Open World Conference of Workers

Call for the Tribunal on Africa

In March 1998, political and trade union leaders from 18 African countries issued an Appeal to hold an "International Tribunal to Judge Those Responsible for the Murderous Course Imposed on the Workers and Peoples of Africa." The call for this International Tribunal on Africa was launched at a conference held in Bingerville, Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) that was organized by the International Liaison Committee for a Workers' International (ILC).

The first session of the International Tribunal on Africa will take place at Compton College in Compton, Calif., on February 5-6 of the year 2000. Compton is in the greater metropolitan Los Angeles area.

Why Such an Appeal?

African people today are threatened by a human and social tragedy unprecedented in the history of humanity. Average life expectancy in the African continent is devastatingly low, and the latest report of the UNDP (United Nations Program on Development) has warned that if nothing decisive is undertaken in the months and years to come, average life expectancy on the African continent will fall further by 20 years. Thus, the African continent's population would consist of orphans and decimated and disorganized families that are ruined by illnesses and epidemics such as AIDS and malaria.

Today, half of the African people are living on less than one dollar per day. If things continue to deteriorate, the African continent will be further ravaged by poverty. Murderous wars and conflicts — which are developing one after the other and affect over half the countries in Africa today — bestow upon the African continent untold tragedy and suffering. Because of these wars and conflicts, hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed or uprooted. There are officially 6 million refugees, and 12 million others wander from one side of the continent to the other with only poverty and death as their future.

The destruction of industry and of the infrastructure across the continent is being accelerated. The peoples of the towns and countryside are faced with mass unemployment. The only future offered to youth is poverty or the armed gangs that are tearing the African continent apart. (There are officially over 300,000 child soldiers.)

Fundamental choices must be made immediately and put into action to end the further devastation of the African continent and to create for Africa the possibility of reaching its full potential.

One need only look at the situation today to know what will happen if nothing is changed in the decade to come: (a) the only borders will be the ones imposed by armed gangs; (b) there will be no qualified people in Africa because future generations will have been sacrificed by these lost school years; (c) because of the wars, the only movements of people will be these mass displacements, not those involving increased trade; (d) people will die in the streets because they will be driven out of hospitals for which they have no money to pay; (e) men and women will be unable to contribute much to the national economy because of their short life span; (e) the African continent will everywhere become another Somalia; and (g) the continent's elite will, simply, leave.

When political and trade union leaders of 18 African countries took the initiative to issue a call for an International Tribunal on Africa, they emphasized that the dramatic devastation of the African continent and the plight of its people cannot be separated from the three successive plagues that have hit the continent — the slave trade, colonial occupation and the "structural adjustment plans" imposed upon Africa for nearly 20 years by institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and the European Union.

The people of Africa were devastated by the slave trade, but in the 1960s they were able to win independence for the African countries. The independence was short-lived. An ensuing succession of military coups took place. Their function was to establish governments willing to act as servants of the same interests as those which created slavery and colonialism.

The faces have changed — it is no longer the colonial occupiers who are in charge — but colonial domination is still ever-present. It is now the "experts" from the World Bank and the IMF who have taken charge of the economies of the African countries and who rule its states. In all the ministries of the African governments, one can find "experts" who exercise genuine power. This is done in the name of "good governance" and, therefore, implicitly, in the name of the so-called inability of Black people to govern for themselves.

Poverty, economic collapse, and disintegration are first and foremost the result of the burden of the foreign debt payment. The figures are no secret: the global amount of the debt of the African continent totals $350 billion; the yearly payment on "debt" service alone by African countries is $33 billion. This so-called "debt" is mainly the accumulation of the debt service.

The debt service on the public debt in Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), for example, accounts for $3.7 billion of the $6 billion owed. We must stop this bleeding of the resources of the African continent. Taken as a whole, the debt service payments of the African states are four times higher than the combined budgets for education and health care. In 1997, Niger and Ethiopia had to use half their budgets to pay the debt service. Zambia used 44% of its budget, and Malawi used 35% of its budget. Fifty percent of export income is devoted to the payment of the "debt." A recent study by the World Bank shows that if the amount of money allotted to "debt" repayment had been used for real development, the yearly income per capita in a country like Zambia would have reached $10,000 dollars, instead of the $600 dollars today.

Today, Africa and the people of Africa are dying.

 

Why the First Session of the Tribunal Is Being Held in the United States

 We believe that the fate of the African continent and its people is inextricably tied to that of Africans all over the world. In spite of the official speeches and exorcising pageantry, slavery is far from being a closed chapter in world history. The legacy of the slave trade still weighs heavily on our present.

When the appeal for an International Tribunal on Africa was launched, political and trade union leaders from 18 African countries stated that it was impossible to understand the present drama in Africa without integrating the meaning of the slave trade and the mass deportation of African people from the African continent. Africa today still bears the scars from tens of millions of men, women and children deported from its shores, loaded on slave ships in chains, starved and whipped. Millions and millions died or committed suicide during slave transport, while millions of others died resisting enslavement or in slave jails before leaving the African continent. Africa was emptied of its living forces and of those who had the greatest ability to produce. Economic activity was plunged into chaos, and the most advanced forms of social and political organization were destroyed.

To all that, one must add that in Africa — as well as in America and around the world — Africans still suffer from the myth of an "inferior race," which was invented by slave traders to justify what can't be justified. Disorganized and maimed by slavery, Africans on the African continent transitioned to the evil of colonial occupation, while Africans in America transitioned to institutional racism — the system of racial segregation and discrimination. Africans throughout the Diaspora have been used in wars which were not their wars. These wars were often characterized as "liberating" African peoples in their individual areas, but instead Africans were used as cannon fodder. Those Africans who were lucky enough to return from these wars discovered that "equality" did not exist for them.

Today, the African continent is torn to pieces and is crumbling. What is the official "image" given of this situation? According to official propaganda, the reason the African continent is crumbling is because it is populated in majority by Blacks! — as if being Black should compel one to live in misery, illness, and wars; as if being Black makes one incapable of governing and destines one to degradation. Through the false and lying depictions of Africa circulating in the official media, one can witness the emergence once more of all the features that were used in the past to justify discrimination against and oppression of Blacks throughout the Diaspora.

What we are aiming to accomplish by organizing the International Tribunal on Africa is to re-establish the link between Africans on the continent and all those victimized by discrimination and oppression who find their roots in slavery and the past regimes of racial discrimination.

Beside delegates from all regions of Africa, Black activists from the Caribbean islands, South America, Europe and the United States will participate and testify to the jury.

The preparatory documents for the Tribunal call for a number of key demands: the complete cancellation of the devastating "debt" and austerity forced onto African people by the colonial powers, including the United States; the right to self-determination and the restoring of political and economic independence for all African nations; and, the immediate payment of needed reparations in forms determined by African people for past and present crimes committed against these nations by the foreign countries, corporations and militaries.

"We are coming from Africa to Los Angeles because there are tens of millions of you in the Americas who share with us the common tragedy represented by the enslavement holocaust of Africa, and the continuing Mafias," said Tribunal co-coordinator Norbert Gbikpi-Benissan, General Secretary of the National Federation of Independent Unions of Togo (West Africa), during a tour of five U.S. cities this past September.

The February 1999 Johannesburg conference, which prepared the Tribunal, adopted a resolution in which one can read:

"Conscious of the devastating effects of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism on the African peoples, the meeting endorsed calls for reparation for the African people in relation to crimes committed against them by the imperialist countries."

In addition to these important issues, joint action to combat the super-exploitative "African Growth and Opportunity Act" legislation, which recently passed in the U.S. Congress, and the repressive and regressive World Trade Organization, will be developed. Quite significantly, organizers have asked freedom fighter, journalist and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal (who is fighting to win a new trial and freedom while currently held on Pennsylvania's death row), to serve as the honorary chairperson of the Tribunal.

The political and trade union leaders of Africa who issued the initial call for the International Tribunal on Africa are convinced that the judgment which the Tribunal will issue will enable the people of Africa to call for the holding of a Congress of African Peoples that could enable the workers and peoples of the African continent to garner the strength to take the measures required to save themselves from this murderous course.

The judgment which the Tribunal will issue will be a means for Black people — wherever they find themselves in the Diaspora — to put an end to the racist and discriminatory policies of those who dare pretend that Africa is in crisis and dislocated by war because Black people are "savages" and are part of a race of inferior men and women. We will eradicate that lie.

With each passing day, as it becomes more and more difficult to survive, Africans on the continent of Africa are demonstrating that they are a proud and courageous people who are standing up and fighting back against the war and plunder imposed upon them.

One final point: At the conclusion of the Preparatory Conference of the International Tribunal on Africa held in Johannesburg in February 1999, the delegates assembled pledged to give the widest possible publicity to the existence of the Tribunal. In this connection, the gathering took notice of the fact that the Open World Conference in Defence of Trade Union Independence and Democratic Rights (OWC) will be held in San Francisco on February 11-14 of the year 2000 at the initiative of U.S. trade unions and the International Liaison Committee for a Workers' International (ILC).

The participants in the Preparatory Conference felt that the OWC provides a unique opportunity for publicizing the work of the Tribunal. They voted to support fully the convening of the Open World Conference and to urge its organizers to assist in the effort to promote the work of the International Tribunal on Africa.

Please Join Us on February 5-6!

We invite you to attend the International Tribunal on Africa on Saturday and Sunday, February 5-6, 2000 in Compton, California (USA). The Tribunal will be held at Compton College from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. both days. Please complete the registration form which follows and mail it TODAY.

Additionally, we urgently need your financial support so that this International Tribunal on Africa will be able to take place. The costs for the Tribunal are nominal, but the costs of the delegation from Africa are overwhelming. Each of the 20 African delegates will require a minimum of US$3,000 to cover travel and lodging expenses.

Won't you please give us your most generous donation in addition to your registration amount? Registration has been set at $50 per person. Registration fees are strictly earmarked toward the cost of the Tribunal and to assist in financing international delegations.

Hotel accommodations have been arranged at The Hampton Inn in Carson, California (freeway accessible and about 5 minutes by car to the Tribunal site at Compton College.) There will be shuttle buses provided Saturday and Sunday for transportation to and from the hotel to the Tribunal site. Double rooms at The Hampton Inn have been guaranteed at the rate of $55 ($27.50 per person).

Please reference the African American Study and Research Group when booking your hotel reservations. All reservations must be made by no later than January 21, 2000 to get the guaranteed rate. Please call The Hampton Inn directly at (310) 768-8833 to make your reservations.

Please complete the registration form on the next page, and mail it today, along with your registration fee and a generous donation. Also, as you fill out the registration make sure you let us know if you would like us to mail you the Tribunal Information Packet, which includes all the background documents from the Bingerville and Johannesburg preparatory conferences as well as the text of the Tribunal Acts of Accusation. Please add $10 (includes postage and handling) to obtain this packet.

You may contact us by phone at (562) 915-3510 (voicemail), by fax at (562) 492-9139 or by e-mail at connierw@earthlink.net.

We look forward to seeing you in February!

Organizing Committee

Jahahara Armstrong, Western Region Coordinator, National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA)

Norbert Tetevi Gbikpi-Benissan, General Secretary, Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Togo (UNSIT)

Alan Benjamin, Editorial Board, The Organizer newspaper; Vice Chair, Golden Gate chapter, Labor Party (for id. only)

Miguel Cristobal, International Relations Committee, Workers Party of France

Daniel Gluckstein, Coordinator, International Liaison Committee for a Workers' International, Paris, France

Dedon Kamathi, Organizer, All African Peoples Revolutionary Party, Los Angeles

Julian Kunnie, Professor, University of Arizona, Tucson

Ray Laforest, Representative, Haitian Mobilization to Defend Immigrant Rights, New York

Cajuste Lexiuste, Representative, Haitian Mobilization to Defend Immigrant Rights, New York

Lybon Tiyani Mabasa, President, Socialist Party of Azania, South Africa

Morgan Moss, member, Black Radical Congress, New Orleans

Muhjah Shakir, member, Black Radical Congress, Oakland, Ca.

Connie White, member, Black Radical Congress, Los Angeles

CALL TO THE FIRST SESSION OF THE INTERNATIONAL TR