The country is in a very fragile condition: the economy is near
meltdown, and discontent among underpaid police and troops, combined
with the willingness of opposition parties and civil society to
protest in the streets, all increase the risk of sudden major
violence. For Zimbabwe to begin to recover, President Mugabe must give
up efforts to extend his term, and the opposing parties must negotiate
a compromise. The months leading to the July parliament session, when
decisions will be taken on Mugabe's fate or transition, are
crucial.

"The prospect of President Mugabe's retirement has created an
exceptional rallying point among varied constituencies within the
country", says François Grignon, Crisis Group's Africa Program
Director. "There is widespread agreement that he must leave so that
the country can finally make progress on the needed economic and
political reforms".

Pressure by the European Union and the U.S., through targeted
sanctions and isolation, has helped divide the ruling party, ZANU-PF,
persuading key figures whose business interests have been hard hit by
the current crisis, that change is needed. This pressure should be
increased if ZANU-PF does not cooperate with the opposition to
implement a transitional government and restore democracy.
The Southern African Development Community (SADC), the organisation of
regional countries, should work as a mediator for negotiations between
ZANU-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and
join the EU and the U.S. in defining a clear sequence of benchmarks
leading to a genuinely democratic process. SADC leaders have an
opportunity to talk to Mugabe now about a retirement package to be
implemented not later than 2008 – and at last get him to listen. The
MDC needs urgently to reconcile its feuding factions.

"The situation today is reminiscent of the last stages of Mobutu's
reign in the Congo", says Crisis Group President Gareth Evans.
"Zimbabwe has the potential to fall into chaos and bring large chunks
of the region down with it unless both domestic and international
parties act now".
________________________________________
Contacts: Andrew Stroehlein (Brussels) 32 (0) 2 541 1635
Kimberly Abbott (Washington) 1 202 785 1601
To contact Crisis Group media please click here
*Read the full Crisis Group report our website: http://www.crisisgroup.org
________________________________________
The International Crisis Group (Crisis Group) is an independent,
non-profit, non-governmental organisation covering over 50
crisis-affected countries and territories across four continents,
working through field-based analysis and high-level advocacy to
prevent and resolve deadly conflict.
________________________________________
]]> Fri, 09 Mar 2007 12:52:00 EST http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/165763 http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/73497
http://www.fingaz.co.zw/story.aspx?stid=2031


Forget about hunger, Zimbabweans just love sex
*Charles Rukuni Bureau Chief *
**
*BULAWAYO — Forget about rampant inflation, high unemployment, or the fact
that more than one million people need food aid. *

Forget that you are lucky to live beyond 34. Zimbabweans just love sex. That
is the impression one gets when one looks at the amount of money being
poured into HIV/AIDS when an estimated 1.4 million are said to have no food.

The major food
donor, the World Food Programme, last month said it might cut down on the
number of people it was feeding because it did not have enough food for an
estimated 1.4 million hungry people until the end of March next year when
the current season's harvest is expected to start rolling in.
It said that it would require US$16 million to purchase 26 000 tonnes of
grain needed to meet the anticipated shortfall.
At about the same time, Britain said it
had awarded 20 million pounds (US$38.7 million) to Zimbabwe to fight the HIV
and AIDS epidemic.
The disease currently affects 1.8 million people. The money would be used to
distribute more than 250 million condoms through 700
hair salons over the next five years. International Development Secretary
Hilary Benn was quoted as saying: "People should not die because they have
sex."
As if to support the appropriateness of the donation, The Sunday Mail
reported that Zimbabwe led the world in the use of condoms. Some 163 million
male condoms and 3.8 million female condoms — the highest in the world — had
been sold in Zimbabwe over the past five years.
While the HIV/AIDS epidemic has devastated the country, Zimbabwe is now
reportedly winning the war against HIV/AIDS. Prevalence is reported to have
declined to 18.1 percent from over 30 percent at one stage.
But some 3 200 people are still reportedly dying each week, a figure
controversial Roman Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube says is higher than the
deaths in Sudan's war-torn Darfur region.
This has prompted some AIDS activists to question why so many people are
still dying while the prevalence rate is reportedly declining. Others are
questioning the efficacy of aid, who this aid actually benefits, and who
determines who needs what.
South African AIDS activist, Theo Smart, in an article entitled: Zimbabwe
observes a reduction in HIV prevalence, but why said while there had been a
substantial reduction in national HIV prevalence, it could not all be
attributed to the ABC (Abstinence, Be faithful and Condoms). The extremely
high mortality rate could also have contributed greatly to the reduction in
prevalence, he argued.
"Mortality plays more than one part in this, because it doesn't only
decrease prevalence directly, it can decrease incidence as well, by
decreasing the pool of infectious individuals who can spread the
infection," Smart argued, citing several case
studies that were released at the 2006 HIV/AIDS Implementers Meeting
of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief that was held in Durban
early this year.
"This is particularly the case when most of those who have died are men
because infected men are much more likely than women to spread the infection
to more than one partner."
He also said Zimbabwe's economic decline over the past seven years could
have played a part.
"The collapsing economy could have additional effects that could decrease
mobility, and therefore risk of HIV infection," he said. "Unemployment has
sky-rocketed in Zimbabwe, and there have been major fuel shortages."
"The commercial mining sector has collapsed, and factory work has
evaporated. Cities no longer offer much work. So as a result of Zimbabwe's
economic contraction, many of the old hotspots for HIV transmission — near
the factories and mines, at truck stops along the highway — could be
dwindling or people no longer have a reason or the means to go there . . .
"It's important to remember that this is, after all, Zimbabwe. Since the
year 2000, Zimbabwe's economy has ground to a halt; the country suffered
from floods, followed by severe drought and endemic food insecurity. In this
context it is odd, to say the least, that the official mortality rate
reportedly peaked before all that trouble began. But even if famine and
inflation didn't increase the numbers of people dying, the calamity would
have increased the costs of caring for a person with HIV tremendously."
Smart argued that the stigma attached to people with HIV/AIDS was an
effective deterrent on its own as people with HIV/AIDS had been variously
described as being "in the departure lounge", or having "crossed the red
robot" or "bewitched by goblins". These were all things very few people
wanted to be associated with and therefore would not take that route.
He, however, stressed that this was not to say that ABC strategies did not
work. But a balanced prevention campaign was needed.
Those who argue that aid is not working in Africa, even in the case of Aids,
said most of the money reportedly being poured into the disease was
trickling back to the donor countries.
Michael Holman, former Africa editor of the Financial Times said in an
article in The Africa Report of last month that the irony about the aid
industry into Africa was that an estimated US$4 million was spent annually
to recruit 100 000 expatriates while at the same time about 70 000 skilled
Africans such as doctors, nurses and engineers, left to work abroad.
"The multi-billion dollar aid industry has largely failed in Africa. Not
only have they failed along with others in the aid industry, most
nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) have become part of the problem," he
wrote. "Not that they will admit their failure. They refuse to share the
blame for the grim record. Instead they have closed ranks - along with UN
development agencies and bilateral agencies — and all sing from the same
hymn sheet: 'Aid works', they claim. 'Give us even more money and we will
complete the job . . ."
A British-based non-governmental organisation, Action Aid, painted an even
grimmer picture. It said of the US$79 billion aid that was meant for Africa
this year, US$37 billion was "phantom aid" which meant that it was not
genuinely available to the countries which were supposed to benefit. It said
too much aid continued to be haphazardly allocated with little reference to
need. It was tied to requirements that it be spent on donor countries' own
companies. It was double counted as debt relief, or was lost through
cumbersome and poorly coordinated procedures and systems.
Condoms available in Zimbabwe, for example, are "specially imported" from
Britain by an American organisation Population Services International.
Action Aid said about two-thirds of aid from the world's biggest donor, the
United States, was phantom aid. In Zimbabwe, most of the programmes being
sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
are implemented by United States-based organisations such as the Futures
Group, the Centres for Disease Control, Population Services International,
the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation and John Snow Inc.
"Too much (aid) continues to be identified, designed and managed by donors
themselves, (is)tied to donor countries' own firms, (is) poorly coordinated
and based on a set of often untested assumptions about expatriate expertise
and recipient ignorance," Action Aid said. As a result, this aid was often
overpriced and ineffective "and in worst cases destroys rather than builds
the capacity of the poorest countries".
Social commentator Claude Mararike agreed. Zimbabweans had to realise that
the West had its own agenda which was not necessarily that of Zimbabweans
and should therefore question what was in it for those countries that
provided aid to the country, he said.
"Anyone who puts his or her money into any activity, gets mileage from that
activity," he said. "Governments in Europe have always been interested in
numbers in Africa and to some extent Asia. How are they increasing? What is
the mortality rate and so on? The question is resources. The fewer the
people in Africa, the better for Europe."
"People must realise that our survival is more important than sex.
Munozofunga the sex madya (You will only think about sex after eating)," he
said.

]]> Fri, 01 Dec 2006 03:57:00 EST http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/73497 http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/61489 Business Day, a leading South African daily newspaper.

In other news, the BBC put together excerpts from leading african newspapers commenting on
Botha's death. Notably, they are not very polite about the passing of
P.W. Botha. one of the few South African 'leaders' to say something of
value on this issue was Tokyo Sexwale [former Premier of Gauteng
Province and a political prisoner on Robben Island] who is quoted on
the BBC website as saying:
"We should not forget the kind of regime he represented, he was
ruthless, he was brutal, he was a leader of apartheid during the
harshest years of that regime, the sad truth is that he is leaving
with many secrets which he should have revealed perhaps during the
time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission."

I agree a lot with the article below by Mvoko and also feel that the
South African government and civil society has missed a great
opportunity to deal effectively with the negative history that their
country is still trying to succesfully emerge from.



Groot Krokodil: when moving on obscures historical perspective
by Vuyo Mvoko
________________________________


THERE are times when I do get to appreciate just how lucky I am. In a
country of more than 40-million people, I'm one of very few people who
have the privilege to occupy, and sometimes command, a public space
many other South Africans only dream of.

Every week, through this column, I get to speak to elected public
representatives, as well to business people who have every right to
conduct their affairs and spend their millions the way they deem fit.
Members of the public greet me and are sometimes full of praise for a
job they say I sometimes do well.

It can only be good for a fragile but extraordinary ego of a boy from
an Eastern Cape township, brought up by a domestic worker
grandmother and a "painter's boy" grandfather. I have sat in front of
presidents and other world leaders, and now tell them what they should
be thinking, saying and doing.

But I must also say that secretly I often battle with under- or
overplaying my role and influence, to say nothing of the discomfort
that sometimes comes with thoughts such as: What if I get proven
wrong? and, Am I imposing my "narrow" world view on others? It
particularly struck me this week, as I listened, watched and read what
everyone was saying about PW Botha, following the apartheid SA prime
minister's death. I felt an awkward sense of betrayal when people I
regard ay my leaders — Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Desmond Tutu —
chose to say very little, if anything, about the atrocious man that we
came to know as Die Groot Krokodil.

Born in the ordinary Free State town of Paul Roux and of ordinary
Afrikaner parents, Pieter Willem Botha died this week with a solid
reputation of being one of the most appalling men to have presided
over the apartheid machinery. He chose to be evil, killing and maiming
thousands of innocent black people, and imposed his narrow world view
on all of us. Until the second he died, we took care of his basic
needs, his health, welfare, security and comfort: privileges which
still remain beyond the reach of millions of black people.

I was ready to dance on Botha's grave when, on behalf of all citizens,
including me, Mbeki expressed "heartfelt condolences" to the Botha
family. Botha's death, I sincerely believed, should have been used to
teach generations that may have never directly experienced his
viciousness that we would have indeed gone very far as a nation had we
not had people like that finger-wagging racist.

Albeit temporarily, Botha made apartheid succeed where it could have
failed. His relaxation of some laws — such as the Immorality Act and
for which some, FW de Klerk included, now believe Botha deserves
credit — were never about a change of heart but were dismal attempts
at buying time. Botha's half-hearted "reforms" remain inconsistent
with everything he did afterwards. For me, there were no obvious
reasons for a liberation movement that the African National Congress
(ANC) says it still is to be as kind to Botha and his rotten legacy.

It prompts the question: does being "a nation at work" now mean that
when opportunities arise for us to put our history into perspective,
we will shy away from that because we need to "move on"? And if that
is the case, is it the sort of thing that the ANC leadership will,
from now on, seek to impress on the minds of its cadreship that it has
deployed in every sphere of our public lives? Will the ANC leadership,
for example, tell its deployees in the SABC that what they committed
themselves to after meeting a parliamentary committee early this week
is perhaps not the right thing to do?

SABC board chairman Eddie Funde, still pissed off at the leak of the
"blacklisting" report implicating news head Snuki Zikalala, apparently
made an undertaking to investigate the source of the leak. This means
that there is still another sideshow in the Zikalala saga — before the
SABC even begins to deal with the issues raised around Zikalala's
management style and journalistic integrity.

Long after everybody else was reporting on Botha's death, the SABC's
10pm news bulletin was still leading with a Helen Zille piece. If the
SABC board focused on the real issues, it could start by confronting
the challenges facing the national public broadcaster, which have a
lot to do with journalism. While the SABC is not really short of money
or bodies it can call journalists, getting scribes with skills, and
keeping them, remains an elusive goal, something that is not helped by
Zikalala's management style and (mis)conception of what a journalist
should do.

My ego notwithstanding, and my thirst for dead Botha's blood refusing
to go away, I am, for once, prepared to let bygones be bygones.
Focusing on the past; hunting down those who may have wronged you;
listening to your ego; abusing your privileged public position;
wanting to be right all the time — all those things may be good for
revenge and point-scoring, but they may just keep your eyes away from
your goal.

Time to let any old and poison-filled Groot Krokodil die, lest we wake
it up only to destroy our future.

Mvoko is an independent media and political consultant.

]]> Fri, 03 Nov 2006 04:56:00 EST http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/61489 http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/60521 State Funeral!!! The BBC just reported that South Africa will be giving this guy a state
funeral... are you kidding me! what is the ANC smoking! We actually
have a debate about whether it's appropriate to name South Africa's
main international airport after O.R. Tambo, a giant in making South
Africa the country that it is today, and then we have a crazy dictator
get hero status? People like Botha and Ian Smith and Adolf Hitler
cannot get state funerals, at least not from the same states that they
have helped to destroy.

(note how the BBC article does use the word racist or racism not even
once. call a spade a spade. this dude was a racist dictator. when will
we all wake up...?)
]]> Wed, 01 Nov 2006 07:02:00 EST http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/60521 http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/60139 last night. it's interesting how the NY Times gives this extra long
obituary, but doesn't even paint him in the negative light that he
deserves. the whole thing tastes like a cucumber. plain and bland.
this guy, who was responsible for one of Africa's most brutal regimes
EVER gets this, as an obituary? He is not even refered to as a racist
in this article. not once. infact, the WORD "racist" comes up once to
refer to "racist policies." When people like Idi Amin died, i bet
their obituaries didn't read this rosy. when other african 'dictators'
died, there are articles of good riddance to bad rubbish. this guy was
a dictator. let's call a spade a spade. he was a horrible, cold, mean,
racist, unrepentant brutal dictator who led one of africa's worst
governments ever... let's see what the NY Times will say about robert
mugabe when he dies. i bet the title of their obituary will not say
"R.G. Mugabe, Zimbabwe's ex-leader dies at [age]." the word dictator
will be mentioned. is that because there are different shades of
african leaders and dictators. how does Pik Botha not fit in amongst
the WORST...?

perhaps we should be the ones calling the NY Times racist, because
this is just sickening, to see the subliminal endorsement of what
Botha stood for.

CNN had a little clip they showed on TV (at least on CNN
international. i know CNN in the US is different) and its tone was the
same. not hard hitting, not standing against the values this man
represented. at the end the voice over said "until the very end, the
crocodile (and Botha was known) was unrepentent, unrelenting..."
what!?

can someone turn up the al jazeera...?



P.W. Botha, South Africa's ex-leader, dies at 90

By JOSEPH R. GREGORY The New York Times

Published: October 31, 2006



P.W. Botha, the hard-nosed South African leader who struggled vainly
to preserve apartheid rule in a tide of domestic racial violence and
global condemnation, died today at his home in South Africa. He was
90.

His death was reported by the South African Press Association in Cape
Town, quoting security staff at Mr. Botha's home on the southern Cape
coast.

Mr. Botha was a combative, irascible son of a well-to-do Afrikaner
farm family who dropped out of college to work for the right-wing
National Party, then rose through the ranks of South Africa's
political establishment, gaining a reputation as the "Old Crocodile"
for his ability to charm, outwit and crush his opponents.

In 1978, Mr. Botha became prime minister and proceeded to engineer the
creation of a new constitution, one that held out the promise of a
limited relaxation of the nation's apartheid policies and paved the
way for him to become president in 1984. "We must adapt or die," Mr.
Botha told his constituents after becoming Prime Minister.

But the constitution only roiled the battle over race. Though it
allowed Asians and people of mixed race to be represented in a
white-controlled Parliament, it continued to exclude the nation's
black majority. Some apartheid laws, like a prohibition on mixed
marriages and a requirement that blacks carry special passes, were
relaxed. But the measures only fueled the anger of apartheid's
opponents. One opposition leader, Frederik van Zyle, said Mr. Botha's
changes in apartheid were the political equivalent of rearranging the
deck chairs on the Titanic.

Holding out the promise that apartheid would eventually be dismantled,
he opened negotiations with Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned leader of
the African National Congress. The talks went nowhere, and Mr. Mandela
remained confined.

At the same time, Mr. Botha, who first achieved national prominence as
defense minister, gave the military and police unprecedented power.
His government repressed dissent, encouraged rivalries among Zulus,
Xhosa and other tribes and ethnic groups, and tried to destabilize
neighboring countries opposed to white rule.

Mr. Botha used the climate of the cold war to justify his actions. He
portrayed a growing Marxist threat in southern Africa and warned that
Communists had infiltrated the anti-apartheid movement at home. South
Africa, he said, was engaged in a "total war" and must develop a
"total strategy" to fight the battle.

As opposition to apartheid spread, Mr. Botha's room to maneuver
shrank. "He was caught in a bind between wanting to show the
international community that he was not inflexible, and not wishing to
appear weak within his own country," the journalist Allister Sparks
wrote in his 1995 account of the end of apartheid, "Tomorrow Is
Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa's Road to Change."

In 1985, Mr. Botha was supposed to announce a giant step away from
apartheid, but his proposals, which offered black Africans the vote
under a legislative system that gave them no real power, disillusioned
South Africa's few remaining friends in the world.

Yet for a while Mr. Botha's methods seemed to belie Alexis de
Toqueville's dictum that "the most perilous moment for bad government
is when it seeks to mend its ways." Mr. Botha was re-elected in 1987.
Two years later, amid growing opposition within his own party to his
intransigent style, the president suffered a stroke and resigned. He
was succeeded by F.W. de Klerk, who legalized opposition parties,
freed Mr. Mandela and other political prisoners, and made the
agreements that eventually brought apartheid down.

Pieter Willem Botha was born on Jan. 12, 1916, in the Orange Free
State to a Boer farm family with deep roots in southern Africa's
"White Tribe" - descendants of mainly Dutch settlers who had had been
living on the continent's southern tip for more than three centuries
and who referred to themselves as Afrikaners.

Beleaguered, stubborn and insular, they saw themselves as heirs to a
promised land watered with the blood of their ancestors in wars
against Zulus, Ndebele and other tribes.

The Boers and the British, with their imperial aims, were also old
enemies, rivals for land, diamonds and gold. Their enmity culminated
in the Boer war of 1899-1901, which ended in a British victory and the
eventual consolidation of the country under the empire.

Mr. Botha's father fought the British, who burned his mother's family
farm. She and her family fled but were eventually captured and
interned. Their experiences forged their son's attitudes. Raised in
the traditions of the Bible and the gun, he learned to ride and shoot
and to embrace the embattled self-image of the Afrikaner.

"I grew up on a farm where I came to know black people very well," Mr.
Botha told Joseph Lelyveld of The New York Times in an interview in
Mr. Lelyveld's 1985 book "Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and
White." "I played with them, I worked with them. I was taught by my
father to be strict with them, but just."

As World War II approached, tensions mounted among those who believed
South Africa should side with Britain, those who advocated neutrality
and those who sympathized with the Nazis. Mr. Botha sided with the
latter, joining the right-wing Afrikaner nationalists in the
Ossewabrandwag, or Ox Wagon Fire Guard, which was closely related to
Daniel Francois Malan's Reunited National Party. A paramilitary group
within the Guard, modeled after the Nazi Brown shirts, agitated
against the pro-Allied government of Jan Christian Smuts.

But Mr. Botha, who in 1935 had left the University of the Orange Free
State to become an organizer for the Nationalists, did not like the
Wagon Guard's "emphasis on national socialism instead of Christian
nationalism," a South African biographer, Brian Pottinger, wrote in
1988 in "The Imperial Presidency: P.W. Botha, the First 10 Years."
"With some courage and a fine nose for the prevailing wind," Mr.
Pottinger wrote, Botha publicly condemned the Ossewabrandwag, charging
it with "interference" in national politics.

By 1944, with victory looming in Europe, the Wagon Guard had become an
embarrassment to Mr. Malan, and he banned National Party members from
associating with it.

A year earlier, Mr. Both married Anna Elizabeth Rossouw, who went by
the name Elise and who died in 1977. They had two sons and three
daughters. He married Barbara Robertson in 1998.

In the postwar years, economic and social uncertainty eroded the
popular base of the Smuts government, which had advocated a
comparatively liberal approach toward race relations. In the 1948
general election, Mr. Malan's Nationalists, campaigning on a platform
of white supremacy and racial segregation, were swept to power. Mr.
Botha, who had become secretary of the party's National Youth League
in 1946, won a seat in Parliament.

Over the next six years under Mr. Malan's leadership, the foundations
of the Apartheid state were laid. The Nationalists imposed segregation
on almost all aspects of South African life. They passed laws
prohibiting mixed marriages and extramarital sex between races and
regulated almost all other social relations. Freedom of movement was
limited: most blacks were required to carry passbooks. And
"independent" homelands, or tribe-based states, were created to make
the various African ethnic groups easier to control.

Throughout the 1950's there were protests and other forms of passive
resistance. In 1960, some 70 protesters were killed and nearly 200
wounded when the police opened fire on a demonstration in Sharpeville,
near Johannesburg. The climate changed after that.

Within the African National Congress, founded in 1912 to advance the
cause of blacks, the leadership diverged, with men like Nelson Mandela
advocating violent opposition to the racist state. By 1970, many
anti-apartheid leaders, including Mr. Mandela, were either in jail or
living in exile.

Meanwhile, Mr. Botha rose through the government ranks. In 1961, he
became the minister of colored affairs; in 1966, minister of defense.
His rise coincided with the country's deepening political isolation.
In 1961, South Africa left the Commonwealth of Nations, whose members
were strongly critical of apartheid policies. As the country's
neighbors achieved independence from colonial rule in the 1960's and
70's, many cut off diplomatic, cultural and commercial ties with South
Africa.

In 1974, the United Nations revoked South Africa's seat in the General
Assembly. Three years later, it imposed a weapons embargo. In the
West, particularly in the United States, debate over imposing trade
sanctions on South Africa reached a fever pitch.

But the disciples of apartheid hung tough. Huge reserves of gold and
diamonds fueled the Afrikaners' ability to circumvent economic
embargoes and political sanctions. As defense minister, Mr. Botha
increased military spending to 20 percent of the government's budget,
conducted a clandestine weapons trade with Israel and other states and
pushed for the development of nuclear weapons.

In the early 1980's, Mr. Botha's government launched military strikes
on the forces of the African National Congress and other insurgent
groups in neighboring countries where they had taken sanctuary. Air
and ground forces struck at targets in Angola, and South African
commandos conducted raids in Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Zambia and
Zimbabwe.

South African forces also equipped and trained rebel movements against
the left-leaning African governments that had replaced the ousted
Portuguese colonialists. Moreover, under the direction of the State
Security Council, created in 1972, Mr. Botha's government carried out
a program to kill anti-apartheid activists.

Racial violence and political protests continued to rise. Increasing
numbers of white South Africans joined the demonstrations. Although
Mr. Botha had come to power with the pledge to uphold apartheid as
well as improve race relations, the two goals were mutually exclusive.
Despite a seeming willingness to relax some apartheid laws, he
remained adamant in his refusal to grant blacks political power.

The situation deteriorated. Police stations and other government
installations were attacked. In 1985, the government announced an
indefinite state of emergency. In 1986, the Anglican anti-apartheid
campaigner Bishop Desmond Tutu addressed the United Nations and urged
further sanctions against South Africa.

Mr. Botha grew defiant. "We are not a nation of jellyfish," he
declared in a party speech in 1986. An aide, Hendrik Jacobus Coetsee,
recalled: "The Old Crocodile was obsessed with looking tough and in
control. He never wanted to show any sign of weakness."

But even within the Botha government, pressure was growing for
negotiations with the African National Congress. Clandestine overtures
were made to Mr. Mandela, who had been in prison since 1963. The Botha
government, hoping to appear reasonable to the world, was looking for
a way to free Mr. Mandela without appearing weak to its own Afrikaner
constituency.

In March 1989, Mr. Mandela offered to negotiate a political
settlement, reversing the African National Congress's commitment to
overthrowing the white government by force. Mr. Botha, who had had a
stroke that January, replied that the two men should meet. The did so
on July 5, 1989.

In the end, the encounter turned out to be little more than a courtesy
call. "Yet, in some subtle way a line had been crossed," Mr. Sparks
wrote. "After that there was no stopping the process. It was just a
matter of time and the man."

Mr. Botha's days in office were numbered. Increasingly ill-tempered
and authoritarian, he remained reluctant to move on with reforming the
nation's apartheid policies. In February 1989, a month after his
stroke, for reasons that are unclear, he had renounced his position as
National Party leader while keeping the presidency. The move left him
open to younger rivals. That August, at a cabinet meeting, his
successor as party leader, Mr. de Klerk, followed by other ministers,
suggested that he step down. That night, in an angry, rambling
broadcast, the president announced that he would resign.

Under the new government, led by Mr. De Klerk, apartheid unraveled. In
1990, Mr. Mandela was freed after 27 years in prison and the African
National Congress became a legal political party. In April 1994, the
republic's first multiracial election was held. The African National
Congress won an overwhelming victory, and Mr. Mandela became
president. In May 1996, a new national constitution was adopted.

Apartheid was finished. In the late 1990's, the brutal methods to
prolong its existence were exposed during hearings of South Africa's
Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Actions by the country's security
forces and police during Mr. Botha's years in power had killed 4,000
people; as many as 50,000 others were held without trial.

The aging Botha derided the commission as a witch hunt. After failing
to attend a hearing in Cape Town on Dec. 19, 1997, he was found guilty
of contempt of the law, fined 10,000 rand and sentenced to a suspended
12-month prison term. The conviction was overturned on appeal, and the
Old Crocodile remained as intransigent as ever.

"I have nothing to apologize for," he said. "I will never ask for
amnesty. Not now, not tomorrow, not after tomorrow."


P.W. Botha, the hard-nosed South African leader who struggled vainly
to preserve apartheid rule in a tide of domestic racial violence and
global condemnation, died today at his home in South Africa. He was
90.

His death was reported by the South African Press Association in Cape
Town, quoting security staff at Mr. Botha's home on the southern Cape
coast.

Mr. Botha was a combative, irascible son of a well-to-do Afrikaner
farm family who dropped out of college to work for the right-wing
National Party, then rose through the ranks of South Africa's
political establishment, gaining a reputation as the "Old Crocodile"
for his ability to charm, outwit and crush his opponents.

In 1978, Mr. Botha became prime minister and proceeded to engineer the
creation of a new constitution, one that held out the promise of a
limited relaxation of the nation's apartheid policies and paved the
way for him to become president in 1984. "We must adapt or die," Mr.
Botha told his constituents after becoming Prime Minister.

But the constitution only roiled the battle over race. Though it
allowed Asians and people of mixed race to be represented in a
white-controlled Parliament, it continued to exclude the nation's
black majority. Some apartheid laws, like a prohibition on mixed
marriages and a requirement that blacks carry special passes, were
relaxed. But the measures only fueled the anger of apartheid's
opponents. One opposition leader, Frederik van Zyle, said Mr. Botha's
changes in apartheid were the political equivalent of rearranging the
deck chairs on the Titanic.

Holding out the promise that apartheid would eventually be dismantled,
he opened negotiations with Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned leader of
the African National Congress. The talks went nowhere, and Mr. Mandela
remained confined.

At the same time, Mr. Botha, who first achieved national prominence as
defense minister, gave the military and police unprecedented power.
His government repressed dissent, encouraged rivalries among Zulus,
Xhosa and other tribes and ethnic groups, and tried to destabilize
neighboring countries opposed to white rule.

Mr. Botha used the climate of the cold war to justify his actions. He
portrayed a growing Marxist threat in southern Africa and warned that
Communists had infiltrated the anti-apartheid movement at home. South
Africa, he said, was engaged in a "total war" and must develop a
"total strategy" to fight the battle.

As opposition to apartheid spread, Mr. Botha's room to maneuver
shrank. "He was caught in a bind between wanting to show the
international community that he was not inflexible, and not wishing to
appear weak within his own country," the journalist Allister Sparks
wrote in his 1995 account of the end of apartheid, "Tomorrow Is
Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa's Road to Change."

In 1985, Mr. Botha was supposed to announce a giant step away from
apartheid, but his proposals, which offered black Africans the vote
under a legislative system that gave them no real power, disillusioned
South Africa's few remaining friends in the world.

Yet for a while Mr. Botha's methods seemed to belie Alexis de
Toqueville's dictum that "the most perilous moment for bad government
is when it seeks to mend its ways." Mr. Botha was re-elected in 1987.
Two years later, amid growing opposition within his own party to his
intransigent style, the president suffered a stroke and resigned. He
was succeeded by F.W. de Klerk, who legalized opposition parties,
freed Mr. Mandela and other political prisoners, and made the
agreements that eventually brought apartheid down.

Pieter Willem Botha was born on Jan. 12, 1916, in the Orange Free
State to a Boer farm family with deep roots in southern Africa's
"White Tribe" - descendants of mainly Dutch settlers who had had been
living on the continent's southern tip for more than three centuries
and who referred to themselves as Afrikaners.

Beleaguered, stubborn and insular, they saw themselves as heirs to a
promised land watered with the blood of their ancestors in wars
against Zulus, Ndebele and other tribes.

The Boers and the British, with their imperial aims, were also old
enemies, rivals for land, diamonds and gold. Their enmity culminated
in the Boer war of 1899-1901, which ended in a British victory and the
eventual consolidation of the country under the empire.

Mr. Botha's father fought the British, who burned his mother's family
farm. She and her family fled but were eventually captured and
interned. Their experiences forged their son's attitudes. Raised in
the traditions of the Bible and the gun, he learned to ride and shoot
and to embrace the embattled self-image of the Afrikaner.

"I grew up on a farm where I came to know black people very well," Mr.
Botha told Joseph Lelyveld of The New York Times in an interview in
Mr. Lelyveld's 1985 book "Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and
White." "I played with them, I worked with them. I was taught by my
father to be strict with them, but just."

As World War II approached, tensions mounted among those who believed
South Africa should side with Britain, those who advocated neutrality
and those who sympathized with the Nazis. Mr. Botha sided with the
latter, joining the right-wing Afrikaner nationalists in the
Ossewabrandwag, or Ox Wagon Fire Guard, which was closely related to
Daniel Francois Malan's Reunited National Party. A paramilitary group
within the Guard, modeled after the Nazi Brown shirts, agitated
against the pro-Allied government of Jan Christian Smuts.

But Mr. Botha, who in 1935 had left the University of the Orange Free
State to become an organizer for the Nationalists, did not like the
Wagon Guard's "emphasis on national socialism instead of Christian
nationalism," a South African biographer, Brian Pottinger, wrote in
1988 in "The Imperial Presidency: P.W. Botha, the First 10 Years."
"With some courage and a fine nose for the prevailing wind," Mr.
Pottinger wrote, Botha publicly condemned the Ossewabrandwag, charging
it with "interference" in national politics.

By 1944, with victory looming in Europe, the Wagon Guard had become an
embarrassment to Mr. Malan, and he banned National Party members from
associating with it.

A year earlier, Mr. Both married Anna Elizabeth Rossouw, who went by
the name Elise and who died in 1977. They had two sons and three
daughters. He married Barbara Robertson in 1998.

In the postwar years, economic and social uncertainty eroded the
popular base of the Smuts government, which had advocated a
comparatively liberal approach toward race relations. In the 1948
general election, Mr. Malan's Nationalists, campaigning on a platform
of white supremacy and racial segregation, were swept to power. Mr.
Botha, who had become secretary of the party's National Youth League
in 1946, won a seat in Parliament.

Over the next six years under Mr. Malan's leadership, the foundations
of the Apartheid state were laid. The Nationalists imposed segregation
on almost all aspects of South African life. They passed laws
prohibiting mixed marriages and extramarital sex between races and
regulated almost all other social relations. Freedom of movement was
limited: most blacks were required to carry passbooks. And
"independent" homelands, or tribe-based states, were created to make
the various African ethnic groups easier to control.

Throughout the 1950's there were protests and other forms of passive
resistance. In 1960, some 70 protesters were killed and nearly 200
wounded when the police opened fire on a demonstration in Sharpeville,
near Johannesburg. The climate changed after that.

Within the African National Congress, founded in 1912 to advance the
cause of blacks, the leadership diverged, with men like Nelson Mandela
advocating violent opposition to the racist state. By 1970, many
anti-apartheid leaders, including Mr. Mandela, were either in jail or
living in exile.

Meanwhile, Mr. Botha rose through the government ranks. In 1961, he
became the minister of colored affairs; in 1966, minister of defense.
His rise coincided with the country's deepening political isolation.
In 1961, South Africa left the Commonwealth of Nations, whose members
were strongly critical of apartheid policies. As the country's
neighbors achieved independence from colonial rule in the 1960's and
70's, many cut off diplomatic, cultural and commercial ties with South
Africa.

In 1974, the United Nations revoked South Africa's seat in the General
Assembly. Three years later, it imposed a weapons embargo. In the
West, particularly in the United States, debate over imposing trade
sanctions on South Africa reached a fever pitch.

But the disciples of apartheid hung tough. Huge reserves of gold and
diamonds fueled the Afrikaners' ability to circumvent economic
embargoes and political sanctions. As defense minister, Mr. Botha
increased military spending to 20 percent of the government's budget,
conducted a clandestine weapons trade with Israel and other states and
pushed for the development of nuclear weapons.

In the early 1980's, Mr. Botha's government launched military strikes
on the forces of the African National Congress and other insurgent
groups in neighboring countries where they had taken sanctuary. Air
and ground forces struck at targets in Angola, and South African
commandos conducted raids in Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Zambia and
Zimbabwe.

South African forces also equipped and trained rebel movements against
the left-leaning African governments that had replaced the ousted
Portuguese colonialists. Moreover, under the direction of the State
Security Council, created in 1972, Mr. Botha's government carried out
a program to kill anti-apartheid activists.

Racial violence and political protests continued to rise. Increasing
numbers of white South Africans joined the demonstrations. Although
Mr. Botha had come to power with the pledge to uphold apartheid as
well as improve race relations, the two goals were mutually exclusive.
Despite a seeming willingness to relax some apartheid laws, he
remained adamant in his refusal to grant blacks political power.

The situation deteriorated. Police stations and other government
installations were attacked. In 1985, the government announced an
indefinite state of emergency. In 1986, the Anglican anti-apartheid
campaigner Bishop Desmond Tutu addressed the United Nations and urged
further sanctions against South Africa.

Mr. Botha grew defiant. "We are not a nation of jellyfish," he
declared in a party speech in 1986. An aide, Hendrik Jacobus Coetsee,
recalled: "The Old Crocodile was obsessed with looking tough and in
control. He never wanted to show any sign of weakness."

But even within the Botha government, pressure was growing for
negotiations with the African National Congress. Clandestine overtures
were made to Mr. Mandela, who had been in prison since 1963. The Botha
government, hoping to appear reasonable to the world, was looking for
a way to free Mr. Mandela without appearing weak to its own Afrikaner
constituency.

In March 1989, Mr. Mandela offered to negotiate a political
settlement, reversing the African National Congress's commitment to
overthrowing the white government by force. Mr. Botha, who had had a
stroke that January, replied that the two men should meet. The did so
on July 5, 1989.

In the end, the encounter turned out to be little more than a courtesy
call. "Yet, in some subtle way a line had been crossed," Mr. Sparks
wrote. "After that there was no stopping the process. It was just a
matter of time and the man."

Mr. Botha's days in office were numbered. Increasingly ill-tempered
and authoritarian, he remained reluctant to move on with reforming the
nation's apartheid policies. In February 1989, a month after his
stroke, for reasons that are unclear, he had renounced his position as
National Party leader while keeping the presidency. The move left him
open to younger rivals. That August, at a cabinet meeting, his
successor as party leader, Mr. de Klerk, followed by other ministers,
suggested that he step down. That night, in an angry, rambling
broadcast, the president announced that he would resign.

Under the new government, led by Mr. De Klerk, apartheid unraveled. In
1990, Mr. Mandela was freed after 27 years in prison and the African
National Congress became a legal political party. In April 1994, the
republic's first multiracial election was held. The African National
Congress won an overwhelming victory, and Mr. Mandela became
president. In May 1996, a new national constitution was adopted.

Apartheid was finished. In the late 1990's, the brutal methods to
prolong its existence were exposed during hearings of South Africa's
Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Actions by the country's security
forces and police during Mr. Botha's years in power had killed 4,000
people; as many as 50,000 others were held without trial.

The aging Botha derided the commission as a witch hunt. After failing
to attend a hearing in Cape Town on Dec. 19, 1997, he was found guilty
of contempt of the law, fined 10,000 rand and sentenced to a suspended
12-month prison term. The conviction was overturned on appeal, and the
Old Crocodile remained as intransigent as ever.

"I have nothing to apologize for," he said. "I will never ask for
amnesty. Not now, not tomorrow, not after tomorrow."
]]> Tue, 31 Oct 2006 21:44:00 EST http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/60139 http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/59373
I think that this is a wrong interpretation of the situation. First of all, Thabo Mbeki is probably one of the most intelligent heads of states in ANY country in the world. I’d like to have any one suggest anything else. There is no way he would deny obvious science, but rather, the mistake he made, as a head of state, was to apply some critical thinking. It was to ask clever questions which could lead to some other response. Obviously that’s not something that you can encourage heads of states to do [hence some other countries have really really stupid people leading them. They don’t think, they just do as they are told.] the main thrust of Mbeki’s inquiry was on the overall causes of AIDS and its devastating impact. The article in the Washington post actually does mention this but I believe, glosses over it and actually misinterprets what Mbeki meant/means:

"President Mbeki said, 'It cannot be the virus alone, we must look at other, other issues that predispose people to the immune system being depressed,' and I am of the same view also," Tshabalala-Msimang said on "Nightline."
The main point is that, people are not dying because of the “virus alone.” So Mbeki’s argument was really, only supposed to lead people to look at the wider system that was causing the extreme impacts of HIV and AIDS. In Africa, poverty is probably the worst killer. Poverty is that parent of violent conflict, disease—including HIV/AIDS, malaria and many others, corruption, dictatorships, hunger and malnutrition. So to have a rallying call to pour millions of dollars into repainting one side of a house falling apart is not doing much justice to the situation either.

I am not saying ARVs are not important or urgent, or that treatment must not be a priority. But we must answer the question of why are the conditions that “predispose people to the immune system being depressed.” These are questions of nutrition and health care systems more than anything else. If the South African government spend all of its money on treatment (i.e. paying global pharmaceutical corporations that own the patents to ARV) millions of dollars to provide the wonder-drugs, what is the real impact…? People will continue to live in environments that do not really compliment the effectiveness of the drugs.

So perhaps one of the greatest blunders of Mbeki’s presidency has not being ‘doing nothing’ about HIV and AIDS, but rather, miscommunication the complexity of the issue. We live in a world where the media simplifies every issue to much for its average reader or viewer that we often fail to understand the multiple dimensions to some of the world’s most complex problems. You need to be able to communicate complexity, with simplicity. Not an easy task. So I actually see the whole “beetroot and lemon” show that Manto has been pushing over the years as a tongue in cheek way of getting people to see beyond the complexity of it all. I am not sure it work so well because, hey, government officials dealing with serious issues are not supposed to have a sense of humor.

But let’s look at bit closely at the beetroot message. What Manto and Co are saying are, let us find simple ways, accessible to people for them to mitigate some of the impacts of AIDS through addressing nutritional issues. Getting South African tax payers to boost the stock prices of Merck, GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer isn’t always the best way to go. Of course just giving people beetroots and lemon juice won’t solve the issue, but how do you make the ‘cocktail’ more than just plastic capsules, but also basic issues that people can do something about. So there was a lot of mismanagement in how to communicate these issues. I don’t think the SA government will reduce their emphasis on the nutritional side of things, but this article is really more about changing tune and direction in engaging different stakeholders, especially on the treatment end of things. It’s not about replacing health and nutrition with treatment. It never has been. It’s been about finding the strategy that best compliments other efforts and the deals with the systemic dimension of the problem, and not just the sound bite friendly aspect of free pills for all.

I hope with this ‘new’ take on the AIDS issues, we’ll see less tension around the issue and more partnership and solidarity to really make a difference on a situation that is causing a lot of death, pain, and suffering.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/26/AR2006102601874.html?referrer=email

In South Africa, a Dramatic Shift on AIDS
Treatment, Prevention Get New Emphasis as Deputy President Takes Key Role

By Craig Timberg

Washington Post Foreign Service

Friday, October 27, 2006; Page A01

JOHANNESBURG -- The South African government is seeking to shake off years of international denunciation for its handling of the AIDS epidemic -- including a fixation on the supposed protective powers of beets and lemons -- while expanding treatment, testing and prevention programs, officials and activists say.

In public comments and private meetings over the past six weeks, Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka has emphasized that the government now believes unequivocally that HIV causes AIDS, a connection that President Thabo Mbeki once publicly questioned. She has also said that antiretroviral drugs must be the centerpiece of the government's response while playing down the dietary recommendations long cited by Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang as key to fighting AIDS.

"The beetroot and all that lemon stuff is out the window," an adviser involved in recasting the government's policy said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about it. "These guys are now serious about getting it right."

Driving the recent change is a growing realization of the severity of AIDS in South Africa -- an estimated 5.4 million of 47 million citizens have HIV, among the highest totals in the world -- and concern that the controversy surrounding the disease was damaging the country's international reputation.

The Treatment Action Campaign, the country's leading AIDS activist group, said that after years of hostility and legal battles, government officials were working cooperatively with members to realize some of their long-standing demands, such as setting targets for dramatically expanding the availability of antiretroviral drugs through the public health system. Mlambo-Ngcuka, who has taken control of the national AIDS commission, has met privately with the group.

"There's clearly a shift taking place," said Zackie Achmat, the head of the Treatment Action Campaign.

Officials say that Tshabalala-Msimang, often ridiculed as "Dr. Beetroot," will maintain some role in AIDS policy, but activists say they are confident she has been effectively marginalized by the appointment of Mlambo-Ngcuka to oversee the government's response to the disease. Government officials privately acknowledge that Tshabalala-Msimang had become an embarrassment, and activists say the tenor of conversations with the government has changed dramatically since the deputy president took over.

"I'm still skeptical, and I'm still waiting for the proof," said Francois Venter, head of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society. "But there's been a switch, the most hopeful switch in years, over the past four or five weeks."

Mbeki's comments questioning the relationship between HIV and AIDS stirred international outrage in 2000, and the government lagged even some less developed African nations in introducing subsidized antiretroviral drugs, which can prolong the lives of those with the disease by many years, perhaps decades. The first government program distributing the drugs began here in April 2004. South Africa's far smaller northern neighbor, Botswana, began two years earlier.

The South African program has grown steadily in the past 2 1/2 years and now reaches about 200,000 people with AIDS -- roughly one-quarter of those estimated to need the medicine immediately. But the demand for the drugs has grown faster than the program could handle despite major new government spending, including $400 million for AIDS programs this year alone.

"There were weaknesses on the implementation side of things," a government spokesman, Themba Maseko, said from Pretoria.

A turning point came in August, at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto, where Tshabalala-Msimang sponsored a display featuring lemons, beets and garlic but no antiretroviral drugs. An interview that Tshabalala-Msimang had with ABC's "Nightline" that same week renewed fears that she and Mbeki did not accept the two-decade-old scientific consensus that HIV causes AIDS.

"President Mbeki said, 'It cannot be the virus alone, we must look at other, other issues that predispose people to the immune system being depressed,' and I am of the same view also," Tshabalala-Msimang said on "Nightline."

The following day, Stephen Lewis, the U.N. special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, denounced the South African government's view as "wrong, immoral and indefensible." Two weeks after that, 81 AIDS scientists from South Africa and around the world signed a letter calling on Mbeki to fire Tshabalala-Msimang.

The president refused. But those events, combined with a government report blaming AIDS for a massive surge of deaths among South Africans in their 20s, 30s and 40s, prompted Mbeki to appoint Mlambo-Ngcuka to lead an urgent review of AIDS programs, pushing Tshabalala-Msimang out of the spotlight, officials say.

In a speech to labor leaders on Sept. 19, Mlambo-Ngcuka said, without qualification, that HIV causes AIDS. She acknowledged "shortcomings" in the government's response to the disease so far. She mentioned the value of a sensible diet but made clear its limits.

"It should be stressed that a healthy lifestyle and good nutrition are not alternatives to treatment," she said, according to a transcript.

Mlambo-Ngcuka also called for peace between the government and its many critics on AIDS. "Our collective response has for too long been undermined by finger-pointing and despair. I appeal to you that we change that," she said.

AIDS activists said they initially reacted warily, but after meeting privately with Mlambo-Ngcuka, including a session Tuesday in Cape Town that lasted nearly two hours, they have grown more confident of the government's desire to improve its handling of the disease.

The activists say they are pushing for several concessions, including a target of treating 1 million South Africans with antiretroviral drugs. They also want targets for expanding HIV testing and for cutting the rate of new infections. Prevention efforts have largely failed in South Africa, experts say, even as Zimbabwe and several East African countries are showing success in curbing new infections.

Maseko, the government spokesman, said that after years of resisting calls from activists, officials have decided to set firm targets for expanding prevention programs and the availability of antiretroviral drugs in the five-year government plan due for release Dec. 1, celebrated around the globe as World AIDS Day.

"We will be accelerating implementation to make sure those who need treatment are getting it," he said.

As discussions continue, activists say the shift in the government's intentions is tangible and hope officials are capable of carrying through on their new promises.

"They have lost at least five years," said Mark Heywood, head of the AIDS Law Project at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. "They're behind on prevention. They're behind on treatment. They're behind on planning for the social impact of HIV. But it's not too late to prevent a whole other generation of people from getting HIV."
]]> Sun, 29 Oct 2006 16:42:00 EST http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/59373 http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/38162 a. any one in the US, working there who doesn't have US citizenship?
b. anyone whose family originally came from the US?"
c. anyone working illegaly in the US?

this story got a lot of coverage, but i don't think it was well told.

there's a lot of self interest in the US in not really tackling this issue. that way, immigrants can keep being exploited as cheap labor in the country, and the US Congress can keep pretending there are no questions of humanity and justice that need answering.

does anyone have any links to good perspectices or other blogs that focus on this issue?

~ dvb


immigrants protest, but the results are mixed
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg The New York Times
WEDNESDAY, MAY 3, 2006
WASHINGTON A nascent immigrant rights movement has shown that it can build an organization, mobilize hundreds of thousands of people across the United States and wield economic power.

But the protesters do not appear to have achieved their primary goal - changing votes in Congress. And some critics say the demonstration Monday may have generated a backlash, hardening positions on Capitol Hill.

The protests, which began in March and resumed Monday with a boycott of work, school and shops, has clearly grabbed the attention of Americans when the issue of illegal immigration is high on the agenda in Washington.

The heightened attention will make it difficult for Congress to duck the question of what to do with the estimated 11 million to 12 million people living illegally in the United States.

Although the outpouring has drawn comparisons to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, questions remain about whether the protesters can translate their passion into political results.

Although some companies closed, it is too early to assess the economic effects of the boycott. The effects were diminished because many workers notified their employers ahead of time that they planned to take the day off.

"This was a one-day deal," said Randel Johnson, vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which supports legislation to legalize immigrants. "If immigrants decided to abandon their jobs for two weeks, that would definitely have an impact."

Some advocates who support "comprehensive immigration reform," the idea that illegal workers should be put on a path to citizenship, say the protests have given that concept an important lift in the debate on Capitol Hill.

Other people say that few if any minds were changed and described the demonstrations as a Rorschach test in which people simply saw their own view reflected in the sea of mostly Latino marchers.

"I have no effective data on this, but it has probably hardened positions and maybe done a little bit of wedging," said Governor Jon Corzine of New Jersey, a Democrat and former senator who said he supported the protesters' cause. "I think that the people that were really fired up about this still are, and the position that they had to start with, they still carry."

The protesters have discovered that there is a thin line between promoting national pride and pushing the buttons of their opponents. They made tactical errors - flying the Mexican flag, recording the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish - that have left even some of their supporters feeling a little bit queasy.

"I have a great respect for a lot of the people that did the protesting, but I think their message is all confused," said Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, whose sympathy dates from his childhood, when his mother, an Italian immigrant, was nearly deported. "The flag, the anthem, all that, it got everybody all mixed up. Take off work, it sounded wrong to some people, right to others."

The American public is deeply divided on illegal immigration; a survey in March by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, found that 53 percent of respondents say people who are in the United States illegally should be required to go home, while 40 percent say they should be granted some kind of legal status that allows them to stay here.

That divide is reflected on Capitol Hill, controlled by Republicans. The House of Representatives opposes citizenship for illegal workers, and has passed legislation aimed only at controlling the borders, while a more comprehensive Senate bill is backed by Republicans like Domenici.

Some say the protests have given the Senate approach a boost.

"While you could never point to a specific vote, they moved the tone and the thrust where now a balanced bill has the upper hand, and it's in part because of the protests," Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, said.

A Republican split over the issue is complicated because it is not just the immigrants who are weighing in. Among their biggest allies are employers, large and small, who are demanding assurances that they will continue to have the labor pool they need. Business groups are important for the Republican base, and many employers gave their immigrant employees the day off Monday in solidarity with the marchers.

"Obviously there's tremendous pressure on lawmakers to fix the problem," said Frank Sharry, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy group.

Julia Preston in New York and Rachel L. Swarns in Washington contributed reporting for this article.


]]> Wed, 03 May 2006 20:35:00 EDT http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/38162 http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/35218
thanks

]]> Fri, 10 Feb 2006 08:02:00 EST http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/35218 http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/32519 These writers, journalists and thinkers that don’t really understand Africa, but like to think that they do, and then go on to show their inability to grasp what’s going on through their writing, really annoy me. If I didn’t believe that debate, dialogue and discussion were by far the best way of learning and bringing about change, I would ask them all to put their pens and cameras down. But debate is informative so let it be …

Did you see Simon Robinson’s article in the European version of Time magazine (http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/article/0,13005,901051205-1134693,00.html) ? I have pasted a copy of it below my comment. A friend of mine mentioned in his blog that he thinks it’s a good article on Africa. I’m disappointed. The idea that democracy is simple, in a place as complex and as torn apart as Africa is just a shallow idea. Living here, I see every day, the levels at which democracy and governance are so hard to make function in a continent like Africa. The leadership needs and requirements to make Africa succeed a very much different to what a western country would need. I agree that there is largely a void of such skills that you end up with people resorting to a totalitarian approach as the ‘easiest’ way to deal with things in the absence of those competencies. Let me elaborate:

To run an African country must be complex. I don’t claim to ever know how to run one, or that I will ever do so some day. No way! But you have to deal with several key factors in a very deep way:
• A history of oppression and abuse
• Tribal tensions that were engineered to keep people fighting each other – and they do not go away over night
• Poverty, and the pressures it puts on people to acquire and hold on to resources to stay out of poverty [those resources often go hand in hand with (political/military) power]
• Cultivating a culture of democracy

I could probably write a long thesis on these points, but I won’t!

You can’t reduce the leadership challenges of Africa to just ‘leaders’ and institutions. Institutions can be manipulated, no matter how strong they are. Look at the institutions in a ‘strong’ democracy like the US. Are they not being manipulated … ? I think so! I also think that for the most part, American people at large are like a frog in a pot of boiling water and will only notice that the water’s getting hot when it’s too late.

Anyway, back to Africa, I read the article below by Simon Robinson and he just makes Africa sound so simple, and by virtue, its people stupid and powerless … it’s disgusting. Here are my objections with his perspective:
1. statements by leaders like Clinton of praising African leaders when they don’t really understand Africa set the wrong tone. You get mad men like Museveni being made to look like models of what the rest of us should aspire you. Forget that for the most part, Museveni had suspended democracy in Uganda. Even now as he allows it to make a come back, he’s not tolerating any opposition. Yet you’ll find the noise being made against him to be really a slap on the wrist. If mugabe had put the opposition leader in jail before an election, imagine the outcry and reaction and action [sanctions etc] from the ‘west.’ The noise would be so loud, your ear drums would pop!

Yet putting the Musevenis on pedestals reinforces what they do and their tactics and ways of sucking up to the west as the way forward if you’re to stay in power, and have the world’s big shots back you!

2. You also have to understand the underlying motivations in Africa and in African society and politics. It is not always as simple as saying people want to stay in power. That’s true in some cases, but there are many other reasons for it too … some of the issues that these ‘leaders’ put on the table are bona fide, important issues that need to be addressed, but then again addressing them is not always in the interests of big business, western foreign policy and other excuses. So they are brushed aside and the leaders are just brashed as power hungry and their cases are made illegitimate. The inconsistencies are amazing. It’s pick and choose. So as partners in developing democracy in Africa, the west often makes itself irrelevant because of how they will treat the same situations in country by country with such colossal differences.

Again, allow me to make comparisons between Zimbabwe and another African country – Kenya. Zimbabwe had a constitutional referendum in 2000 which the government lost. The president in Zimbabwe, as in Kenya, accepted the result, did not suspend elections or his cabinet or people’s right to meet. Yet Zimbabwe’s elections a few months later in which people voted and the government wasn’t overthrown, were called ‘unfree and unfair.’ Kenya’s president has, in my eyes, responded very undemocratically to the whole referendum thing. Today they decided that attending opposition rallies was a threat to national security. No one’s really bothered about asking Kenya to behave herself. So if you’re a politician in Zimbabwe, you take those cautions you receive when you ban opposition rallies as just ‘unfairness and bias’ against you. So it doesn’t help to foster that culture of democracy. Your influence as a partner is zero because you’ve shown such inconsistency in reacting to similar breaches of democratic processes.

With all due respect, constitutional issues in many countries just confuse things. People almost never vote on the constitution presented. They use the occasion to show the sitting government the finger. Constitutions are complex documents and their drafting, such complex and delicate processes that you can't assumt everyone will understand the legal implications of a document that lawyers themselves disagree so much on their natures and interpretations. Look at the recent examples of Zimbabwe, Kenya, France, the Netherlands … so for Robinson to look at the constitutional process in Kenya and use it as a benchmark for measuring democractic process - - hogwash!

3. by the way, Mr. Robinson, the opposition in Zambia last won an election in the early 1990s. since then, they have NOT won an election. That opposition became government and has stayed in power ever since. So please don’t get your facts confused. They once again show how much you don’t understand what you’re really talking about. You’re almost as bad as those people who point to Botswana as a model of African democracy! Ha!

4. Robinsons once again gets it wrong. Look at his analysis of Zimbabwe in this paragraph:
“Take Zimbabwe. Even five years ago, the country boasted one of the best judiciaries in Africa. Voters could make their voices heard, as they did in 2000 when they rejected a new constitution backed by President Robert Mugabe. The independent press was amongst the feistiest on the continent. Over the past few years, though, Mugabe and his henchmen have bludgeoned the opposition into near submission, rigged elections, closed down the independent press and forced most of the country's best judges into retirement. Mugabe, once hailed as a great new African leader himself, has proved more powerful than his country's institutions. “

First of all, the judiciary that was in place in Zimbabwe was still largely a white judiciary from pre-Independence days that protected a very conservative agenda that was not in the interests of most Zimbabweans. The same people who had legislated to maintain and uphold apartheid in Zimbabwe were somehow amongst the “best judiciaries in Africa.” When they disagreed with the government, and left, or ‘were forced out,’ and replaced by capable black Zimbabwean judges, our judiciary is suddenly not credible? Because it doesn’t just rule in favor of white minority or foreign interests… ? when was the last time Robinson was in Zimbabwe, or bought a Zimbabwean independent newspaper? Who is he kidding? There are still independent newspapers in Zimbabwe that are very critical of the government in many ways. We’ve never had private TV or radio. Even in the good days. So there’s no benchmark there. One newspaper was closed down in around 2002, for refusing to register with the regulatory authority. Every other paper registered and is still in business. Yet we are told that all the free press has been shut down. Again, another lie that western media likes to promote. I am not saying journalists here write have all the freedoms in the world and it’s an easy environment to be a journalist. Not at all. But again, there’s reasons for that, and if people understand those reasons, they can make meaningful contributions to addressing those problems. Not advocating for sanctions or punishments to fix things. That never works. But those that don’t understand end up writing trashy generalizations about Africa like Mr. Robinson just did. my question is, how would he like to see the judiciary in zimbabwe therefore ... ? full of old white judges who are good at matters of the law [zimbabwean trained black judges are just as good and competent, and don't always agree of rule in favor of the government], and yet want to rule in contra to the interests of the majority of citizens? it cannot work. not in africa. not in any country. (there's a reason why the appointment of supreme court judges in the US is such a hot issue ... )

5. finally, why are these journalists [Michael Wines of the NY Times fame, as well as Rachel Swans and many others who write for different newspapers as the “Africa specialists”] always dodging the core real issues affecting democracy and good governance and good living in Africa. The issues haven’t changed for over 500 years – the desire to have and control those resources that flow out of Africa. If we’re honest, we’ll admit that democracy in Africa is by and large corrupted by the need to access and control those resources. Often in arrangements involving parties on both sides of the equation. But it’s much, much easier and more acceptable to write about failed leadership and weak institutions. It keeps the dogs of the scent. And it keeps us obsessing about voting for the next loser in Africa and missing the real point. Once you raise the topic, you’re labeled an out of touch nationalist who isn’t in touch with the needs of today’s Africa – modern democracies, run by western educated technocrats [if I hear of the fact that Liberia’s new president studied at Harvard just one more time, I’ll throw my TV out the window!] focusing on building institutions and leadership! Blah!

Good leaders and institutions are important yes. But also understanding the underlying, fundamental issues is important as is having the guts to be fair and objective in dealing with the governance challenges in Africa across the board, not in isolated cases country by country while we pretend that other villains are the “hope for our continent’s future!”

http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/article/0,13005,901051205-1134693,00.html

ESSAY
Africa's Game of Follow the Leader
Why strong institutions matter most when once promising politicians start to fail

By SIMON ROBINSON

Saturday, Nov. 26, 2005
For brutal honesty on the causes of Africa's woes, it's hard to beat Chinua Achebe's The Trouble with Nigeria. Written during the country's rowdy 1983 election campaign, the book, just 68 pages long, is an outpouring of frustration at Nigeria's problems. You only have to read the contents page to tap into Achebe's angst. The author — best known for Things Fall Apart, a powerful work of fiction that almost half a century after its release still tops lists of Africa's greatest novels — uses blunt prose to deliver the message in Trouble. Chapter headings telegraph his views: "False Image of Ourselves"; "Social Injustice and the Cult of Mediocrity"; "Indiscipline"; "Corruption." Achebe lays out his case in the book's very first sentence: "The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership."

Many Nigerians agreed, and Africans across the continent reached similar conclusions about their own countries. Which is why, in the mid-1990s, when a new generation of leaders emerged, Africans dared to hope that things could finally be changing. People like Issaias Afewerki in Eritrea, Laurent Kabila in Democratic Republic of Congo, Paul Kagame in Rwanda, Yoweri Museveni in Uganda and Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia promised a new style of leadership that focused on building economies and democratic nations instead of shoring up their power by force and ensuring that they and their friends got rich. When President Bill Clinton visited Africa in 1998, he touted this generation as Africa's great hope.

The reality has rarely matched the hype. Within months of Clinton's visit, Rwanda and Uganda had invaded Congo, and Eritrea and Ethiopia had gone to war with each other. While some leaders — notably Museveni and Zenawi — still did enough to remain darlings of Western donors, even they have now begun to slide. In Ethiopia, Zenawi has sent troops onto the streets to stop opposition supporters protesting the results of a general election last May. In Uganda, an increasingly dictatorial Museveni announced two weeks ago that he will run for office again, following Parliament's decision to scrap term limits that would have forced him to retire. That long-expected bulletin came just days after his main opponent was thrown in prison on charges — vehemently denied — of treason and rape. Demonstrations have been temporarily banned.

So, Achebe's lament still holds true, then? No. Fixing Africa was never as simple as changing its leaders. And that's why the fall from grace of Museveni and Zenawi may prove a positive thing, even if they hurt their own countries in the short term. It's a reminder, especially to Western countries that invested so much in Africa's new leaders, that strong institutions are far more important than personalities. Good leaders can turn bad if they stay in office long enough: faults become obvious; people compromise to hold onto power; supporters get frustrated with the inevitable slow pace of change. It's not just Africa. There are plenty of erstwhile supporters of Tony Blair who would be happy to see the back of him. The same goes for one-time fans of Jacques Chirac and George Bush. A key difference is that the institutions in the countries those men lead — parliament, the judiciary, the press — are bigger than any one person and counterbalance the worst excesses. That's still not a given in Africa.

Take Zimbabwe. Even five years ago, the country boasted one of the best judiciaries in Africa. Voters could make their voices heard, as they did in 2000 when they rejected a new constitution backed by President Robert Mugabe. The independent press was amongst the feistiest on the continent. Over the past few years, though, Mugabe and his henchmen have bludgeoned the opposition into near submission, rigged elections, closed down the independent press and forced most of the country's best judges into retirement. Mugabe, once hailed as a great new African leader himself, has proved more powerful than his country's institutions.

There is progress, of course. Kenyans last week rejected a new constitution backed by lackluster President Mwai Kibaki — elected just three years ago in a wave of reformist zeal — because of concerns that the proposals vested too much power in his office. (Kibaki promptly sacked his entire Cabinet.) Voters in Ghana, Senegal and Zambia have all elected opposition parties since the turn of the century. Such peaceful shifts prove that institutions in some countries are becoming strong enough to survive change and are not merely dependent upon, or at the mercy of, whoever sits in the presidential palace. Ethiopia and Uganda are also vastly better off than they were before Zenawi and Museveni took power; the backsliding hasn't wrecked all the good work the men have done. But their tainted legacies are a lesson. "A leader's no-nonsense reputation might induce a favorable climate but in order to effect lasting change, it must be followed up with a radical program of social and economic reorganization," writes Achebe in The Trouble with Nigeria. In other words, good leaders are good, but strong institutions are even better.

]]> Mon, 28 Nov 2005 20:18:00 EST http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/32519 http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/32093
this article is ridiculous! france is ripped apart by social tensions, mainly based on issues of equity and economics and, at the same time an incredible opportunity for genuine dialogue and transformation opens up and what do people in political leadership do...? blame it on the number of wives a man has? young french men are angry because their society does not give them opportunities to participate and engage in productive activities. they respond violently to years of picked on and stereotyped as trouble causers; they are unhappy with being referred to [by government ministers] as 'scum' or filth; they are marginalized and not made to feel like they belong where they have settled. they are threatened with deportation should they break the law. yet the root cause of this trouble is polygamy? and we have people preaching to us in africa about creating diverse, multi-racial [emphasized more than multi-ethnic] societies ... what for? so that immigrants to made themselves at home through brutal means 300 years ago can feel at home, but those who are trying to make them feel at home on other continents are to the thrown out, together with their "filthy" cultural practices. but we have to create multi-racial societies that comfortable accommodate other people's cultural practices -- democracy, religion, 'modernization'

why does something about this whole picture JUST DOES NOT MAKE SENSE TO ME!

oh no, hold on dumi -- it's simple. tell you people to limit the number of women they sleep with, and everything with be ok.

the article in the new york times points to this ridiculous claim made by some french thought and political leaders that Polygamy is a key factor in this french unrest! in all fairness, there have been effort to address the other issues too and to highlight them, but the fact that this one gets this much air time repulses me!

d.



Immigrant Polygamy Is a Factor in French Unrest, a Gaullist Says


By ELAINE SCIOLINO

Published: November 18, 2005

PARIS, Nov. 17 - In the search for explanations for the riots that have rocked France , some politicians and intellectuals are pointing to a novel one: polygamy.

In an interview with RTL radio on Wednesday, Bernard Accoyer, the parliamentary leader of President Jacques Chirac's Gaullist party, the Union for a Popular Movement, called polygamy "certainly one of the causes, though not the only one" for France's worst unrest in four decades. He blamed the former Socialist government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin or being "strangely lax" in enforcing the ban on polygamy. Pierre Cardo, a deputy in Parliament from Mr. Chirac's party, said that the most difficult juvenile delinquents were "often products of polygamous families."

Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, one of the country's most eminent historians and the permanent secretary of the Académie Française, was even more pointed. "Everyone is astonished; why are African children in the streets and not at school?" she said on Russian television in Moscow on Sunday. "Why can't their parents buy an apartment? It's clear why. Many of these Africans, I tell you, are polygamous. In an apartment, there are three or four wives and 25 children." Even the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has suggested that polygamy makes it harder for North African Arabs and sub-Saharan Africans to integrate into French life.

"There are more problems for a child of an immigrant of black Africa or of North Africa than for a son of a Swede, a Dane or a Hungarian," said Mr. Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian father, in an interview with France 2 television on Nov. 10. "Because culture, because polygamy, because social origins contribute to more hardships for him."

The remarks have set off an uproar in France and charges of racism. In a statement on Wednesday, MRAP, an antiracist group, accused political leaders on the right of "playing an extremely dangerous role in feeding our country with the racism that causes the damage we know."

No official figures are available on polygamy in France, although some women's rights groups estimate the number of polygamous families as high as 30,000. They come mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, including Mali, Senegal and Gambia. The practice is less prevalent among the much larger and older immigrant population of North Africa.

Bigamy is illegal in France, and punishable by a year in prison and a $53,000 fine. But the practice of polygamy among immigrant families from countries where it is part of the culture and tradition is more complicated. Polygamy was effectively banned by a 1993 law that prevented second wives from getting visas. But it created difficult situations for families that had lived in France for years, and pushed many wives to enter France illegally. Polygamy is therefore largely tolerated, particularly if the marriages took place before the 1993 law went into effect.

To end polygamous living arrangements, local authorities encourage wives to seek separate accommodations. "We tell them, 'It may be legal in Africa, but in France, it's not,' " said a City Hall spokeswoman who would not allow her name to be used, citing City Hall policy.

The issue also has caused a furor in the French news media. Le Monde put the article on its front page Thursday afternoon. An editorial Thursday in Le Courrier Picard, a northern French newspaper, said, "Then like this, it's because Papa is polygamous that the son burns cars." It called such statements "a call for a new and hypocritical apartheid."

In an effort to calm the waters, Jean-François Copé, a Chirac spokesman, sought to distance the government from remarks linking polygamy and the unrest. "You cannot draw such a tight link between polygamy and urban violence," he said Thursday in a radio interview. "The crisis of disadvantaged neighborhoods has multiple causes."

Community groups acknowledge there is a problem of polygamous families, but say the causes of the riots run much deeper. "A culprit has to be found," said Claudette Bodin, co-president of Afrique Partenaires Services, a support group for families from sub-Saharan countries in France, in a telephone interview. "It's easier to accuse polygamous families than to question your own society." Daniel Vaillant, the Socialist mayor of the 18th Arrondissement, which has a large number of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, also said the problem was much larger. "You cannot say that polygamy created or aggravated the riots," he said in a telephone interview. "This is transferring the blame." The root problems, he said, were "those of jobs, of housing, of bitterness."

Ariane Bernard and Hélène Fouquet contributed reporting for this article.


]]> Fri, 18 Nov 2005 22:31:00 EST http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/32093 http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/31355
the rest of us (especially in africa) have a lot to learn from latin america. the article below does a good job of breaking it down, although it is from the perspective of a major US newspaper.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/chitribts/20051031/ts_chicagotrib/bushheadingintodenofleftists

Bush heading into den of leftists
By Colin McMahon Tribune foreign correspondentMon Oct 31, 9:40 AM
ET

For a guy with the headaches President Bush faces, quiet time away and a pleasant visit with friends might be just the ticket. Too bad Bush is booked for South America this week.

The fourth Summit of the Americas will bring Bush into territory that is not quite enemy but far less allied than before. Half the hemisphere's leaders have changed since Bush took office in 2001 promising to make Latin America a priority. The region's politics have changed too.

A resurgent left is reshaping Latin America. This year alone, leftist protests toppled governments in Ecuador and Bolivia. A socialist took power for the first time in Uruguay. And Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, swimming in oil profits and brimming with bravado, is rallying the region against the United States and its economic prescriptions.

All told, more than 320 million Latin Americans have seen their nations turn to the left in recent years--in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.

Yet this turn is not nearly so dramatic as some had feared and others had hoped. So far, complex economic and political realities have softened Latin America's leftist wave.

"The elections in Uruguay and elsewhere have been a referendum against failed policies. People have started looking for alternatives," said Ernesto Talvi, an economist and executive director of the think tank CERES in Montevideo. "But I don't think they are looking for alternatives that revert us to the failed policies of the past."

Markets failed the poor

During the 1990s and early in this decade, free-market policies--low tariffs, fiscal discipline, privatization--remade Latin American economies. But they failed to significantly reduce poverty or expand the middle class. Poor and working-class voters felt robbed by relentless austerity measures, the loss of state jobs and the cutting of government subsidies.

Leftist precepts that analysts had written off only a decade ago underwent a revival. And so did anti-Americanism. Growing numbers of Latin Americans came to accuse Washington of imperialism in foreign policy and of pushing neo-liberal economic policies that enrich the United States and the region's elite at the expense of the masses.

Bush in particular is identified with the policies that have come under criticism. Suspicion from fellow leaders and derision from protesters will greet the American president at the summit, which starts Friday in Argentina. But most of the hemisphere still looks to the United States for leadership, aid and investment.

This presents the Bush administration with an opportunity but also a thorny foreign policy challenge. Push its agenda too much, as the United States is accused of doing in confronting Chavez in Venezuela, and Washington is seen as meddling. Stand too far back, as the United States is accused of doing regionally since the Sept. 11 attacks, and Washington is seen as abandoning Latin American nations trying to do the right thing on human rights, trade and immigration.

U.S. officials acknowledge that the so-called pink tide rolling across Latin America has a mellow tint.

A few governments have raised tariffs to protect domestic industries, but there has been no wholesale return to protectionism. Social spending is rising, but treasuries remain committed to fiscal discipline. Leaders across the region extol the importance of attracting capital and investment, and last year two nations with left-of-center leaders, Brazil and Chile, recorded the highest percentage increases in foreign investment. Economic opportunity is hardly washing away.

Some left-of-center presidents, such as Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, have even come under criticism for being too conservative.

Brazilian turnabout

During his long career as a labor leader and his unlikely slog to the presidency of Brazil, da Silva railed against the free-market economic policies that have transformed his nation. But as the elected leader of the world's fifth most-populous country, da Silva is gambling that fiscal discipline and free markets will spur sustained growth, create jobs and provide the revenue da Silva's government needs to address Brazil's crushing social inequalities.

"Lula changed," said Marcilio Marques Moreira, a former finance minister who also was Brazil's ambassador to the United States. "I don't know if it was by conviction or by pragmatism, but in the process there was a certain type of conversion, at least in economic policy."

This conversion breaks the heart of da Silva's leftist allies. But da Silva's orthodox policies are credited with stabilizing Brazil's economy--and helping to insulate da Silva from an all-out political attack--during a corruption scandal that threatened his government.

That scandal has cost da Silva standing and influence in the region, and Chavez has benefited.

Because of the value of Venezuela's oil, Chavez for now can afford to challenge economic liberalism and even chase off some foreign investors. The Venezuela leader has won many fans with his calls for a "Bolivarian revolution" that would restore a large state role to national economies.

But elsewhere the new leftists are wary of isolating their countries from international credit markets and foreign capital. They are searching for a Latin American third way between unfettered capitalism and state-dominated socialism. They see private business as the engine of growth, but they are not content to leave job creation to the unforgiving market. They believe in free trade but want safeguards to make sure trade is fair.

This may not work, and most Bush administration officials and conservative economists say it will not. They blame corruption and poor execution of market policies, not the policies themselves, for their failure across Latin America. But the hardships and inequalities across Latin American have convinced most voters and the new breed of leftist leaders that the economic orthodoxy of the so-called Washington Consensus has failed them.

Holding off the radicals

The challenge now is for the new leftists to make their way work before radical approaches gain more favor. In some countries, the throwing out of the old has coincided with the rise of new political movements with a strong populist bent and a fervent anti-American agenda. Their commitment to electoral democracy is at best unproven.

So far, the Latin American third way is being built most convincingly by the market-minded socialists running Chile.

Chile has one of the world's most open economies, according to an annual international survey by the conservative Heritage Foundation. And it is the region's beacon for free traders. The left-of-center government of President Ricardo Lagos has aggressively pursued trade deals with countries in Europe, Asia and North America, and Chile's economy has grown more robustly and consistently than any other in the region.

Trade between Latin America and the United States has grown steadily every year since 2001 and has risen to a historic high. But trade between Chile and the United States has positively soared. A bilateral agreement that went into effect in 2004 between the United States and Chile spurred U.S. exports to that country by 33 percent last year, according to U.S. government statistics.

Chile, however, departs occasionally from orthodox neo-liberalism. It has placed limits on how quickly investors can move money in and out of the country, for example, to encourage long-term direct investment and advance "growth with equity."

At the same time, the Lagos government has expanded social programs. In the last 15 years, Chile has slashed the poverty rate to 18 percent of the population from 40 percent. And by doing so, Chile's leadership has brought voters on the far left more toward the center.

"We are being very aggressive in liberalizing and opening the economy," said Chilean Foreign Minister Ignacio Walker. "But we never lose sight that liberalization is the means and not the ends in itself--the means to achieve equitable and sustainable growth."

Argentina is more complex. President Nestor Kirchner's government flirts with price controls, protectionism, currency manipulation and other state interventions that dismay free marketers. But Kirchner has been far more fiscally conservative than his 1990s predecessors, who became darlings of the financial markets even as Argentina was borrowing its way toward a collapse that threw millions of its citizens into poverty.

"It is impossible to conceive of a country without fiscal discipline, correct administration, the care of reserves," Kirchner told the Buenos Aires newspaper Pagina 12, sounding more like a neo-liberal than a leader of his Peronist party.

Since Argentina defaulted more than three years ago on $100 billion in loans and interest, Kirchner has taken a hard line in dealing with creditors and foreign investors. Economists and other Latin governments are closely watching whether he can hold that hard line while ensuring that Argentina gets the capital it needs to continue its recovery.

Already leftists in Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia are calling for their nations to follow Argentina's lead. They want to suspend debt payments and force renegotiations on private creditors and multinational lenders. But even left-of-center economists agree that such moves carry great risks. The populism espoused by Chavez and advocated by his followers would severely damage most Latin American economies by shutting them off from foreign investment, economists argue.

Bolivia, where street protests have forced two presidents from office in the past 18 months, is considered particularly worrisome. U.S. officials accuse Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro of seeking to use proxies such as coca farmer-turned-opposition leader Evo Morales to turn Bolivia into a Marxist, anti-American state. Even leftists such as da Silva and Kirchner, who rely on Bolivia for natural gas, have expressed concerns about a potential economic collapse in Bolivia and the splintering of democratic institutions.

Bush administration officials say a government's political shade is less of an issue than a nation's democratic stability. For one thing, the soundness of institutions matters more to investors than whether a government calls itself left or center or right. Foreign investors seek such qualities as consistent and transparent taxes and regulations, and a judicial system not overrun by corruption. The governments that deliver, no matter what their shade, are deemed suitable partners.

Rice `not worried'

"I am certainly not worried about the rise of left-of-center governments," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared before the June summit of the Organization of American States.

But in an interview with the Miami Herald that was released by the State Department, Rice made clear that not all left-of-center governments were viewed the same way. She offered indirect if not exactly veiled criticism of Chavez. And she praised the Brazilians under da Silva: "They have been absolutely committed to a social agenda ... but doing it in a way that is responsible economically."

Da Silva has stuck with his current economic policy even under extreme pressure from his Workers Party base to employ populist and socialist remedies for Brazil's widespread poverty. That shows how deeply certain principles of the Washington Consensus have penetrated Latin American political and economic thinking.

"When Lula came into office, there was a lot of fear about how the government would manage the economy and a lot of confidence about how ethical the government would be," said Ricardo Ribeiro, an economist and political analyst with MCM Consultants in Sao Paulo. "It is ironic that we are seeing just the opposite."

----------

cmcmahon@tribune.com]]> Tue, 01 Nov 2005 07:25:00 EST http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/31355 http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/30951
if any one out there has good tips about business management in a hyperinflationary economy, send them to me please!

]]> Fri, 21 Oct 2005 07:21:00 EDT http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/30951 http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/30711
and i don't understand why people in america put up with it! okay, so there were demonstrations in DC last month. then everyone put away their picket signs and went home. and they get dooped the very next month. too bad there's no country out there with a government like, eeeeh, the united states of america has, to sponsor "public rebellion" against such rubbish! perhaps we would have a purple-orange-rose-red-white-and-blue revolution!

d.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051014/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_iraq


Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged
By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 51 minutes ago

It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution.

"This is an important time," Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, said, coaching the soldiers before Bush arrived. "The president is looking forward to having just a conversation with you."

Barber said the president was interested in three topics: the overall security situation in Iraq, security preparations for the weekend vote and efforts to train Iraqi troops.

As she spoke in Washington, a live shot of 10 soldiers from the Army's 42nd Infantry Division and one Iraqi soldier was beamed into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building from Tikrit — the birthplace of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

"I'm going to ask somebody to grab those two water bottles against the wall and move them out of the camera shot for me," Barber said.

A brief rehearsal ensued.

"OK, so let's just walk through this," Barber said. "Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?"

"Captain Smith," Kennedy said.

"Captain. Smith? You take the mike and you hand it to whom?" she asked.

"Captain Kennedy," the soldier replied.

And so it went.

"If the question comes up about partnering — how often do we train with the Iraqi military — who does he go to?" Barber asked.

"That's going to go to Captain Pratt," one of the soldiers said.

"And then if we're going to talk a little bit about the folks in Tikrit — the hometown — and how they're handling the political process, who are we going to give that to?" she asked.

Before he took questions, Bush thanked the soldiers for serving and reassured them that the U.S. would not pull out of Iraq until the mission was complete.

"So long as I'm the president, we're never going to back down, we're never going to give in, we'll never accept anything less than total victory," Bush said.

The president told them twice that the American people were behind them.

"You've got tremendous support here at home," Bush said.

Less than 40 percent in an AP-Ipsos poll taken in October said they approved of the way Bush was handling Iraq. Just over half of the public now say the Iraq war was a mistake.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Thursday's event was coordinated with the Defense Department but that the troops were expressing their own thoughts. With satellite feeds, coordination often is needed to overcome technological challenges, such as delays, he said.

"I think all they were doing was talking to the troops and letting them know what to expect," he said, adding that the president wanted to talk with troops on the ground who have firsthand knowledge about the situation.

The soldiers all gave Bush an upbeat view of the situation.

The president also got praise from the Iraqi soldier who was part of the chat.

"Thank you very much for everything," he gushed. "I like you."

On preparations for the vote, 1st Lt. Gregg Murphy of Tennessee said: "Sir, we are prepared to do whatever it takes to make this thing a success. ... Back in January, when we were preparing for that election, we had to lead the way. We set up the coordination, we made the plan. We're really happy to see, during the preparation for this one, sir, they're doing everything."

On the training of Iraqi security forces, Master Sgt. Corine Lombardo from Scotia, N.Y., said to Bush: "I can tell you over the past 10 months, we've seen a tremendous increase in the capabilities and the confidences of our Iraqi security force partners. ... Over the next month, we anticipate seeing at least one-third of those Iraqi forces conducting independent operations."

Lombardo told the president that she was in New York City on Nov. 11, 2001, when Bush attended an event recognizing soldiers for their recovery and rescue efforts at Ground Zero. She said the troops began the fight against terrorism in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and were proud to continue it in Iraq.

"I thought you looked familiar," Bush said, and then joked: "I probably look familiar to you, too."

Paul Rieckhoff, director of the New York-based Operation Truth, an advocacy group for U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, denounced the event as a "carefully scripted publicity stunt." Five of the 10 U.S. troops involved were officers, he said.

"If he wants the real opinions of the troops, he can't do it in a nationally televised teleconference," Rieckhoff said. "He needs to be talking to the boots on the ground and that's not a bunch of captains."



]]> Fri, 14 Oct 2005 03:42:00 EDT http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/30711 http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/30671

From - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/12/international/africa/12memo.html?ex=1286769600en=1bc36f245d786ce8ei=5088partner=rssnytemc=rss

October 12, 2005
Poverty Memo
African Food for Africa's Starving Is Roadblocked in Congress

By CELIA W. DUGGER
It seemed like a no-brainer: changing the law to allow the federal government to buy food in Africa for Africans facing starvation instead of paying enormous sums to ship it from the American heartland, halfway around the world. Not only would the food get to the hungry in weeks instead of months, the government would save money and help African farmers at the same time.

The new approach had an impeccable sponsor in Republican-dominated Washington. The Bush administration, famous for its go-it-alone style, was trying to move the United States - by far the world's biggest food donor - into the international mainstream with a proposal to take a step in just this direction. A lot of rich countries had already done so, most recently Canada.

So why is this seemingly sensible, cost-effective proposal near death in Congress?

Fundamentally, because the proposal challenges the political bargain that has formed the basis for food aid over the past half century: that American generosity must be good not just for the world's hungry but also for American agriculture. That is why current law stipulates that all food aid provided by the United States Agency for International Development be grown by American farmers and mostly shipped on United States-flag vessels. More practically, however, it is because the administration's proposal has run into opposition from three interests some critics call the Iron Triangle of food aid: agribusiness, the shipping industry and charitable organizations.

Just four companies and their subsidiaries, led by Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, sold more than half the $700 million in food commodities provided through the United States Agency for International Development's food aid program in 2004, government records show. Just five shipping companies received over half the more than $300 million spent to ship that food, records show.

Members of Congress often applaud the benefits of food aid for American farmers, but that is not really how it works, as Christopher B. Barrett, a Cornell University economist and co-author of "Food Aid After Fifty Years: Recasting its Role," noted. "It's the middlemen who enjoy most of the gains," he said, "not the farmers."

Mr. Barrett's research has established a third side to the triangle of interests with a deep stake in the status quo: nonprofit aid organizations. He and his co-author, Daniel Maxwell, a CARE official, found that at least seven of them, including Catholic Relief Services and CARE itself, depended on food aid for a quarter to half their budgets in 2001. Those groups distribute food in poor countries. But what is less well known is that they have also become grain traders, selling substantial amounts of the donated food on local markets in poor countries to generate tens of millions of dollars for their antipoverty programs. Given that at least 50 cents of each dollar's worth of food aid is spent on transport, storage and administrative costs, selling food to raise money in, say, Africa, is an exceedingly inefficient way to finance long-term development, Mr. Barrett said. Better to just give nonprofit groups the money directly.

Had the Agency for International Development had the authority to buy food in Ethiopia in the mid-1980's, when a million perished, or in 1999-2000 when 20,000 died, it could have saved many more lives, said its administrator, Andrew S. Natsios, who added, "Speed is everything in a famine response."

He pushed within the administration for a proposal that would allow up to a quarter of his agency's food aid budget to be spent in developing countries. President Bush approved the idea, he said, and it was included in the proposed 2006 budget introduced in February.

Ed Fox, the agency's assistant administrator for legislative and public affairs, said the issue was deliberately given a low profile. Little was to be gained from putting members of Congress in the position of choosing between agricultural constituencies and starving children, he said.

But if the proposal was little noticed by the general public, it did not escape the attention of groups representing the so-called Iron Triangle, who argued that cash used to buy food was more likely to be misused or stolen than were in-kind food donations. They maintained that the administration's proposal should not come at the expense of a program "upon which American producers, processors and shipping companies rely," as a statement from an ad hoc coalition of 17 companies and associations put it.

The Coalition for Food Aid, which represents 16 nonprofit groups, also opposed it. While supporting the idea of buying food in poor countries, said Ellen Levinson, the coalition's lobbyist, its members favored a more limited pilot program paid for only with additional appropriations, not money from the agency's core budget.

Ms. Levinson criticized the administration for failing to spell out how its plan would work, and said a carefully monitored pilot was needed to ensure that food bought in poor countries was safe and that the purchases did not drive up food prices for the poor. She also cautioned that food bought near a crisis would not necessarily be quicker to arrive, noting that the European Union has been very slow to release cash for food in some cases.

But Oxfam, which accepts no direct American food aid and is not part of the coalition, has actively supported the administration's proposal. In testimony submitted to Congress, it pointedly noted that the current system offered too many opportunities "for a variety of private interests to skim off benefits in the procurement, packaging, transportation and distribution of commodities."

And CARE, the second largest distributor of United States food aid and a member of the coalition, had a change of heart. It has now given unconditional support to food purchases in developing countries.

The food aid debate will flare again later this year as global trade talks approach, with the European Union proposing that rich countries give a growing portion of their food aid as cash. But, for now, the administration's proposal is going nowhere. Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, still hopes Congress will ultimately allow up to 10 percent of food aid to be spent in poor countries. "It's a question of trying to save lives," he said.

But opposition remains strong. Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican who heads the House Agriculture Committee, said even Mr. DeWine's modest compromise "would break a coalition that has resulted in one of the most successful food aid programs in world history."

In Canada this year, the politics of food aid has unfolded in a starkly different way, with the leading nonprofit group, the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, the country's main umbrella organization of farm groups, supporting a sharp reduction of the amount of food bought in Canada. "Canadian farmers are not going to say you have to source food in Canada regardless of whether starving people are waiting for it," said the federation's president, Robert Friesen.


Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

]]> Wed, 12 Oct 2005 11:13:00 EDT http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/30671 http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/29719
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm a hopeaholic. There's nothing George Bush can do about it

We have imposed our disastrous president on the world — but America's finest quality is already turning the tide at home


Gloria Steinem

It's hard to travel or send words out of the US now. How can any American expect to be welcomed in the rest of the world when we have imposed the narcissistic and disastrous George Bush on it? I could explain that almost none of his policies has majority support here. Even among those who voted for him, a poll showed that 60% to 80% thought they were voting for the opposite of his actual positions: they supported the comprehensive test ban treaty (he didn't); they supported the Kyoto treaty on global warming (he didn't); they supported the international criminal court (he threatened to sanction any nation that did); and so on. This tells you a lot about the level of information in mass media that prefer celebrities, yelling matches and advertising to investigating what is and isn't accurate.

But never fear, Americans are being punished. Having re-elected Bush as a wartime president, we have to watch him alienating more allies and inspiring more people to join the war against us every day.

Still, I have hope. I have hope because majority opinion has turned against the invasion of Iraq in far less time that it took to wake up to Vietnam. I have hope because Bush's selling-off of the US government, one function at a time, has stumbled on the privatisation of social security. I have hope because Americans are finally connecting, via the internet, with what the rest of the world thinks. I have hope because the only long-term solution to rightwing extremism was visible in the last election; I've seen people willing to vote before, but for the first time I saw people fighting to vote. Only an end to our status as one of the lowest-voting democracies in the world can keep a focused and financed minority from cutting through the majority like a hot knife through butter.

Hard times have made me realise that hope might be the most American of qualities, the reason why many immigrants come here and our best export by far. When I've lived in other countries, it's what I've been most homesick for. After all, unless we make a place in our imaginations for what could be, there's not much point in believing in anything. You might say I'm a hopeaholic.

I owe this not only to being born here, but to working as a feminist organiser. Terminal hopefulness is an occupational hazard. None the less, I've come to feel that hope is natural, a necessity of human evolution — and hopelessness has to be carefully taught by those who benefit from the status quo. Here's why.

I had the good luck of missing school until I was 12 or so. My parents thought that seeing the country from a trailer or caravan was as educational as a classroom, so I escaped the discouragement that, especially in my generation, came with it. I wasn't taught that boys and girls were practically different species, that America was "discovered" when the first white guy set foot on it, or that Europe deserved more space in my textbooks than Asia and Africa combined. I didn't even learn that people at the top were smarter than people at the bottom.

Instead I grew up seeing with my own eyes, following my curiosity, falling in love with books and learning mostly from being around grown-ups — which, except for the books, was the way kids had been raised for most of human history. With no one to tell me that some people were born to poverty or that women weren't leaders, but married or gave birth to them, I just assumed that hope could lead anyone anywhere.

Needless to say, school hit me like a ton of bricks. I wasn't prepared for gender obsession, race and class complexities or the new-to-me idea that war, male leadership and a God who mysteriously resembled the ruling class were inevitable. Soon I gave in and became an adolescent trying to fit in, pretending I didn't know what I knew, and keeping my hopes to myself — a stage that lasted through college. I owe the beginnings of rebirth to living in India for a couple of years and falling in with a group of Gandhians, then coming home to the Kennedys, the civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam.

But most women, me included, stayed in our traditional places until we began to gather, listen to each other's stories and learn that the subordinate roles we played, even in otherwise admirable movements, weren't just or inevitable. Soon a national and international feminist movement was challeng ing the notion that what happened to men was political, but what happened to women was cultural; that the first could be changed, but the second could not. I had the feeling of coming home, of waking from an inauthentic life. I didn't think this refound self-authority was more important than external authority, but it wasn't less important either.

Since then, I've spent decades listening to kids before and after social roles hit. Faced with some inequality, the younger ones say "It's not fair!" — as if some primordial expectation of empathy and cooperation helps the species survive. By the time they are teenagers, social pressures have nourished or starved this hope. I suspect that a natural need for fairness, or any whisper of it that survives, is the root from which social justice movements grow.

So hope is contagious. With that in mind, I offer you a few of my hopes from early and late in life.

I hope we learn that whatever is done to children, they are likely to do to soc-iety. If we can raise even one generation without violence, we have no idea what might be possible on Spaceship Earth.

I hope that spirituality overwhelms religion. I say this because spirituality links, religion ranks; spirituality sees God in all living things, religion rations out God to some more than others; spirituality celebrates life, religion celebrates life after death.

I hope we choose self-authority over hierarchy. We will have to, because the purpose of the latter is to undermine the former.

I hope we learn that the end doesn't justify the means; on the contrary, the means create the ends.

I hope that racism is finally seen as a fiction invented to justify the taking over of land and power. This remains true whether its objects are Africans or Arabs, Jews or the Kwei/San people.

I hope the female half of the world takes back control of the means of reproduction: our own bodies. After all, women are in the original secondary spot because some men wanted to control reproduction, establish paternity and ownership of children and force the bearing of more workers, more soldiers. That's how we got into this mess. Reversing it is the only way to get out.

I hope that men break out of the masculine prison that: a) justifies males dominating females; b) separates men from the full circle of their human qualities; and c) cons the many men at the bottom into endangering their lives to protect the few men at the top.

All these hopes become much more practical when you consider that either/or thinking, patriarchy, hierarchy, nationalism and monotheism, and much more that we've wrongly been sold as inevitable, have been confined to less than 5% of human history. We won't be the first to strive toward such hopes.

Will this fragile Spaceship Earth survive long enough? Only if we act on our hopes every day.



Gloria Steinem is a writer and activist. Her books include Moving Beyond Words and Revolution from Within www.equalitynow.org

]]> Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:48:00 EDT http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/29719 http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/29025 Trevor Kellog , and it turns out he was arriving in the same area to live there for a year as a Rotary Exchange Student. Awesome! so we decided to meet up for breakfast. little did we know what was in store for us.

i was staying with a good friend of mine, Sabrina and her family was really nice to both Trevor and I. we ate like mad, dranks lots of amazing wine [ooops trev, i hope the rotary people don't read my blog!] went for a walk, got lost, drove through many cool, tiny french villages and laughed all afternoon.

trevor's french improved before my very eyes! it was amazing!

anyway, here's a picture of trevor and sabrina at sabrina's home. trev is giving sabrina an iPod lesson!

vive la france!
]]> Tue, 30 Aug 2005 03:42:00 EDT http://Dumisani.tigblog.org/post/29025