Category Archives: Africa

Israel: “worse than apartheid” say South African delegation

The following comes from Jewish Voice for Peace who report on a delegation to Israel who recall the struggle against apartheid South Africa:
Gideon Levy accompanies a group of prominent South African human rights activists, as they visit Israel and the West Bank. Many of the visitors’ comments, who are shocked by what they’re seeing, deal with comparing life in Apartheid South Africa to the conditions prevailing in this part of the OPT.
To me, the major interest of the article is in that it gives us a glimpse into the thoughts and feelings of people who had been through that other struggle.
Racheli Gai.

Gideon Levy: ‘Worse than apartheid’

July 10, 2008
“I thought they would feel right at home in the alleys of Balata refugee camp, the Casbah and the Hawara checkpoint. But they said there is no comparison: for them the Israeli occupation regime is worse than anything they knew under apartheid. This week, 21 human rights activists from South Africa visited Israel. Among them were members of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress; at least one of them took part in the armed struggle and at least two were jailed. There were two South African Supreme Court judges, a former deputy minister, members of Parliament, attorneys, writers and journalists. Blacks and whites, about half of them Jews who today are in conflict with attitudes of the conservative Jewish community in their country. Some of them have been here before; for others it was their first visit.
For five days they paid an unconventional visit to Israel – without Sderot, the IDF and the Foreign Ministry (but with Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial and a meeting with Supreme Court President Justice Dorit Beinisch. They spent most of their time in the occupied areas, where hardly any official guests go – places that are also shunned by most Israelis.
On Monday they visited Nablus, the most imprisoned city in the West Bank. From Hawara to the Casbah, from the Casbah to Balata, from Joseph’s Tomb to the monastery of Jacob’s Well. They traveled from Jerusalem to Nablus via Highway 60, observing the imprisoned villages that have no access to the main road, and seeing the “roads for the natives,” which pass under the main road. They saw and said nothing. There were no separate roads under apartheid. They went through the Hawara checkpoint mutely: they never had such barriers.
Jody Kollapen, who was head of Lawyers for Human Rights in the apartheid regime, watches silently. He sees the “carousel” into which masses of people are jammed on their way to work, visit family or go to the hospital. Israeli peace activist Neta Golan, who lived for several years in the besieged city, explains that only 1 percent of the inhabitants are allowed to leave the city by car, and they are suspected of being collaborators with Israel. Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, a former deputy minister of defense and of health and a current member of Parliament, a revered figure in her country, notices a sick person being taken through on a stretcher and is shocked. “To deprive people of humane medical care? You know, people die because of that,” she says in a muted voice.
The tour guides – Palestinian activists – explain that Nablus is closed off by six checkpoints. Until 2005, one of them was open. “The checkpoints are supposedly for security purposes, but anyone who wants to perpetrate an attack can pay NIS 10 for a taxi and travel by bypass roads, or walk through the hills.
The real purpose is to make life hard for the inhabitants. The civilian population suffers,” says Said Abu Hijla, a lecturer at Al-Najah University in the city.
In the bus I get acquainted with my two neighbors: Andrew Feinstein, a son of Holocaust survivors who is married to a Muslim woman from Bangladesh and served six years as an MP for the ANC; and Nathan Gefen, who has a male Muslim partner and was a member of the right-wing Betar movement in his youth. Gefen is active on the Committee against AIDS in his AIDS-ravaged country.
“Look left and right,” the guide says through a loudspeaker, “on the top of every hill, on Gerizim and Ebal, is an Israeli army outpost that is watching us.” Here are bullet holes in the wall of a school, there is Joseph’s Tomb, guarded by a group of armed Palestinian policemen. Here there was a checkpoint, and this is where a woman passerby was shot to death two years ago. The government building that used to be here was bombed and destroyed by F-16 warplanes. A thousand residents of Nablus were killed in the second intifada, 90 of them in Operation Defensive Shield – more than in Jenin. Two weeks ago, on the day the Gaza Strip truce came into effect, Israel carried out its last two assassinations here for the time being. Last night the soldiers entered again and arrested people.
It has been a long time since tourists visited here. There is something new: the numberless memorial posters that were pasted to the walls to commemorate the fallen have been replaced by marble monuments and metal plaques in every corner of the Casbah.
“Don’t throw paper into the toilet bowl, because we have a water shortage,” the guests are told in the offices of the Casbah Popular Committee, located high in a spectacular old stone building. The former deputy minister takes a seat at the head of the table. Behind her are portraits of Yasser Arafat, Abu Jihad and Marwan Barghouti – the jailed Tanzim leader. Representatives of the Casbah residents describe the ordeals they face. Ninety percent of the children in the ancient neighborhood suffer from anemia and malnutrition, the economic situation is dire, the nightly incursions are continuing, and some of the inhabitants are not allowed to leave the city at all. We go out for a tour on the trail of devastation wrought by the IDF over the years.
Edwin Cameron, a judge on the Supreme Court of Appeal, tells his hosts: “We came here lacking in knowledge and are thirsty to know. We are shocked by what we have seen until now. It is very clear to us that the situation here is intolerable.” A poster pasted on an outside wall has a photograph of a man who spent 34 years in an Israeli prison. Mandela was incarcerated seven years less than that. One of the Jewish members of the delegation is prepared to say, though not for attribution, that the comparison with apartheid is very relevant and that the Israelis are even more efficient in implementing the separation-of-races regime than the South Africans were. If he were to say this publicly, he would be attacked by the members of the Jewish community, he says.
Under a fig tree in the center of the Casbah one of the Palestinian activists explains: “The Israeli soldiers are cowards. That is why they created routes of movement with bulldozers. In doing so they killed three generations of one family, the Shubi family, with the bulldozers.” Here is the stone monument to the family – grandfather, two aunts, mother and two children. The words “We will never forget, we will never forgive” are engraved on the stone.
No less beautiful than the famed Paris cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, the central cemetery of Nablus rests in the shadow of a large grove of pine trees. Among the hundreds of headstones, those of the intifada victims stand out. Here is the fresh grave of a boy who was killed a few weeks ago at the Hawara checkpoint. The South Africans walk quietly between the graves, pausing at the grave of the mother of our guide, Abu Hijla. She was shot 15 times. “We promise you we will not surrender,” her children wrote on the headstone of the woman who was known as “mother of the poor.”
Lunch is in a hotel in the city, and Madlala-Routledge speaks. “It is hard for me to describe what I am feeling. What I see here is worse than what we experienced. But I am encouraged to find that there are courageous people here. We want to support you in your struggle, by every possible means. There are quite a few Jews in our delegation, and we are very proud that they are the ones who brought us here. They are demonstrating their commitment to support you. In our country we were able to unite all the forces behind one struggle, and there were courageous whites, including Jews, who joined the struggle. I hope we will see more Israeli Jews joining your struggle.”
She was deputy defense minister from 1999 to 2004; in 1987 she served time in prison. Later, I asked her in what ways the situation here is worse than apartheid. “The absolute control of people’s lives, the lack of freedom of movement, the army presence everywhere, the total separation and the extensive destruction we saw.”
Madlala-Routledge thinks that the struggle against the occupation is not succeeding here because of U.S. support for Israel – not the case with apartheid, which international sanctions helped destroy. Here, the racist ideology is also reinforced by religion, which was not the case in South Africa. “Talk about the ‘promised land’ and the ‘chosen people’ adds a religious dimension to racism which we did not have.”
Equally harsh are the remarks of the editor-in-chief of the Sunday Times of South Africa, Mondli Makhanya, 38. “When you observe from afar you know that things are bad, but you do not know how bad. Nothing can prepare you for the evil we have seen here. In a certain sense, it is worse, worse, worse than everything we endured. The level of the apartheid, the racism and the brutality are worse than the worst period of apartheid.
“The apartheid regime viewed the blacks as inferior; I do not think the Israelis see the Palestinians as human beings at all. How can a human brain engineer this total separation, the separate roads, the checkpoints? What we went through was terrible, terrible, terrible – and yet there is no comparison. Here it is more terrible. We also knew that it would end one day; here there is no end in sight. The end of the tunnel is blacker than black.
“Under apartheid, whites and blacks met in certain places. The Israelis and the Palestinians do not meet any longer at all. The separation is total. It seems to me that the Israelis would like the Palestinians to disappear. There was never anything like that in our case. The whites did not want the blacks to disappear. I saw the settlers in Silwan [in East Jerusalem] – people who want to expel other people from their place.”
Afterward we walk silently through the alleys of Balata, the largest refugee camp in the West Bank, a place that was designated 60 years ago to be a temporary haven for 5,000 refugees and is now inhabited by 26,000. In the dark alleys, which are about the width of a thin person, an oppressive silence prevailed. Everyone was immersed in his thoughts, and only the voice of the muezzin broke the stillness.”

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How does Zimbabwe maintain her Independence?

My overriding impression from to visiting Zimbabwe and Botswana in 2006 was what an impossible position the black African population continue to find themselves in. Ownership of resources remains outside their hands to a large extent with outside interests continuing to “own” land and mineral deposits. So when Gordon Brown threatened Mugabe with withdrawing British companies, Mugabe’s response was “what are you waiting for?”
The European settlers and their dependents may be having a hard time with inflation rising exponentially, but many, if not most continue to have funds stashed away outside the country. A pound will buy billions of worthless Zimbabwean currency. This is not the case for those without links outside, although as we know many now have relatives who have fled. In UK thousands are still being forced to return. In South Africa resentment of Zimbabweans competing with local residents for jobs has spilled over into violence. It was said that the Zimbabweans were rather better educated than those they attempted to settle alongside.

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Mote and Beam

Two comments concerning responses to the question whether Mugabe is legitimate leader of Zimbabwe today. Both are quoted in Al Jazeera (30/6/2008)
“If media controllers had any courage, the headlines today would read: ILLEGITIMATE & INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL U.S. (P)RESIDENT DECLARES ZIMBABWE ELECTION ILLEGITIMATE. What nerve! Imagine a gang-banging thug sitting in judgment of ANYONE. Now, I readily admit that some people criticizing the Zimbabwe election are sincere in their convictions. George the Bush, Condo-Sleazeball & Gordon Brown are, BY VIRTUE of the illegitimate crimes they have committed, together with all they don’t see as illegitimate, are not: war of aggression against four countries that never did a thing to them, stealing elections, crossing any and everyone’s borders & sovereignty to kidnap MOSTLY innocent people, torturing them – many to death, depriving them of ANY human rights, including habeas corpus, imprisoning them INDEFINITELY. Not a single country in the world other than Israel stoops THAT low.”
Nelson Rappaport, Stockholm, Sweden
Added: Monday, 30 June 2008, 09:43 AM Mecca time, 06:43 AM GMT
“I think Mugabe’s election was every bit as legitimate as George W. Bush’s elections and less harm may be done.”
Puck, Seattle, United States

Understanding Zimbabwe

Understanding what’s going on in Zimbabwe is a tall order, but an article in today’s Guardian (20/6/2008) about who might follow Mugabe with a description of the present locus of power illustrates one aspect. The military became involved in politics after 2000 when a possible alternative to Zanu PF appeared. What the successive generals made clear is that they were not prepared to see a reversal of what they considered they had won through the liberation struggles.
In this regard socialists might have sympathies, particularly if it was clearly a peoples’ struggle. However it seems most people are seen as the enemy now and a powerful elite has emerged enjoying the privileges brought with it.

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Singing like a canary

Smelly is now on trial and has begun to sing out putting his old mates, like Scratcher into deep, deep doo-doo. What a surprise. Did we ever think that Scratcher was an innocent bystander contributing to the air ambulance service? Smelly’s saying that it was all a terrible mistake and how glad he is that the plot didn’t succeed. grovel, grovel.
It seems his mates could well be in trouble. Scratcher is living it up in Spain, (or more possible keeping a low profile – a Russian team were sent to kidnap him if this article can be believed) having been moved on from the U.S. and South Africa where other scams led to him dodging prosecution.
Update on Scratcher.

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A wounded buffalo

As the argument about who won the election in Zimbabwe goes on the situation deteriorates by the minute. I received the following letter from Bulawayo along with an accompanying article.
Dear all
This is an interesting analogy and describes exactly the situation here at
present. It has just come over the tv that the courts have no jurisdiction
over the electoral commission and cannot force them to make the results
known. Is there NO ONE out there who can help us? The situation is
becoming more desperate by the day. I queued this morning for a bag of
very second grade rolls, limited to 6 per customer! One does not ask the
price these days we are just grateful if we can get. I made some soda
bread yesterday with bread flour I had but used the last of the bi-carb and,
of course, there is none in the shops. The shelves remain pathetically
empty and managers are reluctant to put anything on the shelves as there is
still the threat that they may be required to halve the pces and they
certainly cannot survive a further episode like that. If the situation is
like it is in Bulawayo what can it be like throughout the country? We
experienced people passing by when we were having a picnic indicating that
they too were hungry but we just were not in a position to help as we had
barely enough for us. If we had not had a chance to go out of the country
several times recently we certainly would not be able to cope now. One
chap waiting in the bread queue went down on his knees. I do not know if
he was praying or just too weak to stand for as long as was required.
Life is indeed pathetic here at the moment and deteriorating by the day.
My brother and his wife leave next week and I leave the week after until
February and January respectively. Charles will come back for part of that
time. Everyone one speaks to is getting ready to move on but there are so
many who do not have the luxury of that option. I have resigned as
Chairman of the senior citizen centre but it does not mean I will forget
about them. I certainly will do what I can from afar. It seems one of
the senior citizens misunderstood the situation and was frantic that the
soup kitchen was closing! We were able to assure him that this would not
be the case. I hear today that a small piece of beef now costs Z$2
billion! How many people are going to be afford such a luxury.
We just appeal to any of you who can to help if you can. We are very
nearly flat on our backs, let alone being on our knees! The situation is
GRAVELY SERIOUS!!!!!!!
Eddie Cross who wrote the piece which follows is a very optimistic man but
does not always get things right! That crystal ball does have a habit of
dimming over.
Best wishes to all, Juliet

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More about the Qustul Incense Burner

In a teaching article about Nile Valley Civilisations the discovery by Chicago University’s School of Oriental Studies of an incense burner with its pharaonic image we discuss its significance. We believe it revives powerfully the view that Egypt civilisation was essentially of African origin at the start. Clearly its success brought in many others to make it a vibrant multicultural society, but to continue to put across the idea that Africa intervened only as late as the 25th Dynasty, as the National Geographic Magazine did in their February edition, is very far wide of the mark.
Further discussion on this artefact.
The reverse of the incense burner.
More.

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Smelly and Scratcher miss out

Ending up in a prison In Equatorial Guinea is not an ideal to be aimed for. It’s precisely where Simon Mann has ended up while others associated with the attempted coup to gain influence over the country’s oil reserves have done a bit of dodging, including Smelly and Scratcher. Who they? Characters from a Dickensian novel? Don’t know about Smelly but Scratcher’s escapades and dodgy deals are well documented.
Of course Simon is very very sorry and he’s been saying so for four years while in a Zimbabwean jail. Don’t think he would have been sorry if the coup had come off and the sorry gang had ended up with the promised millions. Other names came out of a hat. Peter Mandelson, surely not!? Jeffrey Archer, well he’s been inside but Mr Mann doesn’t think so. JACK STRAW? Well he’s not been involved, but he’s had to do a bit of a turn around about the government having no idea what was going on.

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Dealing with flooding in Southern Africa

A scheme to “harvest” flood water in Malawi is reported in Al Jazeera (6/3/2007). Global warming has meant above average rainfall across Africa with resultant threat to life and livelihood. Deforestation hasn’t helped.
The floods have been compared by organisations such as UNICEF to other major disasters, however as with floods a year ago have not received the coverage that might be expected. The report above comes from Al Jazeera which often reports on significant matters ignored by the world’s press elsewhere.

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A 21 Drum Salute to Roi Kwabena

A large gathering at The Drum in Birmingham tonight (2/2/2008) paid tribute to Roi Kwabena who died from cancer earlier this year. There were academics and entertainers who provided eloquent testimony to the contributions Roi had made to equality and justice.
Roi had a habit of sprinkling water on the ground at the start of his talks and performances. The African tradition of paying respects to ancestors took place at the start of the evening. Roi’s family were given a place of honour, including his mother and then a libation was made to remember Roi and others who paved the way for us benefiting or lives. A table was laid out as an alter and an elder performed the ceremony with the audience chanting “ashay” (be with us) after each name was said. The elder then took some of the water into his mouth and blew it into the air in every direction. Next he took white spirit “because it evaporates more quickly than water” invoking the spirits of those named. At this point all were asked to name someone they wished to be remembered. Family members and outstanding leaders were included. I mentioned Frantz Fanon. “Ashay” came the response.
A dancer then entered. Gracefully descending the steps she bowed before the alter and then acknowledged Roi’s family with blessings. Her dancing accompanied by the 21 drummers was an affecting experience. the mood ranged from calm, fluid, movement to twisting and turning becoming increasingly intense. Finally she picked up the scarf she had dropped earlier as if picking up a young child, holding it aloft as in a naming ceremony when presenting to the deity

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