Tunisian youth, workers and professional people have drawn a line against corrupt autocracies that is having powerful repercussions from Lebanon to Libya and beyond. It is the first time since 1985 that a mass people’s movement has overthrown a regime in an Arab country.
They have defied the mantra that the Arab masses are simply passive subjects of dictatorial leaders. The majority in society are beginning to stand up and rebel. The uprising has seen tens of thousands of youth, workers and professionals, take to the streets in a country of only ten million.
The movement has been spontaneous and secular in response to sharp price increases and soaring youth unemployment, themselves a result of the economic crisis in the southern Mediterranean from Spain and Portugal to north Africa.
The revolt was sparked when an unemployed student in a central province set fire to himself when police tried to stop him selling fruit from a street cart. Unrest burst out around the country spurred on by young people using Facebook. In extraordinary scenes one soldier even embraced a demonstrator.
Small wonder that President’s Ben Ali’s first replacement, Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi, did not last long. Tunisians see him as the architect of the economic policies which allowed Ben Ali’s wife to accumulate vast wealth. Details of the ruling family’s corruption were revealed in US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks at the end of last year, confirming Tunisians’ own suspicions.
A state of emergency continues in the capital Tunis and around the country police loyal to the old regime and military are in armed conflict. The bursts of joy at the overthrow of a decaying, oppressive and corrupt regime are being tempered by the continuing conflict between the military factions and especially brutal reprisals in the rural interior like Kassarine and Thala.
As a writer for CNN notes, “North Africa is seeing its own Intifada”. Behind the surface differences between Tunisia and its neighbours, lies “a more profound and general set of conditions that serve as a common source of populist discontent”. The Tunisian uprising is part of a chain of events from Morocco to Egypt “directed at the institutionalized political oppression that each regime represents and the deeply corrupt ways in which power is manipulated and abused by ruling elites”.
The use of the term Intifada is significant. The Arabic word for “tremor”, the strategy was developed by Palestinian leader and Fatah founder Abu Jihad He organised youth committees in the Palestinian territories in a social and political uprising against Israeli occupation in 1987 – as opposed to individual terror and military action. Forced into exile Abu Jihad was assassinated in Tunis by a hail of bullet fire in front of his family by Israeli Mossad commandos.
The dizzying speed of events in Tunisia is a warning to governments and rulers everywhere in the region and elsewhere. New generations are not prepared to stand by while the fruits of independence from colonial power are squandered by corrupt and dictatorial regimes. Spurring people on is the impact of the global capitalist crisis, which lies behind demands and grievances in every country, including Britain.
Whilst the political parties try to rearrange the deck chairs at the top and as security forces loyal to the old regime kill innocent civilians, ordinary citizens in Tunisia are setting up barricades, arming themselves with sticks and attempting to take control of the streets. Developing people’s assemblies to take economic and political control away from the toothless establishment parties hiding behind the military is now an urgent matter.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label Tunisia riots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tunisia riots. Show all posts
Monday, January 17, 2011
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Market driving hunger crisis
The world is facing a hunger crisis unlike anything it has seen in more than 50 years. Some 925 million people don’t have enough to eat and almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes each day.
That’s the stark reality facing almost one in seven of the world’s population. With food prices reaching a new high, the head of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), Jacques Diouf, has called for “urgent structural change” to solve global hunger. The rapid increase in hunger and malnourishment since the food crisis of 2008 reveals the inadequacy of the present global food system, he said.
The World Bank estimates that the spike in global food prices in 2008, followed by the global economic recession in 2009 and 2010 has pushed between 100-150 million people into poverty.
But all Diouf’s talk of safety nets and social protection programmes, investment and support for small-scale farming is pie in the sky at a time when the market is driving land and food production in entirely the opposite direction.
In Africa, the main development activity at present is not land redistribution, or even food aid, but an enthusiastic entry into the world of global speculation in land and food production. The dramatic weather changes caused by global warming, which governments refuse to address, is also pushing up food prices.
The role of the market in buying and selling commodity futures is a further crucial factor in driving up prices. Last year, US wheat futures prices rose 47 per cent, corn rose more than 50 per cent and soybeans jumped 34 per cent.
Catherine Flax, investment bank JP Morgan's CEO for commodities, admitted that the financial crisis and fears of inflation have made investors suspicious of banks and financial services: "I do think investors are increasingly looking at physical assets, whether agricultural assets or infrastructure type assets, in part because of the expectations of inflation but also I don't think investors are entirely over the insecurity of the financial crisis."
Rising demand in Asia is a major issue. China’s food imports are soaring, as its own agricultural development is neglected, in favour of land privatisation and industrialisation.
There is no will on the part of governments to interfere in this unbridled operation of the market. In fact, there is an increasing tendency to end subsidies and to let inflation rip.
This policy is meeting resistance, especially in North Africa. The Algerian government rapidly cut import duties when food riots threatened its own survival. The price of basic goods rose by 30 per cent in less than a month in Algeria and a popular uprising led to the arrest of more than 1,000 people, many of them minors.
In neighbouring Tunisia dozens of people have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces in clashes centred on unemployment and rising food prices. Bureaucrats in China also fear unrest, with inflation currently running at 5 per cent per year according to official figures, but in reality as much as double that.
Food prices in Australia are likely to soar in the coming months as a result of the Queensland floods, with 50 per cent of crops having been affected and 20 per cent wiped out entirely.
In reality it is THE MARKET in food that is in crisis, not the SUPPLY of food. There is food enough in the world – the rich never go hungry. The operation of the market is preventing people from either growing or purchasing what they need.
The structural change required is more fundamental than that proposed by the FAO. We must rapidly move away from the spoliation of agricultural land by market-driven farming systems. We need a commonwealth in land and a system of food production based on co-operation and the assumption that adequate food is a human right for all.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
That’s the stark reality facing almost one in seven of the world’s population. With food prices reaching a new high, the head of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), Jacques Diouf, has called for “urgent structural change” to solve global hunger. The rapid increase in hunger and malnourishment since the food crisis of 2008 reveals the inadequacy of the present global food system, he said.
The World Bank estimates that the spike in global food prices in 2008, followed by the global economic recession in 2009 and 2010 has pushed between 100-150 million people into poverty.
But all Diouf’s talk of safety nets and social protection programmes, investment and support for small-scale farming is pie in the sky at a time when the market is driving land and food production in entirely the opposite direction.
In Africa, the main development activity at present is not land redistribution, or even food aid, but an enthusiastic entry into the world of global speculation in land and food production. The dramatic weather changes caused by global warming, which governments refuse to address, is also pushing up food prices.
The role of the market in buying and selling commodity futures is a further crucial factor in driving up prices. Last year, US wheat futures prices rose 47 per cent, corn rose more than 50 per cent and soybeans jumped 34 per cent.
Catherine Flax, investment bank JP Morgan's CEO for commodities, admitted that the financial crisis and fears of inflation have made investors suspicious of banks and financial services: "I do think investors are increasingly looking at physical assets, whether agricultural assets or infrastructure type assets, in part because of the expectations of inflation but also I don't think investors are entirely over the insecurity of the financial crisis."
Rising demand in Asia is a major issue. China’s food imports are soaring, as its own agricultural development is neglected, in favour of land privatisation and industrialisation.
There is no will on the part of governments to interfere in this unbridled operation of the market. In fact, there is an increasing tendency to end subsidies and to let inflation rip.
This policy is meeting resistance, especially in North Africa. The Algerian government rapidly cut import duties when food riots threatened its own survival. The price of basic goods rose by 30 per cent in less than a month in Algeria and a popular uprising led to the arrest of more than 1,000 people, many of them minors.
In neighbouring Tunisia dozens of people have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces in clashes centred on unemployment and rising food prices. Bureaucrats in China also fear unrest, with inflation currently running at 5 per cent per year according to official figures, but in reality as much as double that.
Food prices in Australia are likely to soar in the coming months as a result of the Queensland floods, with 50 per cent of crops having been affected and 20 per cent wiped out entirely.
In reality it is THE MARKET in food that is in crisis, not the SUPPLY of food. There is food enough in the world – the rich never go hungry. The operation of the market is preventing people from either growing or purchasing what they need.
The structural change required is more fundamental than that proposed by the FAO. We must rapidly move away from the spoliation of agricultural land by market-driven farming systems. We need a commonwealth in land and a system of food production based on co-operation and the assumption that adequate food is a human right for all.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
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