What is known is based on the archives in the Netherlands and other sources that I will not disclose at this point. Based on this information as well as a wide array of scholarly evidence from Latin America, a coup in Suriname was inevitable. The weakness of the incumbency, the fact that the government was held for ransom by parliament, paralyzing decision-making, contributed to social and political mayhem in the late 1970s. The deviant aspect in the case of Suriname was the nature of conflict, the fact that the conflict revolved around the wish of junior officers to be represented by a union. Their petition was denied by government upon which the junior officers started a protest that got massive support from the general public over the course of the year 1979.

Their actions, that at face value seemed reasonable, had however a deep and murky grounding, a grounding based on conspiracy and treason. All sources depicted a situation of an army inundated by Dutch advisors and technical experts that seemed to undermine the Commando structure of the army. Lower ranking personal for example, refused to accept the Surinamese commanders, and the Dutch military attaché Colonel Valk offered a willing ear, listening and giving advice, when lower ranking army came complaining about the Surinamese officers and the political situation. Colonel Valk, whose presence in Suriname was controversial to say the least, had several axes to grind with the Surinamese government. The fact that he had initially been refused agrement (term used in Diplomacy: agreement), had infuriated him. To be humiliated by a bunch of Baboons, in a banana republic, no less, was too much to bear for a man of his stature. The fact that Suriname eventually granted agrement is peculiar at best, specifically when taking into account that the Surinamese government had been aware of the wheeling and dealing of the Colonel, his intensive contacts with junior officers and his attempts to draw officers into conspiracy and treason.

The role of the Colonel Valk, albeit controversial, becomes less preponderant, when looking at the political crises that marred Suriname in the late 1970. Based on information found, a coup was eminent, the conflict stood on the verge of escalating, and the decay of democracy had reached a point of no return. I allege based on information obtained, that several groups of different plumage, competed in secret to overthrow government. Desire Bouterse with his friends, but also with other groups of junior and senior officers, high ranking police-officers, senior officers, leftist parties and junior officers and last but not least, the possible auto-golpe by the Arron Administration as a way to get out of deadlock. More than five categories of people, army and civilians, vied to take over government, and in the end Desire Bouterse and 16 of his comrades succeeded on the eve of February 25, 1980.

Looking at 7 years of military rule, 1980-1987, to connect the dots between history and the contemporary, raises serious questions on the memory of the Surinamese people. Did they forget how all kinds of roguish governments were wheeled in, Cubans, Maurice Bishop, Kaddafi, Jerry Rawlings leaders who at that time did not take democracy seriously? Did they forget that during the early days of the revolution, the first people were murdered, that in seven years more than 100 people disappeared, that the censorship became a determining factor as well as the deafening silence of the general public?

But murder, massive corruption and criminality did not deter the people to give their support to the former military after 1987, when they founded their own political party led by Desi Bouterse. But by placing the blame on the people alone will forego on the role previous governments, their conscious choice to cloak history. Was it because a debate about the events of the late 1970s would uncover their mishaps, their lack of oversight when dealing with unruly elements in the army, the fact that they had had absolutely no control over such a dangerous and volatile institution as the army? How would they have explained that because of their lacking experience on foreign affairs and diplomacy, some Dutch diplomat with an ax to grind destabilized government, altering the future of an entire nation?
Despite the intellectual inadequacies mentioned, there is ample evidence linking history with the contemporary. The incumbency, led by the former leader of the military authority, now president Desi Bouterse, is in fact the colloquial ‘blast from the past’. The heavy handed borrowing, wanton planning based on images and ideas of cornucopia and mineral wealth, the travels using the national carrier as private plane, the scores of roguish governments, the best friends of Suriname, Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, the president of the remote Equatorial Guinea, all ghosts of the past, that came to life after May 25 2010.

AUTHOR: Natascha Adama
URL: http://natascha23.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: nataliapestova23 [@] yahoo.com

AUTHOR: Natascha Adama
URL: http://natascha23.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: nataliapestova23 [@] yahoo.com

Slavery Suriname

It is odd to observe that little study has been done on the period of apprenticeship in Suriname, the fact that this period impeded real freedom. Van Lier (1971, p. 183) writes that this period became introduced as ‘solution for the labor problem (shortage) in Suriname. Van Lier (ibid) is not too critical of the covenant unlike, for example Heuman (2007) who wrote about Jamaican apprenticeship, the fact that apprenticeship specifically impacted the former preadials. Van Lier (ibid) does specifically mention the classification, separating the plantation slaves from the city slaves, but gives ample description about life on the estates after Emancipation, description correlating with that of Heuman (2007). It is assumed that such a classification system was used to keep the preadials working on the estates after 1863. Significant is the fact that campaigns in Britain to prematurely end apprenticeship failed to materialize in the Netherlands, this despite early publications by the abolitionist press in Britain spelling ‘potential trouble’ (ibid, p.3).

Another noteworthy element of apprenticeship were the notions harbored by both colonial authorities and religious orders that the period of apprenticeship would ensure access to ex-slaves, to proselytize and mold their thinking, to encourage certain habits of servitude and piety, to ensure control and status quo once apprenticeship ended. Van Lier (ibid, p.174-5) demonstrates that after Emancipation interest in Christianity waned as freed turned to their traditional African cultures (NOTE). In Suriname, compulsory education implemented in 1866 and laws prohibiting the expression of African cultures and rites became introduced to keep status quo intact. The period of Apprenticeship had a negative impact on the social and biological well-being of the freed, who had to deal with a lack of autonomy, discrimination, prejudice and a significant decline in health. Van Lier for example mentions a decline in birthrate; later sources make mention of high percentages of infectious disease such as elephantiasis and malaria (NOTE).

Relevant for this paper is the fact that during Apprenticeship only a small number freed opted for matrimony, a number corroborating my earlier hypothesis that matrifocality and serial monogamy became a fixed factor of the Blacks community society in Suriname and other parts of the Caribbean and the USA.

Limited solidarity can be traced back during the early twentieth century, when despite increasing organization and civility, people continued to see the white man (colonizers) as their bosses. Exemplary are existing documents illustrating the extent of social disunity and lack of belief in local politicians (NOTE) who fought for justice, jobs and against discrimination. During the course of the twentieth century, Creoles had to compete with various other ethnic categories for for jobs and social position. Particular the competition with Hindustani indentured gave rise to a polarized socio-ethnic landscape where both ethnic categories competed for Dutch favor. Within the Creole ethnic category, skin-tone also gave rise to latent animosity and competition. In both cases, animosity and polarization were first kindled subsequently fostered by the Colonial Authorities. In 1933, an ambitious plan to revamp the ailing Surinamese economy, entailing the import of new indentured from Indonesia, gravely affected the socio-economic position of Blacks, specifically Black famers living on the outskirts of the city.

Harkening back to the earlier proposed theory that Afro-community-societies are per definition Matrifocal, to link said theory to the work of Cabaniss &Fuller (2005). Said study demonstrated that lone-mothers in general have a harder time changing economic and structural conditions that determine poverty, that in turn diminish changes escaping poverty, because those specific areas (health-care, child-care) that directly affect women typically receive limited attention from government (ibid, p.158). These findings correlate with the finding that after Emancipation little money was spend on social and economic program to improve living conditions of the freed. Afro- Surinamese women typically worked in low paying jobs and had a hard time getting access to higher education and/ or improve skills.

The disproportionate number of lone-mother families, inadvertently hampered social cohesion, because competition occurred at a different social level, at the level of survival, food and shelter and not at higher levels of society, organization, participation and socialization.

AUTHOR: Natascha Adama
URL: http://natascha23.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: nataliapestova23 [@] yahoo.com

An 1840 portrait of Mehmet Ali

To understand why Egyptians rebelled in the early months of 2011 and then continued their uprising in November 2011 after the Mubarak regime was overthrown, one must examine not just the short-term causes (poverty, political corruption, authoritarian rule, etc.) of Arab Spring, but the history of this North African country from the era of Mehmet Ali the reformer (1801-1849) until Arab Spring 2011. Although a North Africa-Middle Eastern-wide mass movement, Arab Spring in Egypt is part of a historical process with very deep roots that date to the Ali era.

As part of a regional mass movement against the old authoritarian regime that includes the military and police as sentinels of the status quo, the Arab Spring revolts of 2011 certainly qualify as Pan-Islamic only in so far as they have religion in common as a catalyst for change against authoritarian governments. Unlike the Arab Spring bottom-up uprising, Egypt’s previous uprisings were nationalist, top-down that included the military as a catalyst to change.

The similarities between past and present include nationalism and Islam as ideological catalysts, although it must be stressed that domestic, regional, and global conditions are constantly changing and revolutions reflect such changes. While ‘Islamism’ and nationalism may be constants in Egypt’s revolts from the 19th century to the present, Islamism and nationalism have undergone changes to reflect domestic and global circumstances. Unlike, Europe that underwent a Renaissance, Commercial and Industrial Revolutions and Enlightenment, this is not the case in Egypt (nor Asia or Africa for that matter), thus religion plays a key role in revolution of a traditional society and shapes the anatomy of the revolution itself.

In the first half of the 19th century when northwest European were trying to expand their colonial empires after the Napoleonic Wars, Mehmet Ali managed to prevent his country from external dependence. This was at a time that the Ottoman Empire was divided into European spheres of influence. Ali carried out a nationalist revolution (the term ‘revolution’ means radical or systemic change) at a time that political revolutions were confined to Europe. However, his successor Abbas I (1848-1854 and Muhammad Said Pasha (1854-1863) prepared Egypt for colonization under England, thus undermining Ali’s reforms intended to achieve a modicum of national sovereignty.

The catalyst to colonization was the unraveling of the strong state structure that Mehmet Ali had built and the extraordinary foreign borrowing to the point that foreign creditors, especially British, paved the way for financial control over Egypt. By controlling Egypt and its precious canal, Britain enjoyed commercial and military control of much of Africa and the Middle East. Egyptian anti-colonial resistance from the late 19th century to the revolt of 1919 did not result in the elimination of British imperial rule.

In July 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers Movement took a page out of Mehmet Ali’s reformist nationalist movement in the 19th century and established a strong sovereign state for the next two decades. Nasser’s top-down revolution took place with the military as key player. The most significant achievement of Nasser was to eliminate British imperial rule and to provide Egypt with a sense of independence that it lacked since Ali.

Just as in the case of Ali, Nasser made mistakes of costly projects that did not yield the best results, exorbitant military spending made necessary owing to regional hostilities and the old War, and wasteful public enterprises. At the very least, the Nasser era afforded the people of Egypt a sense of pride that imperialism had denied them for more than a century.

The US and the West tried to isolate Nasser and portray him as a Communist sympathizer, merely because he opposed surrendering national sovereignty to the US and tried to strengthen Egypt and the Arab and pan-African movement. Nasser and Ali brought to Egypt a sense of respect by asserting national sovereignty and rejecting external dependence, but neither of them succeeded largely owing to pressures from the Great Powers.

Many in the West do not grasp the meaning of ‘national sovereignty’, because it appears as vague as the concept of ‘freedom’ to those who enjoy it and do not have to think about it. A Westerner thinks that ‘sovereignty’ is nebulous and meaningless because s/he lives in a country that enjoys national sovereignty. Why would Egyptians be fighting for this nebulous concept and not be content with a Wall Mart, a fast food restaurant, and a branch of an American or European bank in their city? Why aren’t Egyptians happy to have internet as a shopping mechanism, instead of using it to stir up a grass roots rebel movement?

The Arab Spring revolt is the third in the history of Egypt since Mehmet Ali to assert national sovereignty, not merely a struggle for jobs, higher income, less official corruption, a more efficient public sector and a modern private economy, one not based on the primary sector and tourism so heavily. Arab Spring for Egypt has deep historical roots and there are parallels between what took place in the 19th century before the building of the Suez Canal; what took place in the revolution (Egypt and Sudan) of 1919 official independence in 1922, while Britain remained hegemonic in essence; the successful revolution of 1952 when Nasser took the country to the non-aligned bloc; and what took place in 2011.

There are different interpretations on the causes of the original Arab Spring revolt in Egypt specifically, among them endemic poverty, corruption and external dependence, stronger commitment to Islam, etc. Many Western analysts, journalists and politicians insist that the revolt had absolutely nothing to do with the West, or any other external factors, and that the causes are purely domestic, factional rivalries of varying sorts. This argument assumes that Egypt exists on planet earth completely alone, cut off from the its Arab neighbors, from Israel, from sub-Sahara Africa, from Europe and from its long-time patron the US.

Those who have studied the history of colonial revolts dating back to the 19th century know that colonizers always attributed the causes of revolts to internal factors, rarely placing much weight on external ones. A closer examination of the influence of the US on Egypt in the last four decades reveals that the Arab Spring of 2011 is rooted in semi-colonial and extremely corrupt conditions under Sadat and Mubarak, as much as it is on domestic causes related to Islam that has always played a role in political rebellions.

In the 1980s, the public sector accounted for roughly half of industrial production and 90 percent of banking and insurance, occupying about 20 percent of the labor force; not at all unusual for an undeveloped or even a semi-developed economy. In the 1990s Egypt experienced a financial crisis when international banks refused to extend credit, largely because the state finances depended heavily on state enterprises; a position with which Western governments and IMF agreed. In the wave of neo-liberal policies that the US and IMF were promoting, Egypt agreed to go along the route of privatization.

In the early 1990s, the US government through the Agency of International Development funded to the tune of $10 million the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, a think tank that included the son of former president Mubarak intended to bring about structural change in the country. The US-funded think tank that was intended to reform Egypt in reality looted the country and its members are now in prison, others fled the country. Interested in privatizing as many public companies as possible, the think tank was to bring US-style neo-liberalism in Egypt.

The publicly-stated promise of the US and the West was that Egypt would be lifted from poverty, it would become democratic, it would modernize rapidly, and it would join the modern community of nations – a package called the “Washington Consensus”. That was two decades before Arab Spring, a promise never materialized, a promise that entailed greater poverty, less democracy, more external dependence, greater corruption, and a return to pre-1952 conditions. Working with a US law firm, Mubarak’s son undertook to implement the Washington Consensus in the name of progress. Specifically, the goal was to privatize 350 public companies worth more than $104 billion so that Egypt can join the 21st century.

The USAID-funded think tank, which Mubarak’s son and the US law firm headed, sold public assets worth $100 billion for a mere $10 billion, or $2 billion more than the foreign aid that the US provided between 1991 and 2011, on condition that Egypt must privatize as much of its public sector as possible. The members of the think tank and others linked to the former regime pocketed a great deal of money not only from the sale of public assets, but also from US aid.

After Mubarak fell, U.S. officials began asking questions about $70 billion of US taxpayer money going to Egypt for aid in past six decades and about a handful of people pocketing the money. However, because the US was itself behind the schemes to ‘privatize and reform’, it could not go public with what had taken place in Egypt under Mubarak, especially given that the regime was making just aboput every political and military concession to the US and to a lesser degree to Israel.

Some of the details of these scandalous exchanges were made public by Wikileaks on which the Washington Post then pursued its own investigation. Internal State Department memos (2006) indicate that the US was well aware that its own privatization program was the cause for even greater corruption in Egypt, but USAID continued the program without pause.

The fall of Mubarak was a celebrated event, even by the US, at least publicly, while privately, the US was demanding that the military must guarantee all treaties and obligations. In essence this entailed that Egypt can change faces but not policies, it can have elections but it cannot permit any change in the status quo ante. The military remained behind after Mubarak to make sure that the country stayed a dependency of the West, a nation of poor people with a hand full of millionaires linked to the state, a Muslim country with cordial relations to Israel and US.

Arab Spring for Egypt was not merely part of a regional – North Africa-Middle East – awakening, but it had its own historical causes, and it was more a continuation of the two-century long struggle of Egypt to achieve national sovereignty among nations.Whereas Ali and Nasser used the military to carry out their reforms and strengthen the state structure against foreign intervention, the rebels of Arab Spring are fighting against the military that has evolved into status quo guardian of domestic elites and foreign interests.

As we approach the end of 2011, unless a new regime takes power that genuinely represents the spirit of national sovereignty in the manner of Mehmet Ali and Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt will not have lasting social harmony. Trying to forge alliances with the various interest groups in Egypt, groups that have disparate interests will not be easy, but the catalyst to unity will be a strong commitment to national sovereignty and social justice.

AUTHOR: Jon Kofas
URL: http://jonkofas.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: jonkofas [at] yahoo.com

Though some British East India Company officials stayed in the village of Darjeeling in 1828 and considered the place suitable for a sanatorium for British soldiers, the remote hilly village might not have turned into a hill city of international repute had the Sikkim Chogyal not imprisoned the British East India Company Director Arthur Campbell and explorer botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1849. This ensured a rescue operation by the British and a renewed interest for this ‘home-like’ territory and by 1866 it came to exist in its present shape and form as a hill station.

Darjeeling has an interesting history of successive annexation and re-annexation intertwined with Bengal, Sikkim and Nepal documented in the treaties of Sungauli (1816), Titleya (1817) and Sinchula (1864), which finally ceded the passes leading through the hills and Kalimpong to the British, who developed it as an informal summer capital of Bengal Presidency. The Colonial British gave Darjeeling, apart from Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, a UNESCO World Heritage Site – having Ghum as the world’s highest railway station, a lot: British style public schools (renowned as convents that draw students from the country and abroad), Colonial architecture (Governor’s House) and world class eateries (Keventer’s and Glenary’s). With it’s temparate climate, magnificent Nature and happy smiling faces all around, Darjeeling came to be called as ‘Queen of the Himalayas.’

What made me wonder, in a recent trip to Darjeeling, was about what India, as a free nation, gave Darjeeling in 7 decades of its existence. Darjeeling, the town, is located in the Mahabharat Range or Lesser Himalaya at an average elevation of 6,710 ft (2,050 m) but it is not what Darjeeling is all about – it is a vast tract of hills, a district now in the Indian State of West Bengal, 3203 square kilometers in extent of which 1721 is in mountains. Darjeeling district has four sub-divisions namely, Darjeeling Sadar, Kalimpong, Kurseong and Siliguri. Since childhood we, the plains people, have been reading about Darjeeling in school geography books as a tourist destination, a place famous for tea and Mulberry Silk, panoramic Kanchenjungha and snowfall. People of Bengal romanticizes the hills, the cold, the mongoloid beauty of the Nepalese girls as is replete in our music, movies and literature – but have we ever ventured outside of a tourist’s view of Darjeeling?

The town, with its neighboring town of Kalimpong, was a center for the demand of the Gorkhaland movement in the 1980s. The present movement for a separate state of Gorkhaland is also centered in Darjeeling town. In recent years, the town’s fragile ecology has been threatened by a rising demand for environmental resources, stemming from growing tourist traffic and poorly planned urbanization. The present political leadership in West Bengal is trying to find out the reasons of discord and attempting to unify the people against any separatist ideology; that in itself is a tacit admission of the neglect that Darjeeling received for decades.

‘Did you see those shoes and jeans?’ my friend Somnath asked me. Yes, I saw. With those 2000 bucks jeans and 1000 bucks shoes on almost every local, it might strike you whether the abject poverty and low living standards of the hill people are myths or a fact. But if you see carefully, that’s a cosmetic consumerist make up of a face devoid of nutrition. ‘There are very few jobs and almost no opportunity for women here. I have a family, my children go to school and I am 40. I do all kinds of odd jobs to run my family’, says Vivek, a land broker in Darjeeling, his creasy smiling face belying the stressful life not noticed by tourists often.

Darjeeling has unique problems. It has unique poverty. Its livelihood challenges are unique. I fear if a beurocratic solution and a development package conceived in the caverns of the State Administration will do any good to it.

The approximate ethnic demography of Darjeeling consists of Nepalese (15 ethnic groups including Sherpas), Lepchas, which is an autochthonous tribe, Bhutanese (including Sikkimese Bhutias), Tibetans (refugees who came after 1961), Bengalis (permanent residents and migrants from Bangladesh) and Indian of other origins. Between 1941 and 1981 Darjeeling saw a population explosion and ethnic homogenization of its culture for which it was hardly ready. The primitive, labor and animal intensive agriculture reeled under pressure from population and change in land-use and finally failed to sustain the local demand. Natural Pankhas that used to be next to village homesteads gave way to houses and hotels and people needed to walk miles to reach cultivable lands. The forests receded adding increased hardship to people for transporting fodder leaves, grasses and firewood. As a consequence the age old livestock practice by the people suffered and the per capita livestock count steadily declined.

The disaster proneness of Darjeeling hills has a connection with anthropogenic activities. Under population pressure there had been large-scale deforestation and terraced fields for cultivation on inappropriate slopes came up. The lack of vegetative cover decreased cohesive properties of the soil and water percolation in terraced crop fields on inappropriate slopes are two principal reasons of local landslides here, which, in fact on a decade to decade basis, are getting more frequent.

Population, chronic neglect and consumerism have changed Darjeeling beyond redemption. It is not simply poor, it suffers from an abysmal gap between a urban-rural disparity (per capita income urban Rs. 46,756 and rural Rs. 16, 156). It is no particular case as every place on earth suffers these maladies, but for Darjeeling no ‘plains formula’ will be applicable because we cannot change its geography and ecologic uniqueness. It pains to see that the pricey public schools of Darjeeling hardly enrolls locals, there is no modern health facility, no post graduate institution but shopping malls are coming up in the name of development.

Mary (name changed) runs a deli at Lovers’ point, a place close to Governor’s House in Darjeeling. She comes from a nearby village to set up her shop here daily by walking couple of kilometers as there is no transport available. Mary’s husband works in Siliguri as a watchman but whatever he sends back home is not enough to run her house. Mary is determined to give her children quality education. ‘I don’t want them to run shops like me’ she says. She has a steady customer base of students from a local school and I watched her selling a red colored potato soup, which looked fiercely hot. ‘It is not hot. Kids love it.’ Mary said.

“Do you grow the potatoes?” I asked her.

“No. They come from Siliguri.” She said.

Reference:

1. Environment and rural development in Darjeeling Himalaya: Issues and concerns by Dr. Vimal Khawas – Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology. Ahmedabad, India.
2. Transforming West Bengal – Working paper by Indicus Analytics 

AUTHOR: Pabitra Mukhopadhyay
URL: http://pabitraspeaks.com
E-MAIL: mukhopadhyay.pabitra [at] gmail.com

Seeing the border in this geographic context, one senses how arbitrary it is. The line is the result of deliberate U.S. military conquest and a calculated decision to take the land — with its resources — only to this point. At the end of the U.S. invasion of Mexico (1846-48), when Mexico City, itself, had been taken captive, there was discussion in the U.S. Congress to take “all of Mexico.” But it was agreed upon by both free and slave state representatives to take only the land south to the Rio Grande and west to California. This kept the slave states from adding too much potential new territory while excluding the dark-skinned, Catholic natives from the Protestant white man’s land. It is a line drawn to separate races and claim dominion.

Driving west along Interstate highway 10, beside the unseen river, Ciudad Juarez, a city of over a million people, looks like a neighborhood of El Paso. Except that it looks completely Mexican — one story, concrete block houses spreading across the barren hillsides. Then there is the high, wire wall along the north side of the river. It brings back memories of the Berlin Wall that divided that city in half. The West was all modern glass and steel. The East still spoke of the War that brought its division–bombed out buildings from a past age.

Here, people still move across the line, across the bridges that connect, yet divide the two sides of the river, the two worlds. North of the El Paso Street bridge is a commercial neighborhood that could well be on the other side. Tiendas, stores, with all their signage in Spanish — selling “mayoreo y menudeo,” “big stuff and little” — line the street, with their goods displayed on the side walk. Vendors call, “pásele,” “come in,” just as they do in every city and town in Mexico. Only Spanish is spoken, not one word of English is heard. Mexicans walk south, pulling luggage carts filled with purchases.

Coming off the north end of the bridge, many lanes of cars are squeezed to a standstill in the bottleneck of U.S. border inspection stations. This “national security” blockade is a visible manifestation of the boundary and the differences in wealth and power between the two sides.

One feels the boundary as if it were a dike built against the pressure of the sea. The huge economic difference creates great pressures for movement across the barrier from south to north. Laborers seeking work, drug sellers seeking consumers, both push against the wall, seeking the wealth that lies on the other side. As with any imbalance of pressure, the built-up needs seek discharge. Only here, demand from the north — for laborers and drugs — acts as a drawing force, sucking in from the south what will satisfy its hungers and sending money south.

But, while seeking to open the border to “legitimate, free” trade, the U.S. seeks to exclude trade in labor and drugs. Rather than acknowledge that these market realities transcend the political boundary, the U.S. only tries to build higher walls and multiply the number of border guards to stem an indomitable tide. Yet the wall keeps being breached, by mayoreo y menudeo, big stuff and little.

AUTHOR: Reed Brundage
URL: http://americasmexico.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: Americas [at] ciponline.org

In February 2008, anti-government riots spead through Cameroon. These buildings and vehicles in Kumba were targeted for being government related or owned. Image by Caroline Thomas, copyright Demotix (04/03/2008).

In 2008, a constitutional amendment that unlimited presidential terms was adopted by the National Assembly. This decision caused an outcry in the international community and led to riots in February 2008 which were severely repressed; according to Human Rights organisations, more than 100 citizens were killed and more than 1,000 arrested.

Calm was restored after the Army repressed the demonstrations, and after the President, Paul Biya, delivered a strong speech [fr] against the opposition, who he accused of manipulating the Youth.

In a WikiLeaks cable sent in March 2008 by Scot Ticknor, political and economic chief at the United States Embassy in capital Yaoundé, it is explained that these events could reveal deeper political instability:

How long will the “enforced calm” last? […] All our European diplomatic colleagues, except the French, believe the potential for renewed unrest in the short term remains. None of the grievances of the public have been addressed, whether in the President’s speech or the government’s actions. […] Even if the current situation remains calm, last week was a reminder that there are many unresolved issues, both political and economic, that are likely to resurface at some point down the road, possibly soon. The 75-year-old Biya is increasingly isolated and unpopular and Cameroonians, while generally peaceful, have shown themselves capable of violently taking to the streets.

Another WikiLeaks cable reveals that in September 2008, influential intellectuals depicted a dark future for the country:

Charles Ateba Eyene, an outspoken critic within the ruling CPDM party, concurred with Owona Nguini’s fundamental diagnosis, saying that Cameroon is sitting on “a volcano.” He averred that the crisis is largely generational, with older elites seeking to maintain dominance. Highly centralized power structures and thoroughly corrupt officials at all levels of government have created a system of elite patronage which fundamentally fails to deliver services.

The following video was posted one year after the riots on YouTube. Viewed more than 20,000 times, it shows a young man who was shot dead by public forces during the riots [Warning: Graphic content]:

This crackdown has, according to a post [fr] on camer.be, installed a fragile truce and a climate of fear in the country. An attempted protest was swiftly prevented in February 2011.

Elections tailored for Biya’s victory?

Since the February 2008 events, the Cameroonian opposition has been reproached for its lack of organisation, its stagnation and its inability to present a serious prospect to counter incumbent President Paul Biya’s Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM).

In an article on Afrik.com entitled “Cameroon : Opposition Preparing The Victory of Paul Biya” [fr], the author writes:

Comme à son habitude, l’opposition camerounaise n’a pas réussi à présenter une candidature unique à une élection capitale pour l’avenir du pays et qui se joue à un seul tour.

Moreover the continuous criticism aimed at the Cameroonian Electoral Commission (ELECAM), including claims that it is an instrument for those in power to control the elections, does not bode well for a free and fair ballot.

A 2009 WikiLeaks cable reveals the content of the criticism:

In a February 9 meeting with Ambassador, Minister of Territorial Administration and Decentralization (MINATD) Marafa Hamidou Yaya was very discouraged about the ability of the Electoral Commission (ELECAM) to run a good election. Recently named ELECAM officials were incompetent and corrupt, he said, adding that a failed election in 2011 could result in major civil unrest.

According to this article from the website allafrica [fr], the electoral campaign has been tailored in a way to ensure that Paul Biya succeeds:

(…) La démocratie camerounaise n’est pas comme les autres démocraties véritables où tout se déroule dans une transparence totale. Elle a ses caractéristiques propres, ses stratégies particulières pour que le président sortant garde son fauteuil.

Cameroonian democracy is not like other real democracies in which everything is organised with a total transparency. It has its own characteristics, its own very special strategies to allow the outgoing president to keep his seat.

Possible post-electoral crisis?

The question of possible post-election violence is being taken seriously by the incumbent regime, which has strengthened its security capacities. One thousand military students have been added to the contingent already present in Douala, the country’s economic capital, explains Cameroonian daily Le Jour [fr].

The prospect of unrest has also been considered since comments made by the current Minister of Justice on a possible ethnic division after Biya’s ruling were revealed in a WikiLeaks cable:

In a recent, wide-ranging and frank discussion with the Ambassador, [Amadou] Ali said the foundation of Cameroon’s stability is the detente between Biya’s Beti/Bulu ethnic group, which predominates in Cameroon’s South Region, and the populations of Cameroon’s three Northern Regions, known as the Septentrion, which are ethnically and culturally distinct from the rest of the country. The Septentrion will support Biya for as long as he wants to be president, Ali predicted, but would not accept a successor who was either another Beti/Bulu, or a member of the economically powerful Bamileke ethnic group.

According to an article published on Radio Netherlands Worldwide Africa Desk website, “Cameroon fears ethnic clashes following WikiLeaks cable“, the question is a source of great preoccupation:

The ‘revelation’ by Wikileaks has caused a general outcry in the central African country. The article was in the newspaper headlines for several days and has caused a stir on the streets of Cameroon. “Such statements are a threat to our country’s stability. If ethnic groups fight each other for power, we might find ourselves in the same situation as Rwanda in 1994,” fears Edjouma Alain, a civil servant in the capital Yaoundé.

AUTHOR: Julie Owono
URL: http://bantupolitics.blogspot.com/
E-MAIL: info [at] www.NL-Aid.org

Zanzibar

On the night of January 12, 1964 a band of some 300 people violently seized the Island of Unguja. They were led by a little known man named John Okello, who had lived on Pemba, having come to the Islands some years earlier from Uganda. In Zanzibar he developed a popular following among a core of young, tough men, many of whom were the Stevedores and Porters who worked the ships coming in and out of Zanzibar Harbor. His group met in secret. He promised changes to these men, fellows long used to working together, in sometimes dangerous settings, and ready to follow orders of any “captain” who could pay their fee. Theirs became a rebellion looking for a home.

Political unrest had been increasing on Zanzibar and Pemba since the death of Sultan Khalifa in 1960. He had reigned in Zanzibar for almost 50 years, since 1911. After much jockeying for constituencies and coalitions the main political parties had narrowly split the two general elections of 1961 to the satisfaction of none. The British were leaving, their troops, including a contingent of Irish Guards, stationed near the golf course at the edge of Stone Town, pulled out in early 1963. When the new Sultan, Jamshid, hoisted the flag of the independent nation of Zanzibar, on December 12, 1963, he marked the departure of the last British Resident, (Governor) of Zanzibar and the end of the Colonial period.

Another election in late 1963 had given a slim majority to a coalition of two political parties, the ZNP (the Zanzibar Nationalist Party) and the ZPPP ( the Zanzibar and Pemba Peoples Party). The ASP (the Afro-Shirazi Party) was to be in the minority in a British style parliamentary system with the Sultan serving as the reigning but not ruling “monarch”.

This Nation, a full member of the British Commonwealth and a newly enrolled sovereign member of the United Nations was destined to last only 33 days.
Political debates raged and street demonstrations were not uncommon in those days. I remember bicycling to school through crowds chanting the names of political leaders and traveling in the country past road-blocks manned by British soldiers. The various factions debated everything; rights versus privileges, new-comers versus old established families, Capitalism vs Socialism, merchants vs landowners, Zanzibari’s vs Pemban’s, Asians vs Arabs, Swahili’s vs Mainlanders, and all this against the backdrop of the Cold War and the other nationalistic and de-colonial movements abounding in Africa at that time.

John Okello didn’t have answers to these thorny issues, but he did have the insight to realize that all of these competing interests presented an opportunity for a man of action like himself. After all, a few hundred determined men might be able to seize the few local centers of communication and the three police barracks. Once he had those under his control and possessed the weapons stored there, who on the islands could throw him out? Would the politicians join together to denounce and oppose his illegal actions? Or as he hoped, would they continue to distrust each other, to suspect that one or another of themselves must have put him up to it? Would not they want to make a deal with him, quick, before someone else did? On that January night he rolled the dice.

The ASP Party leaders, though surprised by Okellos’ actions, (many were not even on the Island at the time) moved quickly to embrace the rebels. Hundreds of party followers were wiped into a frenzy by those eager to seize this opportunity to cut the Gordian knot of democratic debate and go straight to the prize of Ruling. They sought to gain the chance to remake society in accordance with their own ideals. Ideals were a dime a dozen in those days. Humanity was to become a much more costly item.

Having seen just how vulnerable a government could be, and not trusting their own mixed record in open elections, it was clear to some ASP leaders that drastic measures were warranted to secure the survival of what was now being called “The Revolution”. The mobs were unleashed. Law and order disappeared from the streets of Zanzibar. Landowners and merchants were dragged from their houses and shops, looting and killing spread throughout Stone Town. The City literally Sacked itself.

Arabs and Asians, who had supported the other Parties in large numbers, were killed indiscriminately. In a single night uncounted lives were lost and over the next few days thousands more fled the Islands with only what they could carry.

John Okello established for himself the rank of “Field Marshall” and, with his mob-battalions, established a reign of terror on the Islands. He broadcast bizarre threats and promises of death to all who might oppose him.

He believed he was touched by God and demonstrated an eccentric attachment to symbolic numbers. For example on January 13, 1964, he broadcast the following messages: “The government is now run by us….should you be stubborn and disobey orders I will take measures 88 times stronger than at present.” and, “If anyone fails to comply… and locks himself in a house, as others have done…I have no alternative but to use heavy weapons. We, the army have the strength of 99,099,000.”

His threats and his ability to act on them, panicked citizens, especially minority groups of all types. On January 14, 1964 he broadcast these chilling words. “Here is the Field Marshall of Zanzibar and Pemba….I am thinking of going to Mtendeni (village) to destroy it if the people there do not obey orders. After 40 minutes I am coming to finish you off, especially the Comorians”. And “To all Arab youths living in Malindi; I will pass through Malindi armed with weapons of which I alone know. I want to see everyone stripped to his underpants and laying down. I want to hear them singing…father of Africans. God bless him in his task and that of the Field Marshall.”

When the dust settled the multi-cultural diversity of the Islands was radically altered. A One Party State was decreed. Still nervous regarding the possibility of resurgent opposition from their now exiled opponents, the “revolutionaries” further secured their positions by signing an agreement of confederation with mainland Tanganyika. This would allow thousands of mainland political allies to intervene in any future struggle. The police forces on the Isles were virtually replaced by mainland police loyal to the Party and an isolationist curtain fell over the Isles which was destined to persist for more than 20 years.

Today that curtain is being lifted. The end of the Cold War and the drive for economic modernization has again opened Zanzibar to the outside world. Multi-party elections were held in 1995 and 2000, more are promised in 2005. A government of more pragmatic and honest leaders has developed in Tanzania and some of the exiles from the revolutionary times are returning to the Islands. The peaceful tolerance of diverse peoples, which was always a feature of Zanzibari life, is now struggling to return to the streets of Stone Town.

AUTHOR: Elias Mhegera
URL: http://mhegeraelias.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: mhegeraelias [at] yahoo.com

So what’s new? This is my take on it.

1. Organic design : For ages our designers, mostly in the field of technology and engineering, remained mechanistic. We remained trapped with ‘mechanical’ limitations of motions and our designs had been too simple and too crude in a Natural setting teeming with wonderfully complex systems. Funnily, these wonderfully complex and highly efficient machines (us included) had been the products of a blind evolutionary process that works on so absurdly simple principles that its almost impossible to relate the ‘feat’ of a gecko moving with equal ease on both horizontal and vertical surfaces with any mechanistic models of our design. For the very first time our engineers and technologists are learning from organisms and getting inspired to follow or even reverse engineer their capabilities to produce robots and semi-intelligent machines that will work and move into territories hitherto inaccessible to us. Think of nanobots that will one day flow through your blood and relieve you from arterial blockages, cancer and even neurotic seizures. Our futuristic designers are changing over from simplistic to complex, from macro to micro and from one to many machines which are quite unlike we studied in our undergraduate projects. That’s a great change because who ever believed that machines would one day self-repair or change functions by their own? This is one new thing that will change our lives almost entirely in foreseeable future.

2. Participatory and Collaborative Enterprise: This is another huge paradign shift in human thinking where ‘compete and win’ is being replaced with ‘collaborate and grow’. While the old Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest remains true, the new question is: whose survival? Is it the question of survival of one or many? The answer comes from Nature again. It is ultimately absurd if there is only one survivor in the end. So we need to compromise (even at some risk of our survival) and form symbiotic relationships with others where many can survive, even grow and thrive through collaboration and joint participation. This is a new social paradigm and applicable overwhelmingly to almost any spere of human enterprise – trade and commerce, science, medicine, art and culture and most surprisingly even religion. This new change is bound to affect our lives too deeply. As I foresee it, in 50 to 100 years, the whole geopolitical boundaries will be almost meaningless and humanity will thrive as a single community perfectly ‘in-phase’ at every point of it much like lasers.

3. Environment Awareness: Though the present world events on Environment issues do not look so bright, I will put my wager on ultimate environment awareness and responsibility on a true global scale in 100 years to come. What is debate now will be a reality in near future and the current millennium will usher philosophies that will make environment sensitivity the most basic human quest. I am somehow sensing this new change to be coherent with the new changes I mentioned already. There are other social pointers to this as well – like empowerment of women, abolition of racism etc. Slowly our societies are getting homogenized (thanks to communication boom) which is a messenger of a quantum leap in the refinement of humanity and better suited for Nature.

Feels like I can see one change everyday.

I am hopelessly optimistic.

AUTHOR: Pabitra Mukhopadhyay
URL: http://pabitraspeaks.com
E-MAIL: mukhopadhyay.pabitra [at] gmail.com

PART IV

After analyzing Cyber-Eco Institutions: Social Identity in the first of a four-part essay in order to establish the thesis for arguing the transformation of the existing social order, in the second part there is analysis of Institutional Challenge that the CEB will be posing to the social order during the 21st century. Ideology & Elites in the third part sets the foundation for the replacement of classical liberal ideology and its many variations in the past two hundred years with CEB ideology, while this final segment dealing with Elites and Cultural Evolution argues that we are and will continue to undergo thoroughgoing cultural evolution that will entail the consolidation of CEB elites in this century.
Elites & Cultural Evolution

Fernand Braudel in Civilisation Materielle et Capitalisme , and Samuel Huntington in Clash of Civilizations and “Culture, Power, and Democracy” contended that late 20th -century world is immersed in clashes of civilizations. Both Braudel and Huntington maintained that the Chinese, Russians, Africans, Indians, and Muslims feel that historically western civilization had tried to impose its hegemony through the “tools of imperial policies” that include everything from wearing apparel and entertainment to religion and hedonistic-atomistic-oriented value system. Cultures under Islam, Hinduism and Confucianism have historically resisted western cultural traits rooted in materialism, atomism, and pluralism that invariably alienate the individual or set her/him separate and above the community. Owing to globalization (neo-imperialism), there is gradual change in the values system of advanced and semi-developed countries around the world, change prompted by the combination of eco-awareness and modern web-cell technology that is shaping the new generation of CEB.

It seems difficult for some to conceive how cyber-eco-consciousness has pervaded the late 20th- century young bourgeoisie immersed in a cyber-eco world that has been an integral and ubiquitous part of life in all areas from education and business to leisure and entertainment. The convergence occurred largely because the environmental movement was popularized about the same time as cyber tech that disseminated information about global warming, holding the promise of seeking solutions from grass roots level to institutional mainstream. Science and technology for the CEB has a culture of life orientation rather than a culture of death, a phenomenon with which the bourgeoisie and hegemonic elites had been associated in the past century, largely because of mass destruction in two world wars and the nuclear race. In Culture Against Man Jules Henry argues that in western culture most people associate science with the culture of death, a culture that includes all academic endeavors, corporations, and government. “Thus we have an elite of death that we support in relative luxury… The culture of life resides in all those people who, inarticulate, frightened, and confused, are wondering where will it all end.” Because the “elite forces of death” are institutionalized, while the mass forces of life are scattered and bewildered, where is the hope for society’s salvation in the future? The answer is from within the existing social order the emergence of the CEB that will provide the answer under an evolving ethos already manifesting itself in multifarious institutional and non-institutional settings.

Culture, of course, evolves over time in layers, and one cultural layer rests and absorbs elements of the previous. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed, culture is grown not acquired ( Ethics ). Given that culture cuts across class lines despite the dominant class institutionalizing it, it is inevitable that CEB culture will be a reflection of the evolving values and tastes of the bourgeoisie, with inevitable influences from aspects of Oriental cultures. A combination of grass-roots and top-down (superimposed or cultural imperialism) CEB culture will spread much faster than any other in history. Top-down (superimposed by domestic or foreign hegemonic elites) cultural domination does not work, at least not for very long even if they are perfectly rational from a social engineering and political perspective as far as the elites are concerned. On the other hand, hegemonic elites intending to co-opt evolutionary cultural trends afford legitimacy and mainstream value whether as part of native culture as in pluralistic-multiethnic western societies, or as an integral part of cultural imperialism as in the Third World under colonialism and neo-imperialism.

The catalyst to cultural dissemination, as with CEB currently in its nascent phase, is mass acceptance just as in religion; but also there must be a material basis for it. In “Grace, Violence and Self,” Frederick Hoffman argues that “grace may be the essence of culture” in so far as it is linked to goodness, virtue, and to a spiritual, and that people have been willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their culture’s survival. For culture to survive and flourish society must have a degree of shared values it is willing to wholeheartedly embrace–spiritual as Hoffman maintains or material as Marxists argue–but also prosperity even if concentrated within a small group of people, hegemonic elites that foment the growth of the education, the arts, sciences and other cultural endeavors. At the same time, hegemonic elites that essentially create and propagate the dominant or mainstream culture are invariably successful in convincing the majority of the population to revere the cultural values and aesthetic achievements emanating from it only if there is not only an idealistic ultimate goal but a practical aesthetic aspect to culture. While economic determinism has an impact in cultural trends–in everything from elite to popular culture–economic determinism is by no means alone in shaping culture from ancient to modern times.
Though educational systems of most advanced and semi-advanced countries are consciously or unconsciously preparing young people for a cyber-eco-bourgeois culture, we are still many years away from an education system immersed in CEB values and chief instrument of disseminating CEB ideology. Besides stressing the traditional intellectual development and training for career, CEB education will have at its core the hypothesis that all progress is predicated on ecology-related research, technology and industry combined with emphasis on how next generation cyber-tech with applications in everything from surgery to space exploration will mean the salvation of humanity. One of the most significant cultural CEB characteristics is the way people choose their partners who share their values. Everything from entertainment and religious worship to the way people choose partners and procreate will be determined by the new CEB-centered value system. CEB cultural trends are manifested in all forms of entertainment from TV and Hollywood motion pictures to magazines, newspapers, books, web blogs and web-related entertainment.

Gradually mainstream public and private institutions are adopting aspects of CEB cultural trends. The catalysts to cultural transformation will be the combination of eco-friendly energy and new high tech industries linked cyber and eco. All countries will be working toward that goal and that will translate into a new ethos that will represent CEB. At this embryonic juncture CEB is still at the “sub-culture” level but in the next half century or so it will be moving into the mainstream as it becomes more widespread and accepted throughout the world. Already there is evidence of CEB subculture in many areas that are obvious. There is very clear evidence of this already not just with cyber-net cafes and bars, but in the eco-friendly foods people choose to produce and consume throughout many advanced countries, and in CEB lifestyles they choose for themselves and their children. As a reflection of culture, food will change to reflect the values of the CEB. Similarly lyrics in music will increasingly reflect CEB values, as will motion pictures, theater, television and all media. Of course there is already eco-tourism that has been around for time, and expanding very rapidly whether it involves travel to mountains or sea. Institutionalized religion too will change as it must reflect the values of its followers to survive. Already religion has adapted to web-cell technology where people access the faith of their choice on line, pray on line, receive sacraments on line, and contribute on line. Already we have CEB-oriented churches where “ecology is next to Godliness” and the followers are guided to preserve God’s ecosystem.
One of CEB’s principal characteristics is its inherent antithesis to “culturalism,” a phenomenon prevalent in a number of ancient and early modern societies, especially the Ming (1368-1644) and Ch’ing (1644-1911) dynasties when Chinese culture was identified with the state and uninviting to foreign influences of any type. Unlike Oriental cultures, especially Chinese rooted in socio-political stability, Western culture from the Renaissance to the present has undergone intellectual, religious, commercial, industrial, scientific and technological revolutions, all of which lead to CEB culture. Rapid institutional changes in the West are rooted in cultural changes and socio-political imbalances since the rise of the nation-state that was the core of national culture as opposed to international culture CEB will be creating. If we accept the premise that scientific, technological, and artistic development and progress is both a reflection of the hegemonic elites representing society’s superstructure and an agent of systemic societal change, then it is inevitable (determinist) that the dynamics which have given rise to CEB will eventually propel it to the core of the superstructure.

AUTHOR: Jon Kofas
URL: http://jonkofas.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: jonkofas [at] yahoo.com