The 22nd Prix Ars Electronica - International Competition for CyberArts is open for entries. From its very inception in 1987, the Prix Ars Electronica has been conceived as an open platform for various disciplines at the intersection of art, technology, science and society. More than 3,300 submissions in 2007 have further enhanced the Prix Ars Electronica’s reputation as an internationally representative competition honoring outstanding works in the cyberarts. The categories Digital Musics, Digital Communities and Hybrid Art are great indicators for this trend. he deadline for submission is March 7, 2008.

In commemoration of the second anniversary of Zoliswa Nkonyane’s brutal murder in February 2005, Triangle Project and its Western Cape alliances launched the end hate 07-07-07 campaign on 3 February in Cape Town at Saartjie Baartman Center. Women, the HIV/Aids sector and individual human rights activists gathered with a common goal, to put an end to all forms of hate crimes.

Normal transportation of goods and people to the west of Kenya resumed last week after days of disruption along the highway from Nairobi to west of the country and Uganda. Armed police cleared the highway of barricades erected by marauding youths in the ongoing post election violence that many people say has now taken a life of it’s own.

The 07-07-07-Campaign to end hate against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Intersexed (LGBTI) persons was launched at the Saartjie Baartman Centre, Heideveld in Cape Town on the 2nd anniversary commemorating the violent and brutal death of 19 year old Zoliswa Nkonyana (04/02/06). The provincial campaign is being spearheaded by Cape Town's Triangle Project, the oldest LGBTI service organisation in the country in partnership with the national Joint Working Group (JWG) and the Western Cape 07-07-07 Alliance partners.

On the Night Of January 30, members of the South African Police Service accompanied by officials of the Department of Home Affairs conducted a brutal and violent raid on the premises of the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg at around midnight, reportedly breaking down the doors of the church and violently attacking and beating up many unarmed and defenceless people who were sheltering in the church. The minister of the church, Bishop Paul Verryn, was also assaulted in the attack. Many people reportedly had items of personal property illegally confiscated by their ‘attackers’ in scenes reminiscent of the behaviour of security agents under apartheid.

This Thursday, 7th February 2008, eight Joe Slovo residents charged with public violence last year are due to appear in the Cape Town Regional Court in Parow (Court Number 4). The Joe Slovo Task Team is very disturbed that the case has been moved from the Bishop Lavis Magistrates Court to the Regional Court and that it is set down for trial, whereas they do not even have a lawyer.

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) is pleased to announce the 2008/2009 competition for its new initiative designed to contribute to the development, restoration and/or consolidation of a culture of regular faculty seminars in African universities. In announcing the competition, the Council will also like to invite applications from staff of faculties of social sciences of African universities for the resources available to support the programme.

Dan Bashaw and Mike Gifford have put together a terrific list of Open Source tools that can be used by activists to spread the message and promote interaction by enewsletters, forums, blogs, wikis and epetitions. They wrote an article for Steven Clift's excellent Democracies Online Newswire.

Tactical Tech are looking for advocacy organisations to test their new mobile advocacy toolkit which they are producing in conjunction with Fahamu. We would like to narrow this first phase of testing to organisations who were represented at the meeting in Nairobi organised by Fahamu in June 2007.

The toolkit is made up of easily accessible tools and materials explaining mobile technologies. This project is carried out in collaboration with the African Human Rights organisation Fahamu.

This toolkit makes the most of the technologies that are currently available in this space to enable advocates and NGOs use mobile phones to:

* Provide access to information such as recorded voice or audio and news updates
* Increase participatory processes and facilitation through polling, voting, surveying and incident reporting
* Enable citizen journalism and remote publishing by using mobiles to blog or to create podcasts, and to upload photographs.
* Conduct awareness raising and outreach through demographically targeted or time based messaging, alerts, ringtones and games or small scale applications
* Co-ordinate meetings or organise ash mobilisation and calls to action
* Provide services allowing the creation of alert/SOS systems for migrant workers and other communities and of early warning and emergency response systems in general.

Tactical Tech is coordinating with a network of 50 of the worlds leading practitioners working with mobiles and advocacy to create the toolkit. It contains a range of tools, case studies and practical how-to guides as well as a set of references for additional resources and reviews of web-based services.

The organisation testing the toolkit should be looking to implement the use of mobiles in one of their projects so we will require some knowledge of the basics of mobiles and computers in order that the most effective use possible is made of the material.

Tactical Tech are looking for the following outcomes from this testing process;

* Feedback on whether the content is understandable, appropriate and well structured
* Feedback on the tone and presentation of the information; whether the language is understandable
* What is missing from the toolkit
* What isn't needed in the toolkit
* Whether the tools included are functional and appropriate

Feedback on the toolkit should be provided not just by the technologists in an organisation but also by programme staff and board members so that a broad range of opinion is canvassed this is vital to ensure that the material is appropriate for those working at different levels of an organisation be it strategic or technical. We will request that full documentation of the testing process is carried out by the organisations taking part.

This process will help us build the final official version of the toolkit in March 2008 so it can be of benefit to advocacy organisations around the world.

If you are interested in taking part please contact [email][email protected]

To keep up-to-date with the latest developments in Zimbabwe, bookmark where the latest postings are to be found.

From November 14-18, 2008, up to 1,500 women's rights activists from around the world will gather in Cape Town, South Africa to discuss the issue of building stronger women's movements globally.

The TUC General Council, expresses shock and outrage at the brutal murder of Mr Alhaji Saula Saka, Lagos State Chairman of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) on 6 January 2008. Our information is that Mr Saka was shot at his home in Iyana Ipaja on the evening of 6 January 2008 by four men and that he succumbed to his injuries at the Lagos State University Hospital in Ikeja at 9.30pm. Mr Saka's brother is of the view that his death was directly linked to his trade union leadership.

The National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL) concludes that the mission of Africa Command (Africom) infringes on the sovereignty of African states due to the particularity of Africa’s history and Africa’s current economic and political relationship to the United States. Further, Africom is designed to violate international law standards that protect rights to selfdetermination and that prohibit unprovoked military aggression. Africom is also likely to become a device for the foreign domination and exploitation of Africa’s natural resources to the detriment of people who are indigenous to the African continent.

Sexual violence defines the conflict in Darfur. This report argues that whilst the primary obstacles to preventing rape and assisting survivors are the perpetrators and the Sudanese government officials, international response has been insufficient.

Workers at the Firestone Rubber Plantation in Liberia have for the first time won representation under a free union vote, throwing out the officials of a company-controlled union. The vote took place in July last year, but it took two court decisions and an unauthorized strike before officials finally agreed to negotiate with the new union and hand over their company-collected union dues. The union recognition is only a first step, however, in changing a system of brutal exploitation of child labor and virtual bondage for the rubber tappers.

The Arnett Drive Settlement has been in Reservoir Hills since 1972. Many of the people living there came there after being evicted from Cato Manor in 1959 and then Newlands in 1971. Today they are under armed attack by the eThekwini Municipality that has its notorious Land Invasions Unit demolishing shacks.

I do not wish to try to argue against Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s analysis of the Kenyan opposition movement and I certainly agree with his contention that “The best thing for Kenya right now is a return to a non-violent path governed by principled democratic structures that will outlive both Raila and Kibaki.” I do, however, feel obliged – as a fellow anti-imperialist and a supporter of popular struggles for justice and equality in Africa and elsewhere – to respond to his faulty analysis regarding some of the recent “people power movements” against autocratic regimes elsewhere.

To begin with, Mukoma Wa Ngugi is completely inaccurate to compare the violent foreign-backed overthrow of democratically-elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide with the nonviolent indigenous-based Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Unlike the imperialist conspiracy against Aristide, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution was a popular movement against an attempt by the incumbent corrupt and autocratic regime of Leonid Kuchma to steal an election on behalf of his favored successor.

Unlike Aristide, President Kuchma was no progressive. In fact, among the popular criticisms directed at Kuchma had been his call for Ukraine to join NATO and, in particular, his support for the deployment of Ukrainian forces in Iraq. By contrast, opposition presidential candidate Victor Yushchenko pledged during his campaign to immediately withdraw Ukrainian troops from Iraq, which he did once assuming office. There was some limited Western support for election monitoring and related efforts that aided the opposition, but the popular movement which forced the invalidation of the rigged election and a fair second vote which followed was of the Ukrainians own doing.

Since coming to power, Yuschenko has continued to demonstrate his independence from Washington. For example, despite enormous pressure from the United States and international financial institutions to give in to neo-liberal reforms, the Ukrainian government under Yuschenko’s leadership still maintains the strongest state role in the economy of all but one of Europe’s 42 countries, hardly the victory for “international capital” that the author implies.

Similarly Mukoma Wa Ngugi is wrong to dismiss Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change as simply a neo-liberal party. It is a broad-based pro-democracy movement which includes both neo-liberal and progressive forces. Certainly there are Western powers and imperialist interests (which hypocritically back pro-capitalist dictators elsewhere in Africa) that are opportunistically trying to engineer the ouster of Robert Mugabe, but that does not mean that they are not also millions of Zimbabweans who have their own legitimate reasons for struggling nonviolently to remove him from power – not the least of which is Mugabe’s chronic mismanagement of public and social services and the economy.

My more fundamental critique of Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s analysis is over the nature of popular struggles against authoritarian regimes. No true people power movement can ever “be used by a national elite to seize power for international capital.” While there have certainly been numerous cases in Africa and elsewhere in which national elites have seized power on behalf of international capital through coups, armed revolts, rigged elections and other means, there has never been a case in which a government that has had the support of the majority of its people has ever been overthrown through a massive nonviolent civil resistance movement. This is why the U.S.-backed strike in Venezuela in 2002-2003 failed to bring down President Hugo Chavez’ government, whereas similar shutdowns of key economic sectors in other countries under less popular regimes have often succeeded. It is certainly true that most of the nonviolent people power revolutions which have brought down dictators in recent decades in such countries as the Philippines, Mali, Serbia, and Indonesia have tended to bring in various forms of liberal democracy, not the more radical changes that are so badly needed in so many societies. It is also true that free elections and political liberty do not guarantee a progressive government or a just society and that these movements which have toppled dictatorships through nonviolent action have oftentimes been led by individuals and coalitions whose political agenda is not as politically progressive as many of us would ideally like to see. However, without individual liberties and accountable government, building a just society becomes virtually impossible. Democracy affords a political opening whereby popular organizations stand a better chance of challenging the excesses of national and global capitalism; of empowering local communities; of openly defending the rights of women, minorities, and the poor; and, of eventually gaining political power.

Few in the Latin American left, for example, would argue that – despite the failure of democratic governance to alter the continent’s underlying social end economic inequality – things were somehow better under the U.S.-backed military dictatorships that once ruled those nations. And, two decades since Latin America’s democratic opening – made possible in large part by people power movements – leftist parties are now winning elections throughout the region. Political and civil rights do not automatically lead to social and economic equality, but such equality will be far more difficult to achieve without the establishment of democratic institutions and the guaranteed protection of individual liberties.

Conversely, while successful violent revolutions have often initially been more effective in overturning the power of traditional elites, reforming archaic social systems and establishing greater economic equality, the authoritarian structure and martial values which come to the fore during armed struggle have tended to result in simply establishing a new form of authoritarianism that creates its own brand of unaccountable elite rule and injustice.

The reality is that successful nonviolent revolutions, like successful armed revolutions, often take years or decades to develop and do so as part of an organic process within the body politic of a given country. There is no standardized formula for success that a foreign government could put together, since the history, culture and political alignments of each country are unique. No foreign government or group working on the behest of international capital can recruit or mobilize the large numbers of ordinary civilians necessary to build a mass nonviolent movement capable of effectively challenging the established political leadership, much less of toppling a government. Furthermore, short of cruder forms of foreign intervention – such as coups, armed revolts, rigged elections – a regime will lose power only if it tries to forcibly maintain a system which the people oppose.

In maintaining our steadfast opposition to U.S. imperialism and efforts to impose the neo-liberal agenda on the people of Africa and elsewhere, let us not belittle the power of masses to make change themselves, even if we do not always have 100% ideological affinity with particular leaders of some of these mass movements. Let us acknowledge that just because a regime spouts anti-imperialist rhetoric, it does not necessarily have their people’s best interest at heart and that the establishment of a more democratic system is often a necessary if not sufficient means of bringing justice to the oppressed.

Since its independence, the state of Niger has been in latent conflict with the Tuareg population living on the Nigerien territory. This situation escalated in 1990 with a massacre of this population group in Tchin-Tabaraden and resulted in an armed conflict. After the conclusion of a treaty of peace, which was intended to make allowances for certain claims brought forward by the Tuareg organizations in 1995, this conflict calmed down. Today, it seems that the implementation of the treaty has failed.

Developing Countries Farm Radio Network (DCFRN) and Technical Center for Agricultural Cooperation (CTA) invite African scriptwriters to participate in the African Farmers’ Strategies for Coping with Climate Change scriptwriting competition. The competition is open to African radio organisations, including broadcasters, production organisations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) with a radio project, and farmers’ associations with a radio show. the Deadline is March 15, 2008.

Targeted and broad-based sanctions must be imposed against the illegitimate and corrupt government of Mwai Kibaki. Everyone knows that the elections were fraudulent and steps must be taken to defend Kenya's nascent democracy. No lasting peace will come to Kenya without justice in the 2007 elections and too much is at stake. The welfare of 150 million people in the East African region is in jeopardy.