Saturday, December 7, 2013

Di Sản Nelson Mandela: Một "Ngụy thần tượng" của Tập Đoàn Quyền Lực Đại Bản Thế Giới

Published on The National Interest (http://nationalinterest.org)
Source URL (retrieved on Dec 7, 2013): http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/spoiling-mandelas-legacy-9105

Spoiling Mandela's Legacy

September 30, 2013
R.W. Johnson [2]
With Nelson Mandela resting at home after [3] a lengthy hospital stay that many feared would see his demise, reflection on his place in South Africa’s history is in order. Mandela was not a good president in practical terms, but he will be remembered, indelibly, for his huge personal courage and fortitude in jail, his policy of racial reconciliation, and his determination to get all South Africans to think of themselves as one nation. Neither thing will ever be forgotten. And because he has been so hugely popular with all races, he also helped all South Africans get used to rule by the African majority.
How much of that legacy remains? Not much. To be sure, a few lunatics apart, no one regrets the end of apartheid or wants minority white rule to return. Everyone will remember Mandela's courage. But it will be just that, a memory.
Most potent was his dream of racial reconciliation. Today one may find even young Africans who support the liberal Democratic Alliance (DA), the main opposition, because they don't like the “policies of racial revenge” of the ruling African National Congress. But that is what we've got. The government is openly antiwhite and often hostile to the Asian and mixed-race minorities too. And although the ANC was formed in 1912 precisely in order to overcome tribalism, Jacob Zuma's party is increasingly a vehicle for Zulu tribalism. Africans from other groups are increasingly and vocally rejecting this movement.
The truly bizarre thing about South Africa is that the ANC was dominated in exile by the Stalinist South African Communist Party (SACP), and today that remains true to a considerable extent. There are many SACP Ministers in the government, all the leaders of Cosatu (the Congress of South African Trade Unions, which has veto power over the government) are Communists, and the ANC formally rules through an alliance with Cosatu and the SACP—a coalition that is two-thirds Communist.
Ronnie Kasrils, an old Communist who was until recently a government minister, has lamented that the ANC was pulled off course in 1991-96 by its compromises with corporate capitalism and that this is the source of the corruption which now threatens to overwhelm the party. His belief, in common with many others, is that South Africa should have created a People's Democracy when the ANC came to power in 1994. The SACP naturally agrees. It has a Zulu leader, Blade Nizimande (a cabinet minister), and the Party has recruited strongly in Zuma's wake, so it too is a primarily Zulu party. Both the SACP and Cosatu continually demand that the government should break through into full-blown socialism. Naturally, they gave President Obama the most hostile reception they could when he visited in late June.
The Kasrils thesis is, of course, nonsense. The ANC in exile was both corrupt and Stalinist (it supported Soviet intervention both in Hungary and Czechoslovakia), and the ruling ANC today is much the same. Inevitably, it is warm friends with Cuba, North Korea and Iran. What is different is that South Africa is the continent’s richest economy, so the feeding frenzy is fiercest here. Increasingly, the ANC is a federation of corrupt regional and municipal warlords. They mouth socialism, but their hands are in the till. Zuma himself gives the example with the multimillion-dollar homestead he has built for himself at Nkandla with government money. Every mineworker and taxi driver knows about Nkandla, feeding extreme union demands (such as 100 percent pay increases) in a sick economy. At bottom, everyone knows that the elite is robbing the country blind, and they accordingly all want their share.
The opposition DA party is essentially the country's only hope. Not accidentally, it has fully embraced Mandela's legacy. In the last nineteen years it has advanced from 1.7 percent of the vote to nearly 25 percent at the last local elections, and it is recruiting more and more discontented Africans. In the 2014 elections it is bound to gain further, though the ANC will still hang on to power. The real question, as power begins to slip from the ANC, is whether they will respect the results of free elections.
Already, in a desperate throw, the government has put together a trade union and Chinese-led consortium to buy out almost all South Africa's morning papers, which will now become ANC propaganda sheets. This is unlikely to work. The distemper with corrupt governance is simply too great, and newspapers that try to cover that up will go bust.
Elections themselves are policed by an Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) that has, however, always been stacked with ANC trusties. The likelihood is that poll rigging will now take off and the IEC will look the other way. But this too won't work: there is too big an opposition constituency; government corruption is too blatant; and already the online press is too strong.
The ANC is aware that its support is slipping and it is already in a state of semipanic. Far too many people have been made rich through corruption or have been politically empowered despite their Stalinist beliefs—and they are sometimes the same people—to easily accept the simple verdict of a grievously disappointed electorate.
Looming in South Africa is a great battle for liberty and democracy in which Mandela's party (and he belonged both to the SACP and ANC in his time) will be decisively on the wrong side. It is perhaps just as well that the old man probably won't be around to see it. Many Western countries still have a sentimental attachment to the ANC as Mandela's party. But it is high time that they realized that they do not want to see another People's Democracy—of all things—rear its head in Southern Africa, a peculiar throw-back to a happily dead era.
R.W. Johnson is an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he taught politics and sociology. His most recent book is South Africa’s Brave New World [4]. He lives in Cape Town.

A Dissenting Opinion on Nelson Mandela

A Dissenting Opinion on Nelson Mandela

By Jonathan Cook

December 07, 2013 "Information Clearing House -  What I am going to write here will doubtless make me unpopular with some readers, even if only because they will assume that what follows about Nelson Mandela is disrespectful. It is not.
So let me start by recognising Mandela’s huge achievement in helping to bring down South African apartheid, and make clear my enormous respect for the great personal sacrifices he made, including spending so many years caged up for his part in the struggle to liberate his people. These are things impossible to forget or ignore when assessing someone’s life.
Nonetheless it is important to pause during the general acclamation of his legacy, mostly by people who have never demonstrated a fraction of his integrity, to consider a lesson that most observers want to overlook.
Perhaps the best way to make my point is to highlight a mock memo written in 2001 by Arjan el-Fassed, from Nelson Mandela to the NYT’s columnist Thomas Friedman. It is a wonderful, humane denunciation of Friedman’s hypocrisy and a demand for justice for the Palestinians that Mandela should have written.
Soon afterwards, the memo spread online, stripped of el-Fassed’s closing byline. Many people, including a few senior journalists, assumed it was written by Mandela and published it as such. It seemed they wanted to believe that Mandela had written something as morally clear-sighted as this about another apartheid system, one at least the equal of that imposed for decades on black South Africans.
However, the reality is that it was not written by Mandela, and his staff even went so far as to threaten legal action against the author.
Mandela spent most his adult life treated as a “terrorist”. There was a price to be paid for his long walk to freedom, and the end of South Africa’s system of racial apartheid. Mandela was rehabilitated into an “elder statesman” in return for South Africa being rapidly transformed into an outpost of neoliberalism, prioritising the kind of economic apartheid most of us in the west are getting a strong dose of now.
In my view, Mandela suffered a double tragedy in his post-prison years.
First, he was reinvented as a bloodless icon, one that other leaders could appropriate to legitimise their own claims, as the figureheads of the “democratic west”, to integrity and moral superiority. After finally being allowed to join the western “club”, he could be regularly paraded as proof of the club’s democratic credentials and its ethical sensibility.
Cameron meets Nelson Mandela
Second, and even more tragically, this very status as icon became a trap in which he was forced to act the “responsible” elder statesman, careful in what he said and which causes he was seen to espouse. He was forced to become a kind of Princess Diana, someone we could be allowed to love because he rarely said anything too threatening to the interests of the corporate elite who run the planet.
It is an indication of what Mandela was up against that the man who fought so hard and long against a brutal apartheid regime was so completely defeated when he took power in South Africa. That was because he was no longer struggling against a rogue regime but against the existing order, a global corporate system of power that he had no hope of challenging alone.
It is for that reason, rather than simply to be contrarian, that I raise these failings. Or rather, they were not Mandela’s failings, but ours. Because, as I suspect Mandela realised only too well, one cannot lead a revolution when there are no followers.
For too long we have slumbered through the theft and pillage of our planet and the erosion of our democratic rights, preferring to wake only for the release of the next iPad or smart phone.
The very outpouring of grief from our leaders for Mandela’s loss helps to feed our slumber. Our willingness to suspend our anger this week, to listen respectfully to those leaders who forced Mandela to reform from a fighter into a notable, keeps us in our slumber. Next week there will be another reason not to struggle for our rights and our grandchildren’s rights to a decent life and a sustainable planet. There will always be a reason to worship at the feet of those who have no real power but are there to distract us from what truly matters.
No one, not even a Mandela, can change things by him or herself. There are no Messiahs on their way, but there are many false gods designed to keep us pacified, divided and weak.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. http://www.jonathan-cook.net

The day the CIA helped the apartheid regime arrest Nelson Mandela

Posted by on Dec 6, 2013 in Uncategorized | 0 comments
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The death of Nelson Mandela has touched off an avalanche of media retrospectives on his life and career, including lots of angles with which most non-South Africans have not been familiar.
HERE‘s a prime example from Jeff Stein:
According to a 1990 Johannesburg Sunday Times newspaper account, a CIA agent by the name of Millard Shirley fingered Mandela for the apartheid regime’s secret police, allowing them to throw up a roadblock and capture him.
“Shirley had a high-ranking ‘deep throat,’ a Durban-based Indian, within South African Communist party ranks,” Gerard Ludi, a retired senior South African intelligence agent told the paper.
“I can only guess that Shirley was instructed by his government to supply the information to the South Africans because it was in America’s interest to have Mr. Mandela out of the way.”
A dozen years later, Ludi told me in 1996, he went into business with Shirley, who had officially retired from the CIA. Naturally, they ran a private security business.
Then, in 1985, came the call from a secret South African government unit called Stratcom (Strategic Communications), whose function was to disrupt and destroy anti-apartheid groups, I reported for Salon. Shirley was hired to train the unit’s operatives and develop a covert operations training manual.
My Salon story continued:
“The South African intelligence services didn’t have decent training materials,” Ludi said. “They asked Millard to update and do a proper training manual. He did it for a year  off and on for a year.”
Asked whether his friend was still working for the CIA at that point, Ludi answered, “Who knows? Shirley tried to retire many times, but the CIA kept calling him back to duty. We gave him about 20 retirement parties.”
According to Mike Leach, who also worked for Stratcom, the manuals used by Shirley had U.S. Department of Defense stamped on their covers. But Shirley’s activities went beyond designing training manuals, according to Leach.
“One of the things Shirley did during the negotiations with unions was to doctor the water on the table with chemicals to induce stomach cramps, to bring about a point where the union officials would want to hurry up the negotiations and just settle because they were physically uncomfortable.”
Another trick was to launder anti-apartheid T-shirts in a fiberglass solution and hand them out to demonstrators, who would soon be convulsed in uncontrollable itching.
The Stratcom unit also intercepted foreign donations to anti-apartheid groups, then sent back thank-you notes on phony letterheads and put the money into more “psychological warfare operations,” said Leach.
The CIA’s involvement in these activities is unclear, but Leach claims the agency sent South Africans to a facility in Taiwan for advanced psychological warfare training. The Telcom auditing official called the CIA’s alleged wiretap training “very sinister.” He suspects the CIA used the program to develop its own spies in Telcom, to protect its assets in the country at this time.
“The American government wanted to know which way the cookie would crumble,” he said.

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Nelson Mandela: the secret Cape Town meetings

Garth Angus, a Cape Town tour guide, recounts the secret meetings that took place between Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/nelson-mandela/10158513/Nelson-Mandela-the-secret-Cape-Town-meetings.html 

South African police shoot dead striking miners

More than 30 people killed at Lonmin platinum mine where strike over pay has escalated into alleged turf war between unions

WARNING: VIDEO CONTAINS GRAPHIC IMAGES Link to video: South African police open fire on striking miners Police have been accused of a massacre after opening fire on mine workers in one of the deadliest days of protest in South Africa since the end of apartheid.
In scenes that evoked memories of some of the country's darkest days, national television showed pictures of police in helmets and body armour shooting at workers on Thursday amid shouting, panic and clouds of dust at Lonmin's Marikana platinum mine. After three minutes of gunfire, bodies littered the ground in pools of blood. The South African police ministry said more than 30 striking miners had been killed.
Newspaper reporter Poloko Tau tweeted from the scene: "Auto guns creacking [sic] and cocked like 100 at a time, scary … warzone down here, 1st shot fired … journalist running, diving and hiding amid shots, water canon spewing water at the strikers … my contact has just been shot dead …"
The deaths came after a week of turmoil at the Marikana mine that had already seen 10 people killed, including two police officers and two security guards. Lonmin, the world's third biggest platinum producer, was forced to suspend production at the mine, about 60 miles north-west of Johannesburg, after what it called an illegal strike escalated into an alleged turf war between rival unions.
His voice shaking with anger, the union leader Joseph Mathunjwa accused the Lonmin management of colluding with a rival union to orchestrate what he described as a massacre. Mathunjwa, president of the militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), told the eNews channel: "We have to send condolences to those families whose members were brutally murdered by a lack of co-operation from management. We have done our bit. If the management had changed their commitment, surely lives could have been saved."
South Africa's president, Jacob Zuma, condemned the killings but made no reference to the handling of the situation by the police. "We are shocked and dismayed at this senseless violence," he said. "We believe there is enough space in our democratic order for any dispute to be resolved through dialogue without any breaches of the law or violence.
"We call upon the labour movement and business to work with government to arrest the situation before it deteriorates any further. I have instructed law enforcement agencies to do everything possible to bring the situation under control and to bring the perpetrators of violence to book." Zuma added: "We extend our deepest condolences to the families of all who have lost their lives since the beginning of this violent action."
The opposition called for an independent investigation. Helen Zille, leader of the Democratic Alliance, said: "We call on union leaders, the police and everyone else involved to immediately work towards a de-escalation of the conflict. All action must be taken to avoid further bloodshed.
"An urgent independent investigation is required to determine exactly what happened; and who is responsible for this massacre. The families of everyone involved, and indeed the nation, deserve to know how and why this bloodshed occurred."
Roger Phillimore, the chairman of Lonmin, said: "We are treating the developments around police operations this afternoon with the utmost seriousness. The South African police service have been in charge of public order and safety on the ground since the violence between competing labour factions erupted over the weekend, claiming the lives of eight of our employees and two police officers.
"It goes without saying that we deeply regret the further loss of life in what is clearly a public order rather than labour relations associated matter."
The violence reportedly flared when police laying out barricades of barbed wire were outflanked by some of an estimated 3,000 miners massed on a rocky outcrop near the mine. Witnesses claimed that some of the miners were armed with pistols and fired first, while also charging the police with machetes and sticks.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said: "According to a Sapa report, police tried to disperse striking workers gathered on top of a hill, wielding pangas and chanting war songs. It ended in a three-minute shootout between the two groups, after police fired teargas and then used a water cannon to disperse the strikers, who retaliated by firing live ammunition at the police."
The protests began last week when workers demanded a pay increase to 12,500 rand (£976) a month. The action turned deadly when the AMCU clashed with South Africa's dominant National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).
The NUM rejected the charge of collusion with mine bosses. Spokesman Lesiba Seshoka said: "We are not surprised by his allegation … It is not true. Everyone can see through these lies."
Seshoka blamed the AMCU – which has been poaching NUM members in platinum mines – for instigating the bloodshed. "These people said today they want to die on the hilltop. They said they will bring their children to die there. That is why we say the ringleaders must be arrested."
There has been growing frustration with the governing African National Congress and its mainstream union allies for moving too slowly to deliver wage increases and public services. Radical and militant voices are making gains in some areas.
Patrick Craven, the national spokesman for Cosatu, which is aligned to the ANC, said it would "convene an urgent meeting of the unions' leaderships to discuss what is emerging as a co-ordinated political strategy to use intimidation and violence, manipulated by disgruntled former union leaders, in a concerted drive to create breakaway 'unions' and divide and weaken the trade union movement".
He added: "Cosatu calls upon all workers to remain vigilant but calm in the face of the most serious challenge to workers' unity and strength for many years."
South Africa is home to four-fifths of the world's known platinum reserves but has been hit by union militancy and a sharp drop in the price of the precious metal this year. At least three people were killed in fighting in January that led to a six-week closure of the world's biggest platinum mine, run by Impala Platinum. Such incidents are seen as tarnishing South Africa's reputation among investors.
This week's violence has forced Lonmin to freeze production at all its South African operations, which account for 12% of global platinum output. The company's London-listed shares fell more than 7% on Thursday. A spokesman at Lonmin's head office in London confirmed strikers had been served with an ultimatum to return to work on Thursday or face dismissal, but denied that might inflame the situation.
"The mine cannot operate without the rock drill operators," he said. "The company tried every avenue it could to negotiate a settlement and we were left with no option."
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http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2011/11/30/south-africas-wealth-still-resting-in-hands-of-a-few/

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Wednesday, September 25, 2013

The reality of hunger in South Africa today - Mpho Putu


Mpho Putu

South Africa has enough food to feed its entire population, and yet many people, especially the poor in the rural areas, remain vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition.  Hunger is a reality today, it kills and is a scandal in a democratic South Africa, a country of plenty.   Hunger has become so deeply entrenched and prevalent, not only in the rural communities as it was thought, but also the major cities have been found to be struggling with food.

A five-year study by the University of Cape Town's African Food Security Unit Network has exposed a food crisis that constitutes a "death sentence" for many and which the government has labelled as "serious".
The survey found the hungriest people in South Africa are found in  Cape Town (80%) and Msunduzi, in KwaZulu-Natal (87%), that, in Johannesburg, 43% of the poor faced starvation and malnutrition. Researchers believe the figure could be higher.
The plight of the hungry was highlighted in 2011 when four children, aged between two and nine, died in a farmer's field as they began an 18km walk in search of their mother and food in Verdwaal, near Lichtenburg, North West. It was later discovered that they had not eaten for more than a week.
 The Constitution of South Africa Chapter 2 section 27 and other pieces of legislature state “Everyone has the right to have access to : sufficient food and water; and social security, including, if they are unable to support themselves and their dependants, appropriate social assistance.” while the Freedom Charter talks to “ no one should go hungry”. The new policy on Food and Nutrition Security and other government programmes such as Zero Hunger emphasises the need by government and other role players to ensure food for all.

Facts

•                    Twenty percent of South African households have inadequate or severely inadequate access to food. This translates to 2.8 million households – or 14 million people – deemed food insecure (SA. General Household survey).

•                    A report by the Human Sciences Research Council showed that only two of every four households in the country have access to food, this is 45.6% of the population.

•                    The HSRC said 26 percent of South Africans are hungry on a regular basis.

•                    Another 28.6 percent are at risk of hunger.

•                     A new study by the HSRC said the Eastern Cape and the Limpopo province have the most number of people living in hunger         

•                    One in five children in South Africa under the age of nine suffers from stunted growth (ie underweight and undersize) as a result of malnutrition. (SA National Food Consumption Survey)

•                    A study done by the Human Science Research Council in 2011, revealed that 19% of households reported skipping meals, and 20% ran out of money to buy food, 35% to 70% of expenditure goes to food in poor households, 50% to 80% of households could not afford an acceptable nutritional balance and based on current prices and levels of fortification only 20% of households could afford a minimum nutritionally adequate diet.

•                    Based on recent information from the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO 2011), supported by independent sources (Heady & Fan 2008), food prices will continue to increase steadily over the next decade.

 The Current Situation
South Africa has about more than 50 million people and a wide variety of cultures, languages and religious beliefs. Close to 15 million South Africans, including 10 million children are beneficiaries of state social grants. This is one of the programme the government is implementing, to support the most vulnerable people in our society.
In addressing and eliminating hunger in South Africa, it is essential to first recognize that the root cause is not simply a shortage of food, but factors which impede people’s access to food, be it environmental, political, economic or socio-cultural. These are results of the long standing apartheid policies of the past. One need also to recognise that it is not the responsibility of the state alone, but business, communities and individual households too
Managing hunger
While the link between poverty and hunger is undisputed, poverty reduction is a complex issue requiring long term state, business and technological interventions. In the interim, sustainable intervention measures are required to reverse the cycle of malnutrition, dependency, poor education, lack of skills and feelings of hopelessness.
 The provision of food hand-outs alone by small independent organisations is no longer an option. The solution lies in the development of sustainable community projects that centre on food production activities in partnership with organisations that, through a collective pooling of resources, skills and knowledge and a participatory approach, ensure that the beneficiaries of such interventions are actively involved and as a result retain and/or regain their self-respect and sense of human dignity.
 It should be understood that food production activities include not only the establishment of gardens and food kitchens, but also, amongst others, clean water supplies, education pertaining to child rearing techniques, hygiene, good nutrition and the introduction of child care centres in which developmental activities are introduced thereby feeding not only the body, but also the mind.
Ownership of any project, the development of skills focused intervention strategies and tangible outcomes, such as supplying vegetables for soup kitchens as well as for sale, are key to success. The community is thereby encouraged to engage in new activities such as brick making or chicken farming leading ultimately to thriving self-sustaining healthy communities. The ultimate aim of any community development organisation is to work itself out of business
 The current economic conditions in South Africa have resulted in funding becoming a problem with the result that it is increasingly difficult for non-profit-making organisations to go it alone. In addition, state departments and municipalities do not always have the resources or even the necessary expertise to engage in extensive community development work.  Commercial and business enterprises, while often prepared to contribute towards funding are under pressure from an ever increasing number of organisations requesting financial support and may not even be aware that there are other ways in which they can contribute towards poverty and hunger alleviation e.g. goods and services in kind. Solutions lie in partnerships with like-minded organisations, a collective pooling of resources, skills and knowledge and authentic engagement with communities, in full recognition that the community itself is capable of contributing towards problem solving activities. A participatory approach ensures that beneficiaries of interventions are actively involved.
Community Participation


Based on its years of service to communities, Non-Government Organisations (NGO), such as FoodbankSA, Meal on Wheels,  in conjunction with a community organisation or business corporation may identify a focus area such as the development of nutrition and skills training programme. Pooling of resources is of critical importance e.g. an organisation may be able to provide facilities, donations and/or goods in kind, while the NGOs provides staff with skills and expertise in community development, health related issues and networking as well opportunities for sourcing funding for special projects and provision of equipment. This partnership forges links with relevant communities through meetings with local and/or traditional leaders.
NGO networks with various service providers such as the Departments of Social Development, and Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Rural Development and local health clinics, all of which have a role to play in hunger management. Furthermore, outside sources such as retailers, manufactures, transport companies can be requested to transport equipment when needed in conjunction with scheduled deliveries to the area and shop owners asked to contribute goods in kind.

Partnerships involving all sectors of society play a vital role in hunger management through the development of sustainable self-help projects that contribute towards the quality of life, independence and dignity of individuals and communities. 
Home-grown food
Educating people on the importance of fresh produce for their health and giving them the skills and means to produce these foods at home (dark green leafy vegetables and orange sweet potatoes, for example, are cheap and easy to grow), could play an important role in improved nutrition in the rural communities

The Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry promotes food gardens at homes and schools, and assists rural smallholders to produce food.
  Hunger can be beaten
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