Re: terrorist chief received Nobel Peace Prize

        Let me be (uncharacteristically?) blunt.  The Nobel Peace Prize is
and always has been, to a considerable extent, garbage.  Most of the
prizes have gone to Europeans and North Americans, sometimes because they
did not kill as many people as they might have.  Rarely have prizes been
awarded to those who struggled against capitalism and the oppression of
workers.  Should we include in the latter category that doughty Communist
Mikhail Gorbachev, the 1990 winner?  Or was he chosen because his policies 
pulled the rug out from under the Evil Empire?

        But my favorite laureates, of course, are people like Kissinger
(not Le Duc Tho, who had the common decency to decline), Sadat, Begin,
Arafat, Rabin, de Klerk, and Andrei ("H-Bomb") Sakharov, not to mention
the Hero of San Juan Hill (Teddy Roosevelt) or the He Who Didn't Keep Us
out of War (Woodrow Wilson).  Not to mention General of the Army George C.
Marshall, who made Western Europe safe for capitalism again.  In such
exalted company, Osama bin Laden might fit right in.  As our very own
President has intoned, "Islam is a religion of peace."

        My only regret, in this bloody charade, is that two obvious
candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize, both of whom led long lives, never
received the ultimate accolade.  One, of course, was Stellvertreter Rudolf
Hess, who risked his life and ended his distinguished career in a heroic
effort to bring peace between the United Kingdom and the Third Reich.
What more could he have done?  How many lives might have been spared had
only the British authorities taken his sage advice?  The mind boggles.
But there was also el Caudillo, Francisco Franco, who brought the Spanish
Civil War to a close and then gave the war-torn Spanish people more than a
third of a century of peace.  What a great man!  He presided over the
killing of a million fellow Spaniards, but how many more millions would
have died had he not prevailed, with the comradely assistance of his
German and Italian brothers?

        Osama, step right up.  It may not be too late for you, too, to
join this pantheon.  Perhaps you can share the next prize with the Mullah
Muhammad Omar and our very own George W. (peace be upon him!) Bush.

        Warren 


On Thu, 15 Nov 2001, Patrick Bond wrote:

> ---- Original Message ----- 
>   From: g kohler 
>   Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2001 3:38 PM
> 
>   The founder in 1961 and chief of the terror organization Umkhonto we Sizwe 
>was caught in 1963 (?) and imprisoned for life... In this case the Nobel 
>committee was of the opinion that the terrorist chief was an outstanding 
>fighter for democracy.
> Hi Gernot. Your general point is right: "terrorist" is a state of mind. For 
>so too was Arafat a terrorist-Nobelist. And so too did FW de Klerk really 
>terrorise black South Africans from 1989-94 (tens of thousands died at his 
>indirect bidding) but he shared the prize with Mandela.
> 
> Next logical question is whether Mandela let the ANC revolution whither on 
>the vine (hence qualifying for Nobel status). Are we now left with "peace" 
>here in South Africa? Or, as in Arafat-land, just heightened contradictions?
> 
> Some say we are seeing the grounds for a new "terrorism"--i.e., the struggle 
>against Class Apartheid now taking a more militant form, such as stealing 
>electricity--against Mandela and his legacy? You can judge (from a frontpage 
>WashPost article last week):
> 
> ***
> 
> For South Africa's Poor, a New Power Struggle
> 
> By Jon Jeter
> Washington Post Foreign Service
> Tuesday, November 6, 2001; Page A01
> 
> SOWETO, South Africa -- When she could no longer
> bear the darkness or the cold that settles into her
> arthritic knees or the thought of sacrificing
> another piece of 
> furniture for firewood, Agnes Mohapi cursed the
> powers that had cut off her electricity. Then she
> summoned a neighborhood service to illegally
> reconnect it.
> 
> Soon, bootleg technicians from the Soweto
> Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) arrived in pairs
> at the intersection of Maseka and Moema streets.
> Asking for
> nothing in return, they used pliers, a penknife and
> a snip here and a splice there to return light to
> the dusty, treeless corner.
> 
> "We shouldn't have to resort to this," Mohapi, 58,
> said as she stood cross-armed and remorseless in
> front of her home as the repairmen hot-wired her
> electricity.
> Nothing, she said, could compare to life under
> apartheid, the system of racial separation that
> herded blacks into poor townships such as Soweto.
> But for all its
> wretchedness, apartheid never did this: It did not
> lay her off from her job, jack up her utility bill,
> then disconnect her service when she inevitably
> could not pay.
> 
> "Privatization did that," she said, her cadence
> quickening in disgust. "And all of this
> globalization garbage our new black government has
> forced upon us has done
> nothing but make things worse. . . . But we will
> unite and we will fight this government with the
> same fury that we fought the whites in their day."
> 
> This is South Africa's new revolution. Seven years
> after voters of all races went to the polls for the
> first time, ending 46 years of apartheid and white
> rule, churches,
> labor unions, community activists and the poor in
> all-black townships are dusting off the protest
> machinery that was the engine of their liberation
> struggle. What most
> provokes South Africans' defiance today are what
> they see as injustices unleashed on this developing
> nation by the free-market economic policies of the
> popularly
> elected, black-led governing party, the African
> National Congress.
> 
> Materially, life here has only gotten worse since
> 1994 as the ANC has pursued a course of piecemeal
> privatization of state industries, whittling of
> import taxes and
> loosening of controls on foreign exchange. The
> policies have expanded opportunities for foreign
> investors but so far have deepened the poverty
> inherited from
> apartheid's segregationist policies.
> 
> With domestic industries more vulnerable to foreign
> competition and the restructuring of public
> enterprises, the most industrialized country in
> sub-Saharan Africa has
> lost nearly 500,000 jobs since 1993, leaving a third
> of the workforce unemployed. The poorest 15 million
> South Africans have had their annual incomes shrink
> by
> nearly a fifth of what they were before apartheid's
> collapse.
> 
> The ANC's top officials, many of whom were initially
> Marxists, say their economic policies aim to remedy
> the imbalances of the past, which included
> protectionist
> trade policies and concentration of wealth in the
> hands of a relative few. To redistribute wealth, ANC
> officials say, they must first expand it, and they
> say only the
> global market and foreign cash can ultimately do
> that, albeit not without some growing pains as the
> economy adjusts.
> 
> Increasingly, this country of 44 million people is
> running out of patience as it endures a financial
> crisis that statistically outstrips the Great
> Depression. At the same
> time, costs of such basic needs as housing,
> electricity and water are soaring.
> 
> "We did not give up our lives and the lives of our
> children only to let this brazen capitalist system
> exploit us even more," said Shadrack Motau, an SECC
> board
> member.
> 
> In South Africa, the most despised acronym is
> arguably not HIV, the AIDS virus that infects nearly
> a quarter of the adult population, but GEAR, the
> ANC's
> economic package -- Growth, Employment and
> Redistribution -- which opens the door to global
> trade.
> 
> Hoping to generate revenue, streamline a bloated
> bureaucracy and extend service to blacks ignored by
> apartheid, the ANC announced six years ago that the
> government would sell public enterprises from the
> state-run airlines and the phone company to Eskom,
> the acronym for the public electricity commission.
> With
> encouragement from institutions such as the World
> Bank and International Monetary Fund, the government
> has so far auctioned off only small portions, while
> restructuring the public franchises into profit
> centers to showcase their attractiveness to
> potential investors.
> 
> The alienation felt by many poor blacks from this
> march to privatization has bred street rallies
> calling for a revival of "the spirit of '76" -- a
> reference to the year of the
> Soweto riots, which gave the anti-apartheid campaign
> its second wind.
> 
> Virtually every week, thousands of demonstrators and
> unionized workers rally in the streets to denounce
> both GEAR and the ANC. Grass-roots organizations in
> Durban have begun moving evicted families back into
> their homes, sometimes only minutes after
> authorities have piled their household goods on the
> streets and
> bolted the doors. Unemployed plumbers in Cape Town
> reconnect their neighbors' water supply when it has
> been shut off because of nonpayment.
> 
> "There's definitely been a revival of the struggle
> mentality," said Bongani Lubisi, 28, one of scores
> of jobless volunteers who roam Soweto each day
> reconnecting
> electrical service. "We thought that when we got rid
> of the old government that our black government
> would take care of us. But instead the capitalists
> are getting
> richer while the working people lose their jobs and
> can't even meet their basic needs."
> 
> For all its anti-communist fervor, the apartheid
> government shielded South Africa's domestic
> industries from foreign competition with policies
> that included stiff
> controls on foreign capital, heavy state subsidies
> and tariffs on imported goods. When blacks refused
> to pay rent and utilities as part of township-wide
> boycotts, the
> apartheid government did not evict them or shut off
> their services for fear of sparking riots.
> 
> Jacob Maroga, executive director of distribution at
> Eskom, said that Soweto's electricity problems
> started when the boycotts of the 1980s bankrupted
> the
> apartheid-controlled municipal government that
> purchased electricity and resold it to residents.
> 
> When Eskom began handling the accounts directly, it
> spent about $75 million in capital improvements and
> wrote off nearly $37.5 million in household debts.
> But in
> its preparations to sell the public utility, Eskom
> has focused on demonstrating its profitability to
> investors, following the World Bank's prescriptions
> for "cost
> recovery" in which the price for each kilowatt of
> electricity is set according to how much the utility
> spends to provide it.
> 
> That meant increasing costs by as much as 400
> percent for some residents in Soweto, who for years
> were charged a flat rate for electricity.
> 
> "The idea is that we would do all [the improvements]
> and then the residents would start living up to
> their commitments. But we still recover only about
> 50 to 55
> percent of the costs for the electricity we sell,"
> Maroga said.
> 
> "There are clearly customers who don't have the
> capacity to pay," Maroga said. "But there is also
> this culture of nonpayment in Soweto where customers
> can afford
> to pay but they prioritize other consumptive
> spending. We need to deal with that."
> 
> In a place where median household income is less
> than $100 a month, 90 percent of all Soweto
> households with electricity are behind in their
> payments, according to
> a university survey. Sixty-one percent have had
> their service shut off within a 12-month period. In
> a community of nearly 1.5 million people, Eskom cuts
> off service
> to about 20,000 delinquent customers each month.
> 
> "This culture of nonpayment that people say exists
> in Soweto," said Virginia Setshedi, an SECC board
> member and law student, "it's only because people
> don't have
> money to pay."
> 
> Because Eskom sells electricity at discounted bulk
> rates, affluent municipalities in mostly white
> suburbs buy electricity and resell it to customers
> for roughly 30
> percent less than what it costs Soweto's consumers.
> For the biggest users of Eskom's electricity --
> industrial sites such as steel plants and coal mines
> -- the rate for
> each kilowatt is roughly one-tenth the rate for a
> household in Soweto.
> 
> That inequity drove a coalition of unreconstructed
> communists, retirees and college students to create
> the SECC nearly a year ago. Its chairman, Trevor
> Ngwane, a
> former ANC municipal council member, recruited a
> friend, a laid-off Eskom repairman, to train
> volunteers how to reconnect a power supply.
> 
> Since then, Operation Khanyisa -- which means "to
> light" in the Zulu language commonly spoken here --
> has unlawfully restored electricity to about 3,000
> homes.
> 
> "We're getting about 50 calls each day from the
> community," Setshedi said. "We don't ask why or when
> the people were cut off, we just switch them back
> on.
> Everyone should have electricity."
> 
> To combat the illegal connections and the SECC's
> growing celebrity, Eskom officials have published
> full-page ads in the Sowetan daily newspaper,
> warning readers
> that 10 South Africans -- mostly children -- were
> killed last year by exposed live wires. But SECC
> officials say that none of those fatalities occurred
> in Soweto,
> where volunteer technicians are trained to wrap live
> wires in plastic bags.
> 
> Patrick Bond, a business professor at the University
> of the Witwatersand and co-director of the Municipal
> Services Project, acknowledges that it is expensive
> to
> provide electricity to the poor, who use little
> electricity and are unable to buy it in bulk through
> their municipality, which results in duplicate costs
> for equipment,
> administration and labor.
> 
> But he said Eskom could largely resolve the debt
> problem in Soweto by charging big industries a few
> cents more for each kilowatt of electricity,
> subsidizing a
> cheaper flat rate for poor customers.
> 
> "Eskom has a rate structure that economically makes
> sense," Bond said. "But socially it makes no sense.
> Their structure is good for the northern
> suburbanites, but
> we'd like to see a structure that is good for
> everyone. That means smaller profit margins in the
> short term but a healthier society in the long
> term."
> 
> Lubisi and another SECC repairman take Bond's
> argument to the street. They arrived one recent
> morning at the Maseka and Moema intersection flanked
> by two
> recruits.
> 
> "Red and white are used as live wires and they are
> very dangerous," Lubisi said, showing the wires to
> the trainees as a crowd gathered.
> 
> James Buthelezi has lived in this house on Maseka
> Street for as long as he can remember, and this was
> the first time the electricity had been cut off.
> Twenty-eight
> people live in this five-room house and a tool
> shed-sized room in the back yard.
> 
> No one has worked in months and the family survives
> on Buthelezi's mother's pension, less than $125 a
> month. Their unpaid bill is more than $3,000. "When
> they
> came to cut off our electricity, we begged them not
> to," said Buthelezi, 58. "We told them that we had
> babies and elderly people inside. They didn't even
> pause."
> 
> The SECC's members have tried to talk to
> Johannesburg's mayor about the hardships endured by
> families like Buthelezi's, but he has repeatedly
> given them the slip.
> In June, more than 20 angry residents marched to the
> mayor's home but again he ducked them.
> 
> Unable to cut off his electricity, they disconnected
> his water.
> 
>                                                ©
> 2001 The Washington Post Company
> 
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