The Afro-Brazilian Tribunal:

SOurce:

Alternative Information and Development Centre (AIDC) -
Johannesburg Office
3rd fl Cosatu House, cnr Leyds and Biccard Streets,
Braamfontein, South Africa

611 words
The Afro-Brazilian Tribunal:
Bounty hunting, slave husbandry and profit

In the recent history of workers’ and peoples’ struggles, it has become customary to use the public tribunal as a form of popular education. The tribunal has been found to be most efficient in making a summation of critical issues in the struggle. People present their experiences in dramatic form as evidence, a panel of jurors reflect on the evidence to arrive at a verdict and the judges consider the verdict towards presenting a judgement together with a sentence. The latter are rung out as with the finality of history.

The entire course of the tribunal marks acts of injustice, their exposure, their condemnation and the final destruction of the perpetrators all in a single chain that ends in the total justification of the peoples’ cause. Many lessons are learned, historical right is asserted and the iniquitous foe is slain. Such was the Afro-Brazilian tribunal run at Porto Alegre during the second World Social Forum.

Accused were the Brazilian government and its associated partners, including the governments of the G7 countries, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organisation, the world’s biggest banks and corporations and the Roman Catholic Church. The alleged crimes were those of genocide, racism and destruction of the lives of indigenous people and blacks over the centuries right up to the present.

The fore-bears of the accused had found Brazil inhabited by some eight million indigenous people. A ruthless system of conquest led to the dispossession of their lands, the despoilation of their cities and holy shrines and the theft of their works of art. Conquest was conjoined with bounty hunting and mass murder. Later they were joined by hundreds of black slaves from Africa. The cruelty of the slave system even included the activity of slave husbandry for purposes of slave sales. The indigenous people and their black brothers were put into bondage or otherwise restricted to ghettoised reservations and areas of exclusion. They were separated from the natural resources of their land which were then subjected to a series of “agricultural activities” that ultimately proved disastrous to the environment itself.

Today the descendants of the indigenes are no more than a mere three hundred thousand. The lot of these people and the descendants of the slaves has hardly improved. As a “free” labour force, they have been brought out of the old farms and dragged into modern ghettos outside the big cities. Witness after witness exposed the inadequacy of state hospitals and schools and the most inhuman conditions in which they are forced to live.

The jury and judges considered today’s neoliberal economic system as a natural continuum with the historical policies of genocide, racism and destruction. They identified capitalism as the system which creates a divided society, split by the profit motive along contours of private appropriation by a few and oppression, exploitation and exclusion of the majority, most of whom have now been defined outside the national economy. This system soon defines exclusion in terms of natural inferiority attaching to those excluded. Thus a creed of racism is entrenched. Since the majority and most oppressed of these hewers of wood and drawers of water is female, the intersection of race and gender is the greatest cross-roads upon which the murder of human liberty is committed.

And so, the judges found all the accused guilty as charged and ordered that their ill-begotten accumulations of wealth be recovered for repairing the various levels of damage inflicted. They stressed that it is critical that the system be removed and that a new economic