Category Archives: Benjamin Fogel

GroundUp: Continued existence of shacks is a real scandal

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http://groundup.org.za/content/continued-existence-shacks-real-scandal

Continued existence of shacks is a real scandal

by Benjamin Fogel

Yet another shack fire has devastated the BM section of Khayelitsha. On New Years morning fires raged through the community, leaving about 4,000 people homeless and killing at least four. The responses from authorities to what has now become a routine occurrence in the area have been mixed.

The response time of fire fighters was reportedly around two hours, despite the fire station being only a kilometer away. One City of Cape Town official Richard Bosman blamed the slow response time on the apparent obstruction of the routes to BM section caused by “resident’s belongings”. What that means in a community still lacking paved roads and desperately in need of “upgrading”, I do not know.

But the real scandal is the existence of shacks. Shack fires are just a symptom of a wider injustice. Shacks have come to be accepted as normal, a permanent existence, yet municipalities continue to insist they are merely temporary. The houses will be built but the settlements cannot be upgraded, as shacks are not permanent structures.

Shacks then occupy a zone of legal flux. If residents attempt to upgrade their dwellings into permanent structures they risk incurring the wrath of municipal demolition teams. Shack-dwellers occupy a curious position between rights bearing citizens and criminality, in which their very housing exists beyond the law.

This is the location of some of the most marginalised people in our society: sprawling shantytowns devoid of basic services-from water to roads to electricity. Despite the oft-repeated assurances of future upgrades from both major political parties, across the country’s mega-townships such as Khayelitsha in Cape Town, most of these upgrades have yet to appear.

In these high-density settlements often lacking electricity, residents are forced to use paraffin lamps for light or gas stoves in order to cook. It is in these circumstances where a misstep can lead to an inferno or falling asleep can destroy a community. As the lamp falls over and the shack is consumed by flames in a matter of minutes, the neighbouring shacks join soon afterwards.

It’s not only damage to property and bodies done by the fire. A psychological toll is left too, as people see the communities disappear in a matter of hours and are forced to rebuild their lives on a regular basis. The physical trauma can be repaired, but can the psychological?

It’s surely obvious that the fortress suburbs that occupy the more privileged sections of our cities, don’t face the same risk from fire. They have electricity,bricks and concrete and space. Not to mention the likely faster response time of emergency services.

Mike Davis writing in a seminal essay titled “Planet of Slums”, which would later become a book, noted that somewhere in one of the emerging mega-cities of the developing world, Jakarta, Lagos, Mumbai or Johannesburg a child would be born, which mark the first time majority of the world’s population lived in urban areas.

Over the last few decades the rapid urbanisation present in South Africa, has been even surpassed by the migration of millions from India to China to Nigeria and Brazil of people to urban areas, although South Africa certainly has its own particular and brutal history of urban development and restriction of the majority of its inhabitants’ movements.

British Academic Matt Birkenshaw writing a few years ago, after his own experience of shack fires while living in the Kennedy Road settlement in Durban, noted that shack fires are often described in the same or a similar language to natural disasters, when in fact they are a result of specific policy choices. According to Birkinshaw:

There is not enough affordable housing for everyone and low cost housing is rarely built close to the city centre. For this reason transport costs make even low-cost housing unaffordable for many people. Growing shack settlements are the result. Local government policy appears to be designed to force shack dwellers to live in “camps” and to prevent the inclusion of shacks in the city. Refusal to allow shack settlements access to electricity leads to the use of dangerous sources of light and heat, such as paraffin stoves and candles. Unwillingness to provide security of tenure stops shack dwellers from informally upgrading their homes with less flammable building materials. Very minimal water supply makes it impossible for shack dwellers to effectively fight fires themselves. Because of these policies, fires are increasingly frequent in shack settlements and shack dwellers face the continual threat of death, injury, homelessness, and loss of livelihood”.

Apartheid left cities with a geography defined by race. The limitations imposed by the apartheid state on permanent residency among black South Africans, and the restricted program on building permanent housing, combined with the strategic location of many homelands near to major urban centres left a legacy of sprawling informal settlements on the outskirts of South Africa’s major cities.

The advent of majority rule in 1994 saw the removal of restrictions on black movement in the country and the official incorporation of former Bantustans into South Africa. Economic pressures, in particular the continuing legacies of underdevelopment in these areas and the lack of significant land reform, saw millions of South African flock to cities in search of what little work was available there. This migration saw the further growth of informal settlements, still defined as merely temporary by government despite being decades old in some cases.

Derided on twitter by a certain opposition leader as “refugees”, subject of a media driven hysteria about invaders, these people are seen as surplus to requirements. This does not stop them transforming what appear to be bleak zones of nothingness into living, breathing, dynamic communities despite the poverty, crime, unemployment, a lack of sanitation or even some basic consumer goods.

It is the failure of government to specifically deal adequately with the rapid growth of informal settlements and broader society as a whole in terms of bringing about any real change in terms of South Africa’s economy and legacy of inequality. Here I don’t distinguish between the DA and the ANC, who both remain largely committed to the same urban policy paradigms bent on establishing mythical “World Class cities” rather than dealing with existing problems.

This is best symbolized by the festive white elephants littering the country known as soccer stadiums built in preparation for the 2010 world cup. While the residents of BM are still waiting for promised upgrades along with millions of their fellow citizens.

The question that remains is how have we normalised the existence of shacks, despite our apparent commitment to adequate housing in our Constitution? How do South Africans commute from Cape Town airport to the city centre without taking full cognisance of the level of inequality?

This normality, this acceptance of the unacceptable and our own inability to conceptualise a different South Africa, based upon a new vision of democratic urban development is the true horror. The existence of shacks is a symptom of a wider social cancer built upon the legacy of inequality and exploitation. It is the real scandal, not the fire which inevitably will occur as a result of their existence.

CounterPunch: The Marikana Massacre: a Premeditated Killing?

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http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/23/the-marikana-massacre-a-premeditated-killing/

The Marikana Massacre: a Premeditated Killing?

by Benjamin Fogel, CounterPunch

Two hundred thousand subterranean heroes who, by day and by night, for a mere pittance lay down their lives to the familiar `fall of rock` and who, at deep levels, ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 feet in the bowels of the earth, sacrifice their lungs to the rock dust which develops miners’ phthisis and pneumonia.
– Sol Plaatjie, first Secretary of the African National Congress, describing the lives of black miners in 1914

Last week’s massacre of 34 striking workers in Marikana, marks perhaps the lowest point in post-Apartheid South African history. Poor, black working class miners were shot down like animals, killed for profit. South Africa remains possibly the most unequal society in the world – the black majority still faces a life of poverty and toil, if they are lucky enough to even find work; while the still largely white elite, enjoy a life more familar to the suburbs of Atlanta or Los Angeles, than a country in which over the half the country’s citizens live below the poverty line, without access to basic services. As a wave of community protests which has arisen the townships of the country over the last few years intensifies South Africa has been dubbed the protest capital of the world. In the last three years, there has been an average of 2.9 “gatherings” per day resulting in a 12,654 “gathering” incidents during 2010.

The violence needed to sustain the profit-margin in the South African mining industry has a long and sordid history — it was one of the principle reasons for the implementation of Apartheid, principally the mines of the Witswatersrand’s need for cheap migrant black labor, from the rural Eastern Cape and Kwazula-Natal. The miners of Marikana principally came from the former Bantustan of Transkei, one of the underdeveloped and impoverished areas in the country. Violence was consistently used by both the Apartheid and colonial states against attempts to organize mineworkers, events such as the 1946 miners strike- which saw 70 000 workers go on strike and the murder of 12 miners, are an all-too common feature in South African history. Apartheid was built upon a two-tiered labour market in which white labour and white unions were actively nurtured by an interventionist state, while black labourers were disposed of their citizenship- in the form of the Bantustan system and the denial of their freedom of movement in the form of the pass laws and their ability to organize in the form of the banning of trade unions. Violence was used in many other key moments of SA labor history including the 1973 Durban Strike and countless battles between labor and the state which occurred in the 1980s which saw the formation of both the trade union federation COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) and NUM (the National Union of Mineworkers).

The fact that a multinational corporation was at the center of the massacre shouldn’t surprise us either. Anglo-American, the largest corporation in South Africa, was one of the principle funders of the slaughter in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the capuability also extends to President Jacob Zuma and his cronies in NUM, figures such as the chairperson are directly implemented in the murder of the 34 workers both in the deployment of police at the mine and NUM’s attempt to break up the strike..

The strike has continued into this week even after Lonmin issued an ultimatum to the workers, demanding that they return to their jobs or face being fired. At least 3 000 strikers refused to comply and the ultimatium was later rescinded . Furthermore, as of today, workers in the nearby Anglo American Platinum’s (Amplats) Thembelani mine and the Royal Bafokeng’s BRPM mine issued similar wage demands to management and downed their tools, giving management until Friday to respond. Lonmin’s manage failed to properly respond to the one essential demand of the striking workers, which was to meet with them. The following account clearly shows that the negotiating team was not comprised of Lonmin management and was prevented from intervening by the police. as this report clearly shows.

”However later they agreed to a meeting provided the workers committed to three conditions: surrender their weapons, elect a small representative group to engage with management and disperse from the mountain … On leaving the briefing area to report back to the miners, the SACC team was told they could not go back to the camp as the place was now a security risk area under the police. Bishop Seoka said they saw two helicopters taking off and assumed that they were going to the mountain where the workers were camping. ‘As they left the area a call came through from the man we spoke to telling us that the police were killing them and we could hear the gun shots and screams of people’, says the Bishop. ‘The man covered with green blanket lying dead was the last person we spoke to who represented the mine workers.”

Clearly, it was the police’s intent to break up the strike. It’s unclear how much political pressure they were under but rather than letting the negotiating team do its work over 500 police surrounded the striking workers with armoured cars and officers on foot carrying assault rifles. A report from University of Johannesburg academic Peter Alexander suggests that the killing was possibly premeditated, as the police erected razor wire fences around the area in which the miners were located. Later tear gas and water cannons were used to disperse the crowd, forcing them to flee towards the police lines which greeted them with live ammunition.

A City Press editorial asked 5 basic question:

* Why did police use live ammunition after an order was issued last year forbidding the use of even rubber bullets during public protests?

* Why did Lonmin bosses refuse to negotiate with representatives of the Associated Mining and Construction Union (Amcu) after initially agreeing to?

* Why didn’t the country’s intelligence services pick up
on the brewing tension at the mine and take the appropriate action?

* Who supplied the newly made traditional weapons carried by thousands of
angry miners?

* Do platinum mines discriminate in favor of certain categories of workers when it comes to wage negotiations?

So far none of the country’s political and civil society leaders have offered anything besides shameful banalities about a future inquiry and mild to enthusiastic support for the police and NUM. The silence of liberal NGOs and civil society organizations has been remarkable. The absence of real leadership on the issue, or strong showings of solidarity for the ongoing strike is a profound statement of the extent of the failure of post-Apartheid South African civil society, which has been largely monopolized by NGOS.

Perhaps the most strident apologist for the massacre has been the South African Communist Party (SACP), a party already deeply comprised by its support for the neoliberal policies of the ANC and its own Stalinist history. Take this appalling bit from Domnic Tweedie of the Communist University: “This was no massacre, this was a battle. The police used their weapons in exactly the way they were supposed to. That’s what they have them for. The people they shot didn’t look like workers to me. We should be happy. The police were admirable”. Not even the bosses of Lonmin and the most reactionary strata of the South African press are so bloodthirsty. This type of disgraceful rhetoric has sadly become all too-common among the once-admirable SACP.

The only exception to this rule was ex-ANC youth league president Julius Malema, who was expelled from the ANC earlier this year primarily because of his opposition to Jacob Zuma. Malema, a figure who is best described as Hugo Chavez meets Kanye West, accused Zuma of having “presided over the murder of our people “ and called for the nationalization of ‘the British owned’ mines to a crowd of thousands of cheering workers. He further accused Lonmin of having “ a high political connection [… which] is why our people were killed. They were killed to protect the shares of Cyril Ramaphosa,” Cyril Ramaphosa being an ex-communist, the ex-chairperson of NUM, and the current owner of the McDonald’s franchise in South African, as well as a Lonmin board member

The mainstream press has found others to blame, however. The newspaper Business Day ran a shameful editorial which referred to Lonmin’s workers as being “[…driven by antiquated beliefs in witchcraft and sorcery, [… and believing] in the powers of ‘sangomas’ (traditional healers) to make them invincible. Try reasoning with that.” Hence the perceived suicidal charge at the police lines with officers armed with R4 assault rifles and the suggested narrative of police defending themselves from primitive black miners clinging to superstitions which resulted in their deaths. The miners were not stupid enough, except in the racist imagination of white South Africans and the apologists of the massacre, to charge at policemen armed only with clubs. These sorts of images revert to classic colonial stereotypes.

The blame is placed on hubris brought on by black magic, rather than the fact workers are being paid less than $500 a month. And obviously it couldn’t have been the tear gas and stun grenades used on the striking miners that made them run towards the police clutching spears, pangas and knobkerries. Some reports have even accused the police of firing from helicopters and later driving over the still-living bodies of those shot.

On the other-hand the same Business Day editorial praised NUM. “The NUM is the thoughtful, considered heart of the union movement here, one of the two rival unions involved in the dispute there. Cyril Ramaphosa and Kgalema Motlanthe, for instance, come out of it. As a union it is a powerful voice of reason in an often loud and rash movement.” A more damning indictment of the true loyalties of NUM’s leadership is harder to find, than such praise in the country’s leading pro-business (and anti-union) daily.

I accuse Zuma and NUM of colluding with the bosses at the Lonmin mine as part of Zuma’s re-election campaign. The blood spilled on the dirt of Marikana is on the hands NUM and Zuma, not just Lonmin and the police. Zuma’s favoured union and principle support base within COSATU is NUM and they could not afford to look weak in the build-up to Zuma’s re-election bid at the ANC’s Manugang conference in November, in which he faces a strong challenge from deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe, who draws support from several of COSATU’s strongest union, most notably the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) and their radical socialist leader Irwin Jim.

If they were to have been shown up by a bunch of upstart, wildcat striking workers at one of the largest platinum mines in the world, in a country where platinum has replaced gold as the principle source of profit for extractive capital, it would have constituted a serious obstacle to Zuma’s re-election campaign. Furthermore the South African mining industry is in its last days, as gold reserves- historically the foundation of the South African economy- and platinum prices continue to drop. This is the real reason for the intensification of extractive mining practices, without workers being compensated for the added risk with any rise in wages

This precarious situation involving the primary industry in South Africa has led to NUM working with the mining capital in order to protect the jobs of their members and attempting to ensure that these companies secure the requisite profits needed to keep the mines open, leading them to view any threats to their position with these companies as a threat to their very existence. Zuma on the other-hand can’t afford to face any more job losses, in the build up to his re-election campaign, unemployment in the country is unofficially at over 40% and youth unemployment is over 60%.

Forget the media propaganda about the union battle between NUM and AMCU. The majority of the strikers were not AMCU members, they were non-unionized workers or NUM members. AMCU was trying to recruit workers who were already involved in the strike rather than organizing it. The background to this, something that none of South Africa’s reflexively anti-union media explicated in their initial coverage, was a strike that occurred in February-March of this year at the Implants mine located close by. During this strike, wildcat strikers affiliated to AMCU, were subjected to similar violence as NUM attempted to protect their position as the dominant union in the mining sector and the favoured union of the mining industry. The difference is the the wildcat strikers won over a 100% increase in wages from the bosses. The average return after deductions 4000 rand a month or 500 USD for some of the most degrading, dangerous and depressing work imaginable. This in a country with one of the highest costs of living for the poor striking workers at Implants managed to get the bosses to give them a 5500 rand (660 USD) increase. This opened up space for the AMCU to appeal to the miners of Lonmin.

The real underlying scandal of the strike was well put by Chris Rodrigues from Rolling Stone:

But what still embitters them is their understanding that they would have to be reincarnated many times over to earn what the CEO of Lonmin did in one single year. Comparing their salary of R48 000 per annum with Ian Farmer’s (2011) earnings of R20, 358, 620 amounts to an, approximately, 424 years discrepancy. Taking a recent estimate of average male life expectancy in South Africa (49.81) and deducting just 18 childhood years from that would mean even if they worked every day of their adult life – they would have to do so over 13 unlucky lifetimes!

Such is the normalization of this capitalist metaphysics that the rival union has been universally rebuked for wanting to reduce it to a ratio of 1 year: 4.26 life spans. No wonder these strikers then entrusted the magic realism of a sangoma, for nothing today needs to be more urgently remedied than “reality”.

As a worker told the Mail & Guardian’s website: “It’s better to die than to work for that shit … I am not going to stop striking. We are going to protest until we get what we want. They have said nothing to us. Police can try and kill us but we won’t move.”

This massacre highlights the degeneration of the dream of post-apartheid South Africa into a nightmare of capital, patronage, corruption, and repression. Now is the time for displays of real solidarity with the miners and a full exposure of the truth behind this awful crime.

We “invaded” Rondebosch Common…but only the police destroyed the fynbos

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There are also articles by Chris McMichael here, Jared Sacks here and Benjamin Fogel here and video footage here and here.

http://mpbackyarders.org.za/2012/01/28/solidarity-we-invaded-rondebosch-common-but-only-the-police-destroyed-the-fynbos/

Statement by those who occupied the common
Take Back the Commons Movement
28 January 2012

We “invaded” Rondebosch Common…but only the police destroyed the fynbos

We did our best. We had everything stacked against us.

The might of the South African Police Force, the paranoia of some Rondebosch rate payers, and the arrogance of our protester turned mayor Patricia de Lille.

Legal march and gathering

As a former activist, de Lille should know the law with regards to gatherings. She should already know that she can’t ban a protest without meeting with us first and without credible threats of violence that could not be assuaged through the meeting. This was an illegal act and a violation of our Constitutional rights and the specific procedure that the City is required to follow according to the Gatherings Act.

It was also clearly illegal that they stopped and threatened people who protested in small groups, given that only groups of 15 or more constitute a legal gathering.

Today’s events

The police came for us in Manenberg, in Bishop Lavis, in Kraaifontein, and in Athlone. They came for us in groups of 50, in groups of 20, ten, five and even two. They penned us inside our townships saying we were not welcome in the leafy suburbs. They arrested two of us in Manenberg. Our buses got rerouted back home.

There were police stationed all over Cape Town: in Kraaifontein, all along Klipfontein Rd, in Little Mowbray, and even in Wynberg. There were Caspirs, SAPS, Water Cannons, Law Enforcement, Anti-Land Invasions units, Metro Police and an unknown number of undercover police.

Though thousands of us attempted to march, only a few hundred made it to the Common. Yet this was a huge victory for us. We walked from as far as Bishops Lavis and Mitchell’s Plain to get there. (20+ kilometres!)

And when we arrived and sat peacefully protesting at the entrance to the Common, the police attacked us, manhandled us, and violently arrested us.

As Khayelitsha’s Pastor Xola Skosana said from the march: “I have escaped imprisonment by the skin of my teeth, saved by the clerical shirt and the religious look, I guess. They sprayed some blue substance on our clothes, tempted to say that’s DA Blood. Most of our people were manhandled and thrown into police vans. I have never seen so many police. Now I know you don’t mess with stolen white property, DA and ANC police will crush you! Watch the news, the writing is on the wall. I salute the mothers and young girls from Mitchell’s Plein who looked the men in blue and dared them to arrest them. Everything was blue, it’s truly DA land”.

Using armoured vehicles and police in riot gear, they herded people together in order to arrest them.

In all 40 of us were taken on the Common, and taken from police station to police station until they were finally charged with “public violence” after being pepper sprayed and charged with ‘public violence’.

But then more of us came on to the Common, in groups of two, five and ten. We caught the police by surprise. Eventually they gave in to 70 of us, letting us occupy, until they finally evicted us at 7pm.

14 men and 26 women were held at Mowbray Police Station, and finally released after human rights lawyers were called in. The last were released at approximately 1:30am after more than 7 hours in the cells.

Police violence

Just a few examples of pervasive police brutality yesterday:

  • A young lady filming was smacked while she was being taken into custody (caught on video)
  • An older man got pepper sprayed while he was already in the back of a police van
  • Police assault at least three young ladies before arresting them (caught on video)
  • Police did not wear their name tags so that they could not be identified. However some of us were still able to lay charges thanks to the assistance of some other supportive police officers
  • The city’s Anti-Land Invasions unit was particularly brutal towards us

    The Caspirs destroyed the Common

    Despite unfounded fears by Friends of the Rondebosch Common that we would take over and destroy the fragile ecosystem in the area, we did nothing to hurt the fynbos and other plants. As we promised, we treated the ecosystem with respect.

    Instead, as this video footage shows, SAPS Caspirs were roaming around the Common destroying everything in their path. So much for the police being deployed to protect it!

    What we achieved

  • We reached the Rondebosch Common against all odds.
  • We exposed the fact that the DA led government is just as violent and authoritarian as their ANC counterparts.
  • We were inclusive, racially diverse, and showed hundreds of naysayers that we are peaceful, caring and proud people.
  • We began a city-wide conversation about inequality, segregation, and democracy.

    What we still lack

  • We need to educate one another about our struggles and how they are interlinked.
  • We need to expose those who are profiting and becoming famous out of the struggles of the poor or to push their political agendas.
  • We need to be better organised

    Our principles as a movement

  • Political parties and organisations affiliated with political parties are not welcome in our struggle.
  • We are inclusive. All are welcome in our struggle as individuals and communities. But participants must leave their party affiliations and t-shirts at home
  • We direct our own struggle. No sympathetic organisation is permitted to come and tell us what we are fighting for and how our struggle should be waged – COSATU included.

    Way Forward

    Those of us who were on the Rondebosch Common at 6pm engaged in a great discussion. We came up with the above achievements, failings and principles. We have resolved to move forward today. We were also, with the help of some dedicated lawyers, able to secure the release of 41 of the people arrested. The police are still refusing to release one protester however, possibly because Patricia de Lille has been gunning for him.

    All 42 have been charged with public violence and 41 will appear in Wynberg Magistrates Court on Monday the 30th of January at 9am.

    The planned summit will go ahead, albeit with smaller numbers and a different venue, and we will also be discussing our next plan of action. We will not take this treatment lying down!

    We are all leaders! Forward to the struggle for land, housing, jobs and most of all dignity!

    For more information, please contact:

  • Mike Hoffmeester @ 0797956121 or mhoffmeester@yahoo.com
  • Yushra Adams @ 0834041279
  • Melvin de Wee @ 0765674918

    • Mahala: Solar Powered Cappucino

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    http://www.mahala.co.za/culture/solar-powered-cappucino/

    Solar Powered Cappucino

    by Benjamin Fogel

    COP 17 drags on. Everybody would rather be somewhere else. When last Saturday’s protest march of around 10,000 people reached Durban’s ICC, the venue of the UN environmental conference, suits rushed out with iphones and blackberries. They seemed desperate to escape the boredom inside for a little local singing and dancing. Some delegates even pushed past mounted police to join the protest. The media was out en masse too. There were bored German, Russian and US TV crews alongside indie media like Democracy Now, with Amy Goodman in the flesh.

    What struck me most is the overwhelming NGO presence. Liberal NGOs like WWF and Greenpeace alongside the admirable 350.org, recently responsible for blocking the keystone pipeline between Canada and the United States, as well as several local social movements, Abahlali baseMjondolo and local COSATU branches. Before the big march last weekend, COSATU promised 65 bus loads of people but only several hundred from the National Union of Mine Workers and the Union of Municipal workers actually showed up.

    I will got out on a limb and declare the protest a complete failure. It was a feel-good ritual designed to placate the democratic conscience of the media. Maybe even a sideshow to cheer what’s left of the delegates souls. As much as it was an incredible feeling being part of a such a large scale protest, it did nothing to interrupt the seamless transition to planetary destruction. Fully paid up elites don’t notice memorandums and marches. If they did there would be genuine commitment to solving the environmental crisis. It would be treated like the planetary emergency it is. Which it isn’t.

    The march was even listed as part of the COP17 official schedule available to all who visit the minimalist Eco-friendly corporate expo abutting the ICC building. It’s set up so corporations can ‘greenwash’ their images in the Durban sunshine. You can sit outside at rustic wooden tables and drink solar powered cappucino. Local businesses are trying to get in on the action. Florida Road is the ideal setting for the solar powered cappucino scam. You can find it all over Durban’s premiere dining strip. Along with Christmas lights and regular coffee. Delegates might prefer getting drunk on exorbitant craft beer within the walled off Durban “Green Zone” while toasting the future success of “Green Capitalism”. For the less distracted, it’s hard to ignore the tilt and glide of cctv surveillance systems monitoring every movement or the riot police outside.

    Back at the conference, South Africa’s Foreign Minister, Maita Nkoana-Mashabane, gave a truly forgettable speech. The only surprising thing about it was that she didn’t receive any audible booing. There was even lukewarm applause from the NGO types. Alex Lenferna, on the shadow team of the official SA negotiation team, later told me they were shooting for “complete neutrality” on all the important issues. Just what’s needed right now as the planet heats up inexorably. Even a COSATU leader privately acknowledged there was a lack of working class or even civil society presence on the official negotiating team. Although both COSATU leaders I spoke to were loathe to criticize the government’s negligible response to climate change.

    Then the person Business Day described as “the affable Costa Rican” – the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, gave us a master class in empty rhetoric. She stood atop a media truck and told us a folksy yarn that began with schoolchildren and ended with her urging us all “to do more and then do more again”. Lukewarm applause except for some enthusiastic Greenpeace folk at the front. Applauding the very people fucking over the planet with dumb wasteful shows like COP17 designed to put off real action on climate change, environmental destruction and pollution with predetermined impasses. You can hear air conditioning units hum outside the compound, sparing insiders the Durban humidity.

    So vague feel-good rhetoric prevails at COP 17. A passive acceptance of the status quo. Sitting there I wanted us to chase them back to their fortified compound, charge the gates Bolshevik style, and, at the very least, occupy the minimalist Corporate Expo center. Last Saturday, the protest reached North Beach where a woman seized the loud hailer and told us to “occupy” the space, an officially sanctioned grass bank about a kilometer from the conference. The UN even laid on some DJs to spin tunes. It was utterly sickening.

    Clearly protests have been institutionalized and defanged at big events like this. They are empty rituals for the world’s media to paint a scenario of democratic inclusion and vibrancy while our collective future hangs in the balance. Getting permission to Occupy something, to a soundtrack, isn’t what the Global revolt of 2011 is about. Institutionalized dissent on this scale is disheartening. It diminishes radical potential. That alone plays into the hands of an increasingly authoritarian ANC who want COP17 to be another safe little showcase for their willingness to comply with global elites.

    Mahala: “Africa is Under-Polluted”

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    http://www.mahala.co.za/reality/africa-is-under-polluted/

    “Africa is Under-Polluted”

    Benjamin Fogel

    The International Conference Center (ICC) in Durban where the COP 17 talks are taking place is located between a Nedbank office block and a mall. A location that effectively symbolizes what ultimately stands in the way of genuine environmental action: state-protected big business and the gratifying wonders of consumerism.

    People marched on the ICC this past Friday to protest reports that developed nations have basically written the event off and are refusing to commit to any serious cuts in emissions until at least 2020. Former Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solon, declared: “If this deal goes through, one third of the planet will be laid [to] waste.” He meant the Global South and Africa in particular. As Larry Summers, a former Obama-Clinton advisor, Harvard President and Wall Street stooge, once put it, “Africa is under-polluted!”

    Some 1000 activists decided to storm the gates walling off the conference from the rest of Durban, taking the police entirely by surprise. The shock led to a potentially incendiary moment. There were enough protestors to initially overwhelm the skeleton police presence and they called in reinforcements from behind the walled-off COP 17 compound. Soon police vans and 30 cops in riot gear rocked up looking confused. They failed to stop people from the Rural Women’s Assembly from occupying the designated space for protest at Speaker’s Corner, but rallied fast and set up a perimeter between the entrance to COP 17 and the street. They tried to push the crowds back towards the street where they wouldn’t disturb the delegates. General Cele might be gone, but the legacy of his Michael Bay inspired policing tactics remains firmly embedded within the culture of South Africa’s finest.

    On Saturday, it was soon apparent that the police had a late night planning session with the Durban municipality. They wouldn’t be caught off guard again. The designated protest route was changed repeatedly by the Municipality. It felt like a deliberate attempt to isolate “radical elements” and show them who is boss. Durban city authorities eventually attempted to block the march from taking place at all. The city had to be taken to court for the march to happen. They backed down at the last minute but insisted on an alternate route far removed from the ICC. The case is sure to have national significance – hopefully exposing the tendency to officially excuse mega-events, UN conferences and the World Cup, from the peoples’ constitutional right of freedom of assembly.

    Thousands of protestors finally marched across Durban. A march besieged by a group of pro-Zuma ANC supporters dressed in green ‘COP17 volunteer’ shirts. I personally witnessed them throwing bottles and stones. They ripped up placards while openly acknowledged they were ANCYL members. Part of a local pro-Zuma, anti-Malema faction. They sung ‘Mshini wami’ and chanted slogans in support of COP 17. One of them shouted at the Rural Women Assembly, “How much Lobola for you bitch?”

    But, what were pro-Zuma supporters doing harassing protestors on the International Day of Climate Action?

    They even admitted to being sent to disrupt the march by local ANC branches. Over 400 marshals failed to intervene. The police actively isolated the Democratic Left Front (DLF) from joining the rest of the protest. ANCYL cadres then physically attacked several of the DLF contingent. Ayanda Kota, part of the DLF group, told me later: “What we experienced yesterday was another example of the fascism for sale of the ANCYL and the treachery of the COSATU leadership.” He suggested COSATU was behind suppressing non-alligned, poor, militant and radical voices all over the country. At a subsequent press conference, the DLF and Desmond Desai from the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, both noted that these ANCYL “Green Bombers” were on the Durban City payroll, representing both the UN and the Zuma regime’s desire for a seamless global media event.

    We thought, while marching, that the ANC “agent provocateurs” were part of the broader protest action, at first. Then we noticed they were singing songs calling for Juju’s head! Allegedly some 200 of these Green Bombers were paid R180 to disrupt the protest. They also seem to have been prompted to target DLF supporters and grassroots organizations supporting the “1 million climate jobs campaign”. This section of the march was deliberately separated with the help of marshals supplied by COSATU. The march itself was comprised largely of NGOs and COSATU members. Harassment of protestors while police stood back went on for over 4 hours suggesting co-ordination and complicity between the police and the ANC crowd. A complicity recorded repeatedly in political violence around Durban.

    Universally loathed, Durban City Manager, Mike Sutcliffe, is a man not known for his tolerance of dissenting voices. Rehad Desai reports that Sutcliffe wanted to restrict the march to a manageable 100 people. Failing that, he tried to keep the march out of the CBD. Only after being confronted by protest lawyers representing civil society, was the march allowed.

    The DLF has initiated a criminal case against the individuals responsible for the violence towards the protestors as well as a civil case against the city of Durban, the mayor and city manager in particular. Sutcliffe and the Municipality have developed a reputation over the years for criminalizing politics outside of the official ruling channels. The result is a disturbing conflation between the local ANC and the state.

    Abahlali baseMjondolo, an independent grassroots organisation, has been on the receiving end of state violence in Durban for years. Its members are often attacked. Infamously, in 2009, the Kennedy Road pogrom took place. Hundreds of Abahlali members were illegally expelled from the informal settlement leading to several violent deaths. The Durban municipality tried to control awareness of the assault by charging the victims. The case was thrown out of court earlier this year.

    On the face of it, it seems that a UN Conference that amounts to a superficial stage-managed show of grappling with imminent environmental collapse without really committing anyone to anything, is happening in a city run by a municipality that pays thugs to attack legitimate protest.

    How apt.