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Africa Action: Durban Position Paper
Africa Action: Durban Position Paper
Date distributed (ymd): 010906
APIC Document
Africa Policy Electronic Distribution List: an information
service provided by AFRICA ACTION (incorporating the Africa
Policy Information Center, The Africa Fund, and the American
Committee on Africa). Find more information for action for
Africa at http://www.africapolicy.org
+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++
Region: Continent-Wide
Issue Areas: +political/rights+ +economy/development+
+US policy focus+
AFRICA ACTION COMMENT
September 5, 2001
With two more days until the conclusion of the World Conference
against Racism, the prospects for full "consensus" among the
delegations remaining after the walkout by the U.S. and Israel
are uncertain. Even the 72-page non-governmental
declaration is prefaced on the web by a disclaimer indicating
less than full consensus
(see
http://racism.org.za/declaration.htm).
Ultimately, however, the success of the conference will be
measured not by formal consensus about words but by whether the
the issues raised and hotly debated are addressed by action after
the conference.
This posting contains a pre-conference position paper by Africa
Action, and a joint statement during the conference by Africa
Action, Treatment Action Campaign, Physicians for Human Rights,
and Student Global AIDS Campaign. In a related posting today we
provide allafrica.com's news story on the continuing debate on
reparations at the conference, and a short but to-the-point
statement to the conference yesterday by Peter Piot, the
executive director of UNAIDS.
Salih Booker, Executive Director, Africa Action
+++++++++++++++++end profile++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
August 22, 2001
AFRICA ACTION on the World Conference Against Racism, Racial
Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR)
Support for WCAR and a Call to fight AIDS and Global Apartheid
Africa Action strongly supports the World Conference Against
Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance
(WCAR) and applauds the work of all who have participated
constructively in the preparatory processes from among UN
agencies, Governments, NGOs and activists worldwide. We note with
particular appreciation the work of the U.S. NGO Coordinating
Committee, the International Human Rights Law Group, National
Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA), the
Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the African and
African Descendants Caucus (AADC).
Africa Action charges that the global AIDS pandemic must be seen
as a matter of international racism. The AIDS crisis - whose
epicenter is in Africa - is the harvest of an international
system of global apartheid, where the consequences of racism,
slavery and colonialism have, five centuries on, impoverished the
African continent and left it on its own to combat the worst
plague in human history. The World Conference should recognize
that the resolution of the global AIDS pandemic is directly
dependent upon the international fight against racism. It is the
devaluation of black life that has enabled the western world to
turn its eyes away from this global health crisis. Of all of the
struggles against racism that we will discuss in Durban, none has
farther reaching consequences for the immediate future of our
common humanity.
Africa Action is addressing the WCAR on four principal areas.
(1) a declaration that the slave trade and enslavement of
Africans were crimes against humanity; (2) the right to
reparations for slavery, colonialism, apartheid and continuing
racism; (3) the cancellation of African countries' external
debts; (4) financing for the Global Fund for AIDS and other
infectious diseases.
The first two points relate to the need to acknowledge history
and to accept that reparations must be paid. The latter two
points address immediate steps that can and must be taken at the
level of international public policy to save millions of African
lives and to reverse the severe impoverishment of African people
that has resulted from historical and contemporary international
racism.
Together these points represent key elements of our vision of how
to invigorate the future: by acknowledging past injustice,
establishing appropriate remedies, and taking new concrete
actions to address the most pressing structural obstacles to
Africans' and African descendants' access to their basic human
rights today, especially -- at this critical juncture - the right
to health (the right to life itself).
1. Crimes against humanity
The enslavement of Africans and the slave trade that sustained
the institutions of slavery were crimes against humanity. The
enslavement of Africans was - as the AADC has pointed out - "a
unique tragedy in the history of humanity which is unparalleled
not only because of its abhorrent barbarism but also in terms of
its enormous magnitude, its institutionalized nature, its
transnational dimension, and especially its negation of the very
essence of the human nature of Africans and African descendants."
These crimes against humanity have shaped the life chances of
hundreds of millions of Africans and African descendants, and
established the foundations of inequality along the "color line"
that are today manifest in a system of global apartheid
characterized by obscene disparities in wealth, power and access
to basic human rights, disparities that closely track race and
place. Formal acknowledgment of these crimes against humanity is
a necessary and salutary step in the process of repairing the
damages caused by these crimes.
2) Reparations for the slave trade, slavery, colonialism and
apartheid
Africa Action believes that actual reparations are more important
than apologies. We believe that reparations will be among the
most prominent issues at the World Conference. We welcome this
and do not believe that this will detract from coverage of other
current problems of intolerance throughout the world that also
require attention, including contemporary forms of slavery.
Indeed the challenge and opportunity at this World Conference is
to connect history to the present. This requires an
acknowledgment of the obligation of rich countries to support
efforts to address the consequences of five centuries of creating
an international economic system that benefits the few, mainly
themselves. It also requires the recognition that racism is still
central to the functioning of this global system.
It is the systemic and long-term impoverishment of the victims of
racism, xenophobia and intolerance that should be the focus of
this World Conference. Africa Action supports the call for
reparations and associates itself with the Abuja Proclamation of
1993 sponsored by the Organization of African Unity and its
Reparations Commission; the Declarations of Africans and African
descendants at the WCAR regional meetings in Dakar, Senegal and
Vienna, Austria; the Principles/Commitments on Race and Poverty
drafted by the NGO Roundtable at the WCAR's Regional Preparatory
meeting for the Americas; and the recent position paper of Human
Rights Watch on Reparations (which represents a welcome shift in
their work towards full inclusion of social and economic rights).
Africa Action believes that Africans and African descendants that
are disadvantaged today as groups should be compensated by the
governments responsible for the practices that inflicted such
suffering upon them and that have today resulted in structural
inequalities and abuses associated with the impoverishment of
Africans and African descendants. Compensation should provide
resources adequate to address these structural inequalities.
Those who commit crimes against humanity must make reparation and
governments cannot avoid responsibility because of the passage of
time. The poverty and inequities that characterize the struggles
of Africans and African descendant people today are consequences
of deliberate acts that have shaped the world.
3) Who Owes Whom? - Cancel Africa's External Debt
While the movement for reparations grows and gains more
attention, respect and response from culpable governments and
other institutions that benefitted from slavery, colonialism and
apartheid; and while the machinery to manage reparations is being
established, there is an urgent need for immediate international
action on two life or death issues directly related to the legacy
of international racism. The first is the illegitimate, immoral
and crippling foreign debt that African countries owe to the
wealthy white countries and the international institutions that
represent their economic interests (i.e. the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund).
The 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa spend approximately $13.5
billion every year repaying debts to rich foreign creditors for
past loans of questionable legitimacy. These debt repayments
divert money directly from basic human needs such as health care
and education, and undermine African governments' fight against
the AIDS pandemic and their efforts to promote sustainable
development. The All-Africa Conference of Churches has called
Africa's massive foreign debt burden "a new form of slavery, as
vicious as the slave trade".
Africa Action calls for the cancellation of Africa's foreign
debt, which we consider in large part to be illegitimate, based
on its origins and consequences. We consider the present and past
attempts to deal with the debt crisis to be absolutely
insufficient, and we oppose the existing debt relief framework,
developed and controlled by creditors and designed to function
only in their interests. Africa Action opposes conditionalities
imposed by Northern creditors which perpetuate a global economic
system where Africa remains economically controlled and exploited
by the developed world. We believe that the costs of debt
cancellation should be borne by the creditor nations and the
International Financial Institutions, and moreover, we believe
that the global North owes Africa an historical debt for
centuries of exploiting the continent's human and natural
resources. Debt cancellation is a step that should be taken
immediately, as partial downpayment on reparations.
4) Fight the "Black Death" - Finance the UN Global Fund for AIDS
AIDS has become the black plague. Its epicenter is Africa, the
region with the next highest infection rate is the Caribbean, and
in the U.S. (the region ranked third) HIV/AIDS infection rates
are increasing mainly among people of color. So while AIDS is a
global threat that knows no borders and does not discriminate by
race, at present it is mainly killing black people. And that is
the cruel truth about why the western world has failed to respond
with dispatch. The pandemic starkly reveals the fault lines of
deep inequality in the world order.
The slave system, and the colonial era that followed, helped
entrench both racial stereotypes and disparities in wealth,
largely determining the starting points for individuals and
countries in today's globalizing world. Among the most sensitive
indicators of that inequality is health. The AIDS pandemic in
Africa provides a dramatic reminder. It is not only that global
inequality is increasing. The distribution of the suffering, as
in the past five centuries, is clearly linked to both place and
race. According to the latest World Health Report, released in
June 2000, forty-four of the fifty-two countries with life
expectancies less than 50 years are in Africa.
The rich countries' failure to act now is linked to the fact that
the majority of those affected are poor, black and female. The
response to the global AIDS pandemic will show whether common
humanity will prevail over corporate greed. It will also show
whether the world is ready to confront centuries of global
injustice. The rich and white world - through their governments -
have thus far refused to finance the war against this threat to
humanity because its victims are mainly black. The Global Fund
for AIDS that the United Nations is attempting to development as
a vehicle to deliver the resources needed to defeat AIDS has
received a mere pittance of its already conservatively estimated
budget of $10 billion. U.S. pledges to the Global Health Fund
fall far short of the $3 billion that would be an appropriate
U.S. share of the $10 billion a year needed. And the U.S.
administration has not repudiated the remarks by the US Agency
for International Development (USAID) Administrator, Andrew
Natsios, who tried to justify denying AIDS treatment to Africans
because, he stated, "they can't tell time."
Conclusion
Africa Action believes it is critical to recognize that the
current international political economy very closely resembles a
form of global apartheid, that African rights are the most
egregiously violated under this system, and that the United
States is the single most powerful actor within this system and
the custodian of its ways.
Global apartheid, stated briefly, is an system of international
white minority rule. Race determines access to basic human
rights; wealth and power are accumulated and structured by race
and place; structural racism is found in global economic
processes, political institutions and cultural assumptions; and
international double standards are practiced that assume inferior
rights to be appropriate for certain "others," defined by origin,
race, gender, or geography.
Global apartheid is more than a metaphor. It is a more accurate
moniker for the corporate globalization that is now rightfully
protested at every international meeting. Global apartheid has
evolved as a consequence of an international economic system
built upon the slave trade, slavery and colonialism, and upon
centuries of racism and racial discrimination. Global apartheid
has national and local consequences throughout the world. But
none is as devastating as the global AIDS pandemic.
Durban, South Africa is an appropriate setting for this - the
third - World Conference Against Racism. The venue should inspire
us to build upon one of the greatest international successes
against racism at the end of the 20th century, the defeat of
apartheid in South Africa. Last year, Durban hosted the 13th
international conference on AIDS (the first ever in Africa).
Durban 2000 (on AIDS) and Durban 2001 (on racism) are connected
by more than geographical coincidence. If the material damages
from past injustice were only felt by past generations, the
argument over apologies and reparations might be academic. But in
fact the racial order derived from the interlocked sequence of
slavery, the slave trade, colonialism and apartheid still
profoundly affects all aspects of life, including survival
itself, in South Africa, the U.S., and globally.
Participation in the WCAR
Every country in the world should participate in the WCAR at the
highest possible level, as befits a world summit on an issue as
serious and important as this. The United States in particular
should participate at the highest level and provide generous
financial support because it is historically the greatest
beneficiary of the crimes justified by racism and the world's
richest country as a result. The United States' threats to
boycott the WCAR represent the height of arrogance and a callous
dismissal of one of the greatest problems facing the U.S. and the
world today. The apparent decision to send a low-level official
instead of Secretary of State Colin Powell puts in question the
symbolism often attributed to Powell's being the first African
American to hold that post. This decision is testimony to the
racism that continues to shape U.S. foreign policy.
Africa Action will participate actively in the NGO forum of the
WCAR and will be well represented by Staff and Board Members
throughout. While we have sought to highlight what we consider to
be strategic priorities for the WCAR, Africa Action also supports
the totality of the work of the Conference. We consider the WCAR
to be an unprecedented opportunity to strengthen the growing
international movement against global apartheid and for global
justice.
Africa Action, Treatment Action Campaign, Physicians for Human
Rights, and Student Global AIDS Campaign Urge Greater Focus on
AIDS Crisis At World Conference Against Racism (WCAR)
August 30, 2001 (Durban, South Africa) - As more than 10,000 NGO
representatives, youth activists and government officials from
around the world gather in Durban to discuss racism and related
issues, Africa Action, Treatment Action Campaign, Physicians for
Human Rights, and Student Global AIDS Campaign strongly urge
delegates to address the most critical manifestation of
international racism: the failure of the international community
to respond to the AIDS pandemic in Africa.
Africa has already lost 17 million people to AIDS, and more than
25 million are currently infected with HIV. In Kwazulu-Natal,
the province where Durban is situated, the infection rate is
37%. AIDS has become the black plague. While it is a disease
that knows no borders and does not discriminate by race, at
present it is mainly killing black people. Vulnerability is
linked to poverty, poverty to race, and race to centuries-old
history of the slave trade and colonialism.
AIDS points to more fundamental global inequalities than those
involving a single disease, illuminating a system of global
injustice and global medical apartheid. It is the devaluation
of black life that has enabled the world to turn its eyes away
from this global crisis. The rich countries of the North have
the technology and resources to prevent millions of unnecessary
deaths and their failure to respond is a function of racism.
Africa Action, Treatment Action Campaign, Physicians for Human
Rights and Student Global AIDS Campaign urge delegates to
address the key features of global apartheid and particularly
the AIDS pandemic. We call upon the richest countries of the
world to contribute at least $10 billion to the UN Global Health
Fund to fight HIV/AIDS. We demand total cancellation of
Africa's illegitimate debt as well as affordable access to AIDS
drugs, which is a fundamental human right. In order to fight
this pandemic, we must also protect against human rights
violations, including racial discrimination.
We urge the South African government to immediately announce the
implementation of a national mother-to-child HIV prevention
programme. In South Africa more than 150 black children are born
with HIV every day. Presently, the majority of poor black women
with HIV/AIDS are denied an intervention that could save their
children while their white and privileged black counter-parts in
the private sector receive the best medical interventions.
After three years of negotiation Treatment Action Campaign (TAC)
and its allies had to resort to the courts to enforce the
equality of poor black women who use the public sector. We call
on all people to support TAC.
Ending the global AIDS pandemic is directly dependent upon the
international fight against racism. Failure to address the
HIV/AIDS pandemic will constitute one of the greatest crimes
against humanity in world history.
This material is distributed by Africa Action (incorporating the
Africa Policy Information Center, The Africa Fund, and the
American Committee on Africa). Africa Action's information
services provide accessible information and analysis in order to
promote U.S. and international policies toward Africa that
advance economic, political and social justice and the full
spectrum of human rights.
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