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Arabica Robusta

The right to demonstrate is the sign of a healthy democracy - And yet it send... - 0 views

dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/...any-kids-to-years-in-detention

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 21 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 21 Nov 10
     
    conveniently, you no longer need to commit a crime to be convicted and sent to prison, you only need to be there when a crowd goes crazy, and you are deemed as guilty as what the worst offender does (the very one who is likely to get away with it). The right to demonstrate in this country, as His Honour Judge said many times, is the mark of a great democracy. But if it goes beyond the peaceful demonstration, it leads straight to prison for a very long time. So you can easily find yourself with a sentence higher than any real criminal will ever get, because these are deterrent sentences, the sign of a great democracy.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka News : Issue 527: Popular organising: The victory of dignity over fear - 0 views

pambazuka.org/527

social movements intervention human rights development corporate africa industry pambazuka

shared by Arabica Robusta on 22 May 11 - No Cached
  • This new mode of struggle substituted the notion of armed struggle with that of popular struggle. It stopped thinking of struggle as something waged by professional fighters, guerrillas, with the people cheering from the stands, but as a movement with ordinary people as its key participants. The potential of popular struggle lay in sheer numbers, guided by a new imagination and new methods of struggle.
  • Around that same time, another event occurred. It too signaled a fresh opening. This was the Palestinian Intifada. What is known as the First Intifada had a Soweto-like potential. Like the children of Soweto, Palestinian children too dared to face bullets with no more than stones. Faced with feuding liberation movements, each claiming to be a sole representative of the oppressed, the youth of the Intifada called for a wider unity. Even though the Egyptian Revolution has come more than three decades after Soweto, it evokes the memory of Soweto in a powerful way. This is for at least two reasons.
  • First, like Soweto in 1976, Tahrir Square in 2011 too shed a generation’s romance with violence.
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  • The second resemblance between Soweto and Tahrir Square was on the question of unity.
  • Tahrir Square innovated a new politics. It shed the language of religion in politics, but it did so without embracing a militant secularism that would totally outlaw religion in the public sphere. It thus called for a broader tolerance of cultural identities in the public sphere, one that would include both secular and religious tendencies.
  • Dubbed by mainstream media the Arab Spring (though it started in December), the wave of protests started in Tunisia spread like wildfire through Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and on to Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia (briefly, or so it seems) Syria and Libya. The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings and the ousting of their dictators have given a distinctive flavour of exhilaration and hope to the latest World Social Forum held in Dakar from 6 to 11 February.
  • Thirty-four civil society and movements activists from 13 countries and three continents joined the conveners of the African Social Forum. We were hosted by the Union Générale de Travailleurs de Tunisie (UGTT), the largest Tunisian trade union, whose role was instrumental in the success of the Tunisian intifada. What follows are some reflections inspired by my participation in the solidarity caravan.
  • The demonstration that passed in front of the National Theatre paraded in front of us and continued towards the Kasbah where it settled into what became the Kasbah 3 sit-in. It followed the successful Kasbah 1 and 2 that called for the change of the interim governments that followed president Ben Ali’s departure still tainted by members of the previous regime. As I write critical reflections are being developed of the disappointing outcome of Kasbah 3 which demanded the exclusion of the current Interior Minister from the provisional government.
  • Those receding images of the demonstration, commented by the Tunisian friend with us on the bus, told an important story, despite differences, challenges and the titanic tasks demanding fulfilment, the utmost joy felt by all in Tunisia is that talking politics is indeed fine, that expressing one’s ideas, negotiating them, discussing them, and demonstrating for them is not repressed any more.
  • The humiliated dignity of a vegetable seller whose livelihood was destroyed by abusive public officials, was every youth’s and then every Tunisian’s humiliated dignity. His pain was everyone’s pain and the irresistible empathy that his tragic protest generated produced the final outburst which escalated and could not be stopped. The repeated violation of the youth’s sense of autonomy, self-respect and integrity sparked the revolution. When such horizons of personal representations are denied and when lying to oneself about the real conditions of one’s existence becomes impossible the trauma is such that even dying is acceptable and burning oneself up a viable protest.
  • We also discussed the role of media and technology in supporting activists. Facebook was in everyone’s mouth, Al Jazeera’s journalists were praised for their courage and dedication (though, some told us, ‘in the long run we can’t forget they are islamists’). But while nobody denied the supportive role of new social media, the general understanding was that though they helped they were certainly not the determining factors pace the international media (perhaps too eager to stress how western technology democratizes the world). Activists in Sidi Bouzid told us something else. They explained to us their sophisticated street strategy. They used cellphones to create zones of pressure and release in lightening-fast succession to disorient the police who ended up running around the town like headless chicken. It was the knowledge of the town down to its tiniest alleyways that won the control of the city, no Facebook or other social media could have been fast enough, they stress, or provided the strength and the courage necessary.
  • A key challenge encountered by many in representing the Tunisian revolution (and more broadly the unrest sweeping through the whole region) has been constituted by banal stereotyping and versions of negative and positive Orientalism. The awed surprise that welcomed the events of Tunisia, and soon after Egypt and the others, was constructed on the widespread misconception about the inability of the people of the MENA region to affect real change and be agent of their own emancipation from oppressive rule. Such misrepresentation is based on limited knowledge and preconceptions, political propaganda, Orientalism and outright racism.
  • Freedom from the dictator, from oppressive and exploitative political and economic systems, from ideological hegemonies, from shrewd political manipulations, from the embodiment of class, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality. There are other ways in which their demands are framed, other discourses, other semantic horizons in which their aspirations are articulated. There is one for each interlocutor and context (as it is the case in complex revolutionary networks of ideas, actors and values).
  • Some suggested that the youth in Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid are less politically wise than the youth in Tunis. Some suggested that decades of marginalisation from the rest of the country and economic and political privileges in the capital have generated profound social and human imbalances. One consequence of these imbalances, it is alleged by some of our Tunisian interlocutors, is that the youth in the most deprived areas are easier to manipulate and subject to launch themselves in unrealistic and unsophisticated political actions, like the hunger strike demanding immediate jobs to all unemployed the chances of success of which are nil beyond the actual will of local and national authorities. Others observed that the revolution has to avoid reproducing among allies the marginalisation and the elitism of wider society in order to avoid creating an unbridgeable gap between activists on the basis of alleged political and cultural sophistication defined in exclusive terms.
  • While the youth in Kasserine stressed repeatedly they did not want to be implicated in political battles played on their behalf by people who they did not trust, in Tunis a member of the student union said instead that they were struggling to ignite a ‘deep social transition’ aimed at ushering ‘a world devoid of capitalism and classism’. He added ‘we revolted against an economic pattern because we want Tunisia for all Tunisians’.
  • A member of the student union in Tunis regarding practices of change commented that as union ‘we distinguish political work from union work.’ Further, he said ‘We want to have a political party for the working class’, it would be one of the 51 registered political parties in Tunisia.
  • The role of women in developing, articulating and practising methodologies of change has been greatly influential in the revolution. An activist in Tunis expressed in the following way her take on change and practices of transformation ‘we are for the internationalisation of the revolutions to fight against savage capitalism’.
  • According to some activists, the international agents and institutions of capitalism and imperialism are trying to destroy the Tunisian revolution and set back the advances it has inspired in Tunisia and in the whole MENA region.
  • There are also internal challenges to the revolutionary movement. There exist tensions between those who want to go back to normality and those who want to fight for a full victory of the revolution and the achievement of a larger set of victories. Their opponents suggest instead that the time has come to revert to representative politics through free and fair elections and the work of the constituent assembly.
  • This question raises issues of global solidarity, development and political models and sets the ground for the cooperation between activists from the four corners of the planet. The joint Secretary General of the UGTT, told us in Tunis about the vision and values of the UGTT: ‘UGTT’s cultural tradition is European and socialist which we influence with new blood.’ He further said that to achieve the international goals of Tunisian workers it is important to establish stronger ties with the international union movement and with unions in South America, South Africa and elsewhere in the global South.
  • Messy as such trial and error is, complex as the shifting allegiances and alliances, chaotic as the multiplication of strategies, ideologies, ideas, visions, desires, aspirations, this is what democracy looks like and this process promises the most inspiring outcomes.
  • At the same time younger activists than the seasoned unionists and human rights activists are developing visions of better futures and are learning politics the hard way after decades of silencing, terror, repression, fear and hopelessness. They submit their demands to mistrusted government institutions, they understand their failure in generating economic development and political accountability, they scale up, down, sideways their demands and their strategies, they win and lose and they go back to the drawing board.
  • While listening to the praises many articulate of Bourguiba’s policies on education, one had the impression that Tunisian learning achievements are now entering a new phase outside of the classrooms of indoctrination and pedantic learning of useless ‘knowledge’, as doubtlessly illustrated by the high unemployment rate of graduates, and into the streets of relations and struggles, negotiations, differences, mediations. Knowledge, politics, culture, religion, dignity and aspirations, eventually met in the streets, emancipated by schools like jail, freed of the hopelessness of trust in something that is handed by a gracious government and empowered by success and failure, by action and thought, by deliberation and struggle, by trial and error by knowledge as it is, messy, dirty and bloody at times, rather than the sanitized and delusional knowledge imparted by any (more or less) tyrannical regime.
  • While heartfelt feelings about the issues addressed are here out of the question, the knowledge of the conflicts at stake might be both limited and oversimplified in symbolic codes that are not more than projections of the foreign observer which are then reproduced in a solipsistic space that while pretending dialogue, indeed reproduces a monologue of images that are selected on the basis of specific interests and emotional sensibilities fully rooted in the eyes of the beholder.
  • Of course, this might well be one further projection in which the assumption is the imbalance of power between ‘us’ and ‘them’ which I think, though, is illustrated if by nothing else by the fact that after the encounters ‘they’ went back to their lives of unemployed or bereaved family members and friends and ‘we’ moved on to our plush hotel and to our drinks by the poolside.
  • Participating in a solidarity tour to Tunisia, Amanda Sebestyen finds a country of dedicated organisers, heights of suffering and generosity, and a dangerous neglect of the deprived heartlands where the uprising was born.
  • Our solidarity tour – organised for the World Social Forum and hosted by the Tunisian League of Human Rights and the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) – arrived in Tunisia midway between Stephen Twigg and Angelina Jolie. The MP was travelling (tourist class, I was pleased to note) with a delegation from the Westminster Foundation for Democracy; the actor, with her entourage, went to the refugee camps on the Libyan border, of which the Tunisian people are immensely – and so justly – proud.
  • When refugees from Libya arrived in the south of Tunisia there was such an immense burst of solidarity that there are still shortages of medicines and staple foods because people bought them to send south when they heard the refugees needed them. Each refugee that arrived – and there were 140,000 in the first week – was greeted by local people with a bottle of water, some bread and some coffee , giving them dignity. The International Red Cross said they had never seen anything like it.'
  • In return, when Tunisians travel to Europe (not fleeing their revolution but taking up one of its new freedoms, escaping the draconian restrictions imposed by Ben Ali and Ghaddafi in return for bribes from Fortress Europe), the response of the EU is to threaten repatriation.
  • A new Tunisian Party of Labour aims to build democracy without falling into neoliberalism or religious bigotry.
  • On the second night, young people initiated rolling protests though the different parts of town. A new tactic was to use mobile phones to call on their friends to make a distraction, and draw police away when they got too heavy in any one place. On the third day the governor fled. For 13 days the uprising was in Sidi Bou Zid alone, then it spread through the region via our union branches: Bouzeyen, Regueb, Jilma; and then over to the town of Kasserine.'
  • 'I don't actually agree that the Internet was the heart of the revolution. The heart of the revolution was the willpower of all the Tunisian people, not just the young.'
  • Someone looking like an El Greco painting, tall and thin with huge eyes, makes his way with grace on crutches to the stage. His leg has been lost... Why are British soldiers being given the best prosthetics and medical help, when these nonviolent heroes – of a democracy we all claim to support – are being left to cope on their own?
  • Importantly, 80 per cent of development funds for this year are now to be allocated to the long-forgotten interior regions. Unfortunately at Kasserine the ministers stayed for only three hours, spending part of their time with officials from the former regime.
  • policemen have virtually disappeared since local people stopped paying bribes. Yet I walked around many times at night and the town was utterly safe; a taxi driver explained how everyone looks out for everyone else. People are more philosophical here. 'The new policemen we can trust are still in the barracks being trained, and it takes time to track down the bad old ones and put them in prison.'
  • 'In the course of this revolution I've discovered my country. I've travelled from the mountains to the desert, I've seen parts of my own home town Tunis which I never knew existed... We're discovering our culture; we're discovering the picturesque beaches and extraordinary landscapes which were reserved either for tourists or for "a certain person"....'
  • Sovereignty is the relation of the state to other states, to external powers, whereas self‐determination is an internal relation of the state to the people. In a democratic context, self‐determination should be seen as the prerequisite to sovereignty.
  • The result of the referendum could not have been in doubt. It would have been clear to anyone with a historical understanding of the issues involved, and of the experience of the process leading to Eritrean independence, that the referendum would lead to an overwhelming popular vote for an independent state in the South. Why then did the power in the North agree to a referendum? My answer is: the agreement to hold a referendum deferred a head-on confrontation with US power.
  • It brought to an end a thousand-year history of Christian states in the North. Sinnar demolished Christian states in the North and inaugurated the political history of Islam in Sudan. Given the conventional understanding that equates Islam with the North and Christianity with the South, I would like us to remember that political power in the North, in Nubia and Beja, was Christian – and that the royal family of the first Muslim state in Sudan came from the South, not the North. In contrast, Islam came to the North in the form of refugees and merchants, not royals or soldiers.
  • The migrations that we know of better were forced migrations, slavery. The South plundered for slaves from the 17th century onwards with the formation of the Sultanate of the Funj along the Nile and the Sultanate of Darfur in the west. But the slave trade became intense only in the late 18th century when the Caribbean plantation economy was transplanted to Indian Ocean islands.
  • Nonetheless, most of those enslaved in the South stayed in Darfur and Sinnar as slave‐soldiers. Most of those in Darfur became Fur. Most of those in Sinnar became Arab. They were culturally assimilated – mostly by consent, but the kind of consent that is manufactured through relations of force. For a parallel, think of how African slaves in North America became English‐speaking Westerners – thereby taking on the cultural identity of their masters.
  • The point of this historical survey of relations between North and South is to underline one single fact: this is not a one‐dimensional history of Northern oppression of the South. True, Northern domination is the main story, especially after independence. But there was a subsidiary story: the story of joint North–South struggle against that domination.
  • The SPLA was a movement with a strong leader – the weaker the organisation, the more difference does the death of one individual make. The history of liberation movements in this region testifies to this fact. It should also remind us that it has not been unusual for strong leaders to be eliminated towards the close of an armed struggle. Remember ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) and the killing of Tongogara on the eve of victory; the ANC (African National Congress) and the assassination of Chris Hani also on the eve of victory; and the SPLA and the death of Garang soon after return to Khartoum.
  • The CPA was built on the lessons of 1972. The key lesson was that power‐sharing had been too narrow. As a result, the CPA called for a broader sharing, ranging from political power to wealth to arms. Still, it remained sharing of power, power‐sharing, between elites, between two ruling groups, the NCP (National Congress Party) and the SPLA. It left out the opposition in both the North and the South. It was power‐sharing without democratisation!
  • All these cases have one thing in common. All have reformed the central state by introducing elections and a multi‐party system. But elections seem to lead to violence rather than stability. Why? For a clue, I suggest we look at another similarity between these cases of internal violence. None have managed to reform the local state – the local authority – the district authority that the British used to call the native authority.
  • Colonialism transformed tribe from a cultural identity to an administrative identity that claimed to be based on descent, not just culture. It became a blood identity. Tribe became a sub‐set of race
  • In sum then, there are two major sources of political violence after independence. Possible violence between North and South has three likely sources: border populations, IDPs and peasants and pastoralists with shared livelihoods.
  • While many have criticized this earlier discourse as Orientalist and lacking in analytical rigour, its seamless replacement dubbed as the ‘Arab Awakening’, is being constructed on the very same bases of representation.
  • In the case of Egypt, the recent uprising is constructed as a youth-led, non-violent revolution in which social media (especially Facebook and Twitter) are champions. The underlying message here is that these ‘middle-class’ and educated youth (read: modern) are not ‘terrorists’ - they hold the same values as ‘us’ (the democratic West) and, finally, use the same tools (Facebook and Twitter) that ‘we’ invented and use in our daily-lives. They are just like ‘us’ and hence they deserve celebration. These constructions are clear from a quick look at CNN, Time, Vanity Fair and others and their representations of the so-called leaders or icons of this revolution.
  • According to the BBC, Dr Gene Sharp - the author of the ‘Non-Violent Revolution Rulebook’ is ‘the man now credited with the strategy behind the toppling of the Egyptian government’ through activists ‘trained in Sharp’s work’. This same profile of young people similarly monopolised television talk shows in Egypt. And while many of these individuals did take part in the uprising - in different capacities - their status as icons of the ‘revolution’ in which the majority of those who participated were of the subaltern classes is both disturbing and telling. This majority have never heard of Sharp or Freedom House, never studied at the American University in Cairo and never worked for Google. More profoundly, they are antagonistic about ‘Western’ influence and presence in Egypt. Thus the class composition of dissent has been cloaked by a new imaginary homogenous construct called ‘youth’.
  • There is no doubt that the anti-regime demonstrations were non-violent, compared to the state-security use of ammunition. However, by 28 January all National Democratic Party headquarters and most police stations were set on fire. This was a clear reaction to the state’s systematic violence against subaltern classes, those who bore the brunt of the regime’s daily torture and humiliation precisely because of their position within the neo-liberal class matrix in Egypt.
  • Even Côte d'Ivoire was at one point was rightly dubbed 'the forgotten war'. It did not fit the media template of a sexy, tech-savvy, populist revolution, as that which had been constructed of Egypt. Instead Côte d'Ivoire had the uncomfortable but familiar look and feel of a Rwanda genocide-lite. It was a messy, bloody struggle for power between rebel and patriot factions in a country most educated people outside of Africa would struggle to find on a map.
  • On 20 February, in an industrial town called Koudougo, bigger than Sidi Bouzid, a student named Justin Zongo was taken into police custody after an alleged dispute with a female classmate. A few days later, Zongo was pronounced dead and according to official police reports, the cause of death was meningitis. His family and friends rejected this and claimed Zongo's death was due to police brutality.
  • So far none of Compaoré's pleas to restore order have worked and the mutiny's snowball effect continues to grow. There are reports that, despite the soldiers' lawlessness in some cities, the youths and some traders have united with revolting army officers.
  • True to dictator form, Compaoré, like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, has blamed foreign conspiratorial forces for the unrest and he has gotten rid of everyone else, except the problem, himself and his corrupt system.
  • All of the protests, from Cape to Cairo, with their own distinct set of local conditions, are linked to food security, economic instability and political dispossession – be it by ballot or dictatorship. There is a widespread feeling of continental discontent, but international and national pundits are so busy putting out possible fires of revolt in 'sub-Saharan Africa' with their analyses that the Burkina uprising has gone by largely unnoticed, and yet in two months mutineering soldiers and youth have stirred up serious trouble for the Compaoré regime – and possibly regionally too.
  • In different ways, masses of people are mounting serious challenges to totalitarian hegemonies and the iniquity of global capital that may lead to a new political dispensation, in successful revolutions, and at the very least for all countries, uprisings, including unsuccessful ones, reshape the role of the citizen in a political landscape as an empowered figure.
  • Some would be inclined to argue that Burkina Faso has been forgotten because the international media is biased towards representation of Africa south of the Sahara, and the ignoring or misrepresentation of the Rwanda genocide is the most cited example. But perhaps it is more complex than a simple Africa south of the Sahara bias; it's a bias against or in favour of certain African countries that has been constructed through namely, a country's geo-political and economic importance to the West and also through a history of colonial relations in which reader and viewer familiarity and association with former colonies is generated.
  • For example, because of its relation to America and France, the attempted return of a former leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, exiled in South Africa, to return to the Caribbean island of Haiti was more widely covered than the same attempt, a month before by another former leader, Marc Ravalomanana, exiled in South Africa to return to the tropical island of Madagascar, off the south-eastern coast of Africa.
  • Similar to Swaziland, the slightest hint of a fallout between the opposition and Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party in Zimbabwe is guaranteed widespread coverage and analysis, whereas the political musical chairs currently being played in Burkina by Compaoré in order to quell mutiny is of little interest to many major international media organisations, including South Africa.
  • In the face of such fierce competition, taking a few moments in between protest broadcasts to ask the world to remember the 5.4 million (and rising) Congolese dead since 1998 or to take a serious look at Compaoré's megalomanic scheming in Burkina Faso wouldn't be a suicidal gamble with the ratings. Events in Africa and the Middle East shouldn't be placed in competition with each other; what's happening in Nigeria, Syria or Libya can share the spotlight with many other untold or under-reported stories. It’s a question of willingness to pluralise news stories and cover unfamiliar terrain.
  • perhaps there is also a competition for dominance in coverage of the big revolution stories to present a more racy, more in-depth and more radical story than other media competitors.
  • But in addition to that dream is a more crucial demand that can be sooner met, namely that existing international media genuinely commit itself to new ways of telling everyone's stories, all the time, rather than competing to duplicate or better the popular stories.
  • President Isayas Afwerki remains firmly entrenched in the seat of power, claiming with alacrity to have foretold the groundswell overtaking his Arab neighbors while banning television coverage of the demonstrations and reorganising the military to pre-empt a possible coup.
  • Eritrea spends a whopping 20 per cent of its national budget maintaining a military comprised of forced conscripts whose virtually unpaid labour is reinvested in further militarisation of the society and economy. The Constitution has been on ice since 1997, the promise of multi-party elections remains unfulfilled and even North Korea boasts greater freedom of the press. Civil society institutions and competing political parties exist only in exile.
  • But human experience is what anthropologists are always after - how to put life and breath and flesh onto the cold bones of statistics; how to illustrate the concrete meanings of political violence and migration policies and practices as people live them. Among such human experiences are those of nineteen members of the elite Air Force of Eritrea who fled to Sudan a couple of years ago, risking the ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy of the Eritrean government - as hundreds of others do every month - seeking to cross the nearest international border.
  • Should the UNHCR take the situation seriously and realise these men need protection - an unlikely showing of concern for individuals by a bureaucracy whose esteemed reputation is outshined only by its impersonality, impenetrability, and unaccountability - they may be taken to a refugee camp, where they will still be subject to many of the same pressures, only in more concentrated form. This is glossed as ‘protection’, even a ‘solution’, though it is hardly that.
  • In detention, they discover legal-dilemma redux: many of the same problems that stalled the refugee process in Sudan follow them to the United States. They are possibly terrorists, or implicated in persecution and human rights abuses; they are cowardly deserters of a sovereign state's military; and of course, they are always criminals for having the audacity to migrate illegally.
  • It is not enough to simply address the human rights violations that lead people to become refugees at the source, crucial as that may be. All along the way, refugees face multiple and nested issues that are sometimes endemic and even actively produced or aggravated by the very systems designed to protect them.
  • Although Carrilles was an anti-communist zealot, it was his training by the CIA and CIA finances that made him a lethal force.
  • The strength of the recruitment of Osama bin Laden was that, unlike Posada, Osama provided some of his own money and helped raise millions from other wealthy anti-communist Arabs. Osama bin Laden then recruited hundreds of thousands for his jihad. Today, many countries in Africa are suffering the repercussions of this alliance between the CIA and Osama bin Laden
  • Students in Africa who do not know the history of United States terrorism will need to study the country’s intricate plot to assassinate presidents and freedom fighters at home and abroad, in addition to understanding the relationship of some US law enforcement agencies to international terrorism.
  • People that really care about Africa must question the credibility of AFRICOM against the background of the US tradition of training terrorists to fight for American interests while labelling freedom fighters as terrorists.
  • Scholars and activists who write on low intensity wars have been highlighting the ways in which the government of the United States was the principal supporter of terrorism.
  • The US Africa Command created a disinformation platform, Operation Objective Voice, to confuse Africans. One of the requirements of psychological warfare and information warfare is for some truth to serve as the basis of the information that is being peddled.
  • the criminal actions associated with killing 73 Caribbean youths are compounded by the economic terrorism unleashed by the US banking system and the forces that spread the doctrine of neo-liberal capitalism. Billions of dollars are scooped up from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America by the US financial oligarchy and these are the forces that benefit from all forms of terror.
  • With Manuel as trade minister from 1994-96, liberalisation demolished the clothing, textile, footwear, appliance, electronics and other vulnerable manufacturing sectors, as he drove tariffs below what even the World Trade Organisation demanded.
  • At that stage, with the world economy teetering, The Economist magazine named South Africa the most risky of the 17 main emerging markets, and the SA government released data conceding that the country was much more economically divided than in 1994, overtaking Brazil as the world’s most unequal major country.
  • Ironically, said Manuel in his miserly 2004 budget speech, ‘The privilege we have in a democratic South Africa is that the poor are unbelievably tolerant.’ In 2008, when an opposition politician begged that food vouchers be made available, Manuel replied that there was no way to ensure ‘vouchers will be distributed and used for food only, and not to buy alcohol or other things.’
  • Manuel’s leadership of the Green Climate Fund adds a new quantum of global-scale risk. His long history of collaboration with Washington-London raises prospects for ‘default’ by the industrialised North on payment of climate debt to the impoverished South.
Arabica Robusta

LAB - Venezuela - the real significance of the student protests - 0 views

lab.org.uk/ela-%E2%80%93-student-protests

social movements intervention human rights development corporate industry venezuela hugo chávez

shared by Arabica Robusta on 23 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Initially organised to protest against economic shortages and insecurity, these demonstrations have been calling for ‘la salida’ – the exit of President Nicolás Maduro.    They have been supported by sections of the opposition alliance, Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD), led by Leopoldo López and Maria Corina Machado.
  • Maria Corina Machado, a signatory to the 2002 ‘Carmona Decree’ that temporarily dissolved the Chávez government, was a key protagonist of the recall referendum. Her ‘civil society’ organisation, Súmate, received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, where she was feted by President George Bush in May 2005.
  • The Chavistas learned a number of lessons from the events of 2002-2004:  the importance of consolidating grassroots support (hence, the launch of the social policy initiative, the Missions); the need to build regional solidarity (hence, the acceleration of regional integration initiatives such as the ALBA); the capacity of the private sector to paralyse economic activity (hence, the deepening of the state’s role in the economy); and the urgency of countering false reporting on the country (hence, the funding of community and public media and new regulatory codes for broadcasting). It was this period that was the catalyst for the transformation of an initially centrist Third Way project into Socialism of the Twenty First Century.
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  • It adopted an electoral path as the balance of power swung to moderate factions, and radicals associated with unconstitutional tactics were pushed to the margins.
  • US-based lobbies antagonistic toward the advance of Chávez’s socialism (and sympathetic to marginalised radicals) no longer saw these elements of ‘civil society’ as an effective oppositional vehicle and jettisoned them, deciding that a new tool for regime displacement had to be nurtured.  Students in private sector universities became the new vanguard of ‘democracy promotion’.
  • In 2008, the US-based Cato Institute awarded the US$500,000 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty to student leader Yon Goicoechea for his role in mobilising protests against the suspension of private broadcaster RCTV’s licence. At the same time, a sizeable amount of the US$45 million in funding provided annually by US institutions to Venezuelan opposition groups was channelled to ‘youth outreach’ programmes.
  • The current protests are important on two counts. First, they mark a coming together of the student movement and radical elements of the MUD. López and Machado have been organising with the student leadership,[5] in particular in relation to the February 12th demonstrations on Venezuela’s Day of the Youth, which commemorates the role of young people in the 1814 independence battle of la Victoria.
  • Despite claims that social media ‘democratises’ the media, it is clear that in Venezuela it has had the opposite effect, exacerbating  the trend towards disinformation and misrepresentation, with overseas media groups and bloggers reproducing – without verification – opposition claims and images of student injuries allegedly caused by police brutality and attacks by government supporters. In its reporting, the Guardian newspaper[8] cited tweets by opposition activists claiming pro-government gangs had been let loose on protestors.
  • The images disseminated, for example, to a Green Movement activist in Iran and then circulated to her thousands of followers with the tag line ‘pray for Venezuela’s students’, and to other democracy movements around the world show Egyptian and not Venezuelan police beating demonstrators. This same image was carried by the Spanish newspaper ABC.[9] Photographs and video clips of Chilean, Argentinian and Bulgarian police suppressing demonstrators and carrying out arrests (in their home countries) have been circulated and published as of they were assaults in Venezuela,[10] and one widely reproduced image shows Venezuela’s Policia Metropolitana corralling student protestors. The Policia Metropolitana was disbanded in 2011. Twitter has additionally been used to harangue commentators, including this author, who checked the accounts of her abusive critics to find most had only been tweeting for a day and in that space of time had accumulated around 40,000 followers.[11]
Arabica Robusta

Social movements for politics and welfare: Egypt and Haiti - 4 views

Egyptian history of local empowerment is much less known (or at least I do not know as much about it) than the Haitian experience. However, it is clear that the anti-regime demonstrators have orga...

social movements intervention human rights development egypt haiti

started by Arabica Robusta on 05 Feb 11 2 follow-ups, last by Arabica Robusta on 05 Feb 11
Arabica Robusta

All dissidents now: Russia's protests and the mirror of history | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...protests-and-mirror-of-history

social movements human development rights russia

shared by Arabica Robusta on 31 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • In an effort to resurrect a spirit of resistance against continuing state oppression, Voina dedicated its action to dissident writers who died in prison camps during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as to Sergey Magnitsky. The past year has seen an influx of historical images into Russian political and cultural life. Although they were present before, the protests have reinvigorated a range of historical symbols as opposition groups, their supporters and their opponents attempt to gain purchase on the situation at hand. Rightly or wrongly, for a range of different groups and individuals, the struggle of dissidents against Soviet power has become a historical source of experience, understanding and symbolism for contemporary protest.
  • For the demonstrators, the move out on to the public square to protest against the false elections and the Putin administration paralleled the 1825 Decembrist revolt against the accession of Nicholas I.
  • Moulded into a key part of Russian culture over the past 180 years, the Decembrists were important for 1960s intellectuals as practical and symbolic models of resistance. This took many forms, including the 1975 demonstration on Leningrad’s Senate Square in honour of the 150th anniversary of the revolt, which named the Decembrists as the 'First Dissidents of Russia.' One of the most famous incarnations was the 1968 verse 'Petersburg Romance' by the guitar-poet and playwright Alexander Galich. This song focuses on the inner torment of the conspirators before they went out on to Senate Square: Our era is testing us.Can you go out on the square?Do you dare go out on the square At the agreed time?
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  • The search for legitimacy was largely provoked by accusations against the opposition of disloyalty and a lack of patriotism and it led to a concerted effort to reinforce the links between patriotism and dissent.
  • Yet the real similarity, he argued, was in the need for a 'conscious minority' (i.e. Herzen's 'educated minority') to act as mediators when the interests of the state and the people are out of sync.
  • Despite the Russian love of martyrs and a number of prominent cases, the idea of political martyrdom has become devalued as an effective form of resistance when cynicism prevails.  Consider the response to attempts at making Sergey Magnitsky into a figure of resistance against the apparent moral and economic corruption deep inside the Russian state: allegations of corruption against high-ranking bureaucrats were quickly transformed back into accusations against Magnitsky himself. In this instance, the 'blame game' rhetoric regarding Western-backed privatisation and economic collapse of the 1990s can quickly be adapted against many figures of the opposition. 
  • The engagement with, and simultaneous formation of, a dissident past indicates the opposition's need for symbols and authority. Against the current background of systemic corruption, it also suggests a desire for sincerity associated with the Soviet underground. Yet in the return to dissent we can see signs of that 'mindset of martyrdom' mentioned by Budraitskis. The demonisation of the Putin regime as the rebirth of Soviet totalitarianism may have aesthetic and moral appeal, but it does not necessarily provide much in the way of political potential apart from the 'boomerang' effect via Western pressure.
Arabica Robusta

US support for regime change in Venezuela is a mistake | Mark Weisbrot | Comment is fre... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-support-regime-change-mistake

social movements intervention human rights development corporate industry venezuela

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  • When is it considered legitimate to try and overthrow a democratically-elected government? In Washington, the answer has always been simple: when the US government says it is. Not surprisingly, that's not the way Latin American governments generally see it.
  • An anonymous State Department spokesman was even clearer last week, when he responded to the protests by expressing concern about the government's "weakening of democratic institutions in Venezuela", and said that there was an obligation for "government institutions [to] respond effectively to the legitimate economic and social needs of its citizens". He was joining the opposition's efforts to de-legitimize the government, a vital part of any "regime change" strategy.
  • Kerry refused to recognize the election results. Kerry's aggressive, anti-democratic posture brought such a strong rebuke from South American governments that he was forced to reverse course and tacitly recognize the Maduro government. (For those who did not follow these events, there was no doubt about the election results.)
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  • Opposition leader Leopoldo López – competing with Capriles for leadership –has portrayed the current demonstrations as something that could force Maduro from office. It was obvious that there was, and remains, no peaceful way that this could happen. As University of Georgia professor David Smilde has argued, the government has everything to lose from violence in the demonstrations, and the opposition has something to gain.
Arabica Robusta

Are We Witnessing the Start of a Global Revolution? by Andrew Gavin Marshall ... - 0 views

dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/...ution-by-andrew-gavin-marshall

social movements intervention human rights development corporate industry dandelionsalad

shared by Arabica Robusta on 16 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Protests in Bolivia against rising food prices forced the populist government of Evo Morales to backtrack on plans to cut subsidies. Chile erupted in protests as demonstrators railed against rising fuel prices. Anti-government demonstrations broke out in Albania, resulting in the deaths of several protesters.
  • As the above quotes from Brzezinski indicate, this development on the world scene is the most radical and potentially dangerous threat to global power structures and empire.
  • Essentially, the project of “democratization” implies creating the outward visible constructs of a democratic state (multi-party elections, active civil society, “independent” media, etc) and yet maintain continuity in subservience to the World Bank, IMF, multinational corporations and Western powers.
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  • enforcing and supporting state oppression and building ties with civil society organizations.
  • In this sense, we must not cast aside these protests and uprisings as being instigated by the West, but rather that they emerged organically, and the West is subsequently attempting to co-opt and control the emerging movements.
  • A July 2009 diplomatic cable from America’s Embassy in Tunisia reported that, “many Tunisians are frustrated by the lack of political freedom and angered by First Family corruption, high unemployment and regional inequities. Extremism poses a continuing threat,” and that, “the risks to the regime’s long-term stability are increasing.”[2]
  • Significantly, the trade union movement had a large mobilizing role in the protests, with a lawyers union being particularly active during the initial protests.[4]
  • Social media and the Internet did play a large part in mobilizing people within Tunisia for the uprising, but it was ultimately the result of direct protests and action which led to the resignation of Ben Ali. Thus, referring to Tunisia as a “Twitter Revolution” is disingenuous.
  • [Editors Note: The US based foundation Freedom House was involved in promoting and training some Middle East North Africa Facebook and Twitter bloggers (See also Freedom House), M. C.].
  • We must also keep in mind that social media has not only become an important source of mobilization of activism and information at the grassroots level, but it has also become an effective means for governments and various power structures to seek to manipulate the flow of information.
  • This was evident in the 2009 protests in Iran, where social media became an important avenue through which the Western nations were able to advance their strategy of supporting the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ in destabilizing the Iranian government.
Arabica Robusta

Spain's Icelandic revolt | Presseurop (English) - 0 views

www.presseurop.eu/...663631-spains-icelandic-revolt

social movements intervention human rights development corporate industry pambazuka spain

shared by Arabica Robusta on 04 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The demonstrations have broadened spontaneously, as was the case for those who rallied under the umbrellas of the "alternative globalisation" movements, and have evolved, one decade after the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on a more modest stage than the one demonstrators faced in the past at the World Economic Forum of the global elite in Davos, Switzerland.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Where are the people who are going to change things? - 0 views

pambazuka.net/...94014

social movements intervention human rights development corporate industry africa pambazuka burkina faso compaore sankara

shared by Arabica Robusta on 23 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Despite what melancholic lyrics may suggest, they exist – the men and women who want to change things. In the months leading up to the 2006 elections in Uganda, there were demonstrations outside the Central Police Station and the High Court where an opposition presidential candidate, Dr Kiiza Besigye, was first detained and then brought to trial.
  • The vendors only came back at lunchtime. As I learnt over the coming days, their commitment was striking: day after day the market vendors attended court in solidarity with Dr Besigye. By contrast, office-workers stayed at their desks. You do not win government contracts by demonstrating in the streets.
  • It is heartbreaking to watch the video footage [iv] of Sankara appealing to his fellow presidents to repudiate unfair debt agreements with IMF and other foreign creditors at the Organization of African Unity Summit in 1987. He accused them of degrading their people. He says, only half-jokingly, that if they do not support him he is going to be assassinated: “I may not make it to the next meeting.”
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  • Mariam Sankara describes him in terms reminiscent of Biko’s conscious black man, “Thomas knew how to show his people that they could become dignified and proud through will power, courage, honesty and work. What remains above all of my husband is his integrity.”
  • He too repudiated debt as a solution to all that ails Africa. But after an attempt to barter trade with neighbouring countries he gave in to the beckoning finger of the North.
  • In either case, his official statement was clear, “When it comes to medical care for myself and my family there is no compromise [vi].” The families of the 16 women a day who die in childbirth for lack of essential drugs, properly motivated (or simply paid) staff and lack of equipment held their peace.
  • Agricultural reform in Uganda was meant to be brought about by the National Agricultural Advisory Service (NAADS). It was funded to the tune of $100m over 8 years, with $50m repayable to the World Bank. The project review after eight years reported “no significant differences were found in yield growth between NAADS and non-NAADS sub counties for most crops….[vii].”
  • Genuine agents of change die young. Either they do not make it to State House or they die while there (with the possible exception of Jerry Rawlings in Ghana). Such is the dynamic. The rest capitulate early while continuing to assume the demeanour of revolutionaries. They can do so because Western powers are willing to turn a blind eye to their increasing profligacy in return for their signatures on a succession of documents keeping their countries in debt bondage. They rule for decades, well into old age at which point they usurp the role of Elder Statesmen and receive credits due to others [viii].
Arabica Robusta

nla.obj-332066213_Akmana_PNG_gold.pdf - 0 views

porgera gold PapuaNewGuinea

shared by Arabica Robusta on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • cific islands monthly : PIM.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 04 Jun 20
       
      Doers, not recorders of facts.
  • Pacific islands monthly : PIM.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 04 Jun 20
       
      Begin here
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 04 Jun 20
       
      He was to tell them that the stolen goods were to be left on a flat rock on the river below the camp, other wise we would have to raid their gardens for food-and there would no payment this time!
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    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 04 Jun 20
       
      "All members. masters and boys, were on the alert at all times. Personal boys would see that their master did not move far without weapons and handed them to him in case this occurred. There was no point in tempting the wigmen with our riches of steel and shell."
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 04 Jun 20
       
      It turned out that back at Akmana Junction while we were on this Upper Maramuni job something was happening. We found on our return that the Akmana camp had been raided and most of our steel and trade goods stolen. As no natives came to the camp with food for trade as usual, we decided to take the offensive. We had very friendly relations with a wigman called Dribau. who had attached himself to the camp as friend and guide. He first joined us on the Baiyer and was a man of influence and obviously highly respected over a wide area. Drihau was now on hand and we asked him to spread the word by hailing across the valleys that we were very angry (we described with actions that our bellies were boiling with anger). He was to tell them that the stolen goods were to be left on a flat rock on the river below the camp. otherwise we would have to raid their gardens for food-and there would be no payment this time! The messages were passed, but by the next day there were no results, so we helped ourselves in the gardens. and put on a display with our .303 rifles, firing them at long range in the general direction of any stray native we saw on watch. sometimes in rapid fire to make the show more impressive. The shots were meant to demonstrate that we were serious, but we were not trying to hit anyone. This got better results. -The next morning there were some stolen goods on the flat rock. About midday we decided we would have to speed things up a bit, so Drihau passed on the news that we would "make thunder without a cloud in the sky" and that they had better watch out! We detonated a big supply of gelignite and made those old mountains echo and re-echo, much to the horror of those visitors who happened to be in the vicinity (who. unfortunately. didn't include any of the miscreants). Those near the camp clung to each other for comfort in their fear (the locals often did this also when they were perplexed and surprised. but not to such a degree of frenzy). They were also much
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 04 Jun 20
       
      The booming of the dynamite did the job. Next morning most of our goods were on the flat rock and it was not long before we were friendly community again, with business as usual, and quite a few grins.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 04 Jun 20
       
      "The warriors were curious and friendly. but Beazley had completed his job and wisely retraced his steps to his previous night's camp. There he was met by another 200 warriors. and since the first group had followed him downstream he now found himself the centre of interest of 400 odd Highlanders who had never before seen a white man. After some demonstrations of fire power with his rifle and the magic of matches he returned to the main camp without incident."
Arabica Robusta

The Assassination of Martin Luther King and the Peace Movement » Counterpunch... - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...er-king-and-the-peace-movement

social movements intervention development human rights corporate industry mlk

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  • When Dr. King finally opposed the war on Vietnam he incurred the wrath of liberals in the Johnson Administration, the liberal philanthropic community, and even a significant number of his colleagues in the clergy. The liberal establishment was scathing in its condemnation of his position and sought to punish him and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), in a manner similar to their assaults on the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), when it took an anti-war and anti-imperialist position much earlier than Dr. King and SCLC.
  • Today the array of forces in support of U.S. military aggression is similar to what we saw from the establishment in 1968, except for one important factor: in 1968 there was an organized, vocal anti-war movement that applied bottom-up pressure on the liberal establishment in power and on the Nixon Administration. Today, however,  not only have significant elements of the contemporary anti-war and peace movement voluntarily demobilized during the Obama era, many of those individuals and organizations have entered into what can only be seen as a tactical alliance with the Obama Administration and provided ideological cover for imperialist interventions around the world.
  • The murder of Dr. King was not just the murder of a man but an assault on an idea, a movement and a vision of a society liberated from what Dr. King called the three “triplets” that had historically characterized and shaped the “American” experience – racism, extreme materialism and militarism. 
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  • The radical revolution of values that King hoped would transform the country was repackaged by the early 1970s into an individualist, pro-capitalist, debt-constructed consumer diversion.
  • the West has demonstrated that it will use all of its military means to maintain its hegemony. Yet, to realize that shift, the “people” are going to have to “see” through the ideological mystifications that still values Eurocentric assumptions as representing settled, objective realities on issues like democracy, freedom, human rights, economic development and cultural integrity in order to confront the new coalitions of privilege.  Dr. King and the black anti-racist, anti-colonialist movements for social justice brought clarity to these moral issues by its example of movement building that sparked struggles for social justice in every sector of U.S. society. That is why sidelining black radical organizations and the black social justice movement has been one of the most effective consequences of the Obama phenomenon.
  • Today the necessity to stand with the oppressed and oppose war and violence of all kinds has never been more urgent. But that stand cannot be just as individuals. Individual commitment is important, but what Dr. King’s life reaffirmed was the power of movement — of organized and determined people moving in a common direction. That is why the government so desperately attempts to disconnect Dr. King from the people and the movement that produced him and to silence any opposition to its colonialist violence. The example of movement building and struggle is an example that has to be brutally suppressed, as witnessed by how the Obama Administration moved on the Occupy Wallstreet Movement once it became clear that they could not co-opt and control it.
  • Arabica Robusta on 06 Apr 13
     
    ""As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask - and rightly so - what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government. - Rev. Martin Luther King, Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence," Riverside Church, April 4, 1967. "
Arabica Robusta

Why the Western Media are Getting Egypt Wrong - 0 views

www.jadaliyya.com/...-media-are-getting-egypt-wrong

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  • As the day went by, the 30 June anti-Morsi demonstrations turned out to probably be the largest ever in Egyptian history, with Egyptians from all walks of life peacefully, yet audaciously, denouncing the Brotherhood’s rule.
  • The Egyptian people’s defiance of Brotherhood rule is a serious popular challenge to the most significant strategic reordering of the region perhaps since the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.
  • As the Egyptian army stepped up its game midday on Monday, and checkmated Morsi by issuing a forty-eight-hour ultimatum to respond to the people’s demands, these same media circuits started a concerted effort to bring the “coup d’état” discourse, sometimes forcefully, to the forefront of the discussion about events in Egypt.
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  • It is both ironic and sad that while mediocre analysts, to say the least of their understanding of the changing Middle East, make frequent appearances in two-minute on-air interviews in newsrooms, the voices of other academics and experts with serious research backgrounds and true expertise of the region remain largely unheard.  Serious analysts are not in demand, not only because they have long overcome this Orientalist paradigm in analyzing the politics of change in the Middle East, but also because they don’t have the talent of crafting those superficial, short, studio-made answers to questions of news anchors.   
  • The United States, Britain and many other counterparts have heavily invested in the empowerment of a tamed Islamist rule—spearheaded, of course, by the Muslim Brotherhood—to take over the Middle East from post-colonial populist regimes living long past their expiry dates. American and British ambassadors to the region have been carefully weaving this vision and reporting back home that this is simply the best formula for the protection of their interests in the region. That such a formula would lend itself to the protraction of another cycle of vicious human rights abuses and continued economic injustices is, naturally, of little concern to them.
Arabica Robusta

They Want It Now - Transitions Online - 0 views

www.tol.org/...23848-they-want-it-now.html

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 05 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • The protesters are urban, young to middle aged, middle class, active on Facebook and Twitter, demanding economic growth but also asking for honesty and morality in politics. The crowds demonstrate in a carnival fashion, forming flash mobs and staging happenings.
Arabica Robusta

http://www.ecprnet.eu/MyECPR/proposals/reykjavik/uploads/papers/2277.pdf - 0 views

www.ecprnet.eu/...2277.pdf

shared by Arabica Robusta on 02 May 12 - No Cached
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 02 May 12
       
      The panel of social cyber-activists analyzed in the aforementioned research indicates  that leftist organizations did not act in coordination with the counterinformation  networks (such as the Nodo50 platform, which had already shown potential on 13M and  in subsequent calls by the MRH) and the campaigning strategies of left-wing parties.  This was not the case for the conservative axis, which the cyber-activists interviewed  felt was "more instrumental in electoral terms and  more effective in their combined  strategies through conventional media, politics and e-politics." (Sampedro, 2010:25).  
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 02 May 12
       
      In 2004, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt launched their vision of a "multitude  project" based on the possibility of a global democratic society, open and inclusive,  promoted by multitudes fighting for justice and a free world. Perhaps we are currently  witnessing its first steps, and the nature of the demonstrations that take place all over  the world may are proof of that. The authors point  that analyzing the nature and  conditions of crowds helps to "identify the real creative forces that are emerging with  the potential to create a new world" (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 95). This new world will  be built over current scenario, the contemporary post-industrial world, which the  theorist Manuel Castells defines as network society, a concept that replaces that of  information (or knowledge) society. 
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 02 May 12
       
      However, above their deliberation potential, ICTs have created a new category of social  movement that is characterized by network organization, coordination and action, as  well as decentralization, flexibility and collective action. New social movements have  managed to mobilize the multitudes (Negri and Hardt, 2004) and have characteristics  that differentiate them markedly from previous social movements.
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    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 02 May 12
       
      As previously pointed out, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri propose the concept of multitude in 2004 and define it as the manifestation of collective intelligence that Lévy  predicted on the fringes of cyberspace in 1995: "The development of computer-assisted  communication and global digital networks appears to be the realization of a more or  less well-formulated project to deliberately create new forms of collective intelligence,  which are more flexible and democratic and based on reciprocity and respect for singularities. In this sense, we could define collective intelligence as a fully distributed  intelligence that is continuously enhanced and synergized in real-time" (Lèvy, 1999:76).  However, Negri and Hardt's concept of multitudes transcends virtual profiles and asserts  its presence in public spaces and offline arenas. It differs from the traditional category  of people in that the people is homogeneous whereas the multitude is plural (2004: 16),  it is not an identity and, in contrast with the homogeneous, irresponsible and easily  manipulated mass, the multitude is plural and highly rational. "The common ground of a  multitude is not discovered, it is built" (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 17).  
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 02 May 12
       
      The area of action in the 13 March 2004 protests was clearly offline, as the streets of  Madrid became spaces for public discussion and hundreds of citizens gathered in  peaceful civil disobedience. This kind of political action lifestyle-based: "Everybody  mistrusted mainstream media and career politicians. To one degree or another, everyone  debated and coordinated the protests in their own name and using their own means. (…)  They positioned themselves in the transformative left or, at the very least, in a state of  vigilant citizenship" (Sampedro, 2005:291-292).  
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Violence: The way of politics in Angola - 0 views

pambazuka.org/...82755

social movements intervention human rights development corporate industry africa pambazuka angola

shared by Arabica Robusta on 11 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • “Mr. Raúl promised us money to stop organizing protests against President José Eduardo dos Santos,” explained Mário Domingos. Kabuscorp, in which former Brazilian world champion Rivaldo plays, is owned by General Bento Kangamba, who is also the president of the club. The general, a member of MPLA Central Committee, is also part of the presidential family, by marriage to Dos Santos’ niece.
  • According to Domingos, the deal was part of a strategy, “to transform our movement into a satellite organization of MPLA, for us to do solidarity work on their behalf, and hold counter-demonstrations to support president Dos Santos.” By the time of the meeting with the president, the movement had already received US $4 million in an escrow account, six pickup trucks Mitshubishi L200, and six apartments in the Chinese-built town of Kilamba. “The governor of Luanda at the time, José Maria, sent his driver to the bank with us, where we cashed in the equivalent of US $700 thousand in cash. Then the governor’s driver took us home,” Mário Domingos.
  • Ironically, the scattering of these emerging youth groups and their leaders, as well as their lack of structural organization, has rendered the regime’s strategies of violence and corruption ineffective. Such strategies only give cannon fodder for Angolans to come to terms with the intractable wickedness of President Dos Santos and his regime.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 11 Jun 12
       
      The [context-dependent] value of de-centered resistance.
  • Arabica Robusta on 11 Jun 12
     
    The captors interrogated 'Pandita Nehru' on who was behind the protests, beat him up and taunted him with an argument, among themselves, on the wisdom to execute him right there. Ever since, he has been mostly off the radar.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Resistance beyond borders: Irish lessons and international workers' solidarity - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...69291

economic crisis 2008 ireland austerity structural adjustment pambazuka

shared by Arabica Robusta on 05 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • The internalisation of whiteness by the Irish workers broke the solidarity in the ranks of the working people. Consequently, sections of the Irish workers became part of the most rabid racists in some parts of the USA. But the realities of the moment have shown that capitalists’ oppression against the working class people knows no borders. There are already projections that the financial crisis will induce a new mass emigration from Ireland. Progressives in Ireland must intensify the ideological and political work inside Ireland to educate these potential émigrés against joining the wave of counter-revolution and racism that is now sweeping North America. It is in this context that we call for an international resistance that transcends national borders and racial categorisation. It is such resistance that is needed to save our common humanity from dehumanisation and plunder by the capitalist class, whose drive for exponential profits is pathological.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 05 Dec 10
       
      Fight the "whiteness" of Irish workers, in the effort to build an international resistance.
  • In Europe, students have joined the rank of demonstrators against the attempt to mortgage their future. Worker–student alliances in France and in England are intensifying the struggle against the capitalists. In particular, British students exposed the activities of the Vodafone companies that avoided paying billions of dollars in taxes. The students have been at the forefront of using new tools of education to bypass the mainstream media to alert workers
  • In Ireland itself, international capitalists such as Peter Sutherland established intellectual institutes within Trinity College Dublin to divert attention from the kind of research that could expose the speculative bubbles that were being heralded as the success story of Ireland. Mainstream economists accepted the propaganda about unbridled capitalist globalisation while proclaiming Ireland as the ‘Celtic Tiger’. Ireland was presented in textbooks all over the world as the example of the benefits of foreign direct investments and capitalist globalisation.
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  • These austerity measures and the consequent resistance bring home to the Western workers what the African peoples have been enduring for more than 30 years of neoliberal plunder. It was the African workers that have been at the forefront of the delegitimisation of the IMF structural adjustment programmes. In Africa, the intellectuals have exposed the capitalist interests that dismantle popular social programmes of access to health and education and strip wealth from workers, placing profits before and above human beings.
  • Even a capitalist such as Warren Buffet has called on other capitalists to pay their fair share of taxes. Buffet said that the US government should tax the rich more, saying ‘people at the high end, people like myself should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it.’
  • The crisis of capitalism is not simply a question of taxes. Restructuring taxation is only one manifestation of the systematic change to the economic, political and ideological structures that came into being as a result of financialisation. This financialisation hollowed out the real production economy in the US and elsewhere. And in Ireland, the bankers from Frankfurt, London and New York descended on the Irish workers to sweep out the real economy that had been built by the Irish working people.
  • Africans must pay close attention to the capitalist events surrounding the economic depression because the same IMF and World Bank are going into African societies promoting fianancialisation and the destruction of trade unions. This is especially the case in countries such as South Africa, Ghana, Angola, Nigeria and Kenya, where the efforts are geared towards scooping up surpluses in the real economy in order to consolidate the neoliberal stranglehold. The same alliance between African workers and African intellectuals which delegitimised the IMF must be strengthened to undermine the alliance between African capitalists and Western capitalists who are bent on introducing the speculative economy. All over Africa, there have been bank bailouts to save capitalists in the face of reductions in spending on health, education and other social services.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Ethiopia: Any lesson from Tahrir Square? - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...70966

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 19 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • how prepared are the people of Ethiopia to stage a peaceful revolution? Will we succeed or could the country be thrown into chaos?
  • One would hope we would have learned a thing or two from our Egyptian counterparts and choose the peaceful route. One would also hope the Ethiopian armed forces would be magnanimous enough not to use lethal force on their compatriots.
  • Like Egypt, Ethiopia has a track record of using plainclothes security personnel, who will stop at nothing to crush dissent. This regime is even willing to foment ethnic and religious strife in order to preempt possible opposition. Given these circumstances, it is absolutely pertinent for activists to take notice of recent events in Egypt, as there is a lot to be learned there.
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  • One of the promising signs of the demonstrations in Egypt has been the people’s ability to remain peaceful while disobedient. For decades, peaceful disobedience has been a proven tactic in bringing some semblance of decency to societies. Interestingly, authoritarian regimes prefer violent dissent, which they are confident of disrupting, as they hold the monopoly in violence. Imagine the impression it leaves on the Arab world when Muslim and Christian Egyptians march shoulder to shoulder to demand their rights. It is a remarkable achievement when you consider, just a few months ago, these two communities were openly feuding.
Arabica Robusta

Report card: Ghana oil gets a "C" | Pipe(line)Dreams - 0 views

www.pipelinedreams.org/...report-card-ghana-oil-gets-a-c

shared by Arabica Robusta on 30 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • On transparency and citizen participation, for example, the government received “B” grades. Regarding transparency, the report states, “On the positive side, Ghana’s parliament passed the long-delayed and debated petroleum revenue management bill at the beginning of March 2011. The bill is now awaiting presidential approval. While some issues were hotly debated, there was consensus from both the majority and the minority members of parliament on all the transparency provisions. Should the bill approved by parliament become law, there will be a number of important transparency provisions.”
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 30 Apr 11
       
      Chad had transparency/accountability in their revenue management law. Is Ghanaian civil society strong enough to keep their government accountable?
  • Of particular concern is the lack of a legal framework for dealing with oil spills: “The institutional weakness in the environmental protection institutions was demonstrated during the investigation into mud spillage by Kosmos Energy.
  • the most encouraging sign was not the grades on the report card, but the presence of several officials at the event including a member of parliament, the communications director from Tullow Oil, the World Bank country director for Ghana and a Deputy Minister of Energy. Although some of the officials’ comments were perfunctory and fairly predictable, their attendance at least signaled the recognition of civil society as an important stakeholder in Ghana’s oil development. 
Arabica Robusta

Police dislodge last of 15-M protestors | In English | EL PAÍS - 0 views

elpais.com/...1312262446_850210.html

social movements intervention development corporate theory geography bauman

shared by Arabica Robusta on 31 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Since the main camp was disbanded on June 12, the government had held that the 15-M information booth that remained in Sol was a municipal concern, while local authorities argued that it was a matter of "public order" and thus of national interest. The eviction comes a week after a failed attempt that ended with police charging against the protestors. A few demonstrators told the SER radio station that this latest move is "more than strongly related" to the upcoming visit to Madrid by Pope Benedict between August 16 and 21, and that they were "expecting it."
  • Ignacio Laro, president of Apreca, the association of business owners in the area, said he was "very happy" because "the problem has been solved and the square can now resume its [commercial and tourist] activity."
Arabica Robusta

Democracy experiments in the Latin American political lab | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...in-latin-american-political-la

social movements intervention development corporate theory geography

shared by Arabica Robusta on 07 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • But their action took on real strength from its territorial outreach. They managed to mobilize local communities, parents and teachers, neighbours and local organizations, into supporting the movement in the face of increasing pressure from the government and the police. Civil society responded, in short, to the embattled students.
  • Feeling the pressure, in December 2015, state governor Geraldo Alckmin finally announced the dismissal of his government’s education secretary, and the shelving of the school reorganization. His proposal, which was received with caution by students, consists in undertaking an extensive dialogue with students, parents, teachers and principals to understand the specific situation in each school and decide its future accordingly
  • We have witnessed numerous demonstrations where citizens have organized themselves to challenge government decisions, have used technology to liaise and social networks and independent media to convey their story. And they have occupied public spaces as a means to convey the message to politicians that politics is about people’s concerns, and that democracy must prevail not only in the formal access to power, but also in the way it is exercised. The political and democratic crises are not exclusively Latin American, but today there is an opportunity for Latin America to rethink its own democracy model, originally developed in the region. The political action in the making, shown by the student mobilization in Sao Paulo, is one of the ways to seize this opportunity.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • We know that democracy in Latin America is far from being consolidated. Not because there is a threat of military coups or openly autocratic regimes, but because of the weakening of institutions, the threats to fundamental rights, the curtailment of freedoms, and the hijacking of power by the economic and political elites and organized crime.
  • There are certainly positive and negative aspects to this social transformation, but what is important here is to recognize its inevitability, and the fact that current political systems have not yet discovered how to react to what is happening. The existing gap between government and society is evidenced in every political process, every protest, every decision made by the powers that be which are incapable of understanding the voices and complexities of public opinion.
  • The classical dynamics of representative democracy, where citizens choose their representatives democratically but the exercise of power is carried on behind closed doors, seems not to take into account the 21st century’s citizen.
  • Something is happening in Latin American politics. While the political system shows structural problems, we witness the emergence of a new field, a laboratory of political experimentation that allows us to imagine a next step forward for democracy in the region.
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