The mission of the World Justice Project (WJP) is to lead a global, multidisciplinary effort to strengthen the rule of law for the development of communities of opportunity and equity.
The World Justice Project is based on two complementary premises:
* First, the rule of law is the foundation for communities of opportunity and equity; and
* Second, multidisciplinary collaboration is the most effective way to advance the rule of law
The WJP uses a working definition of the rule of law based on four universal principles:
1. The government and its officials and agents are accountable under the law.
2. The laws are clear, publicized, stable and fair, and protect fundamental rights, including the security of persons and property.
3. The process by which the laws are enacted, administered and enforced is accessible, fair and efficient.
4. Access to justice is provided by competent, independent, and ethical adjudicators, attorneys or representatives and judicial officers who are of sufficient number, have adequate resources, and reflect the makeup of the communities they serve.
A worldwide rule of law deficit undermines efforts to make societies safe, lift people from poverty and build economic prosperity, reduce corruption, improve public health and enhance education. The WJP taps into a broad recognition that the rule of law is essential to thriving communities and to the success of virtually all fields of endeavor.
The WJP is unique in its engagement of stakeholders from a variety of disciplines, and is building an active network of governmental and non-governmental leaders from 17 disciplinary fields, representing all socio-economic levels of society.
The work of the WJP consists of three complementary and mutually reinforcing program areas: Mainstreaming, Rule of Law Index and Scholarship
The World Justice Project was launched by the American Bar Association in 2006, but since then became an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with 21 global sponsoring organizations in the fields of human rights, labor, public health, business, and more.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Malatsi laments 'harsh' sentence
Former Western Cape MEC for environmental affairs and development planning David Malatsi says he believes his five-year sentence for corruption in connection with his involvement in the multi-million Roodefontein Golf Estate Development was "harsh". Speaking after the sentencing on Monday, Malatsi denied that there was any personal enrichment on his part. "There was no personal enrichment in this case, there was no unjustified enrichment on my part, so I feel the conviction and sentence are unfair. "Bearing in mind that (developer, Riccardo) Agusta paid a fine, Peter Marais was found not guilty... me having to go to jail for doing my job, well..." he said.He said he believed he was "hung out to dry" by the now defunct New National Party, adding that the party should also have been prosecuted.
Minister of Environmental Affairs Marthinus van Schalkwyk, who was the leader of the party at the time, refused to comment on the sentencing. Van Schalkwyk's spokesperson, Riaan Aucamp, referred all queries to the Scorpions. Malatsi will not go to jail immediately as the court granted him leave to appeal against his conviction on one count of corruption and extended his bail.
In October, Malatsi was convicted of the one count of corruption for accepting R100 000 from the developer of the golf estate, Italian businessman Riccardo Agusta. Marais, his colleague at the time, was acquitted of the charges. Agusta accepted a plea bargain with the Scorpions in 2003 in terms of which he was fined R1-million. In passing sentence on Monday, Regional Magistrate Andre le Grange said he took into account Malatsi's personal circumstances, the seriousness of the offence and the interests of society. "The crime of corruption on the part of elected office-bearers and public service officials is no doubt a very serious offence," he said, adding that the superior courts have warned that such offences should be regarded as being as serious as crimes of violence and should be visited by the same penal sanctions.
He took into account that Malatsi was a first offender, but said in his view a sentence of correctional supervision, as requested by the defence, was inappropriate, having regard to the seriousness of the offence. "I have given serious consideration to the imposition of a fine, coupled with a term of imprisonment as a sentence option, but having regard to previous sentences imposed on similar offenders committing similar offences, this sentence option would not be in keeping with the recent judgments of our superior courts will not reflect consistency," he said.
Source: IoL
Minister of Environmental Affairs Marthinus van Schalkwyk, who was the leader of the party at the time, refused to comment on the sentencing. Van Schalkwyk's spokesperson, Riaan Aucamp, referred all queries to the Scorpions. Malatsi will not go to jail immediately as the court granted him leave to appeal against his conviction on one count of corruption and extended his bail.
In October, Malatsi was convicted of the one count of corruption for accepting R100 000 from the developer of the golf estate, Italian businessman Riccardo Agusta. Marais, his colleague at the time, was acquitted of the charges. Agusta accepted a plea bargain with the Scorpions in 2003 in terms of which he was fined R1-million. In passing sentence on Monday, Regional Magistrate Andre le Grange said he took into account Malatsi's personal circumstances, the seriousness of the offence and the interests of society. "The crime of corruption on the part of elected office-bearers and public service officials is no doubt a very serious offence," he said, adding that the superior courts have warned that such offences should be regarded as being as serious as crimes of violence and should be visited by the same penal sanctions.
He took into account that Malatsi was a first offender, but said in his view a sentence of correctional supervision, as requested by the defence, was inappropriate, having regard to the seriousness of the offence. "I have given serious consideration to the imposition of a fine, coupled with a term of imprisonment as a sentence option, but having regard to previous sentences imposed on similar offenders committing similar offences, this sentence option would not be in keeping with the recent judgments of our superior courts will not reflect consistency," he said.
Source: IoL
Friday, November 24, 2006
Agliotti: Selebi knew of probe
The national police commissioner, Jackie Selebi, was "well aware" of an investigation into the alleged crimes of businessman Glenn Agliotti, the Mail&Guardian reported on Friday. Agliotti was arrested last Thursday in connection with the murder of the mining magnate Brett Kebble.
Selebi, it appeared, knew of a an investigation by the police's serious and violent crimes unit into Agliotti and his involvement with Palto - a squad of "freelance operatives" or anti-crime vigilantes. They operated under pretence of being policemen. Palto allegedly used Selebi and police as their cover. The report questioned statements by Selebi that he knew Agliotti since 1992 or 1994 as "a friend, finish and klaar..." and that he did not know of criminal investigations into Agliotti's affairs. Charles Bezuidenhout, a policeman who worked with Palto, was quoted as saying in his affidavit: "Agliotti was or is still involved with the Italian, Russian and Chinese mafias. It was also put to me that Commissioner Selebi was aware of these operations."
The report also quoted Judge Willem Heath as claiming the Kebble family used Agliotti's access to Selebi to lobby him repeatedly over cases police were investigating against Brett Kebble and his father, Roger. According to Heath, from 2003 to 2004, Agliotti met Selebi once every two months "if not more often" to discuss criminal cases against the Kebbles involving alleged fraud and share manipulation, the Mail&Guardian reported.
Source: News 24.com
Selebi, it appeared, knew of a an investigation by the police's serious and violent crimes unit into Agliotti and his involvement with Palto - a squad of "freelance operatives" or anti-crime vigilantes. They operated under pretence of being policemen. Palto allegedly used Selebi and police as their cover. The report questioned statements by Selebi that he knew Agliotti since 1992 or 1994 as "a friend, finish and klaar..." and that he did not know of criminal investigations into Agliotti's affairs. Charles Bezuidenhout, a policeman who worked with Palto, was quoted as saying in his affidavit: "Agliotti was or is still involved with the Italian, Russian and Chinese mafias. It was also put to me that Commissioner Selebi was aware of these operations."
The report also quoted Judge Willem Heath as claiming the Kebble family used Agliotti's access to Selebi to lobby him repeatedly over cases police were investigating against Brett Kebble and his father, Roger. According to Heath, from 2003 to 2004, Agliotti met Selebi once every two months "if not more often" to discuss criminal cases against the Kebbles involving alleged fraud and share manipulation, the Mail&Guardian reported.
Source: News 24.com
New Selebi 'friend' surfaces
Johannesburg - New allegations have been made about police chief Jackie Selebi's allegedly dodgy friends - this time, his ties to an "arch-criminal". Selebi has come under renewed scrutiny after his friend, Glenn Agliotti, was arrested for mining magnate Brett Kebble's murder.
The new claims against Selebi come from Paul O'Sullivan, the former Airports Company of SA (Acsa) security chief who has compiled a dossier on Selebi's alleged misdemeanours. He says he's received some more damaging information on Selebi. According to O'Sullivan, he was approached with new facts about Selebi's ties to an "arch criminal" involved in "human trafficking, prostitution, money laundering and tax evasion". O'Sullivan said he'd handed over the information and the person to the Scorpions.
Source: News 24.com
The new claims against Selebi come from Paul O'Sullivan, the former Airports Company of SA (Acsa) security chief who has compiled a dossier on Selebi's alleged misdemeanours. He says he's received some more damaging information on Selebi. According to O'Sullivan, he was approached with new facts about Selebi's ties to an "arch criminal" involved in "human trafficking, prostitution, money laundering and tax evasion". O'Sullivan said he'd handed over the information and the person to the Scorpions.
Source: News 24.com
Thursday, November 23, 2006
'I'm an African,' says Van Zyl Slabbert
Identity is still an important debate in South Africa, said political analyst Frederik van Zyl Slabbert on Wednesday. He said South Africa had come through a "remarkable" transition and that public debate on issues like identity and race was crucial. He warned against clinging to racial or ethnic identities.
Source: Mail & Guardian
Source: Mail & Guardian
Sunday, November 19, 2006
New twists in Kebble murder
Another business associate of slain mining magnate Brett Kebble's pending arrest Down Under, and the ruling party's unanimous support for embattled national police commissioner Jackie Selebi, added twists to South Africa's high-profile murder mystery at the weekend.
Both Kebble and Selebi had reportedly been friends with Agliotti, who now has the media reputation of being known as "The Landlord" in the drug and smuggling world, a divorcee after two wives dumped him for bigamy, and a police informer.
Sunday papers reported that, according to the police and the Scorpions, Agliotti had allegedly approached Kebble's former security man, Clinton Nassif, to assist in an orchestrated assassination that would leave Kebble's family with life insurance payouts as he faced major debts.
Source: News 24.com
Both Kebble and Selebi had reportedly been friends with Agliotti, who now has the media reputation of being known as "The Landlord" in the drug and smuggling world, a divorcee after two wives dumped him for bigamy, and a police informer.
Sunday papers reported that, according to the police and the Scorpions, Agliotti had allegedly approached Kebble's former security man, Clinton Nassif, to assist in an orchestrated assassination that would leave Kebble's family with life insurance payouts as he faced major debts.
Source: News 24.com
Friday, November 17, 2006
Agliotti's arrest 'shame to SA'
The arrest of a friend to South Africa's top policeman for murder signals a further embarrassment for the beleaguered law enforcement agencies in one of the world's most crime-ridden countries.
Members of the elite Scorpions crime-fighting unit carried out the arrest of Johannesburg businessman Glen Agliotti at dawn on Thursday for mafia-style killing of mining tycoon Brett Kebble last year.
Source: News 24.com
Members of the elite Scorpions crime-fighting unit carried out the arrest of Johannesburg businessman Glen Agliotti at dawn on Thursday for mafia-style killing of mining tycoon Brett Kebble last year.
Source: News 24.com
Wednesday, November 8, 2006
The crisis of US imperialism in historical perspective
The following is an edited version of a report delivered by Nick Beams to a meeting of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia) on the weekend of October 25-26. Beams is the SEP national secretary and a member of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site. He has written and lectured extensively on Marxist political economy.
The 2006 American elections have a truly global significance. They are taking place in conditions where the Bush administration and the entire US ruling elite is embroiled in a deep-going political crisis, precipitated by the disastrous consequences of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. As numerous books, articles and comment pieces—many of them echoing positions articulated within the American military—have made clear, the invasion of Iraq has been a fiasco. The underlying position of the various critics from within ruling circles is that it has weakened both the immediate and the long-term strategic position of the United States.
How to resolve this crisis? A Financial Times columnist recently suggested that anyone who could do so, ought to be awarded the Nobel Prize. No one has an answer. A situation has developed where all the options are bad—that is to say, any proposal immediately throws up new problems and contradictions.
The Iraqi government, as has been widely reported, has been given about two months to move toward bringing the situation under control. Just what that means, however, is not clear. Having denounced the insurgents as terrorists and Baathist dead-enders, the Bush administration is insisting that there should be an amnesty and they should be brought into the political process. But to bring back the Baathists means a bloody crackdown on the Shia militias, and above all on the Sadrists. Such a military bloodbath is now being prepared.
The report of Iraq Study Group headed by James Baker III will be issued after the elections. Among the options being considered is the division of Iraq into three—a Kurdish region in the north, a Shia-dominated region in the south and a Sunni-dominated region in the centre. But this option appears to have been rejected, at least for the present, on the grounds that it would result in even bigger conflicts, coupled with large-scale ethnic cleansing. The present sectarian conflict is largely the result of dividing the polity along religious lines. What would happen if there were to be a geographical division of the country? A Kurdish state in the north would create problems for Turkey, and the Saudi regime could be weakened by a Shia regime in the south, while Iran would be strengthened.
One proposal, which seems likely to come from the Baker report, is discussions with Iran and Syria to try to stabilise the situation. But concessions would have to be made to both Iran and Syria to effect such an agreement—at least, some kind of normalisation of relations and a rejection of the perspective of “regime change”. In the case of Iran, this would involve the reversal of US policy going right back to the immediate aftermath of World War II. And any agreement with Iran and Syria would raise the issue of US relations with Israel.
Aside from these immediate questions, the Iraq debacle has provoked discussion in American foreign policy circles about the long-term position of the United States.
Former State Department official and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas, wrote an article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs entitled “The New Middle East” which reviews some of these issues. He begins as follows:
“Just over two centuries since Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt heralded the advent of the modern Middle East—some 80 years after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, 50 years after the end of colonialism, and less than 20 years after the end of the Cold War—the American era in the Middle East, the fourth in the region’s modern history, has ended. Visions of a new, Europe-like region—peaceful, prosperous, democratic—will not be realised. Much more likely is the emergence of a new Middle East that will cause great harm to itself, the United States, and the world.
“All the eras have been defined by the interplay of contending forces, both internal and external to the region. What has varied is the balance between these influences. The Middle East’s next era promises to be one in which outside actors have a relatively modest impact and local forces enjoy the upper hand—and in which the local actors gaining power are radicals committed to changing the status quo. Shaping the new Middle East from the outside will be exceedingly difficult, but it—along with managing a dynamic Asia—will be the primary challenge of U.S. foreign policy for decades to come.”
According to Haas, the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union provided a situation that gave the United States unprecedented influence and freedom to act. However, this era is now over.
“What has brought this era to an end after less than two decades is a number of factors, some structural, some self-created. The most significant has been the Bush administration’s decision to attack Iraq in 2003 and its conduct of the operation and resulting occupation. One casualty of the war has been a Sunni-dominated Iraq, which was strong enough and motivated enough to balance Shiite Iran. Sunni-Shiite tensions, dormant for a while, have come to the surface in Iraq and throughout the region. Terrorists have gained a base in Iraq and developed there a new set of techniques to export. Throughout much of the region, democracy has become associated with the loss of public order and the end of Sunni primacy. Anti-American sentiment, already considerable, has been reinforced. And by tying down a huge portion of the US military, the war has reduced US leverage worldwide. It is one of history’s ironies that the first war in Iraq, a war of necessity, marked the beginning of the American era in the Middle East and the second Iraq war, a war of choice, has precipitated its end.”
In the future, he points out, the US will increasingly be challenged by the foreign policies of other outsiders in the Middle East. Haas can offer no way forward, warning that there are no quick and easy solutions for the problems the new era poses and that the Middle East will remain a troubled and troubling part of the world for decades to come—enough to make one nostalgic for the old Middle East.
The decline of the US
Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, a thinktank established in the recent period to promote alternatives to the Bush administration, points to the decline in the long-term strategic position of the US and the collapse of the perspectives developed in the post-Cold War period.
In a recent article entitled “The World After Bush”, he writes:
“On 20th January 2009, George W Bush, barring his death, resignation or impeachment, will be succeeded by the 44th US president. Whether Republican or Democrat, the next president will not only inherit a number of crises, but will be in a considerably weaker position to deal with them.
“Much of America’s weakness will be the result of self-inflicted wounds: the unnecessary invasion of Iraq, along with the Bush administration’s gratuitous insults to allies, its arrogant unilateralism and its hostility to international law. But as tempting as it may be to put all of the blame on the Bush administration, the truth is that most of the trends that will limit American power and influence in the next decade are long-term phenomena produced by economic, demographic and ideological developments beyond the power of the US or any government to influence. The rise of China, the shift in the centre of the world economy to Asia, the growth of neo-mercantilist petro-politics, the spread of Islamism in both militant and moderate forms—these trends are reshaping the world order in ways that neither the US nor any of its allies can do much to control.
“In retrospect, we can view the period in US and world history that has just ended as ‘the long 1990s’. Those years began in euphoria with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and expired in frustration in late 2003, when the swift victory of the US and its allies over Iraq’s armed forces was succeeded by an insurgency that exposed the limits of US power. But even if 9/11 and the Iraq invasion had never occurred, the conventional wisdom of the long 1990s would have crumbled at some point after colliding with reality.
“Take the central assumption that at the end of the cold war a bipolar world was replaced by a unipolar one. This was true only in the military dimension—and even there American power was exaggerated. The US has no peers when the task is breaking the conventional armed forces of second and third-tier states like Iraq and Serbia. But when it comes to asymmetric warfare, in the form of campaigns against insurgents like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military, like all conventional militaries, finds itself in the position of a clumsy Goliath trying to quash a nimble and determined David. Stealth bombers and world-class fleets are no help in house-to-house fighting, and missile defences are no good against improvised explosive devices. As the wars in Vietnam and Iraq tragically demonstrate, the US military is not very good at ‘military operations other than war’—and America’s enemies know it.”
Turning to the underlying economic issues, he writes:
“The conventional wisdom of the long 1990s was correct that capitalism had defeated socialism, but mistaken to assume that the libertarian capitalism fashionable in the US in the late 20th century was the winner. The Japanese never adopted laissez-faire capitalism and China and Russia in recent years have devised their own mixes of state capitalism and free markets.
“The growth of China and India, which was supposed to herald a global free market, may instead inaugurate a new age of mercantilism, as Asian industrial powers like China, unwilling to rely on free markets for energy sources and commodities, engage in negotiations with supplier countries. Already bilateral contracts are displacing free markets in oil and gas, and regional trade pacts are proliferating even as global trade talks are stalled. The competition between the rising industrial nations of Asia and the older industrial democracies enhances the leverage of authoritarian and nationalist states endowed with critical resources, particularly oil-producing countries like Iran, Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. These countries view China not only as a customer but also as a counterweight to the US.”
Lind maintains that the “conventional wisdom of the long 1990s ... was mistaken in every respect. The world did not become unipolar in the 1990s; it has been effectively multipolar since the 1970s. Ethnic nationalism, not liberalism or democracy, is the most powerful force in the world today. And the competition of the industrial nations for sources of supply and markets is bolstering mercantilism and economic regionalism, incompatible with the laissez-faire utopia touted by panegyrists of globalisation in the long 1990s.
“All of these trends would constrain US foreign policy, even if Al Gore had been inaugurated in 2001 rather than George W Bush. It will now be additionally constrained by the legacy of the eight-year Bush administration. When the next president is inaugurated, the US will almost certainly still be in Iraq. Rather than have the world witness the inglorious departure of US forces from a chaotic Iraq in the final years of his presidency, Bush is likely to cede the problem to his successor.”
He concludes that the collapse of the neoconservative perspective in the Middle East and the world does not mean success for what he calls the neoliberal perspective of the Democratic Party. “Neoliberals agree with neoconservatives about the goal of US foreign policy—a global free market in a world policed by a benevolent, hegemonic US. Their differences are in the details. Although they are as opposed in practice to a multipolar world order as neoconservatives, neoliberals argue that the US should make its global hegemony more palatable to other countries by endorsing international law and working through international institutions like the UN and NATO.”
He notes that while some neoliberals call for a vast program of investment in developing countries, the Middle East in particular—a kind of new Marshall Plan—this will never be tested, because the money is not there in the first place.
While Lind does not go on to develop the argument, this fact does point to the underlying reason for the resort to militarism—the economic decline of the United States. His perspective is for what he calls a “concert of great powers, organised and led by the US” as the best hope for reconciling international peace with liberal order.
But what happens if those powers do not find it in their interest to be led and organised by the US? Such a concert is only possible provided the US is prepared to make concessions to its rivals and potential adversaries. Here, however, lies the fundamental problem. The US is not in a position to do that. As we have previously noted, the invasion of Iraq was directed not so much against Saddam Hussein, as against the European rivals of the US in the Middle East. The aim was to establish a puppet regime in Iraq and in that way reinforce the position of the US against its European and Asian rivals. The same is true of Iran.
The reason the US pursues such a belligerent policy is rooted in its long-term economic decline. In the immediate post-war period, the US financed the Marshall Plan and consciously rebuilt the other major capitalist powers—except Britain whose empire it was seeking to dismantle. Under today’s conditions, a “concert of great powers” can at best only be an unstable truce.
The historic context
The present situation has to be placed within its broad historical context—that is to say, examined on the basis of the historical development of the world capitalist system.
Following Leon Trotsky, we can delineate very definite phases or periods in what he called the curve of capitalist development, and a number of important features of the present situation clearly emerge.
When Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1847, they pointed to the stupendous achievements of capitalist civilisation. But in many ways what they wrote was only a brilliant anticipation of what was to come. Over the next 25 years, there took place the great Victorian upswing of the mid-nineteenth century.
Following the revolutions of 1848, which cleared away the remaining feudal encumbrances and barriers, at least in Western Europe, came a mighty economic expansion. It was spearheaded by the railway industries and organised by British capital. This was the heyday of British commercial imperialism. British capital financed expansion in Western Europe and the United States. Britain with its empire and navy was the pre-eminent capitalist power, but it laid the basis for the expansion of the other capitalist powers.
The first great upswing in the curve of capitalist development came to an end with a series of financial crises in 1873. While the immediate crisis passed, it did not signal a return to the previous period. Rather, 1873 marked the beginning of what is known in economic history as the Great Depression of the nineteenth century. In contrast to the upswing of the previous quarter century, this was a period of enormous downward pressure on profits.
This pressure, in turn, was the driving force behind some of the great changes of that period. In America, and to some extent Germany, new forms of industrial organisation and industrial processes emerged—in steel-making, in chemicals, the beginnings of assembly line production in the food and meat industries, and the application of steam power to shipping, to name a few. This was the period of the rise of colonial empires, exemplified by the carve-up of Africa in just 20 years. But it was also, although not fully recognised at the time, the beginning of the decline of British hegemony. The very expansion of capitalism, financed by Britain in an earlier period, created the conditions for a weakening of its relative position.
The period of the Great Depression also brought great social changes. The development of new industrial processes saw the emergence of the industrial working class as a powerful social force. In the days of the Communist Manifesto, the working class, except in England, was not highly concentrated. Old artisan forms still remained and factories tended to be small scale. All that changed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
These objective processes found their expression in the development of the mass trade unions and the socialist and labour parties. The rise of Marxism as the theoretical and political guiding force of the socialist movement was expressed in the founding of the Second International. The First International had been wrecked by the anarchists and petty-bourgeois radical forces and by the impact of the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. But by 1889, Marxism had asserted its supremacy over these tendencies. Just 28 years after the founding of the Second International, the first successful socialist revolution was carried out in Russia in October 1917.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx emphasised the global character of the capitalist system. But here, again, this was more a brilliant anticipation than an empirical description. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the capitalist system started, so to speak, to catch up to Marx and the process we now designate as globalisation went ahead in leaps and bounds. Far-flung regions of the world were drawn into the capitalist processes of production, united by new forms of transport and communications.
Minerals and raw materials, some of them new, such as rubber, as well as agricultural products, were transported in bulk to be processed in factories. Finance capital spread across the world as banks financed vast undertakings, in particular the development of infrastructure. The cheapening of raw materials and food, which these developments made possible, assumed vast importance for the development of industrial capitalism, in the same way that the drive to secure ever-cheaper forms of labour does today.
This “second industrial revolution” in the last quarter of the nineteenth century eventually brought an end to the Great Depression in prices and profits. A new capitalist upswing began from around 1895. But it was not a repeat of the earlier upward phase.
Beneath the prosperity, all manner of problems were emerging. One of the crucial differences with the earlier period was that rather than taking place under the aegis of a dominant power, whose economic might worked to ensure the expansion of the capitalist economy as a whole, the new upswing took place amid growing rivalries and antagonisms among the major powers.
The old economic power, Britain, was losing its position. At the turn of the century, it suffered a shock when the Boer War, which was expected to present few problems, turned into a bloody disaster. Britain’s weaknesses had been exposed and, over the course of the next seven years, she abandoned the previous policy of “splendid isolation” and entered into a series of alliances—with Japan, France and Russia—which were to play a significant role in propelling her into the Great War.
War and depression
The eruption of the war in 1914 marked the beginning of a new downswing in the curve of capitalist development. But, as Trotsky was to remark later, it was not so much that the war produced the downswing, rather that the downswing was the key factor in triggering the war. The fundamental economic shift that led to the eruption of the war can be seen in the fact that it was not until the latter 1920s that post-war production in Europe began to attain the levels reached in 1913—only to collapse again with the onset of the 1930s Great Depression.
From the standpoint of globalisation, the inter-war period can be designated as the period of the great reversal. By the beginning of the 1930s, the world market had, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. Trade had contracted by two-thirds, and international finance had come to a virtual standstill. The world was divided among competing empires and spheres of influence.
From the standpoint of the dominant capitalist power, the United States, the Second World War was not a struggle against fascism, so much as a war waged to end the empires of the rival capitalist powers, and to restore the world market and the free movement of capital and trade, upon which American capitalism, and the capitalist system as a whole, depended.
The defeat of Germany and Japan opened the way for the reconstruction of the world economy and made possible the adoption on a world scale of the new, more productive, techniques of the American production. This gave rise to a new upswing in the curve of capitalist development.
One is struck today by the parallels with the mid-nineteenth century upswing. Just as the 1848 revolutions removed constrictions on the expansion of capitalism, so the Allied victory in the war, led by the US, opened the way for the extension of the world market. Just as the mid-Victorian boom rested on the economic might of the dominant power, Great Britain, so the post-war economic boom took place under the aegis of the United States, whose vast economic power and superiority over its rivals enabled it to undertake the task of reconstructing the capitalist system as a whole. However, the very measures it undertook weakened its relative position.
The world economic crisis of the early 1970s, when the profit rate began to fall, signalled the onset of a new downswing in the curve of capitalist development. Over the next two decades, the fall in the rate of profit became the driving force for vast changes in the structure and functioning of capitalist production. These changes, bound up with the application of computer technologies to all aspects of communication and production, have resulted in a quantum leap in the globalisation of production.
Whereas in all previous epochs, surplus value was extracted from the working class within the confines of a given nation-state, this now takes place on a global scale. Capital exists in three forms: as money (the end of the capitalist production process with the sale of commodities and the start of a new round of production), as commodity capital (which emerges from the production process) and as productive capital (the means of production that are employed to extract surplus value from the working class in the course of the production process). Commodity capital and money capital became citizens of the world in an earlier period. Productive capital, however, still retained a certain national identity. But now the disaggregation of the production process beyond the framework of the nation-state means that productive capital has become truly global.
The globalisation of production since the mid-1970s has had vast social and political implications. If the downswing in the latter part of the nineteenth century was the trigger for the establishment of the mass organisations of the working class that held sway for the majority of the twentieth century, then the changes over the past three decades have brought about their disintegration and collapse. This was the significance of the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Capital responded to the downturn in the rate of profit in the 1970s in the same way as it had in the past. It undertook a desperate struggle to revolutionise the process of production. The globalisation of production is the outcome.
The rate of profit
The question now arises: has this produced an upswing in the rate of profit? There is some evidence that it has. But whether this means a new period of capitalist stability is altogether another question. In fact, an examination of the way this profit upturn has been achieved reveals that it has the most explosive social and political consequences.
An article published in the Financial Times on October 14 notes the following: “In Britain, company profits were the highest last year since records began in 1965; yet median weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation, fell by 0.4 percent. It is the same story in all the rich countries of the west. In a recent research note on the US economy, Goldman Sachs, the US investment bank, said: ‘As a share of GDP, profits reached an all-time high in the first quarter of 2006. Several factors have contributed to the rise in profit margins. The most important is a decline in labour’s share of national income.’”
According to a New York Times article published on August 28, the current expansion in the US economy could become the first period of sustained economic growth since World War II that fails to offer an increase in real wages for most workers. The median hourly wage for American workers has declined by 2 percent since 2003 in real terms. This means that wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of GDP since the government started recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have reached their highest levels since the 1960s.
In the first quarter of 2006, wages and salaries represented 45 percent of GDP, down from almost 50 percent in the first quarter of 2001 and a record 53.6 percent in the first quarter of 1970. Each percentage point now represents about $132 billion.
These aggregate figures tend to mask the real situation, because they include income paid to the highest earners. In 2004 the top 1 percent of income earners in the US, including many chief executives, received 11.2 percent of all wage income, compared to 8.7 percent a decade earlier and less than 6 percent three decades ago.
The increase in the rate of profit, the result of the increased profit share in GDP, is in part the outcome of the vast changes in the structure of the world economy resulting from the integration of China and the former Soviet Union into the world labour market. A recent study by Harvard labour economist Richard Freeman notes that a process he calls “The Great Doubling” has seen the global labour force available to capital increase from about 1.46 billion to around 2.93 billion. This has dramatically changed the balance between capital and labour in the global economy. According to Freeman, the ratio of capital to labour in 2000 was about 61 percent of what it would have been had China, India and the ex-Soviet bloc not been integrated into the world economy. Of course, these figures are only approximations, but they do give a sense of the historic dimension of the transformations taking place.
The process, which began with unskilled labour, has not stopped there. A whole series of jobs that were once considered relatively immobile can now be transferred. In effect, any process that can be digitised can be outsourced to anywhere in the world.
Capital has thus been able to bring about a certain restoration in the rate of profit. In other words, there has been a benefit to capital from the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the integration of China and India into the world market. Previously, capital boosted the profit rate by plundering raw materials and resources. Today it does so by plundering cheap labour. But it is far from establishing a new equilibrium. In fact, the situation is highly unstable. Capital accumulation, as measured by the rate of profit, depends more and more on the reduction of the share of national income going to labour in the major capitalist countries. And even where there is a tendency for wages to increase in China and India, the process of accumulation is also highly unstable. Already sections of Chinese labour are becoming too highly priced in relation to what can be obtained in Vietnam or Bangladesh.
There are distinct parallels with the period before 1914. Then, the upturn in capitalist profit was occasioned, at least in part, by the first phase of globalisation—the exploitation of cheap raw materials and agricultural products. Today, it is being fuelled by the increased supplies of cheaper labour. But this mode of accumulation is bound to bring social and political instability because it is dependent on ever-deepening social inequality, which can have far-reaching consequences in both the advanced capitalist countries and the new entrants into the global market.
Like the period before 1914, there is an intensifying conflict among the major powers. The relative economic decline of the US, like that of Britain before it, has extended over several decades. However, it has now become an explosive factor in world politics, as the US attempts to compensate for its loss of economic hegemony by military means. There are criticisms of the Bush doctrine of militarism from within American ruling circles, given the disaster that has unfolded in Iraq. But whenever one reads the alternative proposals—a concert of powers, a return to multilateralism—one is struck by the fact that they all involve some weakening of the position of the US. For three and a half decades, ever since it unilaterally removed the gold backing from the US dollar and ended the Bretton Woods monetary system because it was not able to honour its obligations, the US has been seeking to resolve its economic problems at the expense of its rivals. That process is not going to be reversed. In a sense, the turn to military means represents the intensification of a process that has been unfolding over the entire preceding period.
Timothy Garton Ash of the Guardian wrote last year: “If you want to know what London was like in 1905, come to Washington in 2005. Imperial gravitas and massive self-importance. That sense of being the centre of the world, and of needing to know what happens in every corner of the world because you might be called on—or feel called upon—to intervene there. Hyperpower. Top dog. And yet, gnawing away beneath the surface, the nagging fear that your global supremacy is not half so secure as you would wish. As Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, put it in 1902: ‘The weary Titan under the too vast orb of his fate’ ... The United States is now that weary Titan’” (cited in Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, The Political Economy of American Militarism, p. 36).
Just as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the previously dominant imperialist power, Great Britain, had to increasingly resort to military means in the face of rising challengers (Germany, rival European powers and the US) so today the US faces direct threats to its position. These are the underlying driving forces of the deepening political instability, growing great power rivalry and war that we are witnessing today.
Source: World Socialist Web Site
The 2006 American elections have a truly global significance. They are taking place in conditions where the Bush administration and the entire US ruling elite is embroiled in a deep-going political crisis, precipitated by the disastrous consequences of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. As numerous books, articles and comment pieces—many of them echoing positions articulated within the American military—have made clear, the invasion of Iraq has been a fiasco. The underlying position of the various critics from within ruling circles is that it has weakened both the immediate and the long-term strategic position of the United States.
How to resolve this crisis? A Financial Times columnist recently suggested that anyone who could do so, ought to be awarded the Nobel Prize. No one has an answer. A situation has developed where all the options are bad—that is to say, any proposal immediately throws up new problems and contradictions.
The Iraqi government, as has been widely reported, has been given about two months to move toward bringing the situation under control. Just what that means, however, is not clear. Having denounced the insurgents as terrorists and Baathist dead-enders, the Bush administration is insisting that there should be an amnesty and they should be brought into the political process. But to bring back the Baathists means a bloody crackdown on the Shia militias, and above all on the Sadrists. Such a military bloodbath is now being prepared.
The report of Iraq Study Group headed by James Baker III will be issued after the elections. Among the options being considered is the division of Iraq into three—a Kurdish region in the north, a Shia-dominated region in the south and a Sunni-dominated region in the centre. But this option appears to have been rejected, at least for the present, on the grounds that it would result in even bigger conflicts, coupled with large-scale ethnic cleansing. The present sectarian conflict is largely the result of dividing the polity along religious lines. What would happen if there were to be a geographical division of the country? A Kurdish state in the north would create problems for Turkey, and the Saudi regime could be weakened by a Shia regime in the south, while Iran would be strengthened.
One proposal, which seems likely to come from the Baker report, is discussions with Iran and Syria to try to stabilise the situation. But concessions would have to be made to both Iran and Syria to effect such an agreement—at least, some kind of normalisation of relations and a rejection of the perspective of “regime change”. In the case of Iran, this would involve the reversal of US policy going right back to the immediate aftermath of World War II. And any agreement with Iran and Syria would raise the issue of US relations with Israel.
Aside from these immediate questions, the Iraq debacle has provoked discussion in American foreign policy circles about the long-term position of the United States.
Former State Department official and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas, wrote an article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs entitled “The New Middle East” which reviews some of these issues. He begins as follows:
“Just over two centuries since Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt heralded the advent of the modern Middle East—some 80 years after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, 50 years after the end of colonialism, and less than 20 years after the end of the Cold War—the American era in the Middle East, the fourth in the region’s modern history, has ended. Visions of a new, Europe-like region—peaceful, prosperous, democratic—will not be realised. Much more likely is the emergence of a new Middle East that will cause great harm to itself, the United States, and the world.
“All the eras have been defined by the interplay of contending forces, both internal and external to the region. What has varied is the balance between these influences. The Middle East’s next era promises to be one in which outside actors have a relatively modest impact and local forces enjoy the upper hand—and in which the local actors gaining power are radicals committed to changing the status quo. Shaping the new Middle East from the outside will be exceedingly difficult, but it—along with managing a dynamic Asia—will be the primary challenge of U.S. foreign policy for decades to come.”
According to Haas, the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union provided a situation that gave the United States unprecedented influence and freedom to act. However, this era is now over.
“What has brought this era to an end after less than two decades is a number of factors, some structural, some self-created. The most significant has been the Bush administration’s decision to attack Iraq in 2003 and its conduct of the operation and resulting occupation. One casualty of the war has been a Sunni-dominated Iraq, which was strong enough and motivated enough to balance Shiite Iran. Sunni-Shiite tensions, dormant for a while, have come to the surface in Iraq and throughout the region. Terrorists have gained a base in Iraq and developed there a new set of techniques to export. Throughout much of the region, democracy has become associated with the loss of public order and the end of Sunni primacy. Anti-American sentiment, already considerable, has been reinforced. And by tying down a huge portion of the US military, the war has reduced US leverage worldwide. It is one of history’s ironies that the first war in Iraq, a war of necessity, marked the beginning of the American era in the Middle East and the second Iraq war, a war of choice, has precipitated its end.”
In the future, he points out, the US will increasingly be challenged by the foreign policies of other outsiders in the Middle East. Haas can offer no way forward, warning that there are no quick and easy solutions for the problems the new era poses and that the Middle East will remain a troubled and troubling part of the world for decades to come—enough to make one nostalgic for the old Middle East.
The decline of the US
Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, a thinktank established in the recent period to promote alternatives to the Bush administration, points to the decline in the long-term strategic position of the US and the collapse of the perspectives developed in the post-Cold War period.
In a recent article entitled “The World After Bush”, he writes:
“On 20th January 2009, George W Bush, barring his death, resignation or impeachment, will be succeeded by the 44th US president. Whether Republican or Democrat, the next president will not only inherit a number of crises, but will be in a considerably weaker position to deal with them.
“Much of America’s weakness will be the result of self-inflicted wounds: the unnecessary invasion of Iraq, along with the Bush administration’s gratuitous insults to allies, its arrogant unilateralism and its hostility to international law. But as tempting as it may be to put all of the blame on the Bush administration, the truth is that most of the trends that will limit American power and influence in the next decade are long-term phenomena produced by economic, demographic and ideological developments beyond the power of the US or any government to influence. The rise of China, the shift in the centre of the world economy to Asia, the growth of neo-mercantilist petro-politics, the spread of Islamism in both militant and moderate forms—these trends are reshaping the world order in ways that neither the US nor any of its allies can do much to control.
“In retrospect, we can view the period in US and world history that has just ended as ‘the long 1990s’. Those years began in euphoria with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and expired in frustration in late 2003, when the swift victory of the US and its allies over Iraq’s armed forces was succeeded by an insurgency that exposed the limits of US power. But even if 9/11 and the Iraq invasion had never occurred, the conventional wisdom of the long 1990s would have crumbled at some point after colliding with reality.
“Take the central assumption that at the end of the cold war a bipolar world was replaced by a unipolar one. This was true only in the military dimension—and even there American power was exaggerated. The US has no peers when the task is breaking the conventional armed forces of second and third-tier states like Iraq and Serbia. But when it comes to asymmetric warfare, in the form of campaigns against insurgents like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military, like all conventional militaries, finds itself in the position of a clumsy Goliath trying to quash a nimble and determined David. Stealth bombers and world-class fleets are no help in house-to-house fighting, and missile defences are no good against improvised explosive devices. As the wars in Vietnam and Iraq tragically demonstrate, the US military is not very good at ‘military operations other than war’—and America’s enemies know it.”
Turning to the underlying economic issues, he writes:
“The conventional wisdom of the long 1990s was correct that capitalism had defeated socialism, but mistaken to assume that the libertarian capitalism fashionable in the US in the late 20th century was the winner. The Japanese never adopted laissez-faire capitalism and China and Russia in recent years have devised their own mixes of state capitalism and free markets.
“The growth of China and India, which was supposed to herald a global free market, may instead inaugurate a new age of mercantilism, as Asian industrial powers like China, unwilling to rely on free markets for energy sources and commodities, engage in negotiations with supplier countries. Already bilateral contracts are displacing free markets in oil and gas, and regional trade pacts are proliferating even as global trade talks are stalled. The competition between the rising industrial nations of Asia and the older industrial democracies enhances the leverage of authoritarian and nationalist states endowed with critical resources, particularly oil-producing countries like Iran, Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. These countries view China not only as a customer but also as a counterweight to the US.”
Lind maintains that the “conventional wisdom of the long 1990s ... was mistaken in every respect. The world did not become unipolar in the 1990s; it has been effectively multipolar since the 1970s. Ethnic nationalism, not liberalism or democracy, is the most powerful force in the world today. And the competition of the industrial nations for sources of supply and markets is bolstering mercantilism and economic regionalism, incompatible with the laissez-faire utopia touted by panegyrists of globalisation in the long 1990s.
“All of these trends would constrain US foreign policy, even if Al Gore had been inaugurated in 2001 rather than George W Bush. It will now be additionally constrained by the legacy of the eight-year Bush administration. When the next president is inaugurated, the US will almost certainly still be in Iraq. Rather than have the world witness the inglorious departure of US forces from a chaotic Iraq in the final years of his presidency, Bush is likely to cede the problem to his successor.”
He concludes that the collapse of the neoconservative perspective in the Middle East and the world does not mean success for what he calls the neoliberal perspective of the Democratic Party. “Neoliberals agree with neoconservatives about the goal of US foreign policy—a global free market in a world policed by a benevolent, hegemonic US. Their differences are in the details. Although they are as opposed in practice to a multipolar world order as neoconservatives, neoliberals argue that the US should make its global hegemony more palatable to other countries by endorsing international law and working through international institutions like the UN and NATO.”
He notes that while some neoliberals call for a vast program of investment in developing countries, the Middle East in particular—a kind of new Marshall Plan—this will never be tested, because the money is not there in the first place.
While Lind does not go on to develop the argument, this fact does point to the underlying reason for the resort to militarism—the economic decline of the United States. His perspective is for what he calls a “concert of great powers, organised and led by the US” as the best hope for reconciling international peace with liberal order.
But what happens if those powers do not find it in their interest to be led and organised by the US? Such a concert is only possible provided the US is prepared to make concessions to its rivals and potential adversaries. Here, however, lies the fundamental problem. The US is not in a position to do that. As we have previously noted, the invasion of Iraq was directed not so much against Saddam Hussein, as against the European rivals of the US in the Middle East. The aim was to establish a puppet regime in Iraq and in that way reinforce the position of the US against its European and Asian rivals. The same is true of Iran.
The reason the US pursues such a belligerent policy is rooted in its long-term economic decline. In the immediate post-war period, the US financed the Marshall Plan and consciously rebuilt the other major capitalist powers—except Britain whose empire it was seeking to dismantle. Under today’s conditions, a “concert of great powers” can at best only be an unstable truce.
The historic context
The present situation has to be placed within its broad historical context—that is to say, examined on the basis of the historical development of the world capitalist system.
Following Leon Trotsky, we can delineate very definite phases or periods in what he called the curve of capitalist development, and a number of important features of the present situation clearly emerge.
When Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1847, they pointed to the stupendous achievements of capitalist civilisation. But in many ways what they wrote was only a brilliant anticipation of what was to come. Over the next 25 years, there took place the great Victorian upswing of the mid-nineteenth century.
Following the revolutions of 1848, which cleared away the remaining feudal encumbrances and barriers, at least in Western Europe, came a mighty economic expansion. It was spearheaded by the railway industries and organised by British capital. This was the heyday of British commercial imperialism. British capital financed expansion in Western Europe and the United States. Britain with its empire and navy was the pre-eminent capitalist power, but it laid the basis for the expansion of the other capitalist powers.
The first great upswing in the curve of capitalist development came to an end with a series of financial crises in 1873. While the immediate crisis passed, it did not signal a return to the previous period. Rather, 1873 marked the beginning of what is known in economic history as the Great Depression of the nineteenth century. In contrast to the upswing of the previous quarter century, this was a period of enormous downward pressure on profits.
This pressure, in turn, was the driving force behind some of the great changes of that period. In America, and to some extent Germany, new forms of industrial organisation and industrial processes emerged—in steel-making, in chemicals, the beginnings of assembly line production in the food and meat industries, and the application of steam power to shipping, to name a few. This was the period of the rise of colonial empires, exemplified by the carve-up of Africa in just 20 years. But it was also, although not fully recognised at the time, the beginning of the decline of British hegemony. The very expansion of capitalism, financed by Britain in an earlier period, created the conditions for a weakening of its relative position.
The period of the Great Depression also brought great social changes. The development of new industrial processes saw the emergence of the industrial working class as a powerful social force. In the days of the Communist Manifesto, the working class, except in England, was not highly concentrated. Old artisan forms still remained and factories tended to be small scale. All that changed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
These objective processes found their expression in the development of the mass trade unions and the socialist and labour parties. The rise of Marxism as the theoretical and political guiding force of the socialist movement was expressed in the founding of the Second International. The First International had been wrecked by the anarchists and petty-bourgeois radical forces and by the impact of the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. But by 1889, Marxism had asserted its supremacy over these tendencies. Just 28 years after the founding of the Second International, the first successful socialist revolution was carried out in Russia in October 1917.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx emphasised the global character of the capitalist system. But here, again, this was more a brilliant anticipation than an empirical description. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the capitalist system started, so to speak, to catch up to Marx and the process we now designate as globalisation went ahead in leaps and bounds. Far-flung regions of the world were drawn into the capitalist processes of production, united by new forms of transport and communications.
Minerals and raw materials, some of them new, such as rubber, as well as agricultural products, were transported in bulk to be processed in factories. Finance capital spread across the world as banks financed vast undertakings, in particular the development of infrastructure. The cheapening of raw materials and food, which these developments made possible, assumed vast importance for the development of industrial capitalism, in the same way that the drive to secure ever-cheaper forms of labour does today.
This “second industrial revolution” in the last quarter of the nineteenth century eventually brought an end to the Great Depression in prices and profits. A new capitalist upswing began from around 1895. But it was not a repeat of the earlier upward phase.
Beneath the prosperity, all manner of problems were emerging. One of the crucial differences with the earlier period was that rather than taking place under the aegis of a dominant power, whose economic might worked to ensure the expansion of the capitalist economy as a whole, the new upswing took place amid growing rivalries and antagonisms among the major powers.
The old economic power, Britain, was losing its position. At the turn of the century, it suffered a shock when the Boer War, which was expected to present few problems, turned into a bloody disaster. Britain’s weaknesses had been exposed and, over the course of the next seven years, she abandoned the previous policy of “splendid isolation” and entered into a series of alliances—with Japan, France and Russia—which were to play a significant role in propelling her into the Great War.
War and depression
The eruption of the war in 1914 marked the beginning of a new downswing in the curve of capitalist development. But, as Trotsky was to remark later, it was not so much that the war produced the downswing, rather that the downswing was the key factor in triggering the war. The fundamental economic shift that led to the eruption of the war can be seen in the fact that it was not until the latter 1920s that post-war production in Europe began to attain the levels reached in 1913—only to collapse again with the onset of the 1930s Great Depression.
From the standpoint of globalisation, the inter-war period can be designated as the period of the great reversal. By the beginning of the 1930s, the world market had, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. Trade had contracted by two-thirds, and international finance had come to a virtual standstill. The world was divided among competing empires and spheres of influence.
From the standpoint of the dominant capitalist power, the United States, the Second World War was not a struggle against fascism, so much as a war waged to end the empires of the rival capitalist powers, and to restore the world market and the free movement of capital and trade, upon which American capitalism, and the capitalist system as a whole, depended.
The defeat of Germany and Japan opened the way for the reconstruction of the world economy and made possible the adoption on a world scale of the new, more productive, techniques of the American production. This gave rise to a new upswing in the curve of capitalist development.
One is struck today by the parallels with the mid-nineteenth century upswing. Just as the 1848 revolutions removed constrictions on the expansion of capitalism, so the Allied victory in the war, led by the US, opened the way for the extension of the world market. Just as the mid-Victorian boom rested on the economic might of the dominant power, Great Britain, so the post-war economic boom took place under the aegis of the United States, whose vast economic power and superiority over its rivals enabled it to undertake the task of reconstructing the capitalist system as a whole. However, the very measures it undertook weakened its relative position.
The world economic crisis of the early 1970s, when the profit rate began to fall, signalled the onset of a new downswing in the curve of capitalist development. Over the next two decades, the fall in the rate of profit became the driving force for vast changes in the structure and functioning of capitalist production. These changes, bound up with the application of computer technologies to all aspects of communication and production, have resulted in a quantum leap in the globalisation of production.
Whereas in all previous epochs, surplus value was extracted from the working class within the confines of a given nation-state, this now takes place on a global scale. Capital exists in three forms: as money (the end of the capitalist production process with the sale of commodities and the start of a new round of production), as commodity capital (which emerges from the production process) and as productive capital (the means of production that are employed to extract surplus value from the working class in the course of the production process). Commodity capital and money capital became citizens of the world in an earlier period. Productive capital, however, still retained a certain national identity. But now the disaggregation of the production process beyond the framework of the nation-state means that productive capital has become truly global.
The globalisation of production since the mid-1970s has had vast social and political implications. If the downswing in the latter part of the nineteenth century was the trigger for the establishment of the mass organisations of the working class that held sway for the majority of the twentieth century, then the changes over the past three decades have brought about their disintegration and collapse. This was the significance of the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Capital responded to the downturn in the rate of profit in the 1970s in the same way as it had in the past. It undertook a desperate struggle to revolutionise the process of production. The globalisation of production is the outcome.
The rate of profit
The question now arises: has this produced an upswing in the rate of profit? There is some evidence that it has. But whether this means a new period of capitalist stability is altogether another question. In fact, an examination of the way this profit upturn has been achieved reveals that it has the most explosive social and political consequences.
An article published in the Financial Times on October 14 notes the following: “In Britain, company profits were the highest last year since records began in 1965; yet median weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation, fell by 0.4 percent. It is the same story in all the rich countries of the west. In a recent research note on the US economy, Goldman Sachs, the US investment bank, said: ‘As a share of GDP, profits reached an all-time high in the first quarter of 2006. Several factors have contributed to the rise in profit margins. The most important is a decline in labour’s share of national income.’”
According to a New York Times article published on August 28, the current expansion in the US economy could become the first period of sustained economic growth since World War II that fails to offer an increase in real wages for most workers. The median hourly wage for American workers has declined by 2 percent since 2003 in real terms. This means that wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of GDP since the government started recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have reached their highest levels since the 1960s.
In the first quarter of 2006, wages and salaries represented 45 percent of GDP, down from almost 50 percent in the first quarter of 2001 and a record 53.6 percent in the first quarter of 1970. Each percentage point now represents about $132 billion.
These aggregate figures tend to mask the real situation, because they include income paid to the highest earners. In 2004 the top 1 percent of income earners in the US, including many chief executives, received 11.2 percent of all wage income, compared to 8.7 percent a decade earlier and less than 6 percent three decades ago.
The increase in the rate of profit, the result of the increased profit share in GDP, is in part the outcome of the vast changes in the structure of the world economy resulting from the integration of China and the former Soviet Union into the world labour market. A recent study by Harvard labour economist Richard Freeman notes that a process he calls “The Great Doubling” has seen the global labour force available to capital increase from about 1.46 billion to around 2.93 billion. This has dramatically changed the balance between capital and labour in the global economy. According to Freeman, the ratio of capital to labour in 2000 was about 61 percent of what it would have been had China, India and the ex-Soviet bloc not been integrated into the world economy. Of course, these figures are only approximations, but they do give a sense of the historic dimension of the transformations taking place.
The process, which began with unskilled labour, has not stopped there. A whole series of jobs that were once considered relatively immobile can now be transferred. In effect, any process that can be digitised can be outsourced to anywhere in the world.
Capital has thus been able to bring about a certain restoration in the rate of profit. In other words, there has been a benefit to capital from the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the integration of China and India into the world market. Previously, capital boosted the profit rate by plundering raw materials and resources. Today it does so by plundering cheap labour. But it is far from establishing a new equilibrium. In fact, the situation is highly unstable. Capital accumulation, as measured by the rate of profit, depends more and more on the reduction of the share of national income going to labour in the major capitalist countries. And even where there is a tendency for wages to increase in China and India, the process of accumulation is also highly unstable. Already sections of Chinese labour are becoming too highly priced in relation to what can be obtained in Vietnam or Bangladesh.
There are distinct parallels with the period before 1914. Then, the upturn in capitalist profit was occasioned, at least in part, by the first phase of globalisation—the exploitation of cheap raw materials and agricultural products. Today, it is being fuelled by the increased supplies of cheaper labour. But this mode of accumulation is bound to bring social and political instability because it is dependent on ever-deepening social inequality, which can have far-reaching consequences in both the advanced capitalist countries and the new entrants into the global market.
Like the period before 1914, there is an intensifying conflict among the major powers. The relative economic decline of the US, like that of Britain before it, has extended over several decades. However, it has now become an explosive factor in world politics, as the US attempts to compensate for its loss of economic hegemony by military means. There are criticisms of the Bush doctrine of militarism from within American ruling circles, given the disaster that has unfolded in Iraq. But whenever one reads the alternative proposals—a concert of powers, a return to multilateralism—one is struck by the fact that they all involve some weakening of the position of the US. For three and a half decades, ever since it unilaterally removed the gold backing from the US dollar and ended the Bretton Woods monetary system because it was not able to honour its obligations, the US has been seeking to resolve its economic problems at the expense of its rivals. That process is not going to be reversed. In a sense, the turn to military means represents the intensification of a process that has been unfolding over the entire preceding period.
Timothy Garton Ash of the Guardian wrote last year: “If you want to know what London was like in 1905, come to Washington in 2005. Imperial gravitas and massive self-importance. That sense of being the centre of the world, and of needing to know what happens in every corner of the world because you might be called on—or feel called upon—to intervene there. Hyperpower. Top dog. And yet, gnawing away beneath the surface, the nagging fear that your global supremacy is not half so secure as you would wish. As Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, put it in 1902: ‘The weary Titan under the too vast orb of his fate’ ... The United States is now that weary Titan’” (cited in Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, The Political Economy of American Militarism, p. 36).
Just as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the previously dominant imperialist power, Great Britain, had to increasingly resort to military means in the face of rising challengers (Germany, rival European powers and the US) so today the US faces direct threats to its position. These are the underlying driving forces of the deepening political instability, growing great power rivalry and war that we are witnessing today.
Source: World Socialist Web Site
Friday, November 3, 2006
Kebble murder: The noose tightens
A Scorpions subpoena obtained by the Mail & Guardian outlines the full scope of project "Bad Guys" -- the elite unit's investigation into the allegedly criminal network surrounding Brett Kebble; the network's role in or after Kebble's murder; and police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi's proximity to the network.
The Scorpions' arrest last week of Kebble security adviser Clinton Nassif, although on a relatively minor charge, appears to represent a breakthrough: Nassif features in each of the main strands of the investigation. Nassif handed himself over to the Scorpions last Thursday after they had issued a warrant for his arrest. This was two days before he would have left for the United States, where, on his own version, he intended to set up a call-centre business. He had already sold some of his properties in South Africa.
Nassif is said to have also put his main business, the Central National Security Group (CNSG), on the market. CNSG was contracted to Kebble's former company, JCI, providing services ranging from physical security to intelligence and investigations. The immediate charge against Nassif is one of insurance fraud -- he allegedly had his Mercedes dropped by a forklift in 2004 to increase the damage after he had been involved in a relatively minor accident. He claimed R500 000 from his insurers. Nassif, who denies the charge, was released on R300 000 bail a day after his arrest. Bail was not opposed by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), leading to speculation that he might have agreed to turn state witness in the wider investigation.
The first official confirmation of the extensive nature of the investigation appears in subpoenas issued by the Scorpions to potential witnesses against Nassif. The subpoenas were issued under a section of the NPA Act which compels witnesses to answer questions posed by investigators and to hand over evidence.
The M&G has obtained a copy of the subpoena from one of these witnesses. The subpoena states the project name of the investigation -- "Bad Guys" -- and then lists the offences being investigated: corruption, defeating the ends of justice, contravention of the Prevention of Organised Crime Act, fraud, contravention of the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act, conspiracy to murder and murder. The fact that the subpoenas locate Nassif's alleged insurance fraud in the context of this wider investigation is evidence of his central role in the network surrounding Kebble, and the fact that the Scorpions regard his arrest as a stepping stone to solving much more serious crimes.
The central strands under investigation in project "Bad Guys", and Nassif's alleged connection with them, are as follows:
Conspiracy to murder and murder
The role of Nassif and CNSG in the removal of Kebble's car from police custody the day after he was murdered -- allegedly to be cleaned, and before police had conducted a proper forensic investigation -- suggests an attempt at a cover-up after the murder.
Noteworthy in this episode is the confusion between the roles of the police and of operators in Nassif's CNSG in the early stages of the murder investigation.
From the Scorpions' subpoena and the context it is clear that project "Bad Guys" includes an investigation of the Kebble murder. This raises the possibility that the Scorpions believe Kebble was killed by members of the network he had assembled around him.
Corruption
For some time, the M&G has known of allegations, derived inter alia from reports of an informer close to CNSG, that Nassif and others in the network had paid Selebi. The Sunday Times brought this allegation into the open last weekend, adding that "police have repudiated this claim".
The M&G is not aware of a direct relationship between Nassif and Selebi.
However, Nassif's empowerment partner at CNSG used to be Nontombi Matshoba, Selebi's African National Congress secretary before he entered government in 1994.
Nassif is close to Glenn Agliotti, who also consulted for JCI under Kebble. Agliotti is the businessperson -- and drug smuggling suspect -- whom Selebi has described as "my friend, finish and klaar". Selebi has subsequently tried to downplay their relationship, while Agliotti has denied involvement in crime.
According to one source with intimate knowledge of CNSG, Nassif and Agliotti were introduced to JCI by Paul Stemmet, whose security company, Palto, controversially performed undercover operations for police.
Stemmet habitually boasted he was acting under Selebi's authority. Several sources have said Nassif and Agliotti later fell out with Stemmet.
The M&G has repeatedly underscored the Scorpions' interest in the relationship between Selebi and members of the network. The implication is that Selebi is under investigation.
However, Selebi has told the M&G that he has nothing to fear. "I still insist that if the Scorpions come here with an investigation against me, I am not concerned. I know these hands are not dirty."
Drug trafficking and organised crime
The M&G has reported extensively on the relationship between a major Scorpions drug bust in July and the wider investigation now known to be project "Bad Guys".
Scorpions investigators -- the same as those looking at the network around Kebble -- arrested five suspected members of an international drug syndicate, confiscating hashish and compressed dagga with a street value of between R100-million and R200-million. Key among those arrested was Stephanos Paparas, who has links with Agliotti.
From Scorpions court papers it emerged that they regarded "the Landlord" - Agliotti's code name - as a boss of the drugs syndicate. They have since searched Agliotti's home and business premises.
The wording of the search warrant, obtained by the M&G, makes it clear the investigation also encompassed the role of Stemmet and senior police persons.
Nassif and Agliotti's relationship is believed to have extended well beyond their work for JCI under Kebble. In an affidavit submitted to the Randburg Regional Court last Friday in support of his bail application, Nassif described his plan to set up a call-centre business in Los Angeles and described a visit to the US in July. Several sources confirm Agliotti joined Nassif on that trip.
Nassif's lawyer, Tammo Vink, said M&G questions could not be considered in the available time.
Nassif's cover-up?
It is little surprise that Nassif now features in the Scorpions investigation of the Kebble murder -- his role in the aftermath of the killing was almost immediately controversial. Nassif's actions regarding the car Kebble was driving when he was shot looked like an attempt to prevent a proper forensic examination, though Nassif has defended his actions as entirely innocent.
The treatment of Kebble's Mercedes-Benz S-Class in the aftermath of a high-profile murder was extraordinary. Almost before the mining tycoon's blood was dry, the vehicle was removed from the crime scene to Wynberg police station, where it did not stay for long.
Mark Groenewald, a co-owner of Danmar Autobody panel-beaters, told the M&G that Nassif phoned him at about 11am, the day after the murder, requesting him to collect the vehicle. Nassif told Groenewald that Captain Henry Beukes would authorise the release of the vehicle. Beukes, it has since emerged, was an ex-policeman employed by Nassif. According to Groenewald, Nassif called later the same day, saying members of the Kebble family were flying into Johannesburg and asking that the car be given a complete valet cleaning service.
Nassif has previously denied issuing such an instruction. Meanwhile, Groenewald consulted the car's insurance agent and was warned against cleaning the car. It was therefore covered and left uncleaned. Groenewald said he was subsequently made aware that independent forensic investigator David Klatzow wanted to inspect the vehicle. Klatzow had been appointed by the Kebble family to conduct independent investigations alongside the police.
However, before the inspection could take place, Nassif phoned from Cape Town and attempted to have the car released to his employees from Central National Security. It appears he was aware of the attempt by Klatzow to gain access to the vehicle. Groenewald eventually released the car to the official investigating officer, Captain Johan "Dick" Diedericks, but it was reported at the time that an employee of Nassif, Andre Burger, accompanied Diedericks.
Klatzow was the first to raise the alarm about the removal of the car from the crime scene, and what he calls "unheard of" weaknesses in the police investigation. Klatzow says that when he arrived in Johannesburg three days after the murder, informers were already telling him about the involvement of Kebble associates in the murder. He visited the crime scene, and met with police ballistics and blood-splatter experts. "I discovered that they had not yet examined the car, nor had they properly examined the scene. They hadn't looked for spent cartridges by the side of the road, they hadn't looked for the weapon in the nearby stream."
Later that morning Klatzow was able to view the Mercedes for the first time at Danmar's premises. "I then heard that Nassif was having the car released to him, and I asked [Kebble adviser] Willem Heath to intervene. I wanted to examine the car the next day in the presence of the police experts, but they told me they had been ordered 'from on high' not to examine the car in my presence."
According to Klatzow, Heath's son Marius then called him to terminate his involvement in the investigation, on the basis that Selebi had protested to Roger Kebble about Klatzow's role. Selebi has previously denied this.
The ballistic evidence, Klatzow maintains, points to the probable involvement of people in the security establishment, who favour the kind of low velocity rounds which killed Kebble.
Source: Mail & Guardian
The Scorpions' arrest last week of Kebble security adviser Clinton Nassif, although on a relatively minor charge, appears to represent a breakthrough: Nassif features in each of the main strands of the investigation. Nassif handed himself over to the Scorpions last Thursday after they had issued a warrant for his arrest. This was two days before he would have left for the United States, where, on his own version, he intended to set up a call-centre business. He had already sold some of his properties in South Africa.
Nassif is said to have also put his main business, the Central National Security Group (CNSG), on the market. CNSG was contracted to Kebble's former company, JCI, providing services ranging from physical security to intelligence and investigations. The immediate charge against Nassif is one of insurance fraud -- he allegedly had his Mercedes dropped by a forklift in 2004 to increase the damage after he had been involved in a relatively minor accident. He claimed R500 000 from his insurers. Nassif, who denies the charge, was released on R300 000 bail a day after his arrest. Bail was not opposed by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), leading to speculation that he might have agreed to turn state witness in the wider investigation.
The first official confirmation of the extensive nature of the investigation appears in subpoenas issued by the Scorpions to potential witnesses against Nassif. The subpoenas were issued under a section of the NPA Act which compels witnesses to answer questions posed by investigators and to hand over evidence.
The M&G has obtained a copy of the subpoena from one of these witnesses. The subpoena states the project name of the investigation -- "Bad Guys" -- and then lists the offences being investigated: corruption, defeating the ends of justice, contravention of the Prevention of Organised Crime Act, fraud, contravention of the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act, conspiracy to murder and murder. The fact that the subpoenas locate Nassif's alleged insurance fraud in the context of this wider investigation is evidence of his central role in the network surrounding Kebble, and the fact that the Scorpions regard his arrest as a stepping stone to solving much more serious crimes.
The central strands under investigation in project "Bad Guys", and Nassif's alleged connection with them, are as follows:
Conspiracy to murder and murder
The role of Nassif and CNSG in the removal of Kebble's car from police custody the day after he was murdered -- allegedly to be cleaned, and before police had conducted a proper forensic investigation -- suggests an attempt at a cover-up after the murder.
Noteworthy in this episode is the confusion between the roles of the police and of operators in Nassif's CNSG in the early stages of the murder investigation.
From the Scorpions' subpoena and the context it is clear that project "Bad Guys" includes an investigation of the Kebble murder. This raises the possibility that the Scorpions believe Kebble was killed by members of the network he had assembled around him.
Corruption
For some time, the M&G has known of allegations, derived inter alia from reports of an informer close to CNSG, that Nassif and others in the network had paid Selebi. The Sunday Times brought this allegation into the open last weekend, adding that "police have repudiated this claim".
The M&G is not aware of a direct relationship between Nassif and Selebi.
However, Nassif's empowerment partner at CNSG used to be Nontombi Matshoba, Selebi's African National Congress secretary before he entered government in 1994.
Nassif is close to Glenn Agliotti, who also consulted for JCI under Kebble. Agliotti is the businessperson -- and drug smuggling suspect -- whom Selebi has described as "my friend, finish and klaar". Selebi has subsequently tried to downplay their relationship, while Agliotti has denied involvement in crime.
According to one source with intimate knowledge of CNSG, Nassif and Agliotti were introduced to JCI by Paul Stemmet, whose security company, Palto, controversially performed undercover operations for police.
Stemmet habitually boasted he was acting under Selebi's authority. Several sources have said Nassif and Agliotti later fell out with Stemmet.
The M&G has repeatedly underscored the Scorpions' interest in the relationship between Selebi and members of the network. The implication is that Selebi is under investigation.
However, Selebi has told the M&G that he has nothing to fear. "I still insist that if the Scorpions come here with an investigation against me, I am not concerned. I know these hands are not dirty."
Drug trafficking and organised crime
The M&G has reported extensively on the relationship between a major Scorpions drug bust in July and the wider investigation now known to be project "Bad Guys".
Scorpions investigators -- the same as those looking at the network around Kebble -- arrested five suspected members of an international drug syndicate, confiscating hashish and compressed dagga with a street value of between R100-million and R200-million. Key among those arrested was Stephanos Paparas, who has links with Agliotti.
From Scorpions court papers it emerged that they regarded "the Landlord" - Agliotti's code name - as a boss of the drugs syndicate. They have since searched Agliotti's home and business premises.
The wording of the search warrant, obtained by the M&G, makes it clear the investigation also encompassed the role of Stemmet and senior police persons.
Nassif and Agliotti's relationship is believed to have extended well beyond their work for JCI under Kebble. In an affidavit submitted to the Randburg Regional Court last Friday in support of his bail application, Nassif described his plan to set up a call-centre business in Los Angeles and described a visit to the US in July. Several sources confirm Agliotti joined Nassif on that trip.
Nassif's lawyer, Tammo Vink, said M&G questions could not be considered in the available time.
Nassif's cover-up?
It is little surprise that Nassif now features in the Scorpions investigation of the Kebble murder -- his role in the aftermath of the killing was almost immediately controversial. Nassif's actions regarding the car Kebble was driving when he was shot looked like an attempt to prevent a proper forensic examination, though Nassif has defended his actions as entirely innocent.
The treatment of Kebble's Mercedes-Benz S-Class in the aftermath of a high-profile murder was extraordinary. Almost before the mining tycoon's blood was dry, the vehicle was removed from the crime scene to Wynberg police station, where it did not stay for long.
Mark Groenewald, a co-owner of Danmar Autobody panel-beaters, told the M&G that Nassif phoned him at about 11am, the day after the murder, requesting him to collect the vehicle. Nassif told Groenewald that Captain Henry Beukes would authorise the release of the vehicle. Beukes, it has since emerged, was an ex-policeman employed by Nassif. According to Groenewald, Nassif called later the same day, saying members of the Kebble family were flying into Johannesburg and asking that the car be given a complete valet cleaning service.
Nassif has previously denied issuing such an instruction. Meanwhile, Groenewald consulted the car's insurance agent and was warned against cleaning the car. It was therefore covered and left uncleaned. Groenewald said he was subsequently made aware that independent forensic investigator David Klatzow wanted to inspect the vehicle. Klatzow had been appointed by the Kebble family to conduct independent investigations alongside the police.
However, before the inspection could take place, Nassif phoned from Cape Town and attempted to have the car released to his employees from Central National Security. It appears he was aware of the attempt by Klatzow to gain access to the vehicle. Groenewald eventually released the car to the official investigating officer, Captain Johan "Dick" Diedericks, but it was reported at the time that an employee of Nassif, Andre Burger, accompanied Diedericks.
Klatzow was the first to raise the alarm about the removal of the car from the crime scene, and what he calls "unheard of" weaknesses in the police investigation. Klatzow says that when he arrived in Johannesburg three days after the murder, informers were already telling him about the involvement of Kebble associates in the murder. He visited the crime scene, and met with police ballistics and blood-splatter experts. "I discovered that they had not yet examined the car, nor had they properly examined the scene. They hadn't looked for spent cartridges by the side of the road, they hadn't looked for the weapon in the nearby stream."
Later that morning Klatzow was able to view the Mercedes for the first time at Danmar's premises. "I then heard that Nassif was having the car released to him, and I asked [Kebble adviser] Willem Heath to intervene. I wanted to examine the car the next day in the presence of the police experts, but they told me they had been ordered 'from on high' not to examine the car in my presence."
According to Klatzow, Heath's son Marius then called him to terminate his involvement in the investigation, on the basis that Selebi had protested to Roger Kebble about Klatzow's role. Selebi has previously denied this.
The ballistic evidence, Klatzow maintains, points to the probable involvement of people in the security establishment, who favour the kind of low velocity rounds which killed Kebble.
Source: Mail & Guardian
Britain: Blair government defeats calls for Iraq inquiry
The ability of British Prime Minister Tony Blair to defeat calls for an inquiry into the Iraq war testifies to the insulation of the parliamentary process from any genuine democratic control.
It is more than two years since there was a full debate in the House of Commons on the Iraq war. In that time, the already massive opposition to the US-led invasion has become more entrenched—fuelled by the catastrophic situation created by the occupation. The vast bulk of the British electorate believe that Blair dragged the country into war based on lies and that the troops should be withdrawn.
Yet on November 1, the Blair government was able to face down a motion calling for an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the invasion by 298 votes to 273.
The circumstances surrounding the vote are politically instructive. The motion was brought by the two small nationalist parties, the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru, and merely called for a committee of seven leading members of Parliament (MPs) to review “the way in which the responsibilities of government were discharged in relation to Iraq.”
It was then backed by the much larger Liberal Democrat Party, which has 63 MPs and which had opposed the Iraq war. But the possibility of a defeat for the Blair government was made real by the Conservative Party’s decision to support the motion. Until now, the Conservatives have supported Blair on Iraq—guaranteeing the government a majority even if it faced a substantial rebellion by Labour MPs.
The decision of the Conservative (Tory) Party to endorse the motion was not primarily an effort to exploit popular anti-war sentiment. That party’s attitude towards public opinion is much the same as the government’s. Rather, the volte face was motivated by concerns within the bourgeoisie about the extent of the crisis that Iraq has produced for British capital.
Recent weeks have seen statements by top military personnel, such as head of the army General Sir Richard Dannat, as well as numerous think tanks and analysts proclaiming the Iraq occupation to be a foreign policy disaster worse than the Suez crisis of 1956. In the United States, where anti-war sentiment is a majority position in the electorate, Iraq has dominated the congressional election campaign. Significant sections of the US and British ruling elite are anxious that the worsening quagmire in Iraq is jeopardising their broader geopolitical ambitions for the whole of the Middle East and beyond.
Amongst these layers, an inquiry of the character proposed in Parliament would be a vehicle for making the required “corrections” in neo-colonial strategy. In particular, it would seek to redress what sections of the bourgeoisie consider to have been a fatal compromising of the national interests of British imperialism on the part of the Blair government in pursuit of its “special relationship” with the US.
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell argued from such a standpoint in favour of the motion, asking during the parliamentary debate, “Isn’t it now the time for a British strategy based on British priorities and not one which depends on the outcome of the American elections?”
Even given these strategic imperatives, the Tories were hamstrung by their own record on Iraq and their overriding concern that any inquiry not endanger either the ongoing Iraq occupation or the interests of British imperialism. To this end, they called for the inquiry to be held sometime over the next 12 months, consisting of private hearings under former military personnel. It was only when the government refused to concede to any inquiry that the Conservatives backed the motion.
Despite this reluctance, the Tories’ manoeuvring did serve to expose any pretence of significant oppositional sentiment within the Parliamentary Labour Party. Only 12 Labour MPs, as well as Clare Short, who last month quit the party, voted against the government. This is not even half of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs, which constitutes the official left wing of the party and whose chair, John McDonnell, has announced he will stand for Labour leader when Blair finally resigns.
The scale of this collapse by the nominal “left” within the Labour Party can be judged by comparison with the oppositional vote over the war in 2003. On March 18 of that year, 139 Labour dissidents voted for an amendment opposing the invasion. But immediately war began, the vast majority of Labour dissidents fell into line. By June 4, 2003, only 11 Labour MPs supported a Liberal Democrat motion calling for an inquiry into whether the government had misled parliament over Iraq’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction.
In the three years since then, nothing has changed this political balance of forces within the Labour Party. The same handful of MPs register their formal protest, while the rest justify their support for Blair with claims that they “cannot stomach” voting with the Tories or doing anything that could endanger British troops.
Such arguments are grotesque. The Labour lefts have had no such difficulty in stomaching the government’s lies and attacks on democratic rights, or reconciling themselves to a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, including scores of British troops.
The inability of parliament to even debate Iraq prompted Guardian political columnist Simon Jenkins to observe that “This House of Commons is God’s gift to dictatorship.” Parliament had surrendered its “democratic function,” he continued, with opposition MPs rendered “incapable of performing democracy’s simplest ritual, challenging the executive.”
But how has this situation come about? Jenkins concentrates his fire on the failure of the opposition parties to hold the government to account, at one point declaring that the “Commons has become little more than an electoral college for the prime minister.” He insists that parliament has powers it has not used, explaining, “There is nothing to stop MPs debating what they like. There is nothing to stop a grand committee being appointed to inquire into the war. It can demand ‘persons and papers’ and subpoena anyone it likes. Even if select committees are too scared of the whips to act, Parliament is sovereign. It need not ask Downing Street’s permission to scrutinise.”
This misses the point. Who is supposed to do this?
Jenkins, in effect, berates the Tory opposition—the traditional party of big business—for its failure to bring a nominally Labour government to account. But parliamentary democracy has in reality been stripped of much of its actual substance by the fact that—whatever their tactical disagreements—all the major parties agree in principle on a course of militarism and social reaction, and all of them rest on an increasingly narrow social base of support anchored within the most privileged social layers.
Central to this evisceration of the democratic process is the transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of a financial oligarchy.
The extension of democratic rights to working people was the product of mass political action conducted through the methods of the class struggle, which culminated at the beginning of the twentieth century in the formation of the Labour Party as the political representative of the trade unions. Labour’s degeneration and that of the unions themselves mean that the political views and social concerns of the working class no longer find even limited expression within the machinery of government. Rather, the business of government is predicated on preventing any popular interference with policies that are decided in the boardrooms of the major corporations and that are fundamentally opposed to the interests of the majority of the population.
Ultimately, the decline of parliamentary democracy is an expression of the acute and irreconcilable class antagonisms wracking society. It is impossible to secure a democratic mandate for war and colonial conquest, paid for through the gutting of social programmes and the impoverishment of working people. Official politics becomes a conspiracy against the social and democratic rights of the masses.
It is precisely because maintaining the political disenfranchisement of the working class is of such overriding importance that the bourgeoisie is unable to frankly examine an issue of such strategic import as Iraq. This accounts for the political paralysis identified by Jenkins—one that is highly destabilising for the ruling elite.
Even if the Iraq debacle should finally prompt a move against the Blair government by a section of the ruling elite—an outcome that can by no means be excluded—nothing progressive would result.
Everything now depends on the independent mobilisation of workers, youth and students against the Labour government and all the representatives of big business. At the centre of this is the building of a new and genuinely socialist party.
Source: World Socialist Web Site
It is more than two years since there was a full debate in the House of Commons on the Iraq war. In that time, the already massive opposition to the US-led invasion has become more entrenched—fuelled by the catastrophic situation created by the occupation. The vast bulk of the British electorate believe that Blair dragged the country into war based on lies and that the troops should be withdrawn.
Yet on November 1, the Blair government was able to face down a motion calling for an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the invasion by 298 votes to 273.
The circumstances surrounding the vote are politically instructive. The motion was brought by the two small nationalist parties, the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru, and merely called for a committee of seven leading members of Parliament (MPs) to review “the way in which the responsibilities of government were discharged in relation to Iraq.”
It was then backed by the much larger Liberal Democrat Party, which has 63 MPs and which had opposed the Iraq war. But the possibility of a defeat for the Blair government was made real by the Conservative Party’s decision to support the motion. Until now, the Conservatives have supported Blair on Iraq—guaranteeing the government a majority even if it faced a substantial rebellion by Labour MPs.
The decision of the Conservative (Tory) Party to endorse the motion was not primarily an effort to exploit popular anti-war sentiment. That party’s attitude towards public opinion is much the same as the government’s. Rather, the volte face was motivated by concerns within the bourgeoisie about the extent of the crisis that Iraq has produced for British capital.
Recent weeks have seen statements by top military personnel, such as head of the army General Sir Richard Dannat, as well as numerous think tanks and analysts proclaiming the Iraq occupation to be a foreign policy disaster worse than the Suez crisis of 1956. In the United States, where anti-war sentiment is a majority position in the electorate, Iraq has dominated the congressional election campaign. Significant sections of the US and British ruling elite are anxious that the worsening quagmire in Iraq is jeopardising their broader geopolitical ambitions for the whole of the Middle East and beyond.
Amongst these layers, an inquiry of the character proposed in Parliament would be a vehicle for making the required “corrections” in neo-colonial strategy. In particular, it would seek to redress what sections of the bourgeoisie consider to have been a fatal compromising of the national interests of British imperialism on the part of the Blair government in pursuit of its “special relationship” with the US.
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell argued from such a standpoint in favour of the motion, asking during the parliamentary debate, “Isn’t it now the time for a British strategy based on British priorities and not one which depends on the outcome of the American elections?”
Even given these strategic imperatives, the Tories were hamstrung by their own record on Iraq and their overriding concern that any inquiry not endanger either the ongoing Iraq occupation or the interests of British imperialism. To this end, they called for the inquiry to be held sometime over the next 12 months, consisting of private hearings under former military personnel. It was only when the government refused to concede to any inquiry that the Conservatives backed the motion.
Despite this reluctance, the Tories’ manoeuvring did serve to expose any pretence of significant oppositional sentiment within the Parliamentary Labour Party. Only 12 Labour MPs, as well as Clare Short, who last month quit the party, voted against the government. This is not even half of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs, which constitutes the official left wing of the party and whose chair, John McDonnell, has announced he will stand for Labour leader when Blair finally resigns.
The scale of this collapse by the nominal “left” within the Labour Party can be judged by comparison with the oppositional vote over the war in 2003. On March 18 of that year, 139 Labour dissidents voted for an amendment opposing the invasion. But immediately war began, the vast majority of Labour dissidents fell into line. By June 4, 2003, only 11 Labour MPs supported a Liberal Democrat motion calling for an inquiry into whether the government had misled parliament over Iraq’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction.
In the three years since then, nothing has changed this political balance of forces within the Labour Party. The same handful of MPs register their formal protest, while the rest justify their support for Blair with claims that they “cannot stomach” voting with the Tories or doing anything that could endanger British troops.
Such arguments are grotesque. The Labour lefts have had no such difficulty in stomaching the government’s lies and attacks on democratic rights, or reconciling themselves to a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, including scores of British troops.
The inability of parliament to even debate Iraq prompted Guardian political columnist Simon Jenkins to observe that “This House of Commons is God’s gift to dictatorship.” Parliament had surrendered its “democratic function,” he continued, with opposition MPs rendered “incapable of performing democracy’s simplest ritual, challenging the executive.”
But how has this situation come about? Jenkins concentrates his fire on the failure of the opposition parties to hold the government to account, at one point declaring that the “Commons has become little more than an electoral college for the prime minister.” He insists that parliament has powers it has not used, explaining, “There is nothing to stop MPs debating what they like. There is nothing to stop a grand committee being appointed to inquire into the war. It can demand ‘persons and papers’ and subpoena anyone it likes. Even if select committees are too scared of the whips to act, Parliament is sovereign. It need not ask Downing Street’s permission to scrutinise.”
This misses the point. Who is supposed to do this?
Jenkins, in effect, berates the Tory opposition—the traditional party of big business—for its failure to bring a nominally Labour government to account. But parliamentary democracy has in reality been stripped of much of its actual substance by the fact that—whatever their tactical disagreements—all the major parties agree in principle on a course of militarism and social reaction, and all of them rest on an increasingly narrow social base of support anchored within the most privileged social layers.
Central to this evisceration of the democratic process is the transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of a financial oligarchy.
The extension of democratic rights to working people was the product of mass political action conducted through the methods of the class struggle, which culminated at the beginning of the twentieth century in the formation of the Labour Party as the political representative of the trade unions. Labour’s degeneration and that of the unions themselves mean that the political views and social concerns of the working class no longer find even limited expression within the machinery of government. Rather, the business of government is predicated on preventing any popular interference with policies that are decided in the boardrooms of the major corporations and that are fundamentally opposed to the interests of the majority of the population.
Ultimately, the decline of parliamentary democracy is an expression of the acute and irreconcilable class antagonisms wracking society. It is impossible to secure a democratic mandate for war and colonial conquest, paid for through the gutting of social programmes and the impoverishment of working people. Official politics becomes a conspiracy against the social and democratic rights of the masses.
It is precisely because maintaining the political disenfranchisement of the working class is of such overriding importance that the bourgeoisie is unable to frankly examine an issue of such strategic import as Iraq. This accounts for the political paralysis identified by Jenkins—one that is highly destabilising for the ruling elite.
Even if the Iraq debacle should finally prompt a move against the Blair government by a section of the ruling elite—an outcome that can by no means be excluded—nothing progressive would result.
Everything now depends on the independent mobilisation of workers, youth and students against the Labour government and all the representatives of big business. At the centre of this is the building of a new and genuinely socialist party.
Source: World Socialist Web Site
Wednesday, November 1, 2006
Print Leaflet Feedback Share » NATO forces carry out massacre of Afghan civilians
Official estimates of the civilian death toll from NATO air strikes in southern Afghanistan on October 24 are disputed, but some sources report up to 85 killed.
NATO planes carried out bombing raids in the Panjwayi district near Kandahar. Scores of people were killed in the village of Nangawat, some in their own homes while celebrating the Eid al-Fitr festival that marks the end of Ramadan. Many of the dead were women and children. The bombed district is in the region where NATO forces carried out Operation Medusa in September. This was a “significant success,” according to a senior NATO commander, in which upwards of 500 Taliban fighters were killed. NATO officials claimed to have completely flushed out or killed all Taliban militants in the area.
Reports also suggest at least 40 civilians died during the recent bombing raids when a nomad camp was hit in the district. NATO command has conceded only 12 civilians deaths in the recent air strikes, adding that 48 Taliban fighters were killed in the area. The Taliban has denied losing any men.
Local police and officials have rejected NATO accounts. Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman Zmarai Bashir told the BBC that 40 civilians and 20 Taliban militants were killed, while another government official, who asked not to be named because “it would cause me problems,” said at least 60 had died. Kandahar provincial council member Bismallah Afghanmal told the Associated Press that up to 85 civilians had been killed. Other local officials put the death toll at between 60 and 85.
Residents in Panjwayi say the bombing continued into the night. Local people as well as district officials have described buildings destroyed by aerial bombings. One local man said, “The planes came and were bombing from 3 a.m. And in the morning they started hitting our village with mortars and rockets. They didn’t allow anybody to come to our help.”
Witnesses told Reuters that 25 homes were demolished during four to five hours of bombing. People told the BBC that the bodies of many locals had been pulled from the rubble of their homes and buried.
One of the surviving nomads, who are among the poorest of Afghanistan’s citizens, said 20 members of his family had been killed and 10 injured. He said their camp, with no connection to the Taliban, had been attacked: “There are no Taliban here. We live outside the village in an open area in tents. Anyone can come here to see our homes and area. There are no Taliban here. We all are nomads living in tents.
“Each time they say that it was a mistake. They have destroyed us all in such mistakes. For God’s sake, come and see our situation.”
This was echoed by Kandahar provincial councilor Afghanmal, who said, “These kinds of things have happened several times, and they only say, ‘Sorry.’ How can you compensate people who have lost their sons and daughters? The government and the coalition told families that there was no Taliban in the area anymore. If there are no Taliban, then why are they bombing the area?”
Major Luke Knitig, a spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), said NATO troops had been engaged in heavy fighting against insurgents in three separate incidents in Panjwayi that day and the battle included air strikes.
Hundreds attended a mass funeral for the dead villagers two days after the NATO bombing raids. Many of the mourners condemned both NATO and the Karzai government for the deaths.
One mourner, Abdul Aye, who claimed 22 members of his family were killed in the NATO raids, said, “Everyone is very angry at the government and the coalition. There was no Taliban.”
Taj Mohammad, another villager, said there were no militants and innocent people were killed. Mohammad said 10 of his relatives had been killed in the latest incident.
A NATO officer later said the wild variance in the death toll estimates may stem from insurgents “being misidentified as innocent bystanders.” The unnamed officer stressed that NATO bombs did not go off course.
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said it was “very concerned.”
The latest atrocity against Afghan civilians follows the killing of at least 26 people less than a week before in NATO operations in Kandahar and neighbouring Helmand province.
President Hamid Karzai announced an inquiry by a body to include NATO officers along with a few tribal and community elders. Karzai’s office said his investigators would make suggestions on how to prevent such “unfortunate” incidents in future and ensure “better coordination with foreign forces.” The inquiry is to report in a week’s time.
At a press conference he did not attempt to give a figure of those killed, speaking only of “numbers” of civilian deaths. But he did admit that foreign pilots did not always manage to distinguish between Taliban fighters and civilians.
To shore up the pretense of a sovereign government in Kabul, the press conference was closely followed by a statement from NATO spokesman Mark Laity, who said, “We’ve got tight rules of engagement but sometimes things go wrong.... President Karzai quite understandably and correctly wants us to show maximum care. That’s what we do.”
The prostration of Karzai before the United States is being exploited by Islamist militias. An alleged statement by the Taliban leadership dismissed Karzai’s offer for talks on October 27 and called his administration a “puppet government.”
“We say even today that there is no possibility of any talks when the country is under occupation,” the statement said. “Any talks with aggressors would amount to selling the country.”
Karzai had reiterated to reporters that he was ready to negotiate with the fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Omar if he stopped receiving support from neighboring Pakistan. Karzai says Omar is hiding in the Pakistani city of Quetta, while Pakistan says Omar is in Afghanistan.
Over the past two years hundreds of Taliban supporters, including some senior officials, are believed to have reconciled with the government, but there have apparently been no high-level talks with the Islamist group’s leadership.
NATO forces have relied extensively on attack aircraft in Afghanistan in the past year. According to the New York-based Human Rights Watch, in June the US Central Command confirmed 340 air strikes in Afghanistan, double the 160 strikes in Iraq in the same month.
Source: World Socialist Web Site
NATO planes carried out bombing raids in the Panjwayi district near Kandahar. Scores of people were killed in the village of Nangawat, some in their own homes while celebrating the Eid al-Fitr festival that marks the end of Ramadan. Many of the dead were women and children. The bombed district is in the region where NATO forces carried out Operation Medusa in September. This was a “significant success,” according to a senior NATO commander, in which upwards of 500 Taliban fighters were killed. NATO officials claimed to have completely flushed out or killed all Taliban militants in the area.
Reports also suggest at least 40 civilians died during the recent bombing raids when a nomad camp was hit in the district. NATO command has conceded only 12 civilians deaths in the recent air strikes, adding that 48 Taliban fighters were killed in the area. The Taliban has denied losing any men.
Local police and officials have rejected NATO accounts. Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman Zmarai Bashir told the BBC that 40 civilians and 20 Taliban militants were killed, while another government official, who asked not to be named because “it would cause me problems,” said at least 60 had died. Kandahar provincial council member Bismallah Afghanmal told the Associated Press that up to 85 civilians had been killed. Other local officials put the death toll at between 60 and 85.
Residents in Panjwayi say the bombing continued into the night. Local people as well as district officials have described buildings destroyed by aerial bombings. One local man said, “The planes came and were bombing from 3 a.m. And in the morning they started hitting our village with mortars and rockets. They didn’t allow anybody to come to our help.”
Witnesses told Reuters that 25 homes were demolished during four to five hours of bombing. People told the BBC that the bodies of many locals had been pulled from the rubble of their homes and buried.
One of the surviving nomads, who are among the poorest of Afghanistan’s citizens, said 20 members of his family had been killed and 10 injured. He said their camp, with no connection to the Taliban, had been attacked: “There are no Taliban here. We live outside the village in an open area in tents. Anyone can come here to see our homes and area. There are no Taliban here. We all are nomads living in tents.
“Each time they say that it was a mistake. They have destroyed us all in such mistakes. For God’s sake, come and see our situation.”
This was echoed by Kandahar provincial councilor Afghanmal, who said, “These kinds of things have happened several times, and they only say, ‘Sorry.’ How can you compensate people who have lost their sons and daughters? The government and the coalition told families that there was no Taliban in the area anymore. If there are no Taliban, then why are they bombing the area?”
Major Luke Knitig, a spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), said NATO troops had been engaged in heavy fighting against insurgents in three separate incidents in Panjwayi that day and the battle included air strikes.
Hundreds attended a mass funeral for the dead villagers two days after the NATO bombing raids. Many of the mourners condemned both NATO and the Karzai government for the deaths.
One mourner, Abdul Aye, who claimed 22 members of his family were killed in the NATO raids, said, “Everyone is very angry at the government and the coalition. There was no Taliban.”
Taj Mohammad, another villager, said there were no militants and innocent people were killed. Mohammad said 10 of his relatives had been killed in the latest incident.
A NATO officer later said the wild variance in the death toll estimates may stem from insurgents “being misidentified as innocent bystanders.” The unnamed officer stressed that NATO bombs did not go off course.
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said it was “very concerned.”
The latest atrocity against Afghan civilians follows the killing of at least 26 people less than a week before in NATO operations in Kandahar and neighbouring Helmand province.
President Hamid Karzai announced an inquiry by a body to include NATO officers along with a few tribal and community elders. Karzai’s office said his investigators would make suggestions on how to prevent such “unfortunate” incidents in future and ensure “better coordination with foreign forces.” The inquiry is to report in a week’s time.
At a press conference he did not attempt to give a figure of those killed, speaking only of “numbers” of civilian deaths. But he did admit that foreign pilots did not always manage to distinguish between Taliban fighters and civilians.
To shore up the pretense of a sovereign government in Kabul, the press conference was closely followed by a statement from NATO spokesman Mark Laity, who said, “We’ve got tight rules of engagement but sometimes things go wrong.... President Karzai quite understandably and correctly wants us to show maximum care. That’s what we do.”
The prostration of Karzai before the United States is being exploited by Islamist militias. An alleged statement by the Taliban leadership dismissed Karzai’s offer for talks on October 27 and called his administration a “puppet government.”
“We say even today that there is no possibility of any talks when the country is under occupation,” the statement said. “Any talks with aggressors would amount to selling the country.”
Karzai had reiterated to reporters that he was ready to negotiate with the fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Omar if he stopped receiving support from neighboring Pakistan. Karzai says Omar is hiding in the Pakistani city of Quetta, while Pakistan says Omar is in Afghanistan.
Over the past two years hundreds of Taliban supporters, including some senior officials, are believed to have reconciled with the government, but there have apparently been no high-level talks with the Islamist group’s leadership.
NATO forces have relied extensively on attack aircraft in Afghanistan in the past year. According to the New York-based Human Rights Watch, in June the US Central Command confirmed 340 air strikes in Afghanistan, double the 160 strikes in Iraq in the same month.
Source: World Socialist Web Site
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
P. W. Botha, Defender of Apartheid, Is Dead at 90
P. W. Botha, the South African leader who struggled vainly to preserve apartheid rule in a tide of domestic racial violence and global condemnation, died yesterday at his home in South Africa. He was 90. His death was reported by The South African Press Association in Cape Town, quoting the security staff at Mr. Botha’s home on the southern Cape coast.
Mr. Botha was a combative, irascible son of a well-to-do Afrikaner farm family who dropped out of college to work for the right-wing National Party, then rose through the ranks of South Africa’s political establishment, gaining a reputation as the “Old Crocodile” for his ability to charm, outwit and crush his opponents.
In 1978, Mr. Botha became prime minister and proceeded to engineer the creation of a new Constitution, one that held out the promise of limited reform of apartheid policies. When the Constitution came into effect in 1984, Mr. Botha became president. “We must adapt or die,” Mr. Botha told his constituents after becoming prime minister.
As opposition to apartheid spread, Mr. Botha’s room to maneuver shrank. “He was caught in a bind between wanting to show the international community that he was not inflexible, and not wishing to appear weak within his own country,” the journalist Allister Sparks wrote in his 1995 account of the end of apartheid, “Tomorrow Is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa’s Road to Change.”
Yet for a while Mr. Botha’s methods seemed to belie Alexis de Toqueville’s dictum that “the most perilous moment for bad government is when it seeks to mend its ways.” Mr. Botha was re-elected in 1987. Two years later, as opposition to his intransigent style grew within his own party, the president suffered a stroke and resigned. He was succeeded by F. W. de Klerk, who legalized opposition parties, freed Mr. Mandela and other political prisoners, and made the agreements that eventually brought apartheid down.
Source: New York Times
Friday, October 13, 2006
Why is the American press silent on the report of 655,000 Iraqi deaths?
The US media is virtually silent on a new scientific study that estimates the Iraqi death toll from the US war at 655,000. The study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and funded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was posted Wednesday on the web site of the British medical journal, the Lancet.
The study is the only systematic estimate of the number of Iraqi civilians and military personnel to have died as a result of the US invasion and occupation to be brought to the attention of the American and international public.
Unlike previous estimates, which were based on reviews of media reports or tallies made by the US-backed Iraqi government, the Johns Hopkins study was carried out by Iraqi physicians who interviewed—often at great personal risk—nearly 2,000 families spread across the country, utilizing standard and widely used statistical methods to arrive at an objective estimate of the death toll from the war and occupation. The vast majority of the reported deaths were substantiated by death certificates.
The study concluded with a 95 percent degree of certainty that the number of “excess deaths” in Iraq since the invasion—the number of people who have died in excess of the number that would be expected on the basis of pre-invasion mortality rates—is between 393,000 and 943,000. The figure of 655,000 is given as the most likely number. This represents an astonishing 2.5 percent of the entire Iraqi population.
The researchers further estimated that about 600,000 of the deaths were due to violence in some form, including gunshots, air strikes and bombings. They concluded that US and allied military forces directly caused at least 31 percent—or 186,000—of the violent deaths.
Some 336,000 people, or 56 percent of those killed in violent actions since the invasion, died from gunshot wounds. The study also found that the number of violent deaths in Iraq has steadily increased every year since the invasion. In the period from June 2005 to June 2006, the researchers found a nearly four-fold increase in the mortality rate relative to pre-invasion levels.
There can be no legitimate doubts about the credibility of the study. Lancet is one of the oldest and most prestigious peer-reviewed medical publications in the world. The Johns Hopkins public health school is the largest in the world, and regularly ranks as the top public health school in the United States. The journal article was reviewed and approved for publication by four independent scientific experts in the area.
It is difficult to overestimate the significance of the report, even if one assumes its low-end estimate of 393,000 Iraqi deaths to be correct. It demonstrates that the American intervention in Iraq has produced a social and humanitarian catastrophe of historical dimensions, with vast political implications not only in the Middle East, but throughout the world and, above all, in the United States itself.
By any objective standard, the report merits front-page coverage in every major newspaper in the country and extensive discussion and reporting on television news broadcasts. Yet the response of the US press has been to virtually ignore the report and limit its coverage to news accounts on inside pages which report, uncritically, unsubstantiated statements by government and military officials dismissing the report as “not credible.”
In burying the story, the New York Times and Washington Post have played a particularly significant role. The original articles published by these newspapers on Wednesday were relegated to the inside pages: in the Times on page 8, in the Post on page 12.
The Post decided to bury the story in its back pages despite the fact that the article it published vouched for the scientific validity the Johns Hopkins study, noting that it, and an earlier report on Iraqi deaths published by the same team, “are the only ones to estimate mortality in Iraq using scientific methods.” The “cluster sampling” technique used by the scientists, the newspaper wrote, “is used to estimate mortality in famines and after natural disasters.”
Minimal coverage in the press continued on Thursday, despite the fact that the issue was raised by a reporter at a White House press conference on Wednesday. President Bush contemptuously dismissed the report, stating that it was not credible. He was not challenged and the question was not followed up by any of the other reporters at the news conference.
Bush’s remarks were followed by statements from various supporters and architects of the war similarly dismissing the Johns Hopkins study’s casualty figures. General George Casey, the commander of US forces in Iraq, admitted that he had not bothered to read the report, but nevertheless concluded that it did not have “much credibility at all.”
A spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that the figure of 655,000 killed is “not one we believe to be anywhere near accurate.” Iraqi government officials likewise declared that the figure was “exaggerated.”
On Thursday, neither the Times nor the Post published an editorial on the Johns Hopkins report, or even a follow-up article on the report and the response of the Bush administration.
There was not one challenge in the establishment media to the official attempts to disparage the report. Instead, the minimal coverage on Thursday was largely devoted to reporting the statements by Bush, Casey, Blair and the Iraqi stooge regime. The Los Angeles Times, for example, published a story on its inside pages, “Iraq Disputes Claim of 600,000 War Dead,” reporting the statements by the Iraqi government. The newspaper added its voice to the chorus by remarking that it had conducted its own survey and reached a figure of 50,000 killed.
The attempts to discredit the report are not backed up by any factual or methodological arguments. The administration and its supporters assume, correctly, that they can simply make unsubstantiated claims and the media will not challenge them.
Lee Roberts, a co-author of the study, noted in an interview with the radio program Democracy Now! on Thursday that the cluster survey approach the researchers used “is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government isn’t very functional or in times of war.” He pointed out that both the United Nations and the US government have used the method in determining mortality, including after the Kosovo and Afghan wars. “Most ironically,” he said, “the US government has been spending millions of dollars per year... to train NGOs and UN workers to do cluster surveys to measure mortality in times of wars and disasters.”
With its silence, the media is once again taking its cue from the government. It does not challenge Bush’s ignorant and cold-blooded dismissal of the Johns Hopkins report, just as it did not challenge Bush’s offhand remark at a December, 2005 press conference that 30,000 Iraqis, “more or less,” had been killed since the March, 2003 US invasion—an absurdly low estimate.
The corporate-owned-and-controlled media have buried this story because they do not want the American people to know the truth of what is happening in Iraq.
They want to conceal this truth—as they have done consistently since the war began—because they are complicit in a massive war crime in Iraq, and continue to support the bloodletting by the US military.
The Johns Hopkins report, by revealing the colossal dimensions of the death and destruction wreaked by the United States in Iraq, shatters the edifice of lies that has been erected in an attempt to deceive the people and justify the war—from the phony claims of weapons of mass destruction and Iraq-Al Qaeda ties, to the current claims of a war for “freedom and democracy” and the overarching deception of the “war on terrorism.”
The report inevitably highlights the culpability of the media itself, which has combined an acceptance of unprecedented censorship by the military with self-censorship and deliberate misinformation in order to whitewash an imperialist war for oil and geo-strategic domination of the Middle East.
The scale of mass killing revealed in the Johns Hopkins study published by the Lancet stands as an indictment of the entire American ruling elite, both of its political parties—Democratic no less than Republican—and all of its official institutions, among which the media has played a particularly sordid role.
What the corporate, political and media establishment fear are the explosive social and political implications of growing popular revulsion over the crimes of US imperialism in Iraq and around the world, combined with mounting anger over relentless attacks on working people’s social conditions and democratic rights. The entire political system is being exposed and discredited before the eyes of the people. Such a process inevitably brings with it revolutionary consequences.
Source: World Socialist Web
The study is the only systematic estimate of the number of Iraqi civilians and military personnel to have died as a result of the US invasion and occupation to be brought to the attention of the American and international public.
Unlike previous estimates, which were based on reviews of media reports or tallies made by the US-backed Iraqi government, the Johns Hopkins study was carried out by Iraqi physicians who interviewed—often at great personal risk—nearly 2,000 families spread across the country, utilizing standard and widely used statistical methods to arrive at an objective estimate of the death toll from the war and occupation. The vast majority of the reported deaths were substantiated by death certificates.
The study concluded with a 95 percent degree of certainty that the number of “excess deaths” in Iraq since the invasion—the number of people who have died in excess of the number that would be expected on the basis of pre-invasion mortality rates—is between 393,000 and 943,000. The figure of 655,000 is given as the most likely number. This represents an astonishing 2.5 percent of the entire Iraqi population.
The researchers further estimated that about 600,000 of the deaths were due to violence in some form, including gunshots, air strikes and bombings. They concluded that US and allied military forces directly caused at least 31 percent—or 186,000—of the violent deaths.
Some 336,000 people, or 56 percent of those killed in violent actions since the invasion, died from gunshot wounds. The study also found that the number of violent deaths in Iraq has steadily increased every year since the invasion. In the period from June 2005 to June 2006, the researchers found a nearly four-fold increase in the mortality rate relative to pre-invasion levels.
There can be no legitimate doubts about the credibility of the study. Lancet is one of the oldest and most prestigious peer-reviewed medical publications in the world. The Johns Hopkins public health school is the largest in the world, and regularly ranks as the top public health school in the United States. The journal article was reviewed and approved for publication by four independent scientific experts in the area.
It is difficult to overestimate the significance of the report, even if one assumes its low-end estimate of 393,000 Iraqi deaths to be correct. It demonstrates that the American intervention in Iraq has produced a social and humanitarian catastrophe of historical dimensions, with vast political implications not only in the Middle East, but throughout the world and, above all, in the United States itself.
By any objective standard, the report merits front-page coverage in every major newspaper in the country and extensive discussion and reporting on television news broadcasts. Yet the response of the US press has been to virtually ignore the report and limit its coverage to news accounts on inside pages which report, uncritically, unsubstantiated statements by government and military officials dismissing the report as “not credible.”
In burying the story, the New York Times and Washington Post have played a particularly significant role. The original articles published by these newspapers on Wednesday were relegated to the inside pages: in the Times on page 8, in the Post on page 12.
The Post decided to bury the story in its back pages despite the fact that the article it published vouched for the scientific validity the Johns Hopkins study, noting that it, and an earlier report on Iraqi deaths published by the same team, “are the only ones to estimate mortality in Iraq using scientific methods.” The “cluster sampling” technique used by the scientists, the newspaper wrote, “is used to estimate mortality in famines and after natural disasters.”
Minimal coverage in the press continued on Thursday, despite the fact that the issue was raised by a reporter at a White House press conference on Wednesday. President Bush contemptuously dismissed the report, stating that it was not credible. He was not challenged and the question was not followed up by any of the other reporters at the news conference.
Bush’s remarks were followed by statements from various supporters and architects of the war similarly dismissing the Johns Hopkins study’s casualty figures. General George Casey, the commander of US forces in Iraq, admitted that he had not bothered to read the report, but nevertheless concluded that it did not have “much credibility at all.”
A spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that the figure of 655,000 killed is “not one we believe to be anywhere near accurate.” Iraqi government officials likewise declared that the figure was “exaggerated.”
On Thursday, neither the Times nor the Post published an editorial on the Johns Hopkins report, or even a follow-up article on the report and the response of the Bush administration.
There was not one challenge in the establishment media to the official attempts to disparage the report. Instead, the minimal coverage on Thursday was largely devoted to reporting the statements by Bush, Casey, Blair and the Iraqi stooge regime. The Los Angeles Times, for example, published a story on its inside pages, “Iraq Disputes Claim of 600,000 War Dead,” reporting the statements by the Iraqi government. The newspaper added its voice to the chorus by remarking that it had conducted its own survey and reached a figure of 50,000 killed.
The attempts to discredit the report are not backed up by any factual or methodological arguments. The administration and its supporters assume, correctly, that they can simply make unsubstantiated claims and the media will not challenge them.
Lee Roberts, a co-author of the study, noted in an interview with the radio program Democracy Now! on Thursday that the cluster survey approach the researchers used “is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government isn’t very functional or in times of war.” He pointed out that both the United Nations and the US government have used the method in determining mortality, including after the Kosovo and Afghan wars. “Most ironically,” he said, “the US government has been spending millions of dollars per year... to train NGOs and UN workers to do cluster surveys to measure mortality in times of wars and disasters.”
With its silence, the media is once again taking its cue from the government. It does not challenge Bush’s ignorant and cold-blooded dismissal of the Johns Hopkins report, just as it did not challenge Bush’s offhand remark at a December, 2005 press conference that 30,000 Iraqis, “more or less,” had been killed since the March, 2003 US invasion—an absurdly low estimate.
The corporate-owned-and-controlled media have buried this story because they do not want the American people to know the truth of what is happening in Iraq.
They want to conceal this truth—as they have done consistently since the war began—because they are complicit in a massive war crime in Iraq, and continue to support the bloodletting by the US military.
The Johns Hopkins report, by revealing the colossal dimensions of the death and destruction wreaked by the United States in Iraq, shatters the edifice of lies that has been erected in an attempt to deceive the people and justify the war—from the phony claims of weapons of mass destruction and Iraq-Al Qaeda ties, to the current claims of a war for “freedom and democracy” and the overarching deception of the “war on terrorism.”
The report inevitably highlights the culpability of the media itself, which has combined an acceptance of unprecedented censorship by the military with self-censorship and deliberate misinformation in order to whitewash an imperialist war for oil and geo-strategic domination of the Middle East.
The scale of mass killing revealed in the Johns Hopkins study published by the Lancet stands as an indictment of the entire American ruling elite, both of its political parties—Democratic no less than Republican—and all of its official institutions, among which the media has played a particularly sordid role.
What the corporate, political and media establishment fear are the explosive social and political implications of growing popular revulsion over the crimes of US imperialism in Iraq and around the world, combined with mounting anger over relentless attacks on working people’s social conditions and democratic rights. The entire political system is being exposed and discredited before the eyes of the people. Such a process inevitably brings with it revolutionary consequences.
Source: World Socialist Web
Thursday, October 5, 2006
There'll always be corruption
Pretoria - Corruption will remain a problem in South Africa, Special Investigation Unit (SIU) head Willie Hofmeyr said on Thursday.
Giving an overview of the growth of the SIU over the past few years Hofmeyr said it was difficult to determine just how much corruption there was in government. "There are some areas which are just naturally vulnerable to corruption such as prisons, driver's licences, home affairs. There are always going to be problems and there would be a need for an ongoing capacity to deal with it," Hofmeyr said. Citing an example, he said the unit recently encountered a police officer who was offered R1m to drop a case. "That is more than many officers would make in a lifetime," he said.
By the end of the year the unit hopes to have 600 investigators and legal experts working for it with a budget of R145m this year. "I think we are halfway there it would be another five years before we say we can deal with corruption properly," Hofmeyr said.
Source: News 24.com
Giving an overview of the growth of the SIU over the past few years Hofmeyr said it was difficult to determine just how much corruption there was in government. "There are some areas which are just naturally vulnerable to corruption such as prisons, driver's licences, home affairs. There are always going to be problems and there would be a need for an ongoing capacity to deal with it," Hofmeyr said. Citing an example, he said the unit recently encountered a police officer who was offered R1m to drop a case. "That is more than many officers would make in a lifetime," he said.
By the end of the year the unit hopes to have 600 investigators and legal experts working for it with a budget of R145m this year. "I think we are halfway there it would be another five years before we say we can deal with corruption properly," Hofmeyr said.
Source: News 24.com
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
Marais in the clear as Malatsi found guilty
Former Western Cape Premier Peter Marais was on Wednesday found not guilty in the Bellville regional court on two counts of corruption. His co-accused, former Provincial Environment MEC David Malatsi was however convicted one count of corruption.
The charges related to payments totalling R400 000 made to the New National Party, of which the two men were members, in 2002 by Italian developer Count Riccardo Agusta. The state claimed the payments were to secure approval by the province's environmental authorities for the Count's proposed Roodefontein golf estate development at Plettenburg Bay. Marais raised his arms in a victory salute to a packed public gallery after the verdict and embraced his tearful wife and family members. "Peter Marais has been an honest, God-fearing person," he said outside the courtroom afterwards."No matter how many accusations they bring against me they couldn't prove a single one,"
Malatsi said he was satisfied with the magistrate's findings. He said he had compromised himself with Agusta because he was "misled". He's the one - the magistrate - that must decide whether am I good material for jail'
Source: IoL
The charges related to payments totalling R400 000 made to the New National Party, of which the two men were members, in 2002 by Italian developer Count Riccardo Agusta. The state claimed the payments were to secure approval by the province's environmental authorities for the Count's proposed Roodefontein golf estate development at Plettenburg Bay. Marais raised his arms in a victory salute to a packed public gallery after the verdict and embraced his tearful wife and family members. "Peter Marais has been an honest, God-fearing person," he said outside the courtroom afterwards."No matter how many accusations they bring against me they couldn't prove a single one,"
Malatsi said he was satisfied with the magistrate's findings. He said he had compromised himself with Agusta because he was "misled". He's the one - the magistrate - that must decide whether am I good material for jail'
Source: IoL
Monday, August 21, 2006
CORRUPTION AND ARMED INTIMIDATION AS MOTALA HEIGHTS EVICTIONS CRISIS DEEPENS
On Saturday 17 June 2006 Ward Councillor Derek Dimba arrived at the Motala Heights settlement in Pinetown with municipal officials and 5 car loads of municipal security guards to mark out shacks that would then be destroyed by the militarised police Land Invasions Unit. They had probably chosen the Youth Day weekend thinking that many people would be away at their rural homes. They were wrong. The community was able to mobilise quickly and see off this first threat.
The Motala Heights Development Commitment spent the next day gathering detailed information from residents and preparing affidavits and were at the Legal Resources Centre first thing on Monday morning. They then moved on the Municipal offices in New Germany where they were able to win an unscheduled emergency meeting with Mr. Geoff Nightingale. Nightingale confirmed that the Municipality planned to move 63 families with ‘numbers’ to a new housing development at Nazareth Island and to evict the other residents. The Council’s ‘one shack = one house’ policy means that many families who are sharing shacks face eviction with no prospect of relocation. Nightingale also confirmed that Cllr Dimba had asked the Municipality to immediately destroy all new structures that had been erected. The eThekwini Municipality does not allow the construction of new shacks or the expansion or development of existing shacks. The Development Committee pointed out that all the new shacks and developments (all well made wooden cabins) had been built by long standing residents who needed more space for growing children, had got married, wanted to move out of over crowded shared shacks after finding work and so on.
On Women’s Day, 9 August 2006, Cllr Dimba returned with pistol holstered to each hip and flanked by his usual cohort of armed men. He summoned the community to a meeting where he began by gesturing to his weapons and promised to ‘chase away’ named individuals on the democratically elected committee. He then said, in a chilling echo of high apartheid language, that people in shacks without numbers would have to ‘hamba khaya’ and ‘go back where they came from’. He said that after those people with numbers were relocated to Nazareth Island on 27 August 2006 the houses of the others would be demolished.
The Motala Heights settlement lies amongst the gum tress on the hill behind Motala Heights suburb which is, in turn, just behind the many factories in Pinetown’s industrial area. It was founded in 1992 by Mr. Richard Nzuza and the residents mostly come from Zululand, the Eastern Cape and Ixopo although some are from as far away as the Free State. Almost everyone came here to work or to reunite families divided by migrant labour. Most of the men work in the nearby factories and most of the women work in the houses in the adjacent suburb. There is a school, clinic, library and shops within walking distance which means that living in Motala Heights has the tremendous benefit of radically cutting down the time and money that poor people usually have to spend on transport.
There are almost 300 shacks in the settlement. The land is owned by local tycoon Ricky Govender who has developed cottages for rent on adjacent land and also owns the local bottle store and supermarket as well as a trucking company amongst other businesses. It is rumoured that he has many government contracts too. People in the Motala Heights settlement have excellent relationships with most of the residents in formal houses. They often work in their homes and share the same taxis. The local taxi boss, just known as Leon, is widely respected in the settlement. But the conflict with the Govender family goes back to 1997 when Ricky’s father, Harry, used industrial earth moving equipment to dig up the road leading into the settlement. The shack dwellers responded by building their own road with their own tools and labour. It is now widely believed that Govender is aiming to extend his private development, including housing and a petrol station, up the hill in a large private development after the shack dwellers have been evicted. Cllr Dimba appears to report directly to Govender usually visiting him before and after his armed visits to the Motala Heights Settlement. The Housing Department have told the Motala Heights Committee that they cannot buy the land from Govender as he is demanding a completely unreasonable price. The Community is demanding the expropriation of the small section of Govender’s large land holding where they have built their community in order that there can be an upgrade where people are already living.
The 63 families scheduled to move to Nazareth Island would rather stay in Motala Heights where they are close to work, schools, the local clinic, shops and the other benefits of being near to Pinetown and where they are part of an established community. Many amongst them refused to register for the tiny badly built houses in Nazareth Island for these reasons and many also refused to register in solidarity with others who don’t have ‘a number’ and face eviction without relocation. Numerous people in the community allege that the ‘numbers’ of the people that didn’t register have been sold off to people from elsewhere, especially KwaMashu The Committee is currently making the arrangements to pursue vigorous legal action against this alleged corruption. The more than 200 families who now face eviction and the destruction of their community, their houses and their access to urban opportunity are determined to resist eviction by all means. They will explore all legal options but will also use mass mobilisation and will draw on the support of shack dwellers elsewhere to defend their homes, their community and their right to live near the city. The resistance is being organised by the democratically elected and mandated Motala Heights Development Committee which is affiliated to the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement.
For comment on the particular situation confronted by Motala Heights please contact the following members of the Motala Heights Development Committee:
Mr Bhekuyise Ngcobo 0769212891, Chair
Ms Lousia Motha 0781760088, Deputy Chair
Mr Alson Mkhize, 0827608427
Mr Sizwe Nkwanyana 0839951351
For comment on the general situation confronted by shack dwellers in the eThekwini Municipality as they face the onslaught of the Municipality’s looming mass evictions and forced removals under its World Bank/UN designed ‘slum clearance’ programme that aims to ‘clear the slums by 2010’ please contact the following members of the Abahlali baseMjondolo secretariat.
Mr S’bu Zikode 0835470474, Chair
Mr Mnikelo Ndabankulu 073565241, Media Liason
Ms Fikile Nkosi 0842501446
Mzuyanda Ngthobane (24), Nkosinathi Gabella (28) and Slethiwe Ngcobo (3) all confront eviction from their home in the Motala Heights Settlement. They are pictured outside Mr Ngthobane’s home. Mr Ngthobane is a long time resident of Motala Heights and has just built his own wooden home after years of sharing a shack with 6 others.
Mr. Richard Nzuza, founder of the Motala Heights Settlement.
“I will not be moved. I will die here.”
Source: abahlali.org
The Motala Heights Development Commitment spent the next day gathering detailed information from residents and preparing affidavits and were at the Legal Resources Centre first thing on Monday morning. They then moved on the Municipal offices in New Germany where they were able to win an unscheduled emergency meeting with Mr. Geoff Nightingale. Nightingale confirmed that the Municipality planned to move 63 families with ‘numbers’ to a new housing development at Nazareth Island and to evict the other residents. The Council’s ‘one shack = one house’ policy means that many families who are sharing shacks face eviction with no prospect of relocation. Nightingale also confirmed that Cllr Dimba had asked the Municipality to immediately destroy all new structures that had been erected. The eThekwini Municipality does not allow the construction of new shacks or the expansion or development of existing shacks. The Development Committee pointed out that all the new shacks and developments (all well made wooden cabins) had been built by long standing residents who needed more space for growing children, had got married, wanted to move out of over crowded shared shacks after finding work and so on.
On Women’s Day, 9 August 2006, Cllr Dimba returned with pistol holstered to each hip and flanked by his usual cohort of armed men. He summoned the community to a meeting where he began by gesturing to his weapons and promised to ‘chase away’ named individuals on the democratically elected committee. He then said, in a chilling echo of high apartheid language, that people in shacks without numbers would have to ‘hamba khaya’ and ‘go back where they came from’. He said that after those people with numbers were relocated to Nazareth Island on 27 August 2006 the houses of the others would be demolished.
The Motala Heights settlement lies amongst the gum tress on the hill behind Motala Heights suburb which is, in turn, just behind the many factories in Pinetown’s industrial area. It was founded in 1992 by Mr. Richard Nzuza and the residents mostly come from Zululand, the Eastern Cape and Ixopo although some are from as far away as the Free State. Almost everyone came here to work or to reunite families divided by migrant labour. Most of the men work in the nearby factories and most of the women work in the houses in the adjacent suburb. There is a school, clinic, library and shops within walking distance which means that living in Motala Heights has the tremendous benefit of radically cutting down the time and money that poor people usually have to spend on transport.
There are almost 300 shacks in the settlement. The land is owned by local tycoon Ricky Govender who has developed cottages for rent on adjacent land and also owns the local bottle store and supermarket as well as a trucking company amongst other businesses. It is rumoured that he has many government contracts too. People in the Motala Heights settlement have excellent relationships with most of the residents in formal houses. They often work in their homes and share the same taxis. The local taxi boss, just known as Leon, is widely respected in the settlement. But the conflict with the Govender family goes back to 1997 when Ricky’s father, Harry, used industrial earth moving equipment to dig up the road leading into the settlement. The shack dwellers responded by building their own road with their own tools and labour. It is now widely believed that Govender is aiming to extend his private development, including housing and a petrol station, up the hill in a large private development after the shack dwellers have been evicted. Cllr Dimba appears to report directly to Govender usually visiting him before and after his armed visits to the Motala Heights Settlement. The Housing Department have told the Motala Heights Committee that they cannot buy the land from Govender as he is demanding a completely unreasonable price. The Community is demanding the expropriation of the small section of Govender’s large land holding where they have built their community in order that there can be an upgrade where people are already living.
The 63 families scheduled to move to Nazareth Island would rather stay in Motala Heights where they are close to work, schools, the local clinic, shops and the other benefits of being near to Pinetown and where they are part of an established community. Many amongst them refused to register for the tiny badly built houses in Nazareth Island for these reasons and many also refused to register in solidarity with others who don’t have ‘a number’ and face eviction without relocation. Numerous people in the community allege that the ‘numbers’ of the people that didn’t register have been sold off to people from elsewhere, especially KwaMashu The Committee is currently making the arrangements to pursue vigorous legal action against this alleged corruption. The more than 200 families who now face eviction and the destruction of their community, their houses and their access to urban opportunity are determined to resist eviction by all means. They will explore all legal options but will also use mass mobilisation and will draw on the support of shack dwellers elsewhere to defend their homes, their community and their right to live near the city. The resistance is being organised by the democratically elected and mandated Motala Heights Development Committee which is affiliated to the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement.
For comment on the particular situation confronted by Motala Heights please contact the following members of the Motala Heights Development Committee:
Mr Bhekuyise Ngcobo 0769212891, Chair
Ms Lousia Motha 0781760088, Deputy Chair
Mr Alson Mkhize, 0827608427
Mr Sizwe Nkwanyana 0839951351
For comment on the general situation confronted by shack dwellers in the eThekwini Municipality as they face the onslaught of the Municipality’s looming mass evictions and forced removals under its World Bank/UN designed ‘slum clearance’ programme that aims to ‘clear the slums by 2010’ please contact the following members of the Abahlali baseMjondolo secretariat.
Mr S’bu Zikode 0835470474, Chair
Mr Mnikelo Ndabankulu 073565241, Media Liason
Ms Fikile Nkosi 0842501446
Mzuyanda Ngthobane (24), Nkosinathi Gabella (28) and Slethiwe Ngcobo (3) all confront eviction from their home in the Motala Heights Settlement. They are pictured outside Mr Ngthobane’s home. Mr Ngthobane is a long time resident of Motala Heights and has just built his own wooden home after years of sharing a shack with 6 others.
Mr. Richard Nzuza, founder of the Motala Heights Settlement.
“I will not be moved. I will die here.”
Source: abahlali.org
Wednesday, August 9, 2006
Deby sworn in as Chad's president
Idriss Deby was sworn in Tuesday as Chad's president to serve his new term, according to reports from N'Djamena. Beating the other four contenders, Deby won the presidential election in May by gaining 64.67 percent of the votes.
Among the leaders attending the swearing-in ceremony were Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Source: Peoples Daily
Among the leaders attending the swearing-in ceremony were Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Source: Peoples Daily
Monday, July 31, 2006
First results posted in DR Congo
Polling stations in the Democratic Republic of Congo have begun posting interim results, after the first multi-party election in 40 years. Full results of Sunday's polls are not expected for weeks. The elections were aimed at ending a long civil war, with 32 candidates, including incumbent Joseph Kabila, contesting the presidency.
Over 9,000 candidates stood for parliament. Some 25m voters were protected by 17,000 UN peacekeepers. It is still far from clear whether a second round will be required, or whether a candidate will gain the 50% of the votes needed to win outright, the BBC News website's Joseph Winter reports from Kinshasa. The RCD party, led by former rebel and Vice-President Azarias Ruberwa, told our correspondent there had been "widespread fraud".
RCD Secretary General Kabasu Babu Katulondi said RCD representatives had been chased out of polling stations when counting started, while ruling PPRD officials had been caught trying to vote more than once. "The delay is one of Kabila's tricks to manipulate the figures," he said. Results from several polling stations seemed to back up pre-election predictions that former rebel leader and Vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba would win most votes in Kinshasa.
However President Kabila was expected to win more votes in eastern DR Congo, where he is credited with ending the war. Thomas Luaka, a spokesman for Mr Bemba's MLC party said that while he "deplored some incidents, overall, the elections went well". Earlier, Mr Bemba's supporters had demonstrated on the streets of the capital, Kinshasa, saying they were cheated. Independent Electoral Commission official Carole Kabanga Kaoy said she could not comment on the allegations of fraud until she had received official reports, at which point each party would be free to provide evidence of irregularities.
Mr Kabila, who came to power unelected in 2001, has told the BBC he will accept the result of Sunday's presidential elections, even if he loses. "It would have been the verdict of the people and of course we will definitely accept the verdict of the people," he said.
Opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi and his UDPS party boycotted the vote. There were reports of violence on election day in Mr Tshisekedi's stronghold, the south-eastern Kasai region. But a United Nations official said he was "relieved" and "delighted" with how the voting had gone. "All indications that we have, not just from Kinshasa, but across the country is that the population has responded fairly substantively," UN envoy Ross Mountain said. "The number of incidents have been absolutely minimal. The security hasn't been a problem and it has been an extraordinary day for Congo."
BBC world affairs correspondent Mark Doyle says the real test of the elections will be the acceptance of the results by all of the former warring parties. The presidential candidates include the four vice-presidents who took office in 2003 in terms of a transitional power-sharing deal. Three of the four vice-presidents are the leaders of former armed factions. Some opposition candidates accuse Mr Kabila of being backed by the international community, and are already unofficially complaining about what they say are irregularities in the voting, our corresponent says.
Source: BBC
Over 9,000 candidates stood for parliament. Some 25m voters were protected by 17,000 UN peacekeepers. It is still far from clear whether a second round will be required, or whether a candidate will gain the 50% of the votes needed to win outright, the BBC News website's Joseph Winter reports from Kinshasa. The RCD party, led by former rebel and Vice-President Azarias Ruberwa, told our correspondent there had been "widespread fraud".
RCD Secretary General Kabasu Babu Katulondi said RCD representatives had been chased out of polling stations when counting started, while ruling PPRD officials had been caught trying to vote more than once. "The delay is one of Kabila's tricks to manipulate the figures," he said. Results from several polling stations seemed to back up pre-election predictions that former rebel leader and Vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba would win most votes in Kinshasa.
However President Kabila was expected to win more votes in eastern DR Congo, where he is credited with ending the war. Thomas Luaka, a spokesman for Mr Bemba's MLC party said that while he "deplored some incidents, overall, the elections went well". Earlier, Mr Bemba's supporters had demonstrated on the streets of the capital, Kinshasa, saying they were cheated. Independent Electoral Commission official Carole Kabanga Kaoy said she could not comment on the allegations of fraud until she had received official reports, at which point each party would be free to provide evidence of irregularities.
Mr Kabila, who came to power unelected in 2001, has told the BBC he will accept the result of Sunday's presidential elections, even if he loses. "It would have been the verdict of the people and of course we will definitely accept the verdict of the people," he said.
Opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi and his UDPS party boycotted the vote. There were reports of violence on election day in Mr Tshisekedi's stronghold, the south-eastern Kasai region. But a United Nations official said he was "relieved" and "delighted" with how the voting had gone. "All indications that we have, not just from Kinshasa, but across the country is that the population has responded fairly substantively," UN envoy Ross Mountain said. "The number of incidents have been absolutely minimal. The security hasn't been a problem and it has been an extraordinary day for Congo."
BBC world affairs correspondent Mark Doyle says the real test of the elections will be the acceptance of the results by all of the former warring parties. The presidential candidates include the four vice-presidents who took office in 2003 in terms of a transitional power-sharing deal. Three of the four vice-presidents are the leaders of former armed factions. Some opposition candidates accuse Mr Kabila of being backed by the international community, and are already unofficially complaining about what they say are irregularities in the voting, our corresponent says.
Source: BBC
Saturday, July 22, 2006
The Hague: Liberian Appears In Court
Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president and warlord, made his first appearance before a special United Nations-backed war crimes tribunal since being flown here from Africa last month. He did not speak during the 50-minute hearing, intended to pave the way for his trial on war crimes charges, but his lawyer complained that the deposed leader was locked in his cell for up to 16 hours a day, had limited access to telephones and was being served "Eurocentric" food.
Mr. Taylor faces 11 counts of charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the war in Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2000 in which 50,000 people were killed and thousands more had limbs hacked off. Prosecutors had hoped to start the trial early next year, but Mr. Taylor's lawyer, Karim Asad Ahmad Khan, said that was unlikely. "For a case of this size and magnitude, particularly given the geographical displacement of this court from Sierra Leone, I do think that the earliest this trial can properly start is around July of next year," Mr. Khan said.
Source: New York Times
Mr. Taylor faces 11 counts of charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the war in Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2000 in which 50,000 people were killed and thousands more had limbs hacked off. Prosecutors had hoped to start the trial early next year, but Mr. Taylor's lawyer, Karim Asad Ahmad Khan, said that was unlikely. "For a case of this size and magnitude, particularly given the geographical displacement of this court from Sierra Leone, I do think that the earliest this trial can properly start is around July of next year," Mr. Khan said.
Source: New York Times
Monday, July 17, 2006
Statement by the G-8, the leaders of Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa,
We are outraged by the barbaric terrorist acts, carried out on 11 July 2006 in Mumbai and other parts of India. We stand in solidarity with the Government and the people of India and express our deepest condolences to the victims and their families.
We are determined to continue the fight against terrorism by all legitimate means. We express our readiness to undertake all necessary measures to bring to justice perpetrators, organizers, sponsors оf these and other terrorist acts, and those who incited the perpetrators to commit them. We shall do it in accordance with our obligations under international law, in particular international human rights law, refugee law and humanitarian law.
We are united with India in our resolve to intensify efforts to fight terrorism which constitutes a threat to each of our country, as well as to international peace and security.
Source: G8 Summit 2006, St.Petersburg, 17 July, 2006
We are determined to continue the fight against terrorism by all legitimate means. We express our readiness to undertake all necessary measures to bring to justice perpetrators, organizers, sponsors оf these and other terrorist acts, and those who incited the perpetrators to commit them. We shall do it in accordance with our obligations under international law, in particular international human rights law, refugee law and humanitarian law.
We are united with India in our resolve to intensify efforts to fight terrorism which constitutes a threat to each of our country, as well as to international peace and security.
Source: G8 Summit 2006, St.Petersburg, 17 July, 2006
Russia's G8 presidency event of the year – Foreign Ministry
One of the main foreign political events of 2006 was Russia's first presidency of the Group of Eight, according to a report on the Foreign Ministry's work in 2006 posted on the Russian government's website on Monday.
This will be the first time that Russia will chair this respected international forum. I hope that the experience we have accumulated since joining the G8 will ensure respect for tradition and consolidation of our efforts.
Russia, as the presiding country, regards it as its duty to give a fresh impetus to efforts to find solutions to key international problems in energy, education and healthcare.
This year, we plan to urge our partners to redouble efforts to ensure global energy security. We believe that today, it is crucial to find a solution to a problem which directly influences the social and economic development of all countries, without exception.
I am convinced that our efforts towards attaining this goal should be comprehensive and must stimulate stabilization of the global energy markets, development of innovation technologies, use of renewable energy sources and protection of the environment. We believe that today, we must think very seriously about ways to bridge the gap between energy-sufficient and energy-lacking countries.
The spread of all kinds of epidemics in the world emphasizes the need to step up the fight against infectious diseases. We are convinced that the creation of a global system to monitor dangerous diseases, the development of regular interaction between experts from different states, and broader exchange of research information about dangerous viruses will have a major positive influence on the solution of these serious problems.
In addition to the current agenda, we also plan to raise the issue of education in the G8. In our opinion, the time has come to focus on ways to improve the quality and effectiveness of national education systems and professional training. We must find tools for encouraging the international business community to increase investment into this sector.
Other major international issues we will concentrate on during Russia’s Presidency are counterterrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the settlement of regional conflicts, the development of the global economy, finance and trade, as well as protection of the environment.
I hope that the official site of Russia’s G8 Presidency will help you to get your bearings in the multitude of questions and problems facing us, as well as to learn more about the efforts of G8 member states to solve them in order to promote the sustainable development of humankind.
Source: G8 Summit 2006
This will be the first time that Russia will chair this respected international forum. I hope that the experience we have accumulated since joining the G8 will ensure respect for tradition and consolidation of our efforts.
Russia, as the presiding country, regards it as its duty to give a fresh impetus to efforts to find solutions to key international problems in energy, education and healthcare.
This year, we plan to urge our partners to redouble efforts to ensure global energy security. We believe that today, it is crucial to find a solution to a problem which directly influences the social and economic development of all countries, without exception.
I am convinced that our efforts towards attaining this goal should be comprehensive and must stimulate stabilization of the global energy markets, development of innovation technologies, use of renewable energy sources and protection of the environment. We believe that today, we must think very seriously about ways to bridge the gap between energy-sufficient and energy-lacking countries.
The spread of all kinds of epidemics in the world emphasizes the need to step up the fight against infectious diseases. We are convinced that the creation of a global system to monitor dangerous diseases, the development of regular interaction between experts from different states, and broader exchange of research information about dangerous viruses will have a major positive influence on the solution of these serious problems.
In addition to the current agenda, we also plan to raise the issue of education in the G8. In our opinion, the time has come to focus on ways to improve the quality and effectiveness of national education systems and professional training. We must find tools for encouraging the international business community to increase investment into this sector.
Other major international issues we will concentrate on during Russia’s Presidency are counterterrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the settlement of regional conflicts, the development of the global economy, finance and trade, as well as protection of the environment.
I hope that the official site of Russia’s G8 Presidency will help you to get your bearings in the multitude of questions and problems facing us, as well as to learn more about the efforts of G8 member states to solve them in order to promote the sustainable development of humankind.
Source: G8 Summit 2006
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Prayer for Sylvia Melodie
"The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their father. Who has ears to hear, let him hear."
"Nothing is covered that will not be uncovered. Miracles happen when we bring what is within out into the world."
Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their father. Who has ears to hear, let him hear."
"Nothing is covered that will not be uncovered. Miracles happen when we bring what is within out into the world."
G8 Update on Africa
Since the late 1990s, G8 Summits have given Africa a high priority. At Gleneagles last year the G8 agreed to a further set of measures to reduce poverty and support sustainable development in Africa.
We are continuing to work in partnership with Africa, in particular in support of the AU and NEPAD, with a special focus this year on infectious diseases, education and energy security.
This report reviews progress on G8 commitments on Africa since the last G8 Summit, while respecting the critical role of African ownership of the reform process.
Source: G8 Summit 2006
We are continuing to work in partnership with Africa, in particular in support of the AU and NEPAD, with a special focus this year on infectious diseases, education and energy security.
This report reviews progress on G8 commitments on Africa since the last G8 Summit, while respecting the critical role of African ownership of the reform process.
Source: G8 Summit 2006
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Letter to Zuma over his threat to sue media that don’t pay within 14 days
African National Congress deputy president Jacob Zuma told a number of South African news media on 3 July that he would bring lawsuits against them if they did not pay him a total of 125 million rand (13.6 million euros) in damages within 14 days. He claims he was defamed by their coverage of a trial in which he was acquitted of rape.
Mr. Jacob Zuma
Deputy President
African National Congress
8 Epping Road, Forest Town
Johannesburg 2000
South Africa
Paris, 7 July 2006
Dear Mr. Zuma,
Reporters Without Borders is amazed by the manner in which you have demanded damages from the newspapers The Star, The Citizen, Sunday Sun, Sunday Times, Sunday Independent, Sunday World and Rapport, from radio Highveld Stereo and from cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro, who uses the pen name Zapiro.
If you think you have been defamed, then it is entirely legitimate that you should seek compensation. But in our view you have not chosen the right way to go about it, and you are liable to do further harm to your image rather than restore it.
The exorbitant amounts in damages that your are demanding from the media seem more like an attempt to intimidate them than the response of an injured party. This approach will only encourage the privately-owned press to turn their sights on you, and will in no way help you obtain reparation for any wrong you may have been done.
We are disconcerted by the way this case is developing and the extent of its impact. We are also worried about the effect that such an unprecedented lawsuit against the press could have if it were successful, as this is a country which, probably more than any other in Africa, knows the high price that must sometimes be paid to win independence and freedom.
If the mechanisms that ensure pluralism and free expression were to seize up in South Africa, the peacemaker and development model for all of southern Africa, it would put the entire region’s press in danger. A successful lawsuit by you would give a blank cheque to Africa’s authoritarian regimes, which would use your example to attack their own press.
The independent press uses its right to free expression but also gives you the right of reply. We urge you to support the independent press by engaging it in a dialogue rather than brandishing the threat - one that is out of all proportion for a political leader at the national level - of financial and judicial penalties that would prove fatal for all the media concerned.
We hope you will be convinced by our arguments.
Respectfully,
Robert Ménard
Secretary-General
Source: Reporters without Borders
Mr. Jacob Zuma
Deputy President
African National Congress
8 Epping Road, Forest Town
Johannesburg 2000
South Africa
Paris, 7 July 2006
Dear Mr. Zuma,
Reporters Without Borders is amazed by the manner in which you have demanded damages from the newspapers The Star, The Citizen, Sunday Sun, Sunday Times, Sunday Independent, Sunday World and Rapport, from radio Highveld Stereo and from cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro, who uses the pen name Zapiro.
If you think you have been defamed, then it is entirely legitimate that you should seek compensation. But in our view you have not chosen the right way to go about it, and you are liable to do further harm to your image rather than restore it.
The exorbitant amounts in damages that your are demanding from the media seem more like an attempt to intimidate them than the response of an injured party. This approach will only encourage the privately-owned press to turn their sights on you, and will in no way help you obtain reparation for any wrong you may have been done.
We are disconcerted by the way this case is developing and the extent of its impact. We are also worried about the effect that such an unprecedented lawsuit against the press could have if it were successful, as this is a country which, probably more than any other in Africa, knows the high price that must sometimes be paid to win independence and freedom.
If the mechanisms that ensure pluralism and free expression were to seize up in South Africa, the peacemaker and development model for all of southern Africa, it would put the entire region’s press in danger. A successful lawsuit by you would give a blank cheque to Africa’s authoritarian regimes, which would use your example to attack their own press.
The independent press uses its right to free expression but also gives you the right of reply. We urge you to support the independent press by engaging it in a dialogue rather than brandishing the threat - one that is out of all proportion for a political leader at the national level - of financial and judicial penalties that would prove fatal for all the media concerned.
We hope you will be convinced by our arguments.
Respectfully,
Robert Ménard
Secretary-General
Source: Reporters without Borders
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