Third NYC Encuentro for Dignity & Against Displacement
Movement for Justice in El Barrio
An echo that turns itself into many voices, into a network of voices that, before the deafness of power, opts to speak to itself, knowing itself to be one and many, acknowledging itself to be equal in its desire to listen and be listened to, recognizing itself as different in the tonalities and levels of voices forming it. A network of voices that resist the war that power wages on them. – Words of the Zapatistas at the “First Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism.”
Click here to read Jacques Depelchin's first three letters on the attack on Abahlali baseMjondolo.
Dearest Friends,
Like many people in South Africa and around the world, I am still stunned by what has been done to the people living at the Kennedy Road Settlement in Durban.
From 2005, AbM seems to have managed to overcome many obstacles, but, or so it seems, it has not been able (yet) to overcome the biggest one, namely appearing to be giving a lesson in emancipatory politics to the ANC.
Since assuming power, it seems that there are members of the ANC who seem to have forgotten the role played by ALL the people, but especially, the poorest of the poorest, in propelling the ANC to power. This forgetting could have lethal consequences, not just for the PoPs, but also for every citizen in South Africa and beyond. In the history of emancipatory politics, from slavery to today, the enslaved, the colonized, by definition, must never ever free themselves. Should they try and, worst of all, succeed, those in power shall quickly “put them back into their place”. In retribution, more often than not, this trespassing act, or so considered by those in power was followed by the most severe of punishments, preceded, if necessary, by torture. Since 2005, AbM has been giving lessons on emancipatory politics to a party in power which, directly or indirectly, claims to be the only one to know how to bring about emancipatory politics. Other historical examples are too numerous to list, but let us start with one of the most notorious:
Sent: Friday, February 29, 2008 11:20 PM
Subject: Re: Old and afraid of the world outside
Comrades!
As we are going to sleep today, most of us who have watched the video of the suffering of the people of Haiti, as strong as we are, can not enjoy the food that we are lucky to eat, not to mention our inner peace. Abahlali as a Movement would be guilty of a serious offence if today it can not think critical about what needs to be done to stand in Solidarity with the people of Haiti. As today the World enters the 3rd International Day in Solidarity with the Haitian People.
Nine days after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, it’s now clear that the initial phase of the U.S.-led relief operation has conformed to the three fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island’s recent history. It has adopted military priorities and strategies. It has sidelined Haiti’s own leaders and government, and ignored the needs of the majority of its people. And it has proceeded in ways that reinforce the already harrowing gap between rich and poor.
Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti's capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it's no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence.
Måndag 14 september 2009 Lavalas väljare bojkottade valet i Haiti
Sju dagar före kuppen i Honduras inträffade en händelse som kan få stor politisk sprängkraft. Den 21 juli, i andra omgången av valet till Haitis senat, gick praktiskt taget ingen till valurnorna. Det var resultatet av en framgångsrik politisk strategi som huvudsakligen organiserats av landets största parti, Lavalas, efter att partiets kandidater förbjudits från att ställa upp i valet. ”Operation stängda dörrar och tomma gator”, som bojkotten kallades, kommer få en given plats i Haitis politiska historia.
By supporting NGOs instead of popular movements, is the left suppressing a radical politics in Haiti and elsewhere? And is it possible to defend a popular movement without deifying its leader? Richard Pithouse reviews Peter Hallward's new book on the containment of popular politics in Haiti.
The inequality of class, first universalised into a global Manicheanism in The Communist Manifesto, is not just complicated by gender, race and sexuality. There is also the fact that the globalisation of capital has always been accompanied by the violent division of the world into different kinds of spaces meant to be inhabited by different kinds of people. The unequal allocation of rights and resources across these spaces has always been held to match unequal capacities for thought, speech and action. Attempts at building solidarity across these divisions have often been insufficiently attentive to their objective material differences or too willing to treat claims about subjective difference as objective.
SOPUDEP is a private non-profit school in Haiti that has served the poorest and most vulnerable children of the community of Petion-Ville since 2001. The children who attend SOPUDEP school would never have a chance at an education save for this wonderful project. Most of them also receive their only hot meal every school day through the school's Hot Lunch Program. Given the latest rise in food prices and the hardship this has caused Haitian families, the Hot Lunch Program is an indispensable component SOPUDEP's work in the community.
From Cité Soleil (Haiti) to Durban (South Africa) where Freedom Day is now being seen as Unfreedom Day.
by Jacques Depelchin
April 30-May 4th 2008.
This is a brief report from a visit to Durban, specifically to see for oneself places like Kennedy Road, Motala Heights, to meet with people like S’bu Zikode and Shamita Naidoo whose words continue to impact us in a way which is still generating new thinking. We were on our way to meet people who can be described as the staunchest defenders of the poor, and, by extension, of humanity.
Driving with Pauline from Maputo to Durban reminded her of her native lands in the Caribbean: sugar plantations after sugar plantations. However, for her, that was the 50s. Now, this was 2008, in the Province of Kwazulu-Natal, where Jacob Zuma, the newly elected President of the ANC, comes from. For those who do not know, it is worth remembering, in the name of always connecting the dots, that President Jean Bertrand Aristide presented a thesis in linguistics at the University of South Africa (Unisa) comparing Isizulu and Creol. I am still reading the thesis which can be found on line and downloaded. It was presented in November 2006. I hope and pray that President JBA does get invited/encouraged to visit the place from where so many Haitians originally have came: DRC. We could then look forward to another comparative thesis on Kikongo and Creol and another step in the process of reconnecting those who should never ever been separated from each other
