Belgium’s legacy of colonialism lives on

This shifty-eyed cop has every good reason to be suspicious of the camera catching the Brussels constabulary removing a woman & her child from begging in Grand Place, the central square in Brussels, Belgium. Belgium has ratified or acceded to every convention & protocol in international law concerning human rights. On paper the country looks like an international exemplar of justice. But a country doesn’t just walk away from it’s wretched colonial past by signing a few abstract & unenforceable documents. Colonialism requires a thoroughgoing historical & political accounting. Belgium & other countries are unwillling to make that accounting because it will expose their past criminalities & continuing exploitation & treacheries. That’s why finding decent history books on colonialism is so damn hard.

Belgium has been cited repeatedly in the past several years for violating the human rights documents it has ratified. It’s been cited for abuses in the prison system, in particular for prisoners with mental disabilities & refugees, including children refugees; repeatedly for discrimination against Muslims, in the courts & in the public streets; housing discrimination against Travellers; forcible evictions of thousands of Roma; racist practices toward Black citizens. A picture is shaping up here of a country reproducing its colonial relations within its own borders against anyone who isn’t white. Does that explain why Grand Place is called a “white sepulchre” by Marlow, the protagonist in the 1899 novel “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad?

Conrad, the Polish writer, worked for a Belgian colonial enterprise in Africa & well knew the racist depredations of European imperialism in Africa. Regrettably his experiences led him to misanthropic conclusions & his politics grew quite sour. He’s of the same generation as Mark Twain & shares the political problems of Twain, including racism & misanthropy in their senior years. They both lived in the heyday of colonialism & did not look to the colonized peoples as agents of their own emancipation. This is not the place for excuses like “they were products of their own times” since others were cogently analyzing & excoriating imperialism & colonialism.

Chinua Achebe, the great Nigerian writer (most notably of “Things Fall Apart”), delivered a famous critique of “Heart of Darkness” in a 1975 lecture entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” Achebe was a thoroughgoing analyst of European colonialism & called Conrad a “thoroughgoing racist.” This offended quite a few & stirred up quite a literary & political controversy–in precisely the same way as criticisms of “Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain.

The pending US intervention into Nigeria requires that historical accounting & puts colonialism, neoliberalism, & racist, xenophobic practices under the glare of exposure. It is important that we listen less to the voices of racist historians & writers & more to the voices of Africa.

No US intervention in Nigeria!

(Photo by Geert Vanden Wijingaert/AP)

Mary Scully

World Economic Forum on Africa 2014: a conspiracy of thieves

War isn’t the best way to learn geography but now, as the US charts a major military intervention into Nigeria, those in the US will finally learn that Africa is a continent, not a country–an immense continent that most of us know nothing about (even those who listen to the BCC). But we are now forced to learn since re-colonizing Africa is the grand neoliberal strategy involving competition between countries for who can loot the most & fastest & with the most ruthless disregard for human life. Many of the countries we live in are involved in this corruption up to their eyeballs & we are all going to have to start a crash course–though we don’t even have to know where Nigeria is on a map to know that US intervention will bring nothing but carnage & disaster to the Nigerian people.

In another case of “you can’t make this crap up,” the World Economic Forum on Africa is now meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, under the theme “Forging Inclusive Growth, Creating Jobs.” Nine hundred international big wheels are attending, including several African presidents, international bankers, more bankers, investment firms, academics (who like to yodel for their supper), management consulting firms (akin to loan sharks in their moral fiber), & multinationals like General Electric. Let’s be frank; they’re not going there to improve the quality of human life. Those unsavory thugs are the creme de la creme of global plunder.

Articles about the economic forum claim Africa is undergoing an economic renaissance, that half of the ten fastest-growing economies in the world are in Africa, that the economic growth rate for sub-Saharan countries has surpassed much richer countries for more than a decade. According to the panegyrics, there are “dramatic improvements” in education, maternal & child mortality, agricultural development.

Nobody who has trouble balancing a check book wants to wrangle with the richest bankers in the world but something isn’t computing here because it is also reported that health & education indicators are the lowest in the world, that nearly half of all Africans live in extreme poverty & under the World Bank poverty rate of US $1.25 a day. The jubilant bankers don’t even mention the hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans trekking thousands of miles north to Israel & Europe for work. So those economies may look damn good for the bankers & multinational marauders but not for the working people of Africa.

Tottering on the borders of parody, the articles point out that this economic renaissance is due to the new generation of African leaders committed to widespread reform–by which, of course, the bankers mean barbaric austerity programs to maximize profits for the multinationals. We don’t want to presume a knowledge we don’t possess about African politics, but does this new breed of politicians include Goodluck Jonathan from Nigeria, Paul Kagame from Rwanda, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, or Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe?

There is an omission in the financial panegyrics that stands out like a sore thumb & that is the war in the Congo that has taken millions of lives, employs mass rape as a weapon of war, has caused massive dislocation & millions of refugees, & entails UN occupation. If we want to understand the dystopic vision neoliberalism has in mind for Africa, we only need look at the Congo where the lives of working people are a living hell while multinationals milk the country for all it’s worth in natural abundance.

This wrenching photo is two Congolese refugees taken in 2012 when there were an estimated 280,000 refugees in the eastern part of the country. It’s a shocking image of two war-traumatized children who have become the chattel & the offal of neoliberal barbarism. Keep this image in mind if you’re the least bit inclined to wave one of those damn bring back our girls placards.

(Photo by Jerome Daly/AP)

Mary Scully

No US intervention in Nigeria! US out of Afghanistan and Iraq!

Emancipation, US-style: those falling for the bring back our girls campaign & who think US & UK marines & special forces are really going to Nigeria to rescue young girls need to straighten up & fly right. This is the character of US emancipation: a small Afghan boy is trying to learn how to walk with his prosthetic leg at one of the Red Cross facilities in Afghanistan for amputees who lost limbs from land mines or other US-NATO war crimes.

In the rabid hysteria that passes for the drums of war in US media, they’ve enlisted Malala Yousafzai & the Malala Fund, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Angelina Jolie (always a shill for US wars), & the creepy Mia Farrow, who has long advocated US intervention in Darfur. The only regrettable one is young Malala; the war machine can have the rest of them.

Using women’s rights to justify war is proving quite a propaganda bonanza. But women have always played a unique role opposing war going back to Lysistrata & the Peloponnesian War. It is time for women to raise their voices loud & clear against intervention in Nigeria because when the US & UK are finished thousands of Nigerian men, women, & children will have paid a horrific price for our credulity.

No US intervention in Nigeria! US out of Afghanistan! US out of Iraq!

(Photo by Noorullah Shirzada/AFP)

Mary Scully

| Theresa May under fire for botched bid to fly out hunger striker Ifa Muaza!

Theresa May under fire for bid to fly out hunger striker Ifa Muaza ~ Tracy McVeigh, The Observer.

Home Office officials were refusing to comment on Saturday evening on an apparently botched effort to deport a seriously ill man from Britain by private plane. A jet chartered by the government was forced to return to the UK with Nigerian Ifa Muaza and immigration officials still on board, after a 20-hour flight that saw the plane prevented from entering Nigerian airspace. It diverted to Malta, where an angry dispute broke out with the authorities over the plane’s right to use its airstrip.

The aircraft then had to return to Britain, landing at Luton, where Muaza, a failed asylum seeker who was said last week to have been near death after a 100-day hunger strike, was taken off by stretcher and returned to Harmondsworth detention centre near Heathrow. The flight is estimated to have cost the Home Office £95,000- £110,000. Muaza was the only detainee on board, according to sources.

On Saturday night lawyers and supporters of 47-year-old Muaza, who has won support from numerous politicians, human rights groups and celebrities, were trying to stop a second deportation. “It’s an unbelievable fiasco and we are very worried about his health. He is very weak,” said one.

Lord Roberts, a Liberal Democrat peer, told the Observer he was delighted Muaza was back in the UK but horrified that he had been forced to endure the attempted removal. “I saw him on Tuesday when a doctor had judged him too sick to fly,” he said. “Goodness knows what state he must be in now the poor man. He needs hospital treatment. We should know the cost of this private jet. We’ve already heard this case has cost some £180,000.

“[The home secretary] Theresa May must consider her role immediately. She has caused immense harm to one individual and spent an extraordinary amount of taxpayers’ money. I hope there will be no question of sending this poor man away again.”

The Home Office has used private jets for at least two previous deportations. One was the return of hate cleric Abu Qatada to Jordan in July.

Sources at the detention centre said that staff “were horrified” at Muaza’s medical condition. Doctors at the centre have six times ruled that he is too ill to be held there, while staff were put on notice of “an imminent death”, believed to be that of Muaza, last week.

A letter from Roberts to the home secretary appealing for clemency for Muaza was co-signed by a group of cross-party MPs and peers. After it was revealed on Wednesday that a ticket had been booked on a flight to Abuja, the Nigerian capital, Lib Dem MP Sarah Teather called on Virgin Atlantic to refuse to accept Muaza on the plane due to the concerns about his health.

On Saturday night Teather said she was “truly, truly, appalled” at the treatment of Muaza. “To put a well man through this kind of stress and journey would be bad enough, but to do it to a man in such a desperate condition? Well done, Theresa May, you proved your toughness at the expense of your humanity. This should give everyone pause for thought. I cannot see why this was in anyone’s interest.

“That the government is rushing to deport a man prepared to starve himself to death rather than be returned says everything about the culture of disbelief towards individuals fleeing persecution that is a defining characteristic of the UK’s asylum process,” she told Politics.co.uk.

“I find it hard to believe that a man who has refused to eat for over 90 days is playing the system and being wilfully manipulative. These are the actions of a desperate man who clearly fears for his safety should he be returned to Nigeria.”

John Packer, the bishop of Ripon and Leeds, had also spoken against the deportation, saying Muaza was in clear danger in his native country after defying the terror group Boko Haram by refusing to join their ranks.

Award-winning actors, theatre directors, playwrights, lawyers, leading NGOs and community organisations have also written to May to appeal on behalf of the hunger striker.

Actors Juliet Stevenson, Dame Harriet Walter, Cush Jumbo, Khalid Abdalla, playwright Howard Brenton, author Stella Duffy and comedians Mark Thomas and Daniel Kitson, joined campaign groups including Liberty, Reprieve and Amnesty International in signing the letter.

Ifa Muaza, who has been on hunger strike for 100 days in his battle to escape being returned to Nigeria, has attracted support from celebrities and campaign groups.

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Related articles

• Theresa May under fire for bid to fly out hunger striker Ifa Muaza (theguardian.com)
• UK: Nigerian Hunger-Striking Deportee Muaza’s Plane Forced Back to London (newsrescue.com)
• Heartless treatment of Ifa Muaza | @guardianletters (theguardian.com)
• Theresa May pressed for explanation of hunger striker’s ‘botched’ deportation (theguardian.com)
• Failed asylum seeker deported from UK after 100-day hunger strike (altahrir.wordpress.com)
• Theresa May under fire after £100k failed deportation of asylum seeker Isa Muaza (mirror.co.uk)
• UK Hunger Strike Asylum Seeker Close to Death (bet.com)
• Lord Roger Roberts writes…Please try to prevent the imminent death of a seeker of sanctuary (libdemvoice.org)