Week in Review
New African Initiative?
From Chris McGreal in The Guardian
Leaders of African states formally launched an ambitious plan to rebuild their continent yesterday through a partnership in which good and accountable government and an end to conflict is rewarded with significantly increased western aid and other help.
A dozen presidents met in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, to hail the New African Initiative (NAI) which has received strong backing from Tony Blair and broad promises of support from the EU and the G8 group of leading industrial nations.
But so far there have been no concrete commitments of money to what some call the Marshall Plan for Africa, named after the vast programme of US assistance to western Europe at the end of the second world war.
Allusions to the Marshall Plan are wrong-headed. Recall that the Marshall Plan followed the end of a war between western powers and was intended, ostensibly, to rebuild Europe. Any development efforts in Africa follow the formal end of a very long colonial and slave-trade period, which was, except perhaps for the colonization of the Americas, as brutal as any other period of modern history. The appropriate European response to the horrors of colonialized Africa was unilaterally rejected by Europeans in their attempt to destroy the UN’s Racism conference in Durban in August. The Marshall Plan is what the winners to do to rebuild the societies of the losers. Reparations are what criminals do on behalf of their victims. Africa doesn’t need a Marshall Plan. It needs justice.
The NAI is a merger of two existing plans, Millennium Partnership for the African Recovery Program and the Omega Plan. It’s fully a construct of the same postcolonial political, economic structure out of which every other African development initiative has sprung. It’s hard to see how African people are any more likely to benefit from any new development aid than they were from the billions that were squandered and stolen by earlier generations of corrupt African regimes, many of which enjoyed vital Western support.
The text of the plan gets the history right:
the impoverishment of the African continent was accentuated primarily by the legacy of colonialism, the Cold War, the workings of the international economic system and the inadequacies of and shortcomings in the policies pursued by many countries in the post-independence era.
For centuries, Africa has been integrated into the world economy mainly as a supplier of cheap labour and raw materials. Of necessity, this has meant the draining of Africa’s resources rather than their use for the continent’s development. The drive in that period to use the minerals and raw materials to develop manufacturing industries and a highly skilled human base to sustain growth and development was lost. Thus, Africa remains the poorest continent despite being one of the most richly endowed regions of the world. NAI
Innocent People Are Not Collateral Damage!
From an AP report of 24 October:
QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) — The explosions were so loud and so close that the Afghan family, cowering in their mud-brick home, decided to make a run for a relative’;s house. But before they could gather the children together, the roof fell in.
Now the wounded survivors — a baby boy, a 10-year-old girl, their mother and her brother-in-law — lie in Pakistani hospital beds with burns, shrapnel injuries and broken bones. They are among the first of what their doctor fears will be a wave of war-wounded arriving from Afghanistan.
A Breed Apart?
Violent pride and blood-feud over real or imagined slights have characterised Afghan society. for 1000 years. The one factor which has always drawn the warring groups together is outside interference. Foreigners spell invasion. The Afghans’ cruelty to prisoners is legendary. Rudyard Kipling wrote of wounded British troops in the 1800s rolling to their rifles to commit suicide rather than be captured, castrated, and butchered alive for sport.
What the mujahideen lack in sophisticated combat doctrine designed for tackling organised opponents, they gain in natural tactical use of ground and basic ferocity. The Soviets deployed 115,000 troops who killed a million Afghans. But the mujahideen fought back in the only way they knew how, absorbing the losses and turning sacrifice into strength. In the end, they killed at least 15,000 and wounded 50,000 from one of the world’s most powerful armies.