World Social Forum puts Africa up front

BAMAKO, MALI
World Social Forum puts Africa up front / Round tables issue Bamako Appeal / APPEL DE BAMAKO

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.

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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.

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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:

(i) Construct an internationalism joining the peoples of the South and the North who suffer the ravages engendered by the dictatorship of financial markets and by the uncontrolled global deployment of the transnational firms;

(ii) Construct the solidarity of the peoples of Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas confronted with challenges of development in the 21st century;

(iii) Construct a political, economic and cultural consensus that is an alternative to militarized and neoliberal globalization and to the hegemony of the United States and its allies.”

In Caracas, Venezuela, where the second of the Polycentric WSF sessions finished Jan. 30, President Hugo Chavez called for an international organization to take anti-imperialist action.

The 2007 WSF is scheduled for Nairobi, Kenya.

Catalinotto represented the International Action Center at the meetings that issued the Bamako Appeal.

Photo credit: John Catalinotto