The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S. Hegemony

by Paul Street
Truthdig

There are good reasons for any good progressive to bemoan the presence of the childish, racist, sexist and ecocidal, right-wing plutocrat Donald Trump in the White House. One complaint about Trump that should be held at arm’s-length by anyone on the left, however, is the charge that Trump is contributing to the decline of U.S. global power--to the erosion of the United States’ superpower status and the emergence of a more multipolar world.

This criticism of Trump comes from different elite corners. Last October, the leading neoconservative foreign policy intellectual and former George W. Bush administration adviser Eliot Cohen wrote an Atlantic magazine essay titled “How Trump Is Ending the American Era.” Cohen recounted numerous ways in which Trump had reduced “America’s standing and ability to influence global affairs.” He worried that Trump’s presidency would leave “America’s position in the world stunted” and an “America lacking confidence” on the global stage.

But it isn’t just the right wing that writes and speaks in such terms about how Trump is contributing to the decline of U.S. hegemony. A recent Time magazine reflection by the liberal commentator Karl Vick (who wrote in strongly supportive terms about the giant January 2017 Women’s March against Trump) frets that that Trump’s “America First” and authoritarian views have the world “looking for leadership elsewhere.”

“Could this be it?” Vick asks. “Might the American Century actually clock out at just 72 years, from 1945 to 2017? No longer than Louis XIV ruled France? Only 36 months more than the Soviet Union lasted, after all that bother?”

I recently reviewed a manuscript on the rise of Trump written by a left-liberal American sociologist. Near the end of this forthcoming and mostly excellent and instructive volume, the author finds it “worrisome” that other nations see the U.S. “abdicating its role as the world’s leading policeman” under Trump--and that, “given what we have seen so far from the [Trump] administration, U.S. hegemony appears to be on shakier ground than it has been in a long time.”

For the purposes of this report, I’ll leave aside the matter of whether Trump is, in fact, speeding the decline of U.S. global power (he undoubtedly is) and how he’s doing that to focus instead on a very different question: What would be so awful about the end of “the American Era”?the seven-plus decades of U.S. global economic and related military supremacy between 1945 and the present? Why should the world mourn the “premature” end of the “American Century”?

It would be interesting to see a reliable opinion poll on how the politically cognizant portion of the 94 percent of humanity that lives outside the U.S. would feel about the end of U.S. global dominance. My guess is that Uncle Sam’s weakening would be just fine with most Earth residents who pay attention to world events.

According to a global survey of 66,000 people conducted across 68 countries by the Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research (WINMR) and Gallup International at the end of 2013, Earth’s people see the United States as the leading threat to peace on the planet. The U.S. was voted top threat by a wide margin.

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A Quick Reminder of Why Colonialism was Bad

by Nathan J. Robinson
Current Affairs

Ignoring or downplaying colonial atrocities is the moral equivalent of Holocaust denial…

Perhaps the easiest way to understand why colonialism was so horrific is to imagine it happening in your own country now. It is invaded, conquered, and occupied by a foreign power. Existing governing institutions are dismantled and replaced by absolute rule of the colonizers. A strict hierarchy separates the colonized and the colonizer; you are treated as an inconvenient subhuman who can be abused at will. The colonists commit crimes with impunity against your people. Efforts at resistance are met with brutal reprisal, sometimes massacre. The more vividly and accurately you manage to conjure what this scenario would actually look like, the more horrified you will be by the very idea of colonialism.

One would think this revulsion was now universally shared. But that is far from being the case. The majority of British people are still proud of colonialism and the British Empire. Americans continue to show an almost total indifference to the lasting poverty and devastation inflicted on the country’s indigenous population. Being pro-colonial is no bar to success in academia; Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has long defended the British Empire as a force for good in the world. And now, Princeton PhD and Portland State University professor Bruce Gilley has published an unapologetic “Case for Colonialism” in Third World Quarterly, a respected academic journal.

Gilley’s article takes a very clear stance: not only was colonialism a force for good in the world, but anti-colonial sentiment is “preposterous.” What’s more, Gilley says, we need a new program of colonization, with Western powers taking over the governing functions of less developed countries. Gilley says he intends to overturn or revise three lines of criticism directed against colonialism: “that it was objectively harmful (rather than beneficial),” “that it was subjectively illegitimate (rather than legitimate),” and “that it offends the sensibilities of contemporary society.” Thus he is not just concerned to prove that colonialism was good and should be revived. He also wants to prove that it was “legitimate,” i.e. that there is nothing inherently unjust about invading and dominating a people.

Gilley’s article is a truly extraordinary piece of work. It’s hard to believe, at first, that it isn’t a Sokal-esque satire intended to prove how normalized abhorrent opinions are. But it appears to be sincere. And because it appeared in a mainstream journal, and the sentiments it expresses are somewhat common, it’s worth responding to the case Gilley makes.

Gilley’s argument is, roughly: opposition to colonialism is reflexive rather than reasoned. This has caused terrible consequences, because postcolonial governments have hurt their people by attempting to destroy beneficial colonial institutions. The “civilizing mission” of colonialism was valuable and had a positive effect. Colonialism was legitimate because it helped people and many populations were willing to tolerate it. Anti-colonial arguments are often incoherent, blaming colonial governments for all ills rather than examining what would have occurred in the absence of those governments. And colonialism should cease to be a dirty word; in fact, it should be re-instituted, because many developing countries are incapable of self-government. Gilley’s article is brief, so he does not elaborate much on each of these points. But the thrust of the article is that a commitment to factual rigor requires an unbiased assessment of colonialism, and that such an assessment will reveal colonialism to be a good thing for the colonized. Anti-colonialism is a destructive and irrational “ideology” that should be abandoned.

I suppose to those unfamiliar with the history, Gilley’s argument could appear superficially persuasive. But a moment’s examination of the record reveals why the case he makes is abhorrent. Gilley says he is simply asking for an unbiased assessment of the facts, that he just wants us to take off our ideological blinders and examine colonialism from an empirical perspective. But this is not what he has done. Instead, in his presentation of colonialism’s record, Gilley has deliberately excluded mention of every single atrocity committed by a colonial power. Instead of evaluating the colonial record empirically, he has distorted that record, concealing evidence of gross crimes against humanity. The result is not only unscholarly, but is morally tantamount to Holocaust denial.

First, Gilley says he is making a “case for colonialism,” to rescue Western colonial history’s “bad name.” But he restricts his examination to “the early nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.” He does so because if he were to include the first 300 years of Western colonialism (i.e. the majority), it would be almost impossible to mount any kind of case that the endeavor benefited indigenous populations. The civilizations of the Americas were exterminated by colonialism, through disease, displacement, resource depletion, one-sided warfare, and outright massacre, and their populations suffered a “catastrophic collapse.” Since it is impossible to spin this as benefiting the inhabitants, Gilley avoids mentioning that it even happened. This, in itself, in an article defending “colonialism,” should sufficiently prove that Gilley is unwilling to consider evidence that contradicts his case, by discussing “colonialism” generally while selecting only the cases in which native populations were not extinguished.

Next, Gilley’s method of defending colonialism is through “cost-benefit analysis,” in which the harms of colonialism are weighed against the “improvements in living conditions” and better governance. (Gilley even proposes “greater business confidence” as a potential benefit of a neo-colonial project.) He quotes his standard of measurement:

[I]n times and places where colonial rule had, on balance, a positive effect on training for self-government, material well-being, labor allocation choices, individual upward mobility, cross-cultural communication, and human dignity, compared to the situation that would likely have obtained absent European rule, then the case for colonialism is strong. Conversely, in times and places where the effects of foreign rule in these respects were, on balance, negative compared to a territory’s likely alternative past, then colonialism is morally indefensible

We should observe here that this is a terrible way of evaluating colonialism. It is favored by colonialism’s apologists because it means that truly unspeakable harms can simply be “outweighed” and thereby trivialized. We can see quickly how ludicrous this is: “Yes, we may have indiscriminately massacred 500 children, but we also opened a clinic that vaccinated enough children to save 501 lives, therefore ‘the case for colonialism is strong.’” We don’t allow murderers to produce defenses like this, for good reason: you can’t get away with saying “Yes, I killed my wife, but I’m also a fireman.” We must also be careful about using hypothetical counterfactuals: examining whether colonialism is “better than what would have happened in its absence.” I’m reading Great Expectations at the moment, and so I’ll call this the “Pip’s sister defense”: Pip’s sister justifies her cruelty and physical abuse by constantly reminding Pip that if it were not for her, he would be in an even worse situation. It’s an argument frequently deployed by abusive and exploitative individuals in order to justify their acts. And the point is that whether or not it’s true is immaterial to the evaluation of the person’s crimes. Gilley and other colonial apologists, like the husband telling his wife that while she may not like being hit, she should remember who provides for her, try to exonerate colonial powers by suggesting that enough economic growth could somehow make a “strong case for colonialism” even if there had been constant mass rape and torture. (By the way, I think even committed opponents of colonialism may sometimes fall into this trap. They may feel as if it is necessary to deny that colonialism ever brought any benefits—which, as Gilley points out, even Chinua Achebe doesn’t think. Instead, it’s important to point out that building power lines and opening a school doesn’t provide one with a license to rob and murder people. Furthermore, nobody should be surprised if performance on certain economic and political metrics did end up declining in the postcolonial era, since reconstructing a functioning country after decades or centuries of subjugation is… not easily done.) 

But even if we assume that “cost-benefit” analysis is the correct way to examine colonialism, Gilley has to distort the evidence in order to prove his case. For example, Gilley cites the fact that “since gaining independence, Congo has never had at its disposal an army comparable in efficiency and discipline” to that it had under the Belgians, commenting that “Maybe the Belgians should come back.” If one knows anything about the history of the Belgian Congo, one knows that this statement is equivalent to saying “Maybe the Confederacy should come back” to the American South. Belgian King Leopold created possibly the most infamous colonial regime in history. Contemporaries called it “legalized robbery enforced by violence,” and Leopold “turned his ‘Congo Free State’ into a massive labour camp, made a fortune for himself from the harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death of perhaps 10 million innocent people.” Belgian rule in the Congo was a reign of terror that scandalized the world:

Much of the death toll was the result of killing, pure and simple. Villages were dragooned into tapping rubber, and if they refused to comply, or complied but failed to meet European quotas, they were punished. The hands of dead Congolese were severed and kept by militias to account to their quartermasters for spent ammunition. And, as Morel said, the practice of mutilation was extended to the living. By far the greatest number of deaths, however, were caused by sickness and starvation. The effect of the terror was to drive communities from their sources of food.

Below is one of the most disturbing pictures I have ever seen (WARNING), taken by English missionary and journalist Alice Seeley Harris, who exposed the Belgian abuses. It depicts a man looking at the severed hand and foot of his murdered daughter, who had been killed after the man failed to meet his daily rubber harvesting quotient:

It is shocking that Gilley could discuss Belgian colonialism without so much as mentioning any of this in his “cost-benefit” analysis. But then, despite promising to weigh negatives against positives, he doesn’t really discuss any negatives. He says British suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya was better than the alternative, but doesn’t discuss what it involved, namely mass detention and human rights abuse. Kenyans were “put in camps where they were subject to severe torture, malnutrition, beatings. The women were sexually assaulted. Two of the men were castrated. The most severe gruesome torture you could imagine.” Gilley doesn’t deal with or refute this, he simply writes all allegations off as “scolding.” (Even Niall Ferguson admits that “When imperial authority was challenged… the British response was brutal.) Likewise unmentioned is what happened in India under British rule: the horrific Amritsar massacre, the mass famines that killed millions, and the horrors of the partition. French crimes in Algeria: unmentioned. German genocide in Namibia: unmentioned. Heck, Gilley doesn’t even mention racism, or the various psychological wounds inflicted on colonized people by a dehumanizing ideology (as explained by Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi, all of whom… also go unmentioned.) One of the cruelest aspects of colonialism is the way it forces the colonized into servility and obedience, yet this doesn’t even count as a “cost.” 

In “Shooting an Elephant,” while conceding the prejudices he had developed against the Burmese, George Orwell expressed the revulsion that he felt about participating in the colonial project:

I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos — all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.

British police stand guard over Kenyans as their homes are searched during the Mau Mau uprising. Source: The Independent

I say, then, that Gilley’s article is “morally tantamount to Holocaust denial” because if you say you are performing a cost-benefit analysis of colonialism, and you ignore colonial atrocities, you are fabricating history. Gilley says that anti-colonialism is just leftist ideology, that it doesn’t take account of the facts, but it’s his article that depicts a factually false version of colonial history, one in which colonists acted out of benevolent and civilizing motives, and primarily devoted themselves to opening schools and hospitals, and imposing efficient government. The worst he will say about colonialism is that it was “not an unalloyed good.”

The portions of Gilley’s article alleging that colonialism was “legitimate” adopt reasoning that cannot possibly be taken seriously. Gilley says that “alien rule has often been legitimate in world history because it has provided better governance than the indigenous alternative.” If this logic were accepted, anyone could establish totalitarian rule over anyone else if they could “govern them better than they can govern themselves”; Gilley doesn’t provide any reason why we should accept that theory, he just says it. Gilley also says colonized populations engaged in “relatively voluntary acts” like  “send[ing] their children to colonial schools and hospitals” and “fight[ing] for colonial armies” that legitimized the enterprise, and that “the rapid spread and persistence of Western colonialism with very little force relative to the populations and areas concerned is prima facie evidence of its acceptance by subject populations compared to the feasible alternatives.” Somehow, obtaining compliance from an indigenous population means obtaining legitimacy, which is like saying that a man with a gun to his head has voluntarily decided to give you his wallet. As evidence that colonizers were not attempting to pillage the colonized, he says “Despite cries of ‘exploitation’, colonialism was probably a money loser for imperial powers,” reasoning that would lead us to believe that if a company loses money it must not be seeking profit.

I go into this level of detail because I think it’s crucial to show that Gilley’s article is not a serious work of scholarship. I think the gut reaction of many people will be that Gilley’s arguments are “self-evidently” absurd. But apparently this is not the case, because the Third World Quarterly chose to publish them. I don’t know why they made that decision; frankly, it’s very strange. The board of TWQ is stocked with anticolonial lefties like Vijay Prashad and Noam Chomsky, and while Prashad has said that they didn’t see the article before publication (and threatened to resign if it’s not retracted), it’s odd that the editors themselves thought an essay suggesting that the Belgians should recolonize the Congo was a useful contribution to scholarly discourse.

But while TWQ’s motives remain inscrutable, I suspect I understand Gilley’s. This article does not read as if it is attempting to be taken seriously. Its tone toward critics of colonialism is polemical and mocking (these scholars have a “metropolitan flaneur culture of attitude and performance”). Gilley must intend to provoke people to rage: postcolonial countries should be like Britain, which “embraced and celebrated its colonisers”; anticolonial thought was about “advocacy” rather than “accuracy”; colonialism was not just legitimate but “highly legitimate”; and we should “build new Western colonies from scratch” and “colonial states should be paid for their services” by the colonized.

I expect Gilley wants the following to happen: people will be outraged. They will call for the article to be retracted. Then, Gilley will complain of censorship, and argue that lefties don’t care about the facts, and that his points has been proved by the fact that they’d rather try to have his article purged than have to refute its claims. This is a dynamic that has occurred many, many times. It’s what Milo Yiannopoulos did: he would say things that were truly upsetting and outrageous (including bullying and mocking individual students), then when people got upset and outraged and tried to shut him down, he would complain that “SJWs” were trying to censor him because they can’t deal with facts and arguments. The same thing happened when conservative law professors recently published an op-ed blaming the “rap culture of inner-city blacks” for cultural decline, with one of them lauding the “superiority” of white European culture. People got upset, for obvious reasons, and students objected to having to be taught by a white supremacist. But when one of the professors went on FOX News, he declared that “there were no allegations that anything we said was incorrect.” (There were plenty of such allegations.)

It’s a predictable pattern: A conservative publishes something that is both factually duplicitous and morally heinous. The liberal reaction focuses on the moral heinousness. The conservative says that the liberal doesn’t care about facts. I have a sneaking fear that Bruce Gilley is going to end up on Tucker Carlson’s show, whining that the left wants his article retracted because they refuse to confront the true facts of colonialism and because they are biased against white Europeans.

And so I’m worried about how the response to this article may play out. I am not signing the petition to have it retracted, because I believe that the journal shouldn’t retract it simply because there was public pressure. I am also very concerned that this could be a PR coup for the right, as so many of these things are. It’s tough, of course, because for the reasons I’ve outlined above, the article shouldn’t have been published. Gilley did not meet the standards that should be expected of an academic. He falsified history. When evaluated by a fair standard, he has not upheld the honesty and rigor that should be expected of someone in his position, and the article is a factual disgrace as well as a moral one. But it would be very easy to fall into a certain predictable trap, where the left calls Bruce Gilley a racist, and Gilley declares that they simply can’t handle the truth. And while I’m sympathetic to the argument that we should avoid that by Not Even Addressing Such Rubbish, bad arguments fester when they go unaddressed. (This is why I put myself through the ordeal of reading The Bell Curve.)

I think, then, that all responses to this article should be rigorous and careful. I think everyone should try to read the full thing, to know what Gilley argues and what he doesn’t argue. And we must repeatedly emphasize that the reason Gilley’s piece is so wretched is not just because it advocates something that contradicts our sense of justice, but because he has deliberately produced a false version of history. I am sick and tired of people on the right saying those of us on the left simply Can’t Respond To Their Arguments. I’ve read their arguments, and they’re bad.

Book Recommendation: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Just Five of the Worst Atrocities Carried Out by the British Empire

The Independent

A new YouGov poll has found the British public are generally proud of the British Empire and its colonial past.

YouGov found 44 per cent were proud of Britain's history of colonialism, with 21 per cent regretting it happened and 23 per cent holding neither view.

The same poll also found 43 per cent believed the British Empire was a good thing, 19 per cent said it was bad and 25 per cent said it was "neither".

At its height in 1922, the British empire governed a fifth of the world's population and a quarter of the world's total land area.

Although the proponents of Empire say it brought various economic developments to parts of the world it controlled, critics point to massacres, famines and the use of concentration camps by the British Empire.

1. Boer concentration camps

Armed Afrikaners on the veldt near Ladysmith during the second Boer War, circa 1900

During the Second Boer War (1899-1902), the British rounded up around a sixth of the Boer population - mainly women and children - and detained them in camps, which were overcrowded and prone to outbreaks of disease, with scant food rations.
Of the 107,000 people interned in the camps, 27,927 Boers died, along with an unknown number of black Africans.

2. Amritsar massacre

A young visitor looks at a painting depicting the Amritsar Massare at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar

When peaceful protesters defied a government order and demonstrated against British colonial rule in Amritsar, India, on 13 April 1919, they were blocked inside the walled Jallianwala Gardens and fired upon by Gurkha soldiers.

The soldiers, under the orders of Brigadier Reginald Dyer, kept firing until they ran out of ammunition, killing between 379 and 1,000 protesters and injuring another 1,100 within 10 minutes.

Brigadier Dyer was later lauded a hero by the British public, who raised £26,000 for him as a thank you.

3. Partitioning of India

British lawyer and law lord Cyril Radcliffe, 1st Viscount Radcliffe (1899 - 1977) at the Colonial Office, London, July 1956

In 1947, Cyril Radcliffe was tasked with drawing the border between India and the newly created state of Pakistan over the course of a single lunch.

After Cyril Radcliffe split the subcontinent along religious lines, uprooting over 10 million people, Hindus in Pakistan and Muslims in India were forced to escape their homes as the situation quickly descended into violence.

Some estimates suggest up to one million people lost their lives in sectarian killings.

4. Mau Mau Uprising

Mau Mau suspects at one of the prison camps in 1953

Thousands of elderly Kenyans, who claim British colonial forces mistreated, raped and tortured them during the Mau Mau Uprising (1951-1960), have launched a £200m damages claim against the UK Government.

Members of the Kikuyu tribe were detained in camps, since described as "Britain's gulags" or concentration camps, where they allege they were systematically tortured and suffered serious sexual assault.

Estimates of the deaths vary widely: historian David Anderson estimates there were 20,000, whereas Caroline Elkins believes up to 100,000 could have died.

5. Famines in India

Starving children in India, 1945

Between 12 and 29 million Indians died of starvation while it was under the control of the British Empire, as millions of tons of wheat were exported to Britain as famine raged in India.

In 1943, up to four million Bengalis starved to death when Winston Churchill diverted food to British soldiers and countries such as Greece while a deadly famine swept through Bengal.


Talking about the Bengal famine in 1943, Churchill said: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.”

I stowed away in a ship from Sudan to come here. But it's like a prison

by Jonathan Brown

The Independent

It was a story that shocked the nation – a family of failed asylum-seekers jumping to their death. But what's life like for the residents of the bleak estate on the outskirts of Glasgow? Jonathan Brown visits the crumbling towers of Red Road to find out

From the flat Nour Osman Nour Bush occupies on the 29th floor of 10 Red Road, he has plenty of time to gaze on the sweeping panorama across the rooftops of Glasgow to the Trossachs beyond.

But he does not find the view inspiring; it merely underlines his sense of being trapped in an alien land that does not want him. "It is like being in prison," says the 32-year-old former accountancy student who stowed away in a sweltering container ship from his native Sudan after he claims he was beaten while in jail for dabbling in opposition politics.

As a member of the Zaghawa tribe, a marginalised African group that has been drawn into Darfur's genocidal conflict between black and Arab, he chose to put his trust in the people-smugglers. Funded by the proceeds from the sale of his mother's gold jewellery he sought refuge in Britain where he arrived hidden in the back of a lorry in 2007. But, like 70 per cent of those who seek permission to stay, his asylum application was turned down. Two months ago, his £35-a-week allowance was stopped and he has been told to leave the sparsely furnished flat he shares with a fellow Sudanese.

He is now waiting and wondering what will happen next. "I am getting older and older and my life will finish and nothing good will have happened. I have never had a job. I will never get married or have children. You see people all around you with these things and I have nothing."

It is a story typical of many whose long odyssey escaping the world's trouble spots has brought them to the grim housing estate off Petershill Drive on the outskirts of Glasgow. Here, last Sunday, Serguei Serykh, his wife, Tatiana, and their 19-year-old stepson Stepan, who had just been told they were not welcome to stay in the UK and ordered to leave their temporary accommodation within 21 days, smashed their way through the anti-suicide meshing of their balcony and leapt to their deaths on Red Road, 150ft below.

Official sources say the Serykhs' deaths are a result of the father's paranoid delusions, campaigners for the rights of asylum-seekers are demanding a full public inquiry. They say the tragedy highlights the deep sense of hopelessness of those caught in the system. Like many others last Sunday, Mr Bush heard the Serykhs' screams and rushed to look. The effect on the community here in the Sightburn area of Glasgow, where more than 60 languages are spoken by the inhabitants of this crumbling and soon-to-be demolished world, has been profound.

Feelings of self-harm appear prevalent among the young men in their 20s and 30s who are forbidden from working although some are skilled professionals. They may attend college and travel by bus but struggle to integrate beyond the confines of their nationality groups within the flats. It is an atmosphere in which fears can easily take over. As we sip tea in the bare surroundings, the beige woodchip walls unadorned by pictures or photos, the only decoration a plastic elephant on top of an old-fashioned television found dumped in the streets below, Mr Bush says he still bears the scars from where his feet were beaten while in jail and he was forced to stand for hours on hot stones in the boiling sun.

He cites the case of Adam Osman Mohammed, highlighted in The Independent last year, who returned to Darfur under a government repatriation scheme where he was shot dead in front of his wife and four-year-old son. "It makes me 100 per cent scared," he says. "I can't sleep at night because I do not feel that I am in a safe place. I feel like I am going to be sent back to Sudan and the government will arrest me at the airport and they will kill me. I wake up three times every night and have bad dreams in my head. I have thought about suicide many times."

The fear of return is compounded by the crushing boredom that envelopes the estate and the ever-swirling rumours that circulate by text and word of mouth among the listless young men. "I have nothing to do all day," says Mr Bush. "I am just sitting in the flat. I like to watch football and maybe read a newspaper. Sometimes I go out for a walk but I can't sit here 24 hours a day."

It can scarcely have been the outcome envisaged by the post-war Glasgow City councillors that their futuristic vision of modern living would one day become the sink estate for the world's dispossessed. Now earmarked for demolition, the eight high-rise blocks in their day were the biggest social housing complex in western Europe, the highest buildings in the city, much sought-after by people escaping the overcrowded slum tenements.

But decline was swift and, by the 1980s as the heroin epidemic took grip in Glasgow, no one wanted to live at Red Road. Today the tower blocks may be the subject of artworks and even a critically acclaimed film but their days are numbered and the first will be torn down in May.

Glasgow has taken in more than 2,000 asylum-seekers each year since 2000 under the Home Office policy designed to alleviate pressure on London and the South-east by diverting asylum seekers to different parts of the country.

There are said to be 5,000 asylum-seekers in Glasgow. But Robina Qureshi, executive director of the charity Positive Action in Housing, says the strategy has short-changed the weakest in society. "The government policy in the UK was to put them [asylum-seekers] in the places that no one else wanted under the assumption that no one would complain."

Many of those who arrive at the offices of the charity in the centre of Glasgow are seeking advice or a grant from an emergency relief fund that needs constant replenishing. The clients are not just poor, they are "beyond poor", she says. Cut off from all benefits yet inhabiting an "invisible" world where they are supposed to give up their long-term claim to asylum and simply return home, they have slipped off the radar.

A study by the London School of Economics last year suggested there may be as many as 500,000 failed asylum-seekers still living in the UK, thousands in Glasgow, though no one knows exactly how many.

The first wave of asylum-seekers to come to the city at the turn of the millennium immediately encountered tensions in the poor, white working-class communities where the were placed. In August 2001, 25-year-old Kurd, Firsat Dag, was stabbed to death in Sighthill, another dispossessed area next to Springburn and cut off from the rest of the city by the thundering urban motorway.

Aware that creating high concentrations of asylum-seekers made them vulnerable, today the population is dispersed in all areas of the city, although obvious pockets remain, as does the spectre of violence. Assad, like Firsat Dag is an Iraqi Kurd. He paid $10,000 to travel to Britain in a lorry from his home in Kirkuk three years ago. Like Mr Bush, he too has had his application for asylum turned down and has been ordered to leave his flat on the 28th floor of one of the Red Road blocks.

Assad is angry. "You come to my country and take oil," he says, his sunken eyes gleaming with rage. "Why do you tell me to go back to Iraq? I come here and you call me black-haired bastard," Lifting his shirt, the 26-year-old former mechanic shows off six livid puncture wounds and he has another in his head, the result, he says, of being attacked last January near the Red Road estate.

Assad does not know the identities or nationalities of his attackers but his lungs filled with blood and he required an emergency transfusion. "Ten more minutes and I would be dead," he says. "Now I am very sick and I have headaches all the time. I am not here for passport. I am here for myself, for my safety."

Back in Iraq, which he left in 2007, Assad says, his mother lost a leg in a car-bombing which killed 300 people in a crowded market place. Other family members died during Saddam Hussein's ethnic cleansing of the Kurdish region. His application to stay in Britain now rejected, he is thinking about going to Sweden. If that fails, he says, he does not know what to do. "I swear to God, sometimes I think I will kill myself," he adds.

Dr Rebecca Macfarlane, of the Westmuir Medical Centre in Parkhead, has been working with refugees in the city for 10 years. Many of her patients have been severely traumatised and show symptoms of anxiety and insomnia. "They may have nightmares and flashbacks to bad experiences," she says. "They may be extremely nervous and jump when someone knocks on the door. These are early signs of post traumatic stress disorder and some can be suicidal."

Confidential papers seen by The Independent this week charted the mental decline of Serguei Serykh. The "quiet and serious" Russian was granted protected-person status in Canada in 2000. But in 2007, after his full citizenship claim was rejected, he began to believe he was being hunted by Canadian intelligence who deployed "psychotronic weapons" against him.

In his application for British asylum, he claims to be a former senior officer of the main intelligence agency of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, although British security sources say they were unaware of any links he may have had. When he believed himself to come under attack, he said that, "flaming vibrations passed through my fingertips and into my arms, entering my heart. I felt as though my blood boiled, my heart rate was irregular and was about to stop; every bone in my body trembled in pain". The family travelled to many countries believing themselves to be followed, ultimately ending in a Red Road block.

Linda Fraser, project manager at the Red Road Family Centre, says: "The deaths have had a real impact on the community. They have felt quite traumatised by what happened. There is a real feeling of empathy for them and understanding of how desperate they must have been."

But she believes tensions between the indigenous and the asylum-seeking communities have improved. "After the initial suspicion, the local people have really welcomed them. By and large, they have overcome the myths. But people began to tell their personal stories and Glasgow realised they didn't just wake up one morning and think, 'I'm going to Britain'. They begin to understand why they are here and have empathy."

It is a rare message of hope. Yesterday, the plastic wrappers from the meagre floral tributes laid at the spot where the Serykhs fell were blowing in the wind. Residents are planning another demonstration demanding an official inquiry. Right now, all they can do is just sit and wait.

Democracy Now! Headlines for December 31, 2009

Democracy Now!

Afghan Investigators Accused Int’l Forces of Killing Schoolboys

In other news from Afghanistan, Al Jazeera reports at least eight Afghan civilians have been killed in an air raid by foreign forces in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province. Meanwhile, protests were held in several Afghan cities Wednesday over reports that international forces killed ten civilians, including many schoolboys, in an attack earlier in the week. NATO officials have denied civilians were killed, but Afghan investigators said nearly all those killed were school-age boys. In a statement released yesterday, President Hamid Karzai’s office said that a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan village and took ten people from three homes. Karzai’s office said all of the people detained were shot dead.

Canadian PM Harper Accused of Shutting Down Torture Probe

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has temporarily shut down Parliament until March, after the close of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The move shuts down all parliamentary committees, including a probe into whether Canadian troops turned over Afghan prisoners to Afghan authorities to be tortured. Liberal House leader Ralph Goodale accused Harper of padlocking Parliament and shutting down democracy. Goodale said, “Three times in three years and twice within one year, the Prime Minister takes this extraordinary step to muzzle Parliament. This time it’s a cover-up of what the Conservatives knew, and when they knew it, about torture in Afghanistan."

Dutch Court OKs Nigerian Suit Against Shell

Four Nigerian farmers have won the right to take oil giant Shell to court in The Hague. A Dutch court said on Wednesday it has jurisdiction to hear the case. The Nigerian farmers claim oil leaking out of a Shell pipeline polluted their farm lands and fish ponds. Geert Ritsema of the environmental organization Friends of the Earth welcomed the decision.

Geert Ritsema: “We think this is a breakthrough, because it’s now acknowledged by a Dutch court that the actions of Shell outside of the Netherlands can be—they can be held liable for these actions, and they can be held responsible. And that is the most important victory of today”

The four Nigerian farmers who filed the suit against Shell are expected to testify soon about the oil company’s presence in Nigeria.

Egyptian Police Beat Protesters from Gaza Freedom March

Eighty-six international activists and journalists have reportedly entered Gaza carrying humanitarian aid, but the Egyptian government is continuing to block more than 1,200 other other activists with the Gaza Freedom March from crossing the border. Organizers said Egypt’s position has prevented more aid from entering Gaza. Meanwhile, in Cairo, plainclothes Egyptian police officers beat members of the Gaza Freedom March as they staged a demonstration to demand the right to enter Gaza. Protesters were reportedly beaten with blows to the head and forcefully kicked. Other activists were detained in hotels. One Belgian protester named Maude said Egyptian security forces were tightly controlling their actions in Cairo.

Maude: “There was a lot of events in the street, in the street during the last few days. And now there is a big manifestation, but it’s not possible for us to join our group, because the police is making a circle and we can’t enter in. It’s not possible now."

Marooned at Lanzarote airport, the 'Gandhi of the Western Sahara'

The Independent

Disowned by Morocco, unwanted in Spain: Anita Brooks reports on the plight of a Nobel-nominated activist

Expelled from her homeland and weak from a hunger strike, the last thing award-winning Sahrawi independence activist Aminatou Haidar needs right now is a €180 fine.

But that's what a Spanish court has ordered her to pay for disturbing the peace at the Lanzarote airport in the Canary Islands, where the woman known as the Gandhi of the Western Sahara has camped since 16 November, refusing to eat anything but sugar water in protest at what she sees as her forced exile by Morocco.

The court fine came after Aena, the company that runs the airport, filed a complaint in a local Arrecife court, which on Monday issued a "minimal" €180 (£160) fine on the weakening activist. It is the latest twist to the surreal tale of how this Nobel Prize nominee wound up on a check-in terminal floor surrounded by sun-seeking tourists, her passport rescinded by Moroccan authorities.

Her Kafkaesque plight – which began when Ms Haidar refused to fill in the citizenship line of a customs form – has spurred an outpouring of support by Spanish artists and intellectuals such as film director Pedro Almodovar. They staged a concert outside Madrid at the weekend to pressure the Spanish government into doing more to help Ms Haidar return home.

"If I held a government post, I would be with her today," Almodovar told the crowd. "I would tell her that to preserve her dignity she doesn't have to die."

Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago was expected to visit her at the airport yesterday. A representative from the Robert F Kennedy Centre for Justice and Human Rights in Washington, Marselha Goncalves Margerin, is also by her side. The RFK Centre awarded her its 2008 prize, for denouncing human rights abuses by the Moroccan government.

"I think Morocco miscalculated about the amount of support she has all over the world," Ms Goncalves Margerin told The Independent as Ms Haidar began her 16th day of hunger strike. Ms Haidar's health continues to deteriorate – she can only move in a stretcher or wheelchair – as the Spanish foreign ministry searches for a solution. She fainted during negotiations at the weekend.

But so far she has rejected offers of Spanish nationality, as well as political asylum in Spain. They are unacceptable, according to her lawyer, Ines Miranda, because they would make her "a foreigner in her own land".

Spain's Foreign Minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, announced on Monday that she seemed happy with a new plan: the return of her original passport, which he is negotiating with Morocco.

The 42-year-old activist has devoted her life to the peaceful quest for independence of her mineral-rich desert homeland, a former Spanish colony now controlled by Morocco. She has been tortured and imprisoned in secret Moroccan jails. It took her 15 years for the authorities to grant her a passport.

Last month, she used that passport to travel to the United States, where she received an award from the Train Foundation in New York for her struggles. Then on 14 November she tried to return home to her husband and two teenage daughters in the Western Sahara's main town, Laayoune.

But before she reached the customs desk at Laayoune airport, a Moroccan officer questioned her about why she had left the citizenship line blank on her immigration entry form. Why had she written Western Sahara instead of Morocco in the address line? Her answer did not please authorities, and her passport was confiscated. She was told to sign a form renouncing her citizenship and was forced onto a plane. To where, she did not know.

Once in Lanzarote, she asked the Spanish authorities to be allowed to return to the Western Sahara. But they would not let her board a plane without a passport. According to Ms Goncalves Margerin, Ms Haidar believes Morocco planned her expulsion long before she left for the US, as part of a crackdown against Sahrawis who support the Polisario Front.

Ms Haidar also believes that Spain knew of the Moroccan plan in advance and agreed to offer the activist Spanish nationality. She already possesses a Spanish residency card.

"When she was in the US, she said: 'I expected two things to happen; either they will arrest me or they will take away my travel documents.' But she never thought they would expel her," Ms Goncalves Margerin said. "What is heartbreaking is that Spain agreed to accept her."

"Israel's Worst Enemies Are Those Who Support its Policies" - Chomsky

The Palestine Telegraph

Israel's greatest enemies are those who support its decline into moral degeneration and destruction, philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky has told an audience in Dublin.

Chomsky, who is retired professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Israel was once a civilised society similar to those found in Scandinavia. Now, however, that has changed. There is high inequality just as in the US, and the social security system has collapsed, he said.

In the 1970s, he said, Israel had a choice between security within its existing borders and expansion into settlements and it chose expansion.

It was not possible to carry out the military occupation this required and at the same time maintain elementary moral values. "The worst enemies of Israel were those supporting it. What they were in fact supporting was its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction," said Chomsky.

Chomsky, the son of Jewish parents from Pennsylvania, said that at one stage he considered going to live in Israel but "now I prefer to come to Dublin".

He was speaking at the College Historical Society, or Hist, in TCD, which yesterday awarded him a gold medal for outstanding contribution to public discourse.

Last night, the 80-year-old philosopher and author also addressed UCD's Law Society, which awarded him honorary life membership.

Answering questions from journalist Robert Fisk and a packed student audience at the Hist, Chomsky maintained there were grounds for hope in the conduct of world affairs. Countries such as Britain and the US had become much more civilised, a trend he attributed to the active engagement of citizens, especially young people, in politics. Disillusionment with the policies of John F Kennedy in the 1960s had prompted people to become involved in civil rights campaigns and, later, the feminist movement, he pointed out.

Drawing a distinction between "stories" and "non-stories" in the media and academia, Chomsky pointed out that the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago was followed six days later by the "end of Christianity" through the defeat of liberation theology. This occurred when elite units of the army in El Salvador, trained by the US, murdered six leading Catholic intellectuals. Yet, in contrast to events in eastern Europe, few people knew about this event.

Warning against the pitfalls of humanitarian intervention, he pointed out that British colonists came to the New World with the express intention of helping natives in this manner. "In the process, they helped exterminate them."

Most of these colonists were religious fanatics, Chomsky said, and this streak in American society has lasted almost up to the present day.

He described the conflict in eastern Congo as the worst catastrophe currently going on in the world and asked why Darfur, which was a much smaller conflict, received so much more attention. "In Darfur, you can blame it on enemies - the Arabs - whereas in the Congo it's a lot harder."

The multinationals were "all over" eastern Congo, using local militias to gain control of its rich resources, he said.

- Irish Times

Kuito, and Angola, move on

by Colin Murphy

Le Monde

Seven years after the end of the civil war, and one year since the first elections to be held in Angola in 16 years, there is a new sense of stability and optimism. But in the city of Kuito, people are only now starting to deal with the trauma of the war

For 15 years, the residents of the Gabiconta building in the centre of Kuito town lived in apartments with the front façade missing. Where there should have been walls, windows and balconies, there were holes and rubble, sometimes with a clothesline hung across, signalling survival in a building that seemed condemned.

The building dominated Kuito, towering above the crossroads at the town’s centre, across from a ruined sports pavilion and a roofless church. It dominated the town’s iconography, rivalled only by the images of amputees that became a leitmotif for Angola’s civil war.

Since the nine-month siege that lacerated the town in 1993, Kuito had been, literally, a cemetery. The main street was lined with buildings suspended, perhaps permanently, in states of near collapse. Families fed, washed and slept under sunken roofs, without the privacy of external walls. Those walls that stood were laced with bullet holes and shrapnel marks. Below, the yards and gardens were home to the war’s dead. With the town cut off from its hinterland during the siege, and its residents unable to walk openly in the streets for fear of snipers, graves were dug, by night, in people’s yards, often yards from where they cooked or improvised latrines.

Today, the Gabiconta building retains its iconic status in Kuito, but for a different reason. As the town lurches towards normality, six years after the end of the Angolan war, the Gabiconta building is a beacon of reconstruction rather than a black hole of despair. The yellow, pink and blue hues of its new cladding cast a more gentle light over the crossroads, and testify to the dividend of peace. A new cine-theatre complex and sports pavilion stand across from it; where the Catholic church was, a new church is being built.

Kuito is in the throes of a hectic, haphazard rebuilding, the product of a combination of long-overdue governmental sponsorship, Chinese investment, and the resolute entrepreneurialism of the town’s people, honed over a decade and more of survival in a war economy. It has a frontier-town energy, underscored by the constant roar of the motorbikes that are now the favoured transport for people and goods, as well as an opportunity for young people to show off a bit of bling and bravado.

For anyone who knew Kuito during the war, these mark an extraordinary change in the town’s landscape. But more striking still is the impact of peace on its people’s internal landscape. Even as the town’s architecture is transformed, an emotional archaeology is uncovering stories and memories buried since the war years.

With the success of last year’s legislative elections, the first since 1992, and only the second in the country’s history, fears of yet another return to war have gradually been shaken off. People now talk politics, and recall the war, with unprecedented frankness. Not only are people rebuilding, they are remembering. And this makes it possible to tell the story of the siege, and survival, of Kuito, in newly intimate detail.

The Angolan war was a classic proxy for the cold war through the late 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet bloc and Cuba supporting the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) government, and the US and South Africa backing Jonas Savimbi’s Unita. By 1992, the conflict seemed to be exhausted, and the UN supervised elections and — supposedly — demobilisation. But Savimbi returned to war in spectacular fashion, launching an all-out bid for the key cities of the central highlands, Huambo and Kuito. Huambo fell, but Kuito held out.

This is the heartland of the Ovimbundu, Savimbi’s own people, from whom Unita drew its strength. Kuito voted Unita in the 1992 elections, and should have been sympathetic and susceptible to takeover. But the brutality of Unita’s attack and, when Huambo fell, of its treatment of those inside the city, helped inspire a fierce resistance – a resistance that finally culminated just last year, when Unita suffered a humiliating defeat in the elections.

Proxy war

By January 1993 Unita had surrounded Kuito, advancing as far as the main street. Snipers occupied key buildings at intersections. From a hill outside, the town was bombarded daily by mortars. The town’s people sought refuge in the small cluster of colonial-era multi-storey buildings that marked Kuito’s centre.

In one of these, an elegant art-deco building known as Casa Ford, Olegário Cardoso ran an auto-parts business, and some other retail enterprises. The son of a first-generation Portuguese father, whose own parents had emigrated to Angola in the 1890s, and an Angolan mother, Cardoso had remained in Kuito throughout the war, his elderly father insisting on staying when other Portuguese had left, in 1975.

As the bombardment started, Cardoso started to take in refugees, until there were 478 people living on the ground floor of Casa Ford. In nine months of shelling, just eight died. Three of these were children. A government plane had flown overhead, dropping supplies by parachute, and the children had run to the window to see it. Cardoso knew that Unita often shelled the town in response to a parachute drop, and warned them to stay away from the windows. But a young man, the uncle of one of the children, accused Cardoso of being too anxious, and went himself to the window. The children followed him, and a mortar shell fell directly outside, exploding shrapnel through the shopfront. The children were killed; the uncle escaped.

Albertina Manuela Cassoma initially took refuge in another of Kuito’s iconic war buildings, the Prédio Comercio (Commerce Building). There, on 21 August 1993, a mortar shell landed in the yard while Cassoma was preparing food; it killed her six-year-old niece, her cousin and her mother-in-law, but left Cassoma unharmed. She and her surviving family moved to Casa Ford. Then, in the early afternoon of 15 September, her father was shot by a sniper. He lay in the street all afternoon, until night fell, when they were able to safely retrieve him. He needed an operation, but the hospital had no petrol for the generator, or anaesthetic. They set about trying to procure these, but before they could, he died. It took Cassoma and her brother 24 hours to dig a grave in the yard, during breaks in the shelling. They wrapped their father in a cloth and placed him in a rough coffin that Cassoma’s brother had prepared from scavenged wood.

Survival by any means

Casa Ford had key advantages over other refuges in Kuito. It had two storeys of reinforced concrete, so was unlikely to collapse, even if shelled directly. Cardoso had stocks of dried goods in his warehouse, and was able to trade these for fresh food at the town’s improvised wartime markets. There was a well in the yard, providing fresh water. And Cardoso had a mill, which he ran as a business, milling people’s wheat and corn in exchange for a share of the resulting flour.

Yet the besieged Kuito had long run out of foods like wheat and corn: so how was it that Cardoso was able to run a mill? As the town’s people grew desperate, they developed a strategy for procuring food. Nightly, groups would gather to stage mass “break-outs”: under the protection of small numbers of soldiers or civil defence, or through sheer force of numbers, they would attempt to break through the Unita lines in order to forage for food in the hinterland. These were known as the batidas and became a rite of passage for Kuito’s people. A batida group could number anything from 10 to a few hundred people; sometimes they sneaked through the Unita lines, on other occasions, they would have to fight. Those that made it through would split up to search for food in the fields and villages outside Kuito, for up to a 50-mile radius. At every step, they risked landmines and discovery by Unita patrols, and on their return, they would have to try to break back through the siege lines again.

A resting place

On 18 August 1993, Pastor Armando joined a large batida group. Unusually, he brought with him his whole family. His wife was heavily pregnant, already overdue by one week, and had pleaded with him to bring her to the small town of Kunje, just outside Kuito, which was reputed to be safer. (Kunje, unlike everywhere else in the hinterland, was in government hands.) With their six children, they intended to join the batida in order to break out of Kuito, and then proceed to Kunje, just four miles away. But their group fell into an ambush. Armando’s wife was killed, as was their two-year-old daughter, whom she had been holding by the hand. With his five other children, Armando succeeded in escaping the ambush. They hid overnight in the bush, and eventually made it back into Kuito the following day. Nobody else from the original batida group returned. The bodies of his wife and daughter were never retrieved.

In 2003 the government led an exhumation process, to disinter all the bodies buried in the town and re-inter them in a new cemetery on the outskirts. When Albertina Manuela Cassoma’s father was exhumed, they found little more than the cloth in which he had been wrapped. Nonetheless, the remains were re-interred in the new cemetery, granting him finally “a dignified resting place. It’s difficult to forget”, she said.“But at least, now, I am not reminded constantly. When he is in the yard, you remember all the time. It brings peace to you, and the sense of recrimination is less.”

One morning in August, I visited the cemetery, in the company of Agusto Alegre, another survivor of Kuito’s war. A large sign outside dedicates it to the memory of the “martyrs” of Kuito. Inside, 7,000 graves are identified simply by numbers on small iron plates. The cemetery overlooks the town from a hillside, adjacent to the point from where Unita used to launch mortar attacks. Just beyond the cemetery is a new township, Bairro Zambia, built to accommodate those who returned from exile in Zambia after the end of the war in 2002 – which identifies them, to the people of Kuito, as Unita’s people.

Alegre, a mestico whose Portuguese father fled Angola at the outbreak of the war in 1975, leaving Alegre with his Angolan mother, served in the civil defence in Kuito during the siege. He had six children, and all survived the siege, only to die of various illnesses subsequently – though he and his wife have had six more children since, all of whom are healthy.

“It’s not worth thinking still about the war”, he said. “During the war, nobody thought about anything — they just waited for their hour to come. All we did every day was look for food. ‘What am I going to eat?’ ‘When will I die?’

“The war is in the past now. We’re thinking of other things, of rebuilding our country. We’re thinking of another life. If we dwell on the past, we will be overcome by hatred. There are many Unita now living here, within the town. He who killed my brother – if I think about the war, I will need to kill him also. So to avoid this, it’s better to forget the past. And build a new life. What’s past remains in the past.”

A time of peace

Back in the town, Pastor Armando showed me the new house he was building, a home for his seven children: he has remarried and has two further children by his second wife. He had bought the materials incrementally, and it was taking three years to build, on the site of his original house, destroyed during the war.

“Angola has changed a lot”, he said. “The houses that were destroyed by the war are being rebuilt, roads and bridges are being repaired. Projects that had been placed on hold are now being developed. And one of those was the rebuilding of my house.”

Armando spoke in simple, prosaic terms about his vision for the future. “I hope my children will continue their education. Our dream is that the country will produce the young people qualified to run it well, and that it will be well organised and allow its people a good quality of life.” He harboured no resentment. “There is no justification for ongoing hatred”, he said. “We are in a different time: one of peace, not war.”

Albertina Cassoma, too, looked optimistically towards the future, despite qualms about some aspects of Angola’s reconstruction. For her, the exhumation project was a success, but was left incomplete. Restricted to the town, it did not include those killed outside, on the batidas, such as Armando’s wife. “There are still many remains in the fields and along the roads, lying there without dignity.” She called for a renewed, expanded exhumation project, to bring those to the cemetery. She was also more circumspect about the quality of governance in Angola, an issue that has provoked widespread international criticism.

“We have to change the type of governance. The country has many riches, but only two or three people benefit.” She warned of serious inter-generational and class tensions if the country’s young people were not given the opportunity to participate meaningfully in the economy. Yet there was great potential in this generation, she said. “During the war, we just lived for the moment; nobody thought of the future. Today the young people are worried about their education.”

Kuito, and Angola with it, has succeeded in leaving the war behind, she said. “The trauma and the intolerance are passing. There is forgiveness, and that forgiveness is the basis for life. The country is changing. People are working; the government is helping. If we maintain this momentum, Angola will be another country, a better country, where people can smile and forget the bad things of the past. There is much to do, but that which has already been done is great.”

Johann Hari: Vultures that compound the misery of nations in debt

by Johann Hari

The Independent

The energy that drove Jubilee 2000 needs to be summoned again

Would you ever march up to a destitute African who is shivering with Aids and demand he "pay back" tens of thousands of pounds he didn't borrow – with interest? I only ask because this is in effect happening, here, in British and American courts, time after time. Some of the richest people in the world are making profit margins of 500 per cent by shaking money out of the poorest people in the world – for debt they did not incur.

Here's how it works. In the mid-1990s, a Republican businessman called Paul Singer invented a new type of hedge fund, quickly dubbed a "vulture fund." They buy debts racked up years ago by the poorest countries on earth, almost always when they were run by kleptocratic dictators, before most of the current population was born. They buy it for small sums – as little as 10 per cent of its paper value – from the original holder and then take the poor country to court in Britain or the US to demand 100 per cent of the debt is repaid immediately, plus interest built up over years, and court costs.

If they can't pay, the vulture fund goes after anybody who is paying the poor country money, trying to force them to give it to them instead. In one instance, a fund tried to get a court order freezing Belgian aid payments to the Congo, saying it should go into their bank account.

Let's look at an example. In 1979 – the year I was born – the dictator of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, took out a loan for $15m from the dictator of Romania to buy some tractors. Most didn't work. But after 20 years of non-repayment, the new democratically elected government of Zambia said it had no way to pay the loan, and negotiations began to cancel it. But a multi-millionaire called Michael Francis Sheehan, whose company Donegal International is based in a British tax haven, had spotted a chance. He bought the debt from Romania for $3m, and took Zambia to court in Britain for the full amount – which had now piled up to $55m.

The Zambian government explained that they don't have the money. A fifth of their people are HIV positive, and there are only 600 doctors covering more than 12m people. Most people are dead before their 38th birthday. The Zambian President's adviser, Martin Kalunga-Banda, explained – and aid groups verified – that if the government had to pay out for the dead dictator's bills, "medicines that would have been available to in excess of 100,000 people in the country will not be available.... [and] in excess of 300,000 children will be prevented from going to school." The people who will go sick or uneducated were not alive when the loan was taken out.

The British judge who heard the case was clearly appalled, but he said the law gave him no choice but to require Zambia to pay $15m, a third of what had been demanded. Virtually all the debt relief the country had received that year – as a result of Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History – was wiped out.

What happens to the money once it is redirected? Sheehan – who likes to be known as "Goldfinger" – is fond of vintage Cadillacs, and lives in a mansion in Virginia. Singer used the cash he took to become the biggest donor in New York to George W Bush's 2000 Presidential campaign, and then went on to bankroll Rudy Giuliani's bid in 2008.

In the 1990s and Noughties, there was an extraordinary campaign by ordinary Westerners demanding that Africa's debt be dropped. It had a huge effect: $88bn was cancelled. Malawi – to name just one – went from having to pay $95m a year to $5m. But these vulture funds are unpicking this progress with their long beaks, by grabbing the final threads of debt, and demanding they are all paid at once. Vulture funds have been demanding $130m from Liberia – a fifth of its entire GDP.

I have been to two of the countries most aggressively targeted by the vulture funds – Peru, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. I spent a week in a gargantuan rubbish dump in Peru 35 miles north of Lima. It is home to more than 5,000 children. Among them I found Adelina, a little eight-year old smudge, living there in a nest she had built from trash. She spends all day searching for something – anything – she can sell. The vulture funds managed to get $58m out of Peru, on a debt they paid $11m for.

An hour's drive from Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, I found an orphanage filled with emaciated children. Since six million people have died in the war in Congo, these are the lucky ones: at least they have a roof. The vulture funds demanded $100m from this country. When the government couldn't – on a week's notice – produce an inventory of everything they own for a US court, they began to rack up fines of $80,000 a week.

Most people, when they hear about this, ask – why is this lawful? Of course it's important for countries to repay their debts when possible so they can continue to borrow for investment where necessary – but not if the debts were taken out by thieving dictators generations ago, and not at a loan- shark profit rate of 500 per cent.

As long ago as 2002, Gordon Brown said these funds were "morally outrageous", but only now are there tentative moves on both sides of the Atlantic against them. In the US, the Democratic Representative Maxine Waters has introduced a draft bill called the Stop Vultures Act. It would ban vulture funds from seeking "usurious" payments – defined as anything more than the purchase price of the debt plus six per cent a year interest. In Britain, the Labour MP Sally Keeble introduced a 10-Minute Rule Bill with similar proposals.

This pressed Brown to finally move. He says the British government will give a "debt relief discount" of 90 per cent for any country in the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) programme. This would kill the vulture fund business model. It's good – but it doesn't go far enough. They are lots of poor countries that don't fall into the specific HIPC category, and they will still be carrion under these proposals.

The energy that drove Jubilee 2000 needs to be summoned again to pressure both governments hard. Any measures in Britain will have to be introduced very soon because the Conservative Party is in practice defending the vulture funds. Nick Dearden, the director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign: "At first, we had some Conservative MPs who supported us, but they were quickly silenced by Central Office. They have been saying action against vulture funds isn't worth taking." Ah, the sweet scent of compassionate conservatism.

Is this who we want to be? Do we want to be a society that allows billionaires to sue the starving, the sick, and the stunted for pennies borrowed by somebody else, long ago? If not, we have to shut these funds – now.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

The African victims of Swiss-based Trafigura: 'My nose bled and I was sick for months'

by Jo Adetunji

The Independent

The smell in Abidjan began late at night on 19 August 2006. By morning, what had at first seemed an unpleasant odour became a stench which would leave thousands of some of the world's poorest people in a state of sickness and angry disbelief.

As a fleet of hired dumper lorries made their way around Ivory Coast's capital, sliding tonnes of viscous sludge into water courses and drains, inhabitants of the city woke to find themselves surrounded by toxic waste and fumes, causing a range of symptoms from vomiting and diarrhoea to rashes and breathing difficulties. About 100,000 people claim to have been affected by the waste and some have said they were thankful to be alive.

Guy Olou, a science teacher, said: "It smelt like spoilt eggs and also rubber burning. It sticks in your nose; it was unbearable. I started to cough and after that my nose started to bleed. For three-and-a-half to four months, I was sick. I had to go to hospital. It was terrible, very terrible."

For some, the exposure to the fumes, which contained a sulphur-based compound called mecaptan, the foulest-smelling substance known to man, was linked to horrific outcomes. "There were women who miscarried, and that was very painful," Esaie Modto, the head of a local village said. "But still, the worst was that three people, two adults and a girl died. That was very hard."

In all, 15 deaths have been blamed on the dumped waste, a suggestion backed by several reports, including a document produced yesterday by the United Nations' special rapporteur on human rights.

Such claims have been vigorously denied by Swiss-based Trafigura, the company responsible for producing the waste, which says its independent analysis of samples of the dumped slurry show it could not have produced serious injury or death.

Abidjan, with its four million inhabitants, is near lagoons. People in the city have complained of polluted water supplies, dead fish stocks and poisoned water flowing through the streets when it rained. Whole neighbourhoods were forced to pack up and leave or put up with choking and gagging from the fumes, or worse.

After a deal in 2007 with the Ivorian government, Trafigura paid £100m to "compensate" victims and help clean up the waste. But not all victims were happy.

Jules Dekagnan, a resident of Cocody Riviera, a downtown area of Abidjan, said although they had received some compensation, his wife was still suffering from health problems two years after the waste was dumped. "My wife got problems. Four months later, she got €300compensation, but she still complains of pain in the throat and other parts of the body. Doctors said about €1,000 is needed for adequate treatment. We call on kind-hearted people for help. We have no one to turn to," he told a local newspaper. Martyn Day, representing the victims, signed up 22,000 over two years, saying he would seek between $3,500 for minor damages and up to three times as much for serious cases.