Sixty years after their founding, the World Bank and IMF remain the dominant institutions in development but face determined opposition to their role in shaping globalisation. Bank president James Wolfensohn says that critics should stop "going back to things that were addressed five years ago". The Bank says it has moved on from the Washington consensus to the Post-Washington consensus. Of the ten elements which made up the original 'Washington Consensus', three have been both most aggressively pursued and most strongly opposed. Have the Bank and Fund changed their attitudes to liberalisation, privatisation and fiscal austerity?

The whole of last week was rightly dominated by events in memory of the victims of genocide in Rwanda.

Everybody, whether they meant it or not said: 'Never again'. One just hopes the 'Never again' is not like that echoed after the Jewish holocaust. It was a cry of shame and guilt that in practice worked out as 'never again to Jews' but open season in other areas or other peoples.

The Zionists have had no hesitation to visit holocaust on their Palestinian victims since 1948. They have continued till date because the USA, its principal Patron, and its allies are prepared to look the other way and actively encourage Israeli crimes against humanity as 'self defense', 'incursions', or 'retaliations against Palestinian Gunmen'.

Since 9/11 Bush's America has Israelised its own political and military strategies. In Iraq its capacity for occupation is being built by Sharon's experts. Therefore Israeli genocide against Palestinians is now part of the global 'war on terrorism'.

The big powers internationally refused to do anything as the Rwanda genocide went into full swing because the unwritten post second world war statute of limitation on genocide meant 'not against Jews' anymore, otherwise how does one explain the repetitions of genocide since 1945 in different areas of the world?

But because of cold war (and the cruel logic of protecting 'our bloody crooks') or in order to derogate international responsibility consequent to the Geneva convention on Genocide, they changed the terms to 'ethnic massacres', 'civil war' or now the more fashionable, 'ethnic cleansing'.

It was a very big struggle in 1994 to get the world to accept that what was happening in Rwanda was Genocide because the USA and some of the European countries especially Britain that are now trying to outdo each other as 'the best friend of Rwanda' did not want to accept their international obligations that would have necessitated direct military intervention to stop the genocide.

There was vicarious guilt by many African states too, largely conditioned by regimes who were like the kettle calling the pot black. After the genocide a new guilt about their inaction has set in that makes them largely uncritical of Rwanda's government.

The guilt is by no means limited to extra African powers. Even across Africa the huge official diplomatic and political good will towards Rwanda now has been mostly due to four factors.

One, guilt about African inaction on the Genocide. Two, many predicted that the RPF would not last long in power but it has proven them wrong and showed itself a real force to be reckoned with. Three, many African leaders really envy President Kagame for the kind of tight control he has over his government and country. Four, there are many especially civilianised generals in Africa who are genuinely mesmerized by the military prowess of General Kagame.

Therefore from initial doubts and suspicion the RPF government is now in danger of becoming too respectable in Africa. The consequence of this universal rehabilitation both in Africa and internationally is that a post humus statute of limitation on genocide is being imposed on Africa.

We shout 'never again' in Rwanda and are silent on other genocidaire activities on this continent. What is happening in the Darfur region of Sudan is genocide that is understated as 'civil war', 'Militia violence', or ‘rebellion’.

The world is so desperate for an end to the 'Southern Sudan problem' that it is not prepared to confront other structural problems of marginalization of Sudanese peoples. Darfur is one of the historically marginalized areas of Sudan whose interests are not protected by the largely military treaty agreed between the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army/ Movement.

Yet another error as is common with many peace agreements across Africa (except South Africa) is where priority is given to military formations and those groups that have no armies are supposed to just put up or shut up. It is not by accident that the Darfur liberation efforts took military form as the agreements in Naivasha were being drawn up.

The logic is clear: Our claims can only be credible if we show a capacity to threaten everybody. The Government of Sudan has previously fuelled the conflict by proxy but now it is direct through its allied Arab Militias in the region. It had kept up the pretence that what is happening in Darfur is a kind of local 'tribal conflict'.

But it was a kind of local battle in which the Arab militias have had the support and active encouragement of the Khartoum government to kill, maim, rape and destroy the local population of Darfur who are mostly of African origin.

For Genocide to occur the ideology must exist. The Arab militias believe in their innate superiority and consider the African population as inferior peoples fit only as beasts of burden, to accept Arab or Arabised supremacy without question. The other condition for genocide to take hold is willingness of the government to let this happen with impunity or even encourage it actively.

Lastly, genocide succeeds because the international community refuses to act. All these conditions hold for Darfur. The government of Sudan bombs the people indiscriminately and the Arab militia kill from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, house to house. Like their slave raiding ancestors, they arrive on Camels and horses to wreck havoc on Darfur's defenceless citizens.

People of Darfur do not have to lose another one million people as in Rwanda before we wake up. The dead are already in the thousands and the displaced are almost three quarter of a million. If the UN and the powers that be cannot act what about the new African Union constitutive act of Union that specifically identified genocide and other crimes against humanity as a basis for intervention?

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General Secretary of the Global Pan African Movement, based in Kampala, Uganda and also Director of Justice Africa, based in London.

Efforts to tackle poverty in Mozambique have made progress with the authorities this week reporting a "visible" improvement in social services delivery. At a meeting with donors on Monday to review the country's anti-poverty programme, officials noted a drop in household poverty from 69 percent in 2000 to 54 percent in 2003. "Progress was especially visible in improvements in health care, education, and access to potable water," Prime Minister Luísa Diogo reportedly told journalists in the capital, Maputo, after the meeting. However, despite the gains, the country still faced formidable challenges, Diogo added.

The United Nations will begin the orderly repatriation of more than 300,000 Liberian refugees dispersed in other West African countries in October once the rainy season is over, Abou Moussa, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Liberia, said on Wednesday. Moussa said that would allow time for the disarmament of an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 former combatants to take place beforehand.

Kenya has sought a delay in its participation in an African governance rating system designed to win donor and investor dollars for the globe’s poorest continent, a senior evaluator has said. Last month the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) said Kenya would be among the first four countries to be scrutinised under a peer-review system being closely watched by Africans and international lenders.

Last year the General Assembly produced a new treaty that many would say was long overdue - the U.N. Convention Against Corruption. A few dozen countries have already signed on. But now what? With the new convention as a weapon, and even before it is ratified by the 30 countries needed to bring it into force, a range of international and private organisations are demanding real action, not just promises from governments. People who have spent long years looking for reasons why some countries never make it to the level of development their resources would indicate they should are now zeroing in on corruption more than ever - along with the failure to advance the rights of women - as central impediments to progress.

During apartheid the mining industry was the biggest employer and the main generator of the country's wealth. It was also the central pillar for the structures of racial discrimination. Today a whole raft of progressive labour laws has given workers rights they could not have dreamt of before 1994. However now as before, in this dangerous occupation, miners continue to pay with their lives in order to multiply the profits of large multinational companies. Like in other sectors of the South African economy, workers in the mining industry are reeling from the hardship and suffering caused by the steady haemorrhaging of jobs and the toll of HIV/AIDS.

Malawi's chief elections officer has been suspended for alleged abuses of his office, including a claim that his wife used an electoral commission vehicle to campaign for office. The allegations against chief elections officer George Chimwaza forced the Malawi Electoral Commission to suspend him less than five weeks before the country's May 18 election, commission chairman James Kalaile, a Supreme Court justice, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

International creditors of the African nation of Niger have agreed to cancel 1.2 billon dollars of its debt over time under a controversial debt relief scheme, rewarding the country for its pro-free market economic restructuring plan. Niger becomes the 11th nation to reach the completion point of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) - the mark where creditors permanently grant debt forgiveness. But doubts remain over whether the move will actually reduce poverty in one of the world's poorest nations. “Our call is for a 100 percent debt cancellation,” said Neil Watkins of Jubilee USA Network, a leading group that lobbies for debt forgiveness.

The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) has heavily criticised Guinea, describing the West African country as a "caricature of democracy," where basic freedoms are enshrined in law, but are not respected by the government of President Lansana Conte. The Paris-based human rights organisation published its report earlier this week shortly after the government banned two opposition leaders from leaving the country to travel to Senegal.

The United States, as the main investor in and beneficiary of Angola's oilfields should stop supporting the "sham government" of Angola, according to Rafael Marques, a freelance journalist and director of the Open Society Foundation, Angola. "The US has more leverage than any other country or international institution over the Angolan rulers. It has been very supportive of them. So it can help, through a clear and committed support to democracy and human rights protection, to stop them from plundering the country and from derailing it back into the darkness of sheer violence and an uncertain future." Marques was making a presentation to the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars Africa Program in Washington DC on April 5 2004.

A high-profile Kenyan opposition lawmaker was on Wednesday charged in court with corruption in connection with a land transfer deal that cost a state firm 272-million shillings (about $3,5-million), police said. William Ruto was charged together with a former commissioner of lands, Samuel Mwaita, in a Nairobi magistrate's court with "obtaining money by false pretences and handling false documents", said a spokesperson for the anti-corruption police.

A meeting, jointly hosted and organised by the Centre for Governance and Development (CGD) and the Development Policy Management Forum (DPMF) was held in Nairobi on the 4th of March 2004. The theme of the meeting was “Deepening Regional Integration For Democratization and Development Through Networking/Coalition Building in East African Community (EAC)”. The meeting was organised under a project of the Ford Foundation's Special Initiative for Africa (SIA) which, through an earlier workshop, mandated the DPMF to develop a program for mobilizing CSOs and Research Institutions (RIs) to “promote regional cooperation for democratic governance and monitoring the African Peer Review Mechanism process”. Another meeting of networks took place in Johannesburg, South Africa, on the 29th of March 2004.

The government has been warned that should they exclude youth opinions in decision-making they would be sitting on a time bomb. According to Kagiso Ntume of the Botswana National Youth Council (BNYC) "in most historical revolutions it was the young people who started the movement towards change." He also said that youth organisations that are in existence only encourage a lot of head nodding and do not accommodate the youth opinions at the macro level.

The World Council of Churches has condemned the rising cases of child abuse in Kenya. "The Church, together with parents, must act together to shield future generations from the consequences (of child abuse)," said Dr Samwel Kobia, the body's secretary general. He told churches, as the voice of conscience in the society, to employ their moral and spiritual resources in eliminating rampant violence against children.

The plight of former child soldiers and war-affected children in Angola is beginning to ease as they slowly reintegrate back into their communities, but new threats such as child trafficking and HIV/AIDS are emerging, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday. A post-war child protection strategy had shown "significant results", Abubacar Sultan, UNICEF's head of child protection, told IRIN. Around 3,500 children had been reunited with their families, and 3,480, including former child soldiers, were involved in reintegration programmes such as back-to-school schemes, micro-enterprise programmes for older adolescents, or child-friendly centres where they could socialise and discuss issues.

Each year, more than 200,000 Nigerian children are forcibly taken from their homes to be put to work. Some go with the permission of their parents, and some do not. Many, especially boys who may be as young as five or six, end up as household slaves far from home, or as agricultural workers on smallholdings or in quarries, where they break large lumps of granite with heavy iron hammers and earn little more than a few cents a day. The dust they inhale will do them lasting damage. Some, especially the younger ones, die as a result; others end up with terrible scars, both physical and psychological.

We need to do more than hope, we need to make it a reality. That means that we need to enlist those that are working for good to work together, we need to network and to utilise our collective resources for targeted and significant action.

Everyday in South Africa, where we also celebrate 10 years of democracy after a complicated oppression, I am in awe of how much work needs to be done. Everyday I am witness to both tragedy and triumph - but I know this - we must go on, we must go forward, and we must do it now.

While so many countries immerse themselves in strife - our world is being lost to us, the breath of our mornings forever lost - our lives, our futures tainted and the futures of our children snatched from their cradles.

Just a few years back, I lived some time in Jerusalem and travelled much around Israel. It was a girl called Simone in the northern town of Akko who convinced me to attend the holocaust museum there. At first I was reticent. But she persisted - she said: "You need to know, so that THIS may never happen again." I went. Indeed, 50 years + after the holocaust, I fail to understand things so painful that the mind cannot comprehend them, but I have learnt that people need to know. People need to learn to feel for each other again - and cease from reducing themselves to redundant elements of the systems that proliferate oppression.

We need to build awareness - so that people can act.

There is no "Africa", or "Europe" - there is you and me, each one of us in Africa, or Europe. People make a country, not countries, their people.

These things were NOT MEANT TO BE - it is time for us to wake up and realise that they are not INEVITABLE - they are the collective result of individual choices - made in error and blindness and greed. None of these characteristics are essential to the human character, they are forged by circumstance, social disintegration, lack of self esteem, domination....

But within us all we have the capacity to love, to nurture and to heal. We all must work towards the realisation of these qualities within ourselves and our communities and those of us who are willing and able, have a moral obligation to strive for our brothers freedoms, not only our own.

We write history each day as we each make a passage through our lives, every little action and every grand gesture. We are not puppets - and the time has come for us to break free of the kind of thinking that accepts inevitability, that instils in us inertia.

It is not escapist to say that the "International Community" fails Africa. In many ways, it does, in many ways, the global family fails itself, Africa fails herself and she fails the international community. It is so terribly easy to fail, but in so many ways, we must recognise we have triumphed.

We must strive to respond to any "accusations" of failure with open hearts - to say "If I have failed you brother - let me redress - if I can help you sister - let me take a stand, and if I fail because you are beyond my reach and means, may God help me to keep trying again."

Let us never forget.
(A response to Valentine Ngwa published in Pambazuka News last week, from the AFRO-NETS mailing list)

Thank you very much for your editorial (Pambazuka News 151: What choices for South African voters). Your piece shows what politics is all about: a matter of conscience, a matter of thinking. It is not about power. Sounds iconoclastic, but that is the only way to go: dissolve power. Take care.
P.S: I keep mentioning this book: 'John Holloway: Change the World Without Seizing Power' (verso 2002).

Yes our children are hungry, but what good is beating empty pots in protest against the exorbitant food prices? The idea of civil disobedience is forthcoming but will it really achieve anything? What needs to be taken into consideration is whom we are addressing the issues to and do they care? As citizens we should first understand the flow of our economy, that is, where is it coming from and where is it going to. Until we can answer these questions what arguments are we going to present to the rulers of the country? Maybe we all need fast track courses in business administration and economics to get the grounding of the economic flow of Zimbabwe? As it stands hyper-inflation is the result of high food prices.

How can we develop the economy first? After that how do we stabilise it? Then price controls. We need to start from the root of the problem. Where did we go wrong? What were our main sources of income for the country ten years ago? What are they now? Are we importing more than we are exporting? Are we now importing more than we used to?

Besides, if we are importing the basic things then we are looking at a very serious situation that requires much more than words and disobedience. How valuable are our exports if we have any at all? How are we proposing to rectify the problem? Do we have a reasonable percentage of investors? What are the investments in and how beneficial is it to Zimbabwe? Do we have more companies than we did ten years ago, and if so what good are they to our every day life? Where are the taxes going? Who is really benefiting in Zimbabwe? Are the rich, richer and the poor, poorer? How are we fairing on an African scale, are we lagging behind? If so how far behind are we from other African nations? How are we relating with the rest of the world and vice versa?

Bearing in mind that Zimbabwe has become a lawless totalitarian state, is putting our efforts in a worthwhile cause? We also need to realise that lobbying for reduction in food prices may have negative consequences. There is a much higher price to pay in all this and are we prepared for this? As a civil society what other methods are there of making food more available to the country? How else can we implement a system that is more responsive to our needs as a nation. I would say we are not yet ready because we are thinking with our "tummies" and not our brains.

What good is it to have a whole day of marching, screaming and shouting to have food prices reduced when it is impossible under the circumstances. We need to think rationally and act rationally like a nation with focused goals. We all need to start working hard to produce results for the benefit of the country.

We need to kill the element of corruption, because corruption is for short-term success and long-term failure. We need to be united and generate ideas from one another. We need to be more analytical about our surroundings for the continuance of the prosperity of our nation. We need real and well-thought strategies because it is never too late.

The economy has been scared so much already. These food prices only reflect the value of Zimbabwe’s economy. Much more needs to be done than just marching the streets screaming and shouting for food reductions. Is there no chance for a referendum? It may be a starting point to see how we fair in our requests and where we stand with those in power.

I believe that Zimbabwe is no longer as democratic as it seemed a while ago, therefore most peaceful movements in the last three to four years have resulted in damage to property, animals and people being killed and injured. So we should ask ourselves this, if those in power are fully fed and sheltered they will just look at the rest of the nation as a bunch of "hungry and angry" men. I am not trying to discourage people from expressing their feelings but it requires for us think carefully and logically.

We need to convince the police and the army that we are sailing in the same boat because by the end of the day we are still living in the same country. The police and the army are members of our own families, our fathers, mothers, children, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, they are also our friends, neighbours, fellow workmen, most of all they are human beings, Zimbabweans for that matter.

But can they stand up and really support their purpose for the country, which is to protects the nation from criminals, to act in pursuance of the rule of law, to honour their obligations with full respect for the law. What is the role of law in our society? Is it the corruption we encounter in our everyday life? The police, the politicians, as well as the society at large are cheating the system and therefore endangering our economy. Members of law enforcement need to realise that they have had a larger part to play in this downfall due to failure in their duty to protect citizens. It is not too late to make a change of things and reduce flaws in the system, particularly corruption. Is a civil disobedience the best that can be done? It is now time to wake up.

Monica, Newcastle