Reporters sans frontières (RSF) has condemned the closure of "Le Quotidien", Guinea's only privately-owned daily, on 13 November 2004. The National Communication Council (Conseil national de la communication, CNC) announced the paper's "indefinite suspension" following the publication of an article entitled, "The country is in bad shape...when will the uprising take place?" RSF also deplored the threatening phone calls that the newspaper's editor, Siaka Kouyaté, has been receiving for the past week.

In January of 2004, two similar lawsuits filed against New York Life Insurance Company for injustices dating back to the 19th century resulted in unreasonably different outcomes. A class action lawsuit, filed against New York Life Insurance Company by Blacks whose African ancestors were enslaved in the United States under the company's insurance policies, was dismissed on January 26, 2004. Just three (3) days later, on February 1, 2004, a similar case, filed by Whites whose Armenian ancestors held policies and were genocide victims under the Ottoman Empire, was settled with New York Life for $20 million.

The Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis (TB) approved last Thursday the fifth round of funding proposals to combat the three diseases. The decision was made after a two-day, closed-door meeting of the Global Fund's Board in Arusha, Tanzania. Presidents Mwai Kibaki of Kenya, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania attended the meeting that opened on Wednesday. Previously, there had been uncertainty about the fifth round of funding, with some donors adopting a hard-line stance towards continued funding.

Zimbabwean civil society agencies (CSOs) based in South Africa have resolved to join hands to find a common approach to helping refugees who have fled to the country to escape poverty and persecution under Robert Mugabe's government. Of the 3.4 million Zimbabweans (about 25% of the country's population believed to have left the country) an estimated one to two million were living in South Africa, legally and illegally, they claimed.

“People with HIV/AIDS and their advocates strongly condemn the decision by the United States to block new funding for HIV/AIDS programs around the world through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and its systematic attempts to undermine the work of the World Health Organization and its efforts to ensure that 3 million people in the developing world receive HIV treatment by the end of 2005.

The suspension, proposed by the United States, of new funding for HIV, TB and malaria programs by the Global Fund, will lead to the loss of countless numbers of lives and to thousands of new infections. While we recognize there have been some problems in the disbursement of grants and implementation of programs through the Global Fund, this is not an excuse for suspending new grants to countries that desperately need this support. A fifth round of funding by the Global Fund would provide vital resources to nations around the world confronting these pandemics.

We also condemn the US government’s attacks and those by right-wing think tanks associated with the Administration on the World Health Organization and its prequalification process for evaluating antiretroviral drugs. While there have been specific problems with the dossiers submitted by some of the manufacturers of generic AIDS drugs to the WHO, these problems were recognized and are being handled by the agency. We urge the US government to work with the WHO to strengthen its prequalification program rather than setting up its own regulatory process for these drugs at the US Food and Drug Administration as well as duplicative supply and procurement programs in the developing world.

With these events taken together, we believe that the US government is seeking to draw control of global AIDS programs under its own leadership rather than supporting multilateral responses through the WHO and the Global Fund. The United States cannot go it alone in the fight against AIDS and must work in cooperation with the global community. It should not abuse its power in setting the agenda in the fight against this disease, particularly when it has championed abstinence-only prevention programs that do not work and expensive brand-name drugs that are unsustainable solutions for the developing world.”

Contact: gregggonsalves@earthlink.net

AFRICA: US, JAPAN AND FRANCE UNITING TO CURTAIL FIGHT AGAINST AIDS
Global AIDS Alliance

US, Japan and France Uniting to Curtail Fight Against AIDS

Contact: David Bryden, 202-296-0260 ext 211 or 202-549-3664 mobile

Washington, Nov 16 -- Despite naming AIDS one of six top priorities for his second term, President Bush is taking steps this week to cripple the Global Fund. The Fund, based in Geneva, has the broadest impact and uses the most collaborative and need-driven approach of any international health initiative.

This week the Global Fund's Board, chaired by Secretary Tommy Thompson, will meet week in Tanzania (Nov 17-19) and decide whether to proceed with additional grantmaking. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan will attend the meeting, along with five African Presidents including the Chair of the Africa Union, President Obasanjo.

AIDS advocates consider the meeting a “make-it-or-break-it” meeting for the Fund. Contributions are not keeping pace with the Fund’s needs, which are escalating in 2005 and 2006. The impact of a cancellation of grantmaking on the fight against global disease would be “catastrophic,” according to the Fund’s Director. “The Bush Administration will be sentencing many people to death in Africa, in Asia, in the Caribbean, in Latin America, and in Eastern Europe,” stated noted South African AIDS advocate Zackie Achmat.

Since re-election, the President has intensified efforts to roll back the level of next year’s US contributions to the Fund. Using misleading claims about the Fund's track record, the Administration hopes to persuade Congress to reverse an earlier approved level that was based in part on emergency funding. Congress is now finalizing the Omnibus Spending Bill, and the White House is weighing in with behind-the-scenes negotiations to undercut the Fund.

Also, according to leaked White House talking points, the President is strongly backing a proposal that would essentially stall the Fund at its current level of grantmaking, just as the world is trying to reach a target of getting 3 million people on AIDS treatment by the end of next year. The Administration is lobbying other members of the Board of the Global Fund to support the cancellation of grantmaking for the forseeable future, and this idea has gained considerable momentum. The Fund was supposed to reach a level of annual grantmaking of $7 billion by 2007.

"The President is undermining the positive legacy he hopes to leave on AIDS," stated Dr. Paul Zeitz, Executive Director of the Global AIDS Alliance. "Far from beginning a fresh start in his second term, President Bush still pursues his ill-informed vendetta against the Fund. Sadly, Japan, France and other Board members seem ready to back this incredibly shortsighted policy. Yet, proceeding with plans for next year’s grantmaking would actually help create the pressure needed to get additional contributions. The Fund needs to be strong not only to fight AIDS but also to fill major gaps in the funding of programs to fight Tb and malaria."

Even before the election, the White House was attacking the Fund. On September 21 the White House sent staffers to distribute misleading and inflammatory information about the Fund to Congressional appropriators, the very day President Bush was highlighting his “support” for the Fund in a speech at the UN.

Besides funding issues, this week’s meeting will also consider whether or not to commit to minimum requirements for civil society participation. The Fund's 400-person Partnership Forum backed the requirements at its July meeting.

“It is critically important that the Board require grantees to live up to basic standards of participation from civic groups, including people living with AIDS,” stated Zeitz.

BACKGROUND:

TANZANIA: BUSH ADMINISTRATION PROPOSES GLOBAL FUND DELAY

Health officials in the Bush administration are urging board members of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to delay the distribution of a fifth round of grants because of funding shortages, the New York Times reports. However, people attending the Global Fund's board meeting in Arusha, Tanzania, this week said on Tuesday that the fund "appears likely" to go ahead with a new round of grants, according to the Financial Times. Board members will have to "balance the clear need for increased funding" for programs against the fund's "current resource constraints," according to a Global Fund release.

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=26778

The Band Aid Album, ‘Do they know its Christmas time’, which sold millions of copies and directly raised even more millions of dollars for the relief of famine in Ethiopia 20 years ago is again being released in time for this Christmas. As in 1984 it is widely expected that the album will be a runaway success.

Apart from the millions of dollars raised then and to be raised now, what both the album and the Live Aid concert it inspired in July 1985 (which was watched reportedly by over 1.5 billion people across the world) achieved was to raise awareness about hunger, starvation and famine in Africa. The bloated tummies of underfed babies clutching at emaciated breasts of a hunger-ravished mother or the multitudes of flies and army of other insects holidaying on the mouths and bodies of desperate children, women and men in refugee camps became the dominant image of Africa in the global media. What we saw with our eyes on televisions became engraved permanently on our minds. It was successful in causing almost a stampede of humanitarian concern and focus on Africa.

However it had its own unintended consequences then and twenty years on these negative consequences have a greater impact in that they perpetuate the popular perception that Africa is a basket case continent and Africans are a hopeless and helpless people.

The fact that the same song could be re released without altering the lyrics and with similar accompanying horrible pictures on televisions, in newspapers and other more widely accessible multi media today than then speaks volumes. It is either an admission of failure of previous efforts or a confirmation that Africa is indeed a basket .

I am particularly irked about that dubious line: ‘Thank God tonight its them instead of you’! The only variation on the theme is that instead of targeting Ethiopia last time around it is Sudan that is competing for the sympathy of the West as Africa's most hellish of hells!

It is an indictment of Africa's leaders and also the powerful countries, individuals and institutions within the international community that despite all the awareness and pangs of conscience in the last 20 years, fellow human beings can still be facing such penury, humiliation and starvation in a world with ‘enough for our needs but not enough for our greed’ as Mahatma Ghandi once put it.

However as Africans we can be disgusted, ashamed and rightly critical of the deliberate use/abuse of those horrible images that strip us of our dignity and humanity, but we should be more outraged that Africans (through acts of both omission and commission) have been largely responsible for such continuous misery inflicted on our own peoples. Band Aid, Live Aid or any of the busy body Western NGOs raising huge sums of money on these images did not create them, they are merely exploiting them for their multi-million dollar humanitarian mega business. Therefore the first responsibility and admission of guilt is ours and ours alone. It is up to us to put an end to the brutalisation and extreme pauperisation of our own peoples.

But the Humanitarian agencies also have to ask themselves whether their chosen methods have worked or are working. Or if the end now justifies the means and that end is about their unaccountable power to play god with the destiny of poor people by merchandising our people’s suffering. They often defend the use of the bad images as necessary to raise awareness and prick the conscience of the world (most of the time they mean, Europeans and Americans!). One is bound to ask of Live Aid and Band Aid that after 20 years what the harvest of this conscience safari has been if they have to use the same images and record two decades later.

It has always intrigued me why the conscience of the West can only be pricked by degradation of other peoples. The process of getting westerners to part with their donations end up dehumanizing and degrading Africa. Instead of creating the much needed understanding and solidarity it creates an unequal power relation with psychological hang-ups about superior and inferior peoples; one is a permanent donor and the other is a permanent supplicant. That one-way street does not lead to understanding, rather it institutionalizes a ‘we know best’ attitude on the part of the humanitarian industry. It also makes the humanitarian agencies married to bad news from Africa, thereby becoming professional merchants of our misery. It will seem that the worse the situation is the better for their fund raising drives! Needless to say that this breeds cynicism among those who are supposed to be grateful for the kind help they are receiving.

The more important lesson of the 20 years of Band Aid must surely be bringing into sharp relief the naiveté of those years that symbolic acts of genuine human solidarity will somehow change the hearts and minds of the powerful both in Africa and internationally. They can throw a few coins at the problem to appease immediate pressure and gain public mileage but the real change will only come from raising the power questions that turn drought into famine. It is politics and power that makes Africans seemingly more vulnerable to hunger and starvation than other peoples. Africa is not a poor continent but our peoples are poor because they are powerless over their resources. People are powerless in their countries and our countries are impotent in global power relations. That is why we get fleeced on all fronts.

Charity may offer an instant fire brigade service but it cannot be a substitute for sustainable long-term solutions. Why is it that Ethiopia that received massive humanitarian support twenty years ago is today one of the least recipients of long-term development aid in Africa? Even if it gets more help in aid, as long as it continues to get bad terms of trade and returns for its coffee and other raw materials, like other African countries, it will continue to run a deficit economy needing aid. Many of our countries especially those beloved by IMF/World Bank and Western Countries as ‘doing well’ have become aid addicts while the humanitarian interventionists and NGOs have become aid pushers.

The extreme poverty faced by many Africans in a majority of our countries is structural and unless both the internal and external dimensions of that unequal power relation are transformed I can assure you that in another 20 years, when Bob Geldof and many of his original collaborators would have become Old Age Pensioners (OAPs) they may still be organizing Band Aid 3. I think Saint Bob and Bono in the past few years have come to realize this and that's why they are talking less about charity but more in terms of trade, equity, global justice, debt cancellation, etc. Soon they will have to engage with reparation for Africa for both historical and contemporary depletion and pillage of the continent and her peoples and also the structural linkage between the prosperity of the West and the poverty of global humanity.
This shift is necessary in order to build a global alliance (rather than self -obsessed angst -driven Western do-gooders and their selective conscience) that can truly make poverty history in this new millennium.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa

* Please send comments to

Recruiters of child soldiers should face prosecution by the international criminal court, a human rights group has said. The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (CSUCS) has called on the UN to name, shame and pursue armies and militias which use children to fight. Fighters under the age of 18 have been used in 22 conflicts in the last three years, it reveals in a new report.

Africa is desperately poor, despite being the recipient of tens of billions of dollars in aid over the past few decades. The United Nations (UN) Development Programme says sub-Saharan Africa's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in 2002 was $469 compared with $22987 for affluent members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. But American economist Jeffrey Sachs, in a Brookings Institution paper titled Ending Africa's Poverty Trap, maintains that only a huge infusion of carefully targeted public investment will pull Africa out of poverty.

Developing countries will enjoy their best year of economic growth in 2004, producing a "spectacular" drop in poverty around the world, the World Bank said this week. But Sub-Saharan Africa remained the global laggard because of its vulnerability to oil prices and more fundamental issues of ineffective economic structures and inefficient government spending, the Bank said, which would only partly be offset by further aid flows and debt forgiveness. The report also warned that the growing trend towards regional trade agreements between countries, rather than multilateral trade deals, were not necessarily a panacea for developing countries' problems.

Nearly 16,000 of the world's plant and animal species face extinction largely because of the destructive behaviour of mankind, according to a major new environmental report out Wednesday. Over-exploitation, climate change and habitat destruction are to blame for a crisis that has wiped out at least 27 species from the wild over the last two decades, according to the World Conservation Union's (IUCN) red list of threatened species.

The hardships of life in Buduburum camp are not immediately apparent. On first entering the community it looks more like a bustling town than a refugee camp. UNHCR representative Needa Jehu-Hoyah says poverty, unemployment and a severe shortage of drinking water cause serious problems for the people who live here. But what awaits those who do decide to return to Liberia?

The term "global civil society" has become a catchphrase of our times. But efforts to define and interpret what global civil society actually is have led to ambiguity and dispute. This major work of scholarship and advocacy pierces through the generalizations and debates. It presents cogent examples of groups within civil society--from the Seattle and Genoa protesters to transnational grassroots movements, such as Slum/Shack Dwellers International--that are creatively meeting the challenges and opportunities of an increasingly interconnected world.

There is a general assumption that widows are elderly and are looked after by their children and grandchildren. But research undertaken during the past two decades by the United Nations and NGOs such as WRI has shown that many widows are young- in India for example 34% of rural widows are under 30 years old. Widows, whether, old or young, suffer a high level of social exclusion, discrimination and deprivation; in many cases their own adult children cast them out as being too great a burden.

Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) are instruments used by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to enable developing countries to qualify for debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. The international financial institutions (IFIs) claim that developing countries and their national governments are primarily responsible for the design and implementation of the PRSPs, but evidence suggests this is largely superficial, says research from the University of Oxford’s Queen Elizabeth House which finds that local people, communities or organisations often have only minimal input. The research says civil society participants mostly consist of a mix of NGOs which are not necessarily representative either of society as a whole or of the poor in particular.

The Poverty and Economic Policy (PEP) Research Network of the African Economic Researchers Consortium (AERC), brings together and provides support to developing country researchers working to reduce poverty. This call for research proposals concerns the Poverty Monitoring, Measurement and Analysis (PMMA) and Modeling and Policy Impact Analysis (MPIA) networks and targets researchers residing in developing countries. Both networks offer financial ($CAN 20,000 research grants), technical and scientific support to member researchers.

NGOs representing African descendants are demanding that United Nations documents referring to discrimination make explicit reference to anti-Black racism. The refusal of states and institutions to specifically name anti-Black racism serves to perpetuate the exclusion, marginalisation and oppression of people of African descent, according to the five groups and coalitions that signed a petition calling for this recognition.

The Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM) invites contributions to a series of research papers titled ‘Global Migration Perspectives’, edited by Dr Jeff Crisp and Dr Colleen Thouez. The purpose of the series is to contribute to the current discourse on global migration issues, and to assist the Commission in formulating policy options and proposals for its final report, which will be submitted to the UN Secretary-General in mid-2005. Preference will be given to papers that provide creative and policy-relevant perspectives on global migration issues. A fee will be paid for all papers that are accepted for publication.

"I was my mistress's slave - that was my identity," says Assibit, 50, who ran away from her master in June of this year. After walking 30 kilometres to the nearest village, she was taken by locals to the Timidria office in Abalak. Assibit was born into slavery - as was her mother, her husband and her five children. The government says it is trying to clamp down on slavery - and has introduced laws so that slave owners can be punished - but still there are estimated to be tens of thousands of people in Niger in bonded labour.

The outcome of the US presidential election is a shock to many people outside of the US who have been hoping against hope that Americans will do the world a favour with their votes and get rid of George Bush. Even the much predicted repeat of the disputed outcome of the last presidential election, which Bush controversially won, not by popular vote but through electoral machinations in the state of Florida (in which his brother Jeb was and still is Governor) and the connivance of the Supreme Court did not materialize in the end. Bush this time has won with a clear popular majority.

Winning by a whiff in 2000 did not stop him from behaving as though he had won an overwhelming mandate not just inside America but also to govern the whole world. He has divided his country and polarized the world. Indeed George Bush has succeeded in making America the number one bogey nation of the world with his reckless approach to international peace and security.

If the rest of the world had a vote in the US elections there is no doubt that Bush would have been booted out. If the views of the rest of the world mattered to Americans there would not have been a cliffhanger and it would have been a thorough defeat for the Bushman.

The fact that this is not so shows a number of things. One, Americans are as bitterly divided today as they were four years ago. Two, at the end of the day they (or at least a majority of them, no matter how small) do not care about what the rest of the world thinks. The attitude is one of take it or leave it. Three, opinion polls in America despite all the much-vaunted technology are as voodooist as in any developing country. All the exit polls indicated a Kerry victory but the actual declared results tell a different story. The same happened four years ago. Same mistakes twice should discredit the trade. Either American voters are incredible mass liars or the pollsters are fraudulent or both. Four, all the fears, allegations and counter allegations about the electoral process should humble Americans and all westerners who are quick to judge other peoples that democracy, even in the allegedly most developed country, is still a work in progress.

Now that Bush has been re-elected president the implications should be clear for Americans and the rest of the world. First, he will see the result as a legitimation for his domestic and foreign relations despite all the bitterness that they have caused. If Bush could wreak such havoc with a stolen victory what would he now do with a less controversial one?

Second, If Americans do not care about the views, interests and opinions of the rest of the world, why on earth should any other people or country care about America's views? A world in which every country does as it pleases is a recipe for global chaos. America has every right to decide who and how it is governed but it must respect that right to self-determination in other countries too. For instance if Zimbabweans want Mugabe or Venezuelans want Chavez and Cubans still want their long term president, Castro, why should the US government give itself the right to proclaim or orchestrate regime changes in these and other countries whose leaders it does not like? This also means that if some countries' voters desire theocratic leaders whether of the Islamist or any other religious inclination it will be their right to do so. After all Bush fought on a Christian fundamentalist neo-conservative agenda and his last four years in office has tested the notion of America being a secular state to extreme limits. If that is democratic in America why should it be less so for other peoples?

Third, victory twice over candidates who are definitely intellectually superior to him and more nuanced about the world is yet another demonstration that the standard of both national and global political leadership is in free fall. Bush’s victory could mean only charlatans, dimwits, liars, duplicitous and cruel politicians need aspire for success. This is a publicly Christian president who will even change the American constitution to protect the foetus and unborn children yet has no qualms killing women, children and innocent men in Iraq by the thousands!

Four, the received wisdom in Western election studies is that the voters are so enlightened that they will vote for their economic interests but Bush victory has stood this on its head. His father lost when the economy was not doing badly and he has won with a wobbly economic record whose limited recovery has been jobless. All his life personal failures have never stopped him from political victory. Five, Bush re-election may help reinforce a popular prejudice among non-Americans that Americans are one of (if not the most) ignorant peoples in the whole planet. Otherwise how does one account for the appeal of Bush?

However, America's selective disinterest in global opinion did not diminish the interest of the rest of the world in America's elections. I was particularly happy that observers from around the world, including a few Africans, were there to monitor the elections.

The reaction of the Americans was predictably hostile, believing that their democracy is beyond outside scrutiny. Yet US foundations, government, academics, NGOs and other election tourists from other parts of the West are now institutionalised accessories for any elections in Africa, Latin America, and other poor parts of the world. If they could observe us why can’t we observe them too? Why is what is good for the goose not good for the gander?

Finally, Kerry's running motto for the election was to exhort Americans not to vote for their fears but vote for hope in a new beginning. It is clear that fear has won and the nightmare from it will not be limited to the shores of the USA in the next four years. But one thing is certain - the world will survive Bush.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa

* Please send comments to

Timidria, an organisation that has spearheaded Niger's anti-slavery movement, is being presented with the 2004 Anti-Slavery Award from Anti-Slavery International. Slavery is an integral part of Niger society. Thousands of people are born into a slave class and are forced to work without freedom or pay throughout their lives. The true scale of slavery across the country only became clear last year, following Timidria's research -- the first national study of slavery to be carried out.