SILVER SPRING, Md. —The United States and its European allies worry about human rights violations when they benefit them.
That’s what a few dozen members of the Horn of Africa and East African diaspora agreed to when they met aug. 13 outside Washington, D. C.
A regional convention of the Platform for National Unity, a political party in Uganda, brought together members of the country’s diaspora from the metropolitan spaces of New York and Washington to expand methods on how to fight U. S. interference that supports leaders who paint on behalf of the people. .
“The West needs to replace the regimes by itself, not by the Africans, we Libya,” dr. Berhanu T. Taye, president of the Global Ethiopian Advocacy Nexus (GLEAN) and a member of the Ethiopian American Public Affairs Committee (AEPAC). he was referring to the 2011 U. S. -NATO invasion that turned Africa’s most disgustingly wealthy country into a war zone that hosts slave markets.
“Aid, a tool of Western neo-colonialism”
While the convention’s theme was “Democracy and Security in East Africa and the Horn of Africa,” a series of protests the organization organized the day before called “No to African neo-colonial dictators. “
Neocolonialism refers to the level of colonialism in which a colonial force continues to exert force on a country or country of other people by supporting those within the oppressed country who serve the colonial master. This continues the procedure of extracting wealth from curtains for the benefits of colonial forces. Lending systems through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are seen as tools to subjugate and take advantage of oppressed countries.
Taye called Western aid “opium. ” He encouraged the convention participants to better organize themselves for the struggle. “Aid is only a tool of Western neocolonialism, but also of underdevelopment. “
The party’s regional convention included participants and speakers from countries in addition to East Africa and the Horn of Africa, in addition to Chad, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau.
Some party members and participants from other countries expressed frustration with non-governmental organizations and the fact that the U. S. government takes their considerations seriously.
“People like Museveni and Kagame. . . they couldn’t do what they’re doing without U. S. help. “Said Maurice Carney, who addressed the audience remotely via Zoom. Carney is the founder and executive director of the non-American organization. lucrative organization Friends of the Congo.
Among the violations reported through the group, the government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni is partly to blame for destabilizing the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) by shipping arms and delegated fighters.
Notes from the Aug. 8 meeting of the United Nations Security Council show officials highlighting the Ugandan government’s position for a Daesh-affiliated organization.
Violence in the DRC has displaced 5. 6 million Congolese from the country, while 990,000 have sought safe haven across the African continent. In February, the International Court of Justice ordered Uganda to pay $325 million in reparations to the DRC.
“Billions come out the door”
The International Trade Administration of the U. S. Chamber of CommerceThe U. S. government encourages U. S. corporations to do so in the Democratic Republic of Congo, contributing “tens of trillions of dollars” of mineral wealth.
“The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most blessed places on Earth,” Taye said. “Unfortunately, community agents, [Rwandan President Paul] Kagame and Museveni, are facilitating the looting of Congo for the West.
The non-governmental organization Global Witness reported in April that 90% of the minerals in a mining domain in the Democratic Republic of the Congo had been shown to come from mines that met protection and human rights standards. Companies that own minerals from those mines come with U. S. corporations. Apple, Intel and Tesla.
“The aid coming in through the front door with tens of millions of dollars is a mirage,” Carney said. The United States has provided $618 billion in aid to Uganda since 2001. ] extractions”.
“Africa will be punished”
Conference moderator Joseph Senyonjo said NUPUSA (the U. S. branch of the party) had attempted to have an interaction with U. S. Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), chair of the subcommittee on Africa, global health, global human rights and foreign organizations in the House of Foreign Affairs. Affairs Committee. .
“She didn’t do anything,” he said.
Senyonjo added that Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) didn’t help. Meeks chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee and has introduced a U. S. bill that would punish African countries for circumventing U. S. sanctions against Russia. U. N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said in an Aug. 5 speech in Ghana that U. S. sanctions are not to blame for global wheat shortages, and threatened to take action if African countries buy Russian fossil fuels. The global payment formula prevents it from marketing wheat, one of Russia’s main exports.
What does this mean for African countries than in Russia for 32% of their wheat imports?
“Africa is going to be punished”, participants of the Senyonjo convention.
“We can’t be shy”
Netfa Freeman, the keynote speaker, warned participants to treat the U. S. government. Uu. uu. from a position of weakness and with the aim of appearing kind to conscience. He said the United States recognizes human rights because they were built in violation of the human rights of enslaved indigenous and African peoples. Today it houses a fifth of the world’s prisoners, in addition to the world’s oldest political prisoners.
“Convincing them can’t be the goal,” said Freeman, an organizer with Pan-African Community Action, a grassroots organization founded in southeast Washington; member of the coordinating committee of the Black Peace Alliance; and local radio announcer.
It also added officials such as Thomas-Greenfield, the vice president of the United States. USA Kamala Harris and the U. S. Secretary of DefenseThese reflect the buying elegance that has strength in African countries. A buyer turns out to be an independent leader, but responds to colonial forces. .
Freeman encouraged convention participants to expand the scope of their solidarity to come with People of African Descent in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, for example, because they too suffer from U. S. sanctions and threats of invasion. The assassination of the Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, and the exile of the Prime Minister and President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, with the assassinations of Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Internationalism is the Achilles’ heel of U. S. imperialism,” Freeman said.
Freeman added that the fight will have to be waged against the system, not against individual leaders.
“We can’t be shy. We are not asking for anything. We ask. “
By Lesley Becker
Activism and art are a tough mix to solve disorders that are either exhausting and unbearable. The play, Eclipsed, transports the audience to the intimate home of women who suffer while living as sex slaves in an insurgent camp at the end of Liberia’s civil war in 2003. The story follows a 15-year-old African woman who escapes the camp to become a child soldier in the insurgent forces.
Written by Zimbabwean-American playwright Danai Gurira, Eclipsed made history by being the first Broadway exhibition with an all-female cast, and the first all-African-American cast and an all-female artistic team. Overshadowed on Broadway in 2016, with the Oscar – beating Lupita Nyong’o in the title role.
The playwright wants to raise awareness of the injustices suffered by women and women around the world through the stories of her plays. “Storytelling is in my toolbox, and what I find difficult in storytelling is that it allows other people to disarm, to see other people around the world that they might understand as statistics, [rather than] as genuine colleagues. Other people who care and need to see loose to live a self-determined life,” he said in an interview.
Gurira’s paintings transcend the rationalizations created through terms like “rape as a weapon of war” that are used to characterize human enjoyment of rape and sexual violence. Her paintings depict the humanity of captive women and the possible deceptive choices they will have to make in times of war, and how the trauma of those parties, especially rape, adjusts them.
The impetus to write the play came from a 2003 photo in the Western press of Liberian female fighters. Gurira impressed through her appearance, the fierce and intense look in her eyes, as well as her weapons and excellent fighting attire. In 2003, the Wall Street Journal interviewed a 20-year-old wrestler named Black Diamond, and described her appearance in an almost romantic way: “A gun and a mobile phone hung from her wide, elegant leather belt. His jeans were embroidered with roses. His guerrilla comrades were also elegant, dressed in tight jeans, leopard print blouses and a collection of jewelry. The number of women in his unit, he says, is a secret of the army.
Gurira traveled to Liberia in 2007 and embarked on an adventure that would reveal that the intensity of the young fighters pictured was not empowerment or fierce loyalty to insurgent forces and male insurgent fighters. Instead, the taste and bravado of the young women covered the deep trauma of experiencing the unspeakable horrors of civil war, adding gang rape, the killing of members of the circle of relatives, the looting of their homes, and the rape of mothers and sisters by foot soldiers. women in the peace movement who are credited with forcing an end to the civil war. The characters in the play reflect the history of those women, as well as Gurira’s research, adding the winning prize. Documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell and the Human Rights Watch report “Roles and Responsibilities of Child Soldiers. “
Gurira weaves a story that brings the audience closer to women’s lives, using stories that we can identify in our own lives. The women take care of their hair, clothes and what will be for dinner, even while hiding the quinceañera of their attacker, the commander. The fifteen-year-old woman, whose name is “La Niña”, arrives at the camp as a bright and full of life girl, able to read and with the intention of passing to school a doctor or constitutional lawyer. .
The commander, called “CO” through the women, attacks La Niña when she goes to the bathroom, then designates her as the “number four” wife. After La Niña is raped through the CO, she returns to the shed where the wives live together. She is apathetic and does not answer the women’s questions about what happened, to say that the commander “did that to her. “Soon after, the commander arrives at the women’s hangar and, with fear and anxiety, they have to queue for him, as he chooses the woman he will take next.
The women in the room stick to their classification as “women,” a formula set by the commander, and do not use each other’s name, but are pitted against each with their number in the ranking. The number one wife, the eldest, captured at the age of twelve and has been held captive for ten years. The number two expelled from the women’s hangar and has become an insurgent fighter. Number three is six months pregnant with the commander’s son.
After the commander’s officers loot a village, he provides clothes and other pieces to the number one woman, and she discovers an e-book about Bill Clinton. comic relief to an otherwise intense and heartbreaking work.
Wife Number 3 calls Monica Lewinsky, “wife number two,” and the woman expresses her amazement at the U. S. Congress seeking to remove Clinton from the presidency for having two wives. They realize the closeness liberians feel to the United States, as the United States arranged for the founding of their country.
Woman number two returns to the women’s shed, carrying a giant gun and dressed in jeans and a tight blouse. He brought food for the wives, providing a bag of rice because they don’t have. The number one woman has ethical authority and will. he does not settle for food, because number two is worried about the atrocities of war. Number three, pregnant and lamenting the lack of food, needs to settle for rice. The obvious freedom that the number two has as a soldier appeals to La Niña.
Number two encourages the girl to go to a soldier so she can get a gun and protect herself from rape. The woman follows number two and is a child soldier. She discovers that she is forced to participate in looting, murder and (to her dismay). ) collect women from looted villages to take them to infantrymen to rape.
A Woman’s Peace woman from Liberia secretly visits the wives to tell them that the war will soon end. The unbearable trauma of their war experience has revealed the identity of the wives, and they find their pre-war calls difficult. Rita, the woman of peace, persuades the number one to ArrayFinally, whispers his call and Rita writes “Helena” on the floor of the shed. The well-informed, upper-class woman of peace, Rita, has her own story. Her daughter has disappeared and she is searching the insurgent camps in the hope of locating her. Gurira exposes Rita’s struggle with her classism when Rita tells Helena about the court cases of the women of peace, saying that the commander “tries to treat us as if we were women. “of the people they borrow from the mountain”, not knowing that Helena herself was a 12-year-old woman who was fleeing an attack on her family’s space in a village and was captured while hiding in the bush.
The play ends when Charles Taylor leaves Liberia, marking the end of the long civil war. The woman will have to decide whether to surrender her gun to join the Peace Women group; or remain their weapon and return to the field of insurgent fighters. Helena (number one) struggles with her resolve to leave early on because her identity is her rank in the field. Number two can’t be sure if he hands over his gun and returns to the insurgents’ camp. Number 3 has her baby and decides to stay with the commander, believing that he will take care of her and his little wife. He named daughter Clintine, after Bill Clinton. The call of this Liberian boy, born of rape in a camp of insurgent commanders in times of war, would possibly symbolize Liberia’s call for help from his home country.
Liberia was founded by the American Colonization Society in the early nineteenth century as the first free country in Africa, as part of the “Return to Africa” movement designed by the U. S. government. The U. S. Government to prevent the abolition of slavery. For many years, U. S. involvement has been involved. The U. S. Treasury in Liberia was significant, namely in the exploitation of resources (rubber, diamonds, and gold) through the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company beginning in the 1920s. The United States supported the violent and repressive government of Samuel Doe (1980-1990), but it has been gradually but often disconnected since the end of the Cold War. In 1990, at the beginning of Liberia’s brutal 14-year civil war, U. S. citizens were evacuated and U. S. involvement was evacuated. The U. S. Navy, for all practical purposes, is over.
Under the Geneva Convention, civil war commanders illegally used more than 15,000 young men under the age of 18 as infantrymen in fighting in Liberia between 2000 and 2002. A U. S. expert says Liberia is considered the 51st state. However, while there are important undeniable desires in Liberia lately, such as the DNA machines used for the culprit of the rape and the technicians who know how to make them work, one wonders why the United States has continued to fail to respond to the Liberian crisis.
Despite flagging rape as a national emergency last September, President Weah has failed to comply with the creation of a special prosecutor for rape cases, the creation of a national sex offender registry, or the status quo of Criminal Court E to hear rape cases in Liberia. 15 counties. In March 2021, President Weah unveiled a DNA testing device that will be used to facilitate the prosecution of rape cases. However, the media reports that there are no trained technicians who know how to operate the device in Liberia.
In Nos corps, leurs champs de bataille, Christine Lamb writes that rape is the cheapest weapon known to man. that women can be treated as “spoils of war. “There have been many atrocities in times of war, but in particular, the militarization of the rape of women and girls leaves a lasting mark on the cultural integrity of a society. Liberia has been described as a “culture of impunity” where there is no punishment for attacking women and girls.
Danai Gurira founded a website, newsletter and blog called Love Our Girls that raises awareness among African women who are abused and forgotten. She writes:
“As a writer, writing stories is my act of resistance, my way of putting this incredible African female voice at the forefront and allowing her to manifest her incredible value. I’ve had a hobby for women and girls, hoping to see them. serve as on the same floor as men and have the same opportunities and the same proper protections. I need to be more than an actress and a storyteller, an advocate for women, not just in underdeveloped countries, but around the world. “
The central theme of the play is that the inner sweetness of each of these women, a sweetness that can obviously be noticed in The Girl When She First Arrives at the Camp, is overshadowed by the trauma of rape and captivity. For women combatants, this is compounded by the horror of the acts of war they witness and participate in.
Eclipsed tells how the inner sweetness of those women blocked through the reign of terror of the warlords, their foot soldiers and the government’s foot soldiers.
It is an open question as the curtain falls: what will happen to those women and women when the war ends?And it’s also an open question: what will it take, locally and globally, to fix the damaged rules that allow for violation. of young people and women at an alarming rate, and muster the political will to prosecute and convict those who commit such crimes?Gurira elevates the stories of women and women in times of war and invites the audience to see the lives of women and women who are subjected to repeated rape, deprivation of food and liberty, not yet presenting them as “restless victims” “. . . they are dynamic. comfortable with them. The play provokes the empathy necessary for social justice.
Lesley Becker is a playwright and director who lives in Vermont and is a member of the Burlington Community Justice Center’s Reparation Council. Your pieces can be played in the New Play Exchange; he is a member of the Playwrights Guild.
Mobilizations took to the streets of Colombia on April 28 a national strike in protest against social injustice and competitive tax reforms proposed through the government of Iván Duque. Student movements, industrial unions, youth organizations, feminist groups and movements of indigenous and Afro-descendants. villages marched, blocked roads and organized cultural activities in urban centers and rural territories throughout the country, exercising their right to non-violent protest. But the state responded quickly with violent repression, especially in primary towns such as Cali, Bogotá, Palmira and Popayán. .
– Victor (@victor4nj) May 8, 2021
Although the vast majority of protests were peaceful, remote incidents of looting and violence were used as an excuse to use superior force opposed to the protesters. The media’s discourse about “good protesters” and “bad protesters” legitimizes this response. Numerous reports of infiltrators are used to galvanize violence and looting, as has been the case in previous movements in the country. The armed forces reportedly stood idly by and allowed looting to occur, only to respond to such incidents with violent repression.
Instead of responding to the demands of citizens who oppose tax reform and social injustice, the state responded with militarization, turning nonviolent protests into war scenarios.
– Truee K✯ (@Truee_K) May 5, 2021
Several villages are occupied through 4 armed state actors:
Instead of seeking to pacify the scene and shield citizens, these forces have threatened security, peace and human rights.
Serious human rights violations
Countless videos recorded by protesters and passers-by circulate on social networks, in which cases of police brutality, indiscriminate shooting and use of tear gas in internal neighborhoods involving young people and older adults appear. In recent days, violence has taken on a new face in Cali, with plainclothes police and reports of unmarked cars firing at protesters as they drove.
The non-governmental organization Indepaz, based in Bogotá, reports that between April 28 and May 8, the following occasions occurred:
Armed police threatened lawyers and human rights defenders as they investigated missing users in police stations. The foreign network became aware of the gravity of the scenario when, on May 3, members of a humanitarian project involving United Nations and state officials were attacked by armed police. while waiting to enter a police station in search of missing users. On April 7, while a humanitarian project was taking position north of Cali with the presence of Senator Alejandro López, a car took position, injuring one user and killing three.
The Racialization of State Repression
Violence and repression have a disproportionate effect on black communities, reflecting only the current internal armed confrontation in Colombia. For example, 35 of the 47 murders reported by Indepaz took place in Cali, home so far to Colombia’s largest Afro-descendant population. America del Sur. No it is surprising that structural and systemic racism is deeply rooted in Cali. Many of the most competitive instances of state violence have been perpetrated in neighborhoods predominantly or with a large population of Afro-descendants, treating communities as enemies of war. Historically, those neighborhoods have suffered socioeconomic exclusion, further reinforced by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, and state violence. -regions descended from the north of the department of Cauca, in which Calí is located, and the Pacific coast.
While official statistics do not reveal the proportion of black victims in this current wave of police brutality due to the lack of disaggregated data, the images of the victims obviously show the disproportionate effect on young people of African descent.
— PCN (@renacientes) 28 April 2021
Racial profiling is not only the basis of state violence, but is at the heart of the denial of state duty and impunity. Debates about gang violence and existing urban conflicts are already being used to question whether any of these young people participated in the protests or whether the criminals were killed. in the context of daily violence in their communities. This discourse certainly seeks to decrease the number of protest-like deaths, justifying the deaths of young black men. The first recorded death in Cali took place in the predominantly black neighborhood, Marroquín II, where a 22-year-old was killed. But the army later denied that his death was related to the protests.
Militarization, imperialism and protests
The existing scenario in Colombia cannot be understood in isolation from the broader armed confrontation and the deepening of the neoliberal schedule supported and backed by the United States and the multinationals that feed on Colombia’s herbal resources. US imperialist interests in the region have been transparent ever since. the past 19th century, with the attempted invasion of Colombia’s neighbor Panama in 1885 and the start of the assignment of the Panama Canal in 1904. In 1948, the Organization of American States was created in an assembly in Colombia.
Colombia has been the strategic point of Washington’s political, economic and military operations in recent decades. Thanks to U. S. technical and logistical support, Colombia is now one of the largest military powers in the region. With the signing in 1999 of Plan Colombia and the Patriot Plan of 2002, the presence and influence of the U. S. military deepened.
In addition, the help of the U. S. military. it has depended on state policies that benefited U. S. imperial interests. USA For example, in 2009, the United States signed an agreement with the Uribe government to be able to operate from seven Colombian army bases. Although this agreement was blocked through the Constitutional Court, the Santos government then reached selected bilateral agreements. These have allowed access to and use of the bases in practice, and have further facilitated the failed and harmful strategy of spraying the herbicide glyphosate on illicit crops. All of this helps the ideology of the “enemy within” and the terrorist risk that underpinned the initial rise and expansion of paramilitarism in the 1980s.
It is exactly this style of paramilitarism that the Colombian state is employing in the context of the existing protests, specifically in Cali, where state agents, without proper identification, collaborate with civilians to shoot and kill demonstrators from high-end cars. The Indigenous Guard, which accompanied the protests in Cali, suffered several such attacks, the maximum recently on May 9, when another 8 people were injured.
This violent state repression is another result of imperialist intervention and the extractivist neoliberal assignment that militarism uses for a traditionally racialized population that it sees as residual and as a risk to the white supremacist capitalist order.
Chadians demonstrated on May 14 at the French embassy in Washington, D. C. , in reaction to a French-backed coup to install the son of Idriss Déby, whom they say violates the country’s constitution. French neocolonialism in the minds of Chadians. Jacqueline Luqman of Luqman Nation, an independent media outlet, covered the protest for Black Power Media, another independent media outlet.