Foday Sankoh, the leader of a 10-year terror campaign in Sierra Leone, has died while waiting to be tried for war crimes. The spokesperson for the United Nations-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone told BBC News Online that he had died at 2240 GMT on Tuesday. Sources say he died from complications resulting from a stroke he suffered last year.
Sankoh founded the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) which became notorious for mass rape and hacking off the hands, feet, ears and noses of thousands of civilians during a 10-year civil war, which ended last year. He was detained in 2000 and is believed to have died in Choithrams hospital in western Freetown where he has been since April after suffering a partial stroke.
According to a statement from the Special Court for Sierra Leone's chief prosecutor, David Crane, Sankoh's death from natural causes granted him "a peaceful end that he denied to so many others".
The court last week rejected a request to drop murder charges against him on health grounds. In June court registrar Robin Vincent said the tribunal had hoped to send him abroad for medical treatment. However, the court had then reported that it could not find a country that was willing to accept the rebel leader even for short-term treatment. At one court hearing last year, he said he was "surprised that I am being tried because I am the leader of the world". Earlier this month doctors treating Sankoh said he was in a "catatonic state" - incapable of walking, talking or even of feeding himself and he could not recognise his immediate surroundings.
Sankoh, like President Charles Taylor of neighbouring Liberia, trained in the guerrilla camps of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. He was captured after his fighters shot more than a dozen protesters outside his Freetown home in 2000. The war in Sierra Leone was formally declared over in 2002 following military intervention by the UK and the UN.
Source: BBC
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
Friday, July 18, 2003
HRC says 'kill boer' slogan is hate speech
It's official. The slogan "kill the farmer, kill the boer" is hate speech, according to a finding of an appeal tribunal of the South African Human Rights Commission. Thursday's finding came after a complaint from the Freedom Front (FF) about the use of the slogan - and an appeal against an earlier commission finding that the phrase was not hate speech. "Even though we had to struggle for three years, we welcome the finding. Finally they came to the right conclusion," said FF leader Pieter Mulder.
Declaring the slogan to be hate speech was a first step in the right direction to stop farm killings, Mulder said. "The first finding had double standards because it meant racism was only wrong when it was by whites to blacks, but now we know that it is also wrong for blacks to be racist against whites," said Mulder.
The party lodged a complaint with the Human Rights Commission in Johannesburg after African National Congress members used the slogan during two public meetings in June last year. One was at the funeral of ANC MP Peter Mokaba in Polokwane, and the other at an ANC youth rally in Kimberley. Earlier this year, the commission said the slogan did not constitute hate speech, but was an instance, although an undesirable one, of the right to freedom of expression. The Freedom Front appealed against the finding. "The slogan 'kill the farmer, kill the boer' as chanted at an ANC youth rally in Kimberley and at Mokaba's funeral is hate speech as defined in Section 16(2)(c) of the Constitution," said commissioner Karthy Govender.
He said freedom of expression was a fundamental right in democracy but by the same token South African courts were clear that the freedom of expression was not a supreme right as in the United States constitution. "We have concluded that the calling for the killing of a group of people is an advocacy of hatred, which must amount to harm," he said.
Simon Kimane, of the Freedom of Expression Institute, expressed disappointment with the finding. "There is no causal connection between the slogan and any actual killings of Afrikaners in this country," he said. He said the institution's submission had pleaded for the right of freedom of expression for the young South African democracy, and that the institution feared that the finding might set a bad precedent.
ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama said "kill the farmer, kill the boer" was never an adopted slogan of his party. "The ANC will discourage people from using the slogan," he said.
Source: IoL
Declaring the slogan to be hate speech was a first step in the right direction to stop farm killings, Mulder said. "The first finding had double standards because it meant racism was only wrong when it was by whites to blacks, but now we know that it is also wrong for blacks to be racist against whites," said Mulder.
The party lodged a complaint with the Human Rights Commission in Johannesburg after African National Congress members used the slogan during two public meetings in June last year. One was at the funeral of ANC MP Peter Mokaba in Polokwane, and the other at an ANC youth rally in Kimberley. Earlier this year, the commission said the slogan did not constitute hate speech, but was an instance, although an undesirable one, of the right to freedom of expression. The Freedom Front appealed against the finding. "The slogan 'kill the farmer, kill the boer' as chanted at an ANC youth rally in Kimberley and at Mokaba's funeral is hate speech as defined in Section 16(2)(c) of the Constitution," said commissioner Karthy Govender.
He said freedom of expression was a fundamental right in democracy but by the same token South African courts were clear that the freedom of expression was not a supreme right as in the United States constitution. "We have concluded that the calling for the killing of a group of people is an advocacy of hatred, which must amount to harm," he said.
Simon Kimane, of the Freedom of Expression Institute, expressed disappointment with the finding. "There is no causal connection between the slogan and any actual killings of Afrikaners in this country," he said. He said the institution's submission had pleaded for the right of freedom of expression for the young South African democracy, and that the institution feared that the finding might set a bad precedent.
ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama said "kill the farmer, kill the boer" was never an adopted slogan of his party. "The ANC will discourage people from using the slogan," he said.
Source: IoL
Monday, July 7, 2003
Ethnically Targeted Violence in Northern DRC
The war in Congo has been misdescribed as a local ethnic rivalry when in fact it represents an ongoing struggle for power at the national and international levels, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. The 57-page report, ‘Covered in Blood’: Ethnically Targeted Violence in Northern DR Congo, provides evidence that combatants in the Ituri region of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have slaughtered some five thousand civilians in the last year because of their ethnic affiliation. But the combatants are armed and often directed by the governments of the DRC, Rwanda and Uganda. A number of treaties and ceasefires, the most recent signed in Burundi on June 19, have supposedly ended the conflict between the governments of Uganda, Rwanda, and the DRC, as well as Congolese rebel movements set to share power with the Kinshasa government. But the minor players—often the proxies for the principals—continue the war.
Source: Human Rights watch
Source: Human Rights watch
Tuesday, July 1, 2003
Cgao Coma - bridging ancient and modern
MODERNITY meets iron age in Tsumkwe this weekend as the San community in this isolated part of eastern Namibia and international film-makers lay to rest one of the Kalahari desert's greatest sons. In death, as in life, Cgao Coma, Namibia's most famous actor, will be a bridge between the thousands of years old hunter-gatherer culture of the Bushmen and western civilisation.
He will be buried on Saturday in a semi-traditional ceremony at Tsumkwe, alongside his second wife. While in years past the Bushmen buried their dead and moved on to find new dwellings, Coma's family is expected to stay close to his resting place. The actor of the world famous 'The Gods Must Be Crazy' movies died while hunting in the desert last week Tuesday.
Official records say he was 59 years old, but he did not know his exact age. Many people believe he was older. By the time he died Coma had all but given up the modern way of life, having sold his brick house at Tsumkwe to live with his family in traditional huts in a village outside the capital of former Bushmanland.
According to Government records, Coma was born at Tsumkwe on December 16 1944. His mother tongue was Ju/'hoansi. He spoke Otjiherero and Tswana fluently, but his Afrikaans was not so good. He could not read or write, as is the case with most of the San.
The San are an indigenous hunter-gatherer people of southern Africa. Most live in the Kalahari. They number about 100 000. In the early 1980s, film director Jamie Uys of Mimosa Films in South Africa found the perfect natural actor in Coma to symbolise how the outside world has affected the San. "Uncle Jamie (Uys) told me the richness of Cgao," Dutch Reformed Church minister Peet Poggenpoel said. "He had a natural feeling for acting. What we must remember is that Cgao is a real actor".
Uys told Poggenpoel that Coma would often politely disregard the directors' instructions, and act "naturally", giving the movie authenticity. Reports say Uys was only the fourth white person Coma had met and he had never seen a settlement larger than the village of huts of his San people before he was cast in the film.
By the mid-1980s, Coma was world famous. 'The Gods Must Be Crazy' propelled him to international stardom and started his voyage of discovery in western culture.
Through the movies he became known as N!xau or N!Gau, as outsiders attempted to spell a name known only in the phonetic clicking sounds of his Ju/'hoansi language Some reports say the film grossed US$66 million (N$508 million at today's exchange rate) at the box office. Unappreciative of the immense value of money in a material world, Coma let his first wages waste away. Legend has it that he even left huge wads of cash to be blown away by the wind or eaten by hyenas.
Future earnings were better taken care of, between himself and the film company, said Geoffrey Gomme, a relative. Poggenpoel, who lived at Tsumkwe for nine years, said Coma received the money through his church. "The change that came with being cast was great but he did not have the skills to manage his income. He did not know how much he got from the films," said Gomme.
With some of his first income, Coma bought cattle that lions devoured. He bought a Chevrolet F250 and hired a driver at R150 a month, but sold it later to buy more livestock. In the 1990s, with the help of Mimosa, Coma built his first brick house. It was a three-bedroom house, fully furnished. Gomme said the actor's relatives descended on the house - as many as 30 at once - to share in the wealth. Over the years, they began to sell chairs, fridges, beds and cupboards. "After his wife passed away relatives were selling the furniture for alcohol," said Gomme.
Coma sold the house at the beginning of this year because he felt his relatives were abusing it. A local businessman paid him 20 herd of cattle, five calves, and N$20 000 in a mixture of banknotes and groceries. The family say the house was valued at N$80 000, but did not say when the valuation was made.
Coma then moved to Djokhoe, a village 27 km east of Tsumkwe. His wealth consisted of 21 cattle, 11 sheep, two horses, two bicycles, two spades, two rakes and five axes, including three traditional ones that he made himself. It is not clear how much cash is left in his estate.
A few years ago, Coma said he was getting N$2 000 a month from an investment Mimosa managed for him. Despite the money, Coma did not want to drift from his roots. "Mimosa stored his clothes at the church. When he went to big cities we would get the clothes so he can go there looking neat," said Poggenpoel.
Gomme described the actor's life as "between ordinary person and a poor man. He did not show he had lots of money". Coma himself had told NBC-TV that he preferred to behave as if he were poor, because he feared people might use witchcraft to obtain his wealth. His community saw him as a humble person. Poggenpoel remembers him as a jolly man, who always laughed - "not smile, but laugh".
In the mid-1990s, tuberculosis befell the diminutive actor. He was in and out of hospital as a State patient. His death certificate said he died of "multi-drug resistant" TB.
On Monday last week, he woke up at 06h00 as usual, collected firewood and made tea that he sipped with his father-in-law. He took his bird traps, bow and arrow and a hunting pouch and set off to hunt, his main target being guinea fowl. He did not come back that day. Coma's father-in-law tracked his spoor the next morning and found him on a path back home, bow and arrow still strapped to his shoulder.
Coma had nine children and one step-child from three marriages. Two children died, as did two of his wives. A volunteer in the community, Anthony Tsanigab, said Coma's burial will be huge by San standards. Tsanigab said Coma will be buried differently from tradition because "he was a modern man to them".
Poggenpoel recalled that Coma was extremely popular in Japan. "They had to organise the police to protect him. In Namibia we did not know what a what a big actor we had in Cgao".
Source: The Namibian
Monday, June 16, 2003
Investigating the foundations of equality
Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke and Equality, Cambridge University Press, 2002
Professor Jeremy Waldron’s latest book is an examination of the theory of equality put forward by the seventeenth century English philosopher John Locke. This is a subject that is highly relevant today as the widening social gulf between the super rich and the rest of the population increasingly undermines the political institutions that have been based on the maintenance of at least a measure of social and economic equality. Under these conditions a study of equality as a theoretical principle is to be welcomed.
Locke has some claim to be one of the key sources of modern theories of equality and any discussion of the political implications of social inequality needs to be well grounded in his work. In his Two Treatises of Government Locke maintained that all men were naturally in a state of perfect liberty and equality. He envisaged that by common consent they had agreed to join together into a political or civil society, which ought to be governed by majority decisions. On entering civil society they granted their right to enforce justice to some form of government but they retained the right to resist this government and, if necessary, to overthrow it by force of arms.
The fact that almost a century after his death American revolutionaries could regard it as self-evident that all men were equal was in large part due to Locke’s influence. Whole phrases from the Second Treatise appear in the Declaration of Independence, as though Thomas Jefferson either had the book open on his desk as he drafted the document or had so thoroughly internalised its ethos that its language came most naturally to him. Even when he changes Locke’s words, as when he substitutes “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” for Locke’s “Life, Liberty and Property”, Jefferson shows a profound understanding of Locke’s thought and the way in which it needed to be modified to make it most relevant for his own times. In this form the ideas that Locke defended became part of the subsequent development of democratic theory.
This history makes Locke the inescapable starting point for any consideration of equality as a modern political concept, but at the same time he himself is not a modern thinker. He was born in 1632 and grew up during the English Civil War (1642-48), was at school in Westminster when Charles I was executed a few hundred yards away and went to Christ Church College, Oxford just after the victorious parliamentary forces had purged the academic staff. His youth and early adulthood experiences were shaped by a political struggle that was expressed in a religious form and in which the Bible was regarded as a political handbook. Often this historical background to Locke’s thought is elided in the works of modern political theorists, but it certainly influences his thinking since for Locke human beings are equal because they are made in the image of God and are all sent into the world to do his business. Waldron’s book attempts to reinstate the religious foundations of Locke’s political theory in what he aims to make an historically sensitive account.
In recognising that the roots of Locke’s thought lie to a great extent in the revolutionary struggles of the English Civil War, Waldron is able to give more emphasis than is often the case to the radical aspects of his writings that are easily obscured when he is seen in a later context. Waldron recognises Locke’s debt to the most plebeian elements of the English revolution and thinks that he is closer to the Levellers than is often supposed. He rejects the argument put forward by C. B. Macpherson who suggested that Locke thought, “members of the laboring class do not and cannot live a fully rational life.” [1]
Locke has a very distinctive view of labour that relates both to his political and economic theories. Labour, for Locke, is the source of value and the basis of property rights since people could, in his view, only own that which they had appropriated through their labour. Waldron traces Locke’s conception of labour to his religious outlook, specifically to his attitude to the Fall of Man. Waldron quotes Locke’s comment that when Adam was expelled from Paradise, “God sets him to work for his living, and seems rather to give him a Spade into his hands, to subdue the Earth, than a Scepter to Rule over its Inhabitants.”
Rather than being doomed to a state of original sin, humanity is obliged to work for a living in Locke’s version of the Fall from Paradise.
The picture of Locke that emerges from Waldron’s pages is not of a defender of the seventeenth century status quo, but of someone who was prepared to challenge orthodox ideas and the existing property relations. Ever since the Putney debates of 1647 the way in which economic inequality inevitably undermines political equality had remained an insoluble problem that the Levellers had never managed to resolve. Waldron sets Locke’s discussion of equality in the context of this seventeenth century debate about the relationship between political and economic equality. He concludes that Locke seems to have regarded an unequal distribution of property as inevitable in an economy based on money, but that he was critical of the English inheritance customs that tended to produce large landed estates. He favoured the division of property among heirs, a practice that, it was thought, would result in a more equitable division of land.
So fundamental are Locke’s religious conceptions to his political and economic ideas, Waldron argues, that “bracketing off the God stuff from the equality stuff” is simply not going to work. This is true to the extent that for Locke the idea of equality is logically derived from God since all human beings are equal because they have been divinely created. But does this mean that we cannot separate the principle of equality from the theological character it has in Locke’s thought? It is significant that even before Locke’s death in 1704 editions of his Two Treatises appeared in France without the First Treatise, which was the most explicitly religious of the two. It was this French version of the work that was eventually translated and published in America. Locke is in this sense very much a transitional figure who stands between the religiously based conceptions of the English Civil War and the increasingly secular arguments for equality that emerge in the American and French revolutions. “Bracketing off the God stuff from the equality stuff “ is exactly what did happen to Locke’s theory in practice.
Waldron’s determination not to separate Locke’s theory of equality from its theological foundations casts an interesting light on the direction of liberal thought at the turn of the twentieth century. John Rawls, the political theorist who died earlier this year, drew on the work of Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Mill to develop a political theory that was highly influential throughout the post-war period. He always argued that it must be possible to defend the principle of equality in terms that all members of society, whether religious or secular, could accept and find compelling because there existed an overlapping consensus of ideas. For Rawls all individuals are equal because they have a sense of justice and a conception of the good and because they have the ability to reason.[2]
Waldron used to accept this argument 20 years ago, he writes, but now finds that he cannot and doubts that a non-religious foundation for the principle of equality is viable.
This shift reflects the fact that 20 years ago it was possible for Rawls or Waldron to take for granted a certain consensus on fundamental political principles. There might be sharp differences in their practical application, but principles such as equality were accepted by the right and left in mainstream political life. This is no longer the case today and it has become impossible to base a liberal political philosophy on the assumption that the principle of equality can be taken for granted.
The theological basis that Locke found for equality is certainly not adequate for the beginning of the twenty-first century, a fact that the traditional liberal theory of equality always recognised and so tried to find a generally acceptable secular theory. To attempt to return to a theological conception of equality at this point would be entirely retrogressive.
Waldron does not examine the foundations of equality in the present day or elaborate a theory of his own that goes beyond a rather tentative critique of Rawls and gives the impression of floundering when he suggests that the justification of the principle of equality must exist at some “deeper level”. It is to his credit that he insists that individuals were inherently worthy of respect in late seventeenth century and they are inherently worthy of respect in the twenty-first century too, but having rejected Rawls’ mid-twentieth century liberalism he seems to have cut himself adrift from any theoretical anchor points for this conviction.
While Waldron’s close focus has some definite advantages because it sets Locke’s thought in an appropriate historical context, it is not sufficient in studying such an influential figure or in exploring such a complex concept as equality, which has a profound resonance over a long historical period. One of the features that Waldron himself emphasises about Locke’s thought is that he wrote in a pre-Linnaean, pre-Darwinian world in which evolutionary or historical arguments had no explanatory force. This is extremely important for understanding Locke because our thought has been so thoroughly infused with historical and evolutionary concepts in the course of the last 300 years that it is often difficult to put ourselves into Locke’s mental world.
We think of species as evolving, societies as evolving and ideas as evolving in a way that Locke did not.
There is, however, no reason why we should artificially confine ourselves to Locke’s mental world and deprive ourselves of a whole range of more modern intellectual equipment in reaching an understanding of his thought. Writing in a world before Vico and Herder, before Hegel and certainly before Darwin and Marx, an historical understanding of the principle of equality was not open to Locke but it is to us. We have to step outside Locke’s essentially a-historical worldview, in which equality existed as a timeless principle based on divine dispensation and an unchanging human nature, and adopt a more historical approach than the one either Locke or Waldron offers us.
The problem is not just that Locke’s theological theory is inadequate today, but that it was philosophically inadequate in the seventeenth century too. God’s opinions are so notoriously varied that they have never made a sound basis for philosophy. In John Locke’s mind God may have created all men equal but many of his contemporaries were just as sincerely convinced that God had ordained inequality since he had given kings a divine right to rule over their subjects. Why then did the theory of equality become so powerful?
Equality could only have become a self-evident idea because it made sense in terms of the experience of a great many people. This may seem anomalous in a world that was dominated by absolute monarchies, in which there were immense socio-economic divisions and when most people’s daily experience was of inequality not equality. Landlord and tenant, master and servant, king and subject—these were the relationships that governed the majority of people’s lives in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even Locke himself accepted a system in which political rights were proportionate to landholding and slavery was legally recognised when he helped to draft the constitution of colonial Carolina.
Despite this social reality the concept of equality had deep roots and a complex history. It had always led a double life as both part of the official Christian ideology of natural rights theology that was developed by Thomas Aquinas and part of the ideology of plebeian heresy and rebellion.
The Reformation (1516) and the German Peasant War (1524-6) lent it a powerful impetus, as did the French Wars of Religion (1562-98). One of the conclusions drawn from the Thirty Years War (1618-48) was that the only way to maintain social peace was to treat everyone as though they were equal. Under the impact of these political experiences and the economic developments connected with European colonial expansion, the old scholastic theory of natural law and natural rights was dusted off and revived in a modern form that placed greater emphasis on the political implications of equality and the active right of resistance.
The political ideas expressed in Locke’s Two Treatises represent a codification of the principles of equality and resistance, which had emerged in a practical and unsystematic way in the course of the struggle against King Charles I. They retained a continuing relevance after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 when it became clear that the king was moving in an absolutist direction as, fortified with subsidies from Louis XIV, Charles II found that he could afford to ignore Parliament and insist on the succession of his brother James II, who was a Roman Catholic. This directly threatened the lives, liberties and properties of Protestant Englishmen who feared that the religious orders would claim back their estates, that they would be excluded from office and that a programme of persecution would be instituted as it had been under Mary Tudor.
Under these circumstances the alliance of wealthy merchants and landlords with more radical urban artisans that had played an important role in the Civil War re-emerged. Locke was very much part of this loose movement that came to be identified as the Whigs.
One of Locke’s practical political actions was organising the legal defence of Stephen College, “the Whig joiner”, when he was on trial for his life in Oxford on charges of sedition. The Two Treatises was part of a whole body of Whig literature that included Algernon Sydney’s Discourse Concerning Government—which also had an impact on the American Revolution. Sydney was convicted of treason and executed for his involvement on the strength of the views he expressed in the Discourses. Locke was more fortunate but he expressed similar ideas in the Two Treatises.
Locke has been thought of as exclusively the spokesman for the wealthy merchants and landlords, but his conception that the poor have the right to take what they need from the surplus of the rich is incompatible with any accepted notions of capitalist economics. Locke certainly is a spokesman of these privileged groups, but at the same time he speaks for their supporters among the labourers and artisans. Waldron is right to identify Locke with the Levellers. Indeed Locke is not so far from the more radical Diggers in advocating that the poor should be allowed to dig up common land and that the rich should not be allowed to engross more land than they can use.
Locke’s political ideas reflect the alliance of classes that jointly opposed the drive to absolutism in mid and late seventeenth century England. We may recognise these classes as having inherently incompatible interests, but Locke did not. He expressed a compromise between class interests, but one that rapidly became untenable.
Within a comparatively short space of time the Whigs became the party of the establishment, maintaining power through a system of corruption, and their revolutionary past was transformed into an assertion of the ancient rights of Englishmen—propertied ones in particular. Locke is often identified with this later Whig tradition, but he never attempts to justify revolution on the grounds that Englishmen could claim certain rights under an ancient constitution. His arguments in The Two Treatises are always universalist in nature and point toward the Enlightenment tradition of natural rights rather than to the constitutional tradition of ancient prerogative and privilege. Locke’s arguments are far more theological in character than later theories of natural rights were to be because he effectively bridges the transition between the religious ideology of the English Civil War and the later American and French Revolutions, where if God appears at all it is in the guise of the “God of Nature”.
God, Locke and Equality is a valuable contribution to the debate about the origins of the modern conception of equality because it recognises the radical aspect of Locke’s thought and his connection with a revolutionary tradition, but it demands to be taken further.
Locke’s conception of God, a conception that was far from satisfactory to the orthodox thinkers of his day, was a philosophical portmanteau—which, if unpacked, we would find contained some highly material historical content. In it we could trace the influence of the history of European wars, religious conflicts and revolutions on his thought and in addition identify the new scientific developments of the age that encouraged him to adopt an anthropological approach to political and religious questions. Professor Waldron has left the bag packed.
Notes:
[1] C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism pp.232.
[2] John Rawls, Political Liberalism, p19
Source: World Socialist Web Site
Professor Jeremy Waldron’s latest book is an examination of the theory of equality put forward by the seventeenth century English philosopher John Locke. This is a subject that is highly relevant today as the widening social gulf between the super rich and the rest of the population increasingly undermines the political institutions that have been based on the maintenance of at least a measure of social and economic equality. Under these conditions a study of equality as a theoretical principle is to be welcomed.
Locke has some claim to be one of the key sources of modern theories of equality and any discussion of the political implications of social inequality needs to be well grounded in his work. In his Two Treatises of Government Locke maintained that all men were naturally in a state of perfect liberty and equality. He envisaged that by common consent they had agreed to join together into a political or civil society, which ought to be governed by majority decisions. On entering civil society they granted their right to enforce justice to some form of government but they retained the right to resist this government and, if necessary, to overthrow it by force of arms.
The fact that almost a century after his death American revolutionaries could regard it as self-evident that all men were equal was in large part due to Locke’s influence. Whole phrases from the Second Treatise appear in the Declaration of Independence, as though Thomas Jefferson either had the book open on his desk as he drafted the document or had so thoroughly internalised its ethos that its language came most naturally to him. Even when he changes Locke’s words, as when he substitutes “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” for Locke’s “Life, Liberty and Property”, Jefferson shows a profound understanding of Locke’s thought and the way in which it needed to be modified to make it most relevant for his own times. In this form the ideas that Locke defended became part of the subsequent development of democratic theory.
This history makes Locke the inescapable starting point for any consideration of equality as a modern political concept, but at the same time he himself is not a modern thinker. He was born in 1632 and grew up during the English Civil War (1642-48), was at school in Westminster when Charles I was executed a few hundred yards away and went to Christ Church College, Oxford just after the victorious parliamentary forces had purged the academic staff. His youth and early adulthood experiences were shaped by a political struggle that was expressed in a religious form and in which the Bible was regarded as a political handbook. Often this historical background to Locke’s thought is elided in the works of modern political theorists, but it certainly influences his thinking since for Locke human beings are equal because they are made in the image of God and are all sent into the world to do his business. Waldron’s book attempts to reinstate the religious foundations of Locke’s political theory in what he aims to make an historically sensitive account.
In recognising that the roots of Locke’s thought lie to a great extent in the revolutionary struggles of the English Civil War, Waldron is able to give more emphasis than is often the case to the radical aspects of his writings that are easily obscured when he is seen in a later context. Waldron recognises Locke’s debt to the most plebeian elements of the English revolution and thinks that he is closer to the Levellers than is often supposed. He rejects the argument put forward by C. B. Macpherson who suggested that Locke thought, “members of the laboring class do not and cannot live a fully rational life.” [1]
Locke has a very distinctive view of labour that relates both to his political and economic theories. Labour, for Locke, is the source of value and the basis of property rights since people could, in his view, only own that which they had appropriated through their labour. Waldron traces Locke’s conception of labour to his religious outlook, specifically to his attitude to the Fall of Man. Waldron quotes Locke’s comment that when Adam was expelled from Paradise, “God sets him to work for his living, and seems rather to give him a Spade into his hands, to subdue the Earth, than a Scepter to Rule over its Inhabitants.”
Rather than being doomed to a state of original sin, humanity is obliged to work for a living in Locke’s version of the Fall from Paradise.
The picture of Locke that emerges from Waldron’s pages is not of a defender of the seventeenth century status quo, but of someone who was prepared to challenge orthodox ideas and the existing property relations. Ever since the Putney debates of 1647 the way in which economic inequality inevitably undermines political equality had remained an insoluble problem that the Levellers had never managed to resolve. Waldron sets Locke’s discussion of equality in the context of this seventeenth century debate about the relationship between political and economic equality. He concludes that Locke seems to have regarded an unequal distribution of property as inevitable in an economy based on money, but that he was critical of the English inheritance customs that tended to produce large landed estates. He favoured the division of property among heirs, a practice that, it was thought, would result in a more equitable division of land.
So fundamental are Locke’s religious conceptions to his political and economic ideas, Waldron argues, that “bracketing off the God stuff from the equality stuff” is simply not going to work. This is true to the extent that for Locke the idea of equality is logically derived from God since all human beings are equal because they have been divinely created. But does this mean that we cannot separate the principle of equality from the theological character it has in Locke’s thought? It is significant that even before Locke’s death in 1704 editions of his Two Treatises appeared in France without the First Treatise, which was the most explicitly religious of the two. It was this French version of the work that was eventually translated and published in America. Locke is in this sense very much a transitional figure who stands between the religiously based conceptions of the English Civil War and the increasingly secular arguments for equality that emerge in the American and French revolutions. “Bracketing off the God stuff from the equality stuff “ is exactly what did happen to Locke’s theory in practice.
Waldron’s determination not to separate Locke’s theory of equality from its theological foundations casts an interesting light on the direction of liberal thought at the turn of the twentieth century. John Rawls, the political theorist who died earlier this year, drew on the work of Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Mill to develop a political theory that was highly influential throughout the post-war period. He always argued that it must be possible to defend the principle of equality in terms that all members of society, whether religious or secular, could accept and find compelling because there existed an overlapping consensus of ideas. For Rawls all individuals are equal because they have a sense of justice and a conception of the good and because they have the ability to reason.[2]
Waldron used to accept this argument 20 years ago, he writes, but now finds that he cannot and doubts that a non-religious foundation for the principle of equality is viable.
This shift reflects the fact that 20 years ago it was possible for Rawls or Waldron to take for granted a certain consensus on fundamental political principles. There might be sharp differences in their practical application, but principles such as equality were accepted by the right and left in mainstream political life. This is no longer the case today and it has become impossible to base a liberal political philosophy on the assumption that the principle of equality can be taken for granted.
The theological basis that Locke found for equality is certainly not adequate for the beginning of the twenty-first century, a fact that the traditional liberal theory of equality always recognised and so tried to find a generally acceptable secular theory. To attempt to return to a theological conception of equality at this point would be entirely retrogressive.
Waldron does not examine the foundations of equality in the present day or elaborate a theory of his own that goes beyond a rather tentative critique of Rawls and gives the impression of floundering when he suggests that the justification of the principle of equality must exist at some “deeper level”. It is to his credit that he insists that individuals were inherently worthy of respect in late seventeenth century and they are inherently worthy of respect in the twenty-first century too, but having rejected Rawls’ mid-twentieth century liberalism he seems to have cut himself adrift from any theoretical anchor points for this conviction.
While Waldron’s close focus has some definite advantages because it sets Locke’s thought in an appropriate historical context, it is not sufficient in studying such an influential figure or in exploring such a complex concept as equality, which has a profound resonance over a long historical period. One of the features that Waldron himself emphasises about Locke’s thought is that he wrote in a pre-Linnaean, pre-Darwinian world in which evolutionary or historical arguments had no explanatory force. This is extremely important for understanding Locke because our thought has been so thoroughly infused with historical and evolutionary concepts in the course of the last 300 years that it is often difficult to put ourselves into Locke’s mental world.
We think of species as evolving, societies as evolving and ideas as evolving in a way that Locke did not.
There is, however, no reason why we should artificially confine ourselves to Locke’s mental world and deprive ourselves of a whole range of more modern intellectual equipment in reaching an understanding of his thought. Writing in a world before Vico and Herder, before Hegel and certainly before Darwin and Marx, an historical understanding of the principle of equality was not open to Locke but it is to us. We have to step outside Locke’s essentially a-historical worldview, in which equality existed as a timeless principle based on divine dispensation and an unchanging human nature, and adopt a more historical approach than the one either Locke or Waldron offers us.
The problem is not just that Locke’s theological theory is inadequate today, but that it was philosophically inadequate in the seventeenth century too. God’s opinions are so notoriously varied that they have never made a sound basis for philosophy. In John Locke’s mind God may have created all men equal but many of his contemporaries were just as sincerely convinced that God had ordained inequality since he had given kings a divine right to rule over their subjects. Why then did the theory of equality become so powerful?
Equality could only have become a self-evident idea because it made sense in terms of the experience of a great many people. This may seem anomalous in a world that was dominated by absolute monarchies, in which there were immense socio-economic divisions and when most people’s daily experience was of inequality not equality. Landlord and tenant, master and servant, king and subject—these were the relationships that governed the majority of people’s lives in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even Locke himself accepted a system in which political rights were proportionate to landholding and slavery was legally recognised when he helped to draft the constitution of colonial Carolina.
Despite this social reality the concept of equality had deep roots and a complex history. It had always led a double life as both part of the official Christian ideology of natural rights theology that was developed by Thomas Aquinas and part of the ideology of plebeian heresy and rebellion.
The Reformation (1516) and the German Peasant War (1524-6) lent it a powerful impetus, as did the French Wars of Religion (1562-98). One of the conclusions drawn from the Thirty Years War (1618-48) was that the only way to maintain social peace was to treat everyone as though they were equal. Under the impact of these political experiences and the economic developments connected with European colonial expansion, the old scholastic theory of natural law and natural rights was dusted off and revived in a modern form that placed greater emphasis on the political implications of equality and the active right of resistance.
The political ideas expressed in Locke’s Two Treatises represent a codification of the principles of equality and resistance, which had emerged in a practical and unsystematic way in the course of the struggle against King Charles I. They retained a continuing relevance after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 when it became clear that the king was moving in an absolutist direction as, fortified with subsidies from Louis XIV, Charles II found that he could afford to ignore Parliament and insist on the succession of his brother James II, who was a Roman Catholic. This directly threatened the lives, liberties and properties of Protestant Englishmen who feared that the religious orders would claim back their estates, that they would be excluded from office and that a programme of persecution would be instituted as it had been under Mary Tudor.
Under these circumstances the alliance of wealthy merchants and landlords with more radical urban artisans that had played an important role in the Civil War re-emerged. Locke was very much part of this loose movement that came to be identified as the Whigs.
One of Locke’s practical political actions was organising the legal defence of Stephen College, “the Whig joiner”, when he was on trial for his life in Oxford on charges of sedition. The Two Treatises was part of a whole body of Whig literature that included Algernon Sydney’s Discourse Concerning Government—which also had an impact on the American Revolution. Sydney was convicted of treason and executed for his involvement on the strength of the views he expressed in the Discourses. Locke was more fortunate but he expressed similar ideas in the Two Treatises.
Locke has been thought of as exclusively the spokesman for the wealthy merchants and landlords, but his conception that the poor have the right to take what they need from the surplus of the rich is incompatible with any accepted notions of capitalist economics. Locke certainly is a spokesman of these privileged groups, but at the same time he speaks for their supporters among the labourers and artisans. Waldron is right to identify Locke with the Levellers. Indeed Locke is not so far from the more radical Diggers in advocating that the poor should be allowed to dig up common land and that the rich should not be allowed to engross more land than they can use.
Locke’s political ideas reflect the alliance of classes that jointly opposed the drive to absolutism in mid and late seventeenth century England. We may recognise these classes as having inherently incompatible interests, but Locke did not. He expressed a compromise between class interests, but one that rapidly became untenable.
Within a comparatively short space of time the Whigs became the party of the establishment, maintaining power through a system of corruption, and their revolutionary past was transformed into an assertion of the ancient rights of Englishmen—propertied ones in particular. Locke is often identified with this later Whig tradition, but he never attempts to justify revolution on the grounds that Englishmen could claim certain rights under an ancient constitution. His arguments in The Two Treatises are always universalist in nature and point toward the Enlightenment tradition of natural rights rather than to the constitutional tradition of ancient prerogative and privilege. Locke’s arguments are far more theological in character than later theories of natural rights were to be because he effectively bridges the transition between the religious ideology of the English Civil War and the later American and French Revolutions, where if God appears at all it is in the guise of the “God of Nature”.
God, Locke and Equality is a valuable contribution to the debate about the origins of the modern conception of equality because it recognises the radical aspect of Locke’s thought and his connection with a revolutionary tradition, but it demands to be taken further.
Locke’s conception of God, a conception that was far from satisfactory to the orthodox thinkers of his day, was a philosophical portmanteau—which, if unpacked, we would find contained some highly material historical content. In it we could trace the influence of the history of European wars, religious conflicts and revolutions on his thought and in addition identify the new scientific developments of the age that encouraged him to adopt an anthropological approach to political and religious questions. Professor Waldron has left the bag packed.
Notes:
[1] C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism pp.232.
[2] John Rawls, Political Liberalism, p19
Source: World Socialist Web Site
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Ngcuka calls for stricter asset forfeiture laws
National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka yesterday appealed to MPs to beef up legislation governing asset forfeitures. This followed a high court order won by controversial Businessperson Billy Rautenbach last year for the release of more than R40-million worth of assets seized by the Asset Forfeiture Unit (AFU).
The ruling, by Johannesburg High Court Judge Pierre Rabie, had allowed Rautenbach to take the assets out of the country, to Zimbabwe, despite the government appealing against the decision, Ngcuka told Parliament's justice portfolio committee. "We would like the legislature to give consideration to this. "How can people use the legal system to protect their rights, but then don't want to submit to the jurisdiction of our courts," he said.
The AFU, three years ago, seized Rautenbach's assets, including a luxury home in Sandhurst, Johannesburg, a farm in Paarl, aircrafts, a yacht, as well as various bank accounts. The former Hyundai boss in South Africa had been charged with large-scale fraud, theft, money laundering and evasion of import duties. Ngcuka said he hoped the committee would look into the case and strengthen the law to ensure those accused could not flee with their assets, even though cases were still subject to appeal.
Johnny de Lange, the committee's chairman, said this should not be allowed to happen again. "It is absolutely flabbergasting that a judge can allow that to happen," he said. Ngcuka also said his office was putting in place a system to dramatically cut down on the number of criminal cases withdrawn before the courts. The frequency of suspects being arrested and the cases never coming to court, despite being placed on the court roll, was a source of serious concern. This was particularly the case when arrests were made over a weekend and cases put onto the roll on Monday morning, despite there being no chance of conviction.
Prosecutors were now visiting police stations on Sundays to screen dockets before they were placed on the roll, and only in exceptional instances would a suspect be taken to court before a final decision was taken to prosecute. The new policy would also help ensure against innocent persons being arrested, and detained, he said.
Source: Polity
The ruling, by Johannesburg High Court Judge Pierre Rabie, had allowed Rautenbach to take the assets out of the country, to Zimbabwe, despite the government appealing against the decision, Ngcuka told Parliament's justice portfolio committee. "We would like the legislature to give consideration to this. "How can people use the legal system to protect their rights, but then don't want to submit to the jurisdiction of our courts," he said.
The AFU, three years ago, seized Rautenbach's assets, including a luxury home in Sandhurst, Johannesburg, a farm in Paarl, aircrafts, a yacht, as well as various bank accounts. The former Hyundai boss in South Africa had been charged with large-scale fraud, theft, money laundering and evasion of import duties. Ngcuka said he hoped the committee would look into the case and strengthen the law to ensure those accused could not flee with their assets, even though cases were still subject to appeal.
Johnny de Lange, the committee's chairman, said this should not be allowed to happen again. "It is absolutely flabbergasting that a judge can allow that to happen," he said. Ngcuka also said his office was putting in place a system to dramatically cut down on the number of criminal cases withdrawn before the courts. The frequency of suspects being arrested and the cases never coming to court, despite being placed on the court roll, was a source of serious concern. This was particularly the case when arrests were made over a weekend and cases put onto the roll on Monday morning, despite there being no chance of conviction.
Prosecutors were now visiting police stations on Sundays to screen dockets before they were placed on the roll, and only in exceptional instances would a suspect be taken to court before a final decision was taken to prosecute. The new policy would also help ensure against innocent persons being arrested, and detained, he said.
Source: Polity
Thursday, June 5, 2003
War Crimes Indictment of Liberian President Is Disclosed
President Charles Taylor of Liberia, widely viewed as a wellspring of the violence that has ravaged West Africa, has been indicted on war crimes charges by a special court in Sierra Leone that accused him of ''bearing the greatest responsibility'' for a decade's worth of murders, mutilations and rapes in the neighboring country. He is the second serving national leader to be indicted on war crimes charges in the last decade. The first was Slobodan Milosevic, who was indicted by the tribunal in The Hague while he was president.
The indictment by the court, run jointly by the United Nations and the Sierra Leone government, was originally issued on March 7. It was made public today shortly after Mr. Taylor, bowing to pressure from the leaders of Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, announced that he would step down by the end of the year. Diplomatic officials and news reports from the region described a surreal diplomatic drama in which Mr.
Taylor was transformed from statesman to fugitive in a matter of minutes. The announcement came at the opening of a peace conference convened in Accra, Ghana, and designed to end Liberia's current civil war. Just after being applauded for his retirement announcement, Mr. Taylor left the peace conference abruptly and caught a plane home rather than risk arrest by his Ghanaian hosts. In the brief time that elapsed between the announcement of the indictment and Mr. Taylor's departure, various Ghanaian officials and West African diplomats said they did not know whether they would attempt an arrest, since Mr. Taylor's status as a head of state grants him automatic immunity from such actions, under various international treaties.
The train of events left deep frustration in at least two quarters, diplomatic officials said today. One senior United States official said today that Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and John Kufuor of Ghana felt sandbagged by the release of the indictment on the heels of their successful effort to get Mr. Taylor to resign. But both the Ghanaian government's delays and indecision about arresting Mr. Taylor, and his subsequent return home, left both the war crimes prosecutor's office and some Republican members of the international affairs committee of the United States House of Representatives confused or angry.
In a telephone interview, Luc Copè, the chief of prosecution for the court in Sierra Leone, said: ''We don't have any power of arrest. We depend on a state to execute our orders.'' He added, ''We can serve the warrant of arrest on Liberia. But that would be asking him to arrest himself.''
The indictment itself provided, in stilted legal language, a capsule history of the allegations of crossborder alliances between Mr. Taylor and insurgents in Sierra Leone, and his reported support for a war on civilians that left upwards of 200,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands more maimed or raped or homeless in the late 1990's.
Mr. Taylor originally was a rebel warlord in his own country, and on coming to power, his accusers have charged, he helped rebel groups in neighboring countries, effectively franchising out his own civil war first to Sierra Leone and later to the Ivory Coast. In the case of Sierra Leone, one of the prizes in the conflict was access to Sierra Leone's wealth of diamond mines. ''Victims were routinely shot, hacked to death and burned to death,'' in Sierra Leone, one count of the new indictment said. Another said ''widespread sexual violence committed against civilian women and girls included brutal rapes, often by multiple rapists.''
A third count, involving the mutilations of civilians whose limbs were hacked off, charged that ''these mutilations included cutting off limbs and carving'' the initials of rebel groups on the bodies of the victims. The war crimes court in Sierra Leone, created jointly by the United Nations and Sierra Leone's government 18 months ago, has already indicted several militia leaders from the Revolutionary United Front and the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, who made common cause with Mr. Taylor's government.
The indictment unsealed today charged that Mr. Taylor had ''to obtain access to the mineral wealth of the Republic of Sierra Leone, in particular the diamond wealth of Sierra Leone, and to destabilize the state'' provided ''financial support, military training, personnel, arms, ammunition'' and other support to the R.U.F., which in turn allied itself with the A.F.R.C.
In a statement released in Freetown today, the chief prosecutor of the special court, David M. Crane, said that he had unsealed the indictment when he learned Mr. Taylor would be in Ghana for the peace talks, and thus would be susceptible to arrest. He added, ''To ensure the legitimacy of these negotiations, it is imperative that the attendees know they are dealing with an indicted war criminal.''
A member of Mr. Crane's staff, contacted by telephone in Freeport on Tuesday night, said that the news of the indictment prompted ''cheering in the streets'' of Sierra Leone's capital. In Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, The Associated Press reported that thousands of panicked civilians were running home from work to find their children, apparently fearful of renewed civil strife if Mr. Taylor's government fell.
Mr. Taylor's announcement today that he would resign was made, in the third person, to warm applause, The Associated Press reported. ''It has become apparent that some people believe that Taylor is the problem,'' he said. ''President Taylor wants to say that he intends to remove himself from the process.''
Sourc: New York Times
The indictment by the court, run jointly by the United Nations and the Sierra Leone government, was originally issued on March 7. It was made public today shortly after Mr. Taylor, bowing to pressure from the leaders of Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, announced that he would step down by the end of the year. Diplomatic officials and news reports from the region described a surreal diplomatic drama in which Mr.
Taylor was transformed from statesman to fugitive in a matter of minutes. The announcement came at the opening of a peace conference convened in Accra, Ghana, and designed to end Liberia's current civil war. Just after being applauded for his retirement announcement, Mr. Taylor left the peace conference abruptly and caught a plane home rather than risk arrest by his Ghanaian hosts. In the brief time that elapsed between the announcement of the indictment and Mr. Taylor's departure, various Ghanaian officials and West African diplomats said they did not know whether they would attempt an arrest, since Mr. Taylor's status as a head of state grants him automatic immunity from such actions, under various international treaties.
The train of events left deep frustration in at least two quarters, diplomatic officials said today. One senior United States official said today that Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and John Kufuor of Ghana felt sandbagged by the release of the indictment on the heels of their successful effort to get Mr. Taylor to resign. But both the Ghanaian government's delays and indecision about arresting Mr. Taylor, and his subsequent return home, left both the war crimes prosecutor's office and some Republican members of the international affairs committee of the United States House of Representatives confused or angry.
In a telephone interview, Luc Copè, the chief of prosecution for the court in Sierra Leone, said: ''We don't have any power of arrest. We depend on a state to execute our orders.'' He added, ''We can serve the warrant of arrest on Liberia. But that would be asking him to arrest himself.''
The indictment itself provided, in stilted legal language, a capsule history of the allegations of crossborder alliances between Mr. Taylor and insurgents in Sierra Leone, and his reported support for a war on civilians that left upwards of 200,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands more maimed or raped or homeless in the late 1990's.
Mr. Taylor originally was a rebel warlord in his own country, and on coming to power, his accusers have charged, he helped rebel groups in neighboring countries, effectively franchising out his own civil war first to Sierra Leone and later to the Ivory Coast. In the case of Sierra Leone, one of the prizes in the conflict was access to Sierra Leone's wealth of diamond mines. ''Victims were routinely shot, hacked to death and burned to death,'' in Sierra Leone, one count of the new indictment said. Another said ''widespread sexual violence committed against civilian women and girls included brutal rapes, often by multiple rapists.''
A third count, involving the mutilations of civilians whose limbs were hacked off, charged that ''these mutilations included cutting off limbs and carving'' the initials of rebel groups on the bodies of the victims. The war crimes court in Sierra Leone, created jointly by the United Nations and Sierra Leone's government 18 months ago, has already indicted several militia leaders from the Revolutionary United Front and the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, who made common cause with Mr. Taylor's government.
The indictment unsealed today charged that Mr. Taylor had ''to obtain access to the mineral wealth of the Republic of Sierra Leone, in particular the diamond wealth of Sierra Leone, and to destabilize the state'' provided ''financial support, military training, personnel, arms, ammunition'' and other support to the R.U.F., which in turn allied itself with the A.F.R.C.
In a statement released in Freetown today, the chief prosecutor of the special court, David M. Crane, said that he had unsealed the indictment when he learned Mr. Taylor would be in Ghana for the peace talks, and thus would be susceptible to arrest. He added, ''To ensure the legitimacy of these negotiations, it is imperative that the attendees know they are dealing with an indicted war criminal.''
A member of Mr. Crane's staff, contacted by telephone in Freeport on Tuesday night, said that the news of the indictment prompted ''cheering in the streets'' of Sierra Leone's capital. In Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, The Associated Press reported that thousands of panicked civilians were running home from work to find their children, apparently fearful of renewed civil strife if Mr. Taylor's government fell.
Mr. Taylor's announcement today that he would resign was made, in the third person, to warm applause, The Associated Press reported. ''It has become apparent that some people believe that Taylor is the problem,'' he said. ''President Taylor wants to say that he intends to remove himself from the process.''
Sourc: New York Times
Our country needs facts, not groundless allegations
A letter from Thabo Mbeki
In the Biblical Gospel according to St Matthew, it is said that Jesus Christ saw Simon Peter and his brother Andrew fishing in the Sea of Galilee. And He said to them: "Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men."
Perhaps taking a cue from this, some in our country have appointed themselves as "fishers of corrupt men". Our governance system is the sea in which they have chosen to exercise their craft. From everything they say, it is clear that they know it as a matter of fact that they are bound to return from their fishing expeditions with huge catches of corrupt men (and women).
In March 1999, our country's Human Rights Commission (HRC) conducted hearings on the matter of "racism in the media". Not unexpectedly, instead of dealing with this serious matter, some in our country and others abroad, made a big song and dance about it, seeking to ensure that the HRC should not proceed with the hearings.
To frighten the HRC into silence, these made the absurd and self-serving allegation that these hearings constituted a threat to the freedom of the press. Fortunately, the campaign, whose central objective was to cover up racism in our country, failed.
The hearings took place. The HRC made its recommendations. Despite the scare-mongering, the press is no less free now than it was before the hearings. Others will answer the question whether it has done anything to implement at least some of the recommendations of the HRC.
The ANC made its own submission to the hearings. One of the critical issues it raised was the role of the intensely negative, highly offensive and deeply entrenched stereotype of Africans among some in our country, which makes it inevitable that much reporting in our country would be racist. The ANC made the point that this stereotype necessarily dictated that some in our country would proceed from the position that our government was corrupt as alleged, unless it proved itself to be innocent.
Among other things, it cited the instance of an article in a weekly journal, in which the journalist concerned gratuitously accused the writer of this Letter of dictatorial tendencies. The ANC explained the circumstances surrounding the writing and publication of this article, which were relevant to the subject of the hearings.
This matter having been contested and subsequently taken to court by the journal concerned, the judge found in favour of the ANC. Needless to say, the determination made by the courts did not get the public exposure that the resort to these courts by this journal had evoked.
The false allegation of wrong doing by the ANC was what was vigorously implanted in the public mind. To the contrary, the rejection of this allegation by the courts, and therefore the independent judicial assertion of the truth about this matter, was assiduously hidden from the public.
Had this truth been communicated as openly as it should have been, it would have undermined the racist stereotype of Africans, and demonstrated the correctness of the decision of the HRC to hold its hearings. It was therefore not in the interests of some in our country, who believe in the stereotype, that this truth should be widely known.
The same stereotypical conviction about our government being corrupt, unless it proves itself innocent, has re-surfaced with regard to the defence procurement decided by our government in 2000. The fishermen (and women?) have recast their fishing nets, convinced that they will bring in a rich haul of corrupt government luminaries.
So convinced are they of the outcome of their fishing expedition that they regularly describe the defence procurement as "the arms deal scandal" or "debacle". They say "a deepening shadow of allegations is threatening to engulf the highest reaches of government".
Triumphantly, they proclaim that "the publication of details of an earlier (investigative) draft confirmed long-held suspicions by opponents of the arms procurement exercise that changes were made before publication, possibly at the instance of senior members of government".
They say "there was a crucial 'nondisclosure of facts' to a body tasked with evaluating products", and that "draft reports released in court show evidence that passages detailing possible corruption were edited from the report before it was presented to parliament".
The fishers of corrupt men happily construct doom scenarios that serve their purposes. They speculate about the possibility of a senior official being shown to be corrupt, and how this might lead to the conclusion that the whole procurement process was corrupted, resulting in the "the whole edifice of the arms procurement exercise" crumbling. The reality is that the wish is father to the thought.
But it all sounds terribly dramatic and pregnant with the potential to expose horrifying facts about massive corruption by our government, involving billions of rands To prepare the public mind, words such as "scandal" and "debacle" must be, and are used!
To add to the sense of impeding horror, "senior members of government" must be implicated, including "the highest reaches of government", which means the President. Further to whet the appetite for the expected catch that will be brought in by the fishers, the threat is made that a "shadow of allegations might engulf" these "highest reaches".
Quite how shadows rather than substance, and allegations rather than facts might engulf the President, or anybody else for that matter, is somewhat difficult to fathom. The point however is that neither substance nor facts are important to the fishers of corrupt men in terms of their project to substantiate the stereotype of which the ANC spoke, when it made its presentation at the HRC hearings on racism in the media.
What is central is that the stereotype must be sustained and entrenched. For this purpose, precisely because of this entrenched stereotype, shadows and allegations will serve as well as anything else. Carefully chosen words with no factual information to substantiate them, such as "scandal" and "debacle", also come in as useful devices, to give the shadows and allegations the appearance of substance.
In this no-holds-barred campaign, anything and anybody who stands in the way of the fishers, including and especially the truth, must give way. In the current fishing expedition, the Auditor General (AG) has been targeted as one of the possible big fish that the fishers hope to catch.
Accordingly, they accuse the AG of doctoring the report he presented to Parliament, by omitting some details contained in an earlier draft. The AG has taken strong exception to this charge of fraud. In barely disguised language, the fishers have said that they are convinced that the AG is lying. Naturally, they will not bother to supply facts to disprove what the AG said.
As part of this campaign against the AG, they charge him with having "sanitised" and "heavily edited" the final report, "possibly at the instance of senior members of government". They say nothing of the fact that the AG is required by the law to show his draft reports to any institution he may be auditing, for any comments it may wish to make. The AG is free to accept or reject any comments made by those he has audited.
This happens regularly, is required by law, and carries no imputation whatsoever of corrupt behaviour on the part of the AG. Precisely because he had absolutely nothing to hide by following this procedure, the AG attached an official letter to the draft report he gave the Cabinet sub-committee that approved the primary contracts, citing the provisions in the law requiring him to abide by this procedure.
The fishers have focused especially on the Thomson (Thales) element of the prime contract entered into by the government with the suppliers of the corvettes, the German Frigate Consortium (GFC). The government has explained this very clearly before, that it entered into a contract with the GFC to supply the required number of corvettes, meeting all the stipulated specifications.
The government has no contracts with the companies retained by the GFC to supply the various component parts of the corvettes. Similarly, it never had occasion or need to determine who the partners of the GFC should or should not be, including Thomson (Thales).
The proposition that the government influenced the choice of Thomson by the GFC as one of its sub-contractors is both a blatant falsity concocted by the fishers, and a logical absurdity. In its statement of 15 September 2000, the government announced those with whom it had entered into contracts. These are British Aerospace/SAAB, the German Frigate Consortium and Augusta. It had no primary contract with Thomson (Thales), as the supplier of the electronic combat suite of the corvettes, which matter, of the supplier of this suite, remained in the exclusive domain of the GFC.
In the Background Notes issued on 12 January, 2001, the government said: "It should be pointed out that the Procurement does not deal with subcontractors. This has to be the contractual obligation of the prime contractor as it is they who must deliver reliable equipment and undertake the performance and delivery obligations. This is standard practice in major contracts. To insist that the Government must be held to account for minor subcontracts is to misunderstand procurement. The prime contractors are major international corporations and we are confident that they would ensure the quality of the subcontractors and this is their responsibility."
But of course this does not matter to the fishers, who are intent to prove or otherwise entrench the stereotype of a corrupt African government. This is why their fond scenario visualises a determination that an official acted corruptly, leading, according to them, to the collapse of the "arms procurement exercise", even as they exclude the fact that the final recommendations to the deciding authority, the Cabinet, had to be, and were made by a Cabinet sub-committee, and not officials.
An aggrieved potential and unsuccessful sub-contractor has taken his grievance to our courts. For this reason, we will not comment on the matters he raises, which the fishers nevertheless use triumphantly and wilfully to justify their campaign. But this gentleman decided to raise, in the media, the matter of an earlier process to acquire corvettes for our Navy.
The gentleman concerned makes the false allegation that during the life of the Government of National Unity, formed in 1994, a contract for four corvettes to be built by Bazan of Spain "was cancelled after being awarded". This is not true. The preceding apartheid Cabinet had not approved this contract. The GNU Cabinet decided not to enter into this contract.
Bazan entered the later competition to supply the four corvettes, and lost to the GFC. This issue is of relevance and interest only because of the controversy that some have brought into the current defence procurement. It is an interesting coincidence that this controversy has focused so intensely on the corvettes.
In time the details of the truth will come out about how the controversy concerning the 2000 defence procurement emerged and persisted. The gentleman litigant, who has raised the matter of Bazan of Spain, may be proved to have been justified in raising this issue, even if he made false claims about a Bazan contract that never was.
This detailed truthful account would tell our country interesting things about such matters as defence procurement during the apartheid years, and the promotion of political careers and fortunes in contemporary South Africa. It would tell a story about the political uses of the racist stereotypes that are part of our daily menu of information and perception, and the formation of popular consciousness.
It would inform us about the impact or otherwise of the domestic and international apartheid networks on our democratic order, and the moral integrity of those who correctly claim that they fought for the victory of this order, and therefore seek to position themselves as its true representatives.
The sooner this fascinating story is told the better, so that we can improve our performance with regard to the achievement of the critical objective of building a truly people-centred society.
As an important part of the struggle to realise this objective, we should not, and will not abandon the offensive to defeat the insulting campaigns further to entrench a stereotype that has, for centuries, sought to portray Africans as a people that is corrupt, given to telling lies, prone to theft and self-enrichment by immoral means, a people that is otherwise contemptible in the eyes of the "civilised". We must expect that, as usual, our opponents will accuse us of "playing the race card", to stop us confronting the challenge of racism.
The fishers of corrupt men are determined to prove everything in the anti-African stereotype. They rely on their capacity to produce long shadows and innumerable allegations around the effort of our government to supply the South African National Defence Force with the means to discharge its constitutional and continental obligations. They are confident that these long shadows and allegations without number will engulf and suffocate the forces that fought for and lead our process of democratisation, reconstruction and development.
However, what our country needs is substance and not shadows, facts instead of allegations, and the eradication of racism. The struggle continues.
Source: ANC Today
In the Biblical Gospel according to St Matthew, it is said that Jesus Christ saw Simon Peter and his brother Andrew fishing in the Sea of Galilee. And He said to them: "Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men."
Perhaps taking a cue from this, some in our country have appointed themselves as "fishers of corrupt men". Our governance system is the sea in which they have chosen to exercise their craft. From everything they say, it is clear that they know it as a matter of fact that they are bound to return from their fishing expeditions with huge catches of corrupt men (and women).
In March 1999, our country's Human Rights Commission (HRC) conducted hearings on the matter of "racism in the media". Not unexpectedly, instead of dealing with this serious matter, some in our country and others abroad, made a big song and dance about it, seeking to ensure that the HRC should not proceed with the hearings.
To frighten the HRC into silence, these made the absurd and self-serving allegation that these hearings constituted a threat to the freedom of the press. Fortunately, the campaign, whose central objective was to cover up racism in our country, failed.
The hearings took place. The HRC made its recommendations. Despite the scare-mongering, the press is no less free now than it was before the hearings. Others will answer the question whether it has done anything to implement at least some of the recommendations of the HRC.
The ANC made its own submission to the hearings. One of the critical issues it raised was the role of the intensely negative, highly offensive and deeply entrenched stereotype of Africans among some in our country, which makes it inevitable that much reporting in our country would be racist. The ANC made the point that this stereotype necessarily dictated that some in our country would proceed from the position that our government was corrupt as alleged, unless it proved itself to be innocent.
Among other things, it cited the instance of an article in a weekly journal, in which the journalist concerned gratuitously accused the writer of this Letter of dictatorial tendencies. The ANC explained the circumstances surrounding the writing and publication of this article, which were relevant to the subject of the hearings.
This matter having been contested and subsequently taken to court by the journal concerned, the judge found in favour of the ANC. Needless to say, the determination made by the courts did not get the public exposure that the resort to these courts by this journal had evoked.
The false allegation of wrong doing by the ANC was what was vigorously implanted in the public mind. To the contrary, the rejection of this allegation by the courts, and therefore the independent judicial assertion of the truth about this matter, was assiduously hidden from the public.
Had this truth been communicated as openly as it should have been, it would have undermined the racist stereotype of Africans, and demonstrated the correctness of the decision of the HRC to hold its hearings. It was therefore not in the interests of some in our country, who believe in the stereotype, that this truth should be widely known.
The same stereotypical conviction about our government being corrupt, unless it proves itself innocent, has re-surfaced with regard to the defence procurement decided by our government in 2000. The fishermen (and women?) have recast their fishing nets, convinced that they will bring in a rich haul of corrupt government luminaries.
So convinced are they of the outcome of their fishing expedition that they regularly describe the defence procurement as "the arms deal scandal" or "debacle". They say "a deepening shadow of allegations is threatening to engulf the highest reaches of government".
Triumphantly, they proclaim that "the publication of details of an earlier (investigative) draft confirmed long-held suspicions by opponents of the arms procurement exercise that changes were made before publication, possibly at the instance of senior members of government".
They say "there was a crucial 'nondisclosure of facts' to a body tasked with evaluating products", and that "draft reports released in court show evidence that passages detailing possible corruption were edited from the report before it was presented to parliament".
The fishers of corrupt men happily construct doom scenarios that serve their purposes. They speculate about the possibility of a senior official being shown to be corrupt, and how this might lead to the conclusion that the whole procurement process was corrupted, resulting in the "the whole edifice of the arms procurement exercise" crumbling. The reality is that the wish is father to the thought.
But it all sounds terribly dramatic and pregnant with the potential to expose horrifying facts about massive corruption by our government, involving billions of rands To prepare the public mind, words such as "scandal" and "debacle" must be, and are used!
To add to the sense of impeding horror, "senior members of government" must be implicated, including "the highest reaches of government", which means the President. Further to whet the appetite for the expected catch that will be brought in by the fishers, the threat is made that a "shadow of allegations might engulf" these "highest reaches".
Quite how shadows rather than substance, and allegations rather than facts might engulf the President, or anybody else for that matter, is somewhat difficult to fathom. The point however is that neither substance nor facts are important to the fishers of corrupt men in terms of their project to substantiate the stereotype of which the ANC spoke, when it made its presentation at the HRC hearings on racism in the media.
What is central is that the stereotype must be sustained and entrenched. For this purpose, precisely because of this entrenched stereotype, shadows and allegations will serve as well as anything else. Carefully chosen words with no factual information to substantiate them, such as "scandal" and "debacle", also come in as useful devices, to give the shadows and allegations the appearance of substance.
In this no-holds-barred campaign, anything and anybody who stands in the way of the fishers, including and especially the truth, must give way. In the current fishing expedition, the Auditor General (AG) has been targeted as one of the possible big fish that the fishers hope to catch.
Accordingly, they accuse the AG of doctoring the report he presented to Parliament, by omitting some details contained in an earlier draft. The AG has taken strong exception to this charge of fraud. In barely disguised language, the fishers have said that they are convinced that the AG is lying. Naturally, they will not bother to supply facts to disprove what the AG said.
As part of this campaign against the AG, they charge him with having "sanitised" and "heavily edited" the final report, "possibly at the instance of senior members of government". They say nothing of the fact that the AG is required by the law to show his draft reports to any institution he may be auditing, for any comments it may wish to make. The AG is free to accept or reject any comments made by those he has audited.
This happens regularly, is required by law, and carries no imputation whatsoever of corrupt behaviour on the part of the AG. Precisely because he had absolutely nothing to hide by following this procedure, the AG attached an official letter to the draft report he gave the Cabinet sub-committee that approved the primary contracts, citing the provisions in the law requiring him to abide by this procedure.
The fishers have focused especially on the Thomson (Thales) element of the prime contract entered into by the government with the suppliers of the corvettes, the German Frigate Consortium (GFC). The government has explained this very clearly before, that it entered into a contract with the GFC to supply the required number of corvettes, meeting all the stipulated specifications.
The government has no contracts with the companies retained by the GFC to supply the various component parts of the corvettes. Similarly, it never had occasion or need to determine who the partners of the GFC should or should not be, including Thomson (Thales).
The proposition that the government influenced the choice of Thomson by the GFC as one of its sub-contractors is both a blatant falsity concocted by the fishers, and a logical absurdity. In its statement of 15 September 2000, the government announced those with whom it had entered into contracts. These are British Aerospace/SAAB, the German Frigate Consortium and Augusta. It had no primary contract with Thomson (Thales), as the supplier of the electronic combat suite of the corvettes, which matter, of the supplier of this suite, remained in the exclusive domain of the GFC.
In the Background Notes issued on 12 January, 2001, the government said: "It should be pointed out that the Procurement does not deal with subcontractors. This has to be the contractual obligation of the prime contractor as it is they who must deliver reliable equipment and undertake the performance and delivery obligations. This is standard practice in major contracts. To insist that the Government must be held to account for minor subcontracts is to misunderstand procurement. The prime contractors are major international corporations and we are confident that they would ensure the quality of the subcontractors and this is their responsibility."
But of course this does not matter to the fishers, who are intent to prove or otherwise entrench the stereotype of a corrupt African government. This is why their fond scenario visualises a determination that an official acted corruptly, leading, according to them, to the collapse of the "arms procurement exercise", even as they exclude the fact that the final recommendations to the deciding authority, the Cabinet, had to be, and were made by a Cabinet sub-committee, and not officials.
An aggrieved potential and unsuccessful sub-contractor has taken his grievance to our courts. For this reason, we will not comment on the matters he raises, which the fishers nevertheless use triumphantly and wilfully to justify their campaign. But this gentleman decided to raise, in the media, the matter of an earlier process to acquire corvettes for our Navy.
The gentleman concerned makes the false allegation that during the life of the Government of National Unity, formed in 1994, a contract for four corvettes to be built by Bazan of Spain "was cancelled after being awarded". This is not true. The preceding apartheid Cabinet had not approved this contract. The GNU Cabinet decided not to enter into this contract.
Bazan entered the later competition to supply the four corvettes, and lost to the GFC. This issue is of relevance and interest only because of the controversy that some have brought into the current defence procurement. It is an interesting coincidence that this controversy has focused so intensely on the corvettes.
In time the details of the truth will come out about how the controversy concerning the 2000 defence procurement emerged and persisted. The gentleman litigant, who has raised the matter of Bazan of Spain, may be proved to have been justified in raising this issue, even if he made false claims about a Bazan contract that never was.
This detailed truthful account would tell our country interesting things about such matters as defence procurement during the apartheid years, and the promotion of political careers and fortunes in contemporary South Africa. It would tell a story about the political uses of the racist stereotypes that are part of our daily menu of information and perception, and the formation of popular consciousness.
It would inform us about the impact or otherwise of the domestic and international apartheid networks on our democratic order, and the moral integrity of those who correctly claim that they fought for the victory of this order, and therefore seek to position themselves as its true representatives.
The sooner this fascinating story is told the better, so that we can improve our performance with regard to the achievement of the critical objective of building a truly people-centred society.
As an important part of the struggle to realise this objective, we should not, and will not abandon the offensive to defeat the insulting campaigns further to entrench a stereotype that has, for centuries, sought to portray Africans as a people that is corrupt, given to telling lies, prone to theft and self-enrichment by immoral means, a people that is otherwise contemptible in the eyes of the "civilised". We must expect that, as usual, our opponents will accuse us of "playing the race card", to stop us confronting the challenge of racism.
The fishers of corrupt men are determined to prove everything in the anti-African stereotype. They rely on their capacity to produce long shadows and innumerable allegations around the effort of our government to supply the South African National Defence Force with the means to discharge its constitutional and continental obligations. They are confident that these long shadows and allegations without number will engulf and suffocate the forces that fought for and lead our process of democratisation, reconstruction and development.
However, what our country needs is substance and not shadows, facts instead of allegations, and the eradication of racism. The struggle continues.
Source: ANC Today
Tuesday, June 3, 2003
G8 Update on HIV in Africa
Global health crises call for close international co-operation on policies and methods. We reaffirm our commitment to achieving the development goals set out in the Millennium Summit and at the World Summit on Sustainable Development.
We will work in partnership with developing countries, the private sector, multilateral organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to help achieve these health goals. Multilateral and bilateral Official Development Aid as well as private efforts from companies and NGOs should match and complement existing efforts to improve health outcomes.
We express our continued concern at the increase in the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. We welcome the increased bilateral commitments for HIV/AIDS, whilst recognising that significant additional funds are required. We commit, with recipient countries, to fulfil our shared obligations as contained in the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS for the 2001 United Nations General Assembly Special Session.
Source: G8 Summit, Evian, 3 June 2003
We will work in partnership with developing countries, the private sector, multilateral organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to help achieve these health goals. Multilateral and bilateral Official Development Aid as well as private efforts from companies and NGOs should match and complement existing efforts to improve health outcomes.
We express our continued concern at the increase in the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. We welcome the increased bilateral commitments for HIV/AIDS, whilst recognising that significant additional funds are required. We commit, with recipient countries, to fulfil our shared obligations as contained in the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS for the 2001 United Nations General Assembly Special Session.
Source: G8 Summit, Evian, 3 June 2003
Monday, May 5, 2003
Walter Sisulu dies
African National Congress veteran Walter Sisulu, born in 1912, the year the ANC was founded, has died, ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlante said on Monday. He would have turned 91 this month. Sisulu joined the ANC in 1940 and was among the group of radicals who formed the Youth League in 1943/44.The ANC's leadership had, in the late 1920s, split over whether to co-operate with the Communist Party, and the ensuing victory of the conservatives within the ANC left the party small and disorganised through the 1930s. In the 1940s the ANC revived under younger leaders who pressed for a more militant stance against colour bars in South Africa. The ANC Youth League attracted Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, and Nelson Mandela, who in turn displaced the party's moderate leadership in 1949 at what many view as the party's watershed conference. Under Sisulu, Tambo and Mandela's leadership the ANC began sponsoring non-violent protests, strikes, boycotts, and marches, in the process becoming a target of police harassment and arrest. By the end of World War II the ANC had begun strong agitation against the pass laws, and when the largely white electorate voted in the National Party in 1948, the ANC's membership grew rapidly, rising to 100 000 in 1952.
In 1944, he married Nontsikelelo Albertina, with whom he was to have five children. Mrs Sisulu was a much-loved and internationally respected activist in her own right. Her work earned her the title Mama Africa.
Sisulu was elected ANC secretary general in 1949, a post he held until 1954 when banning orders forced him to resign the position. He served on the joint planning council for the Defiance Campaign, and led one of the first batches of passive resisters when the campaign began in 1952. Campaigners refused to carry the notorious "pass book" all native South Africans had to carry by law and hundreds were arrested. Sisulu was one of the accused in the Treason Trial, which began in 1956.
Source: News 24
Thursday, May 1, 2003
Africa: Liberia: Rebel Leader Sought
Wanted for a campaign of rapes and mutilations in Sierra Leone and accused in the assassination of Felix Doh, a top rebel commander in western Ivory Coast, the warlord Sam Bockarie has found shelter in Liberia, the chief investigator for a special United Nations court said. Mr. Bockarie has been in hiding since his March 10 indictment by the Sierra Leone-based court for crimes against humanity. The investigator, Al White, called on the Liberian president, Charles Taylor, to turn him in or risk prosecution for harboring a war criminal.
Source: New York Times
Source: New York Times
Tuesday, April 8, 2003
A NATION AT WAR: SOUTH AFRICA; Iraq War Sets Bad Precedent, Mbeki Warns
President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa today issued his most stinging evaluation of the war against Iraq, saying that the United States and Britain had unevenly applied standards of democracy, and warning Africans that they could be the next victims of what he depicted as international bullying. Mr. Mbeki opened a conference on elections and democracy in Africa by challenging participants to do more than simply recommit to Western principles such as free elections, a multiparty system and independent human rights monitors. He compared the invasion of Iraq to force-feeding a person on a hunger strike, and said that real democracy was the product of evolution, not something to be imposed. ''The prospect facing the people of Iraq should serve as sufficient warning that in future we, too, might have others descend on us, guns in hand to force-feed us,'' Mr. Mbeki said. ''If the United Nations does not matter,'' he continued, why should ''the little countries of Africa'' think that ''we matter and will not be punished if we get out of line?''
Mr. Mbeki, South Africa's second black president since the end of white minority rule in 1994, has faced pressure from Britain over his country's policies in Zimbabwe. Western diplomats have accused the Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, of launching a new wave of repression against political foes.
Mr. Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe since the end of white-minority rule and his critics charge that he has undermined democracy and installed an authoritarian regime. Mr. Mbeki, architect of what government officials call a ''quiet diplomacy'' in Zimbabwe, has avoided public condemnation of Mr. Mugabe. And in his speech today, he lashed out instead at Britain. ''Great Britain does not limit the period during which a person may hold the position of prime minister, to say nothing about the hereditary position of head of state,'' he said. ''It does not have an independent electoral commission that conducts elections. It does not have an independent human rights commission.'' He offered what seemed to be a sarcastic comment about Britain, the former colonial power in both South Africa and Zimbabwe, and its pronouncements on the validity of elections in Zimbabwe. ''I have never heard of international observers verifying whether any British election was free and fair,'' Mr. Mbeki said. ''Instead, I have heard of observers visiting the United Kingdom during election time to learn about how democratic elections should be conducted.''
Source: New York Times
Mr. Mbeki, South Africa's second black president since the end of white minority rule in 1994, has faced pressure from Britain over his country's policies in Zimbabwe. Western diplomats have accused the Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, of launching a new wave of repression against political foes.
Mr. Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe since the end of white-minority rule and his critics charge that he has undermined democracy and installed an authoritarian regime. Mr. Mbeki, architect of what government officials call a ''quiet diplomacy'' in Zimbabwe, has avoided public condemnation of Mr. Mugabe. And in his speech today, he lashed out instead at Britain. ''Great Britain does not limit the period during which a person may hold the position of prime minister, to say nothing about the hereditary position of head of state,'' he said. ''It does not have an independent electoral commission that conducts elections. It does not have an independent human rights commission.'' He offered what seemed to be a sarcastic comment about Britain, the former colonial power in both South Africa and Zimbabwe, and its pronouncements on the validity of elections in Zimbabwe. ''I have never heard of international observers verifying whether any British election was free and fair,'' Mr. Mbeki said. ''Instead, I have heard of observers visiting the United Kingdom during election time to learn about how democratic elections should be conducted.''
Source: New York Times
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Home affairs' misspent millions
Home Affairs Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi on Tuesday lifted the lid for the first time on allegations of irregular expenditure totalling millions of rands, in a written reply to the portfolio committee on home affairs. Buthelezi, who could not attend the meeting because of a prior engagement, was responding to three questions from the committee. One of them related to a container project to help give rural communities access to the activities of the department. "The container project was never discussed with me by my former director-general, neither was it forwarded as a written submission seeking approval. When it became public... I enquired about the situation and found a host of problems, including irregular actions," wrote Buthelezi.
Detailing his findings in point form, Buthelezi said the problems started with the termination of a "competent" acting chief financial officer. "The person appointed from June 1, 2002 was inexperienced to perform such an important function. The serious nature of the situation became apparent when, on June 3, 2002, she was instructed to place an order for an amount of R12 435 507 for the conversion of 148 container offices. This amounted to more than R85 000 an office without water, power or washroom facilities."
Buthelezi said no prescripts were followed and state tender board instructions were ignored. "Within three days of the order having been placed, a claim was already received for R1 865 326 for payment. There was no contract, no departmental standing committee approval and no treasury approval. Notwithstanding this, the then-acting chief financial officer instructed to pay, which was fortunately reversed before payment. Funds for the containers had at this stage not even been required, and how payment was supposed to be effected is unknown." Buthelezi said the department of public works had also advised them that, among the various options available to ensure service delivery in rural areas, the use of containers was the least desirable.
Home affairs acting director-general Ivan Lambinon told Sapa on Tuesday that he did not know of "this particular document. But there are concerns that things must be done properly and by the rules of the game. As public servants, things must be done honestly," he said. Lambinon identified the then-acting chief financial officer as a Mrs M Shemmans, who was now employed as a director of provision administration in the department. Earlier this month, it was Lambinon who told MPs that he had uncovered a host of problems involving millions of rands in unauthorised expenditure and alleged graft in his department.
The former director-general was Billy Masetlha - now in the presidency - and who had a stormy relationship with Buthelezi. Last year, Buthelezi told the committee he would be forced to table a damage-control bill to protect the state from being sued because the extension, against his wishes, of Masetlha's contract was invalid. Auditor-general Shauket Fakie subsequently agreed that Masetlha's contract was invalid. He also noted that expenditure incurred by Masetlha while his appointment "was not in accordance with... legislative requirements" amounted to about R839m for the period June 21, 2001 to March 31, 2002. A further R332m was spent in the period from April 1, 2002 to June 20, 2002.
Lambinon has been acting director-general since June last year, because of a deadlock between Buthelezi and his cabinet colleagues over who should succeed Masetlha. On Tuesday, committee chairman Patrick Chauke said Buthelezi's absence from the meeting should "not be politicised. Our role in the committee is to play an oversight role over ministers... but we must set up a meeting urgently to discuss matters which are of critical importance and which the minister must brief us on".
Source: Mail & Guardian
Detailing his findings in point form, Buthelezi said the problems started with the termination of a "competent" acting chief financial officer. "The person appointed from June 1, 2002 was inexperienced to perform such an important function. The serious nature of the situation became apparent when, on June 3, 2002, she was instructed to place an order for an amount of R12 435 507 for the conversion of 148 container offices. This amounted to more than R85 000 an office without water, power or washroom facilities."
Buthelezi said no prescripts were followed and state tender board instructions were ignored. "Within three days of the order having been placed, a claim was already received for R1 865 326 for payment. There was no contract, no departmental standing committee approval and no treasury approval. Notwithstanding this, the then-acting chief financial officer instructed to pay, which was fortunately reversed before payment. Funds for the containers had at this stage not even been required, and how payment was supposed to be effected is unknown." Buthelezi said the department of public works had also advised them that, among the various options available to ensure service delivery in rural areas, the use of containers was the least desirable.
Home affairs acting director-general Ivan Lambinon told Sapa on Tuesday that he did not know of "this particular document. But there are concerns that things must be done properly and by the rules of the game. As public servants, things must be done honestly," he said. Lambinon identified the then-acting chief financial officer as a Mrs M Shemmans, who was now employed as a director of provision administration in the department. Earlier this month, it was Lambinon who told MPs that he had uncovered a host of problems involving millions of rands in unauthorised expenditure and alleged graft in his department.
The former director-general was Billy Masetlha - now in the presidency - and who had a stormy relationship with Buthelezi. Last year, Buthelezi told the committee he would be forced to table a damage-control bill to protect the state from being sued because the extension, against his wishes, of Masetlha's contract was invalid. Auditor-general Shauket Fakie subsequently agreed that Masetlha's contract was invalid. He also noted that expenditure incurred by Masetlha while his appointment "was not in accordance with... legislative requirements" amounted to about R839m for the period June 21, 2001 to March 31, 2002. A further R332m was spent in the period from April 1, 2002 to June 20, 2002.
Lambinon has been acting director-general since June last year, because of a deadlock between Buthelezi and his cabinet colleagues over who should succeed Masetlha. On Tuesday, committee chairman Patrick Chauke said Buthelezi's absence from the meeting should "not be politicised. Our role in the committee is to play an oversight role over ministers... but we must set up a meeting urgently to discuss matters which are of critical importance and which the minister must brief us on".
Source: Mail & Guardian
Wednesday, March 19, 2003
Czech student kills himself in protest against war and corruption
The death by self-immolation of a 19-year-old student in Prague in protest against conditions in the Czech Republic has shaken that country. On March 6, at 7:30 in the morning, Zdenek Adamec, a straight-A student, poured gasoline on himself and set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square in front of horrified commuters and other onlookers. A policeman attempted to put out the flames, but Adamec died after attempts to resuscitate him failed.
Adamec, who lived with his parents in Humpolec, 60 miles from Prague, committed his desperate act only a short distance from the spot where philosophy student Jan Palach set himself ablaze in January 1969 to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops.
Various factors contributed to Adamec’s suicide. Police had been investigating the youth in connection with his hosting a web site for a group of “darkers”—computer hackers who used computer and electrical engineering skills to cut the electrical power to whole neighborhoods. Adamec asserted that he had simply done a favor for a friend. According to his father, the police had been threatening him with two years in prison to extract information: “They had constantly exerted pressure on him so that he gave the information, but he was of a timid and vulnerable nature. It is awful that the police behaved so selfishly.”
The youth was apparently a loner, religious, somewhat eccentric, most content working at his computer. His mother said, “He thought they would put him in prison and he would have no books, no school, no Internet and no life.”
In a note Adamec left behind, he described himself as “another victim of the democratic system, where it is not people who decide, but power and money.” He criticized the conditions in Czech schools, asserting, “Drugs, violence, money and power—these are the watchwords of our civilization.”
Adamec posted another letter on the Internet a few hours before he made the trip to Prague and committed suicide. Confused as parts of it may be, Adamec’s note reflects the response of the most sensitive and intelligent young people to the situation produced since the downfall of Stalinism in 1989. The student directly identified himself with Palach, who termed himself “Torch number one,” by heading his note, “Action Torch 2003.”
He wrote: “We didn’t get any better even after the Velvet Revolution [in November 1989].... The so-called Democracy we gained is not a Democracy. It’s about the rule of officials, money and treading on people.” He went on. “The whole world is corrupted by money and is spoilt, depraved.
“It’s not too late for salvation, but if we continue like this we will soon suffocate in the filthy air or in war. You may have read it in newspapers or have seen in on TV. Every weekend there is shooting, even at schools. And who is the cause of all this?”
Adamec condemned war, and the US war plans in Iraq in particular: “And wars? Never-ending nuclear wars tests, we are all the time inventing new measures to kill each other. People should unite, not fight against each other.... Why do you think that Americans attack Iraq and look for another Osama? It’s just a population manipulated by the media and by the government. Iraq has the oil and Americans want it too, that’s the reason. Korea has nuclear weapons—it doesn’t excite them as much.”
Adamec returned a number of times to the degraded state of American society and its influence in the world. “Civilization leads to self-destruction. Have you ever seen the dumping grounds in the USA? Never-ending mountains of rubbish. And we all do the same every day—we come home and go immediately to the TV.”
He spoke about international violence and violence in everyday life: “And look at relationships among people? Look around you. Never-ending violence, almost every week a murder, in all the bigger cities there are homeless people. Mostly it’s not their fault. Addicts wandering on the streets, bribes and corruption everywhere, and what encourages it? The way we let our children grow up. We put them before the TV and that’s it. It’s easy. Already 10-year-old children look at violent movies.... And if you by chance have some problem, everyone turns his back. People like to see others suffer. It’s easy to hurt someone but very difficult to help. It takes a lot of work, but we should try.”
Jaroslava Moserova, who treated Jan Palach as a doctor in 1969 and is now a senator, told the press, “The situation in this country is not the same as it was then. But I have to say there is a great deal of despair arising among young people.”
Some commentators noted the coincidence of Adamec’s self-immolation with the inauguration of right-wing Vaclav Klaus as president. Joseph Broz, a freelance writer, suggested that the election of Klaus February 28 might have influenced Adamec. “This tragedy is a direct impact of the symbol in the Castle [referring to the seat of the presidency].”
Klaus is a reactionary mediocrity elected by the Czech parliament in its third attempt. Former dissident Vaclav Havel stepped down February 2 after 13 years in office. Klaus served as finance minister after the collapse of Stalinism and is closely identified with the introduction of free-market policies. He became prime minister after Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.
In last year’s parliamentary election, Klaus’s Civic Democratic Party received only 24.5 percent of the vote, its worst showing ever. The unreconstructed Communist Party obtained 18.5 percent of the vote, in an election marked by a high protest vote and a low overall turnout (58 percent of eligible voters).
While a small layer has enriched itself, economic conditions for wide layers of the Czech population are worsening. The unemployment rate in one of the most prosperous former Stalinist-ruled countries is 10 percent and rising, and in industrial areas in northern Moravia and northern Bohemia it is 25 to 30 percent.
The real income of working class families has dropped by 13 percent since 1989, and by 1997 the value of basic social benefits as a share of GDP had fallen by 44 percent. The purchasing power of retirees on pensions is 10 percent lower than before the “Velvet Revolution.” Social tensions are increasing, with racism against the Roma encouraged by right-wing, nationalist elements. The future for young people is bleak.
Nor is the despondency felt by Adamec unique to the Czech Republic. In his condemnation of corruption, the power of money in all aspects of life and the cynicism of politicians and the media, in his disgust with American dominance, he no doubt reflects the feelings of large numbers of youth all over the world.
That he felt this despair and saw no way out except through suicide is not primarily his fault. It is largely a measure of the prevailing ideological filthiness in eastern and central Europe, where the rule of the “free market” has been economically and morally disastrous for the vast majority. Nonetheless, Adamec’s tragic act is one that must not be emulated by others.
Without minimizing the depth of the Czech youth’s feelings or drawing fatuous lessons from his death, it is a reality that the global wave of protest and revulsion against the US war in Iraq opens up a different prospect for young people. Trotsky once noted that “peoples never resort to suicide.” He continued: “When their burdens are intolerable, they seek a way out through revolution.”
Source: World Socialist Web
Adamec, who lived with his parents in Humpolec, 60 miles from Prague, committed his desperate act only a short distance from the spot where philosophy student Jan Palach set himself ablaze in January 1969 to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops.
Various factors contributed to Adamec’s suicide. Police had been investigating the youth in connection with his hosting a web site for a group of “darkers”—computer hackers who used computer and electrical engineering skills to cut the electrical power to whole neighborhoods. Adamec asserted that he had simply done a favor for a friend. According to his father, the police had been threatening him with two years in prison to extract information: “They had constantly exerted pressure on him so that he gave the information, but he was of a timid and vulnerable nature. It is awful that the police behaved so selfishly.”
The youth was apparently a loner, religious, somewhat eccentric, most content working at his computer. His mother said, “He thought they would put him in prison and he would have no books, no school, no Internet and no life.”
In a note Adamec left behind, he described himself as “another victim of the democratic system, where it is not people who decide, but power and money.” He criticized the conditions in Czech schools, asserting, “Drugs, violence, money and power—these are the watchwords of our civilization.”
Adamec posted another letter on the Internet a few hours before he made the trip to Prague and committed suicide. Confused as parts of it may be, Adamec’s note reflects the response of the most sensitive and intelligent young people to the situation produced since the downfall of Stalinism in 1989. The student directly identified himself with Palach, who termed himself “Torch number one,” by heading his note, “Action Torch 2003.”
He wrote: “We didn’t get any better even after the Velvet Revolution [in November 1989].... The so-called Democracy we gained is not a Democracy. It’s about the rule of officials, money and treading on people.” He went on. “The whole world is corrupted by money and is spoilt, depraved.
“It’s not too late for salvation, but if we continue like this we will soon suffocate in the filthy air or in war. You may have read it in newspapers or have seen in on TV. Every weekend there is shooting, even at schools. And who is the cause of all this?”
Adamec condemned war, and the US war plans in Iraq in particular: “And wars? Never-ending nuclear wars tests, we are all the time inventing new measures to kill each other. People should unite, not fight against each other.... Why do you think that Americans attack Iraq and look for another Osama? It’s just a population manipulated by the media and by the government. Iraq has the oil and Americans want it too, that’s the reason. Korea has nuclear weapons—it doesn’t excite them as much.”
Adamec returned a number of times to the degraded state of American society and its influence in the world. “Civilization leads to self-destruction. Have you ever seen the dumping grounds in the USA? Never-ending mountains of rubbish. And we all do the same every day—we come home and go immediately to the TV.”
He spoke about international violence and violence in everyday life: “And look at relationships among people? Look around you. Never-ending violence, almost every week a murder, in all the bigger cities there are homeless people. Mostly it’s not their fault. Addicts wandering on the streets, bribes and corruption everywhere, and what encourages it? The way we let our children grow up. We put them before the TV and that’s it. It’s easy. Already 10-year-old children look at violent movies.... And if you by chance have some problem, everyone turns his back. People like to see others suffer. It’s easy to hurt someone but very difficult to help. It takes a lot of work, but we should try.”
Jaroslava Moserova, who treated Jan Palach as a doctor in 1969 and is now a senator, told the press, “The situation in this country is not the same as it was then. But I have to say there is a great deal of despair arising among young people.”
Some commentators noted the coincidence of Adamec’s self-immolation with the inauguration of right-wing Vaclav Klaus as president. Joseph Broz, a freelance writer, suggested that the election of Klaus February 28 might have influenced Adamec. “This tragedy is a direct impact of the symbol in the Castle [referring to the seat of the presidency].”
Klaus is a reactionary mediocrity elected by the Czech parliament in its third attempt. Former dissident Vaclav Havel stepped down February 2 after 13 years in office. Klaus served as finance minister after the collapse of Stalinism and is closely identified with the introduction of free-market policies. He became prime minister after Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.
In last year’s parliamentary election, Klaus’s Civic Democratic Party received only 24.5 percent of the vote, its worst showing ever. The unreconstructed Communist Party obtained 18.5 percent of the vote, in an election marked by a high protest vote and a low overall turnout (58 percent of eligible voters).
While a small layer has enriched itself, economic conditions for wide layers of the Czech population are worsening. The unemployment rate in one of the most prosperous former Stalinist-ruled countries is 10 percent and rising, and in industrial areas in northern Moravia and northern Bohemia it is 25 to 30 percent.
The real income of working class families has dropped by 13 percent since 1989, and by 1997 the value of basic social benefits as a share of GDP had fallen by 44 percent. The purchasing power of retirees on pensions is 10 percent lower than before the “Velvet Revolution.” Social tensions are increasing, with racism against the Roma encouraged by right-wing, nationalist elements. The future for young people is bleak.
Nor is the despondency felt by Adamec unique to the Czech Republic. In his condemnation of corruption, the power of money in all aspects of life and the cynicism of politicians and the media, in his disgust with American dominance, he no doubt reflects the feelings of large numbers of youth all over the world.
That he felt this despair and saw no way out except through suicide is not primarily his fault. It is largely a measure of the prevailing ideological filthiness in eastern and central Europe, where the rule of the “free market” has been economically and morally disastrous for the vast majority. Nonetheless, Adamec’s tragic act is one that must not be emulated by others.
Without minimizing the depth of the Czech youth’s feelings or drawing fatuous lessons from his death, it is a reality that the global wave of protest and revulsion against the US war in Iraq opens up a different prospect for young people. Trotsky once noted that “peoples never resort to suicide.” He continued: “When their burdens are intolerable, they seek a way out through revolution.”
Source: World Socialist Web
Tuesday, March 18, 2003
Africa: Liberia: Inquiry Into Aid Workers' Killings
With the United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, demanding an inquiry into the recent killings of three aid workers in eastern Liberia, President Charles Taylor yesterday ordered an official investigation. The government has accused rebels of killing the aid workers, from the American group Adventist Relief and Development Agency. The rebels have denied the charge. The killings have effectively driven all international aid workers from the region, which has been roiled by fresh fighting and an influx of Liberian refugees fleeing the war in neighboring Ivory Coast.
Source: New York Times
Source: New York Times
Friday, March 14, 2003
Is Durban the drug capital of the country?
With an estimated turnover of more than R1,4-billion, Durban's notorious Point area has the dubious distinction of having a drug industry worth half the agricultural production of the entire province - and it is controlled mainly by Nigerians. According to a report by the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), South Africa has become the cocaine trafficking capital of Africa as West African criminal organisations have moved to take advantage of the country's borders and ports.
The United States Drug Enforcement Agency reported that Nigerian syndicates controlled about 80 percent of the illicit cocaine trade in South Africa and reports by the British police warn that Durban could become another Bogota, with a drug war over turf within the next five years.A 1999 study by the University of Natal's Indicator Project found that between 45 000 and 100 000 Nigerians were living in South Africa - most illegally.Superintendent Willie Louw, the head of Operation West, a joint project targeting West African syndicates, explained that the organisations operated like the Sicilian Mafia, with management structures and designated areas of operation. "They have a top structure with bosses in control and only trade in specific areas and do not move into each others' territories," Louw said.
There were also grey areas where anyone could operate, but the territories were closely guarded and several dealers had been killed by competitors. Louw also confirmed that the Nigerians had taken control of the drug trade in Durban, notably in the Point area, and had "smothered" other syndicates, which now buy from them. The Nigerians also control the sex trade in the city, acting as pimps and supplying prostitutes and their clients with drugs, mainly crack cocaine.Because of the intricate network of the syndicates, Nigerians operating legitimate businesses are often targeted by their countrymen and forced to pay protection money. In a recent incident, Nigerian national Titus Enekew was kidnapped by other Nigerians and a ransom of R100 000 was demanded.
But Enekew was saved by the police. One Nigerian was shot dead and several others were arrested in connection with the kidnapping. Although the Nigerians are also involved in other types of scams their main business appears to be drugs. The drug trade is a big business, with prices varying from R50 for a gram of crack to R450 for a shot of heroin. Police intelligence found that prostitutes and their clients spent between R1 000 and R8 000 a day, with around 200 prostitutes operating in the Point area. At least 34 buildings have been linked to drug peddling and police estimate that 10 dealers operate in each one.
The peddling of drugs at certain night-clubs in the Point district has an estimated turnover of up to R30 000 a night. In an effort to curb the drug trade, a joint metro police and national police task team has been established.
Source: Iol
The United States Drug Enforcement Agency reported that Nigerian syndicates controlled about 80 percent of the illicit cocaine trade in South Africa and reports by the British police warn that Durban could become another Bogota, with a drug war over turf within the next five years.A 1999 study by the University of Natal's Indicator Project found that between 45 000 and 100 000 Nigerians were living in South Africa - most illegally.Superintendent Willie Louw, the head of Operation West, a joint project targeting West African syndicates, explained that the organisations operated like the Sicilian Mafia, with management structures and designated areas of operation. "They have a top structure with bosses in control and only trade in specific areas and do not move into each others' territories," Louw said.
There were also grey areas where anyone could operate, but the territories were closely guarded and several dealers had been killed by competitors. Louw also confirmed that the Nigerians had taken control of the drug trade in Durban, notably in the Point area, and had "smothered" other syndicates, which now buy from them. The Nigerians also control the sex trade in the city, acting as pimps and supplying prostitutes and their clients with drugs, mainly crack cocaine.Because of the intricate network of the syndicates, Nigerians operating legitimate businesses are often targeted by their countrymen and forced to pay protection money. In a recent incident, Nigerian national Titus Enekew was kidnapped by other Nigerians and a ransom of R100 000 was demanded.
But Enekew was saved by the police. One Nigerian was shot dead and several others were arrested in connection with the kidnapping. Although the Nigerians are also involved in other types of scams their main business appears to be drugs. The drug trade is a big business, with prices varying from R50 for a gram of crack to R450 for a shot of heroin. Police intelligence found that prostitutes and their clients spent between R1 000 and R8 000 a day, with around 200 prostitutes operating in the Point area. At least 34 buildings have been linked to drug peddling and police estimate that 10 dealers operate in each one.
The peddling of drugs at certain night-clubs in the Point district has an estimated turnover of up to R30 000 a night. In an effort to curb the drug trade, a joint metro police and national police task team has been established.
Source: Iol
Thursday, March 13, 2003
Only Seven Arrest Warrants to date
Despite press reports to the contrary, the fact is that the Special Court has currently only issued arrest warrants for the following persons:
Foday Saybana Sankoh
Issa Hassan Sesay
Alex Tamba Brima
Morris Kallon
Sam Hinga Norman
Johnny Paul Koroma
Sam Bockarie
Source: Special Court for Sierra Leone
Foday Saybana Sankoh
Issa Hassan Sesay
Alex Tamba Brima
Morris Kallon
Sam Hinga Norman
Johnny Paul Koroma
Sam Bockarie
Source: Special Court for Sierra Leone
Monday, March 3, 2003
Franco-African summit: the scramble for Africa intensifies
On February 19-21, French President Jacques Chirac hosted a Paris summit of African heads of state, entitled “Africa and France, Together in a New Partnership.” Extending an invitation to many countries traditionally considered outside France’s sphere of influence, Chirac invited representatives from every African country except Somalia. Only one head of state, Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivory Coast, who has run afoul of a French intervention force in his country, refused to come or send a high-level delegation.
The global Franco-American rivalry dominated the summit to an unusual degree. Departing from normal procedures, the conference adopted a declaration on the situation in Iraq. Largely echoing the French government’s position, it called for extended United Nations weapons inspections and stressed the importance of the UN in any resolution of the Iraq crisis. The French press praised the declaration as strengthening France’s stance, noting that it was adopted unanimously.
The vote was considered especially important since three African states—Cameroon, Angola and Guinea—are nonpermanent members of the UN Security Council and will vote on upcoming UN resolutions.
Recriminations broke out over the declaration immediately after the conference ended. Rwandan President Paul Kagame, aligned with the US, insisted that he had had no part in discussing it and that it had been “imposed” by the French. On French television, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade claimed that it had been “voted upon”—leaving open the possibility that the French government had confronted the African leaders with a take-it-or-leave-it Iraq declaration.
In a subtle attack on the US, Chirac promised he would propose cutting subsidies of First World agricultural exports to African countries at upcoming trade summits. This issue is quite popular with African heads of state since subsidized First World imports often ruin African farmers. Raising it gave French officials and the French press the opportunity to criticize the US government’s massive 2002 farm subsidy bill, which includes provisions subsidizing US exports to Third World countries. The question of farm subsidies is a longstanding bone of contention between the US and the European Union (EU) at trade talks.
Chirac also promised he would defend the preferential status France has granted to African agricultural exports, despite opposition from the US and the Cairns Group of agricultural exporters.
Chirac’s agricultural proposals also served to shield him from attacks by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had previously criticized him for claiming to care about Africa while preserving the European Common Agricultural Policy subsidies, which effectively shut African farmers out of the European market.
In line with its vicious anti-French attacks over the Iraq crisis, the British press reacted hysterically to the summit. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun tabloid distributed a version of its paper in Paris with a picture of Chirac’s face superimposed on a worm’s body, labeled “Chirac is a worm.”
Most of the British media outlets focused on Chirac’s invitation of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe as exemplifying his willingness to deal with undemocratic governments. They pointed out that Mugabe is still technically under a EU ban prohibiting him from visiting any EU countries. French officials retorted that several African leaders had threatened to boycott the conference if Mugabe was not invited.
While attacking the summit along similar lines, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the British Commonwealth is under increasing pressure from two African members, South Africa and Nigeria, to rescind its condemnation of Mugabe. This article was the exception to the rule, however, as the US media largely blacked out details of the conference.
US and British hostility to Chirac’s meetings with African rulers has nothing to do with concerns over democratic rights. Washington and London likewise prop up authoritarian governments and arm proxies in civil wars across Africa. Rather, they are concerned that France may seek to defend its imperialist interests and relations with former colonies more aggressively than before. The Financial Times of London complained that Chirac had “kidnapped European policy” on Africa.
The new conservative French government represents a break with the previous Socialist government on Africa policy. The French newspaper Le Figaro noted that it is closer to sections of the ruling elite that favor a greater military presence in Africa.
Thus far, the reassertion of French interests in Africa has not gone smoothly. France’s military intervention in the Ivory Coast, where it is keeping a force of 3,000 soldiers, occupied much of Chirac’s time during the conference. In the face of escalating violations of the recent Marcoussis peace accords, by both rebel forces and those of President Laurent Gbagbo, Chirac is trying to form a government of national unity, including both rebel and pro-presidential elements, centered on Prime Minister Seydou Diarra.
Diarra, scornfully labeled “the prime minister of France” in the Ivory Coast, traveled to Paris to meet Chirac during the summit. Chirac issued veiled threats of war crimes prosecutions against Gbagbo, claiming that “death squads” were operating in the streets of the port city, Abidjan—claims that Gbagbo immediately contested.
Even if France somehow manages to broker a peace deal to its advantage in the Ivory Coast, it faces a larger problem: attempts to assert its interests in Africa risk provoking a serious confrontation with the US. Most of the African problems discussed at the summit either involve or are related to fighting between French and US proxies.
The summit discussed the problem of transfer of power in Burundi from a Tutsi to a Hutu head of state. In the region, the US has typically backed the Tutsi ethnic group and France the Hutu ethnic group. This was the case, for example, during the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. It is unclear if the Tutsi-controlled army in Burundi will accept the transfer.
It also discussed the problems in Congo-Kinsasha (Democratic Republic of the Congo), where Tutsi rebels from Uganda and Burundi are fighting government forces for control of gold and diamond mines in the eastern part of the country. France has organized support for the government from neighboring countries—Angola and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe—both of which have faced Anglo-American opposition.
The problem of Chad’s involvement in the civil war in the Central African Republic also involves a Franco-American rivalry. The Central African Republic’s president, Félix-Ange Patassé, has called in Ugandan Tutsi forces to put down a revolt partially sponsored by Chad, which hosts a garrison of 1,000 French troops and is considered a French ally.
The poisoning of international relations arising from the US war drive against Iraq is intensifying the scramble for Africa, which, in turn, is further exacerbating the rivalries between the major capitalist powers. Despite verbal claims of concern for peace, military interventions by France and others seeking to secure natural resources or strategic positions will give rise to more of the civil warfare, social dislocation, indebtedness and poverty that are already devastating Africa. They also bring mankind closer to the point when the increasing tensions between the imperialist powers themselves assume military forms.
Source: World Socialist Web Site
The global Franco-American rivalry dominated the summit to an unusual degree. Departing from normal procedures, the conference adopted a declaration on the situation in Iraq. Largely echoing the French government’s position, it called for extended United Nations weapons inspections and stressed the importance of the UN in any resolution of the Iraq crisis. The French press praised the declaration as strengthening France’s stance, noting that it was adopted unanimously.
The vote was considered especially important since three African states—Cameroon, Angola and Guinea—are nonpermanent members of the UN Security Council and will vote on upcoming UN resolutions.
Recriminations broke out over the declaration immediately after the conference ended. Rwandan President Paul Kagame, aligned with the US, insisted that he had had no part in discussing it and that it had been “imposed” by the French. On French television, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade claimed that it had been “voted upon”—leaving open the possibility that the French government had confronted the African leaders with a take-it-or-leave-it Iraq declaration.
In a subtle attack on the US, Chirac promised he would propose cutting subsidies of First World agricultural exports to African countries at upcoming trade summits. This issue is quite popular with African heads of state since subsidized First World imports often ruin African farmers. Raising it gave French officials and the French press the opportunity to criticize the US government’s massive 2002 farm subsidy bill, which includes provisions subsidizing US exports to Third World countries. The question of farm subsidies is a longstanding bone of contention between the US and the European Union (EU) at trade talks.
Chirac also promised he would defend the preferential status France has granted to African agricultural exports, despite opposition from the US and the Cairns Group of agricultural exporters.
Chirac’s agricultural proposals also served to shield him from attacks by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had previously criticized him for claiming to care about Africa while preserving the European Common Agricultural Policy subsidies, which effectively shut African farmers out of the European market.
In line with its vicious anti-French attacks over the Iraq crisis, the British press reacted hysterically to the summit. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun tabloid distributed a version of its paper in Paris with a picture of Chirac’s face superimposed on a worm’s body, labeled “Chirac is a worm.”
Most of the British media outlets focused on Chirac’s invitation of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe as exemplifying his willingness to deal with undemocratic governments. They pointed out that Mugabe is still technically under a EU ban prohibiting him from visiting any EU countries. French officials retorted that several African leaders had threatened to boycott the conference if Mugabe was not invited.
While attacking the summit along similar lines, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the British Commonwealth is under increasing pressure from two African members, South Africa and Nigeria, to rescind its condemnation of Mugabe. This article was the exception to the rule, however, as the US media largely blacked out details of the conference.
US and British hostility to Chirac’s meetings with African rulers has nothing to do with concerns over democratic rights. Washington and London likewise prop up authoritarian governments and arm proxies in civil wars across Africa. Rather, they are concerned that France may seek to defend its imperialist interests and relations with former colonies more aggressively than before. The Financial Times of London complained that Chirac had “kidnapped European policy” on Africa.
The new conservative French government represents a break with the previous Socialist government on Africa policy. The French newspaper Le Figaro noted that it is closer to sections of the ruling elite that favor a greater military presence in Africa.
Thus far, the reassertion of French interests in Africa has not gone smoothly. France’s military intervention in the Ivory Coast, where it is keeping a force of 3,000 soldiers, occupied much of Chirac’s time during the conference. In the face of escalating violations of the recent Marcoussis peace accords, by both rebel forces and those of President Laurent Gbagbo, Chirac is trying to form a government of national unity, including both rebel and pro-presidential elements, centered on Prime Minister Seydou Diarra.
Diarra, scornfully labeled “the prime minister of France” in the Ivory Coast, traveled to Paris to meet Chirac during the summit. Chirac issued veiled threats of war crimes prosecutions against Gbagbo, claiming that “death squads” were operating in the streets of the port city, Abidjan—claims that Gbagbo immediately contested.
Even if France somehow manages to broker a peace deal to its advantage in the Ivory Coast, it faces a larger problem: attempts to assert its interests in Africa risk provoking a serious confrontation with the US. Most of the African problems discussed at the summit either involve or are related to fighting between French and US proxies.
The summit discussed the problem of transfer of power in Burundi from a Tutsi to a Hutu head of state. In the region, the US has typically backed the Tutsi ethnic group and France the Hutu ethnic group. This was the case, for example, during the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. It is unclear if the Tutsi-controlled army in Burundi will accept the transfer.
It also discussed the problems in Congo-Kinsasha (Democratic Republic of the Congo), where Tutsi rebels from Uganda and Burundi are fighting government forces for control of gold and diamond mines in the eastern part of the country. France has organized support for the government from neighboring countries—Angola and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe—both of which have faced Anglo-American opposition.
The problem of Chad’s involvement in the civil war in the Central African Republic also involves a Franco-American rivalry. The Central African Republic’s president, Félix-Ange Patassé, has called in Ugandan Tutsi forces to put down a revolt partially sponsored by Chad, which hosts a garrison of 1,000 French troops and is considered a French ally.
The poisoning of international relations arising from the US war drive against Iraq is intensifying the scramble for Africa, which, in turn, is further exacerbating the rivalries between the major capitalist powers. Despite verbal claims of concern for peace, military interventions by France and others seeking to secure natural resources or strategic positions will give rise to more of the civil warfare, social dislocation, indebtedness and poverty that are already devastating Africa. They also bring mankind closer to the point when the increasing tensions between the imperialist powers themselves assume military forms.
Source: World Socialist Web Site
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Tens of thousands march in South Africa against Iraq war
On Saturday, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets across South Africa to voice their opposition to the US drive for war against Iraq. Demonstrations were held in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and Bloemfontein.
The protests were organised by the South African Antiwar Coalition, comprising more than 50 organisations. Amongst the groups involved in the protests were the African National Congress, the Azanian People’s Organisation, the Pan Africanist Congress, the United Democratic Movement, the South African Communist Party, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the South African National Civics Organisation, the South African Council of Churches, Lawyers for Human Rights and the Muslim Judicial Council. Not in My Name, an organisation of South African Jews opposed to the Zionist occupation of Palestine, also participated in the demonstrations.
Source: World Wide Web
The protests were organised by the South African Antiwar Coalition, comprising more than 50 organisations. Amongst the groups involved in the protests were the African National Congress, the Azanian People’s Organisation, the Pan Africanist Congress, the United Democratic Movement, the South African Communist Party, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the South African National Civics Organisation, the South African Council of Churches, Lawyers for Human Rights and the Muslim Judicial Council. Not in My Name, an organisation of South African Jews opposed to the Zionist occupation of Palestine, also participated in the demonstrations.
Source: World Wide Web
Monday, February 17, 2003
State to probe reports of SA mercenaries in Africa
Government is investigating the involvement of South African mercenaries in military conflicts in other African countries, Justice and Constitutional Development Minister Penuell Maduna said on Monday. Replying to questions during a special briefing for the media and diplomats, Maduna said government was concerned by the alleged involvement of South Africans and companies in Africa. "Certain cases" had been reported, and checks were being made to determine whether the people involved were violating South African law, he said.
The matter went beyond the issue of conflict diamonds, and if the allegations were found to be true, people involved would be summarily charged and brought to court, Maduna said. He declined to give further details because of intelligence concerns. In terms of the Foreign Military Assistance Act, it is illegal for South Africans or people with permanent residence in South Africa to assist parties to conflicts in other countries. According to recent media reports, former senior South African Defence Force members are helping, among others, Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo to stay in power.
The reports allege former South African military commanders have been recruited locally, and are assisting with training in the Ivory Coast. They say there are between 10 and 20 South Africans acting as "technical advisers", and "not gunslingers", in that country
The matter went beyond the issue of conflict diamonds, and if the allegations were found to be true, people involved would be summarily charged and brought to court, Maduna said. He declined to give further details because of intelligence concerns. In terms of the Foreign Military Assistance Act, it is illegal for South Africans or people with permanent residence in South Africa to assist parties to conflicts in other countries. According to recent media reports, former senior South African Defence Force members are helping, among others, Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo to stay in power.
The reports allege former South African military commanders have been recruited locally, and are assisting with training in the Ivory Coast. They say there are between 10 and 20 South Africans acting as "technical advisers", and "not gunslingers", in that country
Thursday, February 13, 2003
Yengeni found guilty of fraud
Former African National Congress chief whip Tony Yengeni was on Thursday found guilty of fraud by a Pretoria magistrate in terms of a plea agreement with the state. In return, he was acquitted of corruption. The charges relate to a 47 percent discount he received on a luxury 4X4 Mercedes Benz in 1998.
In a written plea explanation handed up to Pretoria's Commercial Crimes Court, Yengeni admitted he acted in breach of his public duties and with the intent to defraud parliament. He said he convinced his co-accused, businessman Michael Woerfel, to arrange the car deal.
Woerfel was at the time the head of Daimler-Benz Aerospace AG's Pretoria representative office."I admit that I failed to disclose to parliament, in circumstances where there was a duty to disclose, that I received the benefit... and that I misrepresented the facts and events as set out," Yengeni's plea explanation says. "The above misrepresentations were made with the intent to defraud Parliament."
Source: IoL
In a written plea explanation handed up to Pretoria's Commercial Crimes Court, Yengeni admitted he acted in breach of his public duties and with the intent to defraud parliament. He said he convinced his co-accused, businessman Michael Woerfel, to arrange the car deal.
Woerfel was at the time the head of Daimler-Benz Aerospace AG's Pretoria representative office."I admit that I failed to disclose to parliament, in circumstances where there was a duty to disclose, that I received the benefit... and that I misrepresented the facts and events as set out," Yengeni's plea explanation says. "The above misrepresentations were made with the intent to defraud Parliament."
Source: IoL
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
National Conventional Arms Control Act 41 of 2002
To establish the National Conventional Arms Control Committee; to ensure compliance with the policy of the Government in respect of arms control; to ensure the implementation of a legitimate, effective and transparent control process; to foster national and international confidence in the control procedures; to provide for an Inspectorate to ensure compliance with the provisions of this Act; to provide for guidelines and criteria to be used when assessing applications for permits made in terms of this Act; to ensure adherence to international treaties and agreements; to ensure proper accountability in the trade in conventional arms; to provide for matters connected with the work and conduct of the Committee and its secretariat; and to provide for matters connected therewith.
PREAMBLE
SINCE the adequate protection of rights to life and security of the person against repression and acts of aggression is fundamental to the well-being and to the social and economic development of every country;
AND SINCE it is the duty of every government to protect and safeguard the rights of its people;
AND SINCE every responsible country has the right to acquire arms to equip itself against acts of aggression;
AND SINCE the Republic is a responsible member of the international community and will not trade in conventional arms with states engaged in repression, aggression or terrorism;
AND SINCE the Republic is engaged in the manufacturing and export of conventional arms;
AND SINCE it is vitally important to ensure accountability in all matters concerning conventional arms, BE IT THEREFORE ENACTED by the Parliament of the Republic of South Africa, as follows: ...
(c) avoid contributing to internal repression, including the systematic violation or suppression of human rights and fundamental freedoms;
(d) avoid transfers of conventional arms to governments that systematically violate or suppress human rights and fundamental freedoms;
(e) avoid transfers of conventional arms that are likely to contribute to the escalation of regional military conflicts, endanger peace by introducing destabilising military capabilities into a region or otherwise contribute to regional instability;
(f) adhere to international law, norms and practices and the international obligations and commitments of the Republic, including United Nations Security Council arms embargoes;
...
Source: SABINET
Friday, January 31, 2003
Reid: 'I am at war with your country'
An article published by CNN contains a partial transcript of Thursday's court hearing in which Richard Reid was sentenced to life in prison for his confessed plan to try and blow up a jetliner with explosives he had hidden in his shoes. The exchange is between Reid and Judge William Young.
Source: CNN
Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Scorpions nab teachers 'for R2,9m fraud'
Three Umlazi teachers have been arrested in connection with fraud totalling R2,9-million in one of the biggest scams against the KwaZulu-Natal department of education. And Scorpions' investigators are separately probing massive fraud within the department, possibly involving senior officials. However, the department won't disclose any information for fear of jeopardising the case.
In the first breakthrough, it has emerged that the salaries of more than 400 teachers were diverted into bank accounts allegedly set up by the three teachers, who were arrested last week by members of the Durban commercial crime unit. Zibuyile Winifreder Shezi, 36, of Ingilosi Primary School, Bhekinkosi Mitchel Shezi, 40, of Zwelesethembiso CP School, and Buyisiwe Theodora Zoe Sithole, 43, of Ingilosi JP School will appear in court again on Friday when they are expected to submit a formal bail application.Police Superintendent Vish Naidoo said more arrests were expected.
It is alleged the teachers were assisted by officials of the education department's Durban South region. "During the first three months of last year, the three accused allegedly changed or had the banking details of other educators changed and their (other educators') salaries were deposited into the (new) accounts," Naidoo said. The investigation had taken a long time because of the complexities of fraud cases, he added.
The teachers were arrested at their schools on January 23 by Det Insp Vincent Cele and colleagues of the Durban commercial crime unit. The teachers appeared in the Durban Magistrate's Court the next day and have been remanded in custody until Friday. "We are investigating the possibility that a person or persons with access to the personnel administration computer system assisted in the execution of this crime and appeal to anyone who can assist us with information in this regard to contact Detective Inspector Cele at 031 332 2534, on extension 2327," Naidoo said. Durban South education officials were unaware of the arrests yesterday, although administration director Richard Mlangeni said investigations by auditors were ongoing.
Education department spokesperson Mandla Msibi said more cases of fraud and corruption were being investigated as part of a concerted effort to root out the problem. "Perpetrators of fraud and corruption should know that we are out to get them because we are determined to run a clean department," Msibi said. Regarding the Scorpions' probe, which involves more than one employee and "a lot of money", he said investigations were at a "sensitive stage".
Source: IoL
In the first breakthrough, it has emerged that the salaries of more than 400 teachers were diverted into bank accounts allegedly set up by the three teachers, who were arrested last week by members of the Durban commercial crime unit. Zibuyile Winifreder Shezi, 36, of Ingilosi Primary School, Bhekinkosi Mitchel Shezi, 40, of Zwelesethembiso CP School, and Buyisiwe Theodora Zoe Sithole, 43, of Ingilosi JP School will appear in court again on Friday when they are expected to submit a formal bail application.Police Superintendent Vish Naidoo said more arrests were expected.
It is alleged the teachers were assisted by officials of the education department's Durban South region. "During the first three months of last year, the three accused allegedly changed or had the banking details of other educators changed and their (other educators') salaries were deposited into the (new) accounts," Naidoo said. The investigation had taken a long time because of the complexities of fraud cases, he added.
The teachers were arrested at their schools on January 23 by Det Insp Vincent Cele and colleagues of the Durban commercial crime unit. The teachers appeared in the Durban Magistrate's Court the next day and have been remanded in custody until Friday. "We are investigating the possibility that a person or persons with access to the personnel administration computer system assisted in the execution of this crime and appeal to anyone who can assist us with information in this regard to contact Detective Inspector Cele at 031 332 2534, on extension 2327," Naidoo said. Durban South education officials were unaware of the arrests yesterday, although administration director Richard Mlangeni said investigations by auditors were ongoing.
Education department spokesperson Mandla Msibi said more cases of fraud and corruption were being investigated as part of a concerted effort to root out the problem. "Perpetrators of fraud and corruption should know that we are out to get them because we are determined to run a clean department," Msibi said. Regarding the Scorpions' probe, which involves more than one employee and "a lot of money", he said investigations were at a "sensitive stage".
Source: IoL
Mandrax may flood market after R3bn theft
The street price of Mandrax is set to go down after the theft of tablets worth three billion rand which police seized in a world-record raid in 2002. On Tuesday it was reported that chemicals used to manufacture Mandrax, and confiscated during the biggest drug bust in the world, had been stolen.
However, it was three billion rand's worth of actual Mandrax - ready for street sale - that was taken and not the chemicals used in the manufacture process, as was reported. Two weeks ago a group of armed robbers made off with the drugs confiscated by detectives in a raid on a Douglasdale property linked to the Mothiba brothers, who are both in custody and awaiting trial. Superintendent Lungelo Dlamini said a gang of men broke into the police vehicle storage facility in Alrode on the East Rand on January 8. "They held up two guards and broke through a wall, which gave them access to a safe where the drugs were being kept," he said.
Bobby Hamman, director of Drug Wise, said the theft probably meant that the stolen Mandrax would go back on to the streets and "back into exactly the same hands". "It came out of a police storage facility, so one would be inclined to believe that some kind of collusion was involved. "But at the end of the day it is likely to cause a decrease in the price, and there will just be a whole lot more available," Hamman said. According to research published by the Medical Research Council regarding drug usage and the costs surrounding substance abuse, the street cost of Mandrax in Cape Town - where it is most commonly used - is currently between R20 and R45 per tablet.
Hamman said, however, that he felt the new flood of Mandrax on the street market was unlikely to have a huge impact on the present trade.
Source: IoL
However, it was three billion rand's worth of actual Mandrax - ready for street sale - that was taken and not the chemicals used in the manufacture process, as was reported. Two weeks ago a group of armed robbers made off with the drugs confiscated by detectives in a raid on a Douglasdale property linked to the Mothiba brothers, who are both in custody and awaiting trial. Superintendent Lungelo Dlamini said a gang of men broke into the police vehicle storage facility in Alrode on the East Rand on January 8. "They held up two guards and broke through a wall, which gave them access to a safe where the drugs were being kept," he said.
Bobby Hamman, director of Drug Wise, said the theft probably meant that the stolen Mandrax would go back on to the streets and "back into exactly the same hands". "It came out of a police storage facility, so one would be inclined to believe that some kind of collusion was involved. "But at the end of the day it is likely to cause a decrease in the price, and there will just be a whole lot more available," Hamman said. According to research published by the Medical Research Council regarding drug usage and the costs surrounding substance abuse, the street cost of Mandrax in Cape Town - where it is most commonly used - is currently between R20 and R45 per tablet.
Hamman said, however, that he felt the new flood of Mandrax on the street market was unlikely to have a huge impact on the present trade.
Source: IoL
Tuesday, January 21, 2003
Van Schalkwyk: Statement on Roodefontein development Van Schalkwyk: Statement on Roodefontein development
I became aware of the Roodefontein development and the possible controversy following media reports relating to the development. It was my initial impression that the controversy, which surrounded the development, was based on a usual conflict between competing and vested interests of role-players, as is the case with most such developments.
On two occasions, I enquired from Mr David Malatsi whether he had acted correctly and properly in dealing with the Roodefontein application and he gave me his firm assurance that he had. When Mr Malatsi was appointed Deputy Minster of Social Development in the National Government, I asked Mr Johan Gelderblom as the Acting Minister of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning to investigate this matter fully and report to me. After one of Mr Gelderblom's reports to me, I contacted the Chief Secretary of the New National Party in the Western Cape, Mr Freddie Adams, and enquired from him whether the party had received any donations that could be considered to be out of the ordinary.
On Monday, 23 December 2002 I met with Mr Adams and he responded to my earlier queries. It became clear to me that there was reason for grave concern. Both Mr Marais and Mr Malatsi will be suspended from all party activities, including party caucuses, with immediate effect pending the conclusion of the Public Protector's investigation and any other party actions, which may arise there from.
Source: Polity
On two occasions, I enquired from Mr David Malatsi whether he had acted correctly and properly in dealing with the Roodefontein application and he gave me his firm assurance that he had. When Mr Malatsi was appointed Deputy Minster of Social Development in the National Government, I asked Mr Johan Gelderblom as the Acting Minister of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning to investigate this matter fully and report to me. After one of Mr Gelderblom's reports to me, I contacted the Chief Secretary of the New National Party in the Western Cape, Mr Freddie Adams, and enquired from him whether the party had received any donations that could be considered to be out of the ordinary.
On Monday, 23 December 2002 I met with Mr Adams and he responded to my earlier queries. It became clear to me that there was reason for grave concern. Both Mr Marais and Mr Malatsi will be suspended from all party activities, including party caucuses, with immediate effect pending the conclusion of the Public Protector's investigation and any other party actions, which may arise there from.
Source: Polity
Wednesday, January 15, 2003
South Africa: ANC escalates privatisations and economic restructuring
On January 14 President Thabo Mbeki gave his state of the nation address before the South African parliament, which was heralded with an air force flypast and a 21-gun salute.
In his speech Mbeki made vague and unsubstantiated promises that in the next year the government would increase the “social wage”, especially of the poor, the old and young children; reduce unemployment; improve public services like hospitals and clinics, schools, roads, access to water and electricity. He also promised to work to eradicate malaria, tuberculosis and particularly to “continue to focus on the treatment of sexually transmitted infections”.
Source: World Socialist Web
In his speech Mbeki made vague and unsubstantiated promises that in the next year the government would increase the “social wage”, especially of the poor, the old and young children; reduce unemployment; improve public services like hospitals and clinics, schools, roads, access to water and electricity. He also promised to work to eradicate malaria, tuberculosis and particularly to “continue to focus on the treatment of sexually transmitted infections”.
Source: World Socialist Web
Friday, December 20, 2002
Natural born copycats
Eight murders have been blamed on Oliver Stone's 'evil' 1995 film. He tells Xan Brooks why Natural Born Killers left no blood on his hands.
On the morning of March 6 1995, teen lovers Ben Darras and Sarah Edmondson left their Oklahoma cabin and took the highway east. In Mississippi they came across a local businessman, Bill Savage, and shot him twice in the head with a .38-calibre revolver. They then swung across to Louisiana, where they gunned down convenience-store cashier Patsy Byers, paralysing her from the neck down. Darras and Edmondson were standard American brats who loved their hard drugs and their R-rated movies. After their arrest, it was revealed that they had prepared for the trip by dropping acid and screening Natural Born Killers on a continuous loop throughout the night.
1. Natural Born Killers
2. Production year: 1992
3. Countries: UK, USA
4. Cert (UK): 18
5. Runtime: 119 mins
6. Directors: Oliver Stone
7. Cast: Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Sizemore, Woody Harrelson
8. More on this film
No film in recent decades has stoked as much controversy as Natural Born Killers. No film-maker, if his critics are to be believed, has quite so much blood on his hands as its director, Oliver Stone. In the eight years since its release, Stone's picture has been confidently linked to at least eight murders - from Barras and Edmondson's wild ride, through the Texan kid who decapitated a classmate because he "wanted to be famous, like the natural born killers", to the pair of Paris students who killed three cops and a taxi driver and were later discovered to have the film's poster on their bedroom wall. The ensuing media storm ensured that the British Board of Film Classification sat on the film for six months before passing it for a theatrical release in February 1995. It also explains why we have had to wait until now for the release of Stone's director's cut on DVD.
Bankrolled by Time Warner, NBK dispatches psycho lovebirds Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) on a murderous, junk-culture joyride. Along the way it melds 35mm with Super-8, animation with back projection and stylised carnage with a thunderous rock soundtrack. The initial response was enthusiastic. The film sailed to the top of the US box office, with Variety dubbing it "the most hallucinatory and anarchic picture made at a major Hollywood studio in the last 20 years...a psychedelic documentary on the American cult of sex, violence and celebrity."
But as the body count mounted, the reaction turned icy. Mario Vargas Llosa publicly cursed the film at the 1994 Venice film festival. David Puttnam (who had previously worked with Stone on 1978's Midnight Express) labelled it "loathsome". In the opinion of the Daily Mail, NBK was simply "evil". "If ever a film deserved to be banned," it concluded, "this is it."
If the media were looking for a fall guy, they found him in Stone. To his critics, the director was a ready-made hypocrite: a rich kid who volunteered for Vietnam and then made Oscar-winning films (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July) lambasting the war; a peace-loving Buddhist who freely admitted that movie violence was "cool". His film, too, was derided as hypocrisy in action: a supposed satire on screen violence that wallowed in two hours of stylised atrocity and then berated the viewer for getting off on it. Thus the director found himself cast as a wicked Svengali, with Natural Born Killers his murderous instruction manual.
Stone is not a man you would think of as a sensitive type. Eight years on, however, he admits that the flak left him shaken. "The controversy was huge, no question about it," he says now. "To my mind, almost everything that was important about Natural Born Killers was overlooked amid all that hysteria over the death toll, and all the nonsense about whether or not I was promoting violence or instigating murder."
Such "nonsense" came to a head in a legal action launched against Stone and Time Warner by lawyers acting for the paralysed Byers, and publicly supported by the author John Grisham, who had been a friend of the murdered Savage. According to the suit, the makers of Natural Born Killers were "distributing a film they knew, or should have known would cause and inspire people to commit crimes". Grisham agreed. There was, he said, a direct "causal link" between the movie and the murders. Therefore, "the artist should be required to share responsibility along with the nutcase who pulled the trigger".
The Byers action was finally thrown out of court in March 2001, and its dismissal rubber-stamped by the Louisiana court of appeal in June of this year. Stone, who says that Time Warner lost "a lot of money" fighting the case, is mightily relieved. "Once you start judging movies as a product, you are truly living in hell. What are the implications for freedom of speech? You wouldn't have any film of stature being made ever again."
He compares the lawsuit to the infamous case of Dan White, the ex-cop who shot San Francisco politician Harvey Milk in 1978. "White used what was known as the Twinkie defence. He said that he had been eating too many Twinkies and that the high sugar content had prompted him to kill. And it worked! He got away with a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter and served five years. But you can't blame the Twinkies in the same way that you can't scapegoat the movies. You can't blame the igniter. People can be ignited by anything. And yet this is something we're seeing more and more of in America today. It's a culture of liability lawsuits. The whole concept of individual responsibility has been broken up and passed around."
I wonder, though, where Stone stands on this thorny issue of liability. Does he feel any measure of artistic responsibility for the films he makes? "That's a very leading question. Because there is no partial responsibility. If you make a film that results in people getting killed, then you are guilty. Therefore I'm not accepting any responsibility."
Surely, though, he wouldn't dispute the idea that a film can influence its viewer. "Of course it can. Maybe it inspires you to change your love life, or to alter your wardrobe. But it's not a film's responsibility to tell you what the law is. And if you kill somebody, you've broken the law."
If NBK has an obvious ancestor, it is A Clockwork Orange. And yet when Stanley Kubrick's movie was linked to various copycat crimes in the early 70s, the director personally had it whipped out of circulation. "Yeah, but I think Kubrick was wrong to do that," Stone argues. "If it wasn't an admission of guilt, it was at least an admission of embarrassment. I'm a big fan of Kubrick, but he was a paranoid man. He reacted to the hysteria of the mob. He crumbled when he should have stood up and defended his work."
Not that Stone didn't suffer some qualms of his own. "When people are attacking you, you are naturally going to have some doubts. 'Why I am making films? Why has this movie been so misunderstood?' And yes, people may have been influenced by the film in some way, but they had deeper problems to contend with. So I felt terrible about it all. In the end I went and hid myself away in a darkened room for a few years." Really? Reading interviews at the time, he struck me as being positively bullish in his defence. The director chuckles. "OK," he says. "Maybe I was joking about the darkened room."
Before permitting the release of NBK in 1994, the censors insisted that Stone strip a whopping 150 shots from the film. The new version restores them all, from a loving camera zoom through a bullet-holed hand to a climactic shot of Tommy Lee Jones's severed head on a stick. The director concedes that on one level this makes the director's cut a more obviously violent film. But he stresses that the restored segments are so over the top that they emphasise his satirical intent.
In other respects, the director's cut plays much like the original: an exuberant shotgun wedding of the crass with the sophisticated that closes with an extended channel-surf through the hot media imagery of the day (OJ Simpson, the Menendez brothers, the Waco siege). Viewed from our lofty 21st-century vantage point, it already seems something of a timepiece: a snapshot of a specific era in US culture; a tenuous accessory to crimes that have been duly tried, sentenced and consigned to history.
"Natural Born Killers was never intended as a criticism of violence," Stone explains. "How can you criticise violence? Violence is in us - it's a natural state of man. What I was doing was pointing the finger at the system that feeds off thatviolence, and at the media that package it for mass consumption. The film came out of a time when that seemed to have reached an unprecedented level. It seemed to me that America was getting crazier."
Since then, he has revised his opinion: "Oh, it's worse than ever now. The reaction of our culture to violence is more extreme than it's ever been. Just look at the events of September 11. I think that the media overreacted to it. Just like they overreacted to my little film."
The director's cut of Natural Born Killers is out now on DVD.
Source: New York Times
On the morning of March 6 1995, teen lovers Ben Darras and Sarah Edmondson left their Oklahoma cabin and took the highway east. In Mississippi they came across a local businessman, Bill Savage, and shot him twice in the head with a .38-calibre revolver. They then swung across to Louisiana, where they gunned down convenience-store cashier Patsy Byers, paralysing her from the neck down. Darras and Edmondson were standard American brats who loved their hard drugs and their R-rated movies. After their arrest, it was revealed that they had prepared for the trip by dropping acid and screening Natural Born Killers on a continuous loop throughout the night.
1. Natural Born Killers
2. Production year: 1992
3. Countries: UK, USA
4. Cert (UK): 18
5. Runtime: 119 mins
6. Directors: Oliver Stone
7. Cast: Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Sizemore, Woody Harrelson
8. More on this film
No film in recent decades has stoked as much controversy as Natural Born Killers. No film-maker, if his critics are to be believed, has quite so much blood on his hands as its director, Oliver Stone. In the eight years since its release, Stone's picture has been confidently linked to at least eight murders - from Barras and Edmondson's wild ride, through the Texan kid who decapitated a classmate because he "wanted to be famous, like the natural born killers", to the pair of Paris students who killed three cops and a taxi driver and were later discovered to have the film's poster on their bedroom wall. The ensuing media storm ensured that the British Board of Film Classification sat on the film for six months before passing it for a theatrical release in February 1995. It also explains why we have had to wait until now for the release of Stone's director's cut on DVD.
Bankrolled by Time Warner, NBK dispatches psycho lovebirds Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) on a murderous, junk-culture joyride. Along the way it melds 35mm with Super-8, animation with back projection and stylised carnage with a thunderous rock soundtrack. The initial response was enthusiastic. The film sailed to the top of the US box office, with Variety dubbing it "the most hallucinatory and anarchic picture made at a major Hollywood studio in the last 20 years...a psychedelic documentary on the American cult of sex, violence and celebrity."
But as the body count mounted, the reaction turned icy. Mario Vargas Llosa publicly cursed the film at the 1994 Venice film festival. David Puttnam (who had previously worked with Stone on 1978's Midnight Express) labelled it "loathsome". In the opinion of the Daily Mail, NBK was simply "evil". "If ever a film deserved to be banned," it concluded, "this is it."
If the media were looking for a fall guy, they found him in Stone. To his critics, the director was a ready-made hypocrite: a rich kid who volunteered for Vietnam and then made Oscar-winning films (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July) lambasting the war; a peace-loving Buddhist who freely admitted that movie violence was "cool". His film, too, was derided as hypocrisy in action: a supposed satire on screen violence that wallowed in two hours of stylised atrocity and then berated the viewer for getting off on it. Thus the director found himself cast as a wicked Svengali, with Natural Born Killers his murderous instruction manual.
Stone is not a man you would think of as a sensitive type. Eight years on, however, he admits that the flak left him shaken. "The controversy was huge, no question about it," he says now. "To my mind, almost everything that was important about Natural Born Killers was overlooked amid all that hysteria over the death toll, and all the nonsense about whether or not I was promoting violence or instigating murder."
Such "nonsense" came to a head in a legal action launched against Stone and Time Warner by lawyers acting for the paralysed Byers, and publicly supported by the author John Grisham, who had been a friend of the murdered Savage. According to the suit, the makers of Natural Born Killers were "distributing a film they knew, or should have known would cause and inspire people to commit crimes". Grisham agreed. There was, he said, a direct "causal link" between the movie and the murders. Therefore, "the artist should be required to share responsibility along with the nutcase who pulled the trigger".
The Byers action was finally thrown out of court in March 2001, and its dismissal rubber-stamped by the Louisiana court of appeal in June of this year. Stone, who says that Time Warner lost "a lot of money" fighting the case, is mightily relieved. "Once you start judging movies as a product, you are truly living in hell. What are the implications for freedom of speech? You wouldn't have any film of stature being made ever again."
He compares the lawsuit to the infamous case of Dan White, the ex-cop who shot San Francisco politician Harvey Milk in 1978. "White used what was known as the Twinkie defence. He said that he had been eating too many Twinkies and that the high sugar content had prompted him to kill. And it worked! He got away with a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter and served five years. But you can't blame the Twinkies in the same way that you can't scapegoat the movies. You can't blame the igniter. People can be ignited by anything. And yet this is something we're seeing more and more of in America today. It's a culture of liability lawsuits. The whole concept of individual responsibility has been broken up and passed around."
I wonder, though, where Stone stands on this thorny issue of liability. Does he feel any measure of artistic responsibility for the films he makes? "That's a very leading question. Because there is no partial responsibility. If you make a film that results in people getting killed, then you are guilty. Therefore I'm not accepting any responsibility."
Surely, though, he wouldn't dispute the idea that a film can influence its viewer. "Of course it can. Maybe it inspires you to change your love life, or to alter your wardrobe. But it's not a film's responsibility to tell you what the law is. And if you kill somebody, you've broken the law."
If NBK has an obvious ancestor, it is A Clockwork Orange. And yet when Stanley Kubrick's movie was linked to various copycat crimes in the early 70s, the director personally had it whipped out of circulation. "Yeah, but I think Kubrick was wrong to do that," Stone argues. "If it wasn't an admission of guilt, it was at least an admission of embarrassment. I'm a big fan of Kubrick, but he was a paranoid man. He reacted to the hysteria of the mob. He crumbled when he should have stood up and defended his work."
Not that Stone didn't suffer some qualms of his own. "When people are attacking you, you are naturally going to have some doubts. 'Why I am making films? Why has this movie been so misunderstood?' And yes, people may have been influenced by the film in some way, but they had deeper problems to contend with. So I felt terrible about it all. In the end I went and hid myself away in a darkened room for a few years." Really? Reading interviews at the time, he struck me as being positively bullish in his defence. The director chuckles. "OK," he says. "Maybe I was joking about the darkened room."
Before permitting the release of NBK in 1994, the censors insisted that Stone strip a whopping 150 shots from the film. The new version restores them all, from a loving camera zoom through a bullet-holed hand to a climactic shot of Tommy Lee Jones's severed head on a stick. The director concedes that on one level this makes the director's cut a more obviously violent film. But he stresses that the restored segments are so over the top that they emphasise his satirical intent.
In other respects, the director's cut plays much like the original: an exuberant shotgun wedding of the crass with the sophisticated that closes with an extended channel-surf through the hot media imagery of the day (OJ Simpson, the Menendez brothers, the Waco siege). Viewed from our lofty 21st-century vantage point, it already seems something of a timepiece: a snapshot of a specific era in US culture; a tenuous accessory to crimes that have been duly tried, sentenced and consigned to history.
"Natural Born Killers was never intended as a criticism of violence," Stone explains. "How can you criticise violence? Violence is in us - it's a natural state of man. What I was doing was pointing the finger at the system that feeds off thatviolence, and at the media that package it for mass consumption. The film came out of a time when that seemed to have reached an unprecedented level. It seemed to me that America was getting crazier."
Since then, he has revised his opinion: "Oh, it's worse than ever now. The reaction of our culture to violence is more extreme than it's ever been. Just look at the events of September 11. I think that the media overreacted to it. Just like they overreacted to my little film."
The director's cut of Natural Born Killers is out now on DVD.
Source: New York Times
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