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By Dr Binoy Kampmark

Things did not go so well this time around.  When the worn Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy turned up banging on the doors of Washington’s powerful on September 21, he found fewer open hearts and an increasingly large number of closed wallets.  The old ogre of national self-interest seemed to be presiding and was in no mood to look upon the desperate leader with sweet acceptance.

Last December, Zelensky and Ukrainian officials did not have to go far in hearing endorsements and encouragement in their efforts battling Moscow’s armies.  The visit of the Ukrainian president, as White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stated at the time, “will underscore the United States’ steadfast commitment to supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes, including through provision of economic, humanitarian and military assistance.”

Republican Senator from Utah, Mitt Romney, was bubbly with enthusiasm for the Ukrainian leader.  “He’s a national and global hero – I’m delighted to be able to hear from him.”  Media pack members such as the Associated Press scrambled for stretched parallels in history’s record, noting another mendicant who had previously appeared in Washington to seek backing.  “The moment was Dec. 22, 1941, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill landed near Washington to meet President Franklin D. Rosevelt just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

Then House Speaker, the California Democrat Nancy Pelosi, also drew on the Churchillian theme with a fetishist’s relish.  “Eighty-one years later this week, it is particularly poignant for me to be present when another heroic leader addresses the Congress in time of war – and with Democracy itself on the line,” she wrote colleagues in a letter.

Zelenskyy, not wishing to state the obvious, suggested a different approach to the question of aiding Ukraine.  While not necessarily an attentive student of US history, any briefings given to him should have been mindful of a strand in US politics sympathetic to isolationism and suspicious of foreign leaders demanding largesse and aid in fighting wars.

How, then, to get around this problem?  Focus on clumsy, if clear metaphors of free enterprise.  “Your money is not charity,” he stated at the time, cleverly using the sort of corporate language that would find an audience among military-minded shareholders.  “It’s an investment in global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way.”  Certainly, Ukrainian aid has been a mighty boon for the US military-industrial complex, whose puppeteering strings continue to work their black magic on the Hill.

Despite such a show, the number of those believing in the wisdom of such an investment is shrinking.  “In a US capital that has undergone an ideological shift since he was last here just before Christmas 2022,” remarked Stephen Collinson of CNN, “it now takes more than quoting President Franklin Roosevelt and drawing allusions to 9/11, to woo lawmakers.”

Among the investors, Republicans are shrinking more rapidly than the Democrats.  An August CNN poll found a majority in the country – 55% – firmly against further funding for Ukraine.  Along party lines, 71% of Republicans are steadfastly opposed, while 62% of Democrats would be satisfied with additional funding.

Kentucky Republican and Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell continues to claim that funding Ukraine is a sensibly bloody strategy that preserves American lives while harming Russian interests.  “Helping Ukraine retake its territory means weakening – weakening – one of America’s biggest strategic adversaries without firing a shot.”

The same cannot be said about the likes of Kentucky’s Republican Senator Rand Paul.  While Zelenskyy was trying to make a good impression on the Hill, the senator was having none of it.  “I will oppose any effort to hold the federal government hostage for Ukraine funding. I will not consent to expedited passage of any spending measure that provides any more US aid to Ukraine.”

In The American Conservative, Paul warned that, “With no end in sight, it looks increasingly likely that Ukraine will be yet another endless quagmire funded by the American taxpayer.”  President Joe Biden’s administration had “failed to articulate a clear strategy or objective in this war, and Ukraine’s long-awaited counter-offensive has failed to make meaningful gains in the east.”

Such a quagmire was also proving jittering in its dangers.  There was the prospect of miscalculation and bungling that could pit US forces directly against the Russian army.  There were also no “effective oversight mechanisms” regarding the funding that has found its way into Kyiv’s pockets.  “Unfortunately, corruption runs deep in Ukraine, and there’s plenty of evidence that it has run rampant since Russia’s invasion.”  The Zelenskyy government, he also noted in a separate post, had “banned the political parties, they’ve invaded churches, they’ve arrested priests, so no, it isn’t a democracy, it’s a corrupt regime.”

Republicans such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley are of the view that the US should be slaying different monsters of a more threatening variety.  (Every imperium needs its formidable adversaries.)  The administration, he argued, should “take the lead on China” and reassure its “European allies” that Washington would be providing “the nuclear umbrella in Europe”.

On September 30, with yet another government shutdown looming in Washington, the US House approved a bill for funding till mid-November by a 335-91 vote.  But the measure did not include additional military or humanitarian aid to Ukraine.  In August, the Biden administration had requested a $24 billion package for Ukraine but was met with a significantly skimmed total of $6.1 billion.  Of that amount $1.5 billion is earmarked for the Ukrainian Security Assistance Initiative, a measure that continues to delight US arms manufacturers by enabling the Pentagon to place contracts on their behalf to build weapons for Kyiv.

The limited funding measure proved a source of extreme agitation to the clarion callers who have linked battering the Russian bear, if only through a flawed surrogate, with the cause of US freedom.  “I am deeply disappointed that this continuing resolution did not include further aid for our ally, Ukraine,” huffed Maryland Democrat Rep. Steny Hoyer.  “In September, the House held seven votes to approve that vital funding to Ukraine.  Each time, more than 300 House Members voted in favor.  This ought to be a nonpartisan issue and ought to have been addressed in the continuing resolution today.”

As Hoyer and those on his pro-war wing of politics are starting to realise, Ukraine, as an issue, is becoming problematically partisan and ripe.  The filling in Zelenskyy’s cap is inexorably thinning and lightening.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

1 October 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Justin Podur

Two interesting things happened at the BRICS summit in South Africa in August. Several new members were invited to join BRICS in 2024: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. And, at Brazil’s urging, a commission was established to study the possibility of a new currency to replace the dollar in international trade. Currency swap agreements will continue to be the way the process moves forward in the short term, though, because the dollar cannot be replaced in a rush.

To escape the shackles of dollarization, Global South countries have a perilous path to walk. The major problems, as described by political economists Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai, are as follows: Global South countries are saddled with immense debts in dollars, and Western corporations claim ownership over their resources. The international legal structure favors the West, finding in favor of American corporations and vulture funds. The U.S.-run covert network continues to have the ability to foment wars and coups against those who defy Western rules—including financial ones. These problems now confront most countries of the world.

Thus far, most of the world is not polarized. Very few countries (mostly in Europe) are unconditional supporters of the U.S.-led West. On the other side, only a handful of states (e.g. Russia, China, Iran) dare to categorically refuse when the West makes demands.

Everyone else—where the future of the global economy will play out—is in-between. Will they find a way out of these traps?

Argentina’s Politicized Debt

For about 200 years, Argentina has been the site of first British, and then U.S. experiments in debt-driven subjugation. Each time a developmentalist government came to power and tried to get the country out of a crisis, it would be followed by a right-wing government that would plunge the country back in.

Among the in-between countries, Argentina has a special role. The country is on the list of the new invitees to BRICS. Its finances are in disarray, and its leading presidential candidate, who takes economic advice from his four dogs, wants to close most of the government down and use the U.S. dollar as the currency. Like many right-wing Western politicians, from Berlusconi and Sarkozy to Trump and Bolsonaro, Milei’s electoral brand is damaged neither by clown antics nor by infeasible economic plans.

And infeasible they are. The Economist notes that “Milei promises cuts worth 15 [percent]… of GDP, to a public sector that accounts for 38 [percent]… of GDP, but struggles to outline where they will come from.”

Nor does he know

“how… Milei’s government would find the $40 [billion] his team thinks is necessary to make the switch to dollars. Currently, Argentina cannot even repay the [International Monetary Fund (IMF)]… to which it owes $44 billion. Having run out of American currency, the central bank is instead burning through yuan borrowed from China… Milei has suggested selling state-owned firms and government debt in an offshore fund to raise the necessary capital. It is hard to imagine there will be many buyers.”

Argentina’s fate has been controlled by imperial debt since 1824 when the British Empire’s bank (Barings—whose Lord Cromer used financial methods to take over Egypt, among other notable operations) first advanced a loan of one million pounds to newly independent Argentina. This was less than 20 years after the British landed forces to try unsuccessfully to colonize Argentina. They ultimately found the financial weapon more effective. The first of nine defaults followed in 1827. The latest was in 2020 (the Economist is advocating a tenth).

In the 20th century, Argentina alternated between elected governments and military dictatorships and switched between developmentalist and neoliberal economic approaches. In the neoliberal periods, Argentina was the site of innovation—new experiments in plundering a country were invented. Among these was what Esteban Almiron outlined as the “financial bicycle” made possible by the peg of the peso to the U.S. dollar:

“When billionaire speculators were allowed to exchange Argentine pesos for unlimited amounts of dollars, benefiting from [high-interest]… rates in pesos, it was the state that had to borrow those dollars from [U.S.]… private banks or from the IMF and pay interests on them. Once exchanged, the dollars obtained by the speculators were moved out of the country, leaving the debt to the state.”

In 2001, Argentina defaulted and dropped the peg. It then paid its $9.5 billion IMF debt in full in 2005, saving the country $842 million in interest in subsequent years. It also negotiated, through to 2010, a restructuring of 92 percent of the rest of the national debt.

Almiron’s history of Argentina’s debt describes what happened next: a story of Argentina and the American vultures. The remaining 8 percent of the debt offers a case study of the rigged international legal structure that facilitates the U.S. plunder of Global South economies. It was held by vulture funds run by American billionaire Paul Singer and others. The vultures turned to the U.S. courts and, predictably, in 2012, got exactly what they wanted—a U.S. judge ruled that Argentina would have to pay them in full.

Then-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner refused to pay, but subsequent elections brought Mauricio Macri into power. Macri increased Argentina’s debt-to-GDP ratio from 52.6 percent to 90.2 percent and oversaw an increase in poverty from 30 percent to 40 percent (four million people entering poverty). By the time he left power in 2019, Argentina had experienced $79.8 billion in capital flight—and defaulted again. Almiron writes that “Macri and his team wrecked the relatively healthy finances of the Argentine state in less than two years.” Macri brought back the financial bicycle:

“Their trick was to buy pesos, profit from the [high-interest]… rates in pesos, then convert them to dollars and move the dollars out of the country. In the meantime, the state had to provide a virtually infinite amount of dollars for the speculators, and was left with the pesos.”

On his way out the door, Macri took out a $57 billion loan from the IMF, later reduced to $44 billion, which “disappeared in just 11 months.”

His successor Alberto Fernández tried to rebuild the gutted health ministry during COVID-19 but was stuck with the $44 billion loan. Out of desperation as much as out of developmentalist ideology, Fernández turned to China, joining the Belt and Road Initiative in 2022 and applying—successfully, it turns out—to BRICS. Argentina will join in 2024. However, collaboration with China (and Qatar) so far has been a matter of getting additional loans from China to pay the IMF. This is not exactly the type of “win-win” deal China seeks with Global South countries in its infrastructure investments and trade deals around resources.

If elected, Milei can be expected to withdraw the BRICS application. If he keeps Argentina in BRICS, he will apply his (and his dogs’) financial genius to facilitate the U.S. use of Argentina not just to drain Argentina, but China (and perhaps other emergency lenders) as well.

With each new plunge into debt, the country’s right-wing attempts to sink the state so much deeper that it can never emerge. When he arrives in office, dog whisperer Milei has promised to outdo Macri’s record of destruction.

The Travails of Pakistan, Ally of Both the U.S. and China

Like Argentina, Pakistan has been controlled by imperial debt regimes—first British, then U.S.—for centuries. What is now Pakistan was once a group of rich provinces in British India. Each kingdom that Britain’s East India Company brought under its boot was saddled with debt, the principal mechanism (there were others) through which Britain drained $45 trillion from the subcontinent. Britain then partitioned the subcontinent into India and Pakistan before handing it over. Today India is playing an ambiguous role in BRICS, while Pakistan’s post-coup government has resorted to severe violence to try to get the country under control.

Also like Argentina, Pakistan is a place where both BRICS and the IMF have a heavy economic presence. In April, about a year after former Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted, the U.S. Institute for Peace reported that Pakistan was facing an “existential” economic crisis. Dividing the debt into three types (multilateral, private, and Chinese), the USIP gave a breakdown of Pakistan’s debt and to whom it was owed: “As of December 2022, Pakistan holds external debt and liabilities of $126.3 billion. Nearly 77 percent of this debt, amounting to $97.5 billion is directly owed by the government of Pakistan to various creditors; an additional $7.9 billion is owed by government-controlled public sector enterprises to multilateral creditors.”

Pakistan’s multilateral debt of $45 billion broke down as follows: the World Bank ($18 billion), the Asian Development Bank ($15 billion), and the IMF ($7.6 billion), with smaller amounts to the Islamic Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. It owes another $8.5 billion to major creditor countries Japan, Germany, France, and the United States.

Pakistan’s private debt was led by Eurobonds and global Sukuk bonds, amounting to $7.8 billion. It also had foreign commercial loans to the tune of nearly $7 billion, likely to increase to nearly $9 billion by the end of the current fiscal year.

Finally, the USIP placed the “Chinese debt” of $27 billion in a separate category:

“This includes around $10 billion of bilateral debt and $6.2 billion in debt provided by the Chinese government to Pakistani public sector enterprises, and Chinese commercial loans of around $7 billion. In addition, China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) has placed $4 billion worth of foreign deposits with Pakistan’s central bank.”

With a GDP of $376 billion and a debt of $126 billion in 2022, Pakistan’s debt-to-GDP ratio of 34 percent is much more favorable than Argentina’s even before the Macri disaster. Still, Pakistan’s Western creditors presented it as an impossible situation and inflation was indeed causing popular hardship.

The 2022-23 government budget projected revenues of $24 billion and expenses of $33 billion. Debt repayments, not factored in, were looking like they would exceed state revenues, at almost $25 billion.

The Chinese debt could be rescheduled as per historical precedent—but it was only 30 percent of the total. What about the rest? Over the decades, Argentina’s developmentalist governments tried to use economic growth to raise the tax and export base to shrink the debt when in power, but Pakistan’s growth forecast wasn’t looking good. Likewise, in the long-term, as documented in Jawad Syed and Yung-Hsiang Ying’s 2020 book China’s Belt and Road Initiative in a Global Context Volume II: The China Pakistan Economic Corridor and its Implications for Business, the CPEC envisions upgrading Pakistan’s value chains and infrastructure as a process of economic development for both countries.

But what about the short term? Pakistan tried to get creative: Prime Minister Imran Khan had just struck a deal for energy and wheat—the two most necessary and inflationary items in the basket—from Russia when he was ousted. The post-coup government scuttled the deal, trying to avoid trouble with the U.S. for trading with U.S.-sanctioned countries outside of dollar transactions. Pakistan took a page out of pre-Nixon-visit China’s book and used barter. But the Western creditors are still there, demanding to be paid (in dollars). Whether by downgrading Pakistan’s credit rating or monitoring and punishing Pakistan as a financial sponsor of terrorism through the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the United States has many tools to force debt compliance on Pakistan.

How did the situation get so dire? Pakistan’s finances, including its U.S. debts, are tied up in the two countries’ web of covert relationships and the interventions of both countries in Afghanistan since the 1970s. Sure, the United States and Pakistan trade cotton and textiles, steel and machinery, but the heart of the economic relationship is martial. The people of Afghanistan suffered the worst, with author Nicolas J.S. Davies estimating a death toll of 875,000, but Pakistan too suffered. Pakistan’s intervention in Afghanistan and U.S. operations in rural Pakistan cost the U.S. ally $150 billion and 70,000 lives according to the Pakistani ambassador to the United States in 2021 and 325,000 deaths according to Davies.

The amount of money the United States spent on the Afghan occupation is immense and probably uncountable. There are official accounting numbers of $100 billion in military contracts alone. Columnist Khawaja Akbar quipped that if Pakistan was passing military aid money onto the Taliban, it could only be a fraction of what the United States spent: “The $1 trillion spent by the U.S. in Afghanistan during the same time period failed to negate the effect of the $30 billion given to Pakistan.”

When Imran Khan ended support for the U.S. effort in Afghanistan, the occupation’s days were numbered: U.S. logistics for the 2001-2021 Afghan war all ran through Pakistan. A New York Times article published shortly after the Taliban takeover noted “Pakistan’s ports and airfields provided the main entry points and supply lines for American military equipment needed in Afghanistan.” American occupation logistics were a touchy issue and the U.S.-Pakistan relationship broke down over it numerous times.

Tariq Ali wrote of one such moment in his 2008 book, The Duel:

“The country is in the grip of a food and power crisis. Inflation is approaching 15 [percent]… The price of gas (used for cooking in many homes) has risen by 30 [percent]… and the price of wheat by more than 20 [percent]… since November 2007. Food and commodity prices are rising all over the world, but there is an additional problem in Pakistan: too much wheat is being smuggled into Afghanistan to feed the NATO armies. According to a recent survey, 86 [percent]… of Pakistanis find it increasingly difficult to afford flour, for which they blame their new government. [Former president Asif Ali] Zardari’s approval rating has plummeted to 13 [percent].”

There is no discussion of the smuggling economy in Pakistan and Afghanistan without mentioning opium. It was an economy of literally uncountable riches, maybe $2 billion, maybe much more, for U.S.- and Pakistan-based covert organizations, criminal organizations, and financial institutions that the Taliban has put an end to.

When the United States stole Afghanistan’s $7 billion in reserves after the Taliban takeover, Pakistan also suffered as the country’s major trading partner.

During the decades of Afghan wars, the United States and Pakistan developed dossiers full of secret leverage on one another—so much so that after invading Afghanistan in 2001, the United States made sure Pakistan was able to get its most important operatives out. This operation would later be called the “airlift of evil.” by the United States.

We can summarize this as follows: Over the course of the U.S. war on Afghanistan, Pakistan ran up an immense covert expense bill, an immense death toll, and an illicit, parallel economy that only harmed the formal economy.

After the Taliban takeover and Imran Khan’s ouster, the United States would resume this web of covert relationships with Pakistan—not over Afghanistan this time, but Ukraine. According to the Intercept, Pakistan’s post-coup IMF negotiations were smoothed by a secret agreement to produce munitions for the United States—munitions the United States would then send to Ukraine to fight Russia. Needless to say, had Imran Khan’s wheat-energy deal with Russia gone through, Pakistan probably would not be sending munitions for the Ukrainian side of the war.

Other Cases

Between Argentina and Pakistan, many of the dilemmas of the dollar-dominated and the post-dollar world are encapsulated. But a quick tour of some other states reveals some other dynamics. The IMF wants Egypt (another new BRICS invitee) to devalue; Egypt’s president, who came to power in a coup a decade ago, is stretching the negotiations out. Keeping Egypt out of a revolutionary situation is how the United States provides for Israel’s security, so expect those negotiations to keep dragging on. In Lebanon, the IMF strategy is different—keeping Lebanon in a state of financial collapse is another plank of the U.S./Israeli strategy, so as with Argentina, the objective is an unending financial crisis. So far, mission accomplished. Tunisia has been pillaged by neocolonial debt arrangements since the 19th century. This continues uninterrupted. Sri Lanka, devastated by the tsunami of 2004, became a recipient of IMF-led predatory lending from that point on. Even though just 10 percent of this debt is owed to China, Sri Lanka is referred to in the West as being caught in a “Chinese debt trap.” In fact, because so little of the debt is Chinese, Sri Lanka is fairly straightforwardly in a Western debt trap from which it will have difficulty escaping.

A couple of final cases to conclude: In Kenya, the IMF is pressuring hard, demanding more suffering from Kenyans in the form of higher taxes and lower spending—the usual austerity measures. Kenyan authorities announced earlier this year they aren’t going to try to reschedule or restructure. Kenya is also the site of one of the flagship China-Africa projects, the Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), along with other infrastructure. On the other hand, a U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) military base is also in Mombasa. Zambia, lucky enough to owe $4.1 billion of its $6.3 billion debt to China, restructured in June. Naturally, the IMF claimed this as a triumph for its own flexibility and long-term vision, claiming the agreement was “helping put Zambia on a path toward sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction.” France’s President Emmanuel Macron also took credit for the “historic achievement”: “We remain [mobilized]… to ensure that other countries caught in a debt trap benefit from a multilateral response,” he tweeted.

In all of these cases, the U.S. and IMF are careful to pressure only when they hold the cards. When China holds a big share of the debt or can offer a meaningful alternative, the IMF also seems to find a way to be less haughty with its debtors. The IMF needs to tread lightly as well: they are no longer the only game in town, and negotiating too hard in the presence of alternatives will lead to default—perhaps the IMF’s last.

In summary: De-dollarization is a road fraught with many challenges. Most countries are not the world’s biggest economy (China) nor the military peer of the United States (Russia). Few countries fall into the category of Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Afghanistan, and the DPRK—those who have suffered everything the United States can realistically throw at them and have nowhere to go but up.

Most are like Argentina and Pakistan, in the in-between of economic suffering, perils, and difficult decisions. Extricating themselves from Western power will be painful, but no longer appears impossible.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and a writing fellow at Globetrotter.

29 September 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Shamsul Islam

Respected VC of JNU, Santishree Pandit Madam,

Namaskaar!

I hope the following report in one of the leading English dailies of India did not misreport you when it stated that Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Vice-Chancellor (VC), Santishree Pandit while speaking at a book launch function on September 17, 2023 at Pune where RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat was present on the dais, told: “I am proud to be a Hindu and belong to the Sangh [RSS].”

https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/pune-news/proud-to-be-associated-with-rss-need-to-counter-leftist-narrative-jnu-vc-shantishree-pandit-101694975582697.html#:~:text=Jawaharlal%20Nehru%20University%20(JNU)%20Vice,need%20to%20counter%20left%20narrative.

Respected Hindu VC of JNU,

Since the above report has not been contradicted, I am not sorry to state that it was a horrible statement coming from an educationist who heads a University that stood as the 2^nd best in the national rankings of 2022 and was named after the first PM of the democratic-egalitarian of Indian polity. Some important questions waiting eagerly for your answers are:

1. You were appointed the VC of JNU for being an educationist or being a proud Hindu? If you were appointed as an Indian educationist (if it was otherwise, I seek no response) then why you need to identify your religious identity on a public platform where you participated as the VC of JNU?
2. By declaring yourself as Hindu VC of JNU have you not divided the all-inclusive JNU fraternity of being Indian into separate religious groupings? If you are the Hindu VC then what is the identity of Sikhs, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains and Christians present as teachers, students and non-teaching employees of the University? Should they also be known as per their religious identities? Is this not what Mohammed Ali Jinnah believed and applied causing Partition?

Respected Madam,

You not only declared to be a proud Hindu but also proud to be belonging to the Sangh. I am sure by Sangh you meant RSS. Do I need to remind you that RSS since its inception hated everything which represented an all-inclusive democratic-egalitarian-secular united India/Bharat? Let me take you to a tour of RSS archives so that there is no complaint of misrepresentation.

RSS denigrated the Tricolour

Respected VC,

As an Indian you must be familiar with the fact that the Tri-colour as the National Flag represents Indian nation. It was this flag carrying which thousands Indian patriots laid down their live as during the British rule it was crime to unfurl it in public. How much RSS hated it can be known by the following denigration of the Flag in its English organ, Organizer just on the eve of Independence (August 14, 1947):

“The people who have come to power by the kick of fate may give in our hands the Tricolour but it never [sic] be respected and owned by Hindus. The word three is in itself an evil, and a flag having three colours will certainly produce a very bad psychological effect and is injurious to a country.”

RSS betrayed India’s Freedom Struggle

Respected Madam,

The Non-cooperation Movement (1920-22) and the Quit India Movement (1942) were two great milestones in the history of the Indian Freedom Movement but RSS kept aloof not only from these but any other anti-colonial campaign. Guru Golwalkar, the most prominent ideologue of the RSS shamelessly denigrated these movements in the following words:

“Definitely there are bound to be bad results of struggle. The boys became unruly after the 1920-21 movement. It is not an attempt to throw mud at the leaders. But these are inevitable products after the struggle. The matter is that we could not properly control these results. After 1942, people often started thinking that there was no need to think of the law.”⁸

[Shri Guruji Samagr Darshan [Collected works of MS Golwalkar in Hindi in 7 volumes], vol. iv, BhartiyamVichar Sadhna, Nagpur, nd, p. 41. Hereafter referred to as SGSD.]

Thus Guru Golwalkar wanted the Indians to respect the draconian and repressive laws of the inhuman British rulers! After the 1942 Movement he further admitted,

“In 1942 also there was a strong sentiment in the hearts of many. At that time too the routine work of Sangh continued. Sangh vowed not to do anything directly. However, upheaval (uthal-puthal) in the minds of Sangh volunteers continued. Sangh is an organisation of inactive persons, their talks are useless, not only outsiders but also many of our volunteers did talk like this. They were greatly disgusted too.” [SGSD, p. 40.]

Guruji tells us that RSS did nothing directly. However, there is not a single publication or document of the RSS which throws light on what the RSS did indirectly for the Quit India Movement. During this period, in fact, its mentor, ‘Veer’ Savarkar, ran coalition governments with the Muslim League.

RSS denigrates martyrs of India’s Freedom Struggle

Respected Madam,

I would like to know your views on the statements of ‘Guruji’ decrying and denigrating the tradition of martyrdom following which Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekar Azad, Ashfaqullah Khan, Ram Prasad Bismil and countless other patriotic Indians laid down their lives for the independence our Motherland. Here is a passage from the chapter, ‘Martyr, great but not ideal’ from Bunch Of Thoughts, a veritable Geeta for RSS cadres such as yourself.

“There is no doubt that such men who embrace martyrdom are great heroes and their philosophy too is pre-eminently manly. They are far above the average men who meekly submit to fate and remain in fear and inaction. All the same, such persons are not held up as ideals in our society. We have not looked upon their martyrdom as the highest point of greatness to which men should aspire. For, after all, they failed in achieving their ideal, and failure implies some fatal flaw in them.”

[Golwalkar, MS., Bunch of Thoughts, Sahitya Sindhu Prakashana, Bangalore, 1996 edition, p. 283.]

Could there be a statement more insulting to the martyrs than this? The founder of the RSS, Dr. KB Hedgewar, went one step further: “Patriotism is not only going to prison. It is not correct to be carried away by such superficial patriotism.” [CP Bhishikar, CP., Sanghavariksh Ke Beej: Dr. Keshavrao Hedgewar, Suruchi, 1994, p. 21.]

Don’t you feel, Madam, that if martyrs like Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Sukhdev, Ashfaqullah, Chandrashekhar Azad had come in contact with the then RSS leadership, they could have been saved from giving their lives for ‘superficial patriotism’? This also must be the reason why RSS leaders or cadres did not face repression during British rule and the RSS did not produce not a single martyr during the Freedom Movement.

RSS’ hatred for democracy

VC Madam,

You will agree with me that it is due to our democratic and egalitarian polity that you have become the administrator of the 2^nd best University of India. But if Guru Golwalkar had his say it would not have been possible. Guruji hated democracy as per his following decree which he presented before a group of 1,350 top level cadres of the RSS in 1940 at the RSS Headquarters: “RSS inspired by one flag, one leader and one ideology is lighting the flame of Hindutva in each and every corner of this great land” [SGSD, vol. I, p. 11.]

As a leading intellectual you must be familiar with the fact that decree of rule under ‘one flag, one leader and one ideology’ was also the battle cry of the Fascist and Nazi parties of Europe in the first half of 20th century. What they did to democracy is well-known to this world!

For RSS Hinduism and Casteism are synonymous

Respected Madam, allow me to ask whether you like RSS believe that Hinduism and Casteism are one and same. The most prominent ideologue of RSS, Guru Golwalkar stated:

“The Virat Purusha, the Almighty manifesting himself…[according to Purusha Sukta] sun and moon are his eyes, the stars and the skies are created from his nabhi [navel] and Brahmin is the head, Kshatriya the hands, Vaishya the thighs and Shudra the feet. This means that the people who have this fourfold arrangement, i.e., the Hindu People, is [sic] our God. This supreme vision of Godhead is the very core of our concept of ‘nation’ and has permeated our thinking and given rise to various unique concepts of our cultural heritage.” [Golwalkar, MS., Bunch of Thoughts, Sahitya Sindhu Prakashana, Bangalore, 1996 edition, pp. 36-37.]

For this infallible belief in Casteism RSS strongly demanded that Manusmriti should replace the Indian Constitution. When the Constituent Assembly of India finalized the Constitution of India under the guidance of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar on November 26, 1949, RSS was not happy. Its organ, Organiser, in an editorial four days later complained:

“But in our constitution there is no mention of the unique constitutional development in ancient Bharat. Manu’s Laws were written long before Lycurgus of Sparta or Solon of Persia. To this day his laws as enunciated in the Manusmriti excite the admiration of the world and elicit spontaneous obedience and conformity. But to our constitutional pundits that means nothing.” [Organizer, Delhi, November 30, 1949.]

Respected VC Madam,

I am reproducing a selection from Manusmriti for your kind reference and would like to know whether you also believe in these decrees of the Manu Code. These dehumanizing and degenerate laws, which are presented here, are self-explanatory.

Laws of Manu Concerning Sudras

1.  For the sake of the prosperity of the worlds (the divine one) caused the Brahmana, the Kshatriya, the Vaisya, and the Sudra to proceed from his mouth, his arm, his thighs and his feet.
2.  One occupation only the lord prescribed to the Sudras, to serve meekly even these (other) three castes.
3.  Once-born man (a Sudra), who insults a twice-born man with gross invective, shall have his tongue cut out; for he is of low origin.
4.  If he mentions the names and castes (jati) of the (twice-born) with contumely, an iron nail, ten fingers long, shall be thrust red-hot into his mouth.
5.  If he arrogantly teaches Brahmanas their duty, the king shall cause hot oil to be poured into his mouth and into his ears.
6.  With whatever limb a man of a low caste does hurt to (a man of the three) highest (castes), even that limb shall be cut off; that is the teaching of Manu.
7.  He who raises his hand or a stick, shall have his hand cut off; he who in anger kicks with his foot, shall have his foot cut off.
8.  A low-caste man who tries to place himself on the same seat with a man of a high caste, shall be branded on his hip and be banished, or (the king) shall cause his buttock to be gashed.
9.  Let him never slay a Brahmana, though he have committed all (possible) crimes; let him banish such an (offender), leaving all his property (to him) and (his body) unhurt.

Laws of Manu Concerning Women

1.  Day and night woman must be kept in dependence by the males (of) their (families), and, if they attach themselves to sensual enjoyments, they must be kept under one’s control.
2.  Her father protects (her) in childhood, her husband protects (her) in youth, and her sons protect (her) in old age; a woman is never fit for independence.
3.  Women must particularly be guarded against evil inclinations, however trifling (they may appear); for, if they are not guarded, they will bring sorrow on two families.
4.  Considering that the highest duty of all castes, even weak husbands (must) strive to guard their wives.
5.  No man can completely guard women by force; but they can be guarded by the employment of the (following) expedients:
6.  Let the (husband) employ his (wife) in the collection and expenditure of his wealth, in keeping (everything) clean, in (the fulfillment of) religious duties, in the preparation of his food, and in looking after the household utensils.
7.  Women, confined in the house under trustworthy and obedient servants, are not (well) guarded; but those who of their own accord keep guard over themselves, are well guarded.
8.  Women do not care for beauty, nor is their attention fixed on age; (thinking), ‘(It is enough that) he is a man,’ they give themselves to the handsome and to the ugly.
9.  Through their passion for men, through their mutable temper, through their natural heartlessness, they become disloyal towards their husbands, however carefully they may be guarded in this (world).
10.  (When creating them) Manu allotted to women (a love of their) bed, (of their) seat and (of) ornament, impure desires, wrath, dishonesty, malice, and bad conduct.
11.  For women no (sacramental) rite (is performed) with sacred texts, thus the law is settled; women (who are) destitute of strength and destitute of (the knowledge of) Vedic texts, (are as impure as) falsehood (itself), that is a fixed rule.

Do I need to remind you that these laws are for Hindus? I would like to remind you that a copy of Manusmriti was burnt as a protest in the presence of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar during historic Mahad agitation on December 25, 1927.

RSS celebrated assassination of Gandhiji

Respected Madam,

I hope you know that Nathuram Godse and others who conspired to kill Gandhiji, claimed to be ‘Hindu Nationalists’. They described killing as something ordained by God. RSS celebrated his killing by distributing sweets was the finding of none other than the first home minister of India, Sardar Patel. In a letter written to Golwalkar on September 11, 1948, Sardar stated:

“Organizing the Hindus and helping them is one thing but going in for revenge for its sufferings on innocent and helpless men, women and children is quite another thing…Apart from this, their opposition to the Congress, that too of such virulence, disregarding all considerations of personality, decency or decorum, created a kind of unrest among the people. All their speeches were full of communal poison. It was not necessary to spread poison in order to enthuse the Hindus and organize for their protection. As a final result of the poison, the country had to suffer the sacrifice of the invaluable life of Gandhiji. Even an iota of the sympathy of the Government, or of the people, no more remained for the RSS. In fact opposition grew. Opposition turned more severe, when the RSS men expressed joy and distributed sweets after Gandhiji’s death.”

[Justice on Trial, RSS, Bangalore, 1962, pp. 26-28.]

Respected VC Madam, since you claim to be a proud member of the RSS, the Indian academic fraternity specially the JNU one would like to know if you are ashamed of this criminal role of RSS in the assassination of Gandhiji. You cannot be neutral on this issue.

RSS believed that South Indian Hindus belong to inferior Race

VC Madam,

You claim to be a proud Hindu and a proud member of the Sangh. You also happen to be from South India. Do you know that RSS believed that the Race Hindus of South India needed to be improved? I am reproducing a speech of Guru Golwalkar on this issue in context of Kerala Hindus. He was invited to address the students of the School of Social Science of Gujarat University on December 17, 1960. In this address, while underlying his firm belief in the Race Theory, he touched upon the issue of cross-breeding of human beings in the Indian society in history. He shamelessly stated:

“Today experiments in cross-breeding are made only on animals. But the courage to make such experiments on human beings is not shown even by the so-called modern scientist of today. If some human cross-breeding is seen today it is the result not of scientific experiments but of carnal lust. Now let us see the experiments our ancestors made in this sphere. In an effort to better the human species through cross-breeding the Namboodri Brahamanas of the North were settled in Kerala and a rule was laid down that the eldest son of a Namboodri family could marry only the daughter of Vaishya, Kashtriya or Shudra communities of Kerala. Another still more courageous rule was that the first off-spring of a married woman of any class must be fathered by a Namboodri Brahman and then she could beget children by her husband. Today this experiment will be called adultery but it was not so, as it was limited to the first child.” [M. S. Golwalkar cited in Organizer, January 2, 1961.]

Through this brazen Racist statement made not in the presence of some lumpen elements but an august gathering of leading Gujarat academics Guruji argued that Brahmans of the North (India) and specially Namboodri Brahamans, belonged to a superior Race. Due to this quality, Namboodri Brahamanas were sent from the North to Kerala to improve the breed of inferior Hindus there. Interestingly, this was being argued by a person who claimed to uphold the unity of Hindus world over. Thirdly, Golwalkar as a male chauvinist believed that a Namboodri Brahman male belonging to a superior Race from the North only could improve the inferior human Race from South. For him wombs of Kerala’s Hindu women enjoyed no sanctity and were simply objects of improving breed through intercourse with Namboodri Brahamanas who in no way were related to them.

Please respond to it, Madam VC! Do you uphold such criminal views of Golwalkar; the most prominent ideologue of RSS?

In RSS male cadres are swayamsevaks (volunteers) but female cadres are sevikas (servants/maids)

Respected Santishree Pandit Madam,

When you declare that you are proud member of the Sangh, you must be familiar with the organizational structure of RSS (the English equivalent being national volunteer association) is an exclusive male organization. The female organization was created in 1936 with the name, Rashtr Sevika Samiti (the English equivalent being society of female servants/maids for the nation). Thus male members are all India volunteers whereas female members are female servants. It is not the only difference. The Sevikas take oath to remain faithful, modest, guard virginity and honour but no such oath is prescribed for RSS cadres.

Madam, please enlighten us about your take on this naked male chauvinistic attitude of the Sangh. You owe this explanation to the nation as a woman too! Is not it a fact that Sangh and Islamic chauvinists are two sides of the same coin so far as denigration of women is concerned?

I would end by requesting your kind self to respond to the above issues as fate of one of the best Universities and future of Indian higher education is at stake. I have relied solely on RSS archives for bringing to your kind notice the anti-humanism, anti-colonial struggle and anti- Indian democracy beliefs and actions of the Sangh. I am ready to face defamation proceedings if you find I have misquoted or reported fake RSS documents.

With regards,

Shamsul Islam

September 27, 2023

Link for some of S. Islam’s writings in English, Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati and video interviews/debates:

http://du-in.academia.edu/ShamsulIslam

27 September 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Mohd Ziyaullah Khan

In recent years, India has witnessed a concerning surge in hate speech and Islamophobia, particularly within states governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This unsettling trend, highlighted  In a report by Hindutva Watch based in Washington, sheds light on the distressing reality that a staggering 80% of recorded hate speech incidents in the country occurred in BJP-ruled states. The report attributes many of these incidents to groups affiliated with the ruling BJP, such as the Bajrang Dal, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and Sakal Hindu Samaj, all of which have ties to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a prominent right-wing Hindu nationalist organization.

The Hindutva Watch Report 

A report by Hindutva Watch, a Washington-based group monitoring attacks on minorities, has unveiled a disturbing trend of escalating anti-Muslim hate speech incidents in India during the first half of 2023. The report, which documented 255 instances of hate speech gatherings targeting Muslims, revealed an average of more than one incident per day during this period. Regrettably, there was no comparative data available for previous years. The report employed the United Nations’ definition of hate speech, characterizing it as “any form of communication… that employs prejudiced or discriminatory language towards an individual or group based on attributes such as religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, color, descent, gender, or other identity factors.”

Notably, around 70% of these hate speech incidents occurred in states slated to conduct elections in 2023 and 2024, underscoring a disturbing correlation between political events and the rise of hate speech targeting the Muslim community. Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Gujarat were identified as the states with the highest number of hate speech gatherings, with Maharashtra alone accounting for 29% of the incidents. These hate speech events predominantly featured conspiracy theories, calls for violence, and socio-economic boycotts against Muslims.

Alarmingly, approximately 80% of these events transpired in areas governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is widely anticipated to secure victory in the general elections of 2024. This concerning trend necessitates immediate attention and action to curb the propagation of hate speech and foster a more inclusive and harmonious society.

Hindutva Watch monitored online engagements of Hindu nationalist organizations, authenticated hate speech videos circulated on social media, and collated data on individual incidents as reported by various media outlets. However, the Indian government, under Prime Minister Modi’s leadership, refutes allegations of minority abuse. Requests for comments from the Indian embassy in Washington remain unanswered

Beyond the The Hindutva Watch Report

Rather than relying on official data, the Hindutva Watch report sourced information from verifiable social media and news outlets, revealing a deeply concerning pattern of orchestrated hate speech and bigotry against minority communities, particularly Muslims. Senior political figures associated with the BJP have openly expressed prejudiced views, further fueling this divisive narrative.

The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for instance, once singled out individuals protesting against the government based on their attire, specifically targeting those wearing traditional Muslim clothing. Prior to the 2019 general election, Amit Shah, the BJP President at the time, derogatorily referred to Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants as “termites” and pledged to forcibly expel them. Islamophobic sentiment is further propagated through social media, often within BJP-curated WhatsApp groups, where the past actions of Muslim rulers are wrongly blamed on the entire Muslim community.

This trend marks a stark departure from previous governments, which aimed to foster communal harmony, support India’s pluralism and diversity, and temper communal passions. The BJP, on the other hand, openly aligns itself with an intolerant majoritarian Hindutva ideology. Leaders within the party and close to the ruling establishment regularly denounce the Muslim minority, branding them a threat to India’s Hindu identity and accusing past governments of appeasement.

Under BJP rule, campaigns have been initiated against interfaith relationships, accusing Muslim men of pursuing “love jihad” to allegedly entrap Hindu women. Additionally, restrictions have been imposed on religious conversions, Muslim marriage practices, and family planning efforts. Discrimination against Muslims is evident in the controversial citizenship law, offering fast-track citizenship to refugees from neighboring Muslim-majority countries, excluding Muslims.

The Damage 

These developments dismay liberals and individuals advocating for secularism in India, revealing the erosion of the country’s constitutional secularism. In just nine years of BJP rule, the cultural pluralism and Hindu-Muslim amity that India once proudly touted have been severely compromised. Muslims, who once held prominent positions as a symbol of India’s unity, now find themselves marginalized in various sectors. Moreover, the rise of Islamophobia has deeply infiltrated north Indian society, while the south has managed to resist to a certain extent. The free press, once a beacon of democracy and inclusivity, has also played a role in erasing the syncretic cultural traditions that India has celebrated for decades.

Wrapping up 

In this climate, the segregation and disempowerment of Muslims are becoming normalized, with Indian society increasingly divided into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Anti-Muslim bigotry is now publicly expressed and practiced with alarming frequency, desensitizing the populace to this alarming trend. Those who decry these actions are met with derogatory responses, further polarizing the nation. In the face of these challenges, it is vital to address this growing discord and work towards promoting a more inclusive and harmonious society.

Mohd Ziyauallah Khan is based in Nagpur and works with a leading digital marketing company in Nagpur as the Content Head.

27 September 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Bharat Dogra

One of the most important characteristics of a democracy, one of its defining features, is that it reflects the views and understanding, aspirations and expectations, of its people on the most important issues. This is sought to be ensured, among other ways, by periodic elections in which it is expected that if the government has acted contrary to the views and expectations of people it will be voted out. Hence there is significant pressure on the government to act according to the views of the people, and whenever it falters in this, there is a significant opportunity for the opposition to focus attention to this failing of the government and to seek to win the next election on this basis. The opposition parties are supposed to play an important course-correction role. The academia and the media are also expected to have an important role in this. Hence there is an in-built system for corrective actions to be taken at an early stage before too much harm is done.  This ability to take corrective action at an early stage is a very, very important asset of any democracy.

The USA (together with some of its most important allies like Britain, France and Germany) is supposed to be one of the most mature democracies of the world. The USA government likes to describe itself as the most important and deserving representative of the democratic world, and when it has hostility with other governments, it likes to represent this as a contest between democracy and authoritarian regimes.

Therefore one would expect the USA democracy to be particularly good at ensuring that corrective actions are taken well in time and harmful policies are checked before these can do much harm. However the problem is that in actual practice this important strength of a democracy for timely corrective actions does not appear to be very visible here in important contexts.

One such important context is that of the USA’s ‘War on Terror’ which is now increasingly believed to have caused immense distress without having achieved anything truly gainful. According to the Brown University’s Costs of War project it has caused nearly 4.5 million deaths directly and indirectly, a vast number.

People are widely believed to be against costly forever wars and in favor of peace and more spending on urgent civilian needs such as health, housing and education rather than on wars.

More recently in the context of the Ukraine proxy war the danger to world peace has been increasing, including the chances of a direct conflict between Russia and the USA, which the people of the USA certainly do not want.

Although there is good evidence that people during the last 25 years or so did not want forever wars and would have been much happier with the money spent on these being used instead for ensuring health, education, housing and essential utilities for all, unfortunately this was not reflected in the government decisions and policy on this issue, or the government taking corrective action in time, or the opposition parties and the media pushing the government towards corrective action. In fact time and again the two main political parties and big media together appeared to be creating an overall consensus on policies which were actually proving very costly in terms of loss of human life and in terms of denying essential needs to most people.

Estimates made by this writer on the basis of the available information conclude that if the various misguided military interventions of the last quarter of a century (1998-2023) had been avoided and the money squandered on this (about 11 trillion dollars over 25 years or about 440 billion dollars a year) had been spent on helping the weaker sections at home and abroad on the basis of ratio of 8:2, then about 12 million lives would have been saved in almost equal numbers in the USA (6 million) and abroad (6 million).

A powerful case could have been built by the opposition as well as the academia and big media (known to be very powerful in the USA) against all these military interventions but this was not done.

The incidents of 9/11 in which many innocent people lost their life were extremely tragic. However many questions were raised about them. If only to satisfy all doubts, should not a real democracy have agreed to a re-investigation by a team of non-government independent experts whose integrity is beyond doubt? If less than one per cent of what was eventually spent on the war on terror was initially spent on investigating the 9/11 attacks, there may have been no need or justification for the dollar 8000 billion spent on war on terror.

The inability of (what has been frequently but wrongly described as) the most ‘mature’ democracy to properly reflect the aspirations of its people, particularly those in the bottom half of the society with several unmet essential needs, would point to the need for corrective steps to improve the structure and functioning of the democracy itself. The USA has also not been able to take corrective actions with respect to correcting several serious internal problems as well, including increasing inequalities and a mental health crisis, particularly among children, amidst demands by mental health professionals for declaring an emergency situation in the context of aggravating mental health problems of children and adolescents.

In fact the same forces of aggression and injustice pushing for wars abroad also push for policies of injustice and inequality within the country, but the link between internal and external problems is often not established. Those who push for wars present themselves as great patriots and thereby manage to hide their agenda of increasing internal inequalities and injustice. A highly corrupt system dominated by the military industrial complex continues to distort the structure and functioning of democracy badly by buying over the loyalty of important persons in the government and the opposition, in the big media and the academia, thereby weakening all avenues of timely corrective actions. Hence one of the biggest strengths of being a democracy is lost due to these corrupting influences, in turn leading to timely corrective actions not being taken.

Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, A Day in 2071, Protecting Earth for Children and Man over Machine.

27 September 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Shiraz Durrani

Preface to the book by  Durrani, Nazmi: Tunakataa! We Say No!  Resistance Poems in Kiswahili and English Reflecting Life in Kenya in the 1980s. Forthcoming:  Nairobi:  Vita Books. 

[Tunakataa: Kiswahili – ‘We Say No!]

Kenyans have been saying Tunakataa/We Say No to colonialism and imperialism for over 500 years, ‘No’ to all the exploitation and oppression that are part of these oppressive systems. But the greed and the brute force of the Portuguese initially, then British and USA imperialism blinded their eyes and closed their ears to the voice of people. Resistance was the only way of challenging the invading forces — political, military, religious, cultural, among others . It was the taking up of arms by Mau Mau in the late 1950s that finally brought independence to Kenya. But not an end to capitalism, long planted by British colonialism through various underhand means. The suppression of the rights of working people, the looting of their land and wealth that are the hallmark of capitalism, remained after independence, this time ably managed by the former homeguard collaborators with colonialism, now reincarnated as the rulers of independent Kenya. But they did not have it all their own way. Resistance which had been the characteristic feature during the colonial period, could not be suppressed by the new ruling class although they continued the use of the same instruments of suppression that colonialism had used: massacres, murders, disappearances and targeting resistance organisations, their leaders, their ideologies and their culture. And people have continued to say ‘No’ to all this, as does Nazmi Durrani in these poems.

An understanding of this intense repression under President Daniel arap Moi can provide the background to these poems of resistance. UMOJA (1989, 15) gives a good summary of the first ten years of President’s Moi’s rule which created the conditions reflected in these poems:

Over the ten years, the Moi-KANU regime has been involved in i) torture, killings, political executions and massacres; ii) arrests, political jailings and detentions without trial on a scale that can only mean that Kenya has been under an undeclared state of emergency; iii) the crushing of all independent democratic social organisations; iv) the rigging of elections even under the one-party state to ensure only those candidates loyal to Moi himself go through and v) the cynical arbitrary and frequent changes of laws and constitution to effect, justify and rationalise the above and to meet all the subjective whims of Dictator Moi.

The regime then used the coup of 1982 as an excuse to suppress all opposition to its bloody rule, as UMOJA (1989, 17) shows:

The regime used the coup attempt of August 1982 as a cover for the silencing of all democratic opposition. After suppressing the coup, the regime let loose its loyalist forces on the population. They stopped people in the streets. They raided people’s homes, confiscated a large quantity of people’s property and raped women. A busload of university students was gunned down. No Kenyan seriously believes the official lies about a toll of 159. Church and other independent sources put the death toll at about 2,000. Certainly all the mortuaries in and around Nairobi were full of dead bodies of civilians. It should be emphasised that these deaths had nothing to do with the acts of suppressing the coup attempt – all the killings took place after the coup had been put down.

It is against this background of brutal suppression of people that Nazmi Durrani’s poems need to be read and seen as well, as part of the history of post-independence resistance. Durrani was part of the organised resistance of the underground December Twelve Movement (DTM). The Appendix to this book reproduces an earlier article that touched on some aspects of Durrani’s life and his political activities.  This included turning his flat in Ngara into a centre of political activities of the Ngara Cell of the December Twelve Movement. But one cannot see the writer, the activist and his political work in isolation from the resistance movement in Kenya at that time. He was part of organised resistance and his activities reflected the aims and visions of December Twelve Movement (DTM). A background to DTM is as important as the brutality of Moi in setting the poems in their historical and political context. This is given by Durrani and Kimani (2021, 20):

Earlier attempts by radical groups to continue the vision of Mau Mau within KANU had failed, reflecting the total surrender of the comprador class to imperialist interests. It became the historical role of underground resistance movements to articulate the new phase in Kenyan politics where open tradition of organized underground resistance in Kenya goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century and continued throughout the colonial period and post-independence. Moreover, it carried on throughout the period of Kenyatta’s regime [as it] consolidated its neo-colonial grip on the country. Among the key underground movements was the December Twelve Movement (DTM) which later emerged as Mwakenya.

Within this overall context of resistance, DTM carried out its political and ideological work in various ways, again as described by Durrani and Kimani (2021, 20-21):

DTM opposed the capitalist outlook of the ruling class and their party. It was active in articulating its ideological position, policies, and outlook, not only among its active members grouped in secret cells but also in disseminating these to its actual and potential supporters among the masses. It was not a mass movement, and only accepted into its membership those who showed a clear grasp of its ideological stand and were willing to put into practice their commitments. The emergence of DTM marked the end of the attempts by democratic forces to form legal opposition parties. DTM’s activities and ideological stand are best seen in its publications.

As a member of this resistance movement, Durrani was active in a number of fields — writing on, and documenting, comprador violence and people’s resistance; taking part in resistance theatre; setting up and managing an underground library of socialist and communist literature and, as mentioned earlier, turning his flat into a resistance resource. The poems included in this book reflect one of the cultural aspects of his political work. He wrote many articles — in Gujarati, English and Kiswahili — on resistance leaders in Kenya; he wrote short stories and poems some of which were published in the local media under pseudonyms. He wrote several children’s short stories. In writing the poems included in this book, he combined a number of his activist pursuits. Many of the poems record historical events of police brutality and people’s resistance to these. Some poems record the events which would otherwise have been forgotten, for example Monica Njeri, The Battle of the Tusker Bus Stop, Workers of Shimanzi and Mnjala Killed. Others raise awareness of the state of exploitation under capitalism, for example, Flood of Profits; yet others take up issues of classes and class struggle, such as Class Struggle , Two Towns, We and You and Who Are We? The poems also depict the victories of the struggles, for example Victory at Chinga while others look ahead to the coming revolution, such as Thunder of Revolution. They also reflect the struggles for liberation not only in Kenya but around the world, for example Comrade Samoral the African Hero,The Nicaraguan Revolution Will Be Victorious, Liberation Wars of the Palestinians, The Great Terrorist Reagan and several others on South Africa. Educating people about capitalism as the reason for their poverty is always present, for example in Exploitation is the Reason for Poverty and Oppression and Resistance are Inseparable. 

Yet another aspect that is significant in these poems is the language used. The poems were originally written in Kiswahili, later translated by the author into English. This indicates the audience that they were aimed at — workers, whose struggles the poems reflect.

The question then is: are these poems to be seen as literature, history or politics? Library cataloguers, historians and students of literature can argues over this. At one level, they are a historical record of the 1980s Kenya. They record the daily lives of working people under state repression, their reactions, their hopes and aspirations. They record how they survived under such oppression and kept their hopes alive for a better future. At the same time, they are political communication depicting exploitation of working people and their resistance. The poems are not one or the other: they are history, they are a call to action, they are a lament and they offer hope in a grim, oppressive world. To say ‘no’ to exploitation is ultimately a statement of political commitment, of being positive about the prospect of liberation, of exhorting people everywhere to rise up agains all forms of suppression, oppression and exploitation. And the context of all this cannot be ignored or forgotten: It is saying ‘No’ to capitalism and imperialism, which is another way of saying ‘Yes’ to liberation under socialism.

Durrani emerges from these poems as a keen observer, listener and learner who takes in and re-tells, the experiences of working people and their struggles. He becomes at one with the oppressed and becomes their voice. He shows those who struggle and those who fall by the wayside and those who triumph, however temporarily. The struggle goes on and the author is always there to see, listen and record.

The spirit of the book is captured by the poem It is Our Right to Fight for Our Rights. It also indicates the reason for waging a war against capitalism and imperialism. Listen to the voice of those struggling for liberation: It’s the right of each and everyone To have food clothing and shelter This is a right, the very foundation of life.

Illustration: The Nation is Like a Cow ( By Nazmi Durrani)

It is Our Right to Fight for Our Rights
It’s our right to fight for our rights
it’s our duty to fight for our rights
Not to fight for our rights is a crime
We cannot uphold our rights without struggle

It’s the right of each and everyone
To have food
Clothing and shelter
This is a right, the very foundation of life
It’s the right of people to get these necessities

By way of work, by sweating for them

Not through charity or exploitation

Work is the right of all

If denied the right to work
People have the duty to change
The system that denies them this right

it’s our right to fight for our rights

Illustration: Shamba Langu! (By Nazmi Durrani)

The poems, the history they depict, the hopes and the vision they carry reflect the reality of life for working people in Kenya in the 1980s. But these are not so different from the situation of working people in Kenya today — or indeed of the working people around the world. Capitalism uses the same tactics wherever it goes; it creates the same exploitation and oppression wherever it goes. And the cry of the people, Tunakataa!, We Say No also follows capitalism everywhere. There is a universality in these poems that reflects the exploited world as it resists capitalism and struggles for socialism. The final word is left to the poem, We Say No: 

Sisi wafanyakazi na mafalahi
Ni sisi tu tunazalisha mali

Tunakataa, tunakataa, tunakataa

Kukubali zinyakuliwe na mabepari

Sisi wafanyakazi wa karakana

Tunatoa jasho kuzalisha bidhaa

Tunakataa, tunakataa, tunakataa

Kuruhusu faida ziende Ulaya

We the workers and peasants

It is we who produce wealth

We refuse, refuse totally
To let it be stolen by capitalists

Today, over two decades later, it is difficult to imagine the situation for working people in Kenya in the 1980s, the on-going repression from the Moi government and the resistance from the working people. It is then also difficult to see the full significance of the events shown in these poems. Some historical notes and references have been added in the book under the heading, the Kenya of the Poems, in order to capture the reality of that time. The poems then become a commentary on the life and times of Kenyan working people and their struggles. But it is not only history — it is also the present in Kenya and many other parts of Africa. The relevance of the poems to the reality of today’s Africa is confirmed by two members of the Learning and Teaching WhatsApp Group (L&T). First, Brian Mathenge from Kenya responds to one of the poems, December 12:

This is a powerful one, by Nazmi Durrani, that our freedom was hijacked, blood and sacrifices of our martyrs betrayed.The last bit is encouraging:

We have no doubt we shall win true freedom
But blood must be shed yet again
We will have to fight with arms once again
We’ve learned from history, we won’t be deceived again.

This can be distributed within our circles.

When asked if the poems are relevant to Kenya and Africa in 2020, Mathenge adds:

Yes, they are, there are few progressive history books or revolutionary publishing media in present Kenya, due to deliberate censorship by the state, making it difficult for the young generation to connect with their past, get inspired and keep the conviction of struggle.

With these few, rich and inspirational articles we draw a lot of strength to keep the struggle going… This [referring to the book, Tunakataa!] would be one of the powerful set of literature, it would be helpful, especially in the generational inheritance of struggle. There’s so much that is untold and scrapped from History.

Another member of the L&T Group, Ivy Himani from Zambia gives her views:

It’s very much relevant… most African countries are having the same cry. In Zambia, it’s been years of independence but that’s just in books.In reality, slavery has just been modernized where a few are privileged at the expense of others.

That is the voice of youth in Africa today. They join the demands for justice and equality. Tunakataa! indeed, is the voice of Africa and African youth today.

References

Durrani, Shiraz (2018): Kenya’s War of Independence: Mau Mau and its Legacy of Resistance to Colonialism and Imperialism, 1948-1990..

Durrani, Shiraz and Kimani Waweru (2021): Kenya: Repression and Resistance from Colony to Neo-colony,1948–1990. The Kenya Socialist, 3, 2021, 7-25. Available at: https://vitabooks.co.ke/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/The-Kenya- Socialist-Issue-3-2021.pdf.

UMOJA (1989): Moi’s Reign of Terror: A Decade of Nyayo Crimes against the people of Kenya. London: Umoja (Umoja wa Kupigania Demokrasia Kenya/ United Movement for Democracy in Kenya. Background Document No. 2.

Shiraz Durrani is a Kenyan political exile living in London. He has worked at the University of Nairobi as well as various public libraries in Britain where he also lectured at the London Metropolitan University.

27 September 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

 

By Rebecca Gordon

For twelve years starting in 1982, my partner and I in San Francisco joined with two friends in Seattle to produce Lesbian Contradiction: A Journal of Irreverent Feminism, or LesCon for short. We started out typing four-inch columns of text and laying out what was to become a quarterly tabloid on a homemade light table. We used melted paraffin from an electric waxer to affix strips of paper to guide sheets the size of the final pages.

Eventually, we acquired Macintosh computers, trekking to a local copy shop to pay 25 cents a page for laser-printed originals. We still had to paste them together the old-fashioned way to create our tabloid-sized pages. The finished boards would then go to a local commercial printing press where our run of 2,000 copies would be printed.

This was, of course, before ordinary people had even heard of email. Our entire editorial process was mediated through the U.S. Postal Service, with letters flying constantly between our two cities. On the upside, through 12 years and 48 issues, we only had to hold four in-person meetings.

All of which is to say that I’m old. That fact — and recent events in the lives of several friends — have brought to mind the first article I ever published in LesCon: “Who’s Going to Run the Old Dykes’ Home?” It’s a question that’s no less pertinent today, and not just for lesbians. My worldview was more parochial back then; I naively believed that someone — the state or their families — would look out for heterosexual elders, but that we lesbians were on our own. It turns out that we — the people of this country — are all on our own.

Playing Aging Roulette

These days, my partner and I seem to be doing a lot of elder care. Actually, I’ve long been a source of tech support for the octogenarian set, beginning with my own father. (“OK, you’re sure you saved the file? Can you remember what name you gave it?”) With our aging friends, we also help out with transport to doctors’ offices, communications issues (with landlines, cell phones, and the Internet), and occasionally just relieving the loneliness of it all.

In recent months, elderly friends of ours have faced losing their housing, their spouses, their mobility, or their cognitive abilities. I find it terrifying and ache because there’s so little I can do to help them.

By Phil Pasquini

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit September 21 with President Biden at the White House today, on this International Day of Peace, was greeted by activists from World Beyond War along with nine other peace groups who protested the visit by calling for the dropping of all charges against Ukrainian peace activist Yurii Sheliazhenko.

Earlier in the week, the group delivered at petition to the Ukraine Embassy that called upon President’s Zelensky and Biden along with other Ukraine diplomats to uphold the rights of conscientious objection along with the right to freedom of expression.

The well-known Ukrainian conscientious objector, Sheliazhenko, who is a journalist, blogger, human rights defender, and legal scholar and does not support the war is opposed to both sides of the conflict. He serves in multiple roles as executive secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, a board member of the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection, and a council member of the International Peace Bureau.

The Kiev public prosecutor has accused Sheliazhenko of being “a Russian propogandist” and stated that they intend to stop him in that role. Activists point out that Ukrainian authorities have become increasingly “intolerant for dissent” in the ongoing war.

World Beyond War likens Sheliazhenko’s present situation of being charged as “… extremely common for war supporters to deny the possibility of opposing both sides of a war and to conclude that anyone who does so must actually support whichever side the war supporter opposes.” Sheliazhenko in a written statement characterized the charges brought against him as “fabricated from the motives of ideological hatred of pacifism.”

Organizers have made the demand that “Yurii’s rights to conscientious objection and free speech be respected by a nation that claims to be waging war for democracy and human rights.” They are also calling for the government “to drop any legal proceedings against Yurii Sheliazhenko and to respect human rights, the right to conscientious objection, and the right to freedom of speech. The absurdity of prosecuting someone for justifying Russian war making on the basis of a statement in which he has explicitly condemned Russian war making, is matched by the absurdity of waging war in the name of freedom and democracy while engaging in this sort of harassment of citizens.”

According to Sheliazhenko’s written statement, on August 3, a group of men unknown to him broke down the door of his apartment and announced that they were members of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU). They said they had a search warrant which they provided to him and refused to wait for his attorney to be present before beginning their search while executing the warrant.

During the ensuing search of the apartment, they collected his electronic devices and other materials as part of their investigation over his objections. Sheliazhenko has claimed that “the materials and equipment that were found cannot be evidence of the commission of crimes on my part and also, taking into account the violations of my rights during these investigative actions, obtained illegally and have no evidentiary value.”

He further asserts the belief “…that this criminal proceeding is illegal, unlawful and politically motivated, a manifestation of repression against the peace movement.”

Sheliazhenko has made three demands in reaction to the criminal charges he is facing. That his human rights activities are not obstructed. That nothing be seized in which he said no “evidence of any illegal actions by me or anyone else was found during the search.” And that he be allowed the opportunity to review the charges brought against him.

On August 8 Sheliazhenko was placed under house arrest by a Kyiv District Court judge and confined to his residence from 10 pm until 6 am the following day, until October 11. The first hearing of his trial was to take place on September 20, but was postponed when the public prosecutor failed to appear in court and has now been rescheduled for October 3.

Activists at the protest stood outside the White House holding banners and signs informing passersby of the situation and calling upon President Biden to address the issue with Volodymyr Zelensky during their bilateral afternoon meeting in the Oval Office. A second group of activists were present at the nearby NW White House appointment gate where they were visible to staff and others who were entering and leaving the secure facility. They busied themselves by handing out information on the issue and engaged with those who wanted to learn more about the situation.

Photo by Phil Pasquini

(This article has appeared in Nuzeink)

Phil Pasquini is a freelance journalist and photographer. His reports and photographs appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Pakistan Link and Nuze.ink.

22 September 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

Amid a deepening military crisis triggered by the collapse of Ukraine’s spring offensive, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spent hours Thursday meeting behind closed doors at the Pentagon, as well as with US President Joe Biden, top Cabinet officials, the US Senate, and leading House lawmakers.

The meetings followed saber-rattling speeches by Biden and Zelensky at the U.N. Security Council, where Biden ruled out any negotiated settlement of the conflict while Zelensky used ethnically charged language to call Russians “evil” and “terrorists.”

Despite months of media propaganda, the Ukrainian offensive has been a bloody debacle, which US intelligence agencies now admit will fail to achieve its objectives. Over the past month, the Biden administration has facilitated the replacement of virtually all leading officials in Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, as the US prepares to take an ever more direct role in the conflict.

Zelensky began the day with a meeting with US military officials, including Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The Pentagon said that the meeting sought “to discuss Ukraine’s longer-term capability requirements and how to support them in the future in terms of deterring Russia.”

Following two hours of meetings at the White House, Biden announced that the United States would send yet another major arms shipment to Ukraine, and that Abrams battle tanks would begin arriving on the battlefield imminently.

“Today, I approved the next tranche of US security assistance to Ukraine, including more artillery, more ammunition, more antitank weapons,” Biden said. “And next week, the first US Abrams tanks will be delivered to Ukraine.”

The latest weapons delivery includes additional cluster munitions, a weapon that scatters unexploded ordnance over a wide area, as well as dozens of combat vehicles and over 3 million rounds of ammunition.

Biden continued, “We also focused on strengthening Ukraine’s air defense capabilities to protect the critical infrastructure that provides heat and light during the coldest and darkest days of the year. That includes providing a second HAWK air defense battery with steady deliveries of additional HAWK and other systems each month through the winter. And a new package of launchers and interceptors.”

Following the meeting, Biden declared, “Mr. President, we’re with you, we’re staying with you.”

The announcement comes as the debacle facing the Ukrainian military becomes impossible to conceal. US media outlets published Russian videos showing the destruction of advancing Ukrainian armored vehicles from a distance, citing them as evidence, yet again, that Ukrainian troops were making a “breakthrough.”

A far more realistic picture was presented the same day by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, who cited a US foreign policy official as saying, “The truth is if the Ukrainian army is ordered to continue the offensive, the army would mutiny. The soldiers aren’t willing to die anymore, but this doesn’t fit the B.S. that is being authored by the Biden White House.”

Tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops have died in the current offensive, likely bringing the total Ukrainian death toll in the war so far to the hundreds of thousands. In July, the New York Times reported that some Ukrainian military units had been wiped out and reconstituted multiple times, and now consisted of older recruits “forced into action.”

In his meeting with Zelensky, Biden called on Congress to pass another $24 billion in funding for the war. “I’m counting on the good judgment of the United States Congress. There’s no alternative,” Biden said.

Zelensky, dressed in military green, gave a secret briefing to the US Senate. Following the briefing, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer asserted that Zelensky told the senators, “If we don’t get the aid, we will lose the war.”

Afterward, Zelensky held a smaller meeting with Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and a group of other members of the House of Representatives. Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that the United States would “get [Ukraine] everything they need” and indicated that the US would ultimately provide the ATACMS long-range missile to Ukraine.

He continued, “There are a lot of political machinations right now, but I assure you we are going to get it passed,” in reference to the White House’s request to send an additional $24 billion to Ukraine.

However, revealing the dwindling support for Ukraine in his caucus, McCarthy denied Zelensky the privilege of addressing a Joint Session of Congress, and removed Ukraine military aid from the latest draft of a continuing resolution that must be passed by September 30 to avoid a partial shutdown of the federal government. A growing section of the Republicans in the House, aligned with Trump, wants to prioritize China rather than Russia as the immediate target of US imperialism.

Biden’s speech to the United Nations Tuesday, in which he declared, “Russia alone bears responsibility,” was aimed at precluding any negotiated settlement of the conflict.

The Biden administration is fearful that the outcome of the 2024 election would jeopardize continued US involvement in the conflict and is seeking, by escalating the war into a direct clash with Russia, to create “facts on the ground” that would make it impossible to end the conflict.

With the failure of Ukraine’s offensive, the Biden administration has concluded that the only way to achieve the United States’ sweeping aims in Ukraine is to massively escalate its involvement in the conflict, including the potential direct deployment of US-NATO troops in a shooting war with Russia.

Originally published in WSWS.org

22 September 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Zoe Alexandra and Vijay Prashad

In Bamako, Mali, on September 16, the governments of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger created the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). On X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Colonel Assimi Goïta, the head of the transitional government of Mali, wrote that the Liptako-Gourma Charter which created the AES would establish “an architecture of collective defense and mutual assistance for the benefit of our populations.” The hunger for such regional cooperation goes back to the period when France ended its colonial rule. Between 1958 and 1963, Ghana and Guinea were part of the Union of African States, which was to have been the seed for wider pan-African unity. Mali was a member as well between 1961 and 1963.

But, more recently, these three countries—and others in the Sahel region such as Niger—have struggled with common problems, such as the downward sweep of radical Islamic forces unleashed by the 2011 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) war on Libya. The anger against the French has been so intense that it has provoked at least seven coups in Africa (two in Burkina Faso, two in Mali, one in Guinea, one in Niger, and one in Gabon) and unleashed mass demonstrations from Algeria to the Congo and most recently in Benin. The depth of frustration with France is such that its troops have been ejected from the Sahel, Mali demoted French from its official language status, and France’s ambassador in Niger (Sylvain Itté) was effectively held “hostage”—as French President Emmanuel Macron said—by people deeply upset by French behavior in the region.

Philippe Toyo Noudjenoume, the President of the West Africa Peoples’ Organization, explained the basis of this cascading anti-French sentiment in the region. French colonialism, he said, “has remained in place since 1960.” France holds the revenues of its former colonies in the Banque de France in Paris. The French policy—known as Françafrique—included the presence of French military bases from Djibouti to Senegal, from Côte d’Ivoire to Gabon. “Of all the former colonial powers in Africa,” Noudjenoume told us, “it is France that has intervened militarily at least sixty times to overthrow governments, such as [that of] Modibo Keïta in Mali (1968), or assassinate patriotic leaders, such as Félix-Roland Moumié (1960) and Ernest Ouandié (1971) in Cameroon, Sylvanus Olympio in Togo in 1963, Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso in 1987 and others.” Between 1997 and 2002, during the presidency of Jacque Chirac, France intervened militarily 33 times on the African continent (by comparison, between 1962 and 1995, France intervened militarily 19 times in African states). France never really suspended its colonial grip or its colonial ambitions.

Breaking the Camel’s Back

Two events in the past decade “broke the camel’s back,” Noudjenoume said: the NATO war in Libya, led by France, in March 2011, and the French intervention to remove Koudou Gbagbo Laurent from the presidency of Côte d’Ivoire in April 2011. “For years,” he said, “these events have forced a strong anti-French sentiment, particularly among young people. It is not just in the Sahel that this feeling has developed but throughout French-speaking Africa. It is true that it is in the Sahel that it is currently expressed most openly. But throughout French-speaking Africa, this feeling is strong.”

Mass protest against the French presence is now evident across the former French colonies in Africa. These civilian protests have not been able to result in straight-forward civilian transitions of power, largely because the political apparatus in these countries had been eroded by long-standing, French-backed kleptocracies (illustrated by the Bongo family, which ruled Gabon from 1967 to 2023, and which leeched the oil wealth of Gabon for their own personal gain; when Omar Bongo died in 2009, French politician Eva Joly said that he ruled on behalf of France and not of his own citizens). Despite the French-backed repression in these countries, trade unions, peasant organizations, and left-wing parties have not been able to drive the upsurge of anti-French patriotism, though they have been able to assert themselves

France intervened militarily in Mali in 2013 to try to control the forces that it had unleashed with NATO’s war in Libya two years previously. These radical Islamist forces captured half of Mali’s territory and then, in 2015, proceeded to assault Burkina Faso. France intervened but then sent the soldiers of the armies of these Sahel countries to die against the radical Islamist forces that it had backed in Libya. This created a great deal of animosity among the soldiers, Noudjenoume told us, and that is why patriotic sections of the soldiers rebelled against the governments and overthrew them.

Anti-Intervention

After the coup in Niger, the West hoped to send in a proxy force—led by the Economic Commission of West African States (ECOWAS)—but the African military leaders demurred. Across the region, people set up solidarity committees to defend the people of Niger from any attack, with the threat provoking “revolt and indignation among the populations,” Noudjenoume explained. Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was even forced to back down from ECOWAS’s crusade when his country’s Congress rejected the measure and mass protests occurred against militarily intervening in the neighboring country. As ECOWAS’s ultimatums to restore the deposed Nigerien leader Mohamed Bazoum expired, it became clear that its threat was empty.

Meanwhile, not only did it appear that the people of Niger would resist any military intervention, but Burkina Faso and Mali immediately promised to defend Niger against any such intervention. The new AES is a product of this mutual solidarity.

But the AES is not merely a military or security pact. At the signing ceremony, Mali’s Defense Minister Abdoulaye Diop told journalists, “This alliance will be a combination of military and economic efforts [among]… the three countries.” It will build upon the February 2023 agreement between Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali to collaborate on a fuel and electricity exchange, to build transportation networks, to collaborate on mineral resource sales, to build a regional agricultural development project, and to increase intra-Sahel trade. Whether these countries would be able to develop an economic agenda to benefit their peoples—and therefore guarantee that France would have no means to exert its authority over the region—is to be seen.

Zoe Alexandra is the co-editor of Peoples Dispatch.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter.

21 September 2023

Source: countercurrents.org