BAMAKO, MALI
World Social Forum puts Africa up front /
Round tables issue Bamako Appeal
/
By John Catalinotto
February 1, 2006--For
those people who know Mali's capital Bamako has only a handful of large
buildings -- some government offices, the luxury hotel at 15 stories, the
international bank and the great mosque -- it may have been a surprise that
this city was picked for the African session of 2006's Polycentric World
Social Forum (WSF).
But Mali has a rich
history that reminds people of the high point of African civilization before
the slave trade decimated the continent. In the early 14th century, Mali was
the leading power in an empire bigger than medieval Europe, on the trading
route from the Middle East to the African Gold Coast.
[click on photo for
enlargement]
On that route was the
legendary city of Timbuktu, located in the dry region of northern Mali known
as the Sahel, on the edge of the Sahara desert. It is said that Mali's 14th
century ruler Mansa (or Kankan) Moussa once traveled to Mecca with an
entourage of 60,000 retainers, each carrying a bar of gold. He gave away so
much gold in Cairo that his generosity collapsed the medieval market for
that precious metal.
Landlocked and
extremely poor, Mali still produces and exports gold, along with cotton.
These two products account for 80 percent of Mali’s exports. Mali’s 480,000
square miles are almost twice that of Texas, but only 4 percent is arable,
mostly in the inland delta of the mighty Niger River, which starts in the
mountains of neighboring Guinea and flows northeast until it turns southwest
through Niger and Nigeria and empties into Nigeria’s oil fields in the Gulf
of Guinea.
Over a million of
Mali's 12.5 million people inhabit the capital, Bamako, a city of tree-lined
streets with small wooden buildings and the feel of a giant village. Many
Malians live in crushing poverty at a survival level, statistically about
the same rate as Bolivia, and 10 percent of the population are nomadic,
mostly Touaregs in the North.
Mali’s infant mortality
rate is over 100 per thousand live births. The adult literacy rate is under
50 percent.
But anyone walking
across the Bridge of Martyrs from the south to the north side of the Niger
will see a beehive of population and traffic, with most people still looking
well, riding mopeds and driving old cars at a density familiar in any modern
city. Continue through the blocks- long market toward the large mosque and
people are mostly walking through the busy narrow crowded streets of the
capital, women dressed in colorful attractive clothing and men standing
tall. Everyone is selling and some buying on these streets, mostly cheap
manufactured goods from all over the world.
Mali had a progressive
government when it won independence from the French Empire in 1960, but it
is now ensnared like most of Francophone Africa in French neo-colonialism.
Mali's currency, the CFA, is locked into the Euro, like that of Bahamas or
Ecuador is to the dollar. The few real jobs are in government services, on a
railroad now facing privatization or in the gold mines, but 80 percent of
the people live off the land, and cotton prices are so low on the world
market that imperialist agribusiness is wiping out the local producers.
Africa front
and center
The organizers of the
World Social Forum chose this city host the African session of its 2006
gathering from Jan. 19-23. Malian activists organized, with a minimal
infrastructure, a series of 600 meetings over those days in the
universities, the congress buildings, the museums and conference centers of
Bamako. According to these intrepid organizers, including former Minister of
Culture Aminata Dramane Traore, some 15- 20,000 people, mostly from
Francophone Africa and including many from the farming villages, attended
the Bamako WSF.
For the first time in
the five years of the WSF’s existence, the issues of Africa were at its
center. According to Malian organizer Mamadou Goita, "We had over 300 people
from the rural areas of Mali alone, while another 8,000 came from
neighboring countries. All of them participated in the forum and enriched
the discussions. This has never happened before."
At the opening demonstration
Jan. 19, thousands of people marched through Bamako’s streets to the
National Stadium, demanding fair trade policies, no privatization of the
railroad, an end to subsidies to imperialist agribusiness, freedom for the
Western Sahara and an end to the debt.
For the people of
Africa, who for the first time had the opportunity to discuss their
day-to-day problems before the world, the forum meant a chance to raise some
of the most basic demands. Fair trade for agricultural products with an end
to subsidies for imperialist agribusiness, development of industry in
Africa, fair treatment of immigrants in Europe, protection of the
environment of the poor countries, an end to the crushing debt burden were
all put on the agenda.
On Jan. 23, a group of
international guests from Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Sweden, Belgium and the
U.S. stopped at a local restaurant near the train station. As we left, some
young Malian men implored us to bring the message back to the WSF and to the
world that "All we want is work. We would prefer to stay here and work. Or
we will come to Europe and work."
This train station was
at one end of the railroad from Dakar, Senegal, to Bamako that was the scene
of an historic 10-month-long strike in 1947-1948 that played a big role in
the region’s struggle for independence from France. Senegalese author and
filmmaker Sembene Ousmane brought the story of this strike to the world in
literary form by in his novel, "God's Bits of Wood."
At the WSF, Malians
brought as a major issue the attempt to privatize the railroad and its sale
to a Canadian-based transnational corporation.
A fate worse
than debt
Because the media has
hyped the alleged commitment to cancel debt of the poorest countries through
the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, people may think the
debt problem has been substantially relieved. In reality, this initiative
has achieved little.
Throughout the 1990s
and in the 21st century, the major imperialist powers have used the leverage
of the crushing debt to enforce through the International Monetary Fund what
is known as “neo-liberal” policies on the indebted countries of Africa, Asia
and Latin America. Without IMF approval, the countries can’t get the new
credit they need to function in the world economy.
The changed demanded is
that African governments cut trade barriers that protect local producers,
denationalize industry, cut government spending on health care, education
and food subsidies, and open their markets, which keeps their economies as
sources of cheap raw materials and cheap labor for transnational
corporations and continued interest to banks. In 1999, for example, the HIPC
countries repaid $1,680 million more than they received in the form of new
loans.
As a result of World
Bank and IMF policies, average incomes in Africa have declined, and the
continent’s poverty has increased. These policies are still imposed on the
HIPC countries that received debt relief, which includes Mali.
In Guinea and Zimbabwe,
the inability to service foreign debts has only caused the Fund, the World
Bank and Western countries to freeze all aid, causing the economic situation
to deteriorate.
In general in Africa,
around $80 billion is needed to guarantee the provision of basic medical
care, primary education and drinking water for the world's poorest
population, said delegates from the Democratic Republic of Congo. However,
they said, the poorest nations in the South had to payoff more than $300
billion in debt to developed countries.
What is really needed
is unconditional cancellation of debt and reparations for the enormous
wealth that has been stolen from Africa in the last five centuries.
At the Bamako WSF there
were 600 meetings scheduled at nine sites throughout the capital. An
additional important issue involved immigration. A whole group of West
African immigrants had just been expelled from Morocco after spending up to
a year walking across the continent in the hope of ending up in Europe with
some sort of job, no matter how hard or how ill-paid.
At one forum, the
discussion involved both the Africans telling of their plight and European
progressives, mainly from France and Italy, trying to work in solidarity
with the Africans and to fight for the rights of all workers. A man from
Angola told of being separated for seven months from his family without
contact as he tried desperately to get to Europe. He had still only reached
Mali.
The WSF does not make
overall demands, let alone organize to carry them out. But participants
expressed their satisfaction in meeting others from the continent also
working for human progress.
The Bamako
Appeal
In addition, a group of
about 80 anti-globalization intellectuals and political activists, including
Marxist economists and organizers, came together to meet on Jan. 18-19 in
Bamako just before the polycentric World Social Forum opened. The gathering,
which was not an official WSF activity but whose invitees also participated
in many WSF discussions, issued a statement at the end of the meeting: the Bamako
Appeal.
The appeal involves
promoting discussion and action on a series of points outlining major
problems for humanity. These include the need to build a workers’ united
front and to struggle against imperialist domination and U.S. military
hegemony; the problems of peasant societies under threat of destruction from
subsidized competition; democratic management of media and cultural
diversity; and the struggle against neoliberal and market-driven policies.
One of the Bamako
Appeal’s major goals is to promote solidarity among workers and progressives
in the imperialist countries and the peoples’ movements in the oppressed
countries. The appeal says the participants “have expressed their concern
with the task of defining alternate goals of development, creating a balance
of societies, abolishing exploitation by class, gender, race and caste, and
marking the route to a new relation of forces between North and South.”
Egyptian economist and
head of the Third World Forum Samir Amin, who is a professor at the
University of Dakar in Mali’s neighbor Senegal, had called this pre-WSF
gathering a “Peoples’ Bandung Conference” to mark the 50th anniversary of
the 1955 conference of non-aligned nations held in Bandung, Indonesia. Some
of the Malian political leaders working on the WSF hosted and participated
in the conference, including Aminata Traore.
Among the 80 people
participating in the pre-WSF discussions were Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua and
Babacar Diop Buuba, both university professors in Dakar, Senegal; former
member of the European Parliament Miguel Urbano Rodrigues of Portugal;
Chilean political journalist Marta Harnecker; Lebanese-French editor Leila
Ghanem; and the organizer of the rebelion.org website Luciano Alzaga.
Also there were Wen
Tiejun and Jinhua Dai of Peking University; editor- in-chief Isobel Monal of
the Cuban magazine “Marx Now”; Brazilian radical economists Paolo Nakatini
and Rosa Marques, and Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) Vice President Jose
Reinaldo Carvalho; French economist Remy Herrera; trade-union expert Ingmar
Lindberg of Sweden; Antonio Tujan of the Philippine Institute of Political
Economy; Mamdouh Habashi of the Anti-Globalization Egyptian Group; Belgian
physicist Jean Bricmont; and John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review
from the United States.
Ignacio Ramonet of Le
Monde Diplomatique, Bernard Cassen of Attac- France, Belgian progressive
anti-war Jesuit Francois Houtart and anti- globalization author Susan
George, who have been closely connected with all prior major social forums,
also spoke.
Along with the invited
guests, there were also some groups of youths from some of the former French
colonies, in particular Senegal, Benin and Togo. Some of the Cuban medical
and other aid workers in Mali also participated.
To carry out the
discussion the larger group split up into 10 different committees. These
held intense discussions for about three hours each, five committees at a
Alarcon asks for anti-imperialist actions
Cuban National Assembly
President Ricardo Alarcon took part in the discussions too. He made some
practical suggestions. One was that the Bamako Appeal have as its goal not
simply to set up an anti-imperialist forum that outlines a program or
spreads ideas, but that it also organize for coordinated anti-imperialist
actions.
The Bamako Appeal does
call for some actions. Among them is support for the March 18-19 worldwide
days of anti-occupation demonstrations.
The call says it aims
“to reinforce the movement protesting against war and occupations, as well
as expressing solidarity with the people in fight in the hot spots of the
planet. In this respect, it would be very important that the world
demonstration against the war in Iraq and the military presence in
Afghanistan envisaged for March 18-19, 2006, coincide with:
-
the prohibition of
the use and the manufacture of the nuclear weapons and destruction of all
the existing arsenals;
-
the dismantling of
all the military bases existing outside of national territory, in
particular the base at Guantanamo;
-
the immediate
closing of all the prisons of the CIA.”
The appeal also calls
for solidarity with Palestine and for being on guard to stop U.S.
intervention against Venezuela and Bolivia.
In summary, the “Bamako
Appeal, built around the broad themes discussed in subcommittees, expresses
the will to:
