FRFI 186 August / September 2005
The protests against G8 at Gleneagles in the first week of July had more publicity than probably any world summit has ever had. From the moment that Bob Geldof and Make Poverty History announced their London Live8 concert on 2 July it was clear that, rhetoric apart, the protests would be the least effective, the tamest and the most rigorously policed and manipulated. Politically the Labour Party was in charge. Protesters who honestly believed that G8 should be a force against poverty in Africa and against global warming, soon realised that they would be allowed to demonstrate only as much as the Labour government and their hirelings would tolerate. The G8 summit ended as the G8 imperialists wanted with a token gesture in the direction of Africa and no progress on measures to redress climate change. Bob Geldof gave G8 ‘10 out of 10’, and swiftly disappeared down his own publicity trumpet. A few weeks later the famine in Niger hit home: the promised international aid had failed to materialise even though the disaster was predicted. A UN aid programme sputtered to life promising relief, too little, too late. The children died as they always have.
Below we print our comrades’ account of the protests in Scotland, and Charles Chinweizu and Louis Brehony analyse what G8 did for Africa and climate change.
Helping themselves to Africa
The Labour government’s sudden passion for eliminating Africa’s chronic poverty is phoney. They have failed to eradicate poverty in Britain, the fourth richest country in the world where poverty levels have doubled since 1979. Their ‘liberation’ war has doubled child poverty and malnutrition in Iraq. British imperialism has a ‘Marshall Plan for Africa’. This began with a series of initiatives in 1998 and culminated in the Commission for Africa report on 11 March and the G8 summit’s communiqué at Gleneagles. This is a humanitarian façade for the benefit of liberal fools. Behind the façade is a new imperialist scramble to recolonise this enormously wealthy continent. CHARLES CHINWEIZU reports.
Africa is rich
Contrary to corporate media misinformation, Africa is not poor but extremely rich in the strategic raw materials on which the world’s industries depend, in particular those in the G8 industrialised nations. 64% of world reserves of manganese, 90% of cobalt and 98% of chrome are found in Africa. These are crucial to the manufacture of cars, buildings, engines, electronics and arms. Over 30% of uranium, 90% of platinum and 40% of gold reserves belong to African people, but are controlled by US, French and British multinationals which are steadily plundering the continent.
Gold, chrome, cobalt, oil, timber, cassiterite, rubber, diamonds and coltan (used in laptops and mobile phones) are being systematically stolen from Africa’s richest country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The thieves are 85 G8 companies, including 18 British firms. All diamond and gold mines in Botswana and South Africa are owned by De Beers and Anglo-American. The apartheid-supporting Oppenheimer dynasty controls both companies, and De Beers controls half the world’s diamond supply. British multinationals Unilever and Shell control 70% of mineral mines in DRC and 50% of crude oil production in Nigeria. Seven French multinationals control electricity, water, transport, communications (Orange) and banking (Crédit Lyonnais) in Côte d’Ivoire.
Africa’s main strategic resources are oil and natural gas. Excluding Sudan, Africa has 10% of proven world reserves. As the domination of the Middle East proves trickier than expected, alternative sources of raw materials have to be secured.
The racist G8’s real aims are unlimited access to key African markets, energy and other strategic resources, and the military securing of communication channels to allow the unimpeded transport of raw materials to their countries. This includes stationing thousands of rapid-deployment and semi-permanent troops and mercenaries throughout Africa, such as those used in the recent attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea. Training and arming of these killers is to be intensified: the G8 has announced an extra 75,000 African ‘peacekeeping’ forces, in addition to the secretly established military training programmes already in place, such as the Africa Contingency Operations Training Assistance, officially set up to provide ‘peacekeeping and humanitarian aid’, run by the US army’s European command in Stuttgart using special forces and CIA terrorists.
None of these ‘peacekeepers’ have been able to prevent the barely documented deaths of well over 10 million people, through the official and secret wars ravaging Africa. That is not their role. Protecting Shell’s oil installations in Nigeria and tin and gold mines in DRC, and the safe passage of their loot, is the real priority. In Liberia, the cosmetic UN mission UNMIL has been kept away from areas along the border with Côte d’Ivoire where illegal diamond mining and timber logging have been continuing unchecked.
British imperialism out of Africa!
British Gas plc has bought up 60m tonnes of liquefied natural gas (17 years’ total output) from Equatorial Guinea. This is worth $15bn but the government will only receive 5% of the production-sharing deal and 10% royalties from the original processing plant contract. In any case, most of the royalties remain in London and Washington bank accounts or ‘fiscal black holes’ in Cyprus, Luxembourg and Jersey in slush funds set up for President Obiang Nguema and various sidekicks.
Whilst the children of the Equatorial Guinea elite are educated in London, funded by oil companies, the rest of the population suffers malaria, dysentery and starvation; the majority lack safe drinking water. British Gas has refused to publish how much it actually paid the government.
Another British firm, AngloGold Ashanti, part of AngloAmerican, has been giving ‘financial aid and logistical support’ to regional warlords responsible for rape, torture and massacres in DRC in order to gain access to gold mines. These are then looted via Uganda and Rwanda and the gold shipped to Europe. AngloGold said it had a ‘moral right’ to operate in DRC, and ‘will enhance the pursuit of peace and democracy’.
In Darfur, the bodies of the dead were barely cold before British oil firm White Nile and French corporation Total began circulating like vultures, disputing ownership of Sudan’s massive oil fields. While the British media has kept silent about the 40,000 rapes of girls and massacres in DRC, there has been a cacophony over Sudan and Darfur in particular, with missionary NGOs calling essentially for an invasion. They got their wish and 10,000 UN troops are now in place in southern Sudan’s oil fields, while Darfur’s people still wait for the £2.4bn aid promised last year, starving in disease-ridden camps, where rape and abuse continue.
In Angola, where $4.22bn went ‘missing’ between 1997-2002 and ten members of the ruling elite have more than $100m each, 70% of the people live in abject poverty, with life expectancy at 36.6 years and infant mortality at 191 per 1,000 live births. G8 banks including British parasites Standard Chartered, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland have loaned state oil company Sonangol $2.35bn at an interest rate 2.5% above the London base rate. This will guarantee control of all future oil production as Angola, Africa’s second largest oil producer, repays the debt.
London International Bank, French radio software firm ATDI and the MoD, set up secret deals to monopolise Liberia’s telecommunications and its alluvial diamond production, worth $800m annually. £2bn looted from Nigeria by late President Abacha still resides in British banks that refuse to hand it back. Despite urging corrupt African leaders to ‘commit to transparent governance’, not one G8 country has itself ratified the UN Convention against corruption.
The root of the problems
Africa’s problems are well documented: 17.9 million people in the horn of Africa and 16.41 million in southern Africa face starvation due to food shortages; 10 million die each year, 30,000 a day, including 4.8 million children under five, from hunger, preventable diseases and extreme poverty. 25 million are infected with HIV/AIDS, with 8,500 dying each day from related illnesses (the real figure is much higher as vile African governments downplay the pandemic). About half of the children, 43 million, are out of school. 300 million sub-Saharan Africans live on less than 65p a day.
These problems began with slavery, the worst of which was grotesque European transatlantic slavery which removed tens of millions to the Americas in chains. European racists then scrambled to colonise Africa: 10 million were killed as a result of Belgian colonialism in the Congo (now DRC) alone. The criminal plunder continues to this day despite ‘independence’. The major imperialist powers Britain, France and the US put in place structures to ensure that ‘independence’ continued to mean dependence.
Will G8 eradicate poverty?
In 1958, the British Foreign Office said ‘[aid is] a weapon in the armoury of foreign policy’. US President Richard Nixon once said ‘the main purpose of aid is not to help other nations but to help ourselves’. A recent ActionAid report revealed that most G8 aid (61%) is creamed off by western ‘consultants’ as technical assistance; about 30% of British aid is fake, double-counted money, spent on business class flights, administrative costs or inflated salaries; about 90% in the case of France and the US. US and Japanese aid is tied to purchase of their goods. For every 40 cents of phantom ‘aid’ Africa gets, it pays out $2 to the rich G8 nations.
Unsurprisingly, most African countries are poorer now than they were in 1950, despite some $450bn [£260bn] in aid, and their debt (now over $300bn) is unpayable. The plans of the Global Fund for Aids, TB and Malaria, set up by Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown, George Bush and Bill Gates, excludes provision of cheaper generic drugs to protect monopoly patents, hence guaranteeing lucrative contracts and markets for US and British pharmaceutical firms.
The G8 has promised to provide $48bn, a $25bn annual increase in aid by 2010, however only $8.5bn [£4.9bn] of the promised $25bn-odd [£14bn] extra aid is really new money. They have spent $200bn ‘liberating’ Iraq, and the global arms trade – of which the G8 are in the top ten arms suppliers – reached £1 trillion in 2004. Africa gets more real aid (£110bn a year) from remittances from the African diaspora. G8 aid is tied to privatisation, deregulation, and opening up of African markets. This neoliberalism has been discredited and rejected in Latin America and India as backward, but is championed by the G8, because as Brown admits ‘[without this] we are unlikely to maintain the growth rates we have enjoyed over the past 20 years’.
100% debt relief is only to be given to 18 eligible countries, 14 of them African, who have completed a long-term programme of World Bank/IMF-imposed economic reforms, known as the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. The debt proposal provides debt stock cancellation of $55bn. It may include nine more African countries in the next two years, if they too complete the HIPC programme and agree to privatise state assets and deepen imperialist control of their resources.
Make Poverty History and Live8
Asking the G8 to eradicate poverty is like asking the Nazis to eradicate anti-Semitism. However, this is the strategy of the MPH campaign, led primarily by the Labour Party, NGOs and celebrities. The NGOs play a similar role to that of the Christian missionaries in Africa who legitimised slavery and colonialism. They perform a task for imperialism, presenting its human, benevolent face while hiding the reality of barbaric neo-colonialism. They also benefit directly, with 61% of all aid expenditure going on providing them with a living.
As for the celebrities, the MPH and Live8 events were hugely successful; loads of white MPH T-shirts were sold, as were loads of fashionable white arm-bands, made in Chinese sweatshops with child slave-labour and emblazoned with Tommy Hilfiger logos (see The Scotsman, 30 May 2005). Sales of artists who played Live8 shot up 1,000%; LiveAid CDs have been re-released and that great friend to Africa, Bob Geldof, who omitted to include any African artists in the Hyde Park concert, has another book on Africa on sale.
G8 nations squander the Earth’s resources and make the poor pay
Prime Minister Blair went into the G8 proclaiming his mission to lead the G8 nations in a bid to halt climate change. With Blair as G8 President, the liberal press speculated that US President Bush might be forced to accept the realities of climate change and do something about it. President Bush duly acknowledged that human activity contributes to global warming, but prevented any practical decisions beyond a commitment to further talks. The G8 Summit represents the interests of the eight richest imperialist countries (US, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia) and above all the US is determined that its economic superiority will not be fettered.
Last winter was Britain’s driest for over 100 years. The country is now facing one of the most severe water shortages for decades, with a large number of reservoirs containing dangerously low water levels – the result of eight months of below-average rainfall. Most scientists don’t doubt that the effects of global warming – caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping gases, like carbon dioxide (CO2), in the earth’s atmosphere – are upon us.
The effects of this man-made disaster will be most felt in the poorest parts of the world. Everything afflicting Africa today will be made far worse – poverty, disease, shortage of clean water, ‘natural’ disasters. Imperialism, which divides the world into oppressed and oppressor nations, has caused all of these problems in Africa in its relentless drive for profits.
With the industrial revolution a process began in which the concentration of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere has increased by 35% – one third of this in the last 40 years. Average global surface temperatures have risen by 0.6 degrees Celsius in the past century. A three degree rise will melt the ice caps and flood coastal cities. On current trends, it is estimated that temperatures will increase between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees before the end of this century.
The Kyoto Protocol, signed by all G8 countries except the US, aims to cut overall emissions of heat-trapping gases to 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2008-12. This requires curbing the use of coal, oil and natural gas. But Kyoto is not worth the paper it is written on. This is not even close to the sort of targets that could stop the effects of global warming from worsening. Yet even Kyoto is too much for the Bush administration whose sole aim is to maintain the US as the dominant imperialist power. The US is the world’s biggest polluter. A quarter of all CO2 emissions – 40,000 pounds – are released on average by each US citizen every year. US emissions total more than those of China, India and Japan combined. Bush made it clear before the G8 Gleneagles summit that the US would not sign up to Kyoto.
The US has flatly refused any legally-binding limit on greenhouse gas emissions and has put nuclear power forward as a solution. Bush mirrors the views of US multinational Exxon-Mobil, rejecting the scientific consensus and calling for more research. The company provided $2.8 million to the Republican Party between 2000 and 2004, and former US Climate Change Advisor, Phil Cooney, now works for the company. It also recently emerged that BP has been privately lobbying in Washington to block legislation to curb greenhouse gases in the US.
Liberal sections of the British press are eager to commend Blair’s efforts at tackling the environment. Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth claimed that ‘Tony Blair is right to plan a public split with President Bush at the G8 on climate change if there is no dramatic improvement in the US position.’ No one at the G8 publicly condemned the US government’s intransigence.
Labour may attempt to portray itself as green but it fails to meet its own targets and Britain’s emissions continue to rise. In 2003-04 Britain increased total emissions more than all other EU countries except Italy and Finland. The 1.3% increase, equivalent to 7.4m tonnes of carbon, was mainly due to Britain’s car culture: there has been no real attempt to improve or cheapen public transport or to discourage car use nationally. The latest figures for Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions show that in 2003 15 EU member countries increased their overall emissions by 1.1%. Under Kyoto, EU countries must reduce emissions by 8% by 2012.
Meanwhile, British imperialism’s environmental hypocrisy is laid bare:
• In June a 1,770 km oil pipeline opened, snaking its way from Baku in Azerbaijan to the Turkish Mediterranean coast. The $4 billion pipeline was built mainly by the British multinational BP – with a 30.1% share – to supply a cheaper source of fuel to the west. Huge areas of land have been destroyed and Turkish activists have been arrested and brutalised for defending villages affected by the pipeline.
• Amid revelations about air travel being one of the most environmentally destructive industries, companies such as British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, easyJet and the airport operator BAA have introduced ‘efficiency gains’ targets of 2% a year to make their businesses ‘greener’. These targets are completely irrelevant as a 3-4% growth in emissions has been forecast, fuelled by the profiteering expansion of the industry. The Labour government has given the go-ahead to expand Stansted and Heathrow airports. Britain does not tax air fuel.
• Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks says: ‘We are going to be burning lots of fuels, lots of coal, lots of oil and lots of gas. If we can find ways of burning the stuff more efficiently and more significantly if we can find ways of capturing CO2, maybe in the North Sea, I think we have to look at that very hard.’
Global warming and the destruction of the environment are the result of the expansion of monopoly capital. In their thirst for profits, multinational companies and their rich, imperialist governments force the consequences of their actions on the same people they economically exploit, the world’s poor. The fight to save the environment must be a fight against imperialism.
Louis Brehony
Labour and police manipulate protests
Protests took place throughout Scotland. From the official ‘Make Poverty History’ rally in Edinburgh on Saturday 2 July to the attempts to break down the fence at Gleneagles the following Wednesday, the G8 protests exposed the relative weakness of the opposition movement and the stranglehold of the Labour Party. Labour Party supporters, including Chancellor Gordon Brown, church leaders and assorted do-gooders dominated the platform at the main rally. Behind the scenes, the potential of Britain’s police state could be seen as police prepared their biggest operation in Scotland since the miners’ strike in 1984/85. Over 15,000 police from around Britain were deployed to contain and at times attack protestors, arresting, searching, filming and detaining them under section 60 of the Public Order Act.
Edinburgh’s Meadows turned into a sea of white, with a scattering of red, on Saturday 2 July as a 250,000-strong Make Poverty History became the largest demonstration in Scotland’s history. Everyone from cardinals to the revolutionary left were present, with many ordinary people who feel strongly about debt relief, aid, poverty and so on. Arriving at the Meadows they found three large concert stages and an array of NGOs and charities already firmly entrenched.
At the Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! stall we raised the issue of poverty not as charity but in the context of opposing capitalism, imperialism and the Labour Party. Our slogan ‘Another World is Here’ highlighted the struggle for social and economic justice in Venezuela and Cuba and support for anti-imperialist struggles in Iraq and Palestine.
On Sunday, the official meetings and workshops organised by G8 Alternatives, in Usher Hall, were dominated by George Galloway MP, who received multiple standing ovations. Galloway used the platform to bolster support for his Respect coalition. The anarchist Dissent! network, which included the Wombles group held an unofficial counter-summit of its own.
Monday’s Carnival of Full Enjoyment turned into a Carnival of Full Police Deployment when the clown army of the small carnival, which was supposed to be a lively, enjoyable march through the streets of Edinburgh was violently attacked by riot police, most with ID numbers hidden. Sections of Edinburgh were closed down, trapping protesters and public alike for hours behind police cordons while police subjected them to stop-and-search. On the same day, the blockade at Scotland’s nuclear submarine base, Faslane, near Glasgow, successfully shut down the base for the first time.
Tuesday’s protest at the Dungavel Detention Centre was harassed by a heavy-handed policing operation, as around 900 demonstrators were matched by hundreds of riot police in balaclavas, on horses and using continuous video-recording to intimidate protesters. Several buses on the way to the protest were searched and delayed by the police. The authorities, afraid that the asylum seekers might be heartened by solidarity from the demonstrators, had already moved the detainees to other prisons for the
duration.
On Wednesday the G8 leaders arrived in the Gleneagles hotel for the opening of the Summit. Early in the morning, some successful blockades were created, particularly on the M9 motorway. Most protesters based in Edinburgh and Glasgow travelled in coaches towards Stirling and then Gleneagles. The first coaches were turned back by police claiming the march had been cancelled because of disorder at Stirling. Finally police let coaches continue but their tactics had reduced the march to 5,000. The police controlled every aspect of the protest as if our steps had been pre-planned.
Since the high points of Seattle in 1999, Prague 2000 and Genoa 2001 the failure of the anti-capitalist movement to develop in strategy has brought stagnation. This failure was clearly expressed in Scotland, in the increasingly depoliticised forms of protest, the disorganisation of opponents to imperialist war, and the lack of solidarity with those who combat imperialism daily. Today support for the Iraqi and Palestinian resistance, support for socialist Cuba and revolutionary developments in Latin America, especially Venezuela, mean connecting these struggles against imperialism abroad to the fight at home. This is key to the emergence of a serious anti-capitalist movement in Britain.
Joey Simons and Ehthesham Ul’Haque
