This article originally appeared in the Jamaica
Observer.
"Man is born free and everywhere is in chains"
was said by a Frenchman, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Two centuries
after Rousseau, another Frenchman, one Nicholas Sarkozy describes
millions of his fellow citizens as "scum" - among several
other pungent epithets directed at them because they happen not
to belong to what Sarkozy clearly conceives of as the master
race.
Fortunately for France, its president - himself
no paragon of egalitarian virtue - is at least more intelligent
and civilized than Sarkozy. Speaking at a news conference with
the visiting Spanish Prime minister, President Chirac said:
once order is restored, France will have to ''draw the consequences
of this crisis, and do so with a lot of courage and lucidity."
''There is a need to respond strongly and rapidly
to the undeniable problems faced by many residents of underprivileged
neighborhoods around our cities,"
It seems that the statesmen of the world are divided,
like the general populations, into the realists and the fantasists.
Sarkozy wants Chirac’s job and he is appealing to the crasser
sentiments of his fellow citizens, a sizeable portion of whom
voted for Chirac’s racist opponent last time the president was
elected. He calculates that with the hardcore of the Gaullist
movement allied to the far right fascism of the ultra nationalists,
his bid for the presidency is all but assured.
It may well be, but a Sarkozy government of France
may very well provoke the defining convulsion of the 21st century -
civil commotion which will not be confined to France or to Europe
but spread to the whole world. As Tony Blair has
been told by a panel of advisers, reacting violently to terrorism
is more likely to spread the disorder than contain it. His parliament
was wiser than Blair; they defeated his proposal for 90-day police detention
without trial.
American observers of the nearly two weeks
of rioting in France have consoled themselves with the thought
that the underclass exposed by Katrina was as nothing compared
to the French landscape of burning cars and looted shops. They
forget that while the American race problem is five hundred years
old, the problem inside France is less than fifty. And despite
the mess they made of Haiti, the French did have the nerve and
the humanity immediately after the Second World War, to try however
timidly, to integrate their colonies into their nation. They can
also point to such as Gaston Monnerville, a black man born in
French Guiana (Cayenne), President of the French Assembly and
of the French Senate, French delegate to the inaugural meeting
of the UN in 1945. They can also point to Alexandre Dumas and
even to Napoleon’s Empress Josephine. The United States has no
comparable examples.
If, however, Sarkozy goes
where only [Vichey Nazi-collaborator government leader Marshal]
Petain has gone before, it seems pretty clear that he will bring
down on France and probably Europe and possibly much of the world,
the conflict which the fundamentalist Christians have been waiting
for, the clash between civilizations, the war between Islam and
Christianity: Armageddon. (Incidentally, this week, the remains of a
Christian church were found at Armageddon.)
Naima Bouteldja, on Z-Net, quotes Laurent
Levy, a founding member of the Movement of the Indigenous of the
Republic, a network which campaigns against the "oppression
and discrimination produced by the post-colonial [French] Republic."
Levy says "the explosion is long overdue. When large
sections of the population are denied any kind of respect, the
right to work, the right to decent accommodation, and often the
right to even access clubs and cafés, then what is surprising
is not that the cars are burning but that there are so few uprisings
of this nature."
There is a structural peculiarity in the French
North African ghettos: because they were purposely built to accommodate
the immigrants, there is very little communal mixing. Structurally,
discrimination is therefore much easier; as in the Jamaican slums,
your postal address condemns you. In the French ghettos, one in
two inhabitants is under 20, and nearly one in two is unemployed.
The stimulus for the recent riots was the electrocution of two
youths coming from a football match who hid in an electricity
substation simply to avoid the identity checks and police
harassment which are a daily torment.
A Euphemism for Slavery
The pundits of the western world are sure that all
France needs to overcome these problems is to embrace globalization
and to tear down its welfare state. The problem, as millions in
France and in this hemisphere see it - is that globalization is
another word for imperialist exploitation and competitiveness
is a euphemism for slavery.
When Chirac says "Whatever our origins, we
are all the children of the republic and we can all expect the
same rights," he is in direct opposition to the rightwing
globalizer, Sarkozy, who dismisses Chirac's "children of
the republic" as "yobs," "fundamentalists,"
"riff-raff," and "vermin" and speaks of the need
for the suburban ghettos "to be cleaned out with Karsher"
- an industrial cleanser.
Sarkozy’s problem, and George Bush’s, is that fifty
years on there are millions of Rosa Parks around the world who
are refusing to be moved to the back of the bus.
This month in Mar del Plata, tens of thousands showed
up to explain their feelings to Mr. Bush, only to be dismissed
by the US press as just another bunch of unruly noisemakers. The
US press general tried to downplay the size of the protest and
to connect the peaceful demonstration addressed by Hugo Chavez
and Cindy Sheehan, among others, to the nihilistic troublemakers
who torched banks and multinational brand named shops hours later
and miles away.
It was strange that forty years after the US managed
to throw Cuba out of the Organization of American States,
another US president was trying to neutralize another Latin spokesman
and hero. Forty years ago it was Che Guevara, leading the Cuban
delegation as Minister of Economics, who told the Americans that
their mini-globalization project - then called Alianza para Progreso:
Alliance for Progress - would not work. Last week Hugo Chavez
was saying the same thing about the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
This time the anti-hero, Chavez, had with him not only the
crowd, as Guevara had, but the presidents of Latin America’s most
important nations. Forty years ago these countries were ruled
by American approved caudillos. This week, former Peruvian strongman
Alberto Fujimori is in jail in Chile and Evo Morales, an indigenous
American, is favored to become the next president of Bolivia.
Morales also spoke at the demo in Mar del Plata with Chavez,
making it clear that as far as his Movement Toward Socialism was
concerned, national resources were national property to be used
in the national interest.
Across the Atlantic, in Nigeria, the Ogoni people
were this week in the tenth year of their mourning for their hero,
Ken Saro-Wiwa, who they say was executed by the government of
their country by the military dictator Sani Abacha, a man who
got along well with the transnational corporations. The Ogoni
people say Saro-Wiwa was framed by the military.
In a memoir
published this week Saro-Wiwa’s son and namesake wrote: "His
death on 10 November 1995 shook the world. John Major [then British
PM] described the trial that sent him to the gallows as a ‘fraudulent
trial, a bad verdict, an unjust sentence.’ Nelson Mandela thundered
that 'this heinous act by the Nigerian authorities flies in the
face of appeals by the world community for a stay of execution.'
Bill Clinton and the Queen added their voices to the worldwide
condemnation, Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth, countries
recalled their diplomats and there were calls for economic sanctions
and a boycott of Shell oil."
Ten years later, Shell still devastates the Ogoni
homeland with oil spills and other environmental abuse and waste.
More than 900 million barrels of Nigerian sweet crude (the easiest
to refine and most profitable) have been pumped out of the Ogoni
homeland since 1958:
Western governments now get more from gasoline taxes
than the oil producing states get for selling the raw material
to the oil companies. The US and Canadian governments get slightly
less than the equivalent of the FOB price, which itself is more
than the oil producers get. Japan, Italy, Germany, France and
particularly the United kingdom, get considerably more from oil
than the oil producing states or even the companies.
And when one considers that this year one oil company, Exxon-Mobil,
in three months had over $100 billion in sales and more than
$9 billion in profits, you may appreciate the kind of money being
made outside of the oil producing countries. In the Niger delta,
public dissatisfaction with the unsustainable mining of oil has
taken drastic forms. There is sabotage, kidnapping and murder.
There is also increasingly sophisticated siphoning of oil from
pipelines, now estimated to cost Shell up to 15% of daily production
- for resale to tankers bound for the world market!! Free enterprise
for you.
Delta residents - most of whom earn less than
$1 a day - accuse oil companies of colluding with Nigeria's
government to foment divisions between rival community groups
in a strategy to deprive them of benefits from oil .
That doesn’t happen in Venezuela, where the government
of Hugo Chavez has nationalized the oil industry. For decades
Venezuela has been one of the world’s largest oil producers (it
is now number five and Nigeria is eighth) but the people of Venezuela
never saw the benefits of their oil riches.
Under Chavez things have changed. Oil revenues are
being poured into public works and social programs. A nationwide
chain of low price supermarkets is run by the state, thousands
of schools have been built, there are thousands of medical clinics
staffed by Cuban doctors and university education is free and
is available to almost anyone who wants it. Outside of Venezuela
Chavez is exchanging oil for medical and other technical assistance
from Cuba and is funding, through the PetroCaribe agreement,
a plan to bring cheaper fuel and the chance to invest savings
to Caribbean countries including Jamaica. No wonder Chavez is
a superstar in Latin America. No wonder Mr. Bush and his
cohorts hate him.
Chavez is to Bush the political equivalent of avian
flu: enormously dangerous and extremely contagious. No wonder
that Bush intimates such as the Rev. Dr. Pat Robertson consider
Chavez such bad news. In October, a few months after having half
apologized for advocating the murder of Chavez, Robertson said
on CNN: " [The US ] could face a nuclear attack from Venezuela
… The truth is, this man is setting up a Marxist-type dictatorship
in Venezuela, he's trying to spread Marxism throughout South America,
he's negotiating with the Iranians to get nuclear material and
he also sent $1.2 million in cash to Osama bin Laden right after
9-11." The televangelist maintained that Chavez sent
a "warm congratulatory letter to Carlos the Jackal, he's
a friend of Muammar Qaddafi," he said. "He's made common
cause with these people that are considered terrorists."
Meanwhile, safe and sound in the US are Orlando
Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, two of the last century’s most
dangerous terrorists, one pardoned by President Bush I, the other
protected by a system which says he cannot be extradited to Venezuela
because he might face torture there.
Of course the US is very sound on the question of
torture. This week the US Senate voted to investigate how come
it was disclosed in the Washington Post that the CIA had perhaps
dozens of secret prisons cum torture facilities round the world.
They didn’t vote to investigate the scandal, but to investigate
those who brought it to public notice.
They forgot, however, that we’ve known about the
secret prisons for a long time. In May of last year Human Rights
Watch estimated that there were 10,000 prisoners in these satanic
dungeons from more than twenty countries, some of them children,
some of them innocent adults just "scraped up" on suspicion.
Among these is at least one journalist, a Sudanese
employee of Al Jazeera - Sami Muhy al-Din al-Hajj, a Sudanese
national, arrested by the US military while working for Al
Jazeera during the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and detained
in Guantanamo for four years without trial.
"Aljazeera.net spoke to al-Hajj's lawyer, Clive
Stafford-Smith, regarding his case and the prospects for his release,"
the Qatar-based network reported. "He said al-Hajj had
suffered extreme physical and sexual abuse and religious
persecution."
According to al Hajj, he is being tortured not for
information but for something more important - to get him to accept
American money to denounce his employers as an arm of Al Qaeda.
When next the assorted heroes of journalism are
saluted, perhaps the hero-makers might care to take a look at
the case of Sami Muhy al-Din al-Hajj.
Did I hear right: "extreme physical and sexual
abuse" - in the War against Terror?
John Maxwell of the University of the West Indies
(UWI) is the veteran Jamaican journalist who in 1999 single-handedly
thwarted the Jamaican government's efforts to build houses at
Hope, the nation's oldest and best known botanical gardens. His
campaigning earned him first prize in the 2000 Sandals Resort's
annual Environmental Journalism Competition, the region's richest
journalism prize. He is also the author of How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalists
and Journalists (Jamaica, 2000). Mr. Maxwell can be reached
at [email protected].
Copyright©2005 John Maxwell