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.
[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.
[click on photo for enlargement]
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
