Left Margin

Davos and the Wretched of the Whole Earth

By Carl Bloice - BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
BC
February 2, 2011

http://www.blackcommentator.com/412/412_lm_wretched_of_the_whole_earth.php

"Davos delegates do not seem to know how to react to
events in Egypt," Gideon Rachman, the Financial Times'
chief foreign affairs columnist, wrote last week. "The
young people demonstrating on the streets of Cairo do
not speak with the kind of voices that are represented
at the forum."

You can say that again.

The contrast between these two events on the world
stage could hardly have been more striking and
instructive. While the mucky mucks of the world,
prominent characters from the fields of finance,
industry, entertainment, journalism and labor, gathered
to ponder the state of the planet the ground was
trembling beneath their feet. What Frantz Fanon called
the The Wretched of the Earth were pushing the lavish
conclave in the Swiss Alps off the front pages. If
Rachman was right, the luminaries in Davos were at a
loss.

While Davos wound down, most of the world's attention
was focused on events in Egypt, and to lesser extent on
Tunisia and Yemen. However, it would be a big mistake
to assume the moving and shaking that has commenced is
somehow restricted to "the Arab world."

First of all, while Egypt is indeed part of the Middle
East, it is also part of Africa, in fact the
continent's largest country. The tremors that started a
couple of weeks ago in Tunis have extended south as
well as east.

For some reason, the U.S. mass media has studiously
avoided the situation in Sudan. Well, not quite. The
big story has been the plebiscite by the Sudanese south
to secede from the country (a prospect that is viewed
with mixed feelings in Africa where the breakup of
nations, particularly when championed from the outside,
is viewed with trepidation). It's the story of what's
happening in the North that has been ignored for three
weeks now.

On Sunday, Reuters reported: "Heavily armed police
patrol Khartoum's main streets beat and arrested
students in central Khartoum"

"Sudanese police have beaten and arrested students as
protests broke out throughout Khartoum demanding the
government resign, inspired by a popular uprising in
neighboring Egypt," said the news agency. "Hundreds of
armed riot police broke on Sunday up groups of young
Sudanese demonstrating in central Khartoum and
surrounded the entrances of four universities in the
capital, firing teargas and beating students at three
of them. Police beat students with batons as they
chanted anti-government slogans such as `we are ready
to die for Sudan' and `revolution, revolution until
victory.'

"There were further protests in North Kordofan capital
el-Obeid in Sudan's west, where around 500 protesters
engulfed the market before police used tear gas to
disperse them, three witnesses said. `They were
shouting against the government and demanding change,'
said witness Ahmed who declined to give his full name."

Reuters said the students were "galvanized by social
networks."

Groups have emerged on social networking sites calling
themselves Youth for Change and The Spark. "The people
of Sudan will not remain silent anymore," the Youth for
Change Facebook page read. "It is about time we demand
our rights and take what's ours in a peaceful
demonstration that will not involve any acts of
sabotage."

The demonstrations in the Sudan actually began January
13 with Sudanese police brutally trying to crush
student protests against proposed cuts in subsidies in
petroleum products and sugar. Widespread economic and
political discontent has provoked sporadic street
protests in north Sudan in recent weeks, with the
security forces maintaining tight control in Khartoum.

Sudan is also part of the Arab world and Africa and
conditions there are present in other parts of the
latter, producing tensions and mass dissatisfaction in
places like Zimbabwe and the Ivory Coast. "While most
sub-Saharan African countries are freer than the Arab
states, they also share some of the social tensions,
political frustrations and high levels of unemployment
that have proved so explosive in the north," said the
Financial Times on Sunday.

Last Saturday, police in Gabon fired tear gas to break
up a demonstration in the capital Libreville by around
5,000 opposition supporters during which up to 20
people were reportedly wounded. It was the second such
confrontation in a week. One report said five people
have been killed and scores injured. "The usually
sleepy central African oil exporter has been troubled
since a 2009 election won by Ali Bongo Odimba, but
which the main opposition group - inspired by power
struggles in Tunisia and Ivory Coast - is insisting was
rigged," Reuters reported January 27. The 2009 election
saw Ali Bongo Odimba replace his father, the late
President Omar Bongo. Hundreds of supporters of
opposition leader Andre Mba Obame, who declared himself
president last week and formed a rival government,
gathered outside the local United Nations offices to
demand he be recognized as president. At a protest
rally, Mba Obame pointed to Ivory Coast and Tunisia
saying, "history was on the march."

The problems that ignited the fire in Tunisia exist in
other parts of Africa as well. As in other parts of the
world, the prices of many basic commodities are rising
and the effect is severe in some parts of Asia, Africa
and Latin America. The economic crisis in the developed
world has reverberated strongly in some places, and in
most countries of the region, economic inequality has
increased alongside ostentatious conspicuous
consumption on the part of the native elites.

Africa and the Arab world are not the only places where
the U.S. and European governments have found themselves
allied with local despots now confronted with simmering
discontent or open street protests. "Riddled with
sporadic unrest for much of its recent history, Albania
finds itself contending with anti-corruption riots as
well," Rene Mullen wrote on Yahoo News Contributors'
network the other day. "However, unlike Egypt and
Tunisia, much of the media has turned a blind eye to
Albanians' current fight for better government.
Albania's recent demonstrations hold similar
demographic triggers as Egypt's demonstrations: anti-
corruption sprinkled with general unrest over economic
disparities. However, few are suggesting Tunisia's
Jasmine Revolution helped instigate Albania's unrest."

Probably not; it could have been the other way around.
We live today in a world globalized media and a
Facebook page is a Facebook page is a Facebook page,
wherever you are.

Or, take Uzbekistan. There have been sporadic street
demonstrations over food prices there since 2005. That
year, Uzbek security forces crushed protests,
reportedly killing up to 1,000 people, mainly unarmed
civilians. Last December, US Secretary of State,
Hillary Clinton, was in the Uzbek capitol Tashkent,
signing a cooperation deal with the leaders of the
natural gas-rich Central Asian country and asking them
to "translate words into practice" to improve their
human rights situation." After Tunisia and Egypt, she
should turn that plea into a robo call to be broadcast
regularly - to no avail.

Meanwhile, back in Egypt, the drama continued to
unfold. As the week began it appeared the stage was
being set for a U.S.-sponsored military takeover.

It should be borne in mind that the conflict being
played out in the streets of Cairo, Sharm El-Sheikh ,
Suez and Alexandria is not merely the Mubarak family
versus the protestors. Hosni Mubarak is in power
because the Egyptian ruling class wants him there. (Its
constituents were busy fleeing the country over the
weekend in their private jets). A Cairo chauffer told
the German Press Agency, "The only times people who
live in better-off areas come into contact with those
who are socially disadvantaged - many of whom live in
illegally built shanty towns - are when they see their
cleaners, their drivers, their concierges."

It is true that that the army [the 10th largest in the
world] plays a somewhat independent role but it has
been up to now to buttress the rich and the powerful.
Since the end of the Egyptian monarchy, all four
leaders have come from its ranks. It looks like, if
Washington has its way, the next Egyptian ruler will
emerge from the barracks as well. The tipoff may well
have come when the capitol inside,r Columnist Fareed
Zakaria, appearing on CNN Sunday advised the Obama
Administration to ease Mubarak out and set up the new
"vice-president" Omar Suleiman as the person to oversee
what it usually refers to as "an orderly transition."
Suleiman is, in the words of the New York Times, "the
establishment's candidate," "business oriented" and one
who "shares Washington's foreign policy agenda."

According to Jane Meyer in The New Yorker, Suleiman is
"a well-known quantity in Washington. Suave,
sophisticated, and fluent in English" who "has served
for years as the main conduit between the United States
and Mubarak." In her book "The Dark Side," she
describes how "since 1993 Suleiman has headed the
feared Egyptian general intelligence service. In that
capacity, he was the C.I.A.'s point man in Egypt for
renditions - the covert program in which the C.I.A.
snatched terror suspects from around the world and
returned them to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation,
often under brutal circumstances."

"The U.S. has long sought to block democracy in the
Arab world, fearing that it would lead to the emergence
of Islamist regimes," writes Steven Kinzer in Newsweek.
That's not quite the story. Washington, Paris and
London have, for six decades now, propped up repressive
regimes and helped them brutally crush left, secular
and Islamist movements and parties because it was
afraid of popular revolutions that could sweep aside
the local elites who control and sell their countries'
natural resources - like oil.

"With the once omnipotent security forces looking
beatable, Egyptians of all backgrounds rose to join the
fight: students, trade unionists, women, rights
activists, Islamists and, crucially, the great workers'
army of Egypt's employed and unemployed.," read the
lead editorial in the Guardian (UK) January 29. Here,
truly, was people power in all its magnificent might.
Here was democracy in the raw. Here was the legitimacy
of an Egypt freed of its old fears and suddenly alive
to its changing destiny. In five days of rage, they
seized control of their country's future. And so,
inevitably, Mubarak must go."

"The revolution threatens not only Hosni Mubarak's
regime but the strategy the US and Britain have
constructed in the Middle East," the paper said the
next day. "The hesitancy with which President Mubarak
reacted last night was matched only by the perceptible
shift in the emphasis of the statements by the US
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Only two days ago
she said the US assessment was that the Egyptian
government was stable and was looking for ways to
respond to the legitimate interests of the Egyptian
people. The primary importance of keeping a key Arab
ally and Middle East interlocutor stable was also
emphasized yesterday by Tony Blair, the Quartet's
envoy. Faced with the conflicting needs to keep an Arab
partner of Israel afloat and to respond to demands for
democratic reform, the US would choose the first every
time. After yesterday's events, Ms. Clinton's calls to
lift internet controls and respond to the grievances of
Egyptians became more strident. But it was too little,
too late. Ms. Clinton's initial support for the Mubarak
regime had not been lost on Egyptians battling for
their freedoms."

And the Middle East, Africa, and the rest of the world.
______________

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice
is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National
Coordinating Committee of the Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly
worked for a healthcare union

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