In depth

Gordon Brown has a new idea about how to “make poverty history” in time for the G-8 summit in Scotland. With Washington so far refusing to double its aid to Africa by 2015, the British Chancellor is appealing to the “richer oil-producing states” of the Middle East to fill the funding gap. “Oil wealth urged to save Africa,” reads the headline in London’s Observer.

Warmest wishes for a happy Holiday Season and a prosperous New Year filled with peace, justice, solidarity and tolerance.

Please note that Alternatives office is closed from December, 24 2004 to January 10th, 2005. See you next year !

In 1994, Nelson Mandela was elected the first black leader of what was hailed as a new multiracial, multicultural and democratic South Africa. Now in 2003 in Soweto, one of the central battlegrounds in the antiapartheid struggle, people get their electricity cut off and no longer have ready access to water. Private security firms evict them from their inadequate housing. Through 1999 and 2000, protests grew against unemployment and privatization of basic services. Crackdowns by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) became increasingly repressive.

After four years, both the World Social Forum (WSF) development and the coordination of struggles and movements have put on the table the need for reflection on the WSF itself and its relation to the social movements.

World civil society is no longer the same following the WSF at Mumbai in India, and whatever the case, the movement started by the first WSF at Porto Alegre has undergone radical change and become considerably stronger. Henceforth, Mumbai has its place on the civic agenda initiated at Seattle, though others may say that this agenda kicked off in South Africa with the fall of apartheid in 1994.

Five days after the closing ceremony of the world social forum 2004 in Mumbai where over 100 000 people marched for world peace, yesterday on 26th January the Indian government celebrated its 55th anniversary of the Republic day by a massive show of its military might.

During the initial years of South Africa’s first phase of its post-1990 political transition, the anti-capitalist hopes, aspirations and struggles of millions around the globe (and particularly in Southern Africa) were, in one way or another, connected to the radical political and economic possibilities that might emerge in a post-apartheid South Africa.

Radical civil society is returning to a vision that aims to diffuse power rather than to seize it. It is a vision that aims to steadily limit the power of parliament and managers by building people’s power from the bottom up. It is a spark in the ashes.In the tenth year of our democracy we are forced to confront a number of sobering facts. For the purposes of this short article we’d like to highlight just five.

The June 16, 1976 Soweto uprising is a key milestone in the quest for Black liberation in South Africa. Contrary to Frantz Fanon’s observation that "Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it", the children of Soweto were discovered by history.

South Africa as vanguard of post-colonial neoliberalism, and laboratory of its social consequences. From the townships around Johannesburg, rebellion against the privatizations of the ANC regime, and the enrichment of a new political class.

Mandela Park is situated in Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s largest township, some 26 kms from the city center. It was established by the Botha government from 1983 with the initial intention of housing all Africans in the area.

Mergers, rationalisation, cost-efficiency, and outsourcing have become the terms defining the "transformation" of the universities in post-apartheid South Africa. For all their sound and fury, recent debates on the changing institutional landscape of post-apartheid universities have been deafeningly silent about the fate of university workers- academics, administrative staff and support service workers.

’Avoid Aids, come inside’ says the sign outside the sex shop near the Durban beachfront. Just 100 meters away 500 Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) activists, from 110 branches across South Africa, were meeting at the second TAC National Congress to plan how to carry on their fight for the roll out of a comprehensive treatment plan for the 5 million people living with HIV-AIDS.

Zackie Achmat, a South African who is a leading proponent of an international solution to the AIDS crisis, was in New York last fall, just as his government at long last delivered on the demands that he and other activists have pushed for years that it develop a comprehensive treatment plan for its 4.5 million citizens living with HIV.

Forget the Soaps! It’s the daily grind of ’normal’ life for working class communities and workers that make compelling drama in post-apartheid South Africa.

A rare activist-driven win for some of Africa’s wretchedly poor women, men and children leaves me humbled. In June 2002, I wrote a ZNet column’Corporate cost-benefit analysis and culpable HIV/AIDS homicide’in which the main prediction proved partly wrong within a few weeks. I have been waiting for a chance to correct the mistake. My error, excessive pessimism, was compounded by another event I would not have considered possible: the November 19 announcement that the South African government will now finally begin providing anti-retroviral (ARV) medicines to hundreds of thousands of people who are HIV+.

"STOP PRIVATISATION". "No war in South Asia". "Dalit [untouchable] rights". "Debt domination is human rights violation". "Power to the people". "Another world is possible". "Free Palestine". "A socialist world is possible". The succession of banners with chanting crowds behind them fills every pathway in the exhibition ground which hosts the fourth World Social Forum in Mumbai.

Here in Mumbai, amidst a city of tumultuous yet functional disorganization, with no street lines and more smog than oxygen, the fourth World Social Forum is set to begin - an event well-suited to the atmosphere of the location.

As part of the World Social Forum (WSF), taking place in Mumbai (Bombay) India from January 16 - 21, Alternatives is organizing numerous activities and conferences. To find out how to participate, or just to learn what we have planned, please click on the link.

India’s governing party, the BJP, is a master at the tactical game of dancing between seduction and blackmail, governance and repression. Prime Minister Atel Behari Vajpai’s and Interior Minister Lal Kishan Advani’s are promoting a profoundly reactionary vision of India that threatens a long-term cycle of war and oppression. But the opposition, weakened by internal quarrels, provides little hope as its own legitimacy is being called into question by the emerging social movements.

The State of Israel is currently seeking to bolster its national security as well as its Eurasian influence through burgeoning bilateral relations with India. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited New Delhi in early September to meet his counterpart, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee; the common foe of militant Muslim extremists and arms and technology sales were the topics of greatest interest.

At the risk of sounding repetitive, one needs to reassert that the methodological problem of identifying and defining a social movement is fairly difficult. The problem becomes particularly complex when we focus on the Asian region. Given its multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-political reality, the bewildering multiplicity and diversity of social movements in the region should not come as a great surprise. After all, social movements necessarily must, and firmly are embedded in the social, cultural and political realities of a nation.

In Delhi state, the government obviously won credit for better governance because of Supreme Court-led efforts to control pollution in India’s capital, traffic disarray and other such issues as rape. Which begs the question, why have a government in Delhi state when it fails to discharge its functions?

History of the India-Pakistan Conflict
By Tariq Ahsan, former teacher, Political Science and International Relations, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad; a freelance writer in Ottawa.

What’s the fastest route to economic development? Welcome foreign direct investment (FDI), says China, and most policy experts agree. But a comparison with long-time laggard India suggests that FDI is not the only path to prosperity. Indeed, India’s homegrown entrepreneurs may give it a long-term advantage over a China hamstrung by inefficient banks and capital markets.

February 28, 2003 marked the first anniversary of the outbreak of the most horrendous religious violence in India since the subcontinent’s 1947 partition. February and March 2002 witnessed the orchestration of what human rights groups have called a "genocide" against minority Muslims in the western Indian state of Gujarat.

Andolan is the common term for a movement in India. The well-known Chipko Andolan literally means ’Hug the Trees Movement’, which originated from an incident in a remote village high up in the Himalayas in 1972. The bare facts of the incident are that there was a dispute between the local villagers and a logging contractor who had been allowed to fell trees in a forest close to the village.

The world’s second most populous country has emerged as a major power after a period of foreign rule and several decades during which its economy was virtually closed. It has developed the capacity to strike at China and arch-rival Pakistan with its own missiles, and has carried out a programme of nuclear tests in defiance of world opinion. However, India is still struggling with huge social, economic and environmental problems.

When the threat of nuclear winter receded with the fall of the Soviet Union, nuclear-armed states led a drive to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. The United States was and continues to be one of the major proponents of nuclear non-proliferation. While the oft-publicized reason for nuclear non-proliferation is to prevent the possibility of an irresponsible state or non-state actor from launching a nuclear attack, the more serious concern behind state-sponsored nuclear non-proliferation policies is to prevent additional states from acquiring the foreign policy leverage gained when states acquire the ultimate weapon.

The year’s Alternatives’weekend retreat will last 4 days, fro Thursday August 21st to Sunday the 24th at the Camp Notre-Dame in St-Ligori, like last year, under the theme of "Resistances against the empire".