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Africa: Global Apartheid
Africa: Global Apartheid
Date distributed (ymd): 010701
APIC Document
Africa Policy Electronic Distribution List: an information
service provided by AFRICA ACTION (incorporating the Africa
Policy Information Center, The Africa Fund, and the American
Committee on Africa). Find more information for action for
Africa at http://www.africapolicy.org
+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++
Region: Continent-Wide
Issue Areas: +political/rights+ +economy/development+
SUMMARY CONTENTS:
This posting contains the cover article "Global Apartheid" from The
Nation magazine of July 9, 2001, by Salih Booker and William
Minter. AIDS both reflects and deepens more fundamental global
inequalities, the article argues, and addressing the pandemic
inescapably forces simultaneous attention to this broader context.
+++++++++++++++++end profile++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Nation, July 9, 2001
(http://www.thenation.com)
Global Apartheid
by Salih Booker & William Minter
In mid-April, worldwide protests forced an international cartel of
pharmaceutical giants to withdraw a lawsuit against the South
African government. The suit--an effort by "Big Pharma" to protect
its enormous profits--sought to block implementation of a 1997
South African law that would make it easier to acquire lifesaving
medicines for more than 4 million South Africans living with
HIV/AIDS. Like the proponents of apartheid before them, these
companies acted to maintain the rules of a system that denies the
value of black lives in favor of minority privilege. The result in
Africa has been murder by patent.
The global pattern of AIDS deaths--2.4 million in sub-Saharan
Africa last year, out of 3 million worldwide; only 20,000 in North
America but most in minority communities--also evokes the racial
order of the old South Africa. To date, access to lifesaving
medicines and care for people living with HIV and AIDS have been
largely determined by race, class, gender and geography. AIDS thus
points to more fundamental global inequalities than those involving
a single disease, illuminating centuries-old patterns of injustice.
Indeed, today's international political economy--in which
undemocratic institutions systematically generate economic
inequality--should be described as "global apartheid."
Global apartheid, stated briefly, is an international system of
minority rule whose attributes include: differential access to
basic human rights; wealth and power structured by race and place;
structural racism, embedded in global economic processes, political
institutions and cultural assumptions; and the international
practice of double standards that assume inferior rights to be
appropriate for certain "others," defined by location, origin, race
or gender.
Global apartheid thus defined, we believe, is more than a metaphor.
The concept captures fundamental characteristics of the current
world order missed by such labels as "neoliberalism,"
"globalization" or even "corporate globalization." Most important,
it clearly defines what is fundamentally unacceptable about the
current system, strips it of the aura of inevitability and puts
global justice and democracy on the agenda as the requirements for
its transformation.
When delegates and demonstrators gather in New York for the UN
General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS on June 25, the future
of global apartheid will be the subtext underlying the millions of
words exchanged. Shooting ahead of the world's response for twenty
years, the AIDS pandemic is now exposing old fault lines as well as
new fissures. That is why the debate on AIDS is increasingly
becoming a debate on what kind of world we want to have: a world
that nurtures our common humanity or a system that protects and
promotes global minority rule.
In coming months the themes of AIDS, debt, racism and control of
the world economy will be considered and debated at multiple global
gatherings. At the G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy, in July, the leaders
of rich countries will meet to consider financing for the new
Global AIDS Fund as well as next steps in the failed debt reduction
plan for poor countries. The World Conference against Racism in
Durban, South Africa, at the end of August will give new attention
to the long-ignored demands of Africans and descendants of Africans
for reparations for slavery, colonialism and contemporary racism.
The World Bank/IMF annual meetings in Washington in October are
likely to witness renewed battles between protesters and the
financiers of global apartheid. And the World Trade Organization's
Seattle follow-up meeting in Qatar in November will gather the
countries that most benefit from global apartheid together with
those that do not (as far away from the street activists as
possible).
Behind the different debates lies a fundamental question: How much
inequality in access to fundamental human rights will the world
accept?
Already a champion of inequality at home--amply demonstrated in the
recently signed $1.3 trillion tax cut--the Bush Administration is
the world's leading defender of global apartheid. And USAID
director Andrew Natsios made the racism behind US foreign policy
explicit recently when he declared that Africans should not receive
lifesaving AIDS treatment because they "don't know what Western
time is." The next immediate test of the US stance on global
apartheid will be whether the Administration is forced to shift
course and increase funding to help finance equal access to
affordable medicines for Africa.
Perhaps more than any other manifestation of global apartheid, the
AIDS pandemic exposes the fact that the distribution of current
suffering associated with global inequality, as in the past five
centuries, is clearly linked to place and race. According to the
World Health Organization (WHO), forty-four of the fifty-two
countries with life expectancies of less than fifty years are in
Africa (with life expectancies still declining due to AIDS). The
glacial pace of the international response to AIDS reflects an
entrenched double standard characteristic of the apartheid system.
As Dr. Peter Piot of UNAIDS remarked just before the World AIDS
conference in South Africa last year, "If this had happened with
white people, the reaction would have been different."
Health is one of the fundamental human rights embodied in the 1946
constitution of the WHO and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. Specifically, the WHO constitution says, "The enjoyment of
the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental
rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion,
political belief, economic or social condition." Article 25 of the
Universal Declaration states that "Everyone has the right to a
standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of
himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and
medical care and necessary social services." As even mainstream
economists increasingly recognize, health is one of the fundamental
prerequisites for development. Along with education and income, it
is one of the three components of the UN's Human Development Index,
which has gained wide acceptance in theory, if not in practice, as
a better benchmark than purely economic indicators like per capita
income. In fact, health is the human right that in practice most
visibly marks distinctions of race, or of economic or social
condition.
Whether governments and international organizations actually have
an obligation to enforce this right is hotly disputed. The Bush
Administration, following in the steps of its predecessors,
stressed in its March 30 response to the UN's draft declaration on
AIDS that "for legal and constitutional reasons, the United States
cannot accept a 'rights based approach' to HIV/AIDS--any more than
it can accept a rights based approach to food, shelter or hunger."
At the UN High Commission on Human Rights in April, the United
States alone abstained on an otherwise unanimously supported
Brazilian resolution recognizing "that access to medication in the
context of pandemics such as HIV/AIDS is one fundamental
element...of the right... to health."
The scale of the AIDS pandemic is unprecedented. But AIDS is like
other widespread diseases in that it is fueled not only by unequal
access to medical care but also by social and economic conditions.
Poverty and gender inequality fuel the pandemic in Africa.
Malnutrition reduces resistance to disease. Migrant labor patterns
(well entrenched in Africa from colonialism and apartheid) raise
the risk of infection. The proximate cause of the spread of AIDS is
HIV, but vulnerability to infection is linked not only to behavior
but especially to unequal power relations between women and men,
and to poverty and living conditions [see Eileen Stillwaggon, The
Nation, "AIDS and Poverty in Africa," May 21]. Poverty, in turn, is
linked to race and to the structural position of communities within
countries and of countries within the world economy.
Thus debating what is to be done about AIDS keeps leading back to
broader issues. Unless women have the freedom to negotiate the
terms of sex, increased awareness and availability of condoms will
have only limited impact. Health services deprived of basic
resources will be unable to meet the need for treatment or
prevention of AIDS. Meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, in April, African
leaders agreed on a target of spending at least 15 percent of their
national budgets on health, two or three times the current levels.
But their chances of meeting this target are slim if they are
forced to give priority to paying illegitimate foreign debts over
making investments in public health (or if they choose to divert
resources to war or personal gain).
Some cite such factors as excuses for inaction. Even as prices of
antiretroviral drugs drop in response to protest and generic
competition, the lack of health infrastructure and the inability of
governments to pay even the reduced prices become new rationales
for denying antiretroviral treatment to Africans. As one
unidentified international health official told the Washington Post
on April 23, while deploring the political stance of activists, "We
may have to sit by and just see these millions of people die."
The alternate response is to address the reasons for lack of
infrastructure and inability to pay. That leads back to policies
imposed by international financial institutions in the 1980s and
1990s and, in a longer view, to harsh historical legacies that
policy-makers still refuse to confront. Granted, corruption and
policy mistakes by African leaders also play a role. But in Africa
and in other developing regions, unsustainable debt and weakened
health systems result in large part from economic policy conditions
imposed by international creditors during the past two decades. The
imposition of "user fees" for primary healthcare, for example,
drove large numbers away from public health services, contributing
to increased rates of sexually transmitted diseases. More
generally, cutbacks in the public sector helped send health
professionals to the private sector or abroad and reduced
investments in healthcare delivery systems. Creditors representing
a collective economic colonialism managed by the World Bank and IMF
increasingly dictated public health and other policies of poor
countries. Debt provided the leverage to enforce the economic
diktat of global apartheid by the rich upon the poor.
The capacity of postindependence African countries to chart their
own course was heavily affected by the fact that neither political
nor economic structures had yet broken free of the colonial
legacies of authoritarian governance and economic dependence on
export of primary commodities. Despite victories by prodemocracy
forces in Africa over the past decade, including the demise of
formal apartheid in South Africa, and despite modest recoveries in
economic growth rates in recent years, AIDS struck a continent that
was extraordinarily vulnerable.
Today's inequalities build on a foundation of the old inequalities
of slavery and colonialism, plus the destructive aftermath of cold
war crusades. Like apartheid in South Africa, global apartheid
entrenches great disparities in wealth, living conditions, life
expectancy and access to government institutions with effective
power. It relies on the assumption that it is "natural" for
different population groups to have different expectations of life.
In apartheid South Africa, that was the rationale for
differentiating everything according to race, from materials for
housing to standards of education and healthcare. Globally it is
now the rationalization used to defend the differential between
Europe and Africa in funding for everything from peacekeeping to
humanitarian assistance ($1.23 a day for European refugees, 11
cents a day for African refugees). As one relief worker said, "You
must give European refugees used to cappuccino and CNN a higher
standard of living to maintain the refugees' sense of dignity and
stability."
Gradations of privilege according to group are closely linked to
the possibility of crossing barriers from the "homelands" to the
more privileged geographical areas. Like apartheid's influx
control, the immigration barriers of developed countries do not
succeed in stopping the flow despite raising the costs of
enforcement. Moreover, the global governance regime that is
assigned responsibility for maintaining the current economic
order--as was the case with apartheid in its heyday--allocates key
decisions to institutions resistant to democratic control: a global
version of "white minority rule."
We are not the first to note the striking parallels between the
world system and the old South Africa. Canada-based international
relations scholar Gernot Kohler wrote a monograph on global
apartheid in 1978 noting multiple parallels: "a white minority is
dominant in the system, has a vastly higher standard of living than
the multiracial majority, and is privileged in several other
dimensions." British political scientist Titus Alexander elaborated
the concept in his book Unraveling Global Apartheid in 1996, noting
that "The G7 countries have 12 per cent of the world's population,
but they use over 70 per cent of its resources in cash terms and
dominate all major decision-making bodies." A sampling of others
who have recently used the term includes South African President
Thabo Mbeki, Cuban President Fidel Castro, Africanist scholar Ali
Mazrui and human rights scholar Richard Falk.
Like these commentators, we do not suggest that the mechanisms of
South African apartheid are precisely duplicated at the global
level. But we do argue that the parallels are more than a casual
turn of phrase.
To those who say that the current global political and economic
orders have to do with more than race, we respond that while that
is true, in fact the old apartheid was also not just "about race."
It was also an extreme mode of controlling labor by managing
differential access to territorial movement and political rights.
Racial oppression makes exploitation easier to manage, while
exploitation continues within as well as between racial groups.
Others have noted that there is no single government or system of
international governance that rules the global system as the former
apartheid regime did South Africa. True, today's global
institutions--from the WTO to the World Bank to various UN
agencies--do fall short of a world government. And no racial
distinctions appear in their constitutions. But their power over
national governments in the global South is in many cases
overwhelming. And representation and leadership within these
bodies--particularly in the international financial institutions
with the most power--do show a strong de facto correlation with
race.
At the global level, control of the movement of labor by
immigration laws, representation within global institutions and
allocation of public investment are of course far more complex and
differentiated than the apartheid system in South Africa (though it
was also more complex than generally recognized). The resulting
global inequality, however, is even starker than that within any
country, including apartheid South Africa. A 1999 World Bank income
inequality study by B. Milanovic estimates that the richest 1
percent of people in the world receive as much income as the
poorest 57 percent. The study also estimates that more than
three-quarters of the difference is accounted for by differences
between countries, while the remainder is from inequalities within
countries. Given such differences, the resemblance between
apartheid's influx control and current efforts to stop the
"illegal" flow of immigrants from South (and East) to North should
be no surprise.
Finally, many have cautioned against a framework that blames the
"external" West for everything, thereby relieving African and other
local tyrants of their responsibilities for this state of affairs.
We maintain that there are integral interrelationships between the
global context and the lack of accountability of governments to
their peoples. The system works differently from the periods of
colonialism or cold war patronage, but the common element is that
the structure builds in rewards for elites that respond to external
pressures more than to the demands of their own people.
Global apartheid is not only an appropriate description of the
current world order; it can also help in efforts to transform it.
Protests in the "Seattle" series have most commonly been framed in
race-neutral terms that obscure the differential impact of global
inequality. We maintain that it is only by understanding
globalization in terms of race as well as markets that we can
accurately probe the foundations on which the current global system
is built and develop a transnational culture of solidarity against
a clearly defined enemy.
Our success should be measured by the extent to which we can compel
the governments of rich countries, as well as multilateral
institutions, to reduce the hemorrhaging of resources from South to
North; dramatically increase investment in global public goods to
redress current inequalities; and accept that realizing fundamental
human rights for all is an obligation--not an optional charitable
response. Some priority steps are clear and immediate: Address the
AIDS pandemic through adequate funding for treatment and
prevention, cancel the illegitimate debt, stop imposing
catastrophic economic policies on poor countries and stop trade
rules that value corporate profit over human life. And, as both an
indispensable means and an end in itself, democratize the
institutions that make such decisions and eliminate their policies
and practices of discrimination by race, gender and HIV status. The
US Congress should reserve 5 percent of the anticipated budget
surplus each year to fight the AIDS pandemic and to support related
global health needs. In addition, Washington can require the full
cancellation of the debts owed by African countries to the World
Bank and the IMF as a condition for future US appropriations to
those institutions. And finally, the Administration should uphold
the rights of African nations to insure access to lifesaving
medications--including generically manufactured drugs--at the
lowest cost for their citizens and should drop the US pressure
against Brazil at the WTO, as it forms part of a strategy seeking
to undermine those rights.
Our language, moreover, should make it clear that we hold global
institutions and those who run them responsible. Allowing the
defenders of privilege to monopolize the term "globalization" for
their own vision too easily allows them to portray themselves as
agents of an impersonal process and to paint advocates of global
justice as narrow nationalists or naïve opponents of technological
progress. If we do not intend to surrender the globe to them, then
we should not surrender the term globalization. Thus, it should not
be necessary to explain that "antiglobalization" protesters are not
against the "widening of worldwide interconnectedness," trade with
other countries or advances in science but rather against
"corporate globalization" or "neoliberal globalization." It is also
not enough to counter with proposals for "people's globalization"
or "globalization from below."
Rather, we should make it clear that genuine globalization requires
that global democracy replace global apartheid. Despite the
apparent diversity of issues, this is precisely what the emerging
movement for global justice demands. We look not to some imagined
past of national autonomy but to a future in which growing
interconnectedness means justice and diversity rather than
continued inequality and discrimination. Moreover, the last few
years show a potential for greater impact that is just beginning to
be felt--in protests from Seattle to Johannesburg to Quebec, in
passage of the international landmine treaty and in shifting the
debate on poor-country debt from "forgiveness" to "cancellation" to
"reparations."
AIDS makes it plain. The fight against global apartheid is a matter
of life and death for much of humankind and for the very concept of
our common humanity.
This material is produced and distributed by Africa Action
(incorporating the Africa Policy Information Center, The Africa
Fund, and the American Committee on Africa). Africa Action's
information services provide accessible information and analysis in
order to promote U.S. and international policies toward Africa that
advance economic, political and social justice and the full
spectrum of human rights.
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