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Africa Policy E-Journal
Africa Action: Letter to Friends 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 Note to distribution list readers: The need to find and act on a vision for human security across boundaries has never been more obvious than in the last month. Our vision must be inclusive: Americans, Africans, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, and all who share the vulnerability of our common humanity. It must encompass those lives taken by structural injustice and indifference as well as those fallen to the intentional violence of terrorism and war. The letter below to members and friends speaks of our ongoing work in this new context, and asks for your support. Many of you who receive our information regularly are already supporters of Africa Action, or supported one of our three predecessor organizations in the past. We need your continued support. If you are among those who receive and use our information but have not yet been able to support us with your contribution, please support us now if you possibly can. -- Salih
Letter from Salih Booker Dear Friends, As many of you know, our New York office is in lower Manhattan, only blocks away from "ground zero." The building reopened the following week, and no staff members were injured. The aunt of one staff member, however, was killed in the attack on the Pentagon. Our Washington office has been twice evacuated but the work continues. This is a time to open our hearts. To open our hearts for the more than 6,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11th. To open our hearts to the thousands of family members and co-workers and friends of those whose lives were violently stolen from them. These murderous attacks have brought home to everyone in this country the vulnerability of human life that each of us shares with every single person around the world. Now more than ever, the struggles for human security, here and in Africa, must be joined. It is a time to open our hearts to all people who are victims of terror, war and the violence of impoverishment that the world's structural inequalities visit upon them daily. It is a time of global grief. We share in common this fragile human life without any distinctions whether of ideology, race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, or nationality and we all share in common the desire to achieve security, human security It is also a time to think clearly about the consequences of what we do and what we fail to do. There can be no real safety in islands of prosperity or protected enclaves. The quest for greater security for the United States must be one that seeks to promote security for others. We can only achieve common security if our efforts visibly reflect common concerns, and are not efforts to pit countries, cultures, or "civilizations" against each other, or to otherwise build rather than tear down barriers of hate among categories of people however defined. African leaders and citizens across the enormous continent have expressed their solidarity with everyone affected by the tragedy here. Many countries and organizations have held memorial services, even though the U.S. did not show such solidarity in 1998 for the hundreds of Africans killed in attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, or in 1994, for the hundreds of thousands slaughtered in Rwanda. As this letter is written, it is still difficult to raise fundamental questions for fear of being branded insensitive or unpatriotic. However, there is a growing recognition that genuine international cooperation rather than coercion is an indispensable component of any effective strategy for defeating organized terrorist groups. The quick congressional vote approving payment of part of delinquent U.S. dues for the UN shows a glimmer of new recognition of global obligations. And yet the necessary shift to a broader vision of human security has hardly begun. Some acknowledge that human security requires seeking solutions to the conflicts and structural injustices that provide fertile ground for terrorism. But the illusion persists that such action can be postponed for "later." And even when the media does begin to cover some of the structural roots of conflicts in the strategic region from the Middle East to South Asia, there is still a failure to advance a fully inclusive vision of global solidarity. Africa is central to the possibility of making such a shift. We join with others in urging restraint and advocating that the battle against terrorism must not become a battle against Afghanis, Arabs, Africans, or Muslims. Africa Action will insist that all human lives are valuable. We reject the double standards of global apartheid, and we will continue to make the connections between lives lost to deliberate intent in violent conflicts and lives lost to indifference to structural injustice. This letter is not the place to go into detail about our continuing programs, about which you can find more information at http://www.africapolicy.org. But I want to share with you a few highlights.
Most centrally, we are continuing our Africa's Right to Health Campaign. The particular circumstances and appropriate actions are different, of course. But our sense of solidarity must be the same for the 6,000 or more dead in the September 11 attacks and the 6,000 to7,000 people estimated to be dying each day in Africa from AIDS. Each set of deaths, one concentrated and visible on television, the other dispersed and only sporadically the focus of coverage, are testimony to the vulnerability of life and to the absolute need for international cooperation to promote human security. Since I last wrote to all of you in June, Africa Action has participated actively in the non- governmental components of the UN General Assembly special session on HIV/AIDS, in New York, and the World Conference against Racism, in Durban, South Africa. In both cases we have concentrated on working with African and other non-governmental groups to press for specific actions rather than simply passing resolutions. We have stressed the need to address present inequalities that still so starkly reflect the racial divides inherited from past centuries. In Durban, we joined with South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign and other groups in a press conference focusing on the failure to address the AIDS pandemic as a contemporary manifestation of international racism. This fall, within the Africa's Right to Health Campaign, we are continuing to work on key issues which were not addressed by world leaders before September 11, and continue to be just as urgent though less likely to gain media attention. Among them: grossly inadequate funding for the Global Health Fund set to become operational by the end of the year, failure by the World Bank to cancel unsustainable and illegitimate debt that adds overwhelming obstacles to African initiatives, and international trade rules that still put profits before health and hamper access to affordable essential medicines for all but the rich. It is not easy in times like these to keep a focus on Africa and on structural issues and long-term solutions. But it is the failure to do so that provides fertile ground for new tragedies. We need your help in working for a world in which the right to human security, the right to freedom from fear, and the right to health apply to all. This is a crucial period. We need your contribution now. In Struggle, Salih Booker To contribute to Africa Action on-line. To print out a contribution form.
Documents previously distributed in the e-journal are
available on the Africa Action website: To be added to or dropped from the e-journal subscription list, write to e-journal@africaaction.org. For more information about reposted material, please contact directly the source mentioned in the posting.
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Africa Policy E-Journal
