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Editorial:
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This issue of the ACAS Bulletin grows out of a
northeast regional conference organized by Educators to Stop the War held in New
York City on 5 March 2005, in which a number of us participated under the ACAS
banner--literally: the original hand-stitched ACAS banner still lives!
The conference was an electrifying event, mobilizing student and teacher
activists from grade schools to universities, and from across the region.
It seemed to us, meeting together after the conference, that it was
imperative to propel this work forward. As
a contribution to this effort we present here four workshop presentations by our
members, as well as continuing works by ACAS and our broader membership.
The links between
Africa and the war in Iraq should not be difficult to draw for readers of the Bulletin.
ACAS has for years now been tracking the US role in the militarization of
Africa (see our website http://acas.prairienet.org and the work of our member,
Daniel Volman). This extends well beyond the use, for example, of Djibouti as a
staging area for the invasion of Iraq, or South Africa’s supply of arms to the
US and UK militaries. Indeed the
militarization of Djibouti is but one small sign of the much greater thrust into
the continent by the US military, the growing embrace between the US military
and African militaries, and the militarization of the overall relationship
between Africa and the US. If we
needed any final confirmation of this trend, it is surely provided by Bush’s
nomination of Paul Wolfowitz, currently US Deputy Secretary of Defense, to the
Presidency of the World Bank.
Militarization for the US state, now under the guise of protecting us from terrorism, is most often about protecting oil fields and pipelines. And oil, most of us agree, is the original reason for this spurious war.(1) As we have detailed in previous issues of the ACAS Bulletin (60/61, Fall 2001, and 64, Winter 2002/2003), Africa has been supplying more and more of US oil requirements, and there is more and more US prospecting for oil in Africa and its surrounding waters. The United States is expected to receive as much as 25 percent of its petroleum imports from Africa within the next ten years, leading to the need to “protect” African states, most often corrupt and militarized ones, and support their own wars on “terrorist” enemies. This has the potential to turn Africa into a new “middle east” for the United States, with all the tragic implications that has for Africans confronting imperial states to the North and increasingly repressive regimes at home.
Our first articles in this issue tackle these
long-term trends. In “From
Stealing to Robbing: Globalization and the US War Economy, ” George Caffentzis
charts the links between oil and the US military. A distinctive feature of the
war economy, he writes, is that it must satisfy demands that are temporally
indeterminate and come from a ubiquitous spatial field.
This marks a shift from the structural adjustment model of the 1980s and
early 1990s to direct military control today. Unlike the Cold War, which put a
limit on the regions where the US military could be deployed, and put a cap on
the future investment required to counter the well-defined adversary's
investment, the new war economy requires a new military model that dictates the
deployment of US troops throughout the planet. “Their job is to occupy an
unprecedented multiplicity of new bases controlling strategic areas of wealth
(which in this age often is spelled "O-I-L") and pressuring an
ever-increasing multitude of recalcitrant states to ‘reform,' consequences be
damned.”
A second general
article, “On the Roots of War: Theses on The War in Iraq,” by Silvia
Federici, examines the social, economic, and political effects of war. “War
defeats social movements, expropriates people from their lands, and gives
capital control over the planet's natural resources: oil, water, minerals, land,
and seeds.” It is not surprising, she notes, that the map of military
intervention is today, to a large extent, also the map of oil. “One of the
main objectives for international capital is the liberalization of the oil
industry, oil being the only vital commodity that is not privatized.”
These articles are followed by two case studies.
We first present two short pieces on oil and the actions
of Kerr-McGee Corporation in occupied Western Sahara. The first, “Oil Blocking
Path to Freedom?” comes from the Washington Office on Africa; the second,
“Shareholders Action” comes from ACAS member Richard Knight. They illustrate
the extraordinary US pressure on Africa’s oil producing nations, which is part
of the same (militarized) energy policy that dictated the invasion of Iraq. Western
Sahara is Africa’s last colony. Formerly
a colony of Spain, the World Court has ruled that the people of Western Sahara
have the right to self-determination. Morocco, which occupies much of the
Western Sahara and is seeking to annex it as part of “Greater Morocco,” has
denied the Sahrawi people this right. The Polisario Front, which was formed in
1973 to fight Spanish colonialism, leads their struggle. The US government, not
unexpectedly, is siding with Morocco, its long-time ally.
From the Western Sahara we turn to Chad, which we reported on in 2001 and again in 2002/03 (ACAS Bulletins 60/61 and 64). Ian Gary and Nikki Reisch ask: is oil a miracle or a mirage? Can oil revenues really transform this poverty-stricken land? Chad, described as Africa’s newest petro-state, is a central African country marked by corruption, instability, and human rights abuses. Their conclusion is that, despite the support received from the World Bank and other donors, the country remains unprepared to manage the complexities of an economy increasingly dominated by oil, adding to concerns about the stability of African oil-exporting countries. Billions of dollars are falling outside the revenue transparency safeguards, the government has limited capacity to spend the money effectively, and there are ongoing problems with human rights and the rule of law. Gary and Reisch are concerned that poverty reduction objectives may not be achieved. (2)
A third set of
articles tackles the impact of the war in Iraq on African studies, Africa
scholars and students, and freedom of speech at home. We began to look at these issues in our last Bulletin,
“Academic Freedom under Attack” (69,
Winter 2004).
Asma Abdel Halim wonders what intellectuals do in
peacetime. Recognizing that one must always begin one's resistance at home
against powers that as a citizen one can influence, she laments a trend
increasingly observed everywhere: “a fluent nationalism, masking itself as
patriotism and moral concern, has taken over critical consciousness, which then
puts loyalty to one's ‘nation’ before everything.” At that point, she
concludes, there is only the treason of the intellectuals and complete moral
bankruptcy.
Bill
Martin takes a broad look at the impact of the “War on Terror” (sic) on our
campuses in his article, “Cloning Condi, or Manufacturing Your Homeland
Security Campus and Cadre.” He traces the launching of large-scale initiatives
to create a cadre and set of institutions that penetrate our campuses and link
them to national security, military, and intelligence agencies.
“The aim,” he writes, “is nothing less, as Congressional hearings
show, than to turn back opposition on our campuses to imperial war, and turn
campuses into institutions that will, over the next generation, produce scholars
and scholarship dedicated to the so-called war on terror.”
As these articles chart, a major aim of
neo-conservatives and militarists is to definitively roll back the movement
gains of the 1970s and 1980s, which led African studies centers and many (but
not all) scholars to reject any further CIA/DOD funding, including the NSEP
program launched in the early 1990s. In
this connection, we publish the ACAS Resolution on the Study of Africa After 9/11
(posted on our website as a petition and signed by 72 people as of 16 March
2005), which sought to reaffirm and reapply the lessons of past victories. The
text of the Resolution is followed by the correspondence we have had with the
secretariat of the African Studies Association (ASA) concerning the ACAS
Resolution, which was passed at the last ASA membership meeting in New Orleans
on 11 November 2004 by a large majority of those in attendance.
ASA, in responding to ACAS three months later, rejected
all of our suggestions, including the very specific ones that called for
open discussion and debate of the impact of 9/11 on African studies, formal ASA
sponsorship of plenary sessions to discuss these matters, and ASA sponsorship of
special issues of African Issues and the African Studies Review.
In
our reply we requested ASA to conduct a formal poll of the membership on
the resolution, to be distributed by secret ballot in a regular mailing of
Association materials. We welcome your response to this exchange and are open to
suggestions for next steps. ASA has now requested a meeting with the ACAS
co-chairs in April, and we will press this issue at the next ASA meeting, so
stay tuned.
Finally, we reprint our most recent Action Alerts,
which were circulated to the membership by E-mail in the past five months.
Endnotes:
(1) According to Greg Palast,
the oil industry prefers state control of Iraq's oil over the neo-cons’
proposed sell-off because it fears a repeat of Russia's energy privatization.
(In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, US oil companies were barred
from bidding for the reserves.) It appears the oil industry has won, that Iraq
will retain control, and that the neo-cons’ plan to use Iraqi oil to scuttle
OPEC has failed. (see “Secret US Plans for Iraq's Oil” 17 March 2005 http://www.baou.com/newswire/main.php?action=recent&rid=20107)
(2)ACAS
wishes to thank the authors for allowing us to reproduce the executive summary
of their recently released report; the full report is available on the website
of the Catholic Relief Services (CRS).