A bill before the US Congress would ban tens of millions of dollars in U.S. economic aid to some of its allies unless they formally agree to exempt U.S. citizens from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Congress passed a law in 2002 that gave the administration the discretion to cut off military aid to countries not belonging to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that ratified the ICC. Over the past year, the administration has done precisely that with about three-dozen countries, almost all of them poor nations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Central Europe. The Nethercutt Amendment would deprive the same nations of economic support funds (ESF), a category of economic assistance that accounts for about $2.5 billion in the current foreign-aid bill.

The Global Network for Good Governance (GNGG), an anti-corruption and good governance network that includes organizations and individuals from 21 countries, has announced the opening of a new branch in Nigeria. The new branch is tasked with establishing a viable network of the GNGG in Nigeria. To do so, the branch will draw the network members from a range of institutions, such as public, private, and third sector organizations, the media, and individuals who share a vision of good governance and a corruption-free society. Contact [email protected] to find out more.

The Practical Guide is unique in providing a concise and simply-worded guide to the World Trade Organization (WTO), from a human rights perspective. Importantly, the Practical Guide contains pointers for individuals and groups concerned with human rights to respond to the threats trade and trade rules can pose to the enjoyment of human rights. It describes human rights mechanisms that can be applied by people concerned to ensure that trade, trade rules or the domestic implementation of international trade rules are carried out in a way that does not have negative impacts on human rights. No prior knowledge of trade or economic issues is required to read and make good use of the Practical Guide.

Millions of men, women and children are still being bought and sold as chattels, forced into bonded labour, held as slaves for ritual or religious purposes, or trafficked across borders, often to be sold into prostitution, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a message marking International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. "All these forms of slavery are abhorrent, and must be eradicated," he declared, calling on all States to ratify and implement existing conventions that fight the scourge. "Slavery offends every value that underlies the United Nations Charter, and the Organization and all its Member States must take a strong stand against it."

The World Development Movement (WDM) has condemned the lyrics of the Band Aid 20 single “Do They Know It's Christmas?” as promoting a negative and inaccurate picture of Africa and its problems. "Such images are patronising and out of date but worst of all they present a misleading impression of why Africa is poor and discourage people from taking action. African poverty is not an unfortunate accident of geography and climate. It is largely the result of damaging policies such as free trade forced on Africa by rich countries," said the WDM.

Tony Blair's Commission for Africa will have little effect unless it tackles global apartheid. So long as global rules are made by a minority, any progress in Africa could be wiped out overnight by changes in currency, trading conditions or security as a result of decisions or neglect by the world's most powerful bodies. Unless Africans have an equal and effective voice in global decision-making, the Commission's work will be forgotten.

All other questions are window dressing.

This Commission would not be necessary if rich countries had been committed to the UN Economic Commission for Africa, founded 1958; the UN Programme for Action for African Economic Recovery and Development initiated in 1986; the Global Coalition for Africa founded in 1990, or the UN Initiative for Africa, launched in 1996. Indeed, the Commission could save money simply by updating the UN Action Plan for African, published in 1991.

The treatment of Africa and its position in global decision-making is in some respects worse than the treatment of the majority in South Africa under apartheid. Although the West condemns racism, and includes Africans and people of African descent at the highest levels of governance, the structures of global decision-making systematically prevent Africa from having an effective say in the economic and political rules which govern their affairs. As a result, African states are often treated like Bantustans, clients of Western powers, and the needs of their people are neglected.

One example of minority rule in global governance is the UN Security Council: 80% of the permanent members are white, representing less than 10% of the world population, and 60% are European. As a result, the Security Council has failed to protect Africans from the scourge of war.

The International Community would not have tolerated genocide in Rwanda if Africa had had a veto in the Security Council. The World Bank and IMF would have done more about aids, debt, famine or declining currencies and commodity prices if Africa had the same votes compared to the US. Nor would Africa have faced steep tariff barriers and dumping if it had the same clout in the WTO as Europe. The G8 would not have let Africa get into its current state if it had been a member.

How the major powers and institutions of global governance allocate and implement budgets, appoint top officials and influence national policies can encourage corruption and make it impossible for citizens to hold governments to account. As the Commission says, transparency can be a powerful mechanism both for enhancing overall delivery by government and the participation of excluded groups. But few global institutions or Africa Desks in the foreign ministries of the rich world are open and transparent.

Giving African nations an equitable and effective say in the major institutions of global governance would address one of the central questions raised by the Commission: if Africa had a veto on the Security Council, IMF, World Bank, WTO, and Bank of International Settlements, it would quickly become a domestic issue for rich countries. They would soon find the political will to make a lasting commitment to Africa's development.

If the Commission is serious about enabling Africa to solve its problems, it will:
- Review Africa's representation on the major institutions of international decision-making
- Advocate equitable representation and powers for Africa in these bodies
- Draw up principles of transparency, accountability, democracy and equitable decision-making for all institutions of global governance, as advocated by the One World Trust.

There are opportunities for reform. This week a UN High-Level Panel will recommend fairer representation for Africa and other Developing Countries on the UN Security Council.

The G8 member states have the power to propose a new global settlement on the basis of our common humanity, in which international decision-making is based on equity, transparency, democracy and accountability. If it does so, the issues facing Africa will remain the common concern of the world. If it does not, the Blair report will join the Pearson Report, the Brandt Report and many other reports in the footnotes of history, as business as usual resumes.

* Titus Alexander is founder of Charter 99 and author of "Unravelling Global Apartheid" (Polity Press/Blackwell, 1996)

* If you agree with these arguments, tell the Commission and give them specific examples about the way in which global apartheid and Africa's position in international decision-making causes harm or hinders progress. If you disagree, join the dialogue at Pambazuka News! Send your comments to

The Commission is holding a series of meetings with Africans throughout the Continent, starting this week, on 1 December, in Dakar, Senegal. Commissioners will also travel to Nairobi (6 Dec); Douala (8 Dec); Lusaka (10 Dec) and Alexandria (14 Dec). These meetings will enable representatives from every African country to comment on the Commission's work, and allow Commissioners to collect new material for their report. The meetings are being organised in partnership with LEAD International www.amref.org/speakforafrica.htm and the Southern African Regional Poverty Network http://www.commissionforafrica.org/getting_involved/consultationdocument.htm

Prepare comments in the form of a brief summary followed by up to 750 words.
Where your submission relates to a particular thematic section of the document, please indicate this in the summary.

Submissions should be sent to the Secretariat to the Commission for Africa by e-mail: [email][email protected]

Mark the Subject 'Submission October-December Consultation' followed by your name or the name of your organisation. http://www.commissionforafrica.org/getting_involved/GettingInvolved.htm

* If you or your organisation has made a submission to the Commission for Africa, please send your contribution to Pambazuka News and we will include it in the newsletter. Send to

An international NGO involved in a school feeding programme has had to leave Zimbabwe because the authorities refused to renew its registration and work permits for expatriate staff. International aid agencies and NGOs must register with the government and have their activities vetted and approved.

To examine how the UN has been providing protection to internally displaced persons and how to make that response more effective, the Brookings Institution-Johns Hopkins Project on Internal Displacement and the Internal Displacement Unit of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs dispatched a team into the field. The study finds that the UN's approach to protecting vulnerable populations "is still largely ad hoc and driven more by the personalities and convictions of individuals on the ground than by an institutional, system-wide agenda."

Reporters sans frontières (RSF) has condemned the closure of "Le Quotidien", Guinea's only privately-owned daily, on 13 November 2004. The National Communication Council (Conseil national de la communication, CNC) announced the paper's "indefinite suspension" following the publication of an article entitled, "The country is in bad shape...when will the uprising take place?" RSF also deplored the threatening phone calls that the newspaper's editor, Siaka Kouyaté, has been receiving for the past week.

Reporters sans frontières (RSF) has condemned the closure of "Le Quotidien", Guinea's only privately-owned daily, on 13 November 2004. The National Communication Council (Conseil national de la communication, CNC) announced the paper's "indefinite suspension" following the publication of an article entitled, "The country is in bad shape...when will the uprising take place?" RSF also deplored the threatening phone calls that the newspaper's editor, Siaka Kouyaté, has been receiving for the past week.

In January of 2004, two similar lawsuits filed against New York Life Insurance Company for injustices dating back to the 19th century resulted in unreasonably different outcomes. A class action lawsuit, filed against New York Life Insurance Company by Blacks whose African ancestors were enslaved in the United States under the company's insurance policies, was dismissed on January 26, 2004. Just three (3) days later, on February 1, 2004, a similar case, filed by Whites whose Armenian ancestors held policies and were genocide victims under the Ottoman Empire, was settled with New York Life for $20 million.

The Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis (TB) approved last Thursday the fifth round of funding proposals to combat the three diseases. The decision was made after a two-day, closed-door meeting of the Global Fund's Board in Arusha, Tanzania. Presidents Mwai Kibaki of Kenya, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania attended the meeting that opened on Wednesday. Previously, there had been uncertainty about the fifth round of funding, with some donors adopting a hard-line stance towards continued funding.

Zimbabwean civil society agencies (CSOs) based in South Africa have resolved to join hands to find a common approach to helping refugees who have fled to the country to escape poverty and persecution under Robert Mugabe's government. Of the 3.4 million Zimbabweans (about 25% of the country's population believed to have left the country) an estimated one to two million were living in South Africa, legally and illegally, they claimed.

“People with HIV/AIDS and their advocates strongly condemn the decision by the United States to block new funding for HIV/AIDS programs around the world through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and its systematic attempts to undermine the work of the World Health Organization and its efforts to ensure that 3 million people in the developing world receive HIV treatment by the end of 2005.

The suspension, proposed by the United States, of new funding for HIV, TB and malaria programs by the Global Fund, will lead to the loss of countless numbers of lives and to thousands of new infections. While we recognize there have been some problems in the disbursement of grants and implementation of programs through the Global Fund, this is not an excuse for suspending new grants to countries that desperately need this support. A fifth round of funding by the Global Fund would provide vital resources to nations around the world confronting these pandemics.

We also condemn the US government’s attacks and those by right-wing think tanks associated with the Administration on the World Health Organization and its prequalification process for evaluating antiretroviral drugs. While there have been specific problems with the dossiers submitted by some of the manufacturers of generic AIDS drugs to the WHO, these problems were recognized and are being handled by the agency. We urge the US government to work with the WHO to strengthen its prequalification program rather than setting up its own regulatory process for these drugs at the US Food and Drug Administration as well as duplicative supply and procurement programs in the developing world.

With these events taken together, we believe that the US government is seeking to draw control of global AIDS programs under its own leadership rather than supporting multilateral responses through the WHO and the Global Fund. The United States cannot go it alone in the fight against AIDS and must work in cooperation with the global community. It should not abuse its power in setting the agenda in the fight against this disease, particularly when it has championed abstinence-only prevention programs that do not work and expensive brand-name drugs that are unsustainable solutions for the developing world.”

Contact: [email protected]

AFRICA: US, JAPAN AND FRANCE UNITING TO CURTAIL FIGHT AGAINST AIDS
Global AIDS Alliance

US, Japan and France Uniting to Curtail Fight Against AIDS

Contact: David Bryden, 202-296-0260 ext 211 or 202-549-3664 mobile

Washington, Nov 16 -- Despite naming AIDS one of six top priorities for his second term, President Bush is taking steps this week to cripple the Global Fund. The Fund, based in Geneva, has the broadest impact and uses the most collaborative and need-driven approach of any international health initiative.

This week the Global Fund's Board, chaired by Secretary Tommy Thompson, will meet week in Tanzania (Nov 17-19) and decide whether to proceed with additional grantmaking. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan will attend the meeting, along with five African Presidents including the Chair of the Africa Union, President Obasanjo.

AIDS advocates consider the meeting a “make-it-or-break-it” meeting for the Fund. Contributions are not keeping pace with the Fund’s needs, which are escalating in 2005 and 2006. The impact of a cancellation of grantmaking on the fight against global disease would be “catastrophic,” according to the Fund’s Director. “The Bush Administration will be sentencing many people to death in Africa, in Asia, in the Caribbean, in Latin America, and in Eastern Europe,” stated noted South African AIDS advocate Zackie Achmat.

Since re-election, the President has intensified efforts to roll back the level of next year’s US contributions to the Fund. Using misleading claims about the Fund's track record, the Administration hopes to persuade Congress to reverse an earlier approved level that was based in part on emergency funding. Congress is now finalizing the Omnibus Spending Bill, and the White House is weighing in with behind-the-scenes negotiations to undercut the Fund.

Also, according to leaked White House talking points, the President is strongly backing a proposal that would essentially stall the Fund at its current level of grantmaking, just as the world is trying to reach a target of getting 3 million people on AIDS treatment by the end of next year. The Administration is lobbying other members of the Board of the Global Fund to support the cancellation of grantmaking for the forseeable future, and this idea has gained considerable momentum. The Fund was supposed to reach a level of annual grantmaking of $7 billion by 2007.

"The President is undermining the positive legacy he hopes to leave on AIDS," stated Dr. Paul Zeitz, Executive Director of the Global AIDS Alliance. "Far from beginning a fresh start in his second term, President Bush still pursues his ill-informed vendetta against the Fund. Sadly, Japan, France and other Board members seem ready to back this incredibly shortsighted policy. Yet, proceeding with plans for next year’s grantmaking would actually help create the pressure needed to get additional contributions. The Fund needs to be strong not only to fight AIDS but also to fill major gaps in the funding of programs to fight Tb and malaria."

Even before the election, the White House was attacking the Fund. On September 21 the White House sent staffers to distribute misleading and inflammatory information about the Fund to Congressional appropriators, the very day President Bush was highlighting his “support” for the Fund in a speech at the UN.

Besides funding issues, this week’s meeting will also consider whether or not to commit to minimum requirements for civil society participation. The Fund's 400-person Partnership Forum backed the requirements at its July meeting.

“It is critically important that the Board require grantees to live up to basic standards of participation from civic groups, including people living with AIDS,” stated Zeitz.

BACKGROUND:

TANZANIA: BUSH ADMINISTRATION PROPOSES GLOBAL FUND DELAY

Health officials in the Bush administration are urging board members of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to delay the distribution of a fifth round of grants because of funding shortages, the New York Times reports. However, people attending the Global Fund's board meeting in Arusha, Tanzania, this week said on Tuesday that the fund "appears likely" to go ahead with a new round of grants, according to the Financial Times. Board members will have to "balance the clear need for increased funding" for programs against the fund's "current resource constraints," according to a Global Fund release.

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=26778

The Band Aid Album, ‘Do they know its Christmas time’, which sold millions of copies and directly raised even more millions of dollars for the relief of famine in Ethiopia 20 years ago is again being released in time for this Christmas. As in 1984 it is widely expected that the album will be a runaway success.

Apart from the millions of dollars raised then and to be raised now, what both the album and the Live Aid concert it inspired in July 1985 (which was watched reportedly by over 1.5 billion people across the world) achieved was to raise awareness about hunger, starvation and famine in Africa. The bloated tummies of underfed babies clutching at emaciated breasts of a hunger-ravished mother or the multitudes of flies and army of other insects holidaying on the mouths and bodies of desperate children, women and men in refugee camps became the dominant image of Africa in the global media. What we saw with our eyes on televisions became engraved permanently on our minds. It was successful in causing almost a stampede of humanitarian concern and focus on Africa.

However it had its own unintended consequences then and twenty years on these negative consequences have a greater impact in that they perpetuate the popular perception that Africa is a basket case continent and Africans are a hopeless and helpless people.

The fact that the same song could be re released without altering the lyrics and with similar accompanying horrible pictures on televisions, in newspapers and other more widely accessible multi media today than then speaks volumes. It is either an admission of failure of previous efforts or a confirmation that Africa is indeed a basket .

I am particularly irked about that dubious line: ‘Thank God tonight its them instead of you’! The only variation on the theme is that instead of targeting Ethiopia last time around it is Sudan that is competing for the sympathy of the West as Africa's most hellish of hells!

It is an indictment of Africa's leaders and also the powerful countries, individuals and institutions within the international community that despite all the awareness and pangs of conscience in the last 20 years, fellow human beings can still be facing such penury, humiliation and starvation in a world with ‘enough for our needs but not enough for our greed’ as Mahatma Ghandi once put it.

However as Africans we can be disgusted, ashamed and rightly critical of the deliberate use/abuse of those horrible images that strip us of our dignity and humanity, but we should be more outraged that Africans (through acts of both omission and commission) have been largely responsible for such continuous misery inflicted on our own peoples. Band Aid, Live Aid or any of the busy body Western NGOs raising huge sums of money on these images did not create them, they are merely exploiting them for their multi-million dollar humanitarian mega business. Therefore the first responsibility and admission of guilt is ours and ours alone. It is up to us to put an end to the brutalisation and extreme pauperisation of our own peoples.

But the Humanitarian agencies also have to ask themselves whether their chosen methods have worked or are working. Or if the end now justifies the means and that end is about their unaccountable power to play god with the destiny of poor people by merchandising our people’s suffering. They often defend the use of the bad images as necessary to raise awareness and prick the conscience of the world (most of the time they mean, Europeans and Americans!). One is bound to ask of Live Aid and Band Aid that after 20 years what the harvest of this conscience safari has been if they have to use the same images and record two decades later.

It has always intrigued me why the conscience of the West can only be pricked by degradation of other peoples. The process of getting westerners to part with their donations end up dehumanizing and degrading Africa. Instead of creating the much needed understanding and solidarity it creates an unequal power relation with psychological hang-ups about superior and inferior peoples; one is a permanent donor and the other is a permanent supplicant. That one-way street does not lead to understanding, rather it institutionalizes a ‘we know best’ attitude on the part of the humanitarian industry. It also makes the humanitarian agencies married to bad news from Africa, thereby becoming professional merchants of our misery. It will seem that the worse the situation is the better for their fund raising drives! Needless to say that this breeds cynicism among those who are supposed to be grateful for the kind help they are receiving.

The more important lesson of the 20 years of Band Aid must surely be bringing into sharp relief the naiveté of those years that symbolic acts of genuine human solidarity will somehow change the hearts and minds of the powerful both in Africa and internationally. They can throw a few coins at the problem to appease immediate pressure and gain public mileage but the real change will only come from raising the power questions that turn drought into famine. It is politics and power that makes Africans seemingly more vulnerable to hunger and starvation than other peoples. Africa is not a poor continent but our peoples are poor because they are powerless over their resources. People are powerless in their countries and our countries are impotent in global power relations. That is why we get fleeced on all fronts.

Charity may offer an instant fire brigade service but it cannot be a substitute for sustainable long-term solutions. Why is it that Ethiopia that received massive humanitarian support twenty years ago is today one of the least recipients of long-term development aid in Africa? Even if it gets more help in aid, as long as it continues to get bad terms of trade and returns for its coffee and other raw materials, like other African countries, it will continue to run a deficit economy needing aid. Many of our countries especially those beloved by IMF/World Bank and Western Countries as ‘doing well’ have become aid addicts while the humanitarian interventionists and NGOs have become aid pushers.

The extreme poverty faced by many Africans in a majority of our countries is structural and unless both the internal and external dimensions of that unequal power relation are transformed I can assure you that in another 20 years, when Bob Geldof and many of his original collaborators would have become Old Age Pensioners (OAPs) they may still be organizing Band Aid 3. I think Saint Bob and Bono in the past few years have come to realize this and that's why they are talking less about charity but more in terms of trade, equity, global justice, debt cancellation, etc. Soon they will have to engage with reparation for Africa for both historical and contemporary depletion and pillage of the continent and her peoples and also the structural linkage between the prosperity of the West and the poverty of global humanity.
This shift is necessary in order to build a global alliance (rather than self -obsessed angst -driven Western do-gooders and their selective conscience) that can truly make poverty history in this new millennium.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa

* Please send comments to

Recruiters of child soldiers should face prosecution by the international criminal court, a human rights group has said. The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (CSUCS) has called on the UN to name, shame and pursue armies and militias which use children to fight. Fighters under the age of 18 have been used in 22 conflicts in the last three years, it reveals in a new report.

Africa is desperately poor, despite being the recipient of tens of billions of dollars in aid over the past few decades. The United Nations (UN) Development Programme says sub-Saharan Africa's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in 2002 was $469 compared with $22987 for affluent members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. But American economist Jeffrey Sachs, in a Brookings Institution paper titled Ending Africa's Poverty Trap, maintains that only a huge infusion of carefully targeted public investment will pull Africa out of poverty.

Developing countries will enjoy their best year of economic growth in 2004, producing a "spectacular" drop in poverty around the world, the World Bank said this week. But Sub-Saharan Africa remained the global laggard because of its vulnerability to oil prices and more fundamental issues of ineffective economic structures and inefficient government spending, the Bank said, which would only partly be offset by further aid flows and debt forgiveness. The report also warned that the growing trend towards regional trade agreements between countries, rather than multilateral trade deals, were not necessarily a panacea for developing countries' problems.

Nearly 16,000 of the world's plant and animal species face extinction largely because of the destructive behaviour of mankind, according to a major new environmental report out Wednesday. Over-exploitation, climate change and habitat destruction are to blame for a crisis that has wiped out at least 27 species from the wild over the last two decades, according to the World Conservation Union's (IUCN) red list of threatened species.

The hardships of life in Buduburum camp are not immediately apparent. On first entering the community it looks more like a bustling town than a refugee camp. UNHCR representative Needa Jehu-Hoyah says poverty, unemployment and a severe shortage of drinking water cause serious problems for the people who live here. But what awaits those who do decide to return to Liberia?