tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69546007028696817282024-03-13T09:07:43.328-07:00SOLIDARITYNET KENYAA SOCIAL JUSTICE BLOGAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.comBlogger112125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-29801806279128257712015-07-21T01:57:00.000-07:002015-07-21T01:57:56.914-07:00Greece: If you don't mind we are little busy with a little thing we invented...its called Democracy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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© 2015 - 2015 Zapiro (All Rights Reserved)<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-22379543911698380112014-02-13T20:40:00.000-08:002014-02-13T20:57:42.290-08:00When Media Become Lapdogs Rather Than Watchdogs<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<o:p> http://gathara.blogspot.com/2014/02/when-media-become-lapdogs-not-watchdogs.html </o:p></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;">A little over a week has passed since<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><a href="http://sabahionline.com/en_GB/articles/hoa/articles/features/2014/02/03/feature-01" target="_blank"><span style="background: white; color: #888888; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">police
stormed the Musa Mosque in Mombasa</span></a><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;">, and killed
up to 9 people whom they accused of participating in a "jihadist
convention." Nearly 130 others, including children were arrested -58 have
since been released- and the rest charged with offences under Kenya’s terrorism
act. The police claim to have recovered terror training materials and
information indicating plans to attack an "unspecified target."</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">I think there is a lot that is disconcerting
about how this story is being told and the assumptions that have been made.
There is little questioning of the government narrative. The media appears to
have already made up its mind about what happened and has entirely ignored<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span><a href="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Fplaylists%2F22215616&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true&visual=true&origin=twitter" target="_blank"><span style="background: white; color: #888888; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">alternative
versions of what happened</span></a><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;">.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">Some things just don't seem to gel with the
“official truth”. To begin with, this was no secret meeting. The media has
reported that the convention was openly advertised on posters pasted across
town and on social media postings and that the authorities were well aware of
it. There is also considerable confusion over who called the meeting and what
exactly was to be discussed. </span></span><a href="http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/thecounties/article/2000103932/police-seized-key-items-from-mosque?pageNo=2" target="_blank"><span style="background: white; color: #888888; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">The
Standard reported</span></a><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;"> </span></span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;">there were lectures “on
various topics justifying jihad, claiming conspiracies against Muslims and
exhorting the faithful to prepare for ishtishhaad (life of sacrifice)”.
However,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><a href="http://sabahionline.com/en_GB/articles/hoa/articles/features/2014/02/03/feature-01" target="_blank"><span style="background: white; color: #888888; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Sheikh
Abdallah Kheir, an imam and lecturer of sociology at Kenyatta University, told
the press</span></a><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;"> </span></span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;">the meeting had been advertised merely as a religious
lecture. Some of those who claimed to have been there also seemed unaware they
were attending a "jihadist convention."</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">Further, it is unclear whether the meeting had
been prohibited (which would raise fundamental issues surrounding the legality
of any such a ban, and the impact on constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms of
assembly and speech -issues that the press has not bothered to address.) T</span></span><a href="http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/thecounties/article/2000103596/police-on-high-alert-as-youths-plan-jihad-meeting?pageNo=1" target="_blank"><span style="background: white; color: #888888; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">he
press reported</span></a><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;"> </span></span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;">that "authorities in
Mombasa" had said they "would not allow it to take place." But
these "authorities" do not appear to have made any effort to inform
the organizers that their meeting had been disallowed. Though in the aftermath
of the raid, the Mombasa County Police Commander was quoted as saying: "'we'
had issued a warning that we will not allow such a meeting because it was
illegal," other reports indicated that</span><a href="http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/m/story.php?articleID=2000103884&story_title=Death-toll-rises-as-suspects-charged-after-Mombasa-violence" target="_blank"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; color: #888888; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"> </span></span><span style="background: white; color: #888888; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">the Mombasa County Security Committee made no attempt
to stop it</span></a><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;"> </span></span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;">"anticipating that known hardcore jihadists would attend
it." In fact, "attending an illegal meeting" does not<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><a href="http://www.capitalfm.co.ke/news/2014/02/kenya-court-charges-70-with-being-shabaab-members/" target="_blank"><span style="background: white; color: #888888; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">appear
to be one of the charges levelled in court in relation with the incident</span></a><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;">.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">As I write this, the government has reportedly
arrested three persons in the capital, Nairobi, after police broke
up<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span><a href="https://twitter.com/bonifacemwangi/status/433487145119281152/photo/1/large" target="_blank"><span style="background: white; color: #888888; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">a
citizens' protest they had themselves cleared</span></a><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;">. The
demonstration, led by the activist Boniface Mwangi and the widely respected Rev
Timothy Njoya, was supposedly<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><a href="http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/?articleID=2000104562&story_title=standoff-looms-after-police-ban-planned-protest-in-nairobi" target="_blank"><span style="background: white; color: #888888; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">outlawed
by the shadowy National Security Advisory Council</span></a><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;"> </span></span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;">which
accused the US Agency for International Development of plotting to topple the
government by financing demonstrations. Again, as the press has dutifully
parroted the government's ridiculous allegations and ignored the constitutional
issues, no one asks why it appears that the authorities once again appear to
have made no effort to inform organizers that their event was “banned” or which
law gave them the power to do so.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">Going back to Mombasa, I am also greatly
concerned at the terms employed in the coverage, much of which mirrors the
distorted and lazy international reporting on seemingly all matters Muslim. The
press has branded the meeting an "outlawed jihadist convention" and
taken to calling those arrested (and, it would seem, pretty much any collection
of young men at the coast) "militants" or "radicalized
youth". We hear of "jihadist" flags and banners (apparently any
black cloth with Arabic-looking script) and everyday household items,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span><a href="http://www.nation.co.ke/photo/-/1951220/2171474/-/bha0mv/-/index.html" target="_blank"><span style="background: white; color: #888888; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">including
scissors, a pair of pliers and a screwdriver, described as "weapons"</span></a><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;">. There's a disturbing vagueness about what is meant by
radicalization. Who gets to decide who is a "radical preacher", which
youngsters have been "radicalized", and what a nice "moderate"
Muslim looks and sound like?</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">A few days after the Masjid Musa raid, a mob in
Kisumu defaced and forced the removal of a monument put up to commemorate a
century of Sikh presence in Kenya's third-largest city. In the days leading up
to the destruction of the statue,</span></span><a href="http://www.capitalfm.co.ke/news/2014/02/sikh-monument-irks-kisumu-preachers/" target="_blank"><span style="background: white; color: #888888; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Christian
preachers were openly inciting their followers</span></a><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;"> </span></span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;">claiming
the structure was "satanic" and attributing weather phenomena to its
erection. Despite this, no one called for regulation of sermons in Kisumu, the
shutting down of “radical preachers” in favor of “moderate Christians” or
characterized the violent youths as “militant” or “radicalized”.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">It is clear that the government has for a long
time been uncomfortable with rising political consciousness at the coast and
elsewhere. Its standard response however has been one of demonization while
continuing to ignore the underlying grievances. Its dealings with civil society
critiques or<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span><a href="http://sahanjournal.com/kenya-must-engage-with-mrc/#.Uvt8nmKSw_Y" target="_blank"><span style="background: white; color: #888888; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">the
Mombasa Republican Council</span></a><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;">, for example, demonstrate
this clearly enough.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">While there may be areas of legitimate security
concerns, such as recruitment into terror outfits like Al Shabaab and possible
terror plots, this does not give authorities carte blanche to ignore
constitutional limits and to deny fundamental freedoms. The constitution exists
primarily to constrain the power of government, not the rights of citizens.
Thus we really should be worried when government sets itself up as the public
censor, purports to ban speech and speakers it does not like and uses
"national security" as an excuse to close down the space for
political expression and protests.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">Unfortunately, our press, more lapdog than
watchdog, has largely failed to question the motives and (mis)deeds of the
people in power. As we have seen before, it is ever happier cozying up to them
and helping to delegitimize their opponents. Like the mob in Kisumu, it is
quick to desecrate and deface, and slow to think and question.</span></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-37029737668471239292013-09-15T00:51:00.000-07:002013-09-15T00:55:18.378-07:00PAMBAZUKA NEWS: INSIDE THE MEDIA IN AFRICA: SPECIAL ISSUE<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">INSIDE THE MEDIA IN
AFRICA: INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE<br />
Henry Makori<br />
<br />
The media landscape in Africa is quite diverse. Campaigns for media freedom and
freedom of expression have resulted in the repeal of repressive laws in some
countries, but old and new challenges persist. There are interesting debates
about the place of the media in the continent's development<br />
<a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/88877">http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/88877</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">THE KENYAN MEDIA'S
'MOVE ON' MANTRA<br />
Rasna Warah<br />
<br />
Local media coverage of the 2013 Kenyan elections downplayed acts of violence
and bordered on self-censorship despite the fact that social media reflected a
deeply politically and ethnically divided society. The new Kenyatta government
has now embarked on a charm offensive to co-opt the media<br />
<a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/88864">http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/88864</a><br /><br />
ELECTIONS 2013: HOW THE MEDIA FAILED KENYA<br />
Henry Makori<br />
<br />
The media in Kenya continues to be the target of intense criticism over its coverage
of the elections in March. It is thought to have shirked its watchdog role and
focused on peace messages. But supporters say that was necessary, given the
circumstances<br />
<a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/88874">http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/88874</a><br /><br />
KENYA'S MEDIA BATTLES IDENTITY CRISIS<br />
Abdullahi Boru Halakhe<br />
<br />
By easily relinquishing a critical agenda setting role, the mainstream media in
Kenya appears to have given up on its well-earned position as an accessory to
the second liberation for which it paid a steep price. Today, media content is
generally vacuous<br />
<a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/88878">http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/88878</a><br /><br />
THE CHANGING FABRIC OF KENYAN SOCIETY<br />
Aamera Jiwaji<br />
<br />
A study of how young Kenyan women engage with Cuando Seas Mia suggests that the
Mexican telenovela is not a cultural imperialist product but one that helps
them redefine their identities as modern African women<br />
<a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/88873">http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/88873</a></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-64261407753503759462013-09-15T00:36:00.000-07:002013-09-15T00:36:48.184-07:00Workers and funding for public litigation..the Fat cats<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHscKFWV8j3sYD_wLvLsv13NivM0Wuk3fCuLxNCwSFhA9KUtCBMyw69XQUyJG__qmYthyphenhyphenUYmEf58YuhVrRi9eP-HsVWP61bg5ziLAuXDn_9RastVYyP_gSzrOgwLzf-pFZoDGI_8psUJF5/s1600/marikanafunding.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHscKFWV8j3sYD_wLvLsv13NivM0Wuk3fCuLxNCwSFhA9KUtCBMyw69XQUyJG__qmYthyphenhyphenUYmEf58YuhVrRi9eP-HsVWP61bg5ziLAuXDn_9RastVYyP_gSzrOgwLzf-pFZoDGI_8psUJF5/s400/marikanafunding.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-27114403909043707312013-09-04T23:51:00.003-07:002013-09-04T23:53:39.976-07:00News this week<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-70616225735040038322013-09-02T23:57:00.000-07:002013-09-02T23:57:08.695-07:00Obama's mission to Syria<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJaDDYoB8Nb2Gx5OYEIreYbvKpJCsybdyLBTd2DgueFy_iMjn6as575W-zXDhbVOFZxLtG5OtseVlMAb_BIT__ANZYRLZajFNvs8PVe_AsP_uqdhDxmfKwoJo0EDT2kkmkf9eWrkCudi8U/s1600/zapirosmartbomb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJaDDYoB8Nb2Gx5OYEIreYbvKpJCsybdyLBTd2DgueFy_iMjn6as575W-zXDhbVOFZxLtG5OtseVlMAb_BIT__ANZYRLZajFNvs8PVe_AsP_uqdhDxmfKwoJo0EDT2kkmkf9eWrkCudi8U/s400/zapirosmartbomb.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-71480040217990729652013-08-31T06:43:00.003-07:002013-08-31T06:43:41.956-07:00ICNC - July 2013 posts<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001NgK14wgBdTu4L09D4_qoJkj88o4eAzvB0lAi9I7rUbnWonJrn9HEo0D7DXDLwhGTavfgMZ_5-nOq6DOnz02syXAQpr4C7VtRq9N_bmUmriGYr-xDwNbEnEfkEg6CvbtzQGConp57vriW6DCCN0panFZBPrGG_scl" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">US civil rights-era leader Mary King says social movements expand space
for other struggles</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Alice Driver, School of
Authentic Journalism, May 15, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The important role Mary King played in
helping to advance the struggle for women's rights is a lesser known story of
how the success of one social movement, the U.S. civil rights struggle, helped
to expand the space for another movement. King spoke recently about how her
consciousness of women's rights was shaped by her organizing and media work for
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement,
while attending the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism - an intensive
workshop focused on journalism and social movements held in Mexico in April<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001uhyhK6IzxoBcRVNBHbbXu9vSciNQ6-q2lO5qkcy48OW2PM6jmXH8B6XIVS3TG7vv92sPlOKtIddkeDvPCvT5ShK6fgAISrblnjV2oonKg2IPgyeFmntLTgtQT0OGTyh44MESkKC9oJQN5zmXygkScZFaCFqED_SGn_siw-0Cyug=" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Mary
Elizabeth King on civil action for change, the women's movement, and the Arab
awakening</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #323232; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Theory Talks, June 5, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #323232; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #323232; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Nonviolent resistance remains by and large
a marginal topic to international relations. Yet it constitutes an influential
idea among social movements and non-Western populations alike, one that has
moved to the center stage in recent events in the Middle East. In this talk,
Mary King-who has spent over 40 years promoting nonviolence-elaborates on,
amongst others, the women's movement, nonviolence, and civil action more
broadly.</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001NgK14wgBdTvWW2z0wN6dmJv54RLivwgBxyIwvt5oeQHSUBvyeudL9HwAqiHJToUopXRJzUEmtEW7l-NlIqaEMH3H-cmgHUxD_aa4JQjWcwF_1HpsOt6G74CoxrxoxkAG_Lk7GRpps5DM3HcEl2A3MkTjALbGpHU4ZvACm-5XmPSM_OfPEi_KlQ==" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">South
Africa and Bolivia: Two struggles, one story - Video</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Narco News TV, May 15, 2013</span></em><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt; line-height: 115%;">In 1985, Mkhuseli "Khusta" Jack
organized a consumer boycott in the city of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, which
helped end racial apartheid. In 2000, Oscar Olivera was the spokesperson for a
popular resistance that stopped the privatization of water in Cochabamba,
Bolivia. In 2013, they met face to face and shared their stories of strategic
organizing with the scholars and professors of the School of Authentic
Journalism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001NgK14wgBdTs88euDyf6Icq2ljpQGwXDs3gSDhN8IXbXakwdwCl17CeTDN0dz2Hsxauk5bSpuXhOMvXK4F2qavv2iqiffIUbBMMTOd07kHyIEfC3jOmztBF1rNsAWvMdVCTWScJ4xqvA9c-dtoHlth5Ni75vudNyRL5rWsC4xgxNIk9ppvFLlvMFfCOzT2ir0M6imtAVhO-Qm_whGM53uO1FRPSGO0aUBybV8JuZbSQoSlG9yglyK8li0OLrdnIIF3eDay2h4vrMHiq-ymY7eZq2so1BWB59i8BUkV9s3P1YA8lGuAbNwIQOV2M_PJn0x" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">South
Korea: Nonviolent resistance against naval base </span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Carole Reckinger, Erenlai
Magazine, April 23, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Since 2007, a small village in the island
of Jeju, South Korea, has led a nonviolent resistance against the construction
of a naval base next door to a UNESCO biosphere reserve. The military base had
been planned to enable better policing of the sea-lanes and faster response to
any acts of aggression by North Korea. The Jeju anti-naval base protests and
their persistence and endurance in the face of mainstream media demonization,
raising fines and government pressure, is a sign of a civil society awakening
in South Korea.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001BJp17RNExrK0Pv3G8uFHNWgwIn3RJCQq6JYplCSWhPWSUxms5_Ul2F7Wd_H2W9_d52zDP_YM4FxNFOjpBl5iMXoRK4_OuROqnk-h9KCeKwaaksSCnOS_jURJKQ101je4Rgo67arJA_7ehqoR_7stv0lNnzqHEM5yQDnvvyFvV00JDvy7mByC8A==" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">People
Power: A tyrant's worst nightmare </span></a><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Peter Ackerman, Deutsche
Welle, May 28, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">With tactics such as strikes, boycotts, and
mass demonstrations, civil resistance spurs defections among supporters of
oppressive regimes. This strategy of dissolving their capacity to use power is
more likely to be effective than violent uprisings. The international community
must stop being mesmerized by the false choice of accommodating or attacking
tyrants and should pay attention to history's verdict: The very people who are
oppressed, if they know how to use civil resistance, can win their rights through
their own initiative. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001BJp17RNExrJ7o3f0aj3cOCt0IeNSeu8mRx-NVtKR1zh23qGQPB5Eoi0di-yh2WxPACLvT_RQReOLAYwj3ArPfm-NJO-5X6dAKOYtx_umzwIF_Vk3VfL1fc3IMHxS1HsElaqt8uiqDCebQOEj9Ln_-iJQpC83hnpj6Lv2hCQ6ROA=" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">US:
Diplomat proves 'Why Civil Resistance Works'</span></a><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Kevin O'Connor, Times
Argus, May 26, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <br />
Think bombs are more powerful than sit-ins, strikes or boycotts? Vermont native
Maria J. Stephan has proof war is no match for nonviolent opposition. Maria J. Stephan
and Erica Chenoweth teamed up to write the book "Why Civil Resistance
Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict," a statistical analysis
of more than 300 global campaigns over the past century that is the first
definitive study of its kind. "The most striking finding," the
authors conclude, "is that between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance
campaigns were nearly twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as
their violent counterparts."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001BJp17RNExrIJ5CFc55BYzSrJfuOUBQzDYqCmZoLsGAUYAFoNLXrF4ySFjAmGsLLpD4B6NhgvX-x33qhcXwLxjy8Q3LJCngd2YylwkO81m9ByBOpHpuzA21rBrLtGrI_6koD6Sd9MH9VfaCdeO4nCKWjA0rIPoN1kvxz-hO2P_5NV9Fh-IJg_U5OT5mN_V4mptXJnIIoWYSaelYpqZdUp6A==" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">How
to be an effective ally in a nonviolent struggle</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Andrew Stelzer, NPR, May
25, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">What does it mean to be an ally in a
political movement? From white Americans in the civil rights era, to Israelis
in Palestine, to Latino-Americans working with the undocumented...how does one
work to support another's struggle? From Mississippi to Zimbabwe, a
roundtable discussion on the do's and don'ts of how to be an effective ally.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001BJp17RNExrIwkCgHEhEmhUXw-TS4cyQLm9ds2PgpLIVFk5MuhJWMcjW90-F_Zs7hav_SZY-WslzjbUqtv6oRbqsY5fYGj-c-nHrx98TtaYL7phYr6AFEfOhas4kGd7ywOLyn5SNUeJg2j8NAshHW9YHjX1QQ_P3H2AD3C_9Zb7A=" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Turkey:
Kissing protest in Ankara </span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Juan Cole, Informed Comment,
May 26, 2013</span></em><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt; line-height: 115%;">After a subway official chastised a young
couple in Ankara for kissing in public, internet activists organized a small
flash mob at the Kurtulus metro station in the Turkish capital, where lots of
couples engaged in a public display of affection. They attracted the ire of a
group of religious men, but were protected by the police.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001BJp17RNExrJKf3vcGIZoaCommXqdalKnkGwHaReDxtntakHxAjHeBcGt5ipOpVnzi12hOi_hLy2koPqBNE-YjVSC8shJkCkC5qZQvwr75QXTFzg5OE3YxLPv69rTL1HBF3f-LAVbWd6gh4QEpUSesHttOx57RpxIQlfY_FDwvbnW3NXZXdKAwqHv7g72hlC_InALBIz_wUo=" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Tunisia:
Dancing resistance continues</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Katharina Pfannkuch, Your
Middle East, May 24, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Two years after the revolution, the streets
of Tunisia are more and more in the hands of the Islamists. The Danseurs
Citoyens use art as a weapon of resistance against the new self-appointed moral
guardians in the country: The idea to re-conquer the streets of Tunis was born
immediately after an attack by Islamists on a group of dancers in the capital.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001uhyhK6IzxoAZyoaMp--nBtMR20ZrlPoVc_pxu9vBQTQD7eUCbXRAjDnpn4cAubCVTzSgGWeZw7TPrVNJLZFLFYsc3uHlkBP-a2KgI-D7whLk_u7wbCmHrLMlp4GaD4wb_rRHxhGOtZqzWOgjIMeFpJlcdX1wfju8bEqnEqCn3t0=" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Embracing
the power of nonviolent revolutions</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Andres Jimenez, Peace and
Conflict Monitor, June 12, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This article discusses the shortcomings of
violent social struggles - their relative exclusivity, vulnerability to foreign
manipulation for geostrategic goals, and their likelihood (if successful) to establish
similarly repressive and violent regimes to the ones they seek to overthrow.
These are then juxtaposed with the relative merits of nonviolent struggles -
their inclusivity, self-sufficiency, and compatibility with democratic
structures of governance<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=0015ZhTQ3_7z4peJOKsV80yjxfyQKGIi5dZFVUhVX7Gmrqd1eaeH3eZ3nt08wxVh6QKsNc8_p64CJtpCzD8O5XUU6csqKXKQMnF4yphbZKiWtIh1T8Q4RZwPK1cWYpgOJPR3Mg401Ohrqgtyob1w5QpHsHpeDkEgWUUQeqEQz5YKed-1s1BDWUk9zVWlkM1f8fHLIGB1NeWgQyxP4D3gTOpCkEm_JDDvLIgZMSWnWv1AKotmKiGuOcewck2FQzXepZklS4dM3fboxZorUyRjW2GmFhmbJMIqxmW8fOpGjQ9Xu6Y3A89Dp0UH8pbO3x_m9KKNzjflJXEeaz6M6VIS2BpHg==" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Western
Sahara: Women play large role in forgotten struggle for independence</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Loveday Morris, Washington
Post, July 7, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In a Muslim-majority region where women are
often marginalized from politics, women have taken an unusually prominent role
in Western Sahara's independence movement against Moroccan rule. Female
activists attribute the phenomenon to a combination of the indigenous Sahrawi
population's moderate interpretation of Islam and the freedom they derive from
their nomadic roots - but also, perhaps counterintuitively, to the prevalence
of traditional gender roles, which they say give women the time to demonstrate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=0015ZhTQ3_7z4pEjG4VutX2qSZG_1Cwb2v_iHhgWG-05HS_QEhxKetBGuI0QOAfYGY7txl7RPaFMnuij1EFRUv8iYH5OxPqP_sTSmbGwX53ztJW8XZhoGluCBfnjRcweu3IzAsOfKjNrcsQA_OhGqPOBfJ8x1M-Kt447sWuI5dwpC90mj-RQcfAUcPr69JFMYYWvaFfjnvfTCrTwzeBClG9DVJEJSvBN7u746UCEKqoZwn7B_RXh8_Fqw==" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Turkey:
After protests, forums sprout in parks</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Sebnem Arsu, NY Times, July
7, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The recent antigovernment riots, which
began with a sit-in at an Istanbul park scheduled for demolition and grew to
encompass the grievances of millions of Turks disillusioned with their
government, have largely faded after an intense crackdown about three weeks
ago. Now, Turkey's parks have become safe places to gather and speak freely,
with people arriving each evening in dozens of parks nationwide to discuss what
happens next. The forums, an unprecedented exercise in grassroots democracy in
a country with no tradition of public assembly, are not affiliated with any
political party.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=0015ZhTQ3_7z4o2foVoVpZxV93xEhskhOSjAnsEZfgdNXIeb6C9Fku4HzqX-VbdPpjEVIWnomTjzOgzpXTmpPt0IzZc0FJ4FpZh4pHFR4oKjBF70CsoMDBMEhOkndLthKeYiKk82mKGwdiO7W_VUJgBSyQSkJSAVNzpJnzj4GPNmtxYmPsokxe7Pr7jvdzuLqRkOswZxdA6rho=" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">The
Street Spirit interview with Erica Chenoweth</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Terry Messman, Street
Spirit, June 7, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Terry Messman interviews Erica Chenoweth
about her recent research on the effectiveness of civil resistance. In
"Why Civil Resistance Works," the book based on this research,
Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan analyze 323 campaigns seeking to change society,
both violently and nonviolently, in one of the most comprehensive studies of
social change movements that exists. Chenoweth speaks about the results of her
research, what led her to undertake the project, and lessons she has learned
that might help illuminate the road ahead for social-change movements.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=0015ZhTQ3_7z4rb-iznS2zh9Cj1RlYoaiaWAzOz0ysnRk94dQ4aecEi-TC6EjgZuBzBdGcgCBhbE6eK-Tkiy_Dy7oyRte2XAPMeT4mOZXw5GZUiL4ackERe3922YOvDuUQb_7FWVteJBxW-jWppGhjtXENmS0I7zEU4yPhY72Y_dggHC6-vZjRFGV9GvQtH_atoGjkGPA-ClQBYmkrDhgnmLV3vCfaq4xnX" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Turkey:
The visual emergence of the Occupy Gezi Movement -- Part II</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Christiane Gruber,
Jadaliyya, July 7, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Early on in the Gezi protests, Erdogan
dismissed the protesters as "marginal groups" and misbehaving
"çapulcus," a term meaning marauder, riffraff, or bum. Both the terms
"marginal" and "bum" went through the movement's satirical
machinery, and the title of "çapulcu" became the highest badge of
merit for any of the demonstrators.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=0015ZhTQ3_7z4o4or_7nkz7O9afi78703VzjWX97M3oAvaIzV-XpUYz0DZx7K2mpONra29rsoHnMW41JGzoeOCdQKeBxy-0ktZd1F2aGzJvKSFfPJAN0uKHynYZxolLbIFw5xPcmvFRgaI2s1PUI5VnCH756UG7yAwUVMoYMdLyHINsLhKDazk7ju1AIQGmN4zl" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Egypt:
Why were Tamarod protests successful?</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Mohamed El-Sayed Abdel
Gawad, Egypt Independent, July 8, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Tamarod, since its founding, adopted peaceful
methods, enabling it to gain a favorable view among a wide spectrum of society.
Tamarod has taught us that peaceful popular action will be a tool of change in
the future. Traditional political movements, on the other hand, often result in
bloody revolts, military coups, or foreign intervention. To conclude, the
success of Tamarod and earlier youth movements has proved that changes in the
Egyptian political arena are no longer brought about by the traditional elite,
but rather by new political forces that operate outside of partisan boundaries
and engage more effectively with the masses<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001CCLyEd01eOLbgSjuKe9DS5MPKR3srRjFnHM06Rn-TzwMUNnEXLZvFYIOm36QOobPTcZQmE_QY1saV2MbJPY0kbuNzVYkGXkTk7RSO3EqEtbsQsybEJx3YJEWKh5_XlFbCrwhf-5UXFiOQBsZ-kV1zbEiKkw_mzGLN5mP7ukPbxPdkL_JUZNfGyDkFSxLMkIY" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Turkish women push for liberation</span></a></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Ariam Frezghi, IPS News,
July 13, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Among the issues bringing protesters to
Gezi Park, the now-iconic site of struggle in Istanbul's Taksim Square, is the
demand for women's liberation. Coming from many walks of life and expressing a
myriad of ideals and values, the women of the Occupy Gezi Movement have voiced
a collective desire: to fight the undercurrent of deeply entrenched patriarchal
values and reclaim autonomy over their own bodies and lifestyles. These demands
are now coalescing around proposed legislation from the country's Health
Ministry to limit the sale of oral contraception.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001gdX8-fjWy8ZvctGBtMswSKbpYJKBRb_JWZzFipxTk4HTQl19rjOdu6LnqE7LLd4sQ2hQU3-13Bx0OAPFuAHG08G6BpK2XRWqQRK3TbfslgG09r_YXjZvuJPb7AzEUCq6GFOKbh1y8XtkqTwFFJaYx27Xakuof6BZUUQbMpWCqfymdcoS0dvLdsMyixPq3qxe" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Bulgaria: A "desire to live in
truth"</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By: Dana Alexandra Scherle, DW,
July 25, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">What is it that connects the
protesters?</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> "What ties them together
is the desire to live in truth. To use the words of Vaclav Havel [in reference
to life under communism during the Cold War], 'they can no longer stand to live
a lie, in a criminal system, in shadows'." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt;">Do you see parallels with the protests in Turkey?</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt;">
"Yes, there are parallels: members of different levels of society have
joined together and reacted as one political subject. And the political subject
says: 'This can't go on'."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-52192229781481923812013-08-31T00:16:00.001-07:002013-08-31T00:16:32.269-07:00Martin Luther King's Dream of Barrack Obama<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikWEDeq75wzhfdQ1tEtmB6GfmJgFIWOx_6fJyi76amJJDpxLR-SByFVMY3Fj1ug7W0yXDgMPWkWZKzlAxMht9_8_W68vGirOlSBrb-UQDSs4HBBr08ouB6F2V8R59cUBTKns0jmF3FZs1e/s1600/mlksdream.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="472" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikWEDeq75wzhfdQ1tEtmB6GfmJgFIWOx_6fJyi76amJJDpxLR-SByFVMY3Fj1ug7W0yXDgMPWkWZKzlAxMht9_8_W68vGirOlSBrb-UQDSs4HBBr08ouB6F2V8R59cUBTKns0jmF3FZs1e/s640/mlksdream.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-92174067081584573582013-07-15T05:30:00.002-07:002013-07-15T05:30:34.519-07:00US bankrolled anti-Morsi activists <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Documents
reveal <u1:country-region><u1:place>US</u1:place></u1:country-region> money
trail to Egyptian groups that pressed for president's removal</span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="NL" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: NL;">Emad Mekay <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="NL" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: NL;">Al Jazeera, 10 Jul 2013<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">[Condensed version of original article]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<u1:place><u1:city><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Berkeley</span></i></u1:city><i>,
<u1:country-region>United States</u1:country-region></i></u1:place><i> -</i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">
President Barack Obama recently stated the <u1:country-region><u1:place>United
States</u1:place></u1:country-region> was not taking sides as <u1:country-region><u1:place>Egypt</u1:place></u1:country-region>'s
crisis came to a head with the military overthrow of the democratically elected
president. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">But a review of dozens of US federal government
documents shows <u1:state><u1:place>Washington</u1:place></u1:state> has
quietly funded senior Egyptian opposition figures who called for toppling of
the country's now-deposed president Mohamed Morsi.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Documents obtained by the Investigative Reporting
Program at UC [<u1:place><u1:placetype>University</u1:placetype> of <u1:placename>California</u1:placename></u1:place>]
<u1:city><u1:place>Berkeley</u1:place></u1:city> show the <u1:country-region><u1:place>US</u1:place></u1:country-region>
channelled funding through a State Department programme to promote democracy in
the <u1:place>Middle East</u1:place> region. This programme vigorously
supported activists and politicians who have fomented unrest in <u1:country-region><u1:place>Egypt</u1:place></u1:country-region>,
after autocratic president Hosni Mubarak was ousted in a popular uprising in
February 2011. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Activists bankrolled by the programme include an
exiled Egyptian police officer who plotted the violent overthrow of the Morsi
government, an anti-Islamist politician who advocated closing mosques and
dragging preachers out by force, as well as a coterie of opposition politicians
who pushed for the ouster of the country's first democratically elected leader,
government documents show. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Information obtained under the Freedom of Information
Act, interviews, and public records reveal <u1:state><u1:place>Washington</u1:place></u1:state>'s
"democracy assistance" may have violated Egyptian law, which
prohibits foreign political funding. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">It may also have broken US government regulations that
ban the use of taxpayers' money to fund foreign politicians, or finance
subversive activities that target democratically elected governments. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">'Bureau for
Democracy'<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<u1:state><u1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Washington</span></u1:place></u1:state>'s
democracy assistance programme for the <u1:place>Middle East</u1:place> is filtered
through a pyramid of agencies within the State Department. Hundreds of millions
of taxpayer dollars is channelled through the Bureau for Democracy, Human
Rights and Labor (DRL), The Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), USAID,
as well as the Washington-based, quasi-governmental organisation the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED). <o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">In turn, those groups re-route money to other
organisations such as the International Republican Institute, the National
Democratic Institute (NDI), and Freedom House, among others. Federal documents
show these groups have sent funds to certain organisations in <u1:country-region><u1:place>Egypt</u1:place></u1:country-region>,
mostly run by senior members of anti-Morsi political parties who double as NGO
activists.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">A main conduit for channeling the State Department's
democracy funds to <u1:country-region><u1:place>Egypt</u1:place></u1:country-region>
has been the National Endowment for Democracy. Federal documents show NED,
which in 2011 was authorised an annual budget of $118m by Congress, funnelled
at least $120,000 over several years to an exiled Egyptian police officer who
has for years incited violence in his native country. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">This appears to be in direct contradiction to its
Congressional mandate, which clearly states NED is to engage only in
"peaceful" political change overseas.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Exiled
policeman<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Colonel Omar Afifi Soliman - who served in <u1:country-region><u1:place>Egypt</u1:place></u1:country-region>'s
elite investigative police unit, notorious for human rights abuses - began
receiving NED funds in 2008 for at least four years. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">During that time he and his followers targeted
Mubarak's government, and Soliman later followed the same tactics against the
military rulers who briefly replaced him. Most recently Soliman set his sights
on Morsi's government. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Soliman, who has refugee status in the <u1:country-region><u1:place>US</u1:place></u1:country-region>,
was sentenced in absentia last year for five years imprisonment by a <u1:city><u1:place>Cairo</u1:place></u1:city>
court for his role in inciting violence in 2011 against the embassies of <u1:country-region><u1:place>Israel</u1:place></u1:country-region>
and <u1:country-region><u1:place>Saudi Arabia</u1:place></u1:country-region>,
two <u1:country-region><u1:place>US</u1:place></u1:country-region> allies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">He also used social media to encourage violent attacks
against Egyptian officials, according to court documents and a review of his
social media posts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">US Internal Revenue Service documents reveal that NED
paid tens of thousands of dollars to Soliman through an organisation he created
called Hukuk Al-Nas (People's Rights), based in Falls Church, Virginia. Federal
forms show he is the only employee. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">After he was awarded a 2008 human rights fellowship at
NED and moved to the <u1:country-region><u1:place>US</u1:place></u1:country-region>,
Soliman received a second $50,000 NED grant in 2009 for Hukuk Al-Nas. In 2010,
he received $60,000 and another $10,000 in 2011. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">INED has removed public access to its Egyptian grant
recipients in 2011 and 2012 from its website. NED officials didn't respond to
repeated interview requests. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">'Pro bono
advice'<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">NED's website says Soliman spreads only nonviolent
literature, and his group was set up to provide "immediate, pro bono
[free] legal advice through a telephone hotline, instant messaging, and other
social networking tools".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">However, in Egyptian media interviews, social media
posts and YouTube videos, Soliman encouraged the violent overthrow of <u1:country-region><u1:place>Egypt</u1:place></u1:country-region>'s
government, then led by the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">"Incapacitate them by smashing their knee bones
first," he instructed followers on Facebook in late June, as Morsi's
opponents prepared massive street rallies against the government. <u1:country-region><u1:place>Egypt</u1:place></u1:country-region>'s
US-funded and trained military later used those demonstrations to justify its
coup on July 3. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">"Make a road bump with a broken palm tree to stop
the buses going into <u1:city><u1:place>Cairo</u1:place></u1:city>, and drench
the road around it with gas and diesel. When the bus slows down for the bump,
set it all ablaze so it will burn down with all the passengers inside … God
bless," Soliman's post read. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">In late May he instructed, "Behead those who
control power, water and gas utilities."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">More recent Facebook instructions to his 83,000
followers range from guidelines on spraying roads with a mix of auto oil and
gas - "20 litres of oil to 4 litres of gas"- to how to thwart cars
giving chase. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">On a YouTube video, Soliman took credit for a failed
attempt in December to storm the Egyptian presidential palace with handguns and
Molotov cocktails to oust Morsi.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Funding
other Morsi opponents<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Other beneficiaries of <u1:country-region><u1:place>US</u1:place></u1:country-region>
government funding are also opponents of the now-deposed president, some who
had called for Morsi's removal by force.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The Salvation Front main opposition bloc, of which
some members received US funding, has backed street protest campaigns that
turned violent against the elected government, in contradiction of many of the
State Department's own guidelines. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">A long-time grantee of the National Endowment for
Democracy and other <u1:country-region><u1:place>US</u1:place></u1:country-region>
democracy groups is a 34-year old Egyptian woman, Esraa Abdel-Fatah, who sprang
to notoriety during the country's pitched battle over the new constitution in
December 2012. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">She exhorted activists to lay siege to mosques and
drag from pulpits all Muslim preachers and religious figures who supported the
country's the proposed constitution, just before it went to a public
referendum. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The act of besieging mosques has continued ever since,
and several people have died in clashes defending them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Federal records show Abdel-Fatah's NGO, the Egyptian
Democratic Academy, received support from NED, MEPI and NDI, among other State
Department-funded groups "assisting democracy". Records show NED gave
her organisation a one-year $75,000 grant in 2011.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Abdel-Fatah is politically active, crisscrossing <u1:country-region><u1:place>Egypt</u1:place></u1:country-region>
to rally support for her Al-Dostor Party, which is led by former UN nuclear
chief Mohamed El-Baradei, the most prominent figure in the Salvation Front. She
lent full support to the military takeover, and urged the West not call it a
"coup". <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">"June 30 will be the last day of Morsi's
term," she told the press a few weeks before the coup took place. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u1:country-region><u1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">US</span></u1:place></u1:country-region>
taxpayer money has also been sent to groups set up by some of <u1:country-region>Egypt</u1:country-region>'s
richest people, raising questions about waste in the democracy programme. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Michael Meunier is a frequent guest on TV channels
that opposed Morsi. Head of the Al-Haya Party, Meunier - a dual US-Egyptian
citizen - has quietly collected US funding through his NGO, Hand In Hand for
Egypt Association. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Meunier's organisation was founded by some of the most
vehement opposition figures, including Egypt's richest man and well-known
Coptic Christian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, Tarek Heggy, an oil industry
executive, Salah Diab, Halliburton's partner in Egypt, and Usama Ghazali Harb,
a politician with roots in the Mubarak regime and a frequent US embassy
contact.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Meunier has denied receiving <u1:country-region><u1:place>US</u1:place></u1:country-region>
assistance, but government documents show USAID in 2011 granted his Cairo-based
organisation $873,355. Since 2009, it has taken in $1.3 million from the <u1:country-region><u1:place>US</u1:place></u1:country-region>
agency. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Meunier helped rally the country's five million
Christian Orthodox Coptic minority, who oppose Morsi's Islamist agenda, to take
to the streets against the president on June 30. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Reform and Development Party member Mohammed Essmat
al-Sadat received <u1:country-region><u1:place>US</u1:place></u1:country-region>
financial support through his Sadat Association for Social Development, a
grantee of The Middle East Partnership Initiative. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The federal grants records and database show in 2011
Sadat collected $84,445 from MEPI "to work with youth in the
post-revolutionary <u1:country-region><u1:place>Egypt</u1:place></u1:country-region>".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Sadat was a member of the coordination committee, the
main organising body for the June 30 anti-Morsi protest. Since 2008, he has
collected $265,176 in US funding. Sadat announced he will be running for office
again in upcoming parliamentary elections. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">After soldiers and police killed more than 50 Morsi
supporters on Monday, Sadat defended the use of force and blamed the Muslim
Brotherhood, saying it used women and children as shields.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Some US-backed politicians have said <u1:state><u1:place>Washington</u1:place></u1:state>
tacitly encouraged them to incite protests.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">"We were told by the Americans that if we see big
street protests that sustain themselves for a week, they will reconsider all
current US policies towards the Muslim Brotherhood regime," said Saaddin
Ibrahim, an Egyptian-American politician opposed Morsi.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Ibrahim's Ibn Khaldoun Center in <u1:city><u1:place>Cairo</u1:place></u1:city>
receives <u1:country-region><u1:place>US</u1:place></u1:country-region>
funding, one of the largest recipients of democracy promotion money in fact.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">His comments followed statements by other Egyptian
opposition politicians claiming they had been prodded by US officials to whip
up public sentiment against Morsi before <u1:state><u1:place>Washington</u1:place></u1:state>
could publicly weigh in.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Democracy
programme defence<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The practice of funding politicians and
anti-government activists through NGOs was vehemently defended by the State
Department and by a group of Washington-based <u1:place>Middle East</u1:place>
experts close to the programme.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">"The line between politics and activism is very
blurred in this country," said David Linfield, spokesman for the US
Embassy in <u1:city><u1:place>Cairo</u1:place></u1:city>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Others said the <u1:country-region><u1:place>United
States</u1:place></u1:country-region> cannot be held responsible for activities
by groups it doesn't control. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">A <u1:city><u1:place>Cairo</u1:place></u1:city> court
convicted 43 local and foreign NGO workers last month on charges of illegally
using foreign funds to stir unrest in <u1:country-region><u1:place>Egypt</u1:place></u1:country-region>.
The <u1:country-region><u1:place>US</u1:place></u1:country-region> and UN
expressed concern over the move. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Some Egyptians, meanwhile, said the <u1:country-region><u1:place>US</u1:place></u1:country-region>
was out of line by sending cash through its democracy programme in the <u1:place>Middle
East</u1:place> to organisations run by political operators. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">"Instead of being sincere about backing democracy
and reaching out to the Egyptian people, the US has chosen an unethical
path," said Esam Neizamy, an independent researcher into foreign funding
in Egypt, and a member of the country's Revolutionary Trustees, a group set up
to protect the 2011 revolution.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Excuses for the
Egyptian coup<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Excerpt
from: ‘Egyptian Coup Apologists Offer Lame Rationalizations’, by Haroon
Siddiqui, the Toronto Star’s Editorial Page Editor Emeritus<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">(<a href="http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/07/11/egyptian_coup_apologists_offer_lame_rationalizations_siddiqui.html">http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/07/11/egyptian_coup_apologists_offer_lame_rationalizations_siddiqui.html</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">Apologists
for the Egyptian coup, including many Egyptian Canadians, are offering<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">lame
rationalizations:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">1. The
situation was chaotic and the economy in ruins — someone had to restore order.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">That’s the
standard excuse for military coups. Besides, the army itself encouraged the<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">undermining
of Morsi by Mubarak-era courts, Mubarak-era police and Mubarak-era<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">financiers
who backed mass demonstrations. They created the upheavals that killed<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">tourism and
stifled the economy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">2. Morsi
only controlled the parliament where his Muslim Brotherhood had nearly half<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">the seats.
But the assembly was dismissed by the courts, leaving him only his own<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">elected
legitimacy — and that was what was systematically destroyed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">3. Morsi
was partisan and unilateral. He was — but far less so than, say, Stephen<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">Harper and
the Republicans in Congress. He appointed no more party loyalists and<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">nincompoops
than [Canadian Prime Minister] Harper has to the Senate or other public
institutions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">4. Morsi
had only a “narrow mandate,” at 52 per cent in a two-way race. But his was a<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">bigger
margin than Obama’s. And in multi-party elections, the Brotherhood<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">proportionately
won more seats than either Harper’s or [UK Pfime Minister] David Cameron’s<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">Conservatives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">5. Morsi
was taking orders from the Muslim Brotherhood. He no doubt was but no<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">more so
than members of the [U.S.] Congress sing their key funders’ tunes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">6. He was
advancing sharia or he may have been preparing to do so. In fact, he fought<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">off
Salafist demands for constitutional guarantees for Islamic law.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-37737454039921809752013-07-15T05:26:00.005-07:002013-07-15T05:26:26.404-07:00Sudden Improvements in Egypt Suggest a Campaign to Undermine Morsi<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">By </span><u1:stockticker style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">BEN</u1:stockticker><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> HUBBARD and DAVID
D. KIRKPATRICK</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">New York Times, July 10, 2013<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u1:city><u1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">CAIRO</span></u1:place></u1:city> — The streets seethe with
protests and government ministers are on the run or in jail, but since the
military ousted President Mohamed Morsi, life has somehow gotten better for
many people across <u1:country-region>Egypt</u1:country-region>:
Gas lines have disappeared, power cuts have stopped and the police have
returned to the street. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The apparently miraculous end to the crippling energy
shortages, and the re-emergence of the police, seems to show that the legions
of personnel left in place after former President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in
2011 played a significant role — intentionally or not — in undermining the
overall quality of life under the Islamist administration of Mr. Morsi. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">And as the interim government struggles to unite a
divided nation, the Muslim Brotherhood and Mr. Morsi’s supporters say the
sudden turnaround proves that their opponents conspired to make Mr. Morsi fail.
Not only did police officers seem to disappear, but the state agencies
responsible for providing electricity and ensuring gas supplies failed so
fundamentally that gas lines and rolling blackouts fed widespread anger and
frustration. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">“This was preparing for the coup,” said Naser el-Farash,
who served as the spokesman for the Ministry of Supply and Internal Trade under
Mr. Morsi. “Different circles in the state, from the storage facilities to the
cars that transport petrol products to the gas stations, all participated in
creating the crisis.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Working behind the scenes, members of the old
establishment, some of them close to Mr. Mubarak and the country’s top
generals, also helped finance, advise and organize those determined to topple
the Islamist leadership, including Naguib Sawiris, a billionaire and an
outspoken foe of the Brotherhood; Tahani El-Gebali, a former judge on the
Supreme Constitutional Court who is close to the ruling generals; and Shawki
al-Sayed, a legal adviser to Ahmed Shafik, Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister,
who lost the presidential race to Mr. Morsi. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">But it is the police returning to the streets that offers
the most blatant sign that the institutions once loyal to Mr. Mubarak held back
while Mr. Morsi was in power. Throughout his one-year tenure, Mr. Morsi
struggled to appease the police, even alienating his own supporters rather than
trying to overhaul the Interior Ministry. But as crime increased and traffic
clogged roads — undermining not only the quality of life, but the economy — the
police refused to deploy fully. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Until now. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">White-clad officers have returned to Cairo’s streets, and
security forces — widely despised before and after the revolution — intervened
with tear gas and shotguns against Islamists during widespread street clashes
last week, leading anti-Morsi rioters to laud them as heroes. Posters have gone
up around town showing a police officer surrounded by smiling children over the
words “Your security is our mission, your safety our goal.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">“You had officers and individuals who were working under
a specific policy that was against Islamic extremists and Islamists in
general,” said Ihab Youssef, a retired police officer who runs a professional
association for the security forces. “Then all of a sudden the regime flips and
there is an Islamic regime ruling. They could never psychologically accept
that.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">When Mr. Mubarak was removed after nearly 30 years in
office in 2011, the bureaucracy he built stayed largely in place. Many business
leaders, also a pillar of the old government, retained their wealth and
influence. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Despite coming to power through the freest elections in
Egyptian history, Mr. Morsi was unable to extend his authority over the
sprawling state apparatus, and his allies complained that what they called the
“deep state” was undermining their efforts at governing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">While he failed to broaden his appeal and build any kind
of national consensus, he also faced an active campaign by those hostile to his
leadership, including some of the wealthiest and most powerful pillars of the
Mubarak era. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Mr. Sawiris, one of Egypt’s richest men and a titan of
the old establishment, said Wednesday that he had supported an upstart group
called “tamarrod,” Arabic for “rebellion,” that led a petition drive seeking
Mr. Morsi’s ouster. He donated use of the nationwide offices and infrastructure
of the political party he built, the Free Egyptians. He provided publicity
through his popular television network and his major interest in Egypt’s
largest private newspaper. He even commissioned the production of a popular
music video that played heavily on his network. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">“Tamarrod did not even know it was me!” he said. “I am
not ashamed of it.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">He said he had publicly predicted that ousting Mr. Morsi
would bolster Egypt’s sputtering economy because it would bring in billions of
dollars in aid from oil-rich monarchies afraid that the Islamist movement might
spread to their shores. By Wednesday, a total of $12 billion had flowed in from
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. “That will take us for 12
months with no problem,” Mr. Sawiris said. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Ms. Gebali, the former judge, said in a telephone
interview on Wednesday that she and other legal experts helped tamarrod create
its strategy to appeal directly to the military to oust Mr. Morsi and pass the
interim presidency to the chief of the constitutional court. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">“We saw that there was movement and popular creativity,
so we wanted to see if it would have an effect and a constitutional basis,” Ms.
Gebali said. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Mr. Farash, the trade ministry spokesman under Mr. Morsi,
attributed the fuel shortages to black marketers linked to Mr. Mubarak, who
diverted shipments of state-subsidized fuel to sell for a profit abroad.
Corrupt officials torpedoed Mr. Morsi’s introduction of a smart card system to
track fuel shipments by refusing to use the devices, he said. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">But not everyone agreed with that interpretation, as
supporters of the interim government said the improvements in recent days were
a reflection of Mr. Morsi’s incompetence, not a conspiracy. State news media
said energy shortages occurred because consumers bought extra fuel out of fear,
which appeared to evaporate after Mr. Morsi’s fall. On Wednesday, Al Ahram, the
flagship newspaper, said the energy grid had had a surplus in the past week for
the first time in months, thanks to “energy-saving measures by the public.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">“I feel like Egypt is back,” Ayman Abdel-Hakam, a
criminal court judge from a Cairo suburb, said after waiting only a few minutes
to fill up his car at a downtown gas station. He accused Mr. Morsi and the
Muslim Brotherhood of trying to seize all state power and accused them of
creating the fuel crisis by exporting gasoline to Hamas, the militant Islamic
group in the Gaza Strip. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">“We had a disease, and we got rid of it,” Mr. Abdel-Hakam
said. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Ahmed Nabawi, a gas station manager, said he had heard
several reasons for the gas crisis: technical glitches at a storage facility, a
shipment of low-quality gas from abroad and unnecessary stockpiling by the
public. Still, he was amazed at how quickly the crisis disappeared. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">“We went to sleep one night, woke up the next day, and
the crisis was gone,” he said, casually sipping tea in his office with his
colleagues. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Regardless of the reasons behind the crisis, he said, Mr.
Morsi’s rule had not helped. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">“No one wanted to cooperate with his people because they
didn’t accept him,” he said. “Now that he is gone, they are working like
they’re supposed to.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-12812745041696572392013-07-06T03:10:00.002-07:002013-07-06T03:10:40.171-07:00ICNC posts - 4 May 2013 <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001kwRKAxmYLOG4oE1_wU2HvHyE4XngQ7OUWDADy0JriLDeqiv5Zy1L56qqqS6YqaaY1V9SnIjRoVABNroy7NSN5llivdImsN_UZh8UfWg_8HKyxlu2K-wZ1Tkkp07Q-k_glH8myhFO2maaWb_qICX36NW-MLGnwfhgI3jwV9JA5hDeGGJENQmpDaiCzGWTeYo1RLkW59Is9vlayF5t8awbyMmt6E8UuhbQ" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Zimbabwe: Democratic regime change agenda is every citizen's right</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt;">By: Thabani Nyoni, Zimbabwe Independent, May 3, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Zimbabwe has seen a plethora of opposition
political parties, civil society groups and human rights organizations as well
as dissenting voices being criminalized, delegitimized and brutalized. This
culture of violence, intolerance and impunity has thrived as the government
uses terms like "sell-outs", "puppets of the West", and
"Western-sponsored agents of regime change" to justify political
persecution. Civil society groups and human rights activists have worked to
expand, democratize and maintain a vibrant and legitimate public sphere in
Zimbabwe, which is a legitimate democratic regime agenda.</span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br /></span>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001kwRKAxmYLOFW06ki4TbtlgPVduvXeh3QHEtYp8gm4gsG_mEJk4kBhE33U8tt_K5mFufipacFjyEaYgV6o8IWIRlPpf0GmC6dxyRoGkm6uLV7sf1k53x6Fw7YVBI6Ohn-hNJ_09kgwVmqg52ZGp4SgK1Fi_2QTDQZ5guh3rKd7d67e44g76p4Pfb5W-VKpr6TgfHGTXWWGcxKbMOolOa8VcJokJN1sv8E28ginl33X-8lmHuv56S8FQhpYjotUItj" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; font-size: 14.0pt; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Eritrean exiles use robocalls to organize resistance
- Audio</span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">By: Gregory Warner, NPR, May 2, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Eritrea's President Isaias Afwerki does not
tolerate any independent media, the Internet is restricted, and Reporters
without Borders recently named it 179th out of 179 countries for freedom of
expression. Isayas Sium, an Eritrean-American exile, had an idea to
subversively protest against the government: robocall Eritreans with a smuggled
phonebook and tell them not to go out as traditional on Friday night. They
called the movement "Freedom Friday." According to one activist,
Eritreans are "...not as fearful as she thought they'd be, as according to
inside sources and recent refugees who've fled, staying home on Friday nights
is becoming kind of cool</span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br /></span>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001kwRKAxmYLOHtdn_9DA030cYkbj4BUckm1kGDX2aHsuj7rKYyMc6jEYRis4Hx-xm5NSRL3FHKjjbKYuF7atPcxRoeg-VNfyZHLHZXuNjISuPeGigXaJ45sJyi2acLPmRrxAa5kBbrG64=" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">How activists and citizen journalists can take advantage of new
technologies</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt;">By: Adam Clayton Powell III, Good Governance Africa, May 2, 2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Citizen journalists, mostly untrained volunteer
newscasters, activists and whistle-blowers can take advantage of powerful new
technologies, many created in Africa, to collect and distribute their reports.
The power and ubiquity of inexpensive, low-end cellphones has increased, making
possible access to tools that can help spread information and safeguard
anonymity. For example, Mimiboard, a virtual noticeboard, won the most
votes at last year's Open Innovation Africa Summit and enables users to post,
via the web or SMS, events and information about social and political issues in
their communities - particularly when these citizen journalists and
activists who may not be able to operate openly.</span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br /></span>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><a href="http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001kwRKAxmYLOGL0KFZYvihJYTLnN7wIofbAkyt9fFXE4RTgTPf_5nZQqB_FwqXlvEgQIN2CXGKl7w7NJ7WLNJKqs-ZqtIYo-U4ArEvBz6fX0EaJ57o--vty7pr4ge0pfcHAZepkuo96G4Ped7atrLaWTRTrS9zFVpa" target="_blank"><span style="color: #49728a; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Community rights through authentic journalism</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt;">By: Felicity Clarke, School for Authentic Journalism, April 24,
2013</span></em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">For more than twenty years, Brazilian
authorities have maintained that the Vila Autódromo favela in Rio de Janeiro's
west zone doesn't belong and have attempted to remove it, citing aesthetic
damage, environmental damage, environmental risk and, more recently Olympic
Park developments as reasons. The community continues to resist, knowing their
legal right to the land and creating an alternative upgrading plan for the
community at a lower cost than relocation. This is where the School of
Authentic Journalism comes in: reporting for RioOnWatch in the last year, I
have been learning how journalism can empower people, even whole communities. </span><br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-72331143438398669532013-07-06T00:49:00.002-07:002013-07-06T00:49:19.244-07:00Zumaville<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0S8xzevOHNiezpdaLzZh77NjODmliWfbKrZXCxDYsLOOtXmaXURgy1LOgasf0QfBEeaZ__Qcgxr3eFogHMgt7V7dtJpSgeoG_XcysoPmL4k-W1up4he968RItSt6JVXuqkVhyphenhyphencAAScx6F/s1600/Zapiro_Zumaville.jpeg1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0S8xzevOHNiezpdaLzZh77NjODmliWfbKrZXCxDYsLOOtXmaXURgy1LOgasf0QfBEeaZ__Qcgxr3eFogHMgt7V7dtJpSgeoG_XcysoPmL4k-W1up4he968RItSt6JVXuqkVhyphenhyphencAAScx6F/s400/Zapiro_Zumaville.jpeg1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-34186537166996133952013-07-01T01:07:00.000-07:002013-07-01T01:07:08.391-07:00The fading beat of Drum magazine<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/sandilememela/2013/05/21/the-fading-beat-of-drum-magazine/">http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/sandilememela/2013/05/21/the-fading-beat-of-drum-magazine/</a><br />
<em style="border: 0px; color: #5a5a5a; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></em>
<em style="border: 0px; color: #5a5a5a; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em><span style="color: #5a5a5a; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"> </span><span style="color: #5a5a5a; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">was the only magazine when the winds of change were blowing through the African continent in 1957. It celebrated its 60th birthday recently.</span><br />
<div class="entry" style="border: 0px; color: #5a5a5a; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
The best talent available in the urban South African community was, like moth to light, attracted to the charismatic power of its visionary and prophetic founder, a Mr Jim Bailey. It was fate that brought them together.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
This collaboration of white economic power and black creative talent delivered a product that could not be ignored. It was taken seriously. There was no other publication like it anywhere else in the world.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> magazine was the bible of African creative thought, laying bare the heart and soul of a nation. It was intuitively connected to the people. Indeed, it was accepted as the “voice of the people”. Quite simply, it was who the urban African population were: strong, resilient and determined souls that confronted and transcended colonialism and apartheid conditions that were considered “a crime against humanity” in the middle of the 20th century.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
There was a wall. That wall of fire leaped as high as the skyscrapers. The wall was impenetrable white economic power and domination. And the African journalists lay prostrate before it. They had no choice. This led them to frustration, hard drinking, sexual promiscuity, fast living, and, ultimately, dying young in their efforts to escape monopoly clutches.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
But their eyes remained on the prize of speaking truth to power.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
We live in the reverberating sounds of the <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> beat. Readers are bombarded by images, primarily, of clowns who are mistaken for celebrities because they appear on television. It is a fleeting popular culture where those who have neither land nor wealth allow themselves to be portrayed as having everything.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Most of what we know about ourselves – people desperate for acknowledgement and recognition by any means necessary – is hyped by the new plastic age of <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em>. We live in a time where perception is reality. What is imagined, especially using the smoke and mirrors of high fashion, far-into-the-night drinking parties and soulless music stars – is more powerful than what is real. If it is featured in <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em>, then it is the new trend, the “in thing”.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
These days <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum’s</em> pictorial news, which can be considered a national album, is the source of the belief that in South Africa perception is reality. The mag is a leader in chronicling contemporary celebrities in the present tense.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
The Drum of Henry Nxumalo, Can Themba, Zeke Mphahlele, Bloke Modisane and Todd Matshikiza, to name a few, had this glitter and glamour to it, too. But they did not deliver that at the expense of truth. They understood that news and not fashion was an important job to do. Depending on how you look at things, today’s <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> has become an institution that reflects the pseudo-reality and thus fails the country every day.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
The reality of prison conditions, bludgeoned youth, poverty, unemployment, abortion, illiteracy is not special focus features in the new <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em>. Instead, it glows bright with the glamour and drama of fake glitterati. Popular figures created by a single appearance on a television soap opera are elevated into role models or super-achievers. Discerning readers recognise this as sowing the seeds of success measured by money and fame in the minds of gullible readers.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Drum journalists ride in hired limousines as VIP guests in the company of stars clothed in borrowed designer clothes. The gullible are most unlikely to see the blurring of lines as journalists must be objective and not take sides.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
The <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> of Nxumalo, Mphahlele and, of course, Stan Motjuwadi was to just tell South Africans and tourists the hard truths, the facts about failing freedom and the truth about empty democracy. What you need to know about the Dream Deferred of Chief Albert Luthuli, Robert Sobukwe and Steve Biko that was once reflected on its pages. That was what <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> used to do in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Adam Small’s eulogy to Biko in 1977, for instance, was the fastest selling <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> in history. In 1980 <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> sales were hovering around 200 000 copies.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
What is the role of <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> in a transitional society?</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Nxumalo, Themba, Mphahlele and Modisane would say it is to get under the skin of the new rulers and remind them of their obligation to the dream of a free and anti-racist society. This was the virus that drove them to self-sacrifice through hard drinking, promiscuous sex, hopelessness and, ultimately, exile and early death. This is the betrayal of patriots that the people need to know.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
There is cause for alarm now that this is not happening. <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> fought a vicious struggle against the heinous state that launched <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Pace</em> magazine just to dilute its political message. Much as it was not an ideological publication, it stood up for principle and was committed to the ideals of a new society.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
George Orwell’s prophetic<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> 1984 </em>marked a new era for <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em>. It was taken over by <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">verligte</em>former Afrikaner Broederbond members who desired to penetrate deeper into the African market and mind. The work of <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em>, now, is not necessarily politically conscious any more. In fact, it never was. Its journalism cannot exactly be defined as a calling. It is a big deal job with access to celebrity parties and petty scandals. The strategic objective has changed from what Jim Bailey wanted: to be a gadfly in the face of evil power. The emphasis, now, is maybe to please the shareholders and feed the beast called profit. The mission is not Sobukwe or Biko’s African personality, Black Consciousness or self-determination.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Instead, it is here to entertain by giving the people what they want. It is here to sell what will give people delusions and dreams to make them forget.<br />Gone is the spirit of Henry Nxumalo, Can Themba, Zeke Mphahlele or Stan Motjuwadi, for instance. There are no stories of enslaved farm workers, abused prisoners, abortion clinics or truly African divas that nourish the soul of the nation.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Everybody is a player now, playing the same game as the movers and shakers who will be written about tomorrow.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
There is a serious problem with the heartbeat of Africa today. It is the fading sound of the cowhide <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em>.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
But everyone seems to, generally, hate the press, today. It is not just <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em>. Even former cabinet spokesman Jimmy Manyi was especially critical of the desire to make profit at the expense of telling the country’s story.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Well, we can say what we will about <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em>. However, we must do it for the right reasons. It is not like it is now a conniving and conspiring institution that wants to keep the people ignorant of their history in the present. There are no executives who wish to dictate to its journalist what to write. Besides, <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> was part of the struggle for freedom of expression and the media in this country.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
The fact is, <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> was not an ideological publication. Its agenda was not to have an agenda besides providing entertainment news and, if possible, make profits for its owners. And to achieve that it must please and not provoke its readers. It must cheer and challenge its subjects.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Let the <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> beat go on to reverberate in our heart and soul no matter how faint the sound.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
The often repeated conspiracy theories about who owns <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> and what they want to use it for do not address the burning issues. It does not matter who owns the press. The loud complaints, if any, should be about the meaning and purpose of the journalists. How do they want to serve the country? The Nxumalos and Thembas made their choice. Today, the media is free despite the barking from the governing party.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
The dumbing down and the erasing of the legacy of what used to be done before is about the focus on the business of journalism which is about business and profits. It is about globalisation and how the media is not for truth but profits. Thus <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> has to create a news mix that will boost the advertising revenue. This is the new agenda.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> has lived through six decades of diminished seriousness and clout as it feeds the beast called the market. In a democracy, the people get what they deserve.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
And as Jim Bailey said, <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</em> can “go and do better”.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Now is the time.</div>
</div>
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Tags: <a href="http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/tag/drum/" rel="tag" style="border: 0px; color: #ee6f23; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Drum</a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-30686862862782066582013-06-29T00:47:00.000-07:002013-06-29T00:47:11.724-07:00Zuma and Obama: The meeting<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipAwU7dYWfoxsUhebVMK-ymUnVqRM57UrzO70nY1PpKS_zaMIQAnUEaAZIA7tfIg79jWuVS05iH5sCZRKIgqRE6lrlaPHuhtbkB86EzjGujezNRV0omVWzNz7h0jdM5GLTk2On-ckJjSxi/s916/Zuma_and_Obama.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipAwU7dYWfoxsUhebVMK-ymUnVqRM57UrzO70nY1PpKS_zaMIQAnUEaAZIA7tfIg79jWuVS05iH5sCZRKIgqRE6lrlaPHuhtbkB86EzjGujezNRV0omVWzNz7h0jdM5GLTk2On-ckJjSxi/s400/Zuma_and_Obama.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-70942295908565945262013-06-28T04:31:00.002-07:002013-06-28T04:31:46.180-07:00Atoning for the Sins of Empire by David M. Anderson<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN-GB">WARWICK, England — THE
British do not torture. At least, that is what we in Britain have always liked
to think. But not anymore. In a historic decision last week, the British
government agreed to compensate 5,228 Kenyans who were tortured and abused
while detained during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s. Each claimant will
receive around £2,670 (about $4,000). <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB"> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">The money is paltry. But
the principle it establishes, and the history it rewrites, are both profound.
This is the first historical claim for compensation that the British government
has accepted. It has never before admitted to committing torture in any part of
its former empire. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">In recent years there has
been a clamor for official apologies. In 2010, Britain formally apologized for
its army’s conduct in the infamous “Bloody Sunday” killings in Northern Ireland
in 1972, and earlier this year Prime Minister David Cameron visited Amritsar,
India, the site of a 1919 massacre, and expressed “regret for the loss of
life.” <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">The Kenyan case has been in
process for a decade in London’s High Court. The British fought to avoid paying
reparations, so the decision to settle is a significant change of direction.
The decision comes months ahead of the 50th anniversary of the British
departure from Kenya— once thought of as the “white man’s country” in East
Africa. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">The Kenya case turned on
the evidence of historians, including my own role as an expert witness. I
identified a large tranche of documents that the British government smuggled
out of Kenya in 1963 and brought back to London. The judge ordered the release
of this long-hidden “secret” cache, some 1,500 files. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">The evidence of torture
revealed in these documents was devastating. In the detention camps of colonial
Kenya, a tough regime of physical and mental abuse of suspects was implemented
from 1957 onward, as part of a government policy to induce detainees to obey
orders or to make confessions. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">The documents showed that
responsibility for torture went right to the top — sanctioned by Kenya’s
governor, Evelyn Baring, and authorized at cabinet level in London by Alan
Lennox-Boyd, then secretary of state for the colonies in Harold Macmillan’s
Conservative government. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">When told that torture and
abuse were routine in colonial prisons, Mr. Lennox-Boyd did not order that such
practices be stopped, but instead took steps to place them beyond legal
sanction. “Compelling force” was allowed, but defined so loosely as to permit
virtually any kind of physical abuse. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">Why did the British keep
these documents, instead of destroying them? Plenty else was burned, or dumped
at sea, as the British left Kenya. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">The answer lay in the
unease of some British colonial officers. Many did not like what they saw. When
the orders to torture came down, some realized the jeopardy they were in. These
men worried that it was they, not their commanders, who would carry the can. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">They were right to worry.
Official reports from the 1950s always blamed individual officers — the “bad
apples in the barrel” — for acts of abuse. But the blame lay not with junior
officers forced to implement a bad policy but with the senior echelons of a
colonial government that was rotten to the core. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">Kenya’s will not be the
last historical claims case. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office faces others,
some of which have been in progress for years. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">A case already before the
courts concerns the 1948 Batang Kali massacre in colonial Malaya, now Malaysia.
There, the relatives of innocent villagers — who were murdered by young
conscript soldiers ordered to shoot by an older, psychopathic sergeant major —
have asked for compensation. For Americans, the case has eerie echoes of
Vietnam. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">In Cyprus, translators
employed by the British during the 1950s told tales of electrocutions and
pulled fingernails as British intelligence officers tried to elicit information
about gunrunning. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">The case of Aden, now in
Yemen, could be the worst of all. In 1965, the British governor retreated up
the steps of his departing aircraft, firing his revolver at snipers arrayed
around the airport runway. This was not the “orderly retreat from empire” that
many historians would have us believe characterized British decolonization.
Britain’s brutality against its Yemeni enemies in Aden during those final days
has become a local legend. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">Though Britain is the first
former European colonial power to pay individual compensation to victims, other
countries have been confronted by similar accusations. In 2006, Germany offered
to pay millions of euros to the Namibian government to compensate for the
German Army’s genocide against the Herero tribe in the early 20th century. It
also issued a public apology in the capital, Windhoek. In 2011, the Dutch
government was ordered by the International Court of Justice to compensate
survivors of a 1947 massacre in colonial Indonesia; it has not yet paid. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">Historical research has
played its part in all these cases, but not all historians are happy with the
way things are turning out. Leading historians of British colonialism have long
tended to rejoice in a benevolent, liberal view of imperialism. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">The British historians
Andrew Roberts, Niall Ferguson and Max Hastings have all nailed their colors to
the mast of the good ship Britannia as she sailed the ocean blue bringing
civilization and prosperity to the world. This view seems unlikely to be
credible for much longer. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">Empire was built by
conquest. It was violent. And decolonization was sometimes a bloody, brutal
business. No American should need reminding of that. And Britain, along with
other imperial powers of the 19th and 20th centuries, may yet have to pay for
this. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">Torture is torture, whoever
the perpetrator, whoever the victim. Wrongs should be put right. Whatever
wrongs were done in the name of Britain in Kenya in the 1950s, the British
government has now delivered modest reparations to some victims. And maybe we
in Britain have also finally begun to come to terms with our imperial past. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB">Would the United States be
so accommodating to a similar claim? In the current political climate, probably
not. But times change. Fifty years from now, will Americans face claims from
Guantánamo survivors? You might, and perhaps you should. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<span lang="EN-GB">David M. Anderson, a
professor of African history at the University of Warwick, is the author of
“Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire.
'” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-83234921526697779172013-06-28T02:47:00.003-07:002013-06-28T02:48:51.200-07:00An open letter to Nelson Mandela by Ben Trovato<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">'I would like to see you make enough of a recovery to flirt with a nurse, shout at a doctor, condemn the ANC for tolerating incompetence and fostering corruption, and send the journalists sloping back to their lairs thinking it’s another false alarm. Then, quite unexpectedly, you go off to heaven to organise an armed uprising against the tyranny of God'</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Your slapping PW Botha’s hand aside in 1985 and saying, “With all due respect, Meneer Botha, if you want to free me, you have to free all of us, or you can go fuck yourself” resonated with the nation. It taught us the principle of all for one and one for all.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Dear Madiba,</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">You probably won’t get this because the mail doesn’t always get through to the intensive care unit at the Pretoria Medi-Clinic Heart Hospital, but I thought I’d write to you anyway.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">I have a feeling that nobody tells you anything these days, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You wouldn’t want to be on Facebook or have a Twitter account. It would make you angrier than Winnie ever did.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">You are causing quite a commotion, I can tell you. I don’t recall ever seeing every major television network in the world running this many lead stories about an old man lying in a hospital bed. You’d laugh. I’m sure you would.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Dozens of them are out there right now, sleeping rough on the cold streets of Jozi, waiting for you to kick the bucket. Some people are calling them vultures. They aren’t, really. They just want to be there when you do decide to shuffle off this mortal coil. Knowing Jacob Zuma’s impish sense of humour, he will hold a press conference in Pretoria when he gets the call. What fun it would be to see all those outside broadcast vans scrambling for the N1. I think the Americans will get there first. As you know, they can be pretty pushy when it comes to getting what they want. After all, it was George Herbert Walker Bush who got you out of jail, not FW de Klerk. Am I right?</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">It’s costing the international media tens of thousands of dollars a day to maintain a presence outside your hospital. Live feeds don’t come cheap these days. They are not bad people. But you are costing them money. And there are other stories to be covered. They are hungry, thirsty, dirty and tired. Most of them, dare I say, would appreciate it tremendously if you popped off sooner rather than later.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">I would like to see you make enough of a recovery to flirt with a nurse, shout at a doctor, condemn the ANC for tolerating incompetence and fostering corruption, and send the journalists sloping back to their lairs thinking it’s another false alarm. Then, quite unexpectedly, you go off to heaven to organise an armed uprising against the tyranny of God.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">A reporter for the Sophiatown Sun, lost and drunk, staggers past the hospital and lands the scoop of the century. That’s the kind of poetry this country needs right now.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">I’m not sure if you know this, but you do have your critics. In medieval times, they would have been burnt at the stake. However, few of us can afford steak these days. I’m sorry. This is no time for jokes.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Your critics, most of whom have good jobs and live in the suburbs, say that you were too soft on the white people. That instead of national reconciliation, there should have been a policy of national retribution. I don’t always know if they’re proposing a pound of flesh or a pound of Sterling.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Looking back, you might perhaps have done more to encourage the rich to give to the poor. Thabo Mbeki confused the rich with his sophisticated pipe-smoking ways and post-prandial, neo-Marxist, watch-out-for-the-tokoloshe talk. Then Jacob Zuma came along and scared the rich right out of the country.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">I see some of your family has come to visit you. That’s lovely. Did you see Zaziwe Dlamini-Manaway and Swati Dlamini? Security probably blocked them because they had a bigger television crew than CNN. Imagine trying to get into the hospital by claiming that you have your own TV show called Being Mandela, but your ID says Dlamini-what-what.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Most of your judgment calls were spot on. Becoming a lawyer, for instance. That was a brilliant idea. The Boers would never have dared arrest a lawyer. Oh, wait.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">But having been acquitted at Rivonia, you should have gone to ground. What the hell were you doing on the R103? You should have been on the N2. It’s quicker and the filth only put up roadblocks over Easter.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">You know what else you should have done? You should have started a fitness class. Did you ever watch one of Jane Fonda’s workout videos? That would have been in 1982, the same year you were transferred from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">If you had come out of jail and launched a health and lifestyle video, you would be a rich man today. Oh, right. You are a rich man. Well, you were until your lawyers, family, friends and enemies started tearing each other apart to get a slice of that big ol’ Madiba pie.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">All I’m saying is that you’re still alive at 94, whereas a lot of people who didn’t spend 20 years on an island aren’t. Sure, it wasn’t exactly Humming Bird Cay in the Bahamas, but you got lots of fresh air, a fair bit of exercise in the limestone quarry, early nights, no alcohol and no women. I think I would rather die young. But that’s just me.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">I won’t tell you about the things that are going on in the name of the liberation struggle because you’d probably have a heart attack and then my letter to you would be redundant. I would have wasted a couple of hours and you’d feel that you would have wasted your entire life.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Your slapping PW Botha’s hand aside in 1985 and saying, “With all due respect, Meneer Botha, if you want to free me, you have to free all of us, or you can go fuck yourself” resonated with the nation. It taught us the principle of all for one and one for all. Now it’s just a free for all. But that’s not your problem. Nor is it your fault. The white pigs emigrated and left the trough wide open for the black pigs. We are human animals. It’s our nature.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">I don’t believe you stopped a genocidal bloodbath. But if you did, thank you for that. What you did do, though, was lift the name South Africa out of the rotten stinking fetid swamp that the National Party had dragged it into. You gave our country a name that we – oppressed and oppressors – could at last be proud of.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">So it’s midnight on June 13th, 2013. I raise my glass to you, Madiba.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Hamba kahle.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Ben Trovato is the Cape Town-based author. He also writes the Whipping Boy column for the Sunday Times. This article is taken from his </span><a href="http://bentrovatowhippingboy.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/an-open-letter-to-nelson-mandela/" style="background-color: white; color: #cc3300; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px; text-decoration: none;">blog</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-78642687484601127262013-06-28T02:25:00.004-07:002013-06-28T02:25:48.907-07:00Walter Rodney in Tanzania: A tribute by Issa Shivji<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeUAbUIiK8EL7JmydMuWB40wTr4hciEfQ-kGFUNSowW1zr_AeopDwZ_hgn6_dAJM8sJelKcUtbTDyJrKW0oaFm3gx3Z9mB1cBgs9ctm3qZbCLUnXr9vPrh8JX3ogbe9QUrY8ZlOqyMP86e/s128/walter.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeUAbUIiK8EL7JmydMuWB40wTr4hciEfQ-kGFUNSowW1zr_AeopDwZ_hgn6_dAJM8sJelKcUtbTDyJrKW0oaFm3gx3Z9mB1cBgs9ctm3qZbCLUnXr9vPrh8JX3ogbe9QUrY8ZlOqyMP86e/s200/walter.jpg" width="159" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><b>Walter was an institution. He left a huge shadow on the left, on the African left, and in Tanzania itself. His own learning and foundation were laid in the east African nation. </b></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">I grew up in the eastern region of Tanzania, where I did my primary school. All my secondary school I did in Dar es Salaam—actually, living in this very apartment. So I grew up here. Then in 1966 I completed my high school, and in 1967 I joined the university. At that time it was the University College, Dar es Salaam, because it was part of the University of East Africa. Nineteen Sixty-Seven was an important year because the year before there had been a student demonstration that opposed the government’s proposal to start National Service, which was mandatory for university students. You had to spend about five months in the camps, and for the next eighteen months 40 percent of your salary would be deducted. Students opposed it. The president, Julius Nyerere, “sent them down”: expelled them for a year.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">That started a whole rethinking about the university, and there was a big conference on the role of the university. Then in February 1967 came the Arusha Declaration. [1] The ruling party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), issued the Arusha Declaration and a policy of socialism and self-reliance. Our word in Kiswahili, Ujamaa (translated as extended family or familyhood), became the official policy. A number of companies in the commanding heights of the national economy were nationalized by the government. That started a whole new debate at the university.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Walter Rodney had just come from SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) and became a young lecturer here.[2] In the conference on rethinking the role of the university in now socialist Tanzania, he played a very important role. So, when I joined the university in July 1967, it was a campus with lots of discussions and debates in which Rodney participated. So that’s my background. From 1967 to 1970, I did my Bachelor of Laws degree in the Faculty of Law. I went to England in 1970 to do my master’s, came back in 1971, and from ’71 to ’72 I did my National Service. Since then, I have been at the university and participated in the various debates and writings.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">In 2006, I retired from the Faculty of Law because we have a statutory retirement age of sixty. But I was appointed the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Chair in Pan-African Studies. It’s newly established and I am the first holder of that Chair. So I am back at the university.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">I can’t recall if Walter came before or after the demonstrations, but he certainly participated in the discussion that followed after the 1966 expulsion and after the Arusha Declaration. After the Declaration, in ’67, ’68, there was a small group of people called the Socialist Club in which Malawians, Ugandans, Ethiopians, and many other students were involved. The Socialist Club was transformed into the University Students African Revolutionary Front (USARF). It was all the initiative of students, not the faculty. Walter was one of the few young faculty involved, but purely within a relationship of equality. There was no professor and student there.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">The students were very militant, and the Revolutionary Front, in which I was a member, was led by the chairman, Yuweri Museveni, who is now the president of Uganda, and a number of other comrades were involved in the leadership. Then in 1968 we established the organ of the USARF, which was called Cheche. This was a cyclostyled student journal containing many militant articles and analyses of not only Tanzania but the world situation and the role of young people in the African revolution. In the first issue, Rodney had an article. He wrote something on labour. I too had an article, called “Educated Barbarians.” This was our first issue. It actually became, we realized only later, a very important journal circulated as far as the United States. There were some study groups anxiously waiting for the journal to come out. The third issue was a special issue called “The Silent Class Struggle.” This was a long essay, written by me, which basically argued that we should not judge socialism simply by listening to what people say, what leaders say, but by what is actually happening in reality: What are the relations of production being created and the class interests involved? So, we worked on the whole question of the development of class and which class is the agency for building socialism. The issue that followed carried commentary on my long essay. One of the comments was by Walter Rodney, and after that the journal was banned and the organization deregistered.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">The reasons given were simply that we don’t need foreign ideology. We have our own ideology: Ujamaa. Cheche is a Kiswahili word. Translated it’s “to spark.” The Spark was Nkrumah’s journal, but Spark was a translation from Iskra, Lenin’s journal. So what the students did immediately after that was change the name to MajiMaji. Now, MajiMaji is a reference to the first revolt, 1905, of the people in Tanganyika and the coast against German imperialism. This was called the MajiMaji War, the MajiMaji Rebellion. The journal continued for some time after that and continued to publish militant articles. Though USARF was banned, many of the leaders of USARF took over the TANU League. The TANU League was the youth arm of the ruling party, and they continued their militant activities.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Ten to fifteen years, beginning in the 1980s, the last period of Mwalimu Nyerere, and particularly the last five years, were very critical. We were engulfed in a serious crisis: economic and political. For the first time, the legitimacy of the political regime was questioned. Since Mwalimu Nyerere stepped down in 1985, the various policies of his government have been reversed under pressure from the World Bank, the IMF, and the donors, particularly from Western imperialism. The 1980s were also the beginning of the fall of the Soviet Union. One of the sites that were attacked, ideologically, was the university. The World Bank was telling Africa you don’t need universities, that they were white elephants, and what you needed to do was to place emphasis on primary education. The university was starved of resources. The faculty also began to move out, finding greener pastures either outside the country or in research institutes, consultancies, think tanks, and so on. Much of the period of vigorous debates was heavily affected by the reorientation of the university. The university was turned into a factory to support and answer to the needs of the market. So faculties of commerce and the professional faculties became much more dominant. The last fifteen to twenty years at the university—all the gains of the Nyerere period have been reversed. One of the objectives of the Nyerere Chair is to try to reclaim to the extent possible the old debates and to reintroduce and redirect the debates on campus.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">In the old period, the international context was very different. It was a period high on revolution. You had the civil rights movement in the United States. You had the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War mobilized young people all over the world. You had the French student demonstrations. You had the liberation movements in Southern Africa, which were based in Dar es Salaam and strongly supported by Mwalimu Nyerere. The students at the university had very close connections with the liberation movements. Members of USARF went to liberated areas and lived there. All over the world, there were vigorous debates going on. This was the first decade of independence in Africa. The whole meaning of independence for Africans was questioned—is it real independence?—and there was talk about neo-colonialism.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Some of the texts fondly read were Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism, and texts by Samir Amin, Paul Baran, and Paul Sweezy.[3] These were the kinds of things read, and also classics of Marxism. So the international context was certainly at a highpoint all over the world. One interesting example of the kind of contradictory situation we had was a seminar of East and Central Africa youth organized under the youth league of the party. It was held at Nkrumah Hall at the university. A lot of our comrades delivered papers. Rodney also delivered a paper. At that time, there were the hijackings by the Palestine Liberation Organization. His paper referred to that. It was a very militant paper about the African revolution and so on castigating the first independent regimes as petit bourgeois regimes that had hijacked the revolution. He called it the “briefcase revolution,” where the leaders went to Lancaster House, compromised, and came back with independence and this was not real independence.[4]</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">This paper was published in the Party [TANU] newspaper called The Nationalist. Nyerere took very strong objection to it. The next day the newspaper carried an editorial called, “Revolutionary Hot Air,” and in very strong terms attacked Rodney for preaching violence to young people.[5] It basically said that while, of course, we were trying to build a socialist society, our socialist society would be built on our own concrete conditions, and you cannot preach violence and violent overthrow of brotherly African governments. He said Rodney is welcome to stay here but not to preach violence to young people. When that editorial appeared, I remember the morning the newspapers came out, we read the editorial and all of us suspected, until more was confirmed, that that editorial was written by President Nyerere himself. We had prepared this special issue of MajiMaji in which all the seminar papers would be carried. One of our comrades, when he read the editorial, became so scared that he took all the papers we had collected and burned them, and in the process scorched the front grass lawn near the student dormitories.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Then Rodney replied in a long letter, a very interesting letter. Basically, he defended himself, but he was also appeasing in that he was thankful and grateful he was allowed to stay here and that when he talked about capitalism and neo-colonialism he was only talking about that system which carried his ancestors as slaves into other parts of the world, and now he was trying to establish a reconnection and talk about this gruesome system which is still with us.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">His famous book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was written here. If you look at the preface of that book, there are two people he thanked personally for reading the manuscript and both of them happened to be students, Karim Hirji and Henry Mapolu. That was the relationship we had with Walter. Museveni knew him very well. Museveni was also a student of political science.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">After 1967, one of the important movements started by the students themselves was that knowledge cannot be compartmentalized. It’s holistic, and whether you are doing science or law or political science, the knowledge must be integrated. The Faculty of Law was the first to start a course called “Problems of East Africa,” in which lecturers from different departments participated, and Rodney was one of them. That course then evolved into what was known as a “common course,” which was compulsory for all the students coming into the university. That further evolved into what became the Institute of Development Studies and later it became the Institute of East African Social and Economic Problems. These were common courses in the formal syllabi. But we the students had our own ideological classes. We met every Sunday, and we were assigned readings; some came with readings, made presentations, everyone participated to do what we called “arm ourselves” ideologically. Again, Rodney was a prominent participant in these ideological classes. This was totally voluntary. What we read and discussed was then taken to the classroom. We would not allow lecturers to get away with anything without being challenged.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">So debates continued outside the classroom and inside the classroom, and there was a close relationship with the liberation movements. All the important leaders of the liberation movements came to the university, gave lectures, participated in debates, from Eduardo Mondlane to Gora Ibrahim of the Pan-African Congress.[6] I remember Stokely Carmichael came. C.L.R. James came to Dar es Salaam and gave fantastic lectures for a whole week. Cheddi Jagan from Guyana came and gave a lecture.[7] East African leaders, including Oginga Odinga, came and gave a lecture.[8] The “Front” (USARF) never missed an opportunity. Whatever events took place in Africa, there would be a statement by the “Front” analyzing and taking a position on it. The USARF positions were taken very seriously by the liberation movements. Samora Machel came and talked to the students. There would not be a single night without some lecture taking place.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">There was a time when there was a bit of a split. This internal division was partly a reaction to the split in international socialism, between China and the Soviet Union. The Dar es Salaam campus followed very closely that debate of the Communist Party of China and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: the rising socialist imperialism. We had lots of discussions on that. But many of them were internal splits within our groups.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">This idea that Rodney left Dar es Salaam because of, or just ahead of, an order to leave—I do not think it’s true. If it were true, he would have definitely told us. Don’t forget, Rodney left early and went to Jamaica. From Jamaica he was deported. That’s where he wrote his very famous pamphlet Groundings with My Brothers. After the riots in Jamaica, he came back to Dar es Salaam. Then he left in 1974. Now, when he was about to leave, I remember specifically a personal conversation. We were driving from the campus, and at the time he and Pat were preparing to leave for Guyana. I told Walter, I said, “Walter, why do you have to go? Look, stay here. You can easily try and get your citizenship and continue the struggle. You don’t have to go back.” He said, “No, comrade. I can make my contribution here but I will not be able ever to grasp the idiom of the people. I will not be able to connect easily. I have to go back to the people I know and who know me.” I heeded that. That was his position and he left.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Then during the Zimbabwe independence celebration—he had returned to Guyana and formed the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) and we closely followed it. On his way to Zimbabwe, and this was a time when the movement was in trouble, he passed through and stayed with one of our comrades here. This comrade told him, “Walter stay, don’t go back. Guyana is dangerous.” There was a case against him in court. Walter said, “No, I cannot just run away. I have to go back.” So it is certainly not true that he was pushed out.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">It’s more believable that he was pulled because he felt he could make his contribution there, in Guyana. And he did, in my view. One can make critical assessments in hindsight, but one of the things we appreciated, and came to learn from, the Party, the WPA, was how it managed to bring together Indian and African youth. This was a real breakthrough. Of course, there were other problems. So my own view is that Walter was not forced out of Tanzania. It could not be true. If so, we would have known.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Even at that time, while we understood Rodney’s background, the comrades here sometimes did not fully subscribe to his positions on race. We often told him that while it was understood in the North American situation, here it could not be applied. Another issue where we had strong disagreement was in relation to a piece he wrote called “Ujamaa as Scientific Socialism.” This was the early seventies. He was trying to show, drawing on the Narodniks, that Ujamaa is scientific socialism.[9] Before he published that, we met and had a discussion on his draft. We had some heated exchanges and vigorously disagreed with him. We argued that you cannot identify petit bourgeois socialism as scientific socialism. At the end of it, Rodney said he would defer to his Tanzanian comrades since we were the ones who knew the situation here. He went ahead and published it. We did not expect he would. So what I am trying to say, coming from a different background, is that we did not accept everything with unanimity.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">But we realized Walter was an institution. Whenever we had differences we met internally and sorted it out. He left a huge shadow here, on the left, on the African left, and in Tanzania itself. His own learning and foundation were laid here. When he came to Dar es Salaam, he came essentially as a young academic from SOAS, where he had just finished his PhD. His years here were an important period of formation of his own ideas. Like it was an important period for the rest of us. I think his national fame came after the book and, of course, was connected with what happened in Jamaica. I’ll try to be as fair as possible. My own view is there were aspects of Rodney’s organizational inclination which I think, in a sense, exposed him. Of course, a powerful movement like that is bound to have enemies. But I am not quite sure if Rodney always paid enough attention: to a matter of tactics, number one, and number two, to security of the leadership. It does happen with powerful leaders like Rodney, the movement tends to become very dependent on single leaders. That is one lesson to draw. When that leader goes, invariably the movement falls apart. That’s what seems to have happened in Guyana. While in theory, of course, we talk about the importance of the movement, importance of the people, importance of the working people, in practice we always find it difficult to build movements which can continue regardless of original leadership.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Of course, I do not know at the moment, and I keep asking people from there, if there has been a critical assessment of the WPA. I haven’t seen one myself. I also get the feeling that once Rodney went and the movement fell apart, even the leaders seemed to disintegrate. I am not sure if any of them have gone back and tried to reassess it.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">While Walter was militant in the Guyana situation, if anything, the impression I got was that his main contribution was building a mass movement. I may be wrong. But I always took the WPA to be a mass movement and not an underground conspiratorial group. If at a certain point the WPA, after assessment, reached the conclusion that there was no other way except armed struggle, I don’t know. I never really came across an assessment. But certainly, from what we know and the way it operated, the image I have of the WPA is of Rodney as its collective leader. Another very interesting contribution of the WPA: collective leadership, with all the mass of youth behind them, walking the streets, going to a sugar plantation. This is the image I have of the WPA. That image is not totally consistent with some kind of conspiratorial group and armed struggle.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">But there are two aspects, particularly for the period we are going through now: collective leadership and a mass movement are important contributions, something to learn from. Not to ignore the circumstances connected with armed struggle, but I think one thing we have learned is that armed struggle alone, without a mass movement, has a tendency to deteriorate. And once again the importance of politics rather than militarism is coming back. I remember in the early eighties I was on a lecture tour in the United States and Canada, and the point I kept emphasizing was that the period we were going through in Africa then was essentially a period of the insurrection of ideas, insurrection of mass movements, open mass movements, rather than underground armed struggle groups: in other words, insurrectional politics. To a certain extent we saw insurrectional politics in the movement that started after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the so-called democratization movement. In West Africa and elsewhere, it became a mass movement.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Of course, it was suppressed, preempted; it was hijacked in many ways. What was essentially insurrectional politics for real democracy was hijacked into multi-parties. Multi-parties is not the end-all of democracy. The liberal Western model cannot simply be adopted, in my view. But those ten to fifteen years of liberal politics and neoliberal economics, I think, are coming to an end. The neoliberal honeymoon is over. Interestingly, there is a whole new, other way of thinking.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Let me give you my own experience in this country. In the few events I organized under the Nyerere Chair, it’s amazing to see how young people want to know more about where we are coming from. For that purpose, today, we are beginning to see people talking about the historical experience, talking about Ujamaa. At one time, Ujamaa had become a term of abuse. Nyerere used to say, “If I was to talk about Ujamaa openly I would be considered a fool. I can only whisper about it.” But now these ideas are coming back. They are being recalled. In my view, the whole imperialist, neoliberal onslaught is coming to end. Of course, it won’t happen tomorrow. But it doesn’t hold the same ideological pull it once supposedly held. There is a lot of rethinking going on in the world. All over Latin America we are witnessing it. So it’s an interesting period.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">Now, I don’t think we can repeat or just reclaim the past, of course, but we will learn from it and people will want to know where we are coming from.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">The current situation in Africa also points to some of the problems of old and the old debates we had. While individuals play an important role, individuals do not necessarily characterize the whole movement. Individuals do get transformed once they get into power. A very good example is our own Yuweri Museveni, who was a militant, a Fanonist actually, during his student days and what he has become subsequently. I think to understand it much more we must view it in terms of the social, political, economic forces of the time. In the case of Mugabe, we have to go back to history. ZANU’s (Zimbabwe African National Union’s) accession to power was a kind of compromise. In which some of the African leaders I know of were involved, including Nyerere. They pushed ZANU to accept that compromise. You will notice—and more work has to be done on this—that in the case of liberation movements at very critical times in South Africa and Zimbabwe, some of the important leaders held a clear vision of what they wanted their societies to be. These leaders were bumped off: Hani in the ANC (African National Congress) and, in Zimbabwe, Herbert Chitepo.[10]</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">When the leaders came to power, they inherited the state structures. Look, for example, at Zimbabwe. The “Lancaster compromise” meant that for ten years they could not touch the land occupied by white settlers. Land was the leading issue for which the people fought. And Mugabe did not take action. The new people who came to power began to develop themselves into a class of their own, so to speak. The land question had to be addressed. But by the time Mugabe addressed it conditions had changed affecting the way he finally addressed it, that led to the situation we are in—to the extent that now you cannot even mobilize your own people to support your anti-imperialist stand. So anything said is just rhetoric. There are complex issues of how those leaders addressed those issues. Particularly in Africa, we notice that when progressive leaders come to power, they find themselves in difficulty because they are not rooted in the people and do not take their messages from the people. Without knowing the pulse of the people, they immediately become alienated. They become prisoners of the structures they inherited.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">So there is a lot to be said about movements that may look protected, confused, but are movements from below. It remains to be seen to what extent the left, or revolutionary elite, will learn from that movement, integrate themselves within it, before they claim to know and to teach. There is a lot of learning, a lot of learning, to be done.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">* Issa G. Shivji is the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Chair at the University of Dar Es Salaam, and hosts the annual Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Intellectual Festival. This essay is adapted from the new Monthly Review Press book, ‘Water A. Rodney: A Promise of Revolution’, edited by Clairmont Chung. The book is comprised of oral histories by academics, writers, artists, and political activists who knew the great writer and revolutionary, Walter Rodney, intimately or felt his influence.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">NOTES</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">1. ↩ The Arusha Declaration is a manifesto that offers guidelines for the practice of a brand of ethics that promotes equality and mutual respect informed by African history and culture.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">2. ↩ University of London, School of African and Oriental Studies.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">3. ↩ Frantz Fanon, was a Martinique-born, French-trained psychiatrist who described the psyche of oppression and the coming revolution in his books; Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah was Ghana’s first president, founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, and a father of the Pan-African movement; Samir Amin is a noted Egyptian economist and head of CODESRIA, based in Dakar, Senegal; Paul A. Baran was a Stanford University professor of economics known for his Marxist views, who wrote The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press,1957); and ;Paul M. Sweezy was a Marxist economist, political activist, publisher, editor, and founder of the magazine Monthly Review.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">4. ↩ Lancaster House, situated in West London and once part of St. James’s Palace, is used by the foreign affairs department to host talks. It hosted the Zimbabwe independence talks as well as Guyana’s.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">5. ↩ The Nationalist, in its December 13, 1969, editorial quoting Rodney’s paper said, “The Paper stated that ‘armed struggle is the inescapable and logical means of obtaining freedom’ and that independence which was achieved peacefully could not, by definition, be real independence for the masses.” Reprinted in Chemchemi: Fountain of Ideas 3 (April 2010).</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">6. ↩ Born in Mozambique, Eduardo Mondlane attended college and graduate school in the United States. He returned to the region and was elected president of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), which was formed in Tanzania, and served until his assassination in 1969. After independence in 1975, the university in the Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, was renamed Eduardo Mondlane University. Ahmed Gora Ebrahim served as secretary of the PAC’s department of foreign affairs. The Pan-African Congress was seen as a “black consciousness” prong in&a mp;a mp;a mp;n bsp;the movement to end apartheid in South Africa.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">7. ↩ Cheddi Jagan was the first premier of Guyana and led the movement for independence through the People’s Progressive Party (PPP). The party split in 1955. Forbes Burnham led the exodus and formed the People’s National Congress (PNC). With assistance from the United States and Britain, Burnham became premier in 1964 and led the negotiations for Guyana’s independence, which came in 1966.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">8. ↩ Kenyan freedom fighter Oginga Odinga served briefly as vice president under Jomo Kenyatta but resigned after differences with him. He continued in political life despite being jailed and often detained by Kenyatta and his successors.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">9. ↩ The Narodniks represented a school of thought that originated in Russia sometime in the 1860s. They saw the peasantry as the revolutionary class that would overthrow the monarchy, and the village commune as the embryo of socialism, but believed the peasantry required a middle class or its equivalent to help engineer the revolution.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14.703125px;">10. ↩ Chris Hani, a lifelong member of the African National Congress in South Africa, was assassinated in 1993 by right-wing opponents of the ongoing negotiations to end apartheid. Hani once headed the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Herbert Chitepo, a huge figure in the Zimbabwe liberation struggle and the ZANU in particular, died on March 18, 1975, in Lusaka, Zambia, when a car bomb exploded. It killed him, his driver, and a neighbor. He was the first black African qualified as a barrister in (then-named) Rhodesia.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-8677385769240357732013-06-26T08:44:00.000-07:002013-06-26T08:52:40.102-07:00Stealing an Election....<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-50861368120838449782013-06-23T08:28:00.003-07:002013-06-23T08:30:57.596-07:00BIG NEWS: The Unga tax is dead!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="text-align: left;">We did it! </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #010101; text-align: left;">The
National Treasury of Kenya has removed the 16% tax hike on Unga, milk
and flour from the VAT bill! </span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Lato Regular"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">From community forums to commuter trains, football
terraces to facebook pages, and on radio and TV, Kenyans for Tax Justice were
joined by thousands of people in Kenya and around the world showing the power
of organising. </span><span style="font-family: "Lato Regular"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We
helped change a bill that would have crippled already struggling
households. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">You helped to change the rules! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://barazalataifa.blogspot.com/"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Patrick Kamotho</span></a></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12.0pt;">, an organiser
with Bunge la Mwananchi, part of the Kenyans for Tax Justice campaign, said
today “I joined this campaign for tax justice because the Unga tax bill was
another way the poor were going to be forced to carry the country on their
backs. Already so many households in
places like Muthurwa can’t put food on the table. Thousands said no to Unga tax
and showed the power of the people!”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is only the beginning. We must keep a
close eye on the government to make sure they don’t retract this commitment,
and we must keep working to make sure that Kenya doesn’t become a tax haven.
But today is a good day. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Please share [insert share link] this news
with your friends and family. The more visible this progress, the better. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With thanks, and in hope<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Kenyans for Tax
Justice</span><span style="font-family: Lato Regular;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-67745111549869066222013-06-23T08:14:00.000-07:002013-06-23T08:14:04.751-07:00Exposing the invisible: African Women and the OAU by Amira Ali<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h2 style="background-color: white; border-top-color: rgb(51, 0, 0); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em; margin: 12px 0px 0px; padding: 4px 0px 0px;">
Exposing the invisible: African Women and the OAU</h2>
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Amira Ali</h4>
<h4 style="background-color: white; color: #330033; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 0.9em; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; margin: 2px 0px 6px; padding: 0px;">
2013-05-30, Issue <a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/632" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">632</a></h4>
<h4 style="background-color: white; color: #330033; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 0.9em; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; margin: 2px 0px 6px; padding: 0px;">
<a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/87606" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/87606</a></h4>
<a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pub=fahamutech" style="background-color: white; color: #cc3300; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="Bookmark and Share" height="16" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/lg-share-en.gif" style="border: 0px;" width="125" /></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"></span><br />
<h4 style="background-color: white; color: #330033; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 0.9em; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; margin: 2px 0px 6px; padding: 0px;">
<a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/87606/print" rel="external" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Printer friendly version</a></h4>
<h4 style="background-color: white; color: #330033; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 0.9em; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; margin: 2px 0px 6px; padding: 0px;">
There is 1 <a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/87606#comments" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">comment</a> on this article.</h4>
<div class="ar_summary" style="background-color: white; border: 2px solid rgb(204, 0, 0); font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 5px; overflow: hidden; padding: 5px; width: 475px;">
Though little acknowledged, one year prior to the founding of the OAU, Pan African Women’s Organization was formed in 1962 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It could be said that PAWO was the building block, the impetus, for the establishment of the OAU</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em; line-height: 1.1em; margin-top: 2px; padding: 0px;">
‘I can hear the roar of women’s silence’ – Thomas Sankara<br /><br /><br />May 25 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Organization of the African Union (OAU), an epic occasion for the African States, post-colonialism. The long, wide and high road to this unity is an unbroken celebration in the hearts and minds of many Africans. The dignity of our brave forbearers, their fervor for freedom and relentless fight against the current of imperialism; their spirit runs deep in our veins.<br /><br />In our observance, usually, our narratives take on male features; we tend to have male dominant memories. The memory is etched by means of language (in the English language) words effectively crafted with authority identifiable to the male adjective. This hegemonic masculinity plays itself out through words like ‘History’, ‘fore fathers’, etc, embodying and sustaining attitudes towards the idea of reality and antiquity.<br /><br />Unfortunately, history as a male domain has become acceptable, and it will continue to be so until we, women and men begin to reclaim the prominent role of women in ‘her story’. As narratives are the result of choices made, in the African context, as a woman and an African-woman, there is responsibility to create space(s) for the silenced and/ stories from the subaltern, from the margin. To celebrate the OAU formation in a male dominant narrative would be effectively equal to casting-off self, allowing the invisibility and reducing the worth of self and women.<br /><br />We salute Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Seku Toure, Julius Nyerere, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Ketema Yifru –an avid Pan-Africanist who played a eminent role –and others who made this day possible, supporting the rich tradition of African collaboration that dates back nearly 40 years to the formation of the OAU. The independence of African states to form the OAU was also made possible by chief freedom fighters such as Patrice Lumumba, Steve Biko, Duse Mohamed Ali, Cheikh Anta Diop, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Amilcar Cabral, JE Casely Hayford, and in the diaspora, W.E.B Du Bois, grassroots organizers such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, to name a few, influential Pan-Africanist who fought for years for the unification and liberation of African people.<br /><br />Though much is not remarked, one year prior to the founding of the OAU, Pan African Women’s Organization (PAWO) was formed in 1962, in Dar es Salaam Tanzania. The basis was the total liberation of the African continent, and the institution of a joint justice. Thus, it could be said that PAWO was the building block, the impetus, for the establishment of the OAU. Women such as Jeanne Martin Cisse, Diallo Virginie Camara, Pumla Kisosonkole, and others were notable in leading PAWO. The PAWO, including the OAU, was shaped and stands tall today, due to the willful strength and weight of African-Women-revolutionaries who paved the way, through participation in armed resistance and engagement of anticonlonial struggles.<br /><br />We pay tribute to: Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, Yaa Asantewaa, Margaret Ekpo, Winnie Mandela, Miriam Makeba, Queen Nzinga, Aba Womens’ Revolt of Nigeria, Muhumusa and the order of the Nyabingi’s movement, and many more. In the history of time, women, in the social and political struggles were commanding sponsors, organizers, supporters and leaders.<br /><br />Lest we forget</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-6562153280653957112013-06-23T08:07:00.002-07:002013-06-23T08:07:25.476-07:00‘The post-colonial state in Africa’ by Prof. Crawford Young<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h2 style="background-color: white; border-top-color: rgb(51, 0, 0); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; font-size: 1.1em; margin: 12px 0px 0px; padding: 4px 0px 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">‘The post-colonial state in Africa’</span></h2>
<h4 style="background-color: white; color: #330033; font-size: 0.9em; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; margin: 2px 0px 6px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Okello Oculi</span></h4>
<h4 style="background-color: white; color: #330033; font-size: 0.9em; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; margin: 2px 0px 6px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2013-05-30, Issue <a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/632" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">632</a></span></h4>
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<a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/books/87619" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/87619</span></a></h4>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Crawford Young succeeds brilliantly and seductively in inciting a yearning for “another history” of governance in Africa in the last 50 years</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In his latest work ‘The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960 – 2010’, Professor Crawford Young has, with habitual lucid simplicity of text, encyclopaedic gaze and insightfully nuanced analysis, joined in the flowering of celebrations of golden jubilees of Uhuru that bloomed across the African continent since 2010; with Uganda’s turn arriving in 2012 when the book was published. In the mid-1960s Young had taught at Makerere College, University of East Africa, and also conducted research on the Cooperative movement in the country.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Young’s work has appropriately come at a time of a pandemic of book famine and an epic struggle in Africa’s universities to recover from decay inflicted by what Adebayo Adedeji, as executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), labelled as ‘economic, social, economic and political warfare’ by the IMF and the World Bank through the imposition of Structural Adjustment Programme, SAP, policies. This condition makes most poignant his incitement of reflexes to urgently raise the call of who ‘will utter a counter narrative from the perspective of Africa telling her own story?’. For his narrative comes from a tradition that is given authoritative dignity by a dominant mission of comparative politics (of non-American and non-European countries) as a field of study to promote the continued existence of the ‘dominated of the world’.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A commendable starting bolt of the book is the rejection of the bifurcation of Africa by giving the Sahara Desert a racial role by inventing ‘Sub-Sahara Africa’, a view recently propagated by those who in 2011 were quick to see convulsive revolutionary youths of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt as located outside of Africa. They had to be ‘Arab’ if their volcanic eruptions were to enjoy the positive climatic virtues of a ‘spring’. With Muamar Gadaffi racing forward to being crowned as Africa’s ‘King of Kings’ by an assortment of traditional rulers - following his transition from the post of the Chairman of the African Union - it is easy to understand Young’s impatience with those scholars who insist on pushing away Kwame Nkrumah’s rebuke that the Sahara had never been a sand and dust curtain dividing Africans. There are, however, many cataracts in Young’s narrative which jolt a shout for one’s own paddles. We shall narrate some bellow.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He is comfortable with the view that anti-colonial nationalists were fired by impatience with slow paces with which colonial authorities ‘managed the public purse’. Alternative voices do insist that it was the exportation of resources to colonizing economies, and racist wealth maldistribution in favour of European settlers and businessmen, which provoked nationalist anger. To him a ‘democratic’ episode which bore independence quickly went into ‘erasure’ due to the rapid onset of failures by Africa’s leaders who soon invented one-party rule, rule by decrees, and imprisonment of critics. There is no consideration of Mahmud Mamdani excellent exposition of how, from 1922, British colonial administrators in Darfur engineered the shattering of the trans-ethnic and trans-racial nationhood which el-Mahdi had aroused with the revolutionary warfare he led against Turkish colonial exploitation and oppression. That disruptive investment in future conflict in post-colonial Darfur became a core feature of British and French gifts to ex-colonies.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The silence over Mamdani’s thesis leads to his non-cynical declaration of “mutually reciprocated goodwill between former colony and former colonizer”. Politicians in Uganda saw Britain’s failure to return districts she had punitively transferred from Bunyoro-Kitara Kingdom to Buganda before independence as a cruel gift meant to yield bloodshed and political instability in a toddler postcolonial state. Wole Soyinka’s wrath against a legacy of boundaries between a territorially vast northern Nigeria and a much smaller southern section is buttressed by critics of colonial constitutional provisions which guaranteed the Northern Region over 50 per cent of seats in the federal legislature. It would take saintly northern politicians to squander these advantages in their contest for power in postcolonial Nigeria. The resultant civil war, in which Biafra recorded over a million deaths, was hardly the fruit of British “goodwill”.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In similar vein his view of relations between France and former colonies cannot contain the wrath which met Thomas Sankara’s initiatives for arousing creative self-reliance across Francophone states and Laurent Gbagbo’s rejection of the legacy that French companies must be the first bidders for all contracts awarded by former colonies. The long term impact of brutalities which wiped out over 5 million people across Central Africa - as noted by the historian Jean Suret-Canale and others - get glossed over. Readers who come without such historical searchlights are doomed to blindness.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The readiness to quote Arthur Lewis’s view that “To be a minister is to have a lifetime’s chance to make a fortune” is complemented by silence over the widely celebrated ascetic and selfless leadership by Mwalimu Nyerere, Samora Machel, Abdel Nasser, , Augustinho Neto, Kwame Nkrumah, Milton Obote, Nyerere’s long-serving minister of Finance Jamal.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The historic protracted wars for the promotion of democratic politics by Africa’s liberation movements led by Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-Patriotic Front, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, the Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola, and the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde- against brutal anti-democracy opposition by NATO powers - is not included in what Young calls the “tsunami of dramatization”. He asserts that it was only a case of late “washing up in Africa”. The prospect of seeing the “Orange Revolution” in Rumania as being washed up from victorious liberation struggles by Soweto children bleeding in streets, is not allowed into gates of Young’s analysis.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Jonathan Frimpong-Ansah is quoted approvingly for characterising Ghana as a “vampire state”. It is not clear what he would call the French colonial regime in Ubangi Shari (now Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Cameroun) if he is allowed to know the texture of that historical nightmare. Crawford Young succeeds brilliantly and seductively in inciting a yearning for “another history” of governance in Africa in the last 50 years.</span><br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-54225070415771032762013-06-09T05:03:00.001-07:002013-06-09T05:03:11.400-07:00UK regrets torture against the Mau Mau and pays compensation<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The British gove<span id="goog_279607529"></span><span id="goog_279607530"></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/"></a>rnment yesterday announced that it would pay Sh2.6 billion to Mau Mau veterans who suffered atrocities in the hands of the former colonial masters.</div>
<a href="http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-123430/uk-regrets-torture-mau-mau-members">http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-123430/uk-regrets-torture-mau-mau-members</a><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague told the House of Commons that his government was issuing a public statement of regret to the victims for the first time in an out of court settlement.</div>
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"The British government recognises that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill treatment at the hands of the colonial administration. The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place, and that they marred Kenya’s progress towards independence. Torture and ill treatment are abhorrent violations of human dignity which we unreservedly condemn," Hague said in London.</div>
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Hague however insisted that the British government "continues to deny liability on behalf of the government and British taxpayers today for the actions of the colonial administration in respect of the claims."</div>
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Some 5,228 Kenyans who were tortured during the Mau Mau uprising against colonial rule in the 1950s will share out the money that the British government will pay out.</div>
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If the money is divided equally, each of the Mau Mau veterans should get Sh500,121. However, the most each of them is likely to receive is Sh347,000 as the rest will go towards paying the legal fees of their lawyers- Leigh Day.</div>
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Hague also a monument would also be put up in Kenya in remembrance of those who lost their lives during the Mau Mau period.</div>
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The news was welcomed in Nairobi by some 160 Mau Mau veteran who were addressed by the British High Commissioner to Kenya Christian Turner.</div>
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Mau Mau Association Secretary General and veteran Gitu wa Kahengeri said that the Mau Mau veterans who had filed the case agreed to the settlement.</div>
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"We accepted the offer made by the British Government. No amount of money can ever be enough to compensate us for what we went through. My father and I were jailed for seven years. This is not about money. The fact that the British Government has apologized and acknowledged what it put us through, that itself is enough," said Kahengeri.</div>
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Kahengeri said that he hoped that this would be the first step towards reconciliation between the Mau Mau and the British Government.</div>
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During the Emergency Period widespread violence was committed by both sides, and most of the victims were Kenyan. Many thousands of Mau Mau members were killed, while the Mau Mau themselves were responsible for the deaths of over 2,000 people including 200 casualties among the British regiments and police.</div>
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Hague told his Parliament that the settlement was part of a process of reconciliation with Kenya celebrating 50 years since it gained independence from the British.</div>
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"We do not want our current and future relations with Kenya to be overshadowed by the past. Today we are bound together by commercial, security and personal links that benefit both our countries. We are working together closely to build a more stable region. Bilateral trade between the UK and Kenya amounts to £1 billion each year, and around 200,000 Britons visit Kenya annually," Hague said.</div>
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Last year, Paulo Muoka Nzili, Wambugu Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara told the High Court in London how they were subjected to torture and sexual mutilation.</div>
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Lawyers said that Nzili was castrated, Nyingi severely beaten and Mara subjected to appalling sexual abuse in detention camps during the Mau Mau rebellion.</div>
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A fourth claimant, Susan Ngondi, died before the legal proceedings began.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-11486003123392468372013-06-09T02:38:00.001-07:002013-06-09T02:38:26.843-07:00Classic read: Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Classic read: Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone</h1>
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<i>Book Review by Sai Englert, April 2013</i></div>
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<b>James Baldwin</b></div>
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<b>First published in 1968</b></div>
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It is no easy task choosing a classic read from James Baldwin's long list of novels, essays and plays. It is tempting to choose Baldwin himself (or his biography at least) as the classic read. Baldwin is one of the most fascinating figures of the US civil rights movement. He is of course less well known than the Stokely Carmichael's, the Malcolm X's and the Martin Luther King's. He wasn't a political leader as such, and refused the tag of "voice of the movement". He was a black, gay man who grew up in a working class family in Harlem and became an internationally renowned author and fighter for civil rights. His path was complicated - pushed to the sidelines of the black power movement because of his sexuality and ostracised from the struggle for LGBT rights because of his colour. Yet Baldwin fought with strength and elegance, in writing and speech, against every oppression and injustice - always with a cigarette at his finger tips and a clever mocking retort to his detractors on his lips. (Readers should watch http://bit.ly/YUBrAq for evidence of this). He believed in the power of love and personal relationships to overcome the horrors of the world and used those stories to describe the world.</div>
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In Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone Baldwin tells the story of Leo Proudhammer's life from his youth in Harlem to his rise to fame as an actor. The story is told in flashbacks as Leo is recovering after having a heart attack on stage.</div>
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It is tale of struggle of a young boy in a black working class neighbourhood, of the experience of daily racism from bigots and white liberals alike and of how a man fights his way through life, exploitation and oppression.</div>
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As a young boy in a working class neighbourhood he faces daily racism from bigots and white liberals alike. But it's also a story of solidarity. This solidarity is found primarily through love - the support of his white southern partner, Barbara, or his close friend and lover Christopher.</div>
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But this is not the kind of support through love that Hollywood and Disney have got us used to. It is not a silent love, which magically hides the violence of an unequal world. It is a hard and real love, one which Baldwin described as love "in the tough and universal sense of daring and growth". After having sex for the first time Barbara tells Leo: "I know what I am doing. You're black. I'm white. Now, that doesn't mean shit, really, and yet it means everything." Leo reflects regularly on the difficulties of real solidarity.</div>
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He says, "It is easier to walk such a gauntlet alone. It is very hard for two, especially if they care about each other, especially if one is black and one is white, especially if one is male and one is female", while still continuing to walk the gauntlet together.</div>
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Tell Me has long been ignored in academia along with most of Baldwin's post-1962 writings. It is considered to lack the "intricacies" and "depth of character" of his early work. The reality though is that the Baldwin of Tell Me had changed. He is an author who has taken part in the Civil Rights movement, who has confronted the system that holds him down, has abandoned the disarmed pessimism of his youth and now furiously embraced the struggle for liberation. The Civil Rights movement and its different components had found its way onto the page. Leo's young black nationalist lover, for example, reflecting the rise of the Black Panthers, tells him: "Guns...we need guns".</div>
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It is not the change in Baldwin's style which unsettles the academic circles - it is his growing radicalism. In 1968, Baldwin is involved in struggle and has abandoned the unity of the lowest common denominator. He wants solidarity in struggle and he wants it now. David Leeming, his close friend and biographer, remembers this shift. He describes: "'Mister Baldwin,' they would say, 'are you saying we can expect trouble?' 'Yes Baby,' he would answer, 'They're going to burn your house down'".</div>
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Tell Me is the story of an angry black man, and his friends and lovers, fighting their way through a fucked up world. All of us who are doing the same should read his beautiful words.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-67118389957650590432013-06-09T02:26:00.002-07:002013-06-09T02:26:56.834-07:00Book Review: Latin America's Turbulent Transitions<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Latin America's Turbulent Transitions</h1>
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<i>Book Review by Rebecca Short, April 2013</i></div>
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<b>Roger Burbach, Michael Fox and Federico Fuentes</b></div>
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Latin America's Turbulent Transitions is the new book by three prominent left wing academics on Latin America: Roger Burbach, Michael Fox and Federico Fuentes.</div>
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Following the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez at the beginning of March, the authors make a timely contribution to the discussion about the future of the left in the region. As US hegemony across Latin America seems to be weakening they look towards social and indigenous movements such as CONAIE in Ecuador and the EZLN in Mexico, the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia, the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) in Brazil and los piqueteros in Argentina.</div>
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The book also deals with the legacy of the new left governments and what they call "neo-extractivist" trading policies.</div>
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The authors all agree that under the leadership of the so-called pink tide of left governments, through continental projects to strengthen economic independence from the US, the region is forging its own path forwards and entering a phase of "21st century socialism".</div>
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The first chapter of the book, which looks at globalisation, begins by giving an introduction to the political economy of the region and the impact of neoliberalism throughout the 1980s.</div>
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It goes on to give a careful analysis of the social movements that have challenged such policies. While the explanation is interesting, some of the conclusions in line with the post-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are arguable.</div>
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Chapter two looks at "the pink tide and the challenge to US hegemony". They argue that in response the the US's "imperial overstretch" Latin America has been allowed to embark on a complex process ultimately leading to more independence.</div>
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The discussion of "neo-extractivism and 21st century socialism" is extremely interesting. The authors argue in favour of the policy of neo-extractivism, which has been widely adopted by the new left governments. The state aims to expand the extraction industry and use the revenue gained to invest in social programmes. But, as authors such as Guillermo Almeyra have pointed out, extractivist economies geared towards export (as in Bolivia) have resulted in repeated clashes with indigenous communities rising up in defence of natural resources, forests and water.</div>
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In the second half of the book the authors look at the situation in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil and Cuba as they claim to be making attempts towards 21st century socialism.</div>
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Although written before the death of Chávez, the book examines the key role he played as the leading figure of the revolution and proponent of 21st century socialism. Looking at the increasing political tensions in Venezuela and the economic impact of the recession it concludes that the country will face three main challenges: the United States and their continued opposition to Chávez's government, corruption and bureaucracy within Venezuela, and the necessity of a collective leadership. It is this last point that will now be paramount following Chávez's death.</div>
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Overall the book is well written and accessible. While I would disagree with some of the reformist arguments I would recommend it to anyone following the transitions in Latin America over the coming years.</div>
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<i>Latin America's Turbulent Transitions is published by Zed Books, £16.99</i></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04613609587958412959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6954600702869681728.post-58380355452298251872013-05-12T01:19:00.000-07:002013-05-12T01:19:03.564-07:00British Government agrees to negotiate an out of Court Settlement with the Mau Mau<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Vindicating the stubbornness of truth and justice by Mugambi Kiai</h1>
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<a href="http://the-star.co.ke/news/article-120034/vindicating-stubbornness-truth-and-justice"><span style="font-size: x-small;">http://the-star.co.ke/news/article-120034/vindicating-stubbornness-truth-and-justice</span></a></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">News that the</strong><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> British government has now agreed to negotiate an out-of-court settlement to compensate Kenyans who were tortured during the Mau Mau war of independence is most welcome.</span></h3>
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<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://www.nation.co.ke/News/politics/Why-the-Mau-Mau-case-ruffled-Britain-/-/1064/1849836/-/lodtx8z/-/index.html" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Why the Mau Mau case ruffled Britain</a></span></h3>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">http://www.nation.co.ke/News/politics/Why-the-Mau-Mau-case-ruffled-Britain-/-/1064/1849836/-/lodtx8z/-/index.html </span></div>
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By KENFREY KIBERENGE kkiberenge@ke.nationmedia.com</div>
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The need to forestall embarrassment arising from the damning evidence Mau Mau veterans would have adduced at full trial may have pushed the British government to seek an out-of-court settlement over the matter....</div>
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<span style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://www.nation.co.ke/News/Ignore-call-to-register-with-law-firm-war-veterans-urged/-/1056/1848672/-/g6alfl/-/index.html" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Ignore calls to register with law firm for pay, war veterans urged</a></span></h3>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">http://www.nation.co.ke/News/Ignore-call-to-register-with-law-firm-war-veterans-urged/-/1056/1848672/-/g6alfl/-/index.html </span></h3>
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By NATION CORRESPONDENT</div>
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A human rights watchdog has urged former Mau Mau fighters to ignore a law firm claiming to have the authority to register them for compensation from the British Government...</div>
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<span style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/Why-Britain-chose-to-settle-Mau-Mau-case-out-of-court/-/440808/1848584/-/l0j4uw/-/index.html" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Why Britain chose to settle Mau Mau case out of court</a></span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 22px;">http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/Why-Britain-chose-to-settle-Mau-Mau-case-out-of-court/-/440808/1848584/-/l0j4uw/-/index.html </span></span></h3>
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By PETER MWAURA</div>
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It’s a public and diplomatic relations coup. Britain was reported this week saying it is willing to negotiate an out-of-court settlement to pay compensation to the Mau Mau veterans who sued because they were tortured and mistreated during the 1952-1960 nationalist..</div>
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<a href="http://www.nation.co.ke/blogs/Children-of-the-Mau-Mau-seek-the-truth/-/446718/1847626/-/2fvfcqz/-/index.html" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black;">Children of the Mau Mau don’t want to be compensated; they seek the truth</span></a></h3>
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">http://www.nation.co.ke/blogs/Children-of-the-Mau-Mau-seek-the-truth/-/446718/1847626/-/2fvfcqz/-/index.html </span></span></div>
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Posted Thursday, May 9, 2013 | By MUTUMA MATHIU</div>
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This Mau Mau fight for compensation from the British brings to mind stories from my childhood and raises interesting questions about who is going to be paid and for what..</div>
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<a href="http://www.nation.co.ke/News/politics/UK-in-secret-talks-to-pay-Mau-Mau--/-/1064/1844532/-/cwfe6/-/index.html" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="color: black;">UK in secret talks to pay Mau Mau</span></a></h3>
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">http://www.nation.co.ke/News/politics/UK-in-secret-talks-to-pay-Mau-Mau--/-/1064/1844532/-/cwfe6/-/index.html </span></span></div>
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Posted Monday, May 6, 2013 | By PAUL REDFERN NATION CORRESPONDENT, London and JOHN NGIRACHU in Nairobi</div>
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The British government is offering the surviving thousands of Kenyans detained during the Mau Mau uprising cash in secret talks for a settlement of their case...</div>
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