60 Minutes on May 12, 1996, Lesley Stahl said, referring to the sanctions on Iraq, “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright, not contesting the figure, replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price-we think the price is worth it.” That is the philosophy of terrorism. The people who crashed planes into the World Trade Center killed almost four thousand people because they resented U.S. domination of the Middle East. The U.S. government helped to kill a half million children in Iraq in order to preserve that domination.
It is the common fashion to dismiss such juxtapositions as claims of “moral equivalence.” In fact, that concept is irrelevant. Whether or not the U.S. government is “morally equivalent” to the terrorists, whatever that might mean, the point is that citizens of the United States have an obligation to oppose its crimes even before they would oppose the crimes of others over whom they have less control.
This does not mean efforts should not be made to stop terrorists of the ilk of Osama bin Laden. It simply means that terrorist efforts to stop them should not be made. The war on Afghanistan has been even worse-terrorist in its methods and designed primarily to project U.S. imperial power, not to stop the terrorists.
If Albright appears on 60 Minutes again, this time she should be asked whether she thinks U.S. policy goals in the Middle East were also worth the deaths of thousands of Americans.
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RAHUL MAHAJAN is a graduate student in physics at the University of Texas at Austin and an antiwar activist, serving on the national boards of Peace Action and the Education for Peace in Iraq Center. His writings on foreign policy and globalization have been published in newspapers like the Baltimore Sun and Houston Chronicle, and alternative publications like Extra! and the Texas Observer. He is a member of the Nowar Collective www.nowarcollective.com.
All material © copyright 2002 Monthly Review