A new report, commissioned by the South African government, outlines three scenarios for tackling HIV/Aids in the country over the next two decades. Political will and donor funding will determine which the government opts to pursue There are more people living with HIV/Aids in South Africa – 5.7 million - than anywhere else in the world. It hasn't got the highest prevalence – that unfortunate title goes to Swaziland, with one in four people infected (among women that amounts to a shocking 31%, compared with 20% among men). But South Africa has a huge mountain to climb to treat its people and protect those who are not infected – half a million become HIV positive every year. There is every sign that the South African government is going to do all it can. Gone are the doubting days of Thabo Mbeki and his lemon and garlic-advocating health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. The present government has allocated increasing amounts of money to HIV prevention and treatment and obtained some grants from the US president's emergency fund for Aids relief (Pepfar) and smaller amounts from the Global Fund to fight Aids, TB and malaria. South Africa is a middle-income country, not poverty-stricken on the scale of much of sub-Saharan Africa. It can fund some of its own response to the epidemic, but clearly the costs could be enormous at a time when every government is struggling to make ends meet. How to tackle it and how much money to spend, not just immediately but for the future, are huge issues. A major inquiry has now been carried out by the aids2031 South Africa project at the request of the South African government. This is an investigation by the Cape Town-based Centre for Economic Governance and Aids in Africa with the Results for Development Institute from Washington DC. South African government officials sat on the steering committee. Their report paints three different scenarios for South Africa. It's not the good, the bad and the ugly. Nothing is so simple. The options on offer here are dubbed narrow, expanded and hard choices and it takes the long view, examining what shoould happen over the next 20 years. Essentially, the narrow option is where South Africa's current Aids plan will take it. Between now and 2031, that will cost R658bn, which is US$88bn. The number of new infections will fall, but only gradually, to about 350,000 a year. The expanded option is ambitious and has greater focus on prevention. Male circumcision programmes would be introduced, but also behavioural change initiatives, to reduce violence against women and empower commercial sex workers. There would also be some initiatives to reduce poverty and an increase in condom distribution and voluntary HIV counselling and testing. The total cost over the 20 years could reach R765bn, or US$102bn, but new infections would fall to less than 200,000 a year. The hard choices programme envisages the government taking the difficult decision to focus on what works best, at a time of financial austerity. Male circumcision would be rapidly scaled up, but some other interventions, for instance to help orphans and vulnerable children, would be curtailed. It's the cheapest option, at R598bn, or US$79bn, but new infections would still fall to 225,000 a year, the group says. The expanded scenario is clearly the best. This is what the report says: "If considerably greater political will and financial resources can be mobilised and the South African society can be motivated to adopt important social and behavioural changes... a powerful change in the epidemic could occur, with lower rates on infection and mortality. "If the financial resources for HIV/Aids are highly constrained and political backing remains strong but more moderate than under the expanded... scenario, then the more targeted approach under the hard choices is still an attractive alternative to the status quo." Robert Hecht, one of the authors and managing director of Results for Development, pointed out that South Africa funds 70% of the US$2bn spent on HIV/Aids in the country itself. But South Africa will need donor help to get through a substantial scale-up, and donors, in these straitened times, may feel they should be helping the poorest countries more. The report offers a powerful argument for helping South Africa too. "They need to get through this period of rapid increase in spending need, allow the donors to feel they are addressing the most significant HIV/Aids epidemic anywhere in the world and justify to their own population that the money is well-spent," he says, adding: "We don't want this to be a report that sits on the shelf." On the government side, Mark Blecher, acting chief director, health and social development at the Treasury, who was co-chairman of the steering committee, said he thought it was "a valuable report... it suggests we need to keep accelerating our programmes quite rapidly". He hopes that Pepfar and the Global Fund can be encouraged to support South Africa's scale-up of treatment and prevention for the next five years. If they do, the report suggests that the epidemic may level off to a point where the South African government can find most of the resources itself. So which scenario will the government choose? Blecher hedges. "We need more thinking on that," he says. Undoubtedly. This is about political will as well as persuading the donors to help and there are few governments that engage in policies for the long-term. Twenty years is a very long time in politics. So even thinking about it should be warmly applauded.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
South Africa considers its options to tackle HIV/Aids over next 20 years
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Black is Back Coalition opposes FBI attacks on antiwar activists and movement
FBI agents take boxes away from activist Mick Kelly's apartment Uhuru!
The Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations wants to state our unequivocal opposition to the September 24 multi-state Federal Bureau of Investigation harassment of a number of antiwar militants and activists.
For the Black is Back Coalition this recent aggression against political dissent is glaring evidence of the depth of the crisis of an imperialism that requires for its survival the permanent exploitation of the world's peoples, including Africans, Mexicans and others within the ghettos and barrios here within the US.
We see this crisis is one that is caused by the struggling masses of the world's peoples to reverse the verdict of imperialism that has resulted in the vast majority of the Earth's population being reduced to a status of poverty and oppression.
It is the struggles of the peoples of the Middle East, South America, Africa and elsewhere imperialism has left its bloody mark that has led to this crisis that the US white ruling class has attempted to quell through seduction with the selection of Barack Hussein Obama as US president. We recognize that Obama was imperialism's desperate response to the resistance of the world's peoples after the failed policies of George W. Bush served to deepen the crisis by winning more of the oppressed to the ranks of imperialist resistance.
The Black is Back Coalition is not hoodwinked by the phony charges imposed on the militants by the FBI under the guise of anti-terrorist investigation.
We know that this is an attempt to isolate the legitimate forces of resistance here in the US and throughout the world. We know that this is an attempt to intimidate those who currently oppose US imperialist foreign policy and to prevent any others from joining in the opposition.
The Black is Back Coalition is opposed to this blatant attack on free speech rights in the name of fighting against terrorism. We call on all activists and proponents of social justice to resist all government efforts to prevent solidarity with and between the oppressed peoples of the world, whether it be the people of Palestine who are locked in a life and death struggle with the illegitimate white nationalist settler state of Israel or the people of South America who are attempting to wrest their future from the oppressive grasp of its historical US imperialist enemy.
Finally, the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations wants to go on record as declaring that our response to these FBI attempts to silence legitimate opposition to US crimes against the peoples of the world must be to unflinchingly redouble our efforts. We must deepen our solidarity with each other and the peoples of the world fighting for a better world.
Toward this end, the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations is holding our second rally and march on the White House on November 13. It is a rally and march dedicated to support for resistance throughout the world and within the US. We call on all activists to join with us.
Down with intimidation!
Defend free speech and all democratic rights!
Victory to the oppressed peoples of the world!
Saturday, September 4, 2010
ISO "Whitening"
I found this piece to be very interesting
This is Just to Say
by Donna Chidi on Thursday, August 26, 2010 at 5:19pm
I sent this to you because I have enjoyed working with you in the ISO over the years or you knew how dedicated I was to my work with the ISO and deserve to know what happened with it.
This is just to say that I am no longer a member of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and did not leave on good terms by any standard. This is also to say that I am still a committed socialist activist and will not allow my negative experiences in the ISO taint my view of revolutionary politics or the amazing activists I met.
If you've got ideas or social justice struggles you're involved in and want to collaborate, then get in touch.
My story is divided into three chronological parts:
- Stifling debate about diversity in NYC ISO
- Mass expulsion and membership exodus on not-so-good terms in DC ISO - resulting in a 90% white branch in a 54% black city (Oh no, she didn't!)
- Getting back to fighting capitalism - LET'S GET ON WITH IT
I. Stifling debate about diversity in the NYC ISO
During the convention period in March 2010, three immigrant ISO members of color submitted a document calling for opening up a dialogue about recruiting and retaining members of color. Although I favored many of the ideas and issues raised in the document, the response to it was so hostile that I could not muster up the courage to speak up in defense of the ideas contained within it. It was clear that the leadership had taken a strong position, as quoted below, and any attempts to raise a different perspective would be shut-down without consideration.
Here is a quote from it, but the full four-page response is attached at the bottom in the Appendix:
“…In fact, the term “diversity” is itself a liberal term that sees combining as many different kinds of experiences and backgrounds as possible as an end in of itself, rather than a means to lead the working class to victory over exploitation and oppression.
The identity politics framework of the document is exposed when the document’s authors argue: “We do believe that comrades of color provide an important link between their communities and revolutionary Marxism.” This both assumes that Marxism is foreign to the fight against racism (and therefore requires special conduits) and that there are such things as “communities” based on racial identity. In fact, any racial or ethnic group is broken down into its various class components. Working class Blacks are no more a part of Barack Obama’s “community” as working class women are part of Hilary Clinton’s or gays a part of Barney Frank’s….”
-H.T. on behalf of the NYC District Committee in Response to “Recruiting, Developing, and Retaining Members of Color in the ISO”
The harsh and hostile response effectively shut down discussion – though the main point of “Recruiting, Developing, and Retaining Members of Color in the ISO” was to start such a conversation. As a comrade of color, I identified with the ideas presented in the document about paying special attention to developing members of color as leaders. It’s difficult to develop a person’s skills if you don’t know what their skills are or anything about them for that matter. So although the long-term leaders of the NYC ISO might have intended to train and develop me as a comrade, those intentions remained intentions as I was ignored for the most part and none of them ever initiated conversation with me. Since the call for open discussion about these issues was so harshly shut down, I got the message that I’d better keep my ideas to myself as these issues were not of concern to our leaders.
II. Expulsions and membership exodus on not-so-good terms in DC ISO - resulting in a 90% white branch in a 54% black city
After the Socialism conference in June 2010, a group of people from the DC branch got together to discuss ideas they had to improve upon the work of the branch and decided to put all their thoughts together in a Perspectives document to be presented to the entire branch during the political perspectives discussion/kick off to organizing for the remainder of the summer. Recognizing similar problems, such as stifling debate and democracy (see above), I signed on in support of the document.
However, before the Perspectives meeting was to take place, the leaders of the branch called an “Emergency Meeting” for the Monday evening before, in which we would discuss some important issues in our branch and which Ahmed Shawki of the national steering committee would attend and convene.
At this Emergency meeting, Shawki described reasons why the national steering committee had voted to expel Zach Mason and indefinitely suspend David Thurston of the DC branch, whom he met with and delivered the news that afternoon. Now, 5 hours later, they were not welcome to this “members only” meeting where the issue of their expulsions would be discussed by everyone else. In that meeting in June, now my last ISO meeting, I commented on how sad it was to see socialists stand up and slander and crucify people they had worked with for 14 years and 7 years respectively without even allowing them to attend and defend themselves.
Among several other hostile comments made in my direction because of this, Shawki closed the discussion by inviting me to leave the ISO, although he has never spoken to me before, “If you think these guys are being crucified, then maybe this organization is not the right organization for you.”
Here is the e-mail exchange that then occurred between myself, Michele Bollinger – the acting convener of the branch, and Ahmed Shawki of the national steering committee.
-------
show details Jul 2
Michele Bollinger to me
Donna,
We would like to meet with you as soon as possible about the status of your membership in the DC branch. Please email back with some dates and time that you are available.
Thanks,
Michele
show details Jul 4
Donna to Michele
Hi Michele,
I believe it was made undeniably clear in the last meeting that I attended that I am not welcome in the DC ISO branch - especially in the comments made by comrades Dave Zirin, Mike Stark, and Ahmed Shawki. Therefore, I am not sure what we would be discussing in particular. If you still need to meet with me, I'm available on Tuesday evening after 6pm.
-Donna
show details Jul 5
Michele Bollinger to Ahmed, me
Hi Donna,
Fair enough, then. I'll take you off the listserve. Any other questions, best to contact Ahmed.
Thanks,
Michele
show details Jul 6
Donna to Michele
Can I have Ahmed's contact info, just in case questions do come up in the coming weeks?
Thanks
show details Jul 6
Michele Bollinger to me
Sure – xxxxxx{Email address}
show details Jul 12
Donna to ashawki
Hi Ahmed,
I've been struggling with finding the words to describe to my NY comrades, what the status of my membership in the ISO is. Evidently, I am no longer a member but I did not resign. Michele Bollinger deferred to you on this question (see messages below) so specifics would be greatly appreciated.
The concerns I need for you to address are: 1) Is there an appeals process for me and 2) How do I explain my membership status to my NY comrades?
Thanks.
Donna
show details Jul 19
Donna to ashawki
Hi Ahmed,
I sent the message below to you last week and am still awaiting your response. It'd be much appreciated.
-Donna
show details Jul 21
Ahmed Shawki to me
Hello Donna:
It is my understanding from the email exchange below that you are no longer a member of the ISO. I base this on what you said in your email of July 4, explaining your decision not to meet with the DC branch committee to discuss your membership status.
So to answer your two questions: 1) I don’t know what you would be appealing and to whom 2) You can circulate this email exchange to comrades in New York to help explain what has taken place. Feel free to have any NYC comrades to email or call me to discuss these issues.
Best. Ahmed
show details Jul 27
Donna to Michele, Ahmed
Hi Ahmed,
I'll use the email exchange then, to describe my membership status. However, I must make the correction that I did not decide NOT to meet with the DC branch committee and offered a date and time that I was available to meet. I only intended in that message to Michele to find out what, said meeting would be about. No one has yet refuted the statement that I am not welcome in the ISO, even though I did nothing wrong by speaking up in that fateful meeting, but somehow I was taken off the listserve before I had a chance to read the email or even think about my membership. As for the Appeals process, obviously, I got the not-so-subtle message that you sent about me leaving the organization and would be a fool to try to claw my way into a group where I am not wanted.
I dedicated the first four years of my adulthood to organizing with the ISO in college in Ithaca, NY and also in New York City and made many personal sacrifices for the sake of my branch in Ithaca. After all that hardwork, including working in a fraction of two people to bring two busloads & carpools of people to the National Equality March last year, you can imagine how I'm feeling very short-changed here.
This terse response you've given to this matter is hardly fitting for the situation and is somewhat dismissive. In my time in the ISO, I saw many new people come and go, but never on such bad terms as the atmosphere in that aforementioned meeting. You said in that meeting "better be friends in the movement, than to be enemies internally," but in order for that to happen, people have to separate on good terms. Nothing about this email exchange implies that you or Michele care about any good terms or amicable relations between myself and the ISO.
However, I will not allow this negative experience color my perceptions of the amazing activists and fighters that I have met in the ISO over the years. This has been a very difficult experience for me and I have taken away important life lessons from it. Hopefully, you all have also learned something from all this as well.
Again, a response would be greatly appreciated.
-Donna
****To date, 8/26/10 no response****
Clearly, I was pushed out/expelled/whatever without a fair process and although it was my intention to resign, I thought I reserved the right to do that myself. In response to that hostile “Emergency meeting,” 6 others resigned from the DC ISO, not including myself. So in total 9 people left the ISO voluntarily and involuntarily as a result of the happenings that day and a realization of the depth of lack of democracy in the ISO.
Most disturbing about the mass-resignations is the complacency of the DC and National ISO leadership to losing a majority of their members of color without regard – almost willingly. They knowingly made the choice to push us out in order to keep the group free of dissenters and people who ask questions – even though it resulted in a much smaller group with a ghastly 90% white majority in a 54% black city, also known as Chocolate City. This may not have been the intention, but actions speak louder than words and over and over again the actions of the leadership ISO say that internal democracy is conditional.
Those of us who left, together with some others, are participating in social justice struggles around DC and are looking to link up with other socialists and activists who want to fight for a better world without tearing each other down along the way.
III. Getting back to fighting capitalism - LET'S GET ON WITH IT
If you've got ideas or social justice struggles you're involved in and want to collaborate, then get in touch – especially if you’re in the Washington DC area.
------------------------------------------------ ~FIN~ ------------------------------
Appendix – The Full Response
“Response to “Recruiting, Developing, and Retaining Members of Color in the ISO”
Comrades who submitted “Recruiting, Developing, and Retaining Members of Color in the ISO” stated as their goal: to “begin an organization‐wide conversation about racial and ethnic diversity in the ISO and our efforts and strategies to recruit, develop, and retain more members of color into it.” Putting aside for the moment the implication that this discussion has not “begun” in the more than 30 years of the life of the organization, the politics of the document are problematic and non‐Marxist.
Despite the authors’ hopes that the document is not “dismissed as one coming from a framework of identity politics,” the politics of the document are in fact based in ‐‐ or at best, influenced by ‐‐ liberal ideas of “diversity” as well as identity politics, “the idea that only those experiencing a particular form of oppression can either define it or fight against it.” (Smith 2008)
A Marxist approach to racism is based on an understanding that it is necessary to build a multi‐racial organization and multi‐racial working‐class struggle because that is the only way that either capitalism or oppression can be fought. And a multi‐racial struggle needs Marxism and the politics of class solidarity to succeed. As the Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin, put it: “Working class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected.”
The need for a multi‐racial organization and fight‐back is not a secondary issue to be discussed (or one which comrades of color within the organization are responsible for raising), but is actually the whole purpose of our project. The question of oppression cannot be separated from an analysis of class exploitation and vice‐versa. This is especially the case in the United States, where the historic role of slavery, white supremacy, and Jim Crow segregation have ensured that racism (and particularly racism against African‐Americans) has become the key division used and manipulated by the American ruling class.
Of course we are not yet where we want to be in achieving our goal (whether that be regarding the racial composition of the group, our size, or our implementation in the working class), but unless we are dreaming up wish‐lists for where we want to be, a serious approach to the question would require a concrete assessment of our work, objective challenges, and specific next steps.
Instead, “Recruiting, Developing..” offers a confusing set of broad generalizations regarding objective difficulties, a two sentence throw‐away regarding the tremendous anti‐racist work of the organization over the years, and vague recommendations which mostly outline the work that the organization already does. Yet implicit in the idea that we need to be “systematic” in our approach to recruiting, developing, and retaining members of color in the ISO, is the assertion that we currently do not. Despite this very serious implication, there is no honest or concrete assessment of our current work anywhere in the document.
A quick look at even the last month in NYC alone would demonstrate the opposite—a city wide tour of Brian Jones speaking on civil rights sit‐in movement brought out a multi‐racial periphery (and a high proportion of African American contacts in particular) at every stop; a city‐wide meeting on Haiti that drew 150 people, chaired by a new member; a Campaign to End the Death Penalty anti‐lynching tour; an event at NYU about Marxism, Nationalism, and the Third World; teacher members organizing against school closings in predominantly African‐American and Latino neighborhoods; and as always a commitment to develop comrades, and particularly comrades of color, as meeting chairs, speakers, and most of all as Marxists.
Liberalism and Identity Politics
But more problematic than the generally non‐concrete, non‐serious assessment of our work, the document reads as a liberal appeal to consciousness and the “will” to build a multi‐racial organization, as though this can be achieved by exhorting ourselves to do so, or by developing a more savvy/sophisticated approach. This was also argued by one of the document’s authors at convention, who said we need a “more complex” approach to Chicano politics, the implication being that Marxism doesn’t adequately address oppression.
In fact, the term “diversity” is itself a liberal term that sees combining as many different kinds of experiences and backgrounds as possible as an end in of itself, rather than a means to lead the working class to victory over exploitation and oppression.
The identity politics framework of the document is exposed when the document’s authors argue: “We do believe that comrades of color provide an important link between their communities and revolutionary Marxism.” This both assumes that Marxism is foreign to the fight against racism (and therefore requires special conduits) and that there are such things as “communities” based on racial identity. In fact, any racial or ethnic group is broken down into its various class components. Working class Blacks are no more a part of Barack Obama’s “community” as working class women are part of Hilary Clinton’s or gays a part of Barney Frank’s.
As Sharon Smith wrote in a 2008 ISR article on identity politics: “There is no such thing as a common, fundamental interest shared by all people who face the same form of oppression. Oppression isn’t caused by the race, gender, or sexuality of particular individuals who run the system, but is generated by the very system itself—no matter who’s running it.”
She argues further, “Oppression is something that even most white male workers suffer to some degree. If one were to compare the self‐confidence of the vast majority of white male workers to that of the arrogant Hillary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice, it would be clear that something more than personal politics is a determining factor in oppression. The problem is systemic.”
Of course possessing a personal “identity,” or awareness of oneself as a member of an oppressed group, is an important and legitimate response to experiencing oppression. Smith explains:
No white person can ever understand what it is like to experience racism. No straight person can
understand what it is like to experience homophobia. And even among people who are oppressed by racism, every type of experience is different. A Black person and a Native American person, for example, experience racism differently—as does a person from Mexico versus a person from Puerto Rico. A gay man and a lesbian have quite different experiences.” But Personal experience is not the same as political strategy, which for Marxists is rooted in an understanding of the systemic nature of oppression under capitalism, and the shared interest of the working class across race, sex, and national borders.
Holding the ISO accountable?
Further, the document argues for affirmative action within the ISO, “because our organization does not exist in an egalitarian socialist vacuum and because there is no such thing as colorblindness. Just like we expect other institutions/organizations (many of which we protest) to include diversity development statements in their guiding principles and make structural changes to reflect those principles, we shouldn’t expect any less of our organization.”
Here the document’s authors compare the ISO to institutions under capitalism that need to be held accountable (and that we in fact protest)! In arguing that “there is no such thing as colorblindness” the comrades that wrote the document seem to be saying that the ISO suffers from racism within our organization. If this is in fact true, it is a grave accusation that needs to be explained.
Of course as individuals who live in an oppressive society, we all carry the internal baggage of that society, or as Marx put it, “the muck of ages.” A conscious attempt has to be made to develop women, people of color, working‐class people who have been told our whole lives that we are not good enough or smart enough to speak our ideas, let alone lead others.
Yet despite the fact that we don’t operate in an “egalitarian vacuum” the fact is that a socialist
organization, because of its very nature and goals, has a different material interest than capitalist institutions. It is made up of a self‐selecting group of individuals who voluntarily commit our lives to the emancipation of the working‐class and liberation of all oppressed groups. As Lenin put it, our vision of revolution is a “festival of the oppressed and exploited.” We are bound together by that common purpose and a self‐interest in making an organization fitted for that task.
An old debate within the Russian socialist movement helps shed light on this question. The 1903 congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) took up as its first agenda item the Jewish Labor Bund’s demand that it be recognized as the representative of Jewish workers living in Russia (to be a conduit, one could say). Jews at that time were of the most oppressed in Russia, living under harsh legal restrictions and terrorized by violent pogroms. The Jewish Bund was a genuine revolutionary organization who adamantly rejected Zionism.
Yet their demand to represent the Jewish working class showed a fundamental distrust of the RSDLP and its handling of oppression against Jews. “The Jewish proletariat,” a leader of the Bund argued, “is very much more strongly interested in the struggle against the exceptional restrictions that are imposed on it than the rest of the proletariat is, and for this reason it is also a more active fighter against this oppression.”
Leon Trotsky, a leading Russian revolutionary, and himself a Jew, responded:
If the Bund, lacking in confidence in the Party, is…demanding safeguards, that we can understand. But how can we put our signatures to this demand? ... To accept such conditions would mean that we acknowledged our own moral and political bankruptcy…
Lenin argued:
Is it not, in fact, the duty of our entire Party to fight for full equality of rights and even for the recognition of the right of nations to self‐determination? Consequently, if any section of our Party were to fail in this duty, it would undoubtedly be liable to censure, by virtue of our principles: it would undoubtedly be liable to correction by the central institutions of the Party. And if that duty was being neglected consciously and deliberately, despite full opportunity to perform it, then this neglect of duty would be treachery.
That is to say, if we cannot trust our own revolutionary organization, committed to the full liberation of the human race, through its own self‐interest to take seriously and systematically the building of a multiracial organization and cadre, then our organization is not worth very much at all.
Conclusion
Lastly, the document argues that comrades of color should be specially trained and developed in the politics of their own identities, “Chicano comrades on questions of ethnic nationalism,” etc. But the best way to train our entire organization to effectively build the movement against oppression and the system which produces oppression is to develop a strong Marxist core. The most effective means to develop comrades of color as cadre is to develop strong Marxists. And while having comrades of color that are confident and well‐versed in our politics certainly helps win others within our multi‐racial periphery, ultimately it is our politics not our identities that win people. That is why, for example, leading white members of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty in NYC carry so much weight and credibility within the work that they do.
Could there have been a document that effectively assessed our work in building a multi‐racial,
revolutionary organization rooted in the working class? Yes, and in fact convention documents that took up our work in particular struggles around the criminal justice system, housing, etc., provided a useful and concrete assessment of some of our work. Another useful contribution would be to assess the objective terrain, challenges and opportunities (for instance, the state of Black politics) that we face in building a multi‐racial organization.
Unfortunately, “Recruiting, Developing, and Retaining Members of Color in the ISO” made no serious attempt to do so. It implies that we do not take seriously, or make systematic, our work in building a multi‐racial organization, essentially race‐baiting the ISO. And it provides neither a Marxist framework nor next steps in achieving that goal.
We’ve made a lot of headway in past years in writing and publishing socialist literature on oppression; in participating and leading in struggles against racism, immigrant‐bashing, homophobia, Islamophobia, and sexism; and in developing a Marxist cadre steeled in the politics of liberation and self‐emancipation. We have a lot to be proud of, and still a long way to go. Political clarity and honest, concrete assessments will be key in moving forward.
H.T. on behalf of the NYC District Committee”
New Orleans Black Activists Denounce Obama and Shame Misleadership Class
New Orleans Black Activists Denounce Obama and Shame Misleadership Class
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
"Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and trade union leaders denounced unemployment, home foreclosures and war in general, but did not dare to hold the corporate Democrat in the White House responsible for any of it."
This weekend saw two major Black demonstrations - one in Washington, one in Detroit - and a presidential speech at Xavier University, in New Orleans, on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Yet a small, hardly noticed protest outside what used to be a public housing project in the St. Bernard section of New Orleans, was probably more relevant to the burning issues of today than the rallies held by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
A relatively small group of New Orleans activists gathered in the rain outside the project to protest the visit to the city by President Obama, whose housing policies spell doom for the entire concept of public housing in the United States. When Katrina struck, the Bush administration's Department of Housing was quick to call for demolition of all the public housing units in New Orleans, even though most of the buildings were salvageable. The residents were locked out, 3,000 of them, like hundreds of thousands of others across the country since the early Nineties, victims of corporate greed for the land the projects sit on and a racist prejudice that holds that Black and poor people are inherently dangerous when concentrated in one place. Katrina was simply a convenient excuse to get rid of public housing in New Orleans, where four major projects were demolished.
In New Orleans and elsewhere across the country, the poor who are evicted from public housing are expected to disperse, get out of the way of corporate development that serves the needs of other people, and be quiet. But this weekend, the former residents of the St. Bernard project refused to scatter and be silent. They had earlier built a tent encampment nearby, called Survivors' Village. Now they denounced President Obama and his friend, Warren Buffett, the multi-billionaire hedge fund baron who is developing the site of their former homes under a new name, Columbia Parc, for a new class of residents.
"The former residents of the St. Bernard project refused to scatter and be silent."
The Obama administration has taken the anti-public housing policies of Bush and previous presidents to a new level, with a plan to abandon any federal commitment to building and maintaining housing for the poor. Instead, fat cats like Warren Buffett and huge private banking institutions will inherit the nation's public housing properties. In New York City, the Citigroup bankers now own a piece of 13 public housing projects - a taste of what Obama has in store for what remains of America's public housing stock.
At the start of this commentary, I said that the St. Bernard neighborhood demonstration was "probably more relevant to the burning issues of today" than Al Sharpton's Washington rally and Jesse Jackson's Detroit event. That's because the demonstrators in New Orleans knew whose policies they were protesting against, and called out his name: President Obama. In Detroit and Washington, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and trade union leaders denounced unemployment, home foreclosures and war in general, but did not dare to hold the corporate Democrat in the White House responsible for any of it.
Obama's wars range from Asia and Africa to the streets of America's cities, whose schools and housing he is turning over to the likes of Warren Buffett, rich finance capitalists that have already exported all the jobs. The demonstrators in New Orleans understand that. What currently passes for Black leadership, does not.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Mass rebellion in South Africa
In South Africa the state is being confronted by an eruption of self organised popular protest on a scale not seen since the 1980s. This article, from the mainstream press there, gives a much better overview than the articles in the British press that miss the politics of the rebellion.
Burning message to the state in the fire of poor’s rebellion
Richard Pithouse
DU NOON, Diepsloot, Dinokana, Khayelitsha, KwaZakhele, Masiphumelele, Lindelani, Piet Retief and Samora Machel. We are back, after a brief lull during the election, to road blockades, burnt-out police cars and the whole sorry mess of tear gas, stun grenades and mass arrests. Already this month, a girl has been shot in the head in KwaZakhele, three men have been shot dead in Piet Retief, and a man from Khayelitsha is in a critical condition.
There are many countries where a single death at the hands of the police can tear apart the contract by which the people accept the authority of the state. But this is not Greece. Here the lives of the black poor count for something between very little and nothing. When the fate of protesters killed or wounded by the police makes it into the elite public sphere, they are generally not even named.
The African National Congress (ANC) has responded to the new surge in popular protest with the same patrician incomprehension under Jacob Zuma as it did under Thabo Mbeki. It has not understood that people do not take to the streets against a police force as habitually brutal as ours without good cause. Government statements about the virtues of law and order, empty rhetoric about its willingness to engage, and threats to ensure zero tolerance of “anarchy” only compound the distance between the state and the faction of its people engaged in open rebellion.
Any state confronted with popular defiance has two choices — repression or engagement. If it wishes to avoid shooting its people as an ordinary administrative matter, the first step towards engaging with popular defiance is to understand the dissonance between popular experience and popular morality that puts people at odds with the state.
A key barrier towards elite understanding of the five-year hydra-like urban rebellion is that protests are more or less uniformly labelled as “service delivery protests”. This label is well suited to those elites who are attracted to the technocratic fantasy of a smooth and post-political developmental space in which experts engineer rational development solutions from above. Once all protests are automatically understood to be about a demand for “service delivery” they can be safely understood as a demand for more efficiency from the current development model rather than any kind of challenge to that model. Of course, many protests have been organised around demands for services within the current development paradigm and so there certainly are instances in which the term has value. But the reason why the automatic use of the term “service delivery protest” obscures more than it illuminates is that protests are often a direct challenge to the post-apartheid development model.
Disputes around housing are the chief cause of popular friction with the state. The state tends to reduce the urban crisis, of which the housing shortage is one symptom, to a simple question of a housing backlog and to measure progress via the number of houses or “housing opportunities” it “delivers”. But one of the most common reasons for protests is outright rejection of forced removals from well-located shacks to peripheral housing developments or “transit camps”. Another is the denial or active removal of basic services from shack settlements to persuade people to accept relocation. Moreover, to make its targets for “housing delivery” more manageable, the state often, against its own law and policy, provides houses only for shack owners, resulting in shack renters being illegally left homeless when “development comes”.
It is therefore hardly helpful to assume that protests against forced removals and housing developments that leave people homeless are a demand for more efficient “delivery”. On the contrary, these protests are much more fruitfully understood as a demand for a more inclusive mode of development, in the double sense of including poor people in the cities and of including all poor people in development projects.
If the state actually engaged with any seriousness with the people to whom it has promised to “deliver services”, these kinds of problems could be resolved. But the reality is that the state very often imposes development projects on people without any kind of meaningful engagement. One reason for this is the pressure to meet “delivery targets” quickly — a pressure that was greatly worsened by the ludicrous and dangerously denialist fantasy of former housing minister Lindiwe Sisulu that shacks could be “eradicated by 2014”.
Another reason why the state systematically fails to engage with poor people is that when it does negotiate, it tends to substitute ward councillors and their committees, as well as local branch executive committees of the ANC, for the communities actually affected by development projects. But the fact is that in many wards the councillors and local party elites represent the interests of local elites, who often have very different interests to poor communities. Moreover, it’s entirely typical for these local elites to seize control of key aspects of development projects, such as the awarding of tenders and the allocation of houses, for their own political and pecuniary gain. It is not at all unusual for ward councillors and allied local elites to threaten their grassroots critics with violence. Ward councillors are often able to order the local police to arrest critics on spurious charges.
It is hardly surprising that ward councillors are a key target of popular protests.
Once a community has realised that their local councillor is hostile to their interests, there are often no viable alternatives for engaging with the state. Attempts at making use of official public participation channels generally fail to get any further than a solid wall of bureaucratic contempt in which everyone is permanently in a meeting. Polite demands for attention are frequently responded to as if they were outrageous. Outright contempt of the “know your place” variety is common. In the unlikely event that representatives from a poor community are able to access a politician higher up than their ward councillor, they are most likely to be sent back to their councillor. There is a very real sense in which we have already developed a sort of caste system in which the poor are simply unworthy of engaging with politicians on the basis of equality.
If development was negotiated directly, openly and honestly with the people who it affects rather than with consultants bent on technocratic solutions, and ward councillors bent on personal and political advantage, things would take a little longer but their outcomes would be far more inclusive and far more to people’s liking. If the ANC is serious about democracy, it should aim to subordinate the local state to the inevitably time-consuming, complex and contested mediation of the poor communities that need it most, rather than the often predatory aspirations of local political elites.
The heart of the moral economy behind the protest is a firm conviction that the poor are people who also count in our society. For some, this means that every citizen counts and one way of realising this is by turning on people seen as non-citizens. For others, everyone, documented or not, counts. But for as long as the state, in its actual practices, does not affirm the dignity of poor people by consulting them about their own future and including them in the material development of our collective future, the rebellion will continue.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Zambian mine lays off 1,300 staff
Zambia's biggest copper mining company, Konkola Copper Mines, has laid off 1,300 workers as it struggles with a fall in both demand and copper prices.
The redundancies represent about 10% of the company's entire workforce.
Konkola said it was embarking on a programme to streamline operations and increase labour productivity in response to falling copper prices.
Many of Zambia's mining companies have been forced to make dramatic job cuts during the global economic downturn.
Price slump
Last month, the Mineworkers' Union of Zambia said about 8,200 jobs had been lost in the sector since December last year.
Copper accounts for a large proportion of Zambia's exports.
The price of copper has fallen dramatically since the summer of last year, when it stood at almost $8,000 (£5,500) a tonne.
By the end of the year, it had dropped to just over $2,800 a tonne.
The price now stands at more than $4,500 a tonne after a major stimulus package in China, the world's biggest consumer of copper, raised hopes that demand for the metal would increase.
More recently, the price has jumped on reports that China is rebuilding its state reserves of the metal, according to Mark Elliot at Fairfax Investment Bank.
But Mr Elliot says the price if copper is notoriously volatile and could slip back if confidence in global demand takes another hit.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Zambia: Zulawu Urges Unions to Be Unanimous On Review of Act
THE Zambia United Local Authorities Workers Union (ZULAWU) has called on all labour unions to unite in ensuring that the law relating to the minimum wage is reviewed to match the current trends.
ZULAWU general secretary Noah Kalangu said in an interview in Ndola yesterday that there was need to intensify efforts aimed at ensuring that the law governing the minimum wage was reviewed.
He said council workers, who played a vital role in country's development process, were the most affected because their salaries were very low.
"Some council workers are still being paid less than K260,000, which is the statutory stipulated minimum wage," he said.
Mr Kalangu said it was sad that the people still expected councils to be efficient in the service delivery when many workers were still being paid what he called peanuts.
"I have just completed a tour of North-Western province and I came across some workers in some rural councils such as Chavuma and Mwinilunga where some permanent employees still get as little as K150,000 and K250,000," he said.
He observed that the immediate review of the minimum wage would help to narrow the gap between the most affected workers in the councils and some chief officers who were getting as much as K5 million.
"As long as the council workers remain exploited as far as getting living wages is concerned it will remain difficult for the country to attain the much-needed development," he stated.
Friday, April 10, 2009
The truth on the Somali 'pirates'
All the media is reporting on how 'Pirates' have Struck a U.S. cargo ship, But Is the Media Telling the Whole Story?
First, I'm not here to paint the Somalis responsible as heroes or as vigilantes, but i'm not going to condemn them as well. The issue is very complicated and this story sheds alot of light on the situation.
http://www.alternet.org/audits/13571...y/?page=entire
According to Hari:
Quote:
| As soon as the [Somali] government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. … This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia -- and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence." |
Here is a youtube of the Somali hip hop artist K'naan speaking on this very issue.
| + YouTube Video | |
Because the is no Somali government, there is no State. There is no institution that police the water and enforce international or national laws,rules, regulations. Consider what one pirate told The New York Times after he and his men seized a Ukrainian freighter "loaded with tanks, artillery, grenade launchers and ammunition" last year. "We don't consider ourselves sea bandits," said Sugule Ali:. "We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard." Now, that "coast guard" analogy is a stretch, but his point is an important and widely omitted part of this story.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Soldiers assassinate Guinea-Bissau president
BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau – Soldiers assassinated the president of Guinea-Bissau in his palace Monday hours after a bomb blast killed the army chief who had been his political rival for decades.
A military statement broadcast on state radio attributed President Joao Bernardo "Nino" Vieira's death to an "isolated" group of unidentified soldiers whom the armed forces said they were now hunting down. It said the military was not planning a coup in the West Africa nation, which has been a transit point for the cocaine trade to Europe.
The capital, Bissau, was calm despite the pre-dawn gunfight at the palace, which erupted hours after armed forces chief of staff Gen. Batiste Tagme na Waie — a longtime rival of the president — was killed by a bomb blast at his headquarters.
The former Portuguese colony has suffered multiple coups and attempted coups since 1980, when Vieira himself first took power in one.
Following an emergency Cabinet meeting on Monday, military spokesman Zamora Induta said top military brass told government officials "this was not a coup d'etat."
"We reaffirmed our intention to respect the democratically elected power and the constitution of the republic," Induta said. "The people who killed President Vieira have not been arrested, but we are pursuing them. They are an isolated group. The situation is under control."
The constitution calls for parliament chief Raimundo Pereira to succeed the president in the event of his death.
Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Jr. said the fact that the military did not go through with a coup deserves praise. "The military showed their patriotism by not seizing power," he said, adding that both Vieira and Waie will receive state funerals in the coming days.
Vieira had ruled the impoverished nation on the Atlantic coast of Africa for 23 of the past 29 years. He came to power in the 1980 coup, but was forced out 19 years later at the onset of the country's civil war. He later returned from exile in Portugal to run in the country's 2005 election and won the vote.
The armed forces' statement dismissed claims that the military killed Vieira in retaliation for Waie's assassination late Sunday. The two men were considered staunch political and ethnic rivals and both had survived recent assassination attempts.
Vieira, from the minority Papel ethnic group, once blamed majority ethnic Balanta officers for attempting a coup against him, condemning several to death and others to long prison sentences.
Among them was Waie, who in the late 1980s was dropped off on a deserted island off the coast of Guinea-Bissau, according to Waie's chief of staff, Lt. Col. Bwam Namtcho. Waie was left there for years before he was allowed to return and officially pardoned by Vieira.
Namtcho said the bomb that killed Waie had been hidden underneath the staircase leading to his office.
Hours later, volleys of automatic gunfire rang out for at least two hours before dawn in Bissau and residents said soldiers had converged on Vieira's palace.
The Portuguese news agency LUSA reported that troops attacked the palace with rockets and rifles. The president's press chief, Barnabe Gomes, escaped but was struck by a bullet in his right shoulder, LUSA said.
It was the second attack on Vieira in recent months. In November, Vieira's residence was attacked by soldiers with automatic weapons who killed at least one of his guards. The president complained later that the army never intervened, leaving his presidential guard to fight off the attackers.
In January, Waie received a call from the presidency asking him to come at once, said Namtcho. But when Waie stepped outside to get into his car, unidentified gunmen opened fire on the car. Waie narrowly escaped and Namtcho says he assumed the attack had been ordered by the president.
Luis Sanca, security adviser to Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Jr., confirmed that the president had died but gave no details.
The African Union condemned the killings, calling them "cowardly and heinous attacks which have come at a time of renewed efforts by the international community to support peace-building efforts in Guinea-Bissau."
In Lisbon, the Portuguese Foreign Ministry lamented Vieira's death and said it was "fundamental that all political and military authorities in the country respect the constitutional order."
Portugal said it would call an emergency meeting of the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries, an eight-member organization based in Lisbon.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Death in the Amazon: Uncontacted Tribes
Photographs published two weeks ago of an uncontacted tribe in Brazil near the Peruvian border have provoked public outrage, with over 1,300 people writing letters to Peru’s government to demand an end to illegal logging. The logging is threatening uncontacted Indians in the area.
The unique pictures of the Brazilian tribe hit the world’s headlines last week. At least one other tribe in the area is thought to have fled over the border from Peru into Brazil, fleeing illegal loggers who are razing their forest home.
Since the pictures were published, the Peruvian government has said it will investigate the issue. Peru’s President Alan Garcia had previously questioned the tribes’ existence.
Survival International is campaigning to support the rights of Peru’s estimated fifteen uncontacted tribes, who are threatened by oil exploration as well as logging.
Survival’s director Stephen Corry said today, ‘These pictures have really struck a chord with people. The uncontacted tribe’s message, with their arrows pointed up at the aeroplane, could not be clearer – they want to be left alone. People understand this, and want to make sure their wishes are respected.’
RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Amazon Indians from one of the world's last uncontacted tribes have been photographed from the air, with striking images released on Thursday showing them painted bright red and brandishing bows and arrows.
The photographs of the tribe near the border between Brazil and Peru are rare evidence that such groups exist. A Brazilian official involved in the expedition said many of them are in increasing danger from illegal logging.
"What is happening in this region is a monumental crime against the natural world, the tribes, the fauna and is further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the 'civilized' ones, treat the world," Jose Carlos Meirelles was quoted as saying in a statement by the Survival International group.
One of the pictures, which can be seen on Survival International's Web site (http://www.survival-international.org), shows two Indian men covered in bright red pigment poised to fire arrows at the aircraft while another Indian looks on.
Another photo shows about 15 Indians near thatched huts, some of them also preparing to fire arrows at the aircraft.
"The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct," said Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, which supports tribal people around the world.
Of more than 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, more than half live in either Brazil or Peru, Survival International says. It says all are in grave danger of being forced off their land, killed and ravaged by new diseases.
Jay Griffiths wrote an article in the Guardian on the issue of the forced invasion and unwarrented contact of the tribes; how it is racist and potentially dangerous.
The message could hardly be clearer: leave us alone. In photographs taken from a low-flying plane, men from an uncontacted group deep in the Amazon forests, body-painted in red and black, draw their bows and arrows to shoot at the intruders in anger and fear. Another tribe living in voluntary isolation is being hunted out of existence.
There was massive public interest when these images were released by the Brazilian government last week, revealing an enormous curiosity about tribal people. And many indigenous people want non-indigenous people to listen to their ecological warnings and their philosophies. But, in sharp contrast, those living in voluntary isolation, the so-called uncontacted tribes, wish no such thing. They want nothing to do with the dominant culture, and they communicate this clearly to "contacted" tribes nearby, begging their help to be left alone.
The risks are well known: uncontacted people have died in their millions from diseases brought by outsiders, whole tribes wiped out. In the Amazon, indigenous campaigners vigorously oppose people going into the territories of the voluntarily isolated. But now, as well as the loggers and miners, there will be dozens of missionaries, television companies and adventurers determined to ignore their message.
Go and talk to Tarzan, I was told, when I was in the Peruvian Amazon, at the invitation of indigenous activists there. (They had asked me to go with them as a witness when they were throwing illegal gold-miners off their lands.) Tarzan, I was told, has a tale to tell about forced contact. A Harakmbut man in his nineties, he is old enough to remember the day in 1952 when his world ended. He is gentle and thoughtful, but still angry.
Missionaries came in a plane which, said Tarzan, "we thought was a huge and frightening eagle. We fled to the hills". The missionaries set up a mission station and a school. "No one wanted to go to school, and anyway after the missionaries came, our children died." After the missionaries' arrival, an estimated 6,000 to 7,000 people died of the illnesses they had brought. The missionaries said they wanted people to know their God, but Tarzan didn't see it that way: "Now we know money." Further, thanks to the missionaries, he says: "Now we know we lack money, which we hadn't known we lacked before."
Astonishingly, this is still happening. Earlier this year a British film crew went to the Peruvian Amazon to find tribal people for a reality TV programme. The crew were accused of visiting an isolated community, bringing a disease that left four people dead.
In the Peruvian Amazon, I met an evangelical missionary who was hunting out uncontacted tribes, claiming he would ease the way for oil workers. The links between missionaries and the other extractive industries are well documented. He spoke of making a "responsible contact", but was risking bringing death. Which of the 10 commandments encourages that?
Anthropologists, activists and many in the media know how to report on indigenous issues with respect; but there is still a profound racism against indigenous people in our culture. The forced invasion of uncontacted peoples is the arrowhead of this racism, and it extends far beyond the irresponsibility of individuals, into whole institutions.
The publishing industry promotes the adventurer, the churches fund the missionary, the corporations send the loggers and miners, the TV company commissions the film crew. In a just world, all should be liable for attempted murder.
Power to the People.
Friday, May 9, 2008
The Death of Boubacar Bah in the Hands of ICE
Originally Posted by Mike Ely of Kasama, when suggested by Kalash Prolet that he'd report it on his website. Power to the People reproduces this article here to spread awareness on the death and coverup of an African Immigrant in US custody.
See the VIDEO on this horrific death of an African immigrant and shameful coverup that followed.
Few Details on Immigrants Who Died in Custody
But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages. He died there four months later without ever waking up, leaving family members on two continents trying to find out why.
Mr. Bah’s name is one of 66 on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007, when nearly a million people passed through.
The list, compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration.
The list has few details, and they are often unreliable, but it serves as a rough road map to previously unreported cases like Mr. Bah’s. And it reflects a reality that haunts grieving families like his: the difficulty of getting information about the fate of people taken into immigration custody, even when they die.
Mr. Bah’s relatives never saw the internal records labeled “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the New Jersey detention center for the federal government. The documents detail how he was treated by guards and government employees: shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth.
Mr. Bah had lived in New York for a decade, surrounded by a large circle of friends and relatives. The extravagant gowns he sewed to support his wife and children in West Africa were on display in a Manhattan boutique.
But he died in a sequestered system where questions about what had happened to him, or even his whereabouts, were met with silence.
As the country debates stricter enforcement of immigration laws, thousands of people who are not American citizens are being locked up for days, months or years while the government decides whether to deport them. Some have no valid visa; some are legal residents, but have past criminal convictions; others are seeking asylum from persecution.
Death is a reality in any jail, and the medical neglect of inmates is a perennial issue. But far more than in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees and their families lack basic ways to get answers when things go wrong.
No government body is required to keep track of deaths and publicly report them. No independent inquiry is mandated. And often relatives who try to investigate the treatment of those who died say they are stymied by fear of immigration authorities, lack of access to lawyers, or sheer distance.
Federal officials say deaths are reviewed internally by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which reports them to its inspector general and decides which ones warrant investigation. Officials say they notify the detainee’s next of kin or consulate, and report the deaths to local medical authorities, who may conduct autopsies. In Mr. Bah’s case, a review before his death found no evidence of foul play, an immigration spokesman said, though after later inquiries from The Times, he said a full review of the death was under way.
But critics, including many in Congress, say this piecemeal process leaves too much to the agency’s discretion, allowing some deaths to be swept under the rug while potential witnesses are transferred or deported. They say it also obscures underlying complaints about medical care, abusive conditions or inadequate suicide prevention.
In January, the House passed a bill that would require states that receive certain federal money to report deaths in custody to their attorneys general. But the bill is stalled in the Senate, and it does not cover federal facilities.
The only tangible result of Congressional concern has been the list of 66 deaths, which names Mr. Bah and many other detainees for the first time, but raises as many questions as it answers.
For Mr. Bah’s survivors, the mystery of his death is hard to bear. In Guinea, his first wife, Dalanda, wept as she spoke about the contradictory accounts that had reached her and her two teenage sons through other detainees, including some who speculated that Mr. Bah had been beaten.
In New York, a cousin who is an American citizen, Khadidiatou Bah, 38, said she was unable to bring a lawsuit, in part because other relatives were afraid of antagonizing the authorities.
“They don’t want to push the case, or maybe they will be sent home,” she said. “This guy was killed, and we don’t know what happened.”
Lingering Questions
The list of deaths where Mr. Bah’s name surfaced is often cryptic. Along with 13 deaths cited as suicides and 14 as the result of cardiac ailments, it offers such causes as “undetermined” and “unwitnessed arrest, epilepsy.” No one’s nationality is given, some places of detention are omitted, and some names and birth dates seem garbled. As a result, many families could not be tracked down for this article.
But when they could be, they posed more disturbing questions.
In California, relatives of Walter Rodriguez-Castro, 28, said they were rebuffed when they tried to find out why his calls had stopped coming from the Kern County Jail in Bakersfield in April 2006. Then in June, his wife went to his scheduled hearing in San Francisco’s immigration court and learned that he had been dead for many weeks, his body unclaimed in the county morgue.
The coroner found that Mr. Rodriguez-Castro, a mover from El Salvador in the country illegally, had died of undiagnosed meningitis and H.I.V., after days complaining of fever, stiff neck and vomiting. The cause of death on the government’s list: “unresponsive.”
Immigration authorities said on Friday that the case was now under review, but would not answer questions about it or other deaths on the list. Sgt. Ed Komin, a spokesman for the jail, said the death had been promptly reported to immigration officials, who were responsible for notifying families.
Four sons in another family, in Sacramento, described trying for days to get medical care for their father, Maya Nand, a 56-year-old legal immigrant from Fiji, at a detention center run by the Corrections Corporation in Eloy, Ariz. Mr. Nand, an architectural draftsman, had been ailing when he was taken into custody on Jan. 13, 2005, apparently because his application for citizenship had been rejected, based on an earlier conviction for misdemeanor domestic violence. In collect calls, the sons said, he told them that despite his chest pains and breathing problems, doctors at the detention center did not take his condition seriously.
The Corrections Corporation said he had been seen and treated “multiple times.” But a letter to the family from an immigration official said his treatment was for a respiratory infection. The letter said that Mr. Nand was taken to an emergency room on Jan. 25, where congestive heart failure was diagnosed, and that he “suffered an apparent heart attack while at the hospital.” He died on Feb. 2, 2005, shackled to a hospital bed in Tucson.
Boubacar Bah had more going for him than many detainees. He had a lawyer and many friends and relatives in the United States, and his detention center in New Jersey was one of the few frequented by immigrant advocates.
But three days after he suffered a head injury in detention last year, no one in his New York circle knew that he was lying comatose in a Newark hospital, where he had already been identified as a possible organ donor.
“Thank you for the referral,” an organ-sharing network wrote on Feb. 3, 2007, according to hospital records. “This patient is a potential candidate for organ donation once brain death criteria is met.”
Four days after the fall, tipped off by a detainee who called Mr. Bah’s roommate in Brooklyn, relatives rushed to the detention center to ask Corrections Corporation employees where he was.
“They wouldn’t give us any information,” said Lamine Dieng, an American citizen who teaches physics at Bronx Community College and is married to Mr. Bah’s cousin Khadidiatou.
On the fifth day, they said, a detention official called them with the name of the hospital. There they found Mr. Bah on life support, still in custody, with a detention guard around the clock.
“There was one guard who knew Boubacar,” Ms. Bah said. “He told me on the down-low: ‘This guy, you have to fight for him. This guy was neglected.’ ”
Within the week, word of the case reached a reporter at The Times, through an immigration lawyer who had received separate calls from two detainees; they were upset about a badly injured man — named “something like Aboubakar” — left in an isolation cell and later found near death.
But advocacy groups said they were unaware of the case. And Michael Gilhooly, the spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that without the man’s full name and eight-digit alien registration number, he could not check the information.
For those who knew Mr. Bah, it was hard to understand how such a man could lie dying without explanations.
“Everybody liked Boubacar,” said Sadio Diallo, 48, who has a tailor shop in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he and Mr. Bah had shared an apartment with fellow immigrants since arriving in 1998. “He’s a very, very, very good man.”
For six years, Mr. Bah had worked for L’Impasse, a clothing store in the West Village, sewing dresses that sold for up to $2,000 with what a former manager, Abdul Sall, called his “magic hands.” Mr. Bah often spent Sundays at the Bronx townhouse his cousins had inherited from the family’s first American citizen, a seaman who arrived in 1943.
In Africa, Mr. Bah’s earnings not only supported his first wife, sons and ailing mother, but in Guinean tradition, allowed him to wed a second wife, long distance. It was his longing to see them all again after eight years that landed him in detention. When he returned from a three-month visit to Guinea in May 2006, immigration authorities at Kennedy Airport told him that his green card application had been denied while he was away, automatically revoking his permission to re-enter the United States. An immigration lawyer hired by his friends was unable to reopen the application while Mr. Bah waited for nine months in detention, records showed.
Mr. Bah died on May 30, 2007, after four months in a coma. His lawyer, Theodore Vialet, requested detention reports and hospital records under the Freedom of Information Act. But by the time the records arrived last autumn, the idea of a lawsuit had been dropped.
So Mr. Vialet just filed the records away — until a reporter’s call about a name on the list of dead detainees prompted him to dig them out.
After the Fall
There are 57 pages of documents, some neatly typed by medics, some scrawled by guards. Some quote detainees who said Mr. Bah was ailing for two days before his fall on Feb. 1, and asked in vain to see a doctor.
The records leave unclear exactly when or how Mr. Bah was injured in detention. But they leave no doubt that guards, supervisors, government medical employees and federal immigration officers played a role in leaving him untreated, hour after hour, as he lapsed into a stupor.
It began about 8 a.m., according to the earliest report. Guards called a medical emergency after a detainee saw Mr. Bah collapse near a toilet, hitting the back of his head on the floor.
When he regained consciousness, Mr. Bah was taken to the medical unit, which is run by the federal Public Health Service. He became incoherent and agitated, reports said, pulling away from the doctor and grabbing at the unit staff. Physicians consulted later by The Times called this a textbook symptom of intracranial bleeding, but apparently no one recognized that at the time.
He was handcuffed and placed in leg restraints on the floor with medical approval, “to prevent injury,” a guard reported. “While on the floor the detainee began to yell in a foreign language and turn from side to side,” the guard wrote, and the medical staff deemed that “the screaming and resisting is behavior problems.”
Mr. Bah was ordered to calm down. Instead, he kept crying out, then “began to regurgitate on the floor of medical,” the report said. So Mr. Bah was written up for disobeying orders. And with the approval of a physician assistant, Michael Chuley, who wrote that Mr. Bah’s fall was unwitnessed and “questionable,” the tailor was taken in shackles to a solitary confinement cell with instructions that he be monitored.
Under detention protocols, an officer videotaped Mr. Bah as he lay vomiting in the medical unit, but the camera’s battery failed, guards wrote, when they tried to tape his trip to cell No. 7.
Inside the cell, a supervisor removed Mr. Bah’s restraints. He was unresponsive to questions asked by the Public Health Service officer on duty, a report said, adding: “The detainee set up in his bed and moan and he fell to his left side and hit his head on the bed rail.”
About 9 a.m., with the approval of the health officer and a federal immigration agent, the cell was locked.
The watching began. As guards checked hourly, Mr. Bah appeared to be asleep on the concrete floor, snoring. But he could not be roused to eat lunch or dinner, and at 7:10 p.m., “he began to breathe heavily and started foaming slightly at the mouth,” a guard wrote. “I notified medical at this time.”
However, the nurse on duty rejected the guard’s request to come check, according to reports. And at 8 p.m., when the warden went to the medical unit to describe Mr. Bah’s condition, the nurse, Raymund Dela Pena, was not alarmed. “Detainee is likely exhibiting the same behavior as earlier in the day,” he wrote, adding that Mr. Bah would get a mental health exam in the morning.
About 10:30 p.m., more than 14 hours after Mr. Bah’s fall, the same nurse, on rounds, recognized the gravity of his condition: “unresponsive on the floor incontinent with foamy brown vomitus noted around mouth.” Smelling salts were tried. Mr. Bah was carried back to the medical unit on a stretcher.
Just before 11, someone at the jail called 911.
When an ambulance left Mr. Bah at the hospital, brain scans showed he had a fractured skull and hemorrhages at all sides of his swelling brain. He was rushed to surgery, and the detention center was informed of the findings.
But in a report to their supervisors the next day, immigration officials at the center described Mr. Bah’s ailment as “brain aneurysms” — a diagnosis they corrected a week later to “hemorrhages,” without mentioning the skull fracture. After Mr. Bah’s death, they wrote that his hospitalization was “subsequent to a fall in the shower.”
The nurse, Mr. Dela Pena, and the physician assistant, Mr. Chuley, said that only their superiors could discuss the case. The Public Health Service did not respond to questions, and the Corrections Corporation said medical decisions were the responsibility of the Public Health Service.
Mr. Bah’s cousins demanded an autopsy, but the Union County medical examiner’s confidential report was not completed until Dec. 6. It was sent to the county prosecutor’s office only as a matter of routine, because the matter had been classified as an “unattended accident resulting in death.”
Prosecutors said they did not investigate. “According to the report, Bah suffered a fall in the shower,” Eileen Walsh, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors, said in an e-mail message. “We are not privy to any other bits of information.”
In the home movies Mr. Bah made of his last journey home, he is only a fleeting presence: a slim man with a shy smile. But without his support, relatives in Africa say they have little money for food and none for his sons’ schooling.
His body went back to Guinea in a sealed coffin.
“I stayed here seven years, waiting for him,” his second wife, Mariama, said in French, recalling their long separation and the brief reunion that led to the birth of their son, now a toddler, while Mr. Bah was in detention.
“I wanted them to open the casket,” she added, “to know if it was him inside. Until today, I cry for him.”
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