Elsewhere Today 468
Aljazeera:
Nawaz Sharif returns to Pakistan
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2007
12:13 MECCA TIME, 9:13 GMT
Nawaz Sharif, the former Pakistani prime minister, has landed at Lahore airport, ending seven years of exile.
Thousands of supporters chanting "Long live Sharif!" gathered on Sunday to greet Sharif who was removed from power by Pervez Musharraf, the current president, in a bloodless coup in 1999.
Accompanied by his brother Shabaz, Sharif smiled and waved to the cheering crowd as he entered Allama Iqbal international airport's arrivals lounge.
Sharif originally tried to return home in September, but was sent back to Saudi Arabia within hours of touching down.
However this time, Musharraf, who imposed emergency rule on November 3, is expected to let Sharif stay to lead his party in January's general election.
'Best moment'
"I am very happy to be back ... it is the best moment of my life," senior party aides quoted Sharif as saying as he arrived on an aeroplane provided by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
"My return is not the result of any deal," he told reporters at the airport. "My life and death are for Pakistan."
"We will fully participate in national politics. We don't believe in the politics of vengeance."
Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder in Lahore said there were noisy scenes outside the airport terminal.
"Everybody has been waiting for this day for some time," he said. "No one has been able to get close to Nawaz Sharif because of the crowds."
About 1,000 of Sharif's supporters found a way through tight security around the airport to enter the terminal building, waving the green flag of his party and shouting "Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif" and "Go, Musharraf, go!".
Workers decorated the streets with banners, posters and portraits, while crowds lined the route from the airport to the city. Loudspeakers on cars blared out music and people waved victory signs.
Yasin Butt, one of Sharif's supporters said: "The lion is returning, and when the lion roars, dictators and political turncoats disappear."
Supporters 'detained'
Sharif's party said about 1,800 of its supporters had been detained in a crackdown on Saturday night in the eastern Punjab province, of which Lahore is the capital.
But Nisar Memon, the federal information minister, said the figure was an exaggeration.
"There are no arrests as such," Memon said. "About 100 people have been confined so that they do not create any issues. We don't want the same mess as there was in Karachi."
Sharif had attempted to return home on September 10, but was sent back into exile within hours of landing.
This time, Musharraf has given his reluctant approval, according to a senior aide to the president.
Ahsan Iqbal, the information secretary for Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N party told Al Jazeera he believed the former prime minister would this time be allowed to remain in Pakistan.
"I think now there is no chance" that Sharif will be deported, he said.
"After he was deported [last time] there was a big backlash against his deportation."
Election boycott
Pakistan's political opposition is split over whether to boycott upcoming general elections.
Sharif indicated on Sunday that his party would demand a restoration of constitutional rule before it took part in the vote, but that any decision on whether to boycott would be taken in conjunction with other groups.
"These [emergency] conditions are not conducive to free and fair elections," he said. "I think the constitution of Pakistan should be restored, and there should be rule of law."
Raja Pervez Ashraf, secretary-general of the PPP party of Benazit Bhutto, another former prime minister, welcomed Sharif's return and said it would help establish an open political atmosphere.
"There is already an understanding on one point, the restoration of democracy in this country," he said.
"We honestly feel that Pakistan needs democracy and a free and fair election is the only way out."
Sharif's return could further complicate the situation for Musharraf, who imposed a state of emergency three weeks ago saying that it was needed to tackle an increase in violent attacks.
But the president's opponents say that most of those targeted have been political opponents, lawyers and members of the media.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/C7A14892-C26F-4D0D-B8CB-F0A20DEB7AE4.htm
AllAfrica:
Kano LG Polls - the Inside Story
By Hassan A. Karofi, Kano
Daily Trust (Abuja) ANALYSIS
25 November 2007
Last weekend's local government polls in Kano State left traces of violence, destruction and heavy presence of troops, reminding residents of the anarchy that reigned in parts of the state for days during and after the elections.
The election was never envisaged to be peaceful. Reason: pre-election campaign tones of the rival political parties dimmed any ray of hope of peaceful polls in the volatile city and across the state.
A day to the Saturday, November 17 elections, strange movements of men and materials were noticed, while political party offices soon became munitions depots. The party offices were taken over by weapons-wielding youths, who were publicly smoking marijuana, blowing flutes of hunters-reminiscent of the war period. These election-eve events instilled fear in the minds of residents of the looming danger ahead of the polls.
An estimated 25, 000 political thugs were recruited by various politicians during the elections. Over 400 of them were later arrested by the police and 40 by the army.
On the election day, polling units became virtual war zones. Many voters were scared from casting their votes. Those who dared the thugs paid heavily, some with their lives. Twenty five persons were reported to have been killed in the fracas that heralded the elections, though the police confirmed only six deaths.
It was in this condition of fear that the November 17 council polls in Kano were conducted.
Soon the trend became the same across the state, with reported taking over of polling units by thugs, who preventing voters from casting their votes and dared the security agents.
The situation was to be exacerbated when conflicting radio announcements started giving different election results. While the state radio station announced results got from the electoral officers, a private radio station in the city countered the results by announcing conflicting ones. The airwaves war soon worsened the tense situation.
When Sunday Trust visited Kura on the voting day, over 200 dagger-wielding youths were seen taking control of the poling unit adjacent to the district head's residence. They were chanting war songs, condemning the rival party as the police watched despondently.
The thugs, who prevented voters from nearing the booth, suddenly started attacking whoever was in their sight. The district head himself had to be persuaded back into his house. The thugs then took over the busy Kaduna-Kano road stopping motorists and forcing them to chant solidarity songs in favor of their (the thugs') political party. They also set up bonfires, forcing many prospective voters to flee to safety.
Because of the reigning anarchy, the electoral officers had to abscond from their posts, in many cases leaving the ballot boxes. Two persons were reported dead and several others sustained injuries.
The violence soon spread to many parts of the state making elections in five local governments impossible. Government properties in Minjibir, Gwale, Ungogo, Gezawa, Garun Malam, Albasu, Doguwa, Bichi and within the city centre were targeted.
Sunday Trust was also at Madobi Local Government Area, home of former Defense Minister Rabi'u Musa Kwankwaso, where the battle was fierce. The former minister locked horns with his estranged political ally and now state commissioner, Musa Iliyasu over who controls the council. Hundreds of thugs marched around the polling centres in the local government. In the ensuing blood shedding, residents were forced indoors, electoral officers taken hostage and the police appeared helpless. The police station in the council headquarters was also targeted as thugs surged with dangerous weapons.
Before sun set, one was confirmed dead and many other persons were injured after bloody clashes between supporters of PDP and ANPP.
The battle for supremacy between the ANPP and PDP were also bloody in Bichi, Gwale, Minjibir, Garun Malam, Albasu and Dawakin Kudu areas. The most daring of the attacks was the killing of the Dawakin Kudu electoral officer Malam Ado. Sunday Trust learnt that luck ran out for Ado when rampaging thugs attacked the vote collation centre. Ado tried to escape but he was apprehended by the thugs, who inflicted fatal injuries on him. He died later at the hospital. Several attempts by our reporters to speak to his family at Tudun Maliki in Kano failed on the ground that the case is with the police.
The thugs also recorded casualties. In Bichi, four suspected thugs were killed when they attempted to ransack a poling booth. Youths totting dangerous weapons confronted the attacker and in the free-for-all, four thugs were killed instantly.
When Sunday Trust attempted to trace their families, it was found out that they were all brought from the neighboring Niger Republic by politicians to help destabilize the elections. Their corpses were still at the Bichi General Hospital when our reporter visited.
A Bichi PDP stalwart, Alhaji Kabiru Sale, accused the ANPP of starting the violence after they realized they were loosing the election. He said over two thousands political thugs were brought in from other states into Bichi because the ANPP realized they cannot win the election in the area. Bichi is home to the Minister of State for Commerce, Ahmed Garba Bichi, who lost the April gubernatorial elections to Governor Ibrahim Shekarau.
In Albasu, the local government secretariat was burnt. But the election officials, including the secretary to the ANPP Sabiu Bako, who were taken hostage by political thugs for over 30 hours, escaped unscathed. Bako told Sunday Trust that he was rescued by the divisional police officer of Garko local government after the Albasu police failed to contain the hostage-taking.
It was in the midst of this lawlessness that the state government solicited the intervention of the military. By Sunday night, troops were drafted to major streets of the city to help restore law and order and protect public buildings.
By Monday it was confirmed that crisis occurred in 15 of the 44 local government areas of the state, six of them losing their secretariat as they were razed down by rampaging thugs. The councils where council secretariats were targeted were Minjibir, Gwale, Ungogo, Gezawa and Rano.
While these crises went on, the state Independent Electoral Commission (KANSIEC) announced results that saw the ruling ANPP sweeping the polls with 36 local government areas. The main rival PDP got three local governments while elections in five others were cancelled. Chairman of the commission, Alhaji Aliyu Tijjani said elections were cancelled in the five areas because they were inconclusive due to violence.
On Tuesday, the General Officer Commanding 1 Mechanized Division of the Nigerian Army accompanied by Major General Kenneth Agbola Vigo, Commander of the 3rd Brigade, Kano, said the army had taken control of the situation and that peace had returned to almost all parts of the state.
The military and the police made hundreds of arrests during and after the violence. The arrested political thugs who appeared before a Chief Magistrate all pleaded guilty to the four-count charges of criminal intimidation, possession of dangerous weapons, unlawful assembly and disruption of public peace. They were all remanded in prison custody till November 25 and December 5 when the court is to rule.
Influential politicians were also accused of taking part in the violence. Secretary to the state electoral commission, Barrister Wada Bashir alleged that former defence minister Kwankwaso led a team of suspected political thugs to the commission's premises.
But the former governor denied leading a team of thugs. "Nothing like that ever happened," Kwankwaso's media assistant, Alhaji Ibrahim Gwangwazo told Sunday Trust. Gwangwazo said when Kwankwaso in company of other party leaders went to the electoral commission to protest the refusal of the commission to count some votes, they were attacked by ANPP officials at the KANSIEC premises. "We did not bother to respond to them as we just went straight to the KANSIEC chairman's office," he said. The state police commissioner, Alhaji Yesufu also denied knowledge of any gunshot when Kwankwaso went to KANSIEC's premises. "I do not know about that allegation and there is no any report or complaint from anybody (about this)," Yesufu said.
Sunday Trust spoke with some of the arrested political thugs who confirmed that they were paid by some politicians to carry out the attacks. One of them who spoke on condition of anonymity said they were hired from Katsina to help fight during the election. He said four of his colleagues died during the fight in Bichi.
With the election results already announced and troops still patrolling Kano city, complaints are still trickling to the electoral commission. In one of the petitions to the commission, the Kura local government chapter of the PDP through its chairman, Barau Salisu Kura alleged that the election was upturned in favor of the ANPP.
There are many such other complaints, Sunday Trust learnt. But is KANSIEC willing to address these grievances? The commission's scribe Bashir said KANSIEC is not mandated by law to listen to any post-election complaint. The proper place to take protest to, he said, is the election tribunal. "They are being guided by ignorance about the law, as we lack any jurisdiction to entertain complaints. Only the tribunals can do that," he said.
For now what remains to be seen is how the situation now under control can be sustained as already despite the announcement of the results, opposition politicians still continue to announce themselves as winners of the polls.
Copyright © 2007 Daily Trust. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200711250023.html
AllAfrica:
Who Needs the Commonwealth?
By Dr. Tajudeen Abdulraheem
Daily Trust (Abuja) OPINION
24 November 2007
The Biennial Commonwealth Summit takes place in Kampala, Uganda November 22-24 amidst the usual controversies that have surrounded these summits whose importance in a world in which Britain is nothing more than post imperial middle power whose claims to global leadership is no more on its imperial past but toadying to the US (one of its former colonies!).
The association of the organisation with British colonialism has always been difficult for many radical anti colonialists to accept. However, it is significant that apart from the USA that never joined most of Britain's former colonies chose to join after their independence even countries with radical nationalists and militant anti imperialist governments like Nkrumah's Ghana or Ghandi's India. Instead of leaving the organisation what has happened is that countries in Africa with tenuous or no direct links to British colonialism like Mozambique, Namibia, and the Cameroon have either joined or have some associate membership. Rwanda's application to join since 1996 may get full approval at the Kampala summit.
The justification has always been that though these countries were forcibly colonised by Britain, that experience has led to a number of shared institutions, official language that could be the bases for technical, political, economic, cultural and diplomatic interface that goes beyond Britain.
The Commonwealth, in typical British pragmatism, has been adjusting to the changing fortunes of Britain as a declining imperial power. It has evolved from White British Commonwealth, through British Commonwealth, to now simply, The Commonwealth. It has grown from being simply an adjunct to British diplomatic and political interests into an organisation where former colonies can and do strike back and isolate Britain on many issues.
Under Margaret Thatcher and her belligerent position in cosying up to Ian Smith (who incidentally died on, Wednesday November 21) and his 'internal settlement' in 1979 and her ignoble support for the apartheid regime, the British government could not get the support of the majority of the members of the Commonwealth.
Indeed, in spite of British support, apartheid South Africa was expelled from the organisation and only resumed membership after the country was liberated from Thatcher's friends. To the right wing politicians and their media hirelings in Britain the Commonwealth is an anti-British, organisation therefore they query why Britain had to be providing the large support it gives towards running it.
The Commonwealth has also provided a means for the cheapest form of diplomacy for many poor countries and statelets to also fly their flags. In these countries, the Commonwealth's development cooperation, technical support and cultural exchanges are very crucial in providing capacity building on skills to the nationals and their governments. In these countries, the Commonwealth performs much needed and therefore appreciated tasks that the best of UN system wide support do in many countries.
However, these technical works of the Commonwealth whether through education grants, training for different kinds of professionals, supporting judiciary, etc do not make headlines. One reason is that they are very modest. The other and more important is that the politics of the organisation is what interests most people. It is just like the way many people unfairly write off the UN because of their frustrations with the opportunistic power play in the Security Council.
The focus on Commonwealth politics is not a misplaced one though they need to be tempered with due regard to other useful tasks it performs. In many cases, I think there is an exaggerated expectation of what the Commonwealth can achieve. It is a talking shop with no real enforcement powers beyond expulsion of erring members. And that option has been rarely used.
Zimbabwe withdrew before it could be expelled. But the exit of Zimbabwe has not diminished the controversy around the conflicts in the country within the Commonwealth. It continues to divide the organization with perceptible clear racial lines that pithches the majority members against the old White Commonwealth members (namely, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and their mother country, Britain).
They take a more hectoring line on Zimbabwe while the African, Caribbean and Asian countries tend to be more conciliatory towards Mugabe. The British simply do not have any moral or political right to lecture anyone about Zimbabwe. Their own inconsistencies also make them vulnerable to charges of multiple standards. The Zimbabwe conflict is parallel to Pakistan's and the way Britain has been responding to Pakistan's General Perves Musharav is different from the way they talk to or about Zimbabwe. Why is what is good for the goose is suddenly not good for the gander?
Although British hypocrisy does not mean that President Mugabe is right to be beating up his opponents and muscling the media, it gives his apologists ammunition to clobber opponents as agents of British colonialism and makes it even more difficult for Africans and African leaders in particular to be openly too critical of Uncle Bob and the excesses of his regime.
I thought Gordon Brown was more strategic and smarter than his predecessor, Blair, and would not be as sanctimonious as him but he has proven to be same, same. His threat not to attend the Africa-EU summit in Lisbon next month if Mugabe was invited has isolated him. He will soon discover as Blair did not just in Africa but also in the Commonwealth where even Britain needs friends. Even if the wealth has never been common!
Copyright © 2007 Daily Trust. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200711240043.html
AlterNet:
The Immigration Con Artists
By David Sirota, Creators Syndicate
Posted on November 24, 2007
I once got suckered by con artists. As I was walking by, they baited me into betting that I could guess which shell a little ball was under. Moving the shells at lightning speed, they diverted my attention and tricked me into taking my eye off the ball. When I lost the bet, I felt bamboozled, just like we all should feel today watching the illegal immigration debate. After all, we're witnessing the same kind of con.
As our paychecks stagnate, our personal debt climbs and our health care premiums skyrocket, We the People are ticked off. Unfortunately for those in Congress, polls show that America is specifically angry at the big business interests that write big campaign checks.
So now comes the con - the dishonest argument over illegal immigration trying to divert our ire away from the corporate profiteers, outsourcers, wage cutters and foreclosers that buy influence - and protection - in Washington.
Republicans like Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.) are demanding the government cut off public services for undocumented workers, build a barrier at the Mexican border and force employers to verify employees' immigration status. Democrats like Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) are urging their allies to either embrace a punitive message aimed at illegal immigrants, or avoid the immigration issue altogether. And nobody asks the taboo question: What is illegal immigration actually about?
The answer is exploitation. Employers looking to maximize profits want an economically desperate, politically disenfranchised population that will accept ever worse pay and working conditions. Illegal immigrants perfectly fit the bill.
Politicians know exploitation fuels illegal immigration. But they refuse to confront it because doing so would mean challenging their financiers.
Instead we get lawmakers chest-thumping about immigration enforcement while avoiding a discussion about strengthening wage and workplace safety enforcement - proposals that address the real problem.
Equally deplorable, these same lawmakers keep supporting trade policies that make things worse. Just last week, both Emanuel and Tancredo voted to expand NAFTA into the Southern Hemisphere. This is the same trade model that not only decimated American jobs and wages, but also increased illegal immigration by driving millions of Mexican farmers off their land, into poverty and ultimately over our southern border in search of subsistence work.
The con artists' behavior is stunning for its depravity.
First they gut domestic wage and workplace safety enforcement. Then they pass lobbyist-crafted trade pacts that push millions of foreigners into poverty. And presto! When these policies result in a flood of desperate undocumented workers employed at companies skirting domestic labor laws, the con artists follow a deceptive three-step program: 1) Propose building walls that would do nothing but create a market for Mexican ladders 2) Make factually questionable claims about immigrants unduly burdening taxpayers and 3) Scapegoat undocumented workers while sustaining an immoral situation that keeps these workers hiding in the shadows.
The formula allows opportunists in Congress to both deflect heat away from the corporations underwriting their campaigns and preserve an exploitable pool of cheap labor for those same corporations. Additionally, these opportunists get to divide working-class constituencies along racial lines and vilify destitute illegal immigrant populations that don't make campaign donations and therefore have no political voice whatsoever.
Of course, diversionary scapegoating is nothing new. As Ronald Reagan pushed his reverse Robin Hood agenda, he attributed America's economic stagnation to "welfare queens." Similarly, Bill Clinton championed NAFTA while telling displaced workers their enemy was "the era of Big Government." This bogeyman, Clinton said, would be vanquished by ending "welfare as we know it."
Undoubtedly, the media will keep claiming illegal immigration is complicated for both parties. But Republicans or Democrats could begin solving the issue, if they simply stopped letting corporate lawyers write trade pacts and started punishing employers who violate wage and workplace laws.
Sadly, even those modest steps probably won't be taken. In a political system that makes it difficult to tell the difference between a lobbyist and a lawmaker, both parties employ the art of distraction to perpetuate the crises that enrich their campaign contributors. Indeed, whether their target is undocumented workers or indigent recipients of public assistance, the political con artists attack the exploited to avoid cracking down on the exploiters - and with immigration, they are hoping America once again gets duped.
David Sirota is the author of Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government-and How We Take It Back (Crown, 2006).
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/68729/
Asia Times:
The general has no uniform
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
Nov 22, 2007
KARACHI - Since seizing power in a bloodless coup in 1999, Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf has promised more than once that he would shed his uniform. Now he is set to finally keep his word, likely as early as next week.
Attorney General Malik Abdul Qayyum said on Tuesday that Musharraf will resign as chief of army staff once the Supreme Court validates his victory in the presidential election of October 6. He will then be formally sworn in as a civilian president and prepare for national elections scheduled for January 8.
The October presidential election had been challenged in court, leading to hundreds of members of the judiciary being removed and the imposition of emergency rule. The new members of the Supreme Court - appointed by Musharraf - have now dismissed all petitions against the result.
The government has freed more than 3,000 people jailed since the November 3 emergency declaration and plans to release 2,000 others soon, an Interior Ministry spokesman said on Tuesday.
There is, however, a disturbing irony in the course of events leading up to Musharraf's reinvention as a civilian president. While the United States is finally satisfied that Musharraf has followed Washington's dotted lines in the "war on terror", history will record that over the past few years the region has seen the emergence of the neo-Taliban not only in Afghanistan but in Pakistan as well.
In this context, Musharraf's visit to Saudi Arabia this week is an attempt to relay though King Abdullah to the George W Bush administration that what is good for the US is not necessarily good for Pakistan, that is, Bush's attempts to dictate the course of national politics have in fact had counterproductive results.
Thus, while Bush this week lauded Musharraf as having "done more for democracy in Pakistan than any modern leader has", it is pertinent to consider the downside in earning such praise.
A war path fraught with danger
Washington tightened the noose around Islamabad early this year with tough demands that Pakistan stop cross-border infiltration of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
The US established benchmarks on progress in this regard, which were pegged to the continued delivery of American military and economic aid to Pakistan, worth billions of dollars. From April, high-level US officials visited Pakistan on a regular basis to keep up the pressure for the implementation of political and military programs that would block the rise of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Washington pointed out that the Taliban's "precious assets" were pouring out from the radical Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad to join the militancy in the North and South Waziristan tribal areas and beyond.
An operational plan was handed over to Islamabad and it was implemented on July 3 when the Lal Masjid was stormed, leading to the deaths of scores of militants. The army was redeployed in the tribal areas and strong contingents of military and paramilitary troops were sent into the Swat Valley in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).
Washington was adamant that Pakistan stick to the plan and made it clear that if Musharraf wavered, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces from Afghanistan would take matters into their own hands and pursue targets deep inside Pakistan.
On the political front, Musharraf was forced to strike a deal with former premier Benazir Bhutto. All corruption cases against her were withdrawn and she was allowed to return to Pakistan after years of self-exile to promote an anti-religious alliance.
From July, the White House has had no complaints over Islamabad's commitment in both letter and spirit. The Lal Masjid was "sanitized" and the Waziristans were bombed in October on the basis of intelligence shared with NATO.
A grand jirga (council) was organized in Kabul to explore ways of engaging the Taliban in peace dialogue, followed by talks directly with the Taliban in Quetta, Pakistan.
For the first time in years, the US was not having to urge Pakistan to "do more", yet paradoxically the situation on the ground was spiraling out of control.
Between July and November, NATO's casualties have been the worst since US-led forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to oust the Taliban. A late Taliban offensive has seen them recover large swathes of territory. For the first time, they are united under one leadership with clear objectives.
At the same time, NWFP has virtually been lost. It has always been a tribal hotspot, but while the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s radicalized NWFP to some extent, Islamabad's writ was never challenged. Indeed, in the nation's 60-year history, Pakistan has always successfully suppressed armed rebellions in the province. Now, for the first time, Pakistan's authority over NWFP has all but ended.
As a result, the Taliban's cross-border activities have increased an estimated 10-fold compared to previous years and the previously calm - but still very scenic - Swat Valley has fallen into the hands of radical clerics.
These indeed are the unintended consequences or blowback of the "war on terror" that Pakistan has prosecuted at the behest of the US. Similarly, the political road map involving Bhutto lies in tatters. Bhutto will now have no dealings with Musharraf and has already accused parties backing him of trying to rig the ballots ahead of January's polls - even hinting that she and other opposition parties might boycott the elections.
As Musharraf hangs up his uniform for the last time, these are the realities he faces - Pakistan's burning tribal areas and a volatile political arena centered on an embittered opposition.
But at least Bush is happy.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com
Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IK22Df01.html
Guardian:
Fight begins for the soul of South Africa
President Mbeki's African renaissance is collapsing, with his party riven by a power struggle played out to a background of corruption and crime
Ruaridh Nicoll in Port Elizabeth
Sunday November 25, 2007
The Observer
Lizzie Jandjies tucked herself tight into the top corner of Dan Qeqe stadium as she waited for presidential hopeful Jacob Zuma to arrive in the South African township of Zwide in the flat hinterlands of Port Elizabeth. Beyond the stadium were houses of breeze block and corrugated iron; homes that were an aspiration to the neatly dressed Jandjies.
Circumstances, she said, had led her from a childhood here to an 'informal settlement' about 30 minutes' drive away. In Moeggefukkel pledges of mains water have been put off until 2012 and supplies (14p for 25 litres) must be carried from nearby houses. There is no electricity and the dark hours are terrifying. 'There is no protection,' she said. 'Criminals come in the night, kick in the door, steal everything and sometimes kill.'
So Jandjies waited, not entirely patiently, for Zuma, the imposing Zulu populist. She hopes that the hero of the struggle against apartheid, a man who in the past two years has faced rape and corruption charges and who entertains the crowd by singing awulethu' mshini wami' - 'get my machine gun' - might hurry up what South Africans call 'development'. But as yet his private jet had failed to streak the blue above.
Jandjies may not share the wealth of South Africa's English, Afrikaner, Indian and middle-class black and mixed race populations, but she does share, alongside their fear of crime, a desire for change, though not everyone feels Zuma is the right man. On 16 December, delegates to the 52nd national conference of the African National Congress will meet in Polokwane, formerly Pietersburg, in the province of Limpopo. There they will decide if President Thabo Mbeki should have a third term as president of the African National Congress (ANC) and, with it, power over the party's MPs.
Polokwane is close enough to the border with Zimbabwe to offer delegates some cautionary guidance (and Zimbabwean refugee waiters will no doubt be a further reminder). For in South Africa's fragmented society, it is common to hear citizens, as they watch the once great liberation movement begin to tear itself apart, raise the subject of Robert Mugabe's descent into dictatorship. As Siphiwe Zulu, an ANC branch chairman in Soweto, put it: 'There is a problem of African leaders who want to stay in office too long.' Such views will cut Mbeki deeply. He, after all, is the man who has tried to foster an African renaissance, overturning Western views of a continent predetermined to failure. His supporters point out that he does not want to remain President after the 2009 elections - the constitution prohibits that - but only president of the party. Mbeki - strategic, smart, with a love of poetry - is determined, so insiders say, not to cling to power but to see off his uneducated, militant and pugilistic old comrade Zuma, because he believes him to be unsuited to power.
Come midday at Dan Qeqe stadium, uplifted voices could be heard near the gate. Down the path came 100 people, holding banners that read 'Thabo Mbeki, ANC president 2007-2012'. They packed into the stand alongside the 1,500 Zuma supporters and sang 'Jacob Zuma is a criminal'. For the Eastern Cape is Mbeki country. It was in Zwide's hard-scrabble dirt that Mbeki's father Govan, a hero of the struggle, was buried in 2001. By turning up, Zuma was sending a signal - that it was he, JZ, who carried lifelong Communist Govan Mbeki's concern for South Africa's poor.
Yet South Africa's future does not rest solely on these two frontrunners. Other names will be available to delegates in Polokwane: Zuma's estranged wife, the Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, and the former Gauteng premier Tokyo Sexwale (star of South Africa's The Apprentice). Most intriguing, in the shadows and as yet silent, is the trade unionist turned multimillionaire Cyril Ramaphosa. 'I don't remember a time when the leadership was openly contested,' said a senior unionist.
Such open conflict within the ANC is unknown and is proving hard for some to bear. As I stood watching each side mock the other in the stand, an old man in a grey suit elbowed me in the ribs. He could barely speak English, but was insistent with those words he had: 'One ANC. Must stay together.' There were tears in his eyes.
It was never going to be an easy job, replacing Nelson Mandela as President. And Mbeki is, as one South African newspaper put it, 'a hard man to love'. It wasn't always so. In exile Mbeki would debate South Africa's problems over bottles of fine single malt in hotels from Lusaka to Lagos, developing his belief in an African renaissance where 'our rebirth as a continent must [begin] with the rediscovery of our own soul'.
Now, though, says his biographer Mark Gervisser, the dreams expressed in exile have had to be deferred by the realities of South Africa's problems. Mbeki's war against those 'determined to prove everything in the anti-African stereotype' is now focused on those who, for honourable reasons, criticise obvious cronyism and corruption.
He has opened himself to attack by expressing scepticism about the link between HIV and Aids, in part because he believes it plays to the Western view of Africans as, in his words, 'natural born, promiscuous carriers of germs ... doomed to inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sins of lust'. It would take 800 South Africans dying every day of Aids before he made anti-retrovirals widely available. And still he grumbles that the true cause is poverty, as Gervisser's biography, released last week, reveals.
Meanwhile, his belief in an African renaissance has been tested against his loyalty to old friends. He, all but alone in the ANC, was close to Mugabe during the battle with the late Ian Smith's regime. He has protected Jackie Selebi, the chief of police and South African head of Interpol, against charges of corruption, and he has failed to fire his alcoholic Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala Msimang, despite suggestions she used her influence to receive a new liver and the revelation that she once stole an anaesthetised patient's watch.
Yet, set against this, Mbeki has presided over an economy that has grown by 5 per cent a year, where property prices have recovered after an initial white flight, where the Springboks once more brought home the rugby World Cup, where two million new homes have been built, and where the government's Black Economic Empowerment scheme has established a black middle class.
'People see a lot of change,' said Siphiwe Zulu, the ANC branch chairman in the Soweto neighbourhood of Zola (which he described as containing 'the poorest of the poor, old ladies and old-timers'). 'Most of the streets were without tar. There were no street lights. Now there is even a shopping mall.' (Soweto also has a country club and its own chapter of the Hell's Angels.)
A black elite has formed, led by Ramaphosa. The former head of the National Union of Mineworkers stepped back from politics in the 1990s to, in the words of Richard Holbrooke, the former US ambassador to the UN, 'show the way to a generation of black South Africans who would gradually control the South African economy'. Through mining, media and a variety of other interests, he has become one of the richest men in the country. Unsurprisingly, the organisations that the ANC is allied to - the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the South African Communist Party and the ANC's own youth league - feel such wealth isn't trickling down fast enough.
'Black economic empowerment is enriching a very few,' said Blade Nzimande, general secretary of the Communist Party. 'It is not even creating a black bourgeoisie, it is creating a small group of black people indebted to the capitalist class ... A majority of Communist members would prefer Jacob Zuma.'
Apart from the convoy of black cars that rolled on to the rugby pitch, traffic cops stationed at the intersections and the phalanx of bodyguards, Zuma struck a modest note when he finally turned up at Dan Qeqe six hours late. He told the crowd - once the Mbeki supporters stopped singing - that the ANC needed a strong leader, and then he promised to support whoever was chosen.
Even more than dissent, the ANC dislikes the smell of ambition. Just before Zuma pulled in, another figure had appeared at my side. Thylani Grootboom, an Mbeki supporter, wanted something understood, reinforcing his point with a jabbing finger: 'Campaigning for yourself, it's against the culture of the ANC.' Zuma's weakness in the run-up to the Polokwane conference is the sense, increasingly pervasive, that he is putting himself forward too much.
Born eight days apart from Mbeki, Zuma did not come from anti-apartheid royalty. He was raised by his widowed mother who worked as a domestic. He showed immense courage as head of the underground in KwaZulu Natal and an intelligence that negated his lack of a formal education. Gervisser says that he is 'fearless, affable and loyal'.
As with all the potential candidates, it is impossible to extract a policy, because policies are supposed to be the preserve of the party itself. Instead there is character. In 1994 Zuma managed to convince Mandela that Mbeki would be a better deputy than Ramaphosa, yet as time passed Mbeki has increasingly believed that Zuma lacks the judgment for top office. He believes, according to Gervisser, that a Zuma presidency would destroy his dream of renaissance.
Certainly Zuma has had his difficulties. The charge of raping a 31-year-old family friend was dropped, but he hardly delighted doctors when he shrugged off the unprotected sex (he knew she was HIV positive) by saying that the shower he took afterwards 'would minimise the risk of contracting the disease'. He led the National Aids Council at the time.
Charges of corruption may prove trickier yet. A £4bn arms purchase of (among other weaponry) fighters, corvettes and submarines from European companies (among them BAE Systems) has poisoned the South African political pool. Zuma has been accused of taking payments. Whether this derails him remains to be seen. Andrew Feinstein was the senior ANC MP on a parliamentary committee that looked into allegations surrounding the arms deal and he has just published a book, After the Party, that offers a rare insight into the ANC's methods. 'Mbeki has far more to lose from a thorough investigation than Zuma,' he said. 'Zuma's misdemeanours were relatively small, amounting to a payment of 500,000 rand (£35,000) to protect a French arms company from any investigation, while Mbeki either directly solicited, or condoned soliciting, money for the ANC in return for contracts.' In other words, Zuma can make Mbeki's life very difficult in court.
From a new life in London, Feinstein laments what has 'become of [a] once proud organisation'. The ANC, he writes, is no longer driven by 'lofty ideals but by issues of personality, power and patronage'. Mbeki clings to power in the hope he can use patronage to deliver someone he trusts into the presidency in 2009. Zuma grasps for power through the force of his personality. Meanwhile, Ramaphosa denies wanting the job but does just enough to stay in the running, waiting to be drafted as a compromise.
Attempting to guess who will be leader of the ANC in a month's time would be foolish. Branches are currently choosing delegates for the trip to Polokwane and telling them who to vote for but when the moment comes, the votes are secret. 'Some people are behaving as if the world is coming to an end on 16 December,' said Nzimande. 'People are being offered jobs, money is going round.'
Meanwhile, crime grows worse. Last week was, apparently, the beginning of the 'heist season'. It is now too dangerous to walk up Table Mountain. And the online crime page of South Africa's Independent newspaper (iol.co.za) provides the chattering classes with a deepening well of the blackest humour.
Lizzie Jandjies had often chuckled as we waited for Zuma, but not at levels of crime. As the populist's convoy swept away from Zwide, she prepared for the journey back to her house without electricity, water or a door to stop a determined boot. She was, she said, pleased that the rival supporters had been satisfied with trading songs of disdain: 'I'm just glad it didn't become violent.'
Rivals for power
Thabo Mbeki, 65
Intellectual who spent the apartheid years in exile, he was widely distrusted by colleagues. His skill in avoiding nationwide conflict in the late 1980s saw him elected president in 1999.
Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, 58
A rare advocate for action on the Aids pandemic, Jacob Zuma's ex-wife is now Foreign Minister.
Tokyo Sexwale, 56
Former premier of Gauteng province, he calmed townships riven by ANC and Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party. Now a oil and diamond tycoon.
Cyril Ramaphosa, 55
The former leader of the National Union of Mineworkers shook the apartheid authorities with a devastating strike in the 1980s.
Jacob Zuma, 65
The uneducated Zuma ran the ANC underground in KwaZulu Natal and spent 10 years on Robben Island.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2216598,00.html
Jeune Afrique: Les autorités cèdent
temporairement devant les vendeurs ambulants
SÉNÉGAL - 22 novembre 2007 - par AFP
Les autorités sénégalaises ont autorisé jeudi les commerçants ambulants de Dakar à reprendre leur travail jusqu'à la fin décembre, suspendant ainsi une interdiction frappant leur activité qui avait provoqué de violentes protestations mercredi et jeudi.
A l'issue d'une rencontre dans l'après-midi avec des représentants des marchands ambulants, le sénateur-maire de Dakar Pape Diop a "autorisé les commerçants à revenir à leur place sur la voie publique sans toutefois gêner la circulation", a rapporté une source proche de la mairie.
Cette autorisation est valable "jusqu'après la Tabaski" (Aïd el-Kébir), qui doit être célébrée vers le 20 décembre, a encore indiqué cette source.
De nouveaux heurts sporadiques avaient éclaté plus tôt jeudi entre vendeurs en colère et forces de sécurité, qui ont fait usage de gaz lacrymogène pour disperser leurs agresseurs qui chargeaient à coups de pierres autour du marché Petersen au Plateau (quartier administratif).
Ce marché, qui devait accueillir une partie des commerçants ambulants délogés, aux termes d'un accord conclu mercredi avec le gouvernement, a été partiellement incendié dans la nuit.
En fin d'après-midi, le calme était revenu dans les rues de la capitale, où des éléments de la police étaient déployés sur les grands axes, ont constaté des journalistes de l'AFP.
"La situation est calme et maîtrisée", a précisé à l'AFP un responsable de la police sous couvert de l'anonymat, qui n'a pu préciser le nombre de personnes arrêtées jeudi.
Depuis le 15 novembre, la police et la gendarmerie avaient mené des opérations dites "de déguerpissement" pour expulser des trottoirs de Dakar leurs traditionnels occupants, des commerçants "tabliers" ou ambulants, des mendiants et des cireurs de chaussures.
Cette interdiction, décidée par le président Abdoulaye Wade, a fortement pénalisé le secteur informel, qui génère la quasi-totalité des emplois au Sénégal.
Elle avait engendré mercredi une première vague de violentes protestations de commerçants, qui ont dégénéré en accrochages avec les forces de l'ordre à Dakar.
Dans le quartier populaire de la Médina, près du Plateau, les locaux de la mairie d'arrondissement et de la Sénélec, la compagnie nationale d'électricité, avaient été endommagés à coups de pierre et plusieurs véhicules avaient été incendiés.
Ces protestations, parmi les plus violentes depuis l'élection en 2000 du président Abdoulaye Wade -réélu dès le premier tour en février 2007 pour un mandat de cinq ans-, se sont soldées par l'arrestation de plus de 200 personnes, selon un responsable de la police.
Une bonne partie des commerçants du centre-ville avaient préventivement maintenu leur rideaux fermés jeudi.
Plusieurs journaux privés soulignaient jeudi que ces protestations constituaient l'expression d'un ras-le-bol des franges les plus démunies de la population, frappées de plein fouet par de récentes hausses des prix des produits de première nécessité.
Le quotidien Walfadjiri a ainsi estimé que "ces événements, qui dépassent le cadre d'une simple action revendicative", constituent "l'expression d'un ras le bol généralisé tout droit sorti des bas-fonds de la société".
Selon Le Quotidien, "le pouvoir ne peut à la fois “judiciariser” l'immigration clandestine, traquer les vendeurs à la sauvette (...) et espérer gouverner dans la tranquillité".
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP34047lesaustnalu0
Jeune Afrique: Une "folle journée d'émeutes
jamais vues" selon la presse privée
SÉNÉGAL - 22 novembre 2007 - par AFP
La presse sénégalaise estimait jeudi que les manifestations de mercredi à Dakar, les plus violentes depuis l'arrivée au pouvoir du président Abdoulaye Wade en 2000, constituaient l'expression d'un ras-le-bol des franges les plus démunies de la population.
"Dakar à feu et à sang", "Emeutes d'une rare intensité", "Baptême du feu de Wade", "Une folle journée d'émeutes jamais vues": les titres des journaux privés mettaient en exergue, photos à l'appui, l'ambiance d'insurrection urbaine qui a gagné les rues de la capitale mercredi après-midi.
"Attention, la chienlit menace", a averti Walfadjiri, relevant que "c'est la première fois depuis l'alternance politique (en 2000) que (...) des évènements d'une telle ampleur sont signalés sur l'espace public".
Sud Quotidien estimait que "le spectacle vécu hier (renvoyait) au souvenir des années de braise 1988-1989", théâtre de violentes protestations populaires contre l'ancien régime socialiste.
Selon le journal, ce "dialogue du ventre" traduit l'"absence des moyens de survie" pour ces marchands ambulants chassés des trottoirs de la capitale sénégalaise il y a une semaine, sur ordre du chef de l'Etat.
Cette mesure qui les prive de tout revenu a mis le feu aux poudres mercredi à Dakar, où plusieurs centaines de vendeurs ambulants ont violemment protesté, rejoints par des groupes de jeunes.
Les manifestants ont allumé des feux à l'aide de pneus, poubelles et étals en bois, endommagé des véhicules et des bâtiments publics.
"Plus qu'un avertissement", assurait Le Matin, expliquant que "la bombe sociale a tonné hier".
"Comment peut-on soustraire à quelqu'un son gagne-pain sans au préalable lui donner une alternative plausible" dans un pays où le secteur informel génère la quasi-totalité des emplois, s'interrogeait l'éditorialiste du journal.
"Dakar a été transformé en vaste camp de bataille", relevait de son côté Le Populaire, notant les "dommages collatéraux inestimables" avec la fermeture de la quasi-totalité des commerces dans le centre-ville.
Dans un édito au vitriol, Walfadjiri a dénoncé l'incapacité des autorités et des services de renseignements à prévoir "des évènements qui dépassent le cadre d'une simple action revendicative" et qui constituent "l'expression d'un ras le bol généralisé tout doit sorti des bas-fonds de la société".
Selon Le Quotidien, "le contexte social est tel que les populations traînent avec elles des urgences de survie à satisfaire".
"Face à cela, le pouvoir ne peut à la fois “judiciariser” l'immigration clandestine, traquer les vendeurs à la sauvette (...) et espérer gouverner dans la tranquillité", assure le journal.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP25227unefoevirpe0
Mother Jones: Southern Inhospitality:
Playing the Immigration Issue
Congress may be deadlocked on immigration, but municipalities across the nation are working to make life as difficult as possible for illegals.
Bruce Falconer
November/December 2007 Issue
On a hot August afternoon at the Prince William County Fair in northern Virginia, Greg Letiecq tried to make eye contact with passersby gorging themselves on funnel cakes and cotton candy. Standing before a booth draped with American flags and "Help Save Manassas" signs, Letiecq was enjoying a kind of local celebrity. The Washington Post had recently run a front-page story on how his blog, Black Velvet Bruce Li, had become the "most influential local blog in Virginia." (A previous incarnation, Black Velvet Bruce Lee, was taken down in the wake of a slander suit.) Several days earlier, former Virginia Senator George Allen had visited Letiecq's booth; he and his wife Susan walked away wearing Help Save Manassas stickers.
All this notoriety came after Letiecq helped draft a series of tough local ordinances targeting illegal immigrants. Unanimously passed by the county Board of Supervisors on July 10, the purposely vague measures aimed to deny illegal aliens "public benefits" and to empower police to question criminal suspects about their immigration status and, if necessary, initiate deportation. County officials are checking to see if the ordinances violate state or federal law; the county's police chief, Charlie Deane, issued a five-page public plea to moderate the proposals, saying they would lead to more crime, higher taxes, and the perception that the county is racist. But Letiecq, a sometime defense-industry programmer, expects the ordinances to be law by year's end. And they'd already produced the desired results, he told me between drags on his cigarette. "They're moving out," he said. "I know a guy who runs a pool hall in Manassas Park, where they have lots of illegals. He says they're moving to Centreville. Some of them are going to Montgomery County in Maryland."
Prince William County lies about an hour southwest of Washington, D.C. For much of its history, it was known primarily for the Civil War battles fought near Manassas, the county seat. Its population was overwhelmingly white and comfortable with the pace of rural life. But as property values in Washington have soared, Prince William County's population has swelled by 60 percent since 1990, with almost half of the increase occurring since 2000. This growth has demanded new houses, shopping malls, parking lots, gas stations, and roads. Construction projects have required cheap labor, which in turn has attracted a large influx of recent immigrants: The proportion of foreign-born residents has ballooned from 6 percent in 1990 to almost 20 percent in 2005. Today one in four students enrolled in the county's school system is Hispanic.
It's a demographic shift playing out all over America, but perhaps nowhere more than in the Washington area—6 of its counties are among the nation's 20 fastest-growing Hispanic population centers. Since Letiecq founded Help Save Manassas in April (modeled after a similar group in nearby Herndon), "Help Save" chapters have begun popping up statewide and spread to Maryland. They represent a growing movement among municipal and county officials who, frustrated by Congress' failure to address the issue, are taking on illegal immigration themselves. According to Michael Hethmon, director of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which helped craft the Prince William ordinances and is assisting with similar efforts in at least six other states, the sum of these local measures is greater than its parts. "We're testing some really fundamental issues about citizenship and national identity," he told me. "Because of the importance of the issues—national security, civil rights, nationality, privacy—it's better to use local and state efforts, not only as attempts to deal with the problems themselves, but as an essential test bed for, ultimately, a viable federal solution." Letiecq admits the failure of federal immigration reform "helped us grow in numbers and influence." But, he adds, "what really moves an electorate is when these issues are local, when it affects life on your street."
Talk of "illegals" dominates conversation in Prince William. I had gone to the county fair with my wife, herself of Hispanic ethnicity. Within minutes of arriving, we were pulled aside by one of the vendors, a white man in a Hawaiian shirt with sandy, feathered hair and a gold necklace. He could tell we were from out of town, and asked, "You here to see how the other half live? We're okay; we're nice people down here, even the illegals." He agreed to talk about the issue if I didn't use his name. The proposed ordinances had scared illegals, he said. Many now stayed indoors and, if forced to go out, drove slowly for fear of being pulled over. Among county residents, the most common complaints centered on overcrowded houses, which threatened to lower property values, and on public services and school funding being diverted to people who "don't pay taxes." But the vendor also worried the ordinances would scare illegal immigrants from sending their kids to public schools. "You have to educate them," he said. "If you don't, you're just left with a bunch of dumb illegals, and you don't want that." He looked at my wife and joked, "Are you legal?"
Back at the Help Save Manassas booth, volunteers wearing T-shirts emblazoned with "What part of illegal don't you understand?" displayed photographs of garbage-strewn houses and yards. One showed a tent next to an overturned wading pool propped up by a stick—overflow, Letiecq claimed, from a house full of illegals. An elderly woman in a Democratic Party T-shirt confronted a stocky ex-Marine named Steve, asking, "How do you know that the people living in these houses are illegal? Poor people would live like that, too."
"Ma'am, they're illegal. They are," Steve said. "You're in denial."
She later told me Help Save Manassas was closely aligned with the local Republican Party and had taken up the issue of illegal immigration as a matter of political convenience. "It used to be gays. Now it's illegals. They're just looking for ways to scare and divide people." The real issue that Letiecq and his supporters have with the immigrants "is only that they're not quite white."
Letiecq—who derailed Democratic General Assembly candidate Jeff Dion by revealing he's gay, is being sued for defamation by former gop House of Delegates candidate Steve Chapman, and now promotes a blog that impugns Chapman's attorney Fasail Gill as a "terrorist"—insists he is equally opposed to illegals from Canada or Sweden. Regardless, mobilizing the community is too important to worry about offending people's sensibilities. "Around here, numbers is the game," Letiecq said. "We're building a grassroots movement, an issue-advocacy, membership-based organization. We're trying to get really big, really fast."
In that, he seems to be succeeding: Before the county fair, Help Save Manassas' membership was 690. By the end, it had 1,453 members, making it by far the largest anti-illegal-immigration group in the Washington area.
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2007/11/outfront-southern-inhospitality.html
New Statesman:
Africa's unsung heroes
Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody on going to Uganda with Save the Children and the heroes that hold some of the poorest communities in the world together
Gary Lightbody
Published 22 November 2007
It will be Gordon Brown's first visit to Africa as Prime Minister when he joins other world leaders in Uganda for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, on 23-25 November. In the south the capital, Kampala, will be "beautified" but, as far as we know, none of the heads of state will visit the impoverished north to see how Uganda is emerging from war, let alone meet the families traumatised by two decades of violence.
The conflict started in 1986 when the current president, Yoweri Museveni, seized power. The Lord's Resistance Army then formed in defiance of Museveni's coup, intent on destabilising and demoralising the north. A fragile ceasefire is now in place.
The tactics of the LRA, the most consistent of which have been the abduction and forced enrolment of children, wrecked communities. The UN estimates that between 20,000 and 30,000 children, some as young as six, have been kidnapped in the past 20 years. They are taken from their homes, surrounding fields and even schools. Hooked into giant rope-lines of captured kids, they are led to LRA hiding places where they are beaten and threatened with death until they are brainwashed enough to be trusted with a rifle.
Flying to Gulu with Save the Children, we passed over verdant land as far as the eye could see. I'm told you can grow anything here. But the people of Gulu are poor and desperate. That the land is rich enough to feed all the people many times over, but doesn't, depressed me deeply. People are terrified to stay in their homes for fear of kidnap or murder. For safety, many live in displaced persons camps. Few trust the ceasefire.
After a 20-year war, most of the infrastructure in the remote parts of Uganda has suffered. Like the men, women and children, education and health care are also serious casualties. While we were in the Gulu region, we visited schools and hospitals and found the conditions appalling.
At one Save the Children project school we were greeted by about 1,500 pupils who share only 37 teachers. This is a well-staffed school since it has been helped by the charity; it has desks, books and permanent classrooms. Others we visited had few of these essentials. In most, children sit tightly packed on the floor learning from a well-worn blackboard. If they have a classroom, that is.
The affable headmaster was himself a victim of the LRA. A few years back he was taken from the school grounds: the LRA was trying to make the education system grind to a halt by kidnapping teachers. He was held for ten days before he bravely escaped and even more bravely continued to rebuild the school.
When we see just how many of the facilities were donated by Save the Children, it makes me wonder what they would do without such organisations. It could still be the field from which the headmaster was abducted. Back then, lessons were held under the shade of a large tree.
The war has left little government funding for education, so people like the headmaster have had to make things happen. The school has a large vegetable garden where the children grow food for their lunch.
But schools here are seldom as permanent as this one. Others we saw were little more than shacks, with one teacher for every three classes. Each class waits patiently, sometimes for hours, for its turn with a teacher. Yet the conditions in schools pale in comparison with those in hospitals.
On our last day in the north we visited Gulu hospital. The head nurse, Oliangole Jenny Rose, and the principal nursing officer, Lillian Okot, showed us round the wards. The smell was overwhelming. The bedsheets were stained, the floors dirty and in some cases covered in straw. Children screamed in severe discomfort while their exhausted mothers tried to console them.
The only sterile area was the surgery, so even the most basic procedures, such as redressing a wound, had to be carried out there. In a separate ward a recent mother doted over a little bundle on the floor, which, on closer inspection, revealed tiny twins. The mother and her cherubic girls had Aids, for which there is a shortage of drugs.
Nurse Okot told us that many staff have been tempted away to higher-paid and less dangerous jobs in South Africa, Europe and the United States. She had spent years travelling, learning medical techniques from around Europe, but felt she needed to return to her homeland to help. These communities could not cope without such heroes.
Nurse Rose told us that the hospital had no generator, and the night I arrived there was a power cut. I was in a hotel and woke up in oppressive darkness. Trying to hold a hospital together in those conditions seems impossibly difficult. But the staff try.
There is little government assistance for health care in northern Uganda. Patient demand is too great, the staff are too stretched, basic supplies too few.
Schools suffer the same neglect. There are not enough classrooms, books and teachers to meet the overwhelming needs of children who want to learn "for a better life". Some hope to be doctors or lawyers but the largest number intend to be teachers. They want to follow in the footsteps of those whose courage has inspired them.
We hear a lot about corruption and greed in Africa, and the desperation and poverty of its people. We hear less of the heroes holding communities together. It was my privilege to meet a number of these astonishing people in our short time in Uganda. The teachers, nurses and community leaders in the country are an inspiration. They can only hope now for a lasting peace.
Gary Lightbody, frontman of Snow Patrol, travelled to northern Uganda with Save the Children
http://www.newstatesman.com/200711220020
Página/12:
“Las decisiones en economía no son neutras”
COMO VE SU GOBIERNO LA PRESIDENTA ELECTA
A dos semanas de asumir la presidencia, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner explica las políticas que aplicará durante su mandato, da a conocer nombres de embajadores y mantiene el suspenso sobre las segundas líneas. Define cómo será el acuerdo social que propugna y revela que difundirá a principios de 2008 un “relevamiento físico” de toda la Argentina, provincia por provincia, que será la base de los planes productivos y de infraestructura. Sus ideas sobre la oposición y el sistema político, la meneada política exterior, los cuestionamientos a los funcionarios y el Indec y, a todo lo largo del diálogo, su crítica a la mirada con que la mayoría de los medios muestra la realidad.
Por Ernesto Tiffenberg, Mario Wainfeld y
Fernando Cibeira
Domingo, 25 de Noviembre de 2007
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner es una reporteada deseable. Es una protagonista excluyente, otorga todo el tiempo del mundo a la entrevista, en su casa de Calafate, en la tarde del viernes. Da la impresión de estar a gusto, contesta sin enfados, acepta y propone bromas y cuando se le agradece por el largo tiempo concedido comenta creíblemente que no le pareció mucho. Se interna en los temas, no regatea extensión, le gusta hablar de política, busca ser persuasiva. Al mismo tiempo, la presidenta electa es una entrevistada difícil. Cuestiona a menudo la pertinencia de las preguntas, de la narrativa que supuestamente las sustenta, remite a debates anteriores, no todos librados contra este diario. Recae con notable recurrencia en la polémica sobre la lógica de los medios o la de los periodistas, que la induce a numerosas digresiones. En esa dialéctica, la charla recorrió un largo camino regado con unas botellas de agua mineral y una oferta de pastelitos caseros. Néstor Kirchner estaba en la casa pero se retiró durante el reportaje. Sí asistieron el vocero Miguel Núñez, y Cleopatra, una amistosa caniche toy que aprovechó el reportaje para dormitar a gusto al lado de su dueña, la presidenta que viene.
–En uno de sus primeros discursos de campaña le dijo al presidente Kirchner que iba a intentar que no lo extrañaran demasiado, ¿por qué le gustaría que la extrañaran a usted?
–Ah, sinceramente preferiría que no me extrañaran porque el que viene después sea mejor que yo. Lo ideal sería que los recambios institucionales tuvieran una continuidad, más allá de las diferencias en el espectro ideológico.
–Y si no quiere que la extrañen, ¿cómo le gustaría que la recuerden?
–Primero, porque la primera mujer que fue presidenta le hizo honor al género. Siento que tengo una obligación con el género en cuanto a demostración de eficiencia y eficacia en gestión de gobierno. Es un pressing que una siente.
–¿Y en contenidos o políticas? ¿Qué meta le gustaría alcanzar?
–La profundización del proyecto que se inició en el 2003. Nosotros hicimos en esta primera etapa lo macro, que no fue poca cosa. Planteamos un modelo de acumulación económica basado en la industrialización, transformación, en el agregado de valor, frente a lo que había sido el modelo de transferencia de los noventa. También de inclusión social. Habría que profundizar eso. La anterior fue de mucha gestión, pero mucha gestión macro, la próxima será de mucha gestión micro, tendiente a identificar las actividades económicas en las cuales necesitamos mayor grado de inversión, de tecnología. O qué es lo que nos falta en donde somos más o menos competitivos.
–¿Cómo será el acuerdo social que viene proponiendo?
–Lo defino como un acuerdo de carácter estructural en el cual se definan metas, objetivos cuantificables y verificables, siempre basado en este modelo. Con acuerdos sectoriales porque no se puede hacer lo que se hizo en el pacto Gelbard, en 1973, referido nada más que a precios y salarios. No es ésta la idea que tenemos. Y luego de ese acuerdo estructural global, ir sectorialmente sobre cada actividad, porque no son las mismas necesidades ni posibilidades las de cada sector.
–¿Cómo se imagina ese acuerdo, será una reunión de las representaciones corporativas?
–No, nada que ver. Si fuera corporativo no serviría, en términos de representación únicamente de cúpulas sectoriales. Por eso digo que tiene que ver con las necesidades de cada sector. Hay una fuerte necesidad de articulación entre el sector público, privado y el representado por los trabajadores, y no con criterio corporativo sino por cómo se articula hoy en todas las economías desarrolladas del mundo. En Alemania hay acuerdos entre empresarios, sindicatos y Estado. El Pacto de la Moncloa fue un gran acuerdo en este sentido. A eso queremos apuntar.
–Avanzando un poco, ¿cómo sería la primera reunión, cincuenta representantes de distintos sectores o...?
–... bueno, no quieran saber todo lo que se va a hacer. Un poco de paciencia. Ya vamos a articular el diseño.
–De todas maneras, usted sugiere que los actores son los representativos de la sociedad, de la producción, del trabajo y no los partidos políticos. La Moncloa, en cambio, era básicamente un acuerdo entre fuerzas políticas.
–No hay que olvidarse de que el Pacto de la Moncloa viene después de cuarenta años de franquismo, en el gobierno de transición, luego tuvieron el Tejerazo. No me gusta decir “va a ser el Pacto de la Moncloa”, o va a ser tal otro acuerdo. Ninguna sociedad es igual a la otra, ni ningún momento histórico se repite. Tiene que ver esencialmente con un acuerdo muy estructural acerca de cuáles tienen que ser las metas, tiene que ver también con este modelo de perfil industrial, en qué sectores vamos a hacer hincapié, en qué sectores es más necesaria la inversión, en dónde la tecnología. No hay que imaginar esto como una gran ceremonia en la cual nos juntamos setenta o cien personas, a la manera de proclama constitutiva con aires fundacionales, olvídenlo, esto no es así. No funciona así en ninguna parte del mundo. A veces preguntan “¿qué planes, qué medidas?”, como si gobernar fuera lanzar cuatro medidas (un plan) y sobre eso, desarrollar una gestión. No es así. Gobernar es cosa de todos los días, con todos los sectores, todo el tiempo. Hoy se fija una política, mañana cambian las circunstancias internacionales y hay que volver a reunirse para fijar metas y objetivos. Es difícil traducirlo, pero esto es lo que sucede en la gestión de gobierno.
–Aceptando la idea y aceptando también que hay una tensión entre la idea del largo plazo y la planificación...
–... éste es el gran problema del país. Hemos carecido toda la vida de una mirada estratégica de largo plazo. Esto ha dado la imposibilidad de articular a largo plazo de todos los sectores, no sólo de una gestión de gobierno.
–El gobierno de Kirchner arrancó de la emergencia, cuya salida imponía una cantidad de tareas, por así decirlo, gruesas: bajar el desempleo, bajar la pobreza, mejorar las exportaciones. La necesidad de salir tal vez motivó que el elemento básico no fuera la planificación sino la direccionalidad general y una acción intensa en el día a día.
–No, hubo un plan. Si uno recorre los discursos de Kirchner durante la campaña, a él le gustaba hablar de neokeynesianismo, de un plan de obra pública que activara la rueda de la economía y la dotara de la infraestructura necesaria. La planificación no es algo hecho con un compás arriba de un tablero de arquitectura y presentado tipo mamotreto. Están las ideas directrices y se va trabajando toda la planificación en materia de obra pública. Se está trabajando en un plan desde hace dos años, que es un relevamiento físico de la Argentina, que posiblemente presentemos en enero o febrero, donde hemos relevado provincia por provincia, región por región, en cómo está conformada actualmente en sectores productivos, sectores de servicios, rutas. Hay que profundizar en esa dirección.
–En la campaña hubo una discusión económica en cuanto a si convenía seguir creciendo al nueve por ciento con riesgo de inflación, o si convenía bajar suavemente al seis por ciento por ejemplo y controlar mejor las variables.
–Como si fuera la temperatura del aire acondicionado. Sería fantástico si tuviera un aparatito como el de la calefacción y pregunto “¿Tenés mucho calor? ¿La pongo a diez grados, a quince?”
–No es simple, ni en eso se consigue consenso.
–(Risas.) Ningún proceso económico se puede manejar desde un control. Cada vez que nos dijeron eso, Argentina terminó en recesión. La economía es una ciencia profundamente social, tiene que ver con las expectativas de todos los actores: de los trabajadores, de los consumidores, de los usuarios, de los productores, etcétera. Todas las economías del mundo crecen en la medida de lo posible, es lo que necesitamos también nosotros. En definitiva, haber llegado al 8,1 por ciento de desocupación no es una cuestión que se haga diciendo “a ver si lo pongo a cinco o lo pongo a seis”. Los que teorizan de esta manera vienen de experiencias monetaristas, con el sector financiero.
–Más allá de si se puede establecer en un laboratorio cuánto va a crecer la economía, hay dos o tres indicadores controvertidos, en especial en este año. Uno es la inflación. También el nivel de gasto público y el superávit.
–Estamos exactamente en el nivel de superávit que hemos marcado presupuestariamente, llegamos a 3,15. El desempeño en materia de gestión del gasto público también tiene que ver con el desarrollo de la economía. No entiendo cuál es el planteo. ¿Tendríamos que bajar el nivel de inversión pública?
–La pregunta es: ¿la relación gasto-producto 2007 es la mejor que imagina la presidenta para el año que viene?
–Es la que está pautada en el Presupuesto. Es increíble escuchar a los economistas que toda la vida han administrado con un déficit estructural a la República Argentina –los representantes de sus escuelas o ellos mismos en algunos casos– cuestionar al primer gobierno que gestiona sin déficit. Parece que hubiera que dar vuelta cómo se administra. Los que te preguntan son los que administraron con déficit y endeudaron a los argentinos, los condujeron a una desocupación record y terminaron con la tragedia del 2001, corralito mediante. A veces no sé qué es lo que hay que hacer para ser valorizados desde los medios de comunicación, porque desde la sociedad ya lo fuimos.
–Hay economistas que no tienen una mirada muy diferente a la del gobierno nacional que plantean que habría que moderar el gasto con respecto a 2007. No es necesario proponer un modelo antagónico para preguntarse si son necesarios retoques a los números de este año para acrecentar la sustentabilidad futura de este modelo.
–Uno va siempre durante toda la gestión ajustando, viendo si falló algo o cómo se puede mejorar. Pero, más que observaciones, lo que uno siente es que se marca que se está desbocando el gasto público y entonces va a haber déficit. Siempre todo es extremo. A partir del tomate se construyó que venía una disparada hiperinflacionaria como la del gobierno de Alfonsín o como la que tuvo Menem en su primera etapa. ¿A cuánto está el tomate hoy?
–¿Qué rol debe tener el Estado en la redistribución del ingreso?
–Activo, absolutamente. Este gobierno ha mejorado la redistribución del ingreso –no todo lo que hemos querido y era deseable–, de aquella participación del 34 por ciento del PBI que tenían los asalariados en 2003, a un 41 por ciento. Y, por primera vez desde hace aproximadamente una década y media, hemos movido el índice de Gini.
–¿Cómo se expresaría el rol activo del Estado? ¿A través de una reforma impositiva, por ejemplo?
–No, en la profundización del modelo y en la necesaria negociación de los sectores involucrados en las cuestiones de la producción. Hemos negociado más de mil convenios colectivos por primera vez en mucho tiempo.
–¿Cuándo dijo “reforma impositiva no” significa que no hay ninguna perspectiva de reforma al sistema actual?
–Hemos hecho una modificación de bienes personales, creo que ha sido una buena medida. Si me hablan de una reforma tributaria general, no lo hemos pensado. El tema de que si se reduce el IVA se traduce en menores precios y por lo tanto en un mayor poder adquisitivo, no está verificado. Al contrario, creo que si se reduce el IVA el beneficio por ahí termina apropiado por cadenas intermediarias y no por el usuario o consumidor.
Dem & Pop
–Si en un seminario internacional le preguntaran cuál es el perfil político de este gobierno y del que viene, ¿cómo respondería? ¿Un gobierno progresista, socialdemócrata, nacional y popular?
–Popular y democrático.
–¿Nacional ya no?
–Me parece que no se puede ser popular sin ser nacional, soy muy jauretcheana. Profundamente popular y democrático, lo defino sin valerme de categorías europeas. Lo es por su impronta, por su modelo de acumulación, por su manera de interpelación, su modo de relacionamiento. Por eso causa escozor en otros sectores.
–Esas referencias aluden a su lectura de lo popular. ¿Y lo democrático?
–Uno de los caballitos de batalla de la oposición era la calidad institucional. Creo que, como nunca, en este gobierno las instituciones cumplieron su rol constitucional. Fíjese lo que es la Corte Suprema de Justicia. Mire el Senado. Fui senadora por primera vez en diciembre de 1995, un senado que se fue deteriorando cada día más hasta que terminó con el escándalo de los sobornos. Me voy de este Senado como presidenta. Daniel Scioli, Alberto Balestrini, Celso Jaque, Jorge Capitanich se van elegidos para gobernar sus provincias. De este Parlamento denostado por opositores y comunicadores se va, legitimado, el oficialismo, los que defendíamos públicamente al gobierno. El Parlamento real no tiene nada que ver con lo que dicen los medios. Disculpen si estoy monotemática...
–No nos habíamos dado cuenta...
–... pero creo que los medios ocupan hoy en la región un lugar que antes ocupaban otros sectores respecto de ser los que tratan de condicionar a los gobiernos de ciertos signos políticos, populares democráticos. No es una percepción exclusiva mía. Me contó Isabel Allende que los noticieros de una hora en Chile destinan tres cuartos a informar sobre hechos de violencia, a machacar sobre el tema. Hay una direccionalidad de la información sobre inseguridad. Escuché a un comunicador contar que una persona entrevistada le dijo a un encuestador “¿de qué me sirve ganar más plata si me van a matar?”. No importa tener gobiernos que consigan trabajo o que mejoren el poder adquisitivo de los trabajadores, lo importante es que den seguridad...
–Respecto de ese tema. Se ha criticado la unificación de Justicia y Seguridad, básicamente porque se juzga que sea el mismo ministerio el que se ocupe de los derechos humanos y de la policía. Una parte sustancial de la acción de los organismos de derechos humanos son denuncias y acciones sobre delitos, excesos y abusos policiales.
–Emilio Mignone, hace muchos años, hablaba de la tensión que hay en democracia entre el valor “seguridad” y el valor “derechos humanos”. Siempre existe esa tensión pero lo más adecuado es que la Justicia gestione ambos, retomando lo que fue habitual. Sí, me parece adecuado. No creo que la seguridad sea un problema en sí mismo, objeto de planes aislados separados del modelo económico social, de la educación.
–¿Tiene prevista alguna medida para acelerar o facilitar los juicios a los represores por violación de derechos humanos?
–Conozco un proyecto del radicalismo redactado por Ricardo Gil Lavedra, puede haber algún otro. Me preocupa que ese proyecto permita que se acumule prueba de otros expedientes sin que los acusados hayan podido controlarla. Puede afectar el derecho de defensa y colocarnos en horrible posición. No quiero, en ningún aspecto, afectar la legalidad de los juicios. La legitimidad de la lucha por los derechos humanos tiene mucho que ver con su legalidad. A los represores se les dan todos los derechos que consagra la Constitución.
–Así debe ser. Pero subsiste un problema, que se expresó en la trágica desaparición de Julio Jorge López. La repetición de la prueba genera una serie de dificultades para el avance de los juicios y de sobreexigencias (y peligros mayores) para los testigos.
–Sin lugar a dudas. Un camino puede ser unificar causas en función a los centros de detención, creo que hasta la defensa de Febres había propuesto algo así para justificar su conducta frente a la de sus jefes. Hay que ser muy cuidadosos, no hay que poner en tela de juicio al debido proceso.
¿Reforma?
–Trascendió que existe la intención, durante de su mandato, de promover una reforma constitucional.
–Ah, bueno... Le puedo dar un listado así de largo (lo grafica dejando un buen espacio vertical entre sus manos) de cosas que han trascendido.
–Hablemos mejor sobre si hay o no intención de reformar la Constitución.
–¿A alguien se le ocurre hablar de una reforma y yo tengo que salir a contestar? También dijeron que íbamos a sacar la sala de periodistas de la Casa Rosada.
–Por ahí ese cambio figuraba en la reforma constitucional.
–(Risa) ¿Por qué tengo que desmentir lo que inventan? No me parece una buena metodología.
–No le pedimos una desmentida, sino una respuesta. ¿Cree que éste es un buen momento para una reforma constitucional?
–No, porque nunca se nos ocurrió. No lo veo, por parte del Gobierno.
Moción para otro
reportaje y cierre
–¿Van a construir alguna estructura política para la Concertación plural y para otros eventuales aliados como socialistas o el Frente Grande?
–Eso debería ser motivo de un reportaje a Néstor Kirchner, que va a tener mucho tiempo y les puede dar pormenores. Quien tiene que conducir los destinos de todos los argentinos tiene bastante con ocuparse de la gestión del Estado.
–¿Su idea es que el Presidente...?
–... tengo que mantenerlo ocupado (risas).
–¿Es una ocupación útil o pura laborterapia?
–El es un animal político, toda la vida ha construido política, toda la vida ha participado. Lo va a seguir haciendo. Volviendo a la estructura, es difícil proyectar porque uno interactúa con montones de cosas. Son cosas que van confluyendo. Uno no puede sentarse y diseñar la política como si fuera construir una casa... Hay mucho de trabajo cotidiano. Sí creo que debemos reconstruir un sistema de partidos políticos, con partidos que tengan que ver con un proyecto y que no todo dependa de la voluntad de una o dos personas. Cuando explota el sistema de representación, especialmente el partido radical, no se ve cuál va a ser el desarrollo de la política en el siglo XXI.
–¿Cómo imagina ese desarrollo, cómo aspira a que sea?
–Imagino espacios populares y democráticos donde los partidos se reagrupen respecto de grandes temas: la distribución, el posicionamiento en el mundo, la interrelación con la región, el respeto irrestricto a los derechos humanos. El radicalismo se acomoda, en el siglo XX, en la lucha contra el “régimen falaz y descreído”, contra el fraude, por el sufragio universal. El segundo partido del siglo, el peronismo, se ubica en torno a la justicia social. El tercer partido fue el militar, que se encargó de representar a los sectores más concentrados, que no podían llegar al poder mediante el sufragio. El problema es cómo se agrupan los nuevos partidos en el siglo XXI, en relación a qué tópicos. Y lo que debemos preguntarnos es quién cumple ahora el rol de representar a los sectores más concentrados.
–¿Cómo responde usted esa pregunta?
–Para mí, está claro que nosotros (este espacio político que represento) nos estamos agrupando en torno a una mejor distribución del ingreso, la vigencia irrestricta de los derechos humanos. Y si uno escucha los discursos que se plantearon durante la campaña, no todos... No me gusta hablar de los dirigentes de la oposición. Sería bueno que fueran agrupaciones más orgánicas, no tan centradas en una figura y que propusieran algo más que slogans. Y asumir a quién representan. Cuando uno escucha críticas a las retenciones al campo o a los juicios a las violaciones de derechos humanos, está claro. No soy yo la que tiene que clasificar eso, sería una clasificación interesada. Pero no vi en letras de molde clasificaciones exactas que dijeran “quien tiene esa posición, normalmente, es de derecha”.
–Dentro de lo que se reconoce como centroizquierda o lo que usted define como espacio popular y democrático hay otras fuerzas que comparten en líneas generales ese ideario. Por ejemplo, podrían ser los gobernadores Hermes Binner o Fabiana Ríos. ¿Ustedes deberían darse una política especial respecto de ellos?
–Esa pregunta deberían hacérsela a ellos, no a nosotros. Nosotros hemos tenido, desde el principio, una política respecto de esos sectores, muchos de sus dirigentes ya están con nosotros. Jorge Rivas, Ariel Basteiro, muchos dirigentes de la CTA. Este espacio que afecta intereses minoritarios, pero muy poderosos, debe contar con mayor sustentabilidad política y social. No es casual el diseño que se dio en estas elecciones, convocando a hombres y mujeres del radicalismo (en especial el que gobierna provincias) y del socialismo.
–La representación republicana es muy compleja. Usted fue elegida por una amplia mayoría y, desde ese mismo momento, representa a todos los argentinos, incluyendo aquellos que no la votaron. Hay un 55 por ciento que no votó Frente para la Victoria. ¿Se le ocurre algo para decirles, especialmente a ellos?
–No me parece representativo, ni democrático, ni republicano intentar representar al cien por ciento. Es una de las principales cuestiones que se están planteando en Europa, la indiferenciación de proyectos incide en el desapego a la política. Hay un excelente libro, “En torno a lo político”, de Chantal Mouffe, que aborda esta cuestión. Institucionalmente represento a todos los argentinos, soy la presidente, es claro. Pero no voy a poder representar (hace comillas con los dedos índice y mayor de las dos manos) “lo que todos quieren” porque la representación de intereses no es lo mismo que la institucional. Sobre todo en economía, las decisiones en economía no son neutras. Si uno mejora la participación de los trabajadores en el PBI, el otro sector deja de percibir una parte. Lo que tengo que buscar son las decisiones para que la mayoría de los argentinos viva mejor porque, en definitiva, también los demás recibirán beneficios en otros aspectos, por ejemplo en la calidad de vida. La modificación de la distribución del ingreso puede restarles algo pero les conviene vivir en una sociedad integrada, sin ghettos, que es el paisaje que suele verse en otros países de la región y que no terminó de llegar a la Argentina. No aspiro a representar al cien por ciento de los argentinos pero sí a una enorme mayoría. Con un modelo inclusivo, con menores índices de pobreza y de indigencia, con mayores exportaciones, más industrial, casi todos mejorarían.
–¿Para qué le jugó o le juega a favor ser mujer? ¿Para qué le juega o le jugó en contra?
–No creo que me juegue a favor. Mejor le contesto esa pregunta en un tiempo. Michelle Bachelet tuvo esa experiencia y dijo que “se juzga distinto al hombre y la mujer. Si el hombre grita, es enérgico, tiene autoridad. Si la mujer grita no tiene control, es una histérica”. O sea, siempre es más difícil ser mujer. En el senado me pasaba argumentar algo y no me hacían caso, era como si pasara un carro. Un hombre decía lo mismo y lo aceptaban. Me daba una rabia. Vamos a tratar de quebrar la racha histórica de género.
–¿Hay contenidos específicos de género que está dispuesta a promover? ¿Salud reproductiva, aborto?
–Saben que no estoy por la despenalización del aborto. Respeto todas las opiniones, no me sumo a los que estigmatizan a nadie. Mis ideas pueden tener que ver con que pertenezco a una generación en la que la mujer estuvo a la par del hombre, ni por arriba ni por abajo. No creo en los avances individuales, etarios o de género por fuera o independientemente del modelo político. En las sociedades donde hay buena distribución del ingreso, protección de los derechos humanos hay mejores posibilidades de recolocación de género.
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Fin de ciclo
BENDINI A LA HORA DE LA VERDAD
La verdadera historia sobre el relevo del jefe de inteligencia del Ejército. Con una versión interesada, Bendini trató de descargar su responsabilidad en Aníbal Fernández y en la SIDE. Los subtenientes y tenientes de Videla integran la actual cúpula. Las intrigas de inteligencia son ineficaces frente a un gobierno con buena información y que no acepta relativizar el control civil sobre el instrumento militar.
Por Horacio Verbitsky
Domingo, 25 de Noviembre de 2007
La desproporcionada reacción del Estado Mayor del Ejército por el relevo de su jefe de inteligencia escenifica la lucha de Roberto Bendini por la supervivencia, luego de haber apostado al reemplazo de la ministra de Defensa Nilda Garré. Por debajo de las apariencias circulan inquietantes corrientes subterráneas, que traen y llevan datos sobre la función que cumplieron hace tres décadas varios integrantes de la actual cúpula del Ejército, cuando eran los subtenientes y tenientes de Jorge Videla.
El caso fue mencionado el domingo pasado en un brevísimo texto en esta página. Decía que “la capacidad de autosugestión hizo que algunos jefes de las Fuerzas Armadas imaginaran el relevo de la ministra que reglamentó la ley de defensa y jerarquizó el Estado Mayor Conjunto. Pero eso sólo demuestra que aparte de la prohibición legal, tampoco les conviene hacer inteligencia interior porque les sale mal”. Ante las constancias de la ingenua tentativa de la burocracia castrense por digitar la designación de las autoridades civiles, el presidente Néstor Kirchner decidió proceder en silencio pero en forma contundente. Es la primera vez que el ministerio de Defensa, luego de consultar con el Comandante en jefe, releva a un jefe de inteligencia. Los ministros y los presidentes a lo sumo relevaban a los jefes de Estado Mayor, pero una vez designado el sucesor, le daban amplia libertad para hacer y deshacer a su gusto. Tampoco tenían buena información sobre lo que ocurría en las Fuerzas Armadas. La única réplica posible para ese grupo de generales fue instalar una versión interesada de los hechos, con la finalidad de salvar a su jefe. Lo hizo mediante una filtración dirigida a dos diarios nacionales por el secretario general del Estado Mayor, general Roberto Gustavo Fonseca, un apellido que brilló en el generalato de la penúltima dictadura. Su versión, reproducida por Clarín y La Nación, decía que el jefe de inteligencia, general Osvaldo Montero, había sido relevado debido a una operación contra la ministra Garré y en favor de su reemplazo por Aníbal Fernández. El parte castrense extraoficial afirmaba que la Secretaría de inteligencia grabó conversaciones de Montero y excluía de cualquier sospecha de vinculación con el episodio al jefe de Estado Mayor, Roberto Bendini. El señalamiento a la SIDE y al ministro del Interior Aníbal Fernández y la simultánea exculpación de Bendini revelan una típica jugada de control de daño. Fonseca, igual que Montero, que el general Jorge Tereso, director de Planeamiento del Ejército, y que el retirado general Gonzalo Angel Palacios son hombres de la confianza personal de Bendini, quien los designó y los conduce. Sólo hay dos posibilidades: Bendini ignoraba las actividades de su amigo Montero, y es un inepto, o las respaldaba y es algo peor.
Qué, cuándo y dónde
Apuntarle a Fernández es una maniobra de distracción. Según el ministro, advertido de que no se renovaría su mandato en Interior, le adelantó al jefe de gabinete que no deseaba ir a Defensa. Fastidiado por tener que servir a las órdenes de una mujer, Bendini hizo ante testigos el elogio de Fernández como eventual sucesor de Garré, dando por supuesto lo que sólo era una expresión de sus deseos. Fernández comenzó por negarlo, durante un reportaje radial con el periodista Ernesto Tenembaum y terminó por admitirlo. No recordaba que Bendini hubiera dicho: “Vos tenés que ser nuestro ministro”. Pero agregó que, “si fuera cierto”, sólo sería “un halago, un gestito, porque había sido un día de homenaje a la Policía, porque acababa de dar un discurso donde yo remarcaba la responsabilidad que tiene la Fuerza ante la sociedad en este momento”. El periodista no había mencionado el acto del Día de la Policía, el 26 de octubre, dos días después de las elecciones. Es decir que el ministro no recordaba lo que le habían dicho, pero sí cuándo y dónde. “Dialéctica no”, atinó a replicar Fernández. Las insidias contra la ministra, difundidas por Montero a través de medios hipercríticos de Garré pero también de Kirchner, procuraban asegurar ese desenlace.
Cosa de hombres
Garré sacó de unidades militares y trasladó a una unidad penal a los detenidos por crímenes de lesa humanidad, fortaleció el Estado Mayor Conjunto, reglamentó la ley de Defensa, suprimió el viejo Código de Justicia Militar y las previsiones discriminatorias de género, como las prohibiciones de casarse con personal militar de otra jerarquía o con personal de las fuerzas de seguridad; organizó programas de “derechos humanos y construcción de ciudadanía en el contexto democrático para las Fuerzas Armadas”, como el que culminará el lunes 3, con la participación del Instituto Latinoamericano de Seguridad y Democracia y el reino de Holanda.
Su trato con los jefes de Estado Mayor es sincero. Aníbal Fernández sabía que la presión por la prensa no es un método idóneo para condicionar decisiones presidenciales y que, aislados en Calafate, Kirchner y CFK tomarían solos las principales decisiones. Para congraciarse con quienes podrían ser sus próximos subordinados, le bastaban sus bigotes. La explicación que dio esta semana Fernández acerca de su falta de conocimiento sobre cuestiones de Defensa no dice gran cosa. Eso es lo que más atractivo lo hacía a los ojos de quienes no quieren intromisiones en lo que consideran su coto privativo. Además, desde 1983 ninguno de los ministros designados en esa cartera sabía distinguir un tanque de un transporte blindado de tropas. La única excepción a esta regla es Horacio Jaunarena, pero sólo porque lo aprendió cuando fue secretario del mismo ministerio, nunca antes.
Modus operandi
En diciembre de 2003 el entonces ministro José Pampuro anunció que Tereso había sido removido como secretario general del Ejército (el cargo que hoy ocupa Fonseca) y que se le había aplicado la máxima sanción disciplinaria por haber pedido a la justicia que seis ex integrantes del Batallón de Inteligencia 601, detenidos por crímenes de lesa humanidad, pasaran las fiestas de Navidad y Año Nuevo con sus familias. Esos oficiales, junto con el último comandante en jefe del Ejército durante la dictadura, Cristino Nicolaides, están sometidos a juicio en este momento. Ya terminó la ronda de testimonios y se espera que la sentencia sea dada a conocer por el juez federal Ariel Lijo antes de fin de año. Se trata del primer juicio a militares desde la nulidad de las leyes de punto final y de obediencia debida. Hasta ahora sólo fueron juzgados un policía federal, uno bonaerense, un cura católico y un prefecto.
Cuando se conoció el pedido de Tereso al entonces juez de la causa, Claudio Bonadío, el Ejército sostuvo que no lo había consultado con Bendini. Sin embargo, una vez cumplida la sanción, en vez de ponerlo en disponibilidad como paso previo a un seguro retiro, Bendini intercedió ante el presidente Néstor Kirchner para que se le asignara un nuevo destino. Alegó que era un hombre capaz y confiable, que no había procedido con mala intención y que de otro modo la conducción del Ejército se le volvería más difícil. La verdad de lo sucedido recién se conoció en forma oficial en diciembre del año pasado, cuando el CELS impugnó el pedido de ascenso de Tereso. El ahora senador Pampuro informó por escrito a sus colegas de la Comisión de Acuerdos que en aquella ocasión “Tereso no había actuado por iniciativa personal sino en el marco del vínculo jerárquico”, es decir por orden de Bendini. El Senado aprobó entonces su pliego, pero no hubo ninguna sanción para quien había dado la orden objetada por el presidente. Desde entonces, Tereso es el director de Planeamiento del Ejército.
Sepultureros
Aquellos procesados del ex 601 por quienes intercedió Tereso fueron compañeros del general Palacios, rescatado por Bendini de la gran purga de 2003. En 1976, cuando prestaba servicios en Campo de Mayo, Palacios fue comisionado para deshacerse del cadáver del guerrillero Roberto Santucho, muerto en uno de los pocos enfrentamiento reales de aquellos años, con el capitán Juan Carlos Leonetti, quien también perdió la vida ese día. El cuerpo fue exhibido en el Museo de la Subversión, lo cual está documentado en fotografías que Martín Balza entregó a la justicia cuando fue jefe de Estado Mayor. Pero a pesar de la legitimidad del procedimiento, el Ejército decidió que el cuerpo debía desaparecer, como el de Eva Perón dos décadas antes. En 1977 Palacios fue jefe de personal y ayudante de campo del Comandante del Regimiento de Infantería de Monte 28, de Tartagal. En esa unidad, que fue entrenada por los Rangers estadounidenses, funcionaba un campo clandestino de concentración en el que había entonces 300 detenidos-desaparecidos. En 1979 participó en la misión clandestina en Centroamérica, cuando la dictadura decidió hacer política exterior enseñando a secuestrar y torturar a los camaradas del istmo. A raíz de ello fue contratado como instructor de contrainsurgencia en la Escuela de las Américas. Ya como coronel y a cargo de una de las Escuelas de Armas del Ejército, Palacios recibió la tarea de remover cadáveres cuyo hallazgo podía ser comprometedor, entre ellos el de Santucho. Así surge de un informe que circuló en el Ejército luego de que Kirchner ordenara buscar los restos del ex jefe del PRT-ERP. El informe dice que el segundo de Palacios era en ese momento el ahora relevado jefe de inteligencia, general Montero. Los ascensos de Palacios fueron impugnados ante el Senado en 1995 y 1997 por el presidente fundador del CELS, Emilio Mignone. Sin embargo, en 1999 Fernando de la Rúa lo ascendió a general de brigada y en 2003 Bendini pidió que no pasara a retiro junto con la cúpula que acompañó a los generales Ricardo Brinzoni y Daniel Reimundes. Alegó para ello que era un “general nacionalista” al que necesitaba para apoyar su conducción. La reaparición del par conceptual nacionalistas-liberales, establecido durante las décadas de autonomía castrense respecto del poder político, es uno de los peores retrocesos ocurridos durante la gestión de Bendini, pese al rechazo a esa concepción tanto por parte de Kirchner como de Garré. Bendini, con el apoyo de algunos dirigentes de la segunda y tercera línea del gobierno, hizo hincapié en la idea del Ejército como partero de la Nación, cuyo nacimiento ubica en la resistencia española y criolla contra las invasiones inglesas de 1807. El CELS volvió a impugnar a Palacios en 2005 cuando Bendini intentó ascenderlo a general de división, Kirchner le negó esa promoción y debió pasar a retiro a fin de ese año. Bendini no pudo seguir defendiéndolo, cuando “el nacionalista” Palacios condujo un ejercicio basado en una hipótesis de conflicto armado con Chile, objetado por el ministerio de Defensa cuanto todavía estaba a cargo de Pampuro.
Yo sí, pero tú también
Otro episodio significativo ocurrió en agosto de este año, cuando el periodista José Eliaschev informó en el semanario Perfil que Tereso había sido condecorado por la Armada a raíz de su actuación en el grupo de tareas de la ESMA. Por decisión oficial, Bendini le pidió explicaciones. Tereso respondió que nunca había recibido esa condecoración y recordó un episodio de 1976, cuando estaba de retén en el Regimiento de Granaderos y fue requerido en apoyo de una operación de la ESMA, que había concluido cuando llegó al lugar, en la que murió un marino y no hubo civiles detenidos ni muertos. Con toda intención, Tereso incluyó en su contestación que también Bendini prestaba servicios en esa unidad en aquel año. Para evitar más sorpresas, el ministerio de Defensa pidió a las tres fuerzas que informaran acerca de todos los oficiales y suboficiales condecorados por su actuación en la guerra sucia. El informe de Bendini incluye a Tereso, pese a la negativa del interesado.
La vida te da sorpresas
Bendini es miembro de la promoción 99 del Ejército, que egresó del Colegio Militar en diciembre de 1968, es decir que era teniente recién ascendido al producirse el golpe de 1976. En esa misma promoción estudió, pero no llegó a graduarse, el periodista Juan B. Yofre, jefe de la SIDE durante el gobierno de Carlos Menem, quien tuvo una participación destacada en el episodio que culminó con el alejamiento de Montero y uno de los especialistas en la difusión de acción sicológica de baja calidad. Varios de los integrantes de esa promoción reprocharon a Bendini haber descolgado el retrato de Videla en el Colegio Militar, en cumplimiento de una orden presidencial. Como vocero de ese malestar, Yofre publicó en su último libro Fuimos todos. Cronología de un fracaso, 1976-1983 una foto de Bendini junto con Videla, cuando integraba la custodia del dictador. El propósito expreso de la obra es diluir las responsabilidades políticas, éticas y penales. Pero su texto es una enumeración de torpezas e incompetencias cometidas por Videla, Massera & Cía y una ventilación de intrigas entre funcionarios de la Cancillería. Las diferencias entre Yofre y Bendini fueron superadas ante la enemiga común. La versión del Ejército sobre el relevo de Montero y la situación de Bendini señala que Garré supo de las murmuraciones del jefe de inteligencia por grabaciones realizadas por la SIDE. Clarín sostuvo, incluso, que para ello un funcionario de la SIDE al que identifica como Fernando Pocino le dejó su celular cuando Montero estuvo internado en el Hospital Militar y que por ese aparato hizo los “comentarios críticos” sobre Garré. Esta versión tiene una imposibilidad cronológica: Montero se internó después de la decisión ministerial de relevarlo, para dilatar la ejecución de la orden y especular con la designación de un nuevo ministro que lo repusiera en el cargo. Por eso no asistió al acto del Día de la Inteligencia, durante cuyo transcurso se recibió el balde de agua fría de la confirmación de Garré. Montero tampoco hizo comentarios críticos sobre su superior, sino que difundió informaciones falsas a periodistas y operadores de inteligencia. Por alguna razón que no se explicita, todas esas publicaciones inspiradas por Bendini y Fonseca dan por supuesto que la SIDE no sólo escuchó las conversaciones de Montero sino que lo hizo sin orden judicial. La vida te da sorpresas.
Videla con Bendini, en el libro de Yofre.
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Página/12:
Próximos episodios de Start Trek
Por Juan Gelman
Domingo, 25 de Noviembre de 2007
Se está convirtiendo en algo más que una película. EE.UU. acelera su capacidad de guerrear en las galaxias, a título “preventivo” siempre: el informe de 621 páginas de ambas cámaras del Congreso sobre el presupuesto de defensa del 2008 contiene un rubro titulado “Ataque global inmediato” por el que se destinan 100 millones de dólares al nuevo programa “Falcon”. Su meta es construir “un vehículo de crucero supersónico capaz de enviar una carga explosiva de 5,5 toneladas a una distancia de 18.000 kilómetros en menos de dos horas” (The Washington Post, 12-11-07). Casi nada.
El proyecto estadounidense de dominar el espacio en nombre de “la seguridad nacional” no es nuevo y lo mencionó explícitamente Donald Rumsfeld, primer jefe del Pentágono de Bush, en la audiencia senatorial que aprobó su nombramiento: “La historia nos muestra que todos los medios –aire, tierra y mar– han sido campos de conflicto. La realidad indica que lo mismo sucederá con el espacio. Dada esta certeza virtual, EE.UU. debe desarrollar los recursos de represalia y defensa contra actos hostiles en y desde el espacio y asegurar su continua superioridad en la materia” (American Forces Press Service, 11-1-01). El 11 de enero del 2007 –exactamente 6 años después– China lanzó un misil que destruyó un satélite propio que orbitaba a 865 kilómetros de la Tierra para medir las condiciones climáticas. Esto no produjo alegría en la Casa Blanca. Antes, por el contrario.
La nueva política espacial estadounidense establecida en el 2006 contempla el empleo de sistemas nucleares de exploración para “el progreso de conocimientos fundamentales sobre nuestro planeta, el sistema solar y el sistema del universo”, pero subraya que también se trata de “garantizar que nuestra capacidad espacial esté disponible a tiempo para promover
la seguridad nacional, la seguridad interior y los objetivos de la política exterior” (www.space.com, 7-10-06). Y no se trata sólo de espiar a los estadounidenses mismos vía satélite: el escudo de defensa antimisiles que W. Bush quiere extender a Polonia y la República Checa se trata en realidad del perfeccionamiento de tecnologías nucleares de ataque “en y desde el espacio”, como indicó Rumsfeld. Era su costumbre decir las cosas al revés.
Investigaciones de diversas fuentes, como el World Policy Institute (www.worldpolicy.org), permiten acercar una idea de los nuevos elementos que financia el presupuesto militar-industrial del 2008. El escritor Stan Cox los resume así (www.alternet.org, 15-11-07): microsatélites con la capacidad de destruir satélites de otras naciones; espejos en órbita que permitirían reflejar y reenviar rayos de láser emitidos desde la tierra o el aire contra objetivos espaciales determinados; misiles que podrían destruir satélites desde tierra; armas que podrían lanzarse desde la atmósfera terrestre dotadas de una velocidad de 40.000 kilómetros por hora. Un arsenal desconocido y terrorífico.
Poco se habló en concreto de estos artefactos en la conferencia anual sobre espacio y defensa que tuvo lugar en Omaha, Nebraska, del 9 al 11 de octubre, y que reunió a la cúpula del Comando Estratégico de EE.UU. y a representantes de la industria armamentista. Pero nadie dejó de entender el significado de eufemismos como el del contraalmirante James Caldwell, subjefe del organismo Espacio y Ataque Global, dependiente del Comando Estratégico, cuando declaró que su misión consistía en “producir efectos globales, cinéticos y no cinéticos”. La preocupación estadounidense por las novedades espaciales de Pekín se refleja en el comentario que formuló un observador anónimo: “La nueva política espacial (de EE.UU.) afirma que podemos defender los cielos con tecnología. Pero no podemos y los chinos acaban de probarlo” (www.space.com, 19-1-07).
Los consorcios armamentistas, espaciales y electrónicos más grandes del país auspiciaron la conferencia y en ella participaron: Locked-Martin, Northtrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, desde luego, y aun otros menores. Se comprende: hay mucho dinero detrás de estos proyectos. Los fondos que la Casa Blanca les asigna triplican casi el presupuesto de la NASA. EE.UU. ocupa el 95 por ciento de la inversión mundial en la militarización del espacio y el espionaje desde el aire, y posee más de la mitad de todos los satélites de naturaleza militar que giran sobre nuestras cabezas 15 o 20 veces por día. Se ignoran las capacidades y los alcances exactos de las nuevas armas espaciales estadounidenses, “uno de los secretos mejor guardados del gobierno” (The Wall Street Journal, 15-8-07). No hace falta conocerlos para imaginar que Star Trek no sólo se proyectará en los cines.
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The Independent:
Darkness falls on the Middle East
In Beirut, people are moving out of their homes, just as they have in Baghdad
Robert Fisk
Published: 24 November 2007
So where do we go from here? I am talking into blackness because there is no electricity in Beirut. And everyone, of course, is frightened. A president was supposed to be elected today. He was not elected. The corniche outside my home is empty. No one wants to walk beside the sea.
When I went to get my usual breakfast cheese manouche there were no other guests in the café. We are all afraid. My driver, Abed, who has loyally travelled with me across all the war zones of Lebanon, is frightened to drive by night. I was supposed to go to Rome yesterday. I spared him the journey to the airport.
It's difficult to describe what it's like to be in a country that sits on plate glass. It is impossible to be certain if the glass will break. When a constitution breaks – as it is beginning to break in Lebanon – you never know when the glass will give way.
People are moving out of their homes, just as they have moved out of their homes in Baghdad. I may not be frightened, because I'm a foreigner. But the Lebanese are frightened. I was not in Lebanon in 1975 when the civil war began, but I was in Lebanon in 1976 when it was under way. I see many young Lebanese who want to invest their lives in this country, who are frightened, and they are right to frightened. What can we do?
Last week, I had lunch at Giovanni's, one of the best restaurants in Beirut, and took out as my companion Sherif Samaha, who is the owner of the Mayflower Hotel. Many of the guests I've had over the past 31 years I have sent to the Mayflower. But Sherif was worried because I suggested that his guests had included militia working for Saad Hariri, who is the son of the former prime minister, murdered – if you believe most Lebanese – by the Syrians on 14 February 2005.
Poor Sherif. He never had the militia men in his hotel. They were in a neighbouring building. But so Lebanese is Sherif that he even offered to pick me up in his car to have lunch. He is right to be worried.
A woman friend of mine, married to a doctor at the American University Hospital, called me two days before. "Robert, come and see the building they are making next to us," she said. And I took Abed and we went to see this awful building. It has almost no windows. All its installations are plumbing. It is virtually a militia prison. And I'm sure that's what it is meant to be. This evening I sit on my balcony, in a power cut, as I dictate this column. And there is no one in the street. Because they are all frightened.
So what can a Middle East correspondent write on a Saturday morning except that the world in the Middle East is growing darker and darker by the hour. Pakistan. Afghanistan. Iraq. "Palestine". Lebanon. From the borders of Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean, we – we Westerners that is – are creating (as I have said before) a hell disaster. Next week, we are supposed to believe in peace in Annapolis, between the colourless American apparatchik and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister who has no more interest in a Palestinian state than his predecessor Ariel Sharon.
And what hell disasters are we creating? Let me quote a letter from a reader in Bristol. She asks me to quote a professor at Baghdad University, a respected man in his community who tells a story of real hell; you should read it. Here are his own words:
"'A'adhamiya Knights' is a new force that has started its task with the Americans to lead them to al-Qa'ida and Tawheed and Jihad militants. This 300-fighter force started their raids very early at dawn wearing their black uniform and black masks to hide their faces. Their tours started three days ago, arresting about 150 citizens from A'adhamiya. The 'Knight' leads the Americans to a citizen who might be one of his colleagues who used to fight the Americans with him. These acts resulted in violent reactions of al-Qa'ida. Its militants and the militants of Tawheed and Jihad distributed banners on mosques' walls, especially on Imam Abu Hanifa mosque, threatening the Islamic Party, al-Ishreen revolution groups and Sunni endowment Diwan with death because these three groups took part in establishing 'A'adhamiya Knights'. Some crimes happened accordingly, targeting two from Sunni Diwan staff and one from the Islamic Party.
"Al-Qa'ida militants are distributed through the streets, stopping the people and asking about their IDs ... they carry lists of names. Anyone whose name is on these lists is kidnapped and taken to an unknown place. Eleven persons have been kidnapped up to now from Omar Bin Abdul Aziz Street."
The writer describes how her professor friend was kidnapped and taken to a prison. "They helped me sit on a chair (I was blindfolded) and someone came and held my hand saying, 'We are Muhajeen, we know you but we don't know where you are from.' They did not take my wallet nor did they search me. They only asked me if I have a gun. An hour or so later, one of them came and asked me to come with them. They drove me towards where my car was in the street and they said no more." So who are the A'adhamiya Knights? Who is paying them? What are we doing in the Middle East?
And how can we even conceive of a moral stand in the Middle East when we still we refuse to accept the fact – reiterated by Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, and all the details of US diplomats in the First World War – that the Armenian genocide occurred in 1915? Here is the official British government position on the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915. "Officially, the Government acknowledges the strength of feeling [note, reader, the 'strength of feeling'] about what it describes as a terrible episode of history and recognises the massacres of 1915-16 as a tragedy. However, neither the current Government nor previous British governments have judged that the evidence is sufficiently unequivocal to be persuaded that these events should be categorised as genocide as it is defined by the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide." When we can't get the First World War right, how in God's name can we get World War III right?
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article3191532.ece
The Nation:
Love by a Thousand Cuts
by BARRY SCHWABSKY
[from the December 10, 2007 issue]
History, said Stephen Dedalus, was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. For Kara Walker, history seems to be a nightmare she's trying to enjoy, perhaps in the sense that Slavoj Zizek urges his readers to "enjoy your symptom." Whether or not Walker succeeds in attaining this enjoyment through her work (I'll wager she does), lots of other people certainly do. Even in this era of immense and sudden success for certain young artists, it's hard to think of any who have come so far, so fast. A 1994 MFA graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Walker began to garner attention as soon as her work appeared in the "Selections 1994" show at the Drawing Center in New York; the next year she produced three one-person shows, two of them in public spaces, and by 1997 the artist, then all of 27 years old, had been given a MacArthur fellowship. Her work is in the most important American museums, and the European ones that own or have exhibited her art are nothing to sneeze at either. In New York alone, she's exhibited in the past four years at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Met and the New School, not to mention Sikkema Jenkins, the commercial gallery in Chelsea that handles her work. And the art world shows no sign of Walker fatigue: A traveling retrospective of her work, My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, which originated earlier this year at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, recently closed at ARC/Museé d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, where I saw it, and where it was called Mon Ennemi, Mon Frère, Mon Bourreau, Mon Amour. The retrospective, which includes three films, a dozen large-scale wall works and hundreds of drawings, watercolors and small paintings, has now arrived at the Whitney (through February 3), after which it will finish its tour at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (March 2-June 8).
Why is it that museums can't get enough of Walker's work? Early on, Walker found the holy grail of the contemporary art lover, an instantly recognizable amalgamation of technique and content not previously associated with any other artist-the aesthetic equivalent of what marketing gurus call a unique selling proposition. What struck the eye from the first were Walker's grand-scale figurative compositions made with cut-out black silhouettes affixed directly to the wall, and the neat way this folksy, traditional and domestic technique, expanded to the scale of a public mural and executed with a breathtaking precision and elegance, meshed with the subject matter: the violence of American black slavery recast as a perverse sexual fantasy. Here was Uncle Tom's Cabin as it might have been envisaged by a disciple of the Marquis de Sade, or Mandingo remade as a Matisse cutout, if Matisse had been a student of Aubrey Beardsley rather than of Gustave Moreau. The ironies thus generated are endless, delectably so: the use of a graphic technique that ruthlessly reduces everything to the polarity of black and white to evoke moral and psychological ambiguity and doubt, for instance, and favoring a mode of representation that makes it impossible to represent skin color in addressing questions of race.
The intensity of Walker's ambivalence about identity is evident even in one of the simplest of these mural silhouettes: a work from 1998 called Cut functions as a portrait of the artist, the "emancipated negress" we encounter in the archly elaborate titles of some of her other works. Here, the gesture of cutting that's the basis of Walker's silhouettes is given a surprising twist. With a pair of girlish braids and wearing a big flowing skirt, the figure in Cut seems to be rising into the air, kicking her heels together like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz using her ruby slippers to go home. One outstretched hand clutches a straight razor, which has slit the other wrist so deeply that the hand, with its daintily spread fingers, is hanging on to the forearm by just a thread. Blood gushes up like a feathery geyser from the wrist, and a couple of puddles of it have gathered on the ground beneath her. Then one notices that the hand that holds the razor has somehow been slashed too-blood plumes from it as well, though less profusely-and for that matter the razor blade is hanging from its handle in the same way, as if it had even cut itself. This is an image of self-laceration as ecstasy beyond the dreams of your average paraphiliac.
What's important, though, is that the blade that's used to make the art is equated with the blade that draws the artist's own blood. Cut is the kind of expressionist melodrama Edvard Munch or Oskar Kokoschka would have understood, though in their day the creative artist could not be his own femme fatale. Yet its execution (the word suddenly becomes a strange sort of pun) is the opposite of Expressionist style as we normally conceive it-not disordered but precise, not turbulent but cool, not messy but clean, not demonstrative but formal, even downright prim. Walker draws blood, but her art is dry. She presents her work as concerning self-control in emotional extremity-where self-control does not necessarily mean keeping quiet but rather the opposite, being capable of a stylized gesture so extreme that it can only freak out its witness with its sublime indifference to self-sacrifice. The most extreme gesture in Walker's art, however, is one that is shown in this allegory of her self-conception as an artist, though it is nearly everywhere else in her oeuvre: the insistent equation of polymorphous carnal pleasure with the perverse power structure of slave society.
Maybe our delight in this copious phantasmagoria amounts to a sort of enlightened masochism. Although Cut implies that this is a form of self-wounding, Walker means to draw blood from the rest of us as well, and not just through pictures of master-slave orgies and the like. Thanks to Francis Picabia and Barbara Kruger, there may be nothing new about an artwork taking a verbally aggressive stance toward its public, but it's hard to remember any before that addressed its viewer as "Dear you hypocritical fucking Twerp," as Walker's does in Letter From a Black Girl (1998), a text displayed prominently on a wall in the retrospective, not to mention on the cover of its catalogue. That charming salutation pretty well sums up the mixed feelings that Walker cultivates with such feverish tenacity, and while her work can make you feel kind of beat up on, there's nothing quite like the jolt of being told "I hate you" by someone who really seems to mean "I love you"-the emotional up-and-down can be addictive.
It's easy to take a single figure like Cut as paradigmatic of Walker's vast, multifigured murals, starting with Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994), because those works, eschewing traditional hierarchical composition, are spread across the wall as concatenations of isolated figures or, more typical, tight little groups of two or three, cut from the same sheet. The most complicated of them, if not quite the largest, also gets the longest title: Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFE LIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or "Life at 'Ol' Virginny's Hole' (sketches from Plantation Life)" See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause (1997). But the scenes it shows are comparatively tame by Walker's standards. Sure, there's a bit of farting and pissing going on, and a couple screwing on a rooftop-but nothing like the sadomasochism and child abuse that turn up with such regularity elsewhere in her work. For that matter, most of these pieces-unlike her later film works-may actually be a good bit less obscene in reality than they become in one's retrospective imagination of them. In part that's because "her characters"-as one of Walker's savviest supporters, Hamza Walker (no relation), director of education at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, put it-"shamelessly engage in the most shameless acts." They are without shame because the silhouette technique empties Walker's figures of all inner life-the better to stir that of their viewers. Equally, the figures are disconnected from one another. In all these pieces, there is little or no narrative connection between these figures and small groups, just a freewheeling Bruegelesque concurrence between them.
As early as 1998, Walker admitted that she was "sort of" getting tired of doing the cutouts. Around 2000 she began experimenting with abstract colored projections on the walls to which the cut-paper silhouettes were affixed. The results were not successful, on the whole: in works like Darkytown Rebellion (2001) the figures seem a bit lost amid a garish multiplicity of colors to which they have no relation. Walker once said that in her student work, "I used to avoid the face issue by just kind of mashing up different colors," and here, likewise, the use of color seems a distraction.
Since 2004 she has been exhibiting animated films, which represent a more decisive broadening of her aesthetic-precisely because her work in the medium is formally so much rougher, less refined, than her paper cutouts, though in retrospect the multiplicity of vignettes in her murals leads naturally to the sequence of scenes in a film. The first of them, Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions, takes off from the premise that white men have become slaves to black women. 8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker (2005) is a more episodic fantasia on the fate of blacks under slavery. In these films the narrative, such as it is, is played out by hand-manipulated shadow puppets-not unlike those used by the South African artist William Kentridge in some of his films (for instance, Shadow Procession, from 1999), except that Walker handles hers in an ostentatiously crude way that makes the work feel like something produced by a brilliant but emotionally disturbed child who's been given her first camera as a birthday present.
Above all, the imaginary world of the shadow puppets is never allowed to occupy the viewer's attention completely. Instead, one is constantly made aware of the arbitrary manipulation (in both senses of the word) of these hapless figures by the even more shadowy figure of the person who moves them about-her hands are often visible, and in one segment of 8 Possible Beginnings, we see a young woman, presumably the artist herself or in any case her stand-in, earnestly cutting a silhouette-her model is a white man in a hat-after which an intertitle congratulates her: "Good job, Bess!" In Testimony, we even get to see a milky, viscous fluid spatter over the image, in case we didn't get the masturbatory gist. Childish in a different sort of way is the specific form of fantasy 8 Possible Beginnings engages at one point, where the distinction between the sexes has no meaning. In one episode, a rather frail-looking master engages his handsome male slave, first in a bout of fellatio, then in anal sex-which results in the young man's pregnancy and then the birth of their not-exactly-human offspring.
Walker, according to a leaflet at ARC, "accounts for the relationships between black and white people, master and slave, segregation and its inherent contradictions," and "counterbalances the American official history as propagated by cinema and literature"-an essentially realist rationale for her art that's not uncommon in commentary on her work. Such deadening verbiage strains to find edifying significance in the fraught and unruly fantasies Walker throws in our faces. All of her work makes clear, 8 Possible Beginnings just a bit more blatantly than the rest, that any basis it may have in historical or even in biological reality is completely circumstantial. Slavery becomes a metaphor for sex-and, why not, for love-as much as sex becomes a trope for slavery. Not that this lets anyone off the hook. There's no writing off Walker's inventions as the byproducts of a deranged imagination-as if she were some sort of black female art-world-insider counterpart to Henry Darger.
But this is just where interpretation gets tricky. "None of this is about her own fantasies," insists the exhibition's curator, Philippe Vergne, deputy director and chief curator at the Walker Art Center. "It is about the codes of representation and their power." Yet any such intellectual impersonality is constantly belied by the incandescent tone of Walker's work. And after all, how powerful could those codes be if they weren't able to generate some pretty urgent fantasies? Likewise, another contributor to the exhibition catalogue, cultural historian Sander Gilman, works overtime to establish that attacks on Walker for pandering to racism and sexism-and it's not surprising that they've come up-must be misguided because art cannot be "a mimetic mirror of the inner life of the artist," cannot be unambiguously traced back to "the character of the artist." But while the causal connections may be interestingly oblique and tenuous, still, the art comes from precisely what the painter and occasional critic Carroll Dunham, writing in Artforum, has called "the hostile, raunchy, ironic consciousness driving Walker's art."
Some of Walker's most fascinating work consists of writing, whether embodied in vinyl lettering on a wall, as with Letter From a Black Girl, or scribbled on paper to be presented as a form of drawing either with or without any pictorial accompaniment. It would be a mistake to rely too heavily on these texts to interpret her other works-they are artworks too, posing their own hermeneutical challenges, not commentaries-but they help underscore what may be slightly more obliquely indicated by the murals, films and other pieces: that all this is intensely personal to Walker, and that precisely for this reason, it reflects her hyperawareness of context-above all the art-world context that, as the daughter of an artist, she must have been at least tangentially aware of since childhood. "I knew that the only way to gain an audience in the art world was to cloak my work in the guise of blackness," we read on one sheet from the sometimes almost embarrassingly diaristic 1997 drawing series Do You Like Creme in Your Coffee and Chocolate in Your Milk? "I would have to make work that was so directly racial that no one could help but notice." Since she could hardly pass as white, she would have to pass as black.
This paradoxical strategy undoubtedly explains the angry reaction Walker's work-or rather its quick success-aroused among a number of prominent older black women artists: in her they see a black woman putting on blackface. Walker's ruminations, however, convey an almost excruciating sincerity at odds with the canny trickster we imagine behind the insolent films and murals. But if they also suggest a calculated bid to manipulate the white, liberal art world in the interest of success, what about the fantasy, recounted elsewhere in the sequence, of seducing none other than David Duke, "to 'bring down'...the former Klansman and almost Louisiana Senator in SCANDAL!" Well, more surprising things than that have happened.
Still, as for scandals, Walker may have caused a few, but they've been small change compared with the honors heaped on her. Does that mean she's doing something so right it's wrong? I don't think so. Whoever her public is-and they're not all white men like me-she does "bring us down" to dwell amid appalling desires and admit they might be or become one's own. "But that I would fuck an avowed RACIST-not at all unusual," writes Walker in Do You Like Creme. "Since all I want is to be loved by you And to share all that deep contradictory love I possess. Make myself your slave girl so you will make yourself my equal-if only for a minute." Walker turns out to be a closet utopian, and it's not her scathing humor or her obscenity that's made her loved-it's her perverse optimism.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071210/schwabsky
ZNet | Europe: Decree Law on deportation
and the "war against the last"
by Marco Revelli and Melting Pot Europe;
Melting Pot; November 22, 2007
A Decree Law on the expulsion of [European] Community citizens. European space, European citizenship. We interviewed Marco Revelli, a historian and sociologist who teaches at the East Piedmont University.
For one barrier fallen - that which has seen Romania and Bulgaria make their way into the European Union - it seems like other, newer barriers have to be mounted. The politics, the mass media, the community laws, all seem to have short-circuited. You have described this situation as "a crisis of the nerves of the Italian scenario". What's going on?
To be honest, what we have assisted to in the last week is a real case of our common sense of community and the political sphere precipitating and becoming barbarous; something that probably doesn't have precedents, at least not in the last half century of our recent history. All of a sudden we discover ourselves to be in a country that is prey to a crisis of nerves at every level: public opinion; mass media, that have had a deplorable role in the communications area; and politics, that has produced a devastating short-circuit.
From one event - the terrible murder of Giovanna Reggiani - attributable to an individual, a person, who, among other things, had been arrested immediately thanks to the accusation of a Rom lady living in the same settlement, we have gone on to blame a whole ethnic group, a whole population of poor and migrants already subject to stigma and social persecution in Italy and in Romania.
This is a proof of absolute irresponsibility, certainly triggered by the right-wing that has fascism written in its DNA, by Gianfranco Fini, who, if we scratch the surface of the civilizing paint that he has given himself, remains a fascist as always, but made proper and chased by the left-wing, by the Mayor of Rome in particular, who I think has a very grave responsibility, and who has allowed a real reprisal to follow the episode. The destruction of settlements by means of the city's bulldozers is an act of war, of reprisal, against a collective that didn't have any responsibility except that of living in the same place the assassin lived in.
The blaming and the grand showing of the event was followed by a Decree Law which will structurally and permanently modify, in the Italian Legal Order, the regulation for free circulation and the right to reside of a generality of subjects, the [European] Community citizens. Whereas since a long time there's been talk of getting past the Bossi-Fini law and the Centers for Temporary Permanence (CTP), today their regime is extended also to Community citizens, probably contrary to European Union norms.
What kind of scenario do you think is emerging in Europe with the possibility, for example, of detaining Community citizens in CTP's?
Let's say straight away that, already by itself, the urgent meeting of the government to issue a Decree Law of this type, in an emergency, right after the episode of the murder, is proof of being out of control, of a mental crisis of our politics. To bind legislative activity - the emitting of a norm that regards, yes, a generality of persons - to a news event that regards a single person, is a violation of our juridical culture.
The contents of this act of law reflect the emotive climate in which it has been emanated: it is an unconstitutional act, especially in its original formulation, that has nonetheless already produced some effects because it has been enacted on real persons. It subtracts a series of acts that have to do with dispositions on personal freedom from jurisdictional control, suspends the habeas corpus, a consolidated acquisition in every juridical culture, allows administrative authorities to decide, without any control, over the lives of persons, and suspends or completely upsets, in a certain sense, the principle of freedom of movement of [European] Community citizens.
Romanian citizens in Italy are Community citizens to all effects, but by interpreting some of the characteristics of European directives in a certain way, a particular application has been carried out. The fullness of the right of citizenship has been tied to income. This is a concept of "census" citizenship which is akin to taking a couple of centuries' leap back into history and establishing that he who hasn't enough income is not fully a European citizen.
We might say that we should have expected this since Europe was born on "census" bases, it is the Europe of the finance and the capital in the first place. It is a Europe which is very much uninterested in matters of civil rights. What the Italian government has done is a further forcing of matters to make Europe give its worst in all this. It seems like a European space that looks like a hierarchical space. Before the Romanians and the Bulgarians came here, let's not forget that our economy entered in their countries. Many entrepreneurs have in fact externalized the almost totality of their production lines over there. Can freedom of movement be valid only in one direction?
Furthermore, the production model that has gotten established, the Post-Fordist model, nourishes on mobility and on the precious "migrant work". Thousands of Romanian citizens are today central to the Italian economy, in the construction sector, in the sector of caring of persons, for example. Notwithstanding this centrality, all of the actual security policies are constructed over their backs.
How would you explain this situation?
In two ways I'd say: First, the norms that regulate the freedom of movement in Europe are not those of the rights of persons but of the lex mercatoria [law of the market]. Capital circulates absolutely freely, goods circulate, men circulate only within the limits in which they can be classified as goods or as bearers of capital. This type of interpretation of freedom of movement in Europe makes the credit card the equivalent of a passport. We therefore have a deformation of the material constitution of Europe in an explicitly mercantile sense.
On the other hand we have the transformation of our cities from containers of productive machines into productive machines themselves. It is the emergence of what is known as the Biopolitic city, the city that takes over the old Fordist city.
The Fordist city re-proposed, in spatial terms, the division of labour and the rationalization of a Taylorist type of space. Instead, the Post-Fordist city is one that puts the totality of life to work, the totality of our dimension, of the bios, the totality of our relationships, the totality of our time, and so on. The streets of our cities become the equivalent of the divisions of production of the factory. The kind of ethnic cleansing that is realized in our cities, the type of police control that is exercised over them, the enforcing of discipline, lead also to the deportability of those who are not directly productive in this frame, of those who cannot be put completely to work because they are not willing: they are considered obstacles, they are considered a disturbance.
The public space has totally become a productive space. In the productive space the discipline of production is enforced and thus the elimination of the other. The new foremen are the unionists. The party of the unionists today is the equivalent of the enterprise command. In Rome, a "Rangers Task Force" has been setup by the Mayor to work in the settlements. The bulldozers that squash school notebooks of children lodging in the settlements are a snapshot of a present that has swept aside welcoming and integration in the name of a "war undertaken against the last".
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=74&ItemID=14350
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