A U.N. fact-finding mission’s new report on gross human rights abuses in Darfur must be made public before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights votes on a key resolution on Sudan, Human Rights Watch has argued. A fact-finding mission from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) was due to present its findings on Darfur to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. The mission recently spent 10 days in Chad interviewing Sudanese refugees who had recently fled the conflict in Darfur. Unexpectedly, OHCHR decided not to release its report on Darfur to the Commission, which on Friday will conclude its annual six-week session. The decision came at the same time as a move by the Sudanese government, which had denied OHCHR access to the country for the past two weeks, to finally grant it travel authorization. The Sudanese government had allegedly called for a delay in the release, arguing that the report would be “incomplete” without a visit to Sudan.

The European Union has told Sierra Leone it will not help fund May local government elections due to still unanswered questions about corruption during previous ballots, a government minister said Monday. "The EU wrote my ministry that they are not in the position to fund the elections, even though the request was made eight months ago," Sidique Brima, the minister for local government, told reporters.

The world needs to more than double its spending if it is to achieve its 2015 target of halving the proportion of people without access to sanitation and drinking water, a senior United Nations official told a UN commission set up to promote sustainable development in poor countries. José Antonio Ocampo, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, said that while there has been progress towards meeting targets for access to clean drinking water and improved sanitation, especially in East and South Asia, it has not been fast enough, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

It has a reputation for being as calm as the lake that bears its name, but as Malawi heads into its third multiparty presidential and parliamentary elections in May, serial attacks allegedly perpetrated by ruling party youth militias against opposition leaders and journalists cast doubts over the stability of the sliver-shaped central African country. The Malawi Human Rights Commission has warned that rising incidents of pre-election violence by the Young Democrats, the militant youth wing of the ruling United Democratic Front, is polarising the country along ethnic and regional lines. Political analysts, furthermore, worry that voters are losing faith in the democratic process. The upcoming vote marks the second consecutive poll to be marred by ruling- party violence.

The government of Ghana has provoked a feud with civil society organisations just as Accra becomes the first to fall under the lens of the African Peer Review Mechanism. In an attempt to purge the private voluntary sector of alleged graft, the government has ordered all non-governmental organisations to register with the Registrar General and submit annual reports and financial statements by the end of April 2004 or risk being black-listed.

Following a briefing by the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Jan Egeland, on the humanitarian situation in northern Uganda, the members of the UN Security Council on 14 April 2004 condemned the atrocities carried out by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and expressed their concern about the humanitarian crisis, in particular the large-scale displacement of the civilian population, as well as the abduction of children and their forced recruitment as soldiers. The Council members called on the Ugandan government “to enhance its protection for displaced persons and those providing essential services to them”, and called on all parties to facilitate safe and unimpeded humanitarian access to the civilian population in accordance with international law.

With the re-commencement of the disarmament, demobilization, rehabilitation, and reintegration (DDRR) of fighters of Liberia’s warring factions on15 April 2004, UNICEF is mobilizing resources to provide immediate care and reintegration support to the estimated 15,000 children who will come through the demobilization process. Extensive awareness campaigns have been conducted jointly with UNMIL to prepare children for demobilization and reintegration. The campaigns have also aimed at preparing families and communities for the reunification of the returning children.  Sensitization messages have focussed on peace and tolerance, the importance of disarmament, sending children to school and protecting their rights.

In Senegal, pastoralists are tracking their wandering cattle herds using cell phones and Global Positioning Systems. In South Africa, small tourist businesses operating out of the townships are attracting customers from around the world by using the Internet. In Mozambique, forest wardens are using high-frequency radios to stop poaching. Across the African continent, communities are using information and communication technologies (ICTs) for their social and economic development. The articles in this collection present stories of how research is helping to create a “made in Africa” information revolution.

Police in Madagascar have rescued 11 babies between the ages of three weeks and nine months who were in the process of being sent abroad. The rescue followed a raid on a house in the capital Antananarivo where eight men were arrested and charged following a police inquiry on illegal child trafficking. The illicit acquisition and adoption of babies has increased during the last four years in Madagascar, according to Director of Judicial Police Mr Albert Rakotondravao.

In downtown Lome there is an area known locally as “The Child Market,” where girls as young as nine are offered for sex, sometimes for less than a dollar. Child welfare groups complain that Togo lacks strong laws to punish the pimps who ruthlessly exploit these children. And the kids themselves complain that the police who patrol the district and are supposed to protect them, simply demand sex for free. Many of these girls have been separated from their families. Others have simply been abandoned. Most are illiterate. Being alone in the world all of them are highly vulnerable to exploitation by pimps and brothel keepers.

The World Bank last Thursday released a major report that says that more than $1 trillion is paid globally in bribes yearly. This comes to an average of $2.7 billion per day. The figure does not include embezzlement of public funds or theft of public assets. The study by the World Bank Institute (WBI) in Washington, United States, is an ongoing research, but it shows that the scale of bribery as an economic crime is alarming. This can be seen when the figure is compared with the estimated size of the world economy in 2001-02, for example, which stood at just over US$30 trillion.

Police in Zambia have questioned former Zambian president, Frederick Chiluba, over further allegations of corruption. Mr Chiluba's lawyer said he was likely to face new charges that he used state funds to buy two houses which he later sold to pay legal bills. The former head of state already faces charges of stealing tens of millions of dollars of public money.

How monolithic is the group of twenty developing countries that emerged as a regional force during the World Trade Organisation's 5th Ministerial meeting at Cancún? Will the so-called G20 expand its agenda beyond the question of agricultural subsidies? Will it prove a force to shift the global balance of power? Walden Bello, Right Livelihood Award winner and Trans National Institute (TNI) board member and fellow, addressed these crucial questions at a Policy Dialogue organised by TNI and the Institute of Social Studies on the 5th April, as part of an ongoing series of policy dialogues aimed at inspiring critical thinking about the current neo-liberal development paradigm.

When six million Jews died in the Shoah, the Jewish civilization indeed vowed, "Never again."

When the Rwandan genocide occurred, in 1994, the world was wrong to ignore the victims' plight and choose not to intervene. Black Africans, like Jews before them, were not worth the effort to save. It was a familiar lesson.

Dr. Abdul-Raheem is right to point to a similar situation developing today in Darfur, in western Sudan, where black Africans are again being massacred, this time by Arabs, with the support of Sudan's government, and with the tacit support of the Arab world. The world should take heed and do something now, before it is too late.

Unfortunately, Dr. Abdul-Raheem's otherwise perceptive piece is spoiled by his own anti-Semitism, when he drags into his article a typical demonization of Israel, and compares its self defence against terrorists to a "holocaust." The only thing that prevents the Palestinians from doing to the Israelis what is being done to the black Africans in Darfur is Israel's ability to defend themselves. As they vowed, "Never again."

Editor's comment: It helps no one to dismiss anyone who criticise Israel's policies, including acts of gross violations of human rights, as being anti-semitic. It's an old trick that uses abuse in place of debate - and has no place in the pages of Pambazuka News.

Military authorities in Nigeria said last Thursday they had set up a special panel to determine whether a group of soldiers and civilians arrested on suspicion of plotting to topple the government should face court martial. General Alexander Ogomudia, the Chief of Defence Staff, has created an all military "Special Investigation Panel" which will determine whether those arrested should face military trial on the basis of the allegations against them, his spokesman Colonel Ganiyu Adewale said.

A Zimbabwean human rights body has criticised an African-Asian grouping which shot down a draft resolution on the human rights situation in Zimbabwe for the second year at the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva last Thursday. The draft resolution, mooted by the European Union and supported by the United States, would have expressed "deep concern" at what it said were "continuing violations of human rights in Zimbabwe, in particular politically motivated violence, including killings, torture, sexual and other forms of violence against women, incidents of arbitrary arrest, restrictions on the independence of the judiciary, and restrictions on the freedoms of opinion, expression, association and assembly".

The guns in Liberia's civil war have been silent for several months now, as the country makes tentative efforts to establish lasting peace. But in many respects, inhabitants of the capital - Monrovia - have simply exchanged one sort of war for another: the battle against criminal activity. Fourteen years of intermittent fighting have stripped government departments of the personnel and equipment needed to perform their duties. The result is that citizens have taken to meting out mob justice to real and perceived criminals.

The African Union said at a meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia last week that it would send a group of monitors to Sudan's western Darfur region, where severe conflict has resulted in the outpouring of some 110,000 refugees into Chad and the displacement of hundreds of thousands. The military observers, from Ghana, Senegal, Namibia and Nigeria, will be there to see that a 45-day cease-fire is carried out among militia groups, government soldiers and rebel fighters, so that aid workers can more easily assist the suffering.

The third free election and the 10th anniversary of democracy in SouthAfrica this month together offer a chance to distinguish between celebratory and critical thinking.

Global and local mainstream media tend to the former, adding the obvious caveats about Pretoria's handling of AIDS and Zimbabwe, and remarking upon unemployment. Henning Melber's Pambazuka #151 article, 'What choices for South African voters', in the latter category, has already advanced a variety of other doubts about, especially, the regional and international weaknesses of president Thabo Mbeki's government, which we need not dwell on here.

Now that the dust is settling on the election results - with no surprises whatsoever - the polity can consider what trajectories might lead to a different future, and what socio-economic results of a ten-year neoliberal governing strategy must be reversed. The details of the government's domestic performance since 1994 should be subject to far more rigorous examination, now that the hot rhetoric of the campaigns is fading.

The results, after all, appear tediously similar to 1999. The ruling African National Congress won roughly 70%, as anticipated, and Mbeki's brilliant Machiavellian divide-and-conquer of the white-dominated opposition parties reduced their combined vote markedly, with Tony Leon's Democratic Alliance winning around 13%. At closer to 5%, half its 1994 percentage, the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party will need the DA to help it continue governing KwaZulu-Natal. The 2% won by Patricia de Lille's centrist Independent Democrats was in the same league as the conservative African Christian Democratic Party and the New National Party, which in 1994 had more than 20% and in 1999, 7%. The Afrikaner bitter-ender Freedom Front had 1%. Parties whose critique of ANC rule was mainly from the left did badly: the United Democratic Movement and Pan Africanist Congress appear to have each barely maintained a parliamentary seat; the black-consciousness Azanian Peoples Organisation and its breakaway Socialist Party of Azania do not seem to have even attained parliamentary standing.

But with its two-thirds of the vote, will the ANC use its power to pass constitutional amendments that could, in theory, revise the Constitution against residual property rights and patriarchy, in favour of the ANC's low-income, black, women constituents? Although ANC campaigners are talking left these days, the same people, when in government, persist in walking right.

One reason is that the progressive forces which did not run candidates for election have not shown sufficient strength and consistency, what with ANC-aligned trade unionists sending mixed signals, and independent leftists in the urban communities and rural landless movement working at cross-purposes. Leading Johannesburg township activists engaged in a spoiled-ballot exercise (they scrawled all over their voter card), in tactical conflict with the Landless People's Movement, which called for a simple boycott, in anticipation that the apathy factor would rise substantially. Early returns suggest that turnout was substantially lower than 1994 and 1999, but at more than 70% of registered voters, the LPM cannot claim victory for the boycott strategy.

What the landless activists can do, however, is honour the arrests of more than 50 of their members in the ghetto of Thembelihle, near Soweto, on election day. As their press release explained, 'The people have been arrested in terms of the Electoral Code of Conduct and the 1993 Prohibition of Illegal Gatherings Act. The charges are related to illegal gatherings on the day of elections. The LPM regards the charges as spurious. The LPM members were not permitted to gather even though they were prepared to observe regulations allowing only protests held at least 200m from any polling station. They were arrested as they disembarked from their transport, and so no gathering or meeting even took place.'

Judging by this sort of repressive - indeed, paranoid - security and the falling living standards experienced by the majority of black South Africans, the government should be subject to the kinds of insurgent protests witnessed recently in Bolivia and Argentina. To naysay these harsh realities, the ANC took to doctoring simple statistics during the campaign.

Some illustrations demonstrate why the government can make inspiring claims of delivery - but retain market-oriented policies ranging from macroeconomics to microdevelopment. It is no secret that Pretoria's homegrown structural adjustment policy, co-authored by the World Bank in 1996, codified the pro-corporate economic philosophy inherited from apartheid. The result was the doubling of the formal unemployment rate from 16% in 1994 to 32% in 2002. When one considers, in addition, those millions of people who have given up any hope of finding a job, the rate rises to 43%. Both the public and private sectors shed more than 10% of formal sector jobs since liberation in 1994.

Yet as the election neared, ANC politicians like trade and industry minister Alec Erwin began insisting that two million new jobs were created since 1994, based on an official Labour Force Survey. That survey defines 'employment' as including 'beg[ging] money or food in public' and 'catch[ing] any fish, prawns, shells, wild animals or other food for sale or family food.' Asked about this measure two months ago, the main trade union official, Zwelinzima Vavi, said simply, 'It is absurd to record such labour as jobs.' Nevertheless, last week Vavi's chief economist defended the statistics by way of justifying labour's endorsement of the ANC as the only party with, supposedly, 'the workers' interests at heart.'

In reality, the ten-year liberation celebrations to be held around the day of Mbeki's re-inauguration, April 27, will be much more boisterous in the mansions and corporate headquarters of Johannesburg. 'The government is utterly seduced by big business, and cannot see beyond its immediate interests,' remarked the neoliberal editor of Business Day newspaper, Peter Bruce, last June.

Shortsighted ANC election propaganda bragged of having created 'a level of macroeconomic stability not seen in the country for 40 years.' Stability? In reality, there were three currency crashes witnessed over a period of a few weeks in February-March 1996, June-July 1998 and December 2001, ranging from 30 to 50% each. Each led to massive interest rate increases which sapped growth and rewarded the speculators. These moments of macroeconomic instability were as dramatic as any other incidents during the previous two centuries, including the September 1985 financial panic that split big business from the apartheid regime and paved the way for ANC rule.

It is here that the core concession made by the ANC during the early 1990s transition deal is apparent, namely in the desire by white businesses to escape the economic stagnation and declining profits born of a classical capitalist crisis, in the context of a sanctions-induced laager, and amplified by the 1970s-80s rise of black militancy in workplaces and communities.

The deal represented simply this: black nationalists got the state, while white people and corporations could remove their capital from the country, and simultaneously remain domiciled in South Africa with, thanks to economic liberalisation, still more privileges. Trade, credit, cultural and sports sanctions ended; exchange controls were lifted; luxury imports flooded in; white people's incomes rose by 15% during the late 1990s; taxes were cut dramatically; and the corporate pre-tax profit share soared during the late 1990s, back to 1960s-era levels associated with apartheid's heyday.

Hence inequality soared during ANC rule, state statistics show. Black 'African' South Africans suffered an income crash of 19% from 1995-2000, with every indication of further degeneration in subsequent years. The ANC rebuttal is that when state spending is accounted for, the inequality lessens. Yet notwithstanding deeper poverty, the state raised water and electricity prices, to the point that by 2002 they consumed 30% of the income of those households earning less than $70 per month. An estimated 10 million people had their water cut off, according to two national government surveys, and 10 million were also victims of electricity disconnections (see for the ongoing numbers controversy).

This is all crucial for the coming months, in the event policies can be altered by a more confident government, as claimed by leftists within the ANC and amongst its allies.

On an optimistic note, the debate over whether state services have been provided to low-income black customers in a sustainable manner - or instead are priced too high because of privatisation pressures -- was finally joined by Mbeki last week. As reported in Sunday's City Press newspaper (mainly read by blacks), 'After meeting pensioners like 92-year-old Mamelodi resident Johanna Mashigoane, whose electricity had been cut off as she could not afford to pay for it, and unemployed Macassar resident Zelna Hendricks, who had received an eviction letter from the council after failing to pay rates, Mbeki could not hide his outrage. Local government policy towards the poor, he declared, would have to change after the elections and central government would need to allocate more money to municipalities to deal with this problem.'

Although municipal policy on disconnections and evictions is in fact a national policy with World Bank fingerprints, approved by the Cabinet on several occasions, Mbeki's raised consciousness is a step forward to reality. The week before, his chief communications officer took a step backwards when he wrote insensitively in the Sunday Times (mainly read by whites) in defense of disconnections: '10 million people connected to water which cannot by any stretch of the imagination be compared with the few households occasionally cut off.'

The question is whether such zigzagging is merely a product of election rhetoric, or instead reflects the permanent contradictions between big-business advocates of essentially neoliberal development policies, and well-moblised activists. South Africa hosts some of the world's most militant social movements, who demand the decommodification of water, electricity, anti-retroviral medicines and healthcare, education, and even a Basic Income Grant.

Defenders of the elite transition deal may claim that leftward pressure on the ANC also emanates from the Constitution's celebrated socio-economic rights clauses. But the 1996 document appears a bit tattered these days, partly because the judges are too frightened to take a stand against the state's neoliberal policies, and partly because of an incident on March 21 at the opening of the Court's beautiful new building in central Johannesburg
at the site of the old Fort Prison next to Hillbrow.

The tale is worth recounting. Johannesburg community activists in the Anti-Privatisation Forum called a march to protest the installation of pre-paid water meters in Soweto by the French company Suez, which is running the city's outsourced water company. City officials banned the march on absurd grounds (traffic disturbances - on a Sunday?). The police arrested 51 activists, some simply because they were wearing red shirts, and blocked travel of APF buses into Johannesburg. Neither the judges nor Mbeki – who attended the opening ceremony - uttered a word in the protesters' defense, so even first-generation civil/political rights now appear merely contingent.

That incident aside, the country's highest court has heard three major cases on socio-economic rights: one led to the death of a man denied kidney paralysis treatment because the judges deemed it too expensive; the next helped the Treatment Action Campaign acquire AIDS medicines for pregnant women because the judges agreed the state was needlessly killing tens of thousands of infants each year; and another allegedly enforced the right to emergency municipal services - but checking back on the successful plaintiff, Irene Grootboom, in her Cape Town ghetto, the Sunday Times found her community as destitute as in September 2000, at the time of her case.

To be sure, the status of women like Grootboom includes some improvements since 1994, especially in reproductive rights, albeit with extremely uneven access. But contemporary South Africa retains apartheid's patriarchal modes of surplus extraction, thanks to both residual sex discrimination and the migrant (rural-urban) labour system, which is still subsidised by women stuck in the former bantustan homelands.

Structured super-exploitation of women is accompanied by an apparent increase in domestic violence associated with rising male unemployment. Mbeki was quoted by the SA Press Association on March 22, the day after Human Rights Day: 'He said if ever his sister was to arrive home and tell him that she was in love with African Christian Democratic Party leader Kenneth Meshoe, he would have to beat her.' A spokesperson said the president was only joking.

Women are also the main caregivers in the home, and bear the highest burden associated with degraded health. Public-sector services continue declining due to underfunding and competition from private providers. Infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, diarrhea, cholera, malaria and AIDS are rife, all far more prevalent than during apartheid. Most South Africans with HIV still have little prospect of receiving antiretroviral drugs to extend their lives. Only last week - in time for the election -- did the medicines finally begin to make their way to hospitals and a few clinics.

During his five years as president, Mbeki has taken various obstinate stands against the poor and the sick. He has also stood down human rights activists and arms-control groups opposed to his $6 billion purchase of sophisticated weaponry from European corporations. The widespread influence-peddling scandals associated with the arms deal threatened deputy president Jacob Zuma last year, after he allegedly solicited a bribe in a manner the justice minister deemed 'prima facie corruption', and it forced the resignation of several leading ANC politicians and officials caught in plots.

On the environmental front, the country's ecosystem as today in worse condition, in many crucial respects -- e.g., water and soil resources mismanagement, contributions to global warming, fisheries, industrial toxics, genetic modification -- than during apartheid. For example, in spite of water scarcity, major dam projects are generating destructive environmental consequences downriver, and the extremely high costs of water transfer deter consumption by poor people. The location of natural surface and groundwater remains skewed towards white farmers due to apartheid land dispossession. Because a World Bank-style neoliberal land reform policy was adopted just after liberation, less than 3% of arable land was redistributed, as against a 1994-99 target of 30%.

The systematically repressive side of Mbeki's regime was unveiled to the world during the August 2002 protests against the UN's World Summit on Sustainable Development. Leading anti-privatisation activists in the black townships of Johannesburg and Cape Town are repeatedly harassed and detained by police -- mainly illegally (resulting in high-profile acquittals) – for resisting evictions and disconnections. Treatment Action Campaign members were savagely beaten in early 2003 during a non-violent civil disobedience campaign to acquire medicines.

In short, the record upon which the ANC campaigned was one of low-intensity democracy in which the ruling party regularly wins elections because US-style corporatist trade unions remain aligned to the ruling party, their leaders unwilling to risk establishing a broad-based progressive movement to fight neoliberalism from outside. But because the transition from racial to class apartheid will not go unpunished forever, this state of affairs is certainly not the last word. Certainly in another ten years, or before, a much more optimistic report will be filed: optimistic, that is, for genuine socio-economic transformation.

Patrick Bond - [email][email protected] - teaches at Wits University, Johannesburg and York University, Toronto while on sabbatical. His new book, out this month from University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, is Talk Left, Walk Right: South Africa's Frustrated Global Reforms.

* Conflict and Emergencies: Monitor Darfur ceasefire, says Human Rights Watch
* When 'never again' becomes again and again
* Human Rights: Ethiopian Anuak face crimes against humanity
* Women and Gender: Trade policy overlooks women's role
* Elections and Governance: US should rethink its support for Angolan government
* Development: The World Bank and IMF at 60: Any changes?
* HIV/AIDS: Ten years on in the struggle against Aids
* Education: Access and the privatisation of education
* Land and Land Rights: No progress in WTO agriculture talks