Pambazuka News : Issue 527: Popular organising: The victory of dignity over fear - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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First, like Soweto in 1976, Tahrir Square in 2011 too shed a generation’s romance with violence.
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Burkina Faso: A struggle to keep the lid on | African news, analysis and opinion - The ... - 0 views
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The threat to the government has come from the three parts of society that have shaken regimes from Tunisia to Bahrain: students, the military and traders. To appease them, Compaoré has sacked his government and named a new head of the military. Luc Adolphe Tiao, a former journalist and ambassador to Paris, was appointed the new prime minister on 18 April to calm the political tensions. But unrest in the military has continued and the government is having difficulty fending off opposition claims of brutality and corruption.
Pambazuka - Glimpses of the Tunisian revolution: The victory of dignity over fear - 0 views
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We expressed our admiration and solidarity and we offered our support and the promise to carry their stories, their struggles and their aspirations with us and share them in whatever ways we could as our commitment to contribute to imagine and construct a better world, more just and equal, each of us in the places where we live and work.
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We also explained that we wished to explore the viability of a regional and continental Social Forum in Tunisia to celebrate the revolution and support the transition.
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Enthusiastic citizens discussed and negotiated their differences, exchanged their experiences, disagreed vehemently, even shouted their frustration and disappointments contributing to give form to their visions and inspiring in each other actions and daily practices towards the establishment of a new society.
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Pambazuka - 'Walk to work' and lessons of Soweto and Tahrir Square - 0 views
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The memory of Tahrir Square feeds opposition hopes and fuels government fears. For many in the opposition, Egypt has come to signify the promised land around the proverbial corner. For many in government, Egypt spells a fundamental challenge to power, one that must be resisted, whatever the cost.
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Many asked whether the Egyptian revolution will spread South of the Sahara. And they responded, without a second thought: No! Why not? Because, media pundits said, sub-Saharan societies are so divided by ethnicity, so torn apart by tribalism, that none can achieve the degree of unity necessary to confront political power successfully. This response makes little sense to me. For this answer resembles a caricature. Nowhere in the history of successful struggles will you find a people united in advance of the movement. For the simple reason that one of the achievements of a successful movement is unity. Unity is forged through struggle.
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Soweto was a youthful uprising. In an era when adults had come to believe that meaningful change could only come through armed struggle, Soweto pioneered an alternative mode of struggle.
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Report card: Ghana oil gets a "C" | Pipe(line)Dreams - 0 views
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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.”
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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.
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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.
No jobs, no house, no freedom - 0 views
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We are told every day that freedom means voting plus service delivery. We do not accept this definition and we will not be intimidated by all those who say that our refusal to accept this definition means that we are immature and unprofessional. As a movement of the forgotten it is our duty to continually ask ourselves what freedom really means. Freedom is always something that should be defined by the people.
Ota Benga Alliance | For Peace, Healing and Dignity - 0 views
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In honoring Ota Benga, we focus our efforts on the need to treat each other with dignity, with respect for cultural diversity as a source of strength, and with truth as a foundation for genuine reconciliation to end the cycles of violence, vengeance, and militarism. We believe that peace and dignity cannot be achieved while the injustices of the past and present are buried in silence, and while the struggles of the present go unheard.
Resist/Submit: Vodafone, Monsanto, Marriott, BP, General Dynamics, etc.: Managing Explo... - 0 views
Tina Louise: Fragmented People, Coagulating - 0 views
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Naïve, optimistic and blinkered by rose coloured shades? Sure it is likely to get a lot bloodier before we tidy the place but in my heart, it truly feels like we have let something escape and that it is refusing to be contained again. It feels also like, that something - is us.
In defense of public-sector unions | SocialistWorker.org - 0 views
BRAZIL: Women in "Pacified" Favelas Claim Their Rights - IPS ipsnews.net - 0 views
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In December, a police team spent a week at the Complexo do Alemão, taking down complaints, mainly about physical injuries and threats, Rosa said. "The week we were in the favelas many cases were reported, and two aggressors were even caught in the act. Women are starting to claim their rights," she said.
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The pacification force of 1,700 soldiers has occupied the Complexo do Alemão in the north of Rio for nearly three months. Every two hours, military police patrol the streets, on foot or in vehicles. "Everyone thinks this is an enforced peace. What we wanted was peace without police action, a dream that may come true one day," Andrade said.
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Fabiano de Carvalho, spokesman for the pacification force, said there were many similarities between the structure and tactics used by Brazilian troops since 2004 in the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, and those used in the favelas.
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I cite: This is becoming more than just a fight over collective bargaining rights. - De... - 0 views
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Without anti-trust laws you end up with single parties controlling multiple industries. And controlling whatever parts of our lives depend on those industries. That is not freedom for us. Without estate taxes you end up with dynasties stretching over generations and controlling more and more wealth and power. Power over the little guy. That is not freedom for us.
Is Cameroon Next After Libya? | TPMDC - 0 views
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"There's no doubt in my mind that the current situation in the Middle East that this has sort of spurred in recent days opposition members to speak out," he said. "There's always an appearance of stability when there's no serious opposition... but you only need something like what happened in Egypt or Libya or Tunisia or Bahrain to see that atmosphere of contentedness and happiness on the surface doesn't go deep."
From Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty: The Challenge of Social Movements | Books | AlterNet - 0 views
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Ironically, the strength of these farmer-to-farmer networks—i.e., their capacity to generate farmers’ agroecological knowledge in a horizontal, widespread, and decentralized fashion—is also a political weakness. On one hand, there are no coordinating bodies within these networks capable of mobilizing farmers for social pressure, advocacy, or political action. On the other, their effectiveness at developing sustainable agriculture at the local level has kept its promoters focused on improving agroecological practices rather than addressing the political and economic conditions for sustainable agriculture.
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efforts to bring agrarian advocacy to farmer-to-farmer networks have run up against the historical distrust between development NGOs implementing sustain- able agriculture projects and the peasant organizations that make up the new agrarian movements. Aside from having assumed many of the tasks previously expected of the state, NGOs have become an institutional means to advance social and political agendas within the disputed political terrain of civil society.
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Though the MST initially promoted industrial agriculture among its members, this strategy proved unsustainable and economically disastrous on many of its settlements. In 1990 the movement reached out to other peasant movements practicing agroecology, and at its fourth national congress in 2000, the MST adopted agroecology as national policy to orient production on its settlements.
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Pambazuka - Development aid: Enemy of emancipation? - 1 views
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In Africa there have historically been two types of civil society, those that have collaborated with the colonial power and those which have opposed it.
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Are the big NGOs (non-governmental organisations) harmful towards Africa? FIROZE MANJI: Let’s not talk about their motivations, which are often good. The question is not about evaluating their intentions, but rather the actual consequences of their actions. In a political context where people are oppressed, a humanitarian organisation does nothing but soften the situation, rather than addressing the problem.
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I have become anti-development. This wasn’t the case before. Let’s have an analogy: did those enslaved need to develop themselves, or to be free? I think that we need emancipation, not development.
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