PRC ‘Solidarity’
Posted on January 12, 2010
Xinhua, the official organ of the nominally ‘Marxist’ People’s Republic of China (PRC) has published an article about the race riots in Calabria which calls migrant workers a ‘burden’ and further implies that they are responsible for crime in Italian cities. This is the Chinese Communist Party’s current line on worker solidarity.
Only naive fools and slippery opportunists actually contend that the PRC is ‘Marxist’ or ‘socialist’ in any sense. The PRC was a particularly grotesque deformed workers’ state at its inception and it has evolved into a capitalist military-industrial complex, with a few trappings of ‘Marxism-Leninism’. China is engaged in imperial adventures of its own in Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Zimbabwe and elsewhere, supplying weapons to brutal dictators and warlords and exploiting cheap sweatshop labour in exchange for oil and natural resources; while in China, the state security apparatus relentlessly harasses Africans students and workers. The image of Africans as burdensome criminals serves the Chinese Communist Party’s imperialist agenda, which differs only in detail from the British, French, Portuguese, Belgians and others that went before them. As the Americans like to say: Get some!
Southern Italy Like Alabama In 1920s
Posted on January 11, 2010
Scylla and Charybdis were mythical monsters which preyed on sailors passing through the Strait of Messina between Sicily and Calabria.
African migrant workers in Calabria are caught between a modern and very real Scylla and Charybdis. One one side is the parasitic criminal organisation known as the ‘Ndrangheta, which profits from the super-exploitation of low-paid migrant labour, on the other is the motley, corrupt gang of chancers and rebranded fascists which constitutes the Italian governing coalition.
Race riots in the Calabrian town of Rosarno have resulted in the detention or relocation — ‘for their own safety’ — of more than a thousand African migrant workers. Residents of Rosarno indiscriminately attacked migrants with metal bars and wooden clubs after the workers organised a protest against poor working conditions, unpaid wages, racist attacks and shootings. Italian centre-left MP Jean-Léonard Touadi said Rosarno, now a whites-only town, is ‘like Alabama in the 1920s’.
Italian interior minister Maroni of Lega Nord, a party described as ‘openly embracing racist and fascist’ attitudes, blamed the workers for their own predicament, while other rightwingers cried that nobody asked the Africans to come to Italy: the ‘free’ flow of capital and resources is in one direction only, from the poor and the marginalised to the rich and light-skinned bosses of Fortress Europe and Fortress America.
Too Many Of Whom And Too Much Of What?
Posted on January 10, 2010
What the new population hysteria tells us about the global economic and environmental crisis, and its causes.
A No One Is Illegal discussion paper
There is a conventional view in Britain that racism has been driven onto the defensive or even banished completely from most areas of daily life. The political Right, indeed, constantly portrays itself as the victim of “liberal oppression� and “political correctness gone mad�. Yet somehow, racism has won some huge victories in recent years, in all the liberal democracies, with very little opposition, to such an extent that the terms “fortress Britain�, “fortress Europe� and “fortress USA� are now quite normal usage – and, without even needing to be told, everybody understands what these fortifications are for: to stop the poorer, darker-skinned peoples of the world “flooding� into its richer, paler parts.
This transformation has been achieved by a combination of threats of violence from the “shadowy far right�, and “measured�, responsible-sounding rhetoric focusing, relentlessly, on the apparently colour-blind, objective issue of “sheer numbers�. It is “these people’s� numbers, apparently, that demand urgent attention; their numbers are their only human attribute that matters, and this underlies the incessant chant from anti-immigrant pressure groups, like Migration Watch UK, that Britain (for example) is a “tiny, overcrowded island� and from the resurgent far right (BNP, UKIP) that their anti-immigrant politics are “about space, not race�; and the extraordinary, apocalyptic visions of right-wing illuminati like Gunnar Heinsohn and Christopher Caldwell (see below) of a world overrun by rapidly-breeding Muslims.
Being “too many� is a hard, indeed a terrifying, charge for a lone human being to face. It can be applied to anyone. And it will be, increasingly, in all manner of insidious, destructive and even deadly ways, if the current trend to target “sheer human numbers� invades the political mainstream and we have a return to full-blown population politics: an old, prurient politics driven by an itch to control not just the movement of (certain kinds of) people, but also their sex-lives, and their very existence.
Babies of Mass Destruction, resurrected
As recently as the early 1990s, this form of politics had been banished to the moral wilderness and looked unlikely ever to return. It had inflicted unspeakable, and completely futile, injuries on millions upon millions of lives all over the world. And its justification – in so far as it ever had one – was melting away: the global population-explosion of the mid 20th-century was drawing to an end; a trend now so thoroughly established that nobody now disputes it (see “How frightening are these ‘frightening numbers’?�, below). The resurgence of population politics instead speaks volumes about the crisis in the global capitalist system. And it puts the issue of human autonomy firmly and urgently in the spotlight.
The core belief of this kind of politics is that there are certain people whose normal, non-criminal activities (like travelling around, or having or not having babies, and other normal activities that people undertake to sustain their own and their families’ continued existence) must be restrained for the common good. These activities may in themselves do no harm but when done en masse, they supposedly become major, even apocalyptic threats.
The No One Is Illegal group insists that these activities can only ever be a matter of personal choice. They are properly termed “reproductive rights�: affecting as they do “the process by which human beings meet their basic needs and survive from one day to the next.�[1]. All efforts to deny that fact and meddle with these choices lead inevitably to needless and useless suffering, and in the end will damage any society that tolerates that impulse to scapegoat and control.
We will argue that identifying yet more scapegoats and subjecting them to yet more controls will absolutely not help us through our economic and ecological crisis. On the contrary, it is these very attitudes to, and abuse of, human beings and their rights, which immigration controls exemplify so perfectly, that brought this crisis about.
Already, many of those now urging population control say that “we� must be prepared to sacrifice some human rights in the face of the greater danger[2]. The prophet of climate change himself, James Lovelock, has even proposed that “We need another Churchill now to lead us from the clinging, flabby, consensual thinking of the late 20th century� and “an effective defence force will be as important as our own immune systems�[3].
We argue that, far from being peripheral “luxuries�, human rights are the key to our global future, the only sure guarantors of social and environmental sustainability.
The crash of October 2008: population-control to the rescue!
Throughout 2008-9, as banks collapsed, credit bubbles imploded, and the reality of climate change penetrated even the innermost comfort-zones of neoliberalism, mainstream media sprouted headlines, leader articles and commissioned features declaring that the real, urgent problem facing the planet is not its economic system, but its human population. Moreover, oppressive “liberals� had turned population into a “taboo subject�, which must be challenged.[4] It is no longer just a matter of controlling people’s movement; it is a matter of controlling their existence.
In October 2008, the UK got a new Immigration Minister, Phil Woolas, who swept the bank bailouts from the front pages, telling the Times: “This government isn’t going to allow the [UK] population to go up to 70 million.â€� Sir Andrew Green, chair of Migration Watch, applauded: “It is the first time that a government minister has actually linked immigration and population.â€�[5]
“Population� seems to touch the nerves immigration alone cannot reach – even those of otherwise-humane Greens and anti-capitalists like Paul Kingsnorth, who shocked fellow-campaigners by saying that Woolas “has a point�, and challenged them “to explain how we can meet our climate change targets with an extra 15 million people here�.[6]
In early 2009, the Optimum Population Trust’s annual conference got headline media billing. Its patron Jonathon Porritt (also an adviser on green issues to UK premier Gordon Brown) announced that “the UK population must fall to 30mâ€�[7] and the world as a whole must somehow lose over 3 billion people[8]. In April 2009, Britain’s best-loved TV naturalist, David Attenborough, joined the Optimum Population Trust himself, and declared population growth “frightening”.
At the same time, and sometimes even in the very same press-releases, came intensified verbal attacks not only on immigrants but also on the long-term sick and the unemployed. In the Sun (December 8th 2008), Woolas’s pronouncement that “Immigrants will have to EARN the right to UK benefits and council housing … [and] wait TEN YEARS before they get a pennyâ€� sat right next to Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell’s pronouncement that from now on “nearly all benefit claimants will be forced to work in exchange for state handoutsâ€�.
Migrant, criminal, claimant… Nobody’s safe in the population game
“Population� is an us-and-them game where anybody can be “it�. You don’t have to be black. If you become unemployed, or a bit too ill, you may cease to be an individual with rights, and become part of a “population� instead, and a suitable case for “management�. In this way, population politics implies the “legalisation� of humanity: the right to be treated as a human being must be earned; it is granted by legal authorities; it cannot be acquired lightly, for example by being born, or conceived, or just turning up on one’s own unauthorised, autonomous initiative.
It is part of the universal language of raw power. In the UK, the idea of “earned citizenship� already begins to sound quite normal; but it was expressed only a little more strongly by Sudan’s ex-premier Sadiq al-Mahdi in the early stages of the Darfur crisis: “The honour of living must be earned�[9].
When people become mere “population�, they can be subjected to what would be called criminal violence in any other context: forced labour; separation from children; arbitrary checks and searches; intrusive interrogation; verbal abuse; even imprisonment and serious assault (especially when the controls become target-driven, as they almost inevitably do).
“Population� separates a worthy, privileged “us� from a despised and indefensible “them�, onto whom all unpleasantness can be projected; who can be, and then are, exploited mercilessly, or abandoned, or got rid of in almost any way human ingenuity can devise.
“We� ostensibly embraces all true-born, good-hearted native folk, rich and poor, in thrilling yet cosy opposition to the alien menace. Even the humblest citizen may join this noble project. Or face the consequences. Such is the magic of populist politics, and the road to fascism.
Population politics preserves privilege, but it won’t save the planet
Like immigration controls, population control only creates misery for those least able to bear it, and jobs for those who inflict that misery. It pushes the real, genuinely urgent issues off the agenda.
In the past, education, roads, sanitation and proper health-care were denied to people all over the world on the grounds that they distracted from the more urgent “problem� of population. Today, population threatens to become the smokescreen that prevents or delays the concerted, wholehearted global response that’s needed to deal with the causes and effects of climate change. Which would mean facing uncomfortable truths. As population historian Matthew Connelly put it during a BBC Radio 3 discussion of neo-Malthusianism in “today’s crowded world�:
When people say the US or the UK for that matter is overpopulated I want to ask them which people in particular they have in mind, who are in and of themselves a problem?
If the problem is consumption, then of course it’s the wealthiest people we need fewer of. I mean, Britain would do much better if it had 100 million subsistence farmers, say, than 50 million people who are doctors and lawyers and bankers and so on. It could have much less of a carbon footprint if it imported subsistence farmers from the Sahel, and exported bankers and lawyers to Africa. But nobody is proposing that![10]
A war on the poor of all countries, by the rich of all countries: Eugenics, Malthusians and Populists Vs mothers, babies and migrants
Since it first became a political force in the 19th century, the professed aims of population control have changed constantly: to protect scarce food supplies; to promote “racial hygieneâ€� and improve the species; to preserve “our culture and valuesâ€�; to protect wildlife and the environment; to assist the “developmentâ€� of ex-colonial countries; and now to save the planet itself. It has never achieved had any significant effect on human numbers – but it has been consistently and superbly effective at preventing action on other fronts, especially redistribution from the rich to the poor. Its agenda is not merely racist, but also (and even more) “classistâ€�. Immigrant-control may be dressed up, for popular consumption, in nationalist colours; but when it comes to controlling parents and babies, the real nature of the game becomes very clear: class trumps mere nationality. Population-control targets “our ownâ€� poor as well as those in “poor countriesâ€� (and with enthusiastic support from those “poor countries’â€� own rich elites).
Some very unattractive obsessions lie at its heart, especially a preoccupation with other people’s sex lives – especially of “the poorâ€�. It is all about who “belongs toâ€� whom. In the USA for example, fears about the fertility of black, brown and Asian people go hand in hand with fear of declining fertility among “our ownâ€� (i.e. white) women, and moral crusades against abortion (but also moral panics about teenage sex, “welfare momsâ€�, and assisted and surrogate pregnancy).
Hard-line Republican Tom DeLay made the connection clear in 2007: “If we had those 40 million children that were killed over the last 30 years [by abortion], we wouldn’t need the illegal immigrants to fill the jobs that they are doing today.�[11] Similar rhetoric emerges in Berlusconi’s Italy, and in the UK – where anti-abortion (and anti-assisted pregnancy) MP Frank Field has joined forces with Migration Watch and its co-founder, long-serving pillar of the Eugenics Society, Professor David Coleman, who consistently argues that immigration must be resisted in favour of utilising “domestic demographic reserves� (increasing “labour force participation� by raising the retirement age, less-generous pension provision, and other measures) and encouraging motherhood: “fertility offers a much more efficient lever on the age structure than does immigration�.[13]
The pressure works its way right down the global pecking order. In the poorest parts of China and India (where one- and two-child policies are still being enforced) the brutal logic of poverty makes sons vital to a family’s survival. In India in 1960, a working-class woman needed to have 6.3 babies to be sure of having one son who survived to adulthood. Thanks to relatively cheap, handheld doppler-scanners girl-foetuses can now be detected, and the mother comes under pressure to abort. This has led to skewed gender-ratios: in India 927 girls per 1,000 boys overall and as few as 716 per 1,000 in Delhi – and utter devastation for untold thousands of women. By way of a final twist to the knife, the surfeit of young men is blamed by fashionable Western analysts for civil unrest and terrorism (letting poverty, socially destructive neoliberal reforms and Western intervention off the hook).[14] The influential German sociologist and columnist Gunnar Heinsohn even blames the ongoing crises in Palestine on the Palestinians’ failure to control their own birth-rates.[15] They should be denied aid, he says, till they have taken this problem in hand.
But why do otherwise sane, decent people buy this politics? Of course, there is the fear that “they might, just have a pointâ€� (global warming, at least, is a real threat, and humanity – or at least, some of it – is definitely implicated). But why (even if sheer human numbers actually were the problem) do otherwise-decent people support policies that inflict cruelty that they would never in a million years dream of perpetrating themselves? Dubious “lifeboatâ€� metaphors are sometimes invoked to justify cruelty. Yet in actual life-or-death situations, people very often put their shared humanity above personal survival, even if that means there will be no survivors[16].
A 200-year war against welfare
Population-control made its political debut in early 19th century Britain, when Thomas Malthus’s theory of population growth[17] gave exactly the moral insulation Britain’s rising middle class needed against the terrible poverty that tore through the country during the economic slump and restructuring that followed the Napoleonic Wars. Malthus’s arguments were used to drive through the New Poor Law of 1834, which attempted to imprison in the workhouse anyone improvident enough to claim welfare. The workhouse system, which took decades to dismantle, presaged in some detail today’s anti-immigrant system: notably its distinction between “deserving and undeservingâ€�, and its parallel, unaccountable, cut-price policing and judicial system.
The Malthusian argument goes: not only is there no point in relieving the starving poor (if fed, they will only breed more, negating our good efforts); it would also be wrong and unkind to feed them: by encouraging them to breed, we will end up overwhelming the very resources on which they depend for help. So, conveniently, the kindest thing is to let them starve. This “cruel to be kind� rationale permeates all kinds of population and anti-welfare politics and, in its more general form, ‘the perversity thesis’, plays a key role in reactionary politics in general[18].
Modern population politics (in the full, broad sense: targeting immigrants as well as babies) took shape fairly rapidly during the el-Niño famine years of the 1870s. For the first time, people all over the world suddenly had to contend not only with a run of bad harvests, but also with imperialism. The result was spectacular famines right across the global South – and instead of compassion, it was the nightmare vision of “starving multitudes� that seized Western imaginations. Starving people somehow acquired supernatural powers, to cross vast distances en masse and invade suburbia. The hysteria was fuelled and rationalised by a deadly brew of Malthusian theory plus Francis Galton’s theories of inheritance[19] (which he named “eugenics� in 1882), evoking the spectre of a world overrun by greedy, oversexed morons.
Malthus personally helped shape the deadly British response to the crisis in India: he’d trained many colonial administrators at the East India Company’s Haileybury staff college. As in Ireland thirty years previously, large amounts of high-quality food were exported while people starved, and forced-labour masqueraded as “relief�[20].
Matthew Connelly describes a “surge of creativity in elaborating and theorizing the threatâ€�. An 1877 US House/Senate committee “asserted that although the Chinese lacked sufficient ‘brain capacity’ to sustain self-government, they could survive in conditions that would starve other men … the American must come down to their level or below them.â€� First, the Page Law of 1875 banned women from China seeking to join their husbands in the U.S. Then, in 1882, came the US Chinese Exclusion Act: the first of a global epidemic of exclusionary laws and populist politics, one of whose hallmarks was an indulgent attitude toward racist violence. Riots in the US against Chinese and Italian immigrants in the 1880s were excused by politicians as “the working people’s way of demonstrating their citizenshipâ€�(35). Riots against Jews in Germany in 1886 were excused as “but the public method of voicing the sentiment ‘no rights without duties’â€� [21] — which is echoed today in discourse about “earned citizenshipâ€�.
Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser argue that this “populist turn� in US politics (identifying excluded, disadvantaged groups as the enemy) explains the USA’s otherwise puzzling failure to develop a social security system for its citizens[22]. Now, in the hands of Christopher Caldwell, David Goodhart and their ilk, a cart-before-horse version of this argument is used to promote fear of foreigners (that large out-groups destroy the social cohesion that underpins welfare states).
Population reduction: separating the good Americans from the nasty Nazis
In the 20th century, the worldwide population control movement entered enthusiastically into eugenic nationalism; but after World War II distanced itself from “Nazi excesses�, and successfully portrayed as something quite different the postwar campaigns inflicted in the name of “development� on people in Asia, Africa and the Americas.
Nazi genocide was certainly different in many ways from subsequent population-control campaigns, although its legal and administrative foundations, the 1933 sterilization laws and tribunal system, were taken from the USA: the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law drafted in 1922 and adopted in many individual states. What is more the genocide should have taught “respectable� population-controllers an important lesson: the systematic, industrialised, outright murder of millions of Jews, Russians and others had surprisingly little long-term effect on their numbers. Russia’s population for example certainly fell between 1941 and 1945 (from 197 million to 171 million) but had recovered by 1960, whereafter growth steadied through the 1960s and 1970s, reflecting the rapid improvements in health and education[23].
The 20th century’s main population-control action was the work of a strange alliance of totally unaccountable NGOs, composed of birth-control pioneers (often with eugenicist agendas) and independently-wealthy, male population-control enthusiasts like John D. Rockefeller, the disposable paper-cup millionaire Hugh Moore, and the unspeakable Clarence Gamble (heir to the Procter and Gamble soap empire) whose attitude to Indian villagers was described by one local civil servant as “they are all natives and sex to him�[24].
After World War II, the movement gained increasingly generous funding and influence (especially from the US government and the World Bank). Even the UN was enlisted, after intense lobbying that led to the setting-up of the uniquely-unaccountable UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), which then served as a conduit for largely US funds. Blatant, amateur experimentation was inflicted on millions upon millions of poor people in India, China, Indonesia, Korea and throughout Africa involving millions of – in effect – forcible sterilizations, abortions, untested and even unsterile intra-uterine devices (IUDs), implants, injections and pills. Poor populations in rich countries were also targeted: Appalachia, and black areas of US cities – where the experimental hormone implant Norplant was promoted as “a tool in the fight against black povertyâ€�, and even made a precondition for welfare[25]. Population-control dominated the development-aid agenda. During Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, and Robert McNamara’s tenure of the presidency of the World Bank, it became orthodoxy that $5 “investedâ€� in birth control was worth $100 invested in economic growth[26]. Aid was routinely made conditional on the introduction of dramatic population-control programmes, which took priority over even the most basic health provision.
It was a global war – described as such – almost entirely waged by rich, white men on poor black and Asian women; often by actual generals such as the USA’s General William Draper and China’s Xinzhong Qian; macho, military language was the norm: “attacking the problem at the post-partum stageâ€� (persuading mothers to accept sterilization immediately after delivery) and “deploying crack troopsâ€� to raise acceptance rates. Population-control propagandists such as Paul Ehrlich entered into the spirit of it all; he urged “logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles and surgical instrumentsâ€� and condemned the US government for not insisting on compulsory sterilization for all Indian men with 3 or more children.[27]
This war was of course fought with “military precisionâ€� – with all the ghastly errors and cavalier attitude to them we associate with that phrase, and the same perverse “reverse-precautionary principleâ€� we find in immigration-control regimes: if in doubt, do harm. The literature is littered with statements like “Whether you like it or not, there will be a few dead peopleâ€�[28]. Anything went: Connelly found that identical reports had somehow been sold by the Population Council’s jet-setting consultants to Kenya in 1965 and then to Iran in 1966, with only a single paragraph changed in the covering letter[29].
And there were plenty of casualties. During Indira Gandhi’s ambitious, target-driven campaigns in India, homes were bulldozed for non-compliance and in the last 6 months of 1976 6.5 million people were sterilized, many of them forcibly, and “hundreds if not thousands died from infections�[30].
In 1977, to her great surprise, Gandhi was ejected from office by an outraged electorate: the beginning of mass-resistance to the policy, which would culminate in partial victory at the 1994 UN Cairo “population summit� – after which population-control became a tar-baby no respectable politician would touch. Organisations that had backed coercion transformed themselves into champions of autonomy overnight. Others changed their names. The American Eugenics Society became the Society for the Study of Social Biology; Eugenics Quarterly became Social Biology. In the UK, in 1988, the Eugenics Society renamed itself The Galton Institute.
Unreal numbers with all-too-real consequences
Population politics loves to present itself as scientifically objective (as if this somehow makes wrecking other people’s lives less objectionable). It becomes fixated on targets, which become conditionalities for foreign aid (and a myriad other things including jobs, housing and performance bonuses) which inexorably ends up with coercion “in the field�. Conditionality ends up starving other public services of resources. In South Africa, family-planning became the only free, health-related service available to non-whites (and a compulsory precondition for jobs and homes).
It was a similar picture all over Africa and south-east Asia. In Bangladesh, terrible levels of peri-natal mortality went unaddressed in the 1980s, while aid agencies objected even to the provision of rehydration salts for diarrhea because they considered it diverted attention away from family planning[31].
Infantile reverence for “hard figuresâ€� blinded the population-controllers to reality. In 1989, Nigeria was forced by the World Bank into a ‘structural adjustment’ programme contingent on a massive birth-control programme that then consumed far more resources than the entire Health Ministry – only to discover in the 1992 census that the population had been overestimated by between 20 and 30 million[32].
And throughout the history of population politics tentative projections have been treated as “scientific predictions�. In 1965 the UK government projected that by 2000 the British population would be 75 million: 5 million more than the ‘alarming’ 70 million now projected for 2050 (Aaronovitch, 9/9/08[33]). Projections for world population have varied even more wildly – yet have been treated as firm predictions, and used to ramp up a fever of anxiety in which almost any coercion begins to seem acceptable. In his 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich predicted that there would be global famine in the 1970s and hundreds of millions of deaths. Twenty years earlier, UNESCO’s first director, Julian Huxley had been urging the use of atomic weapons “to keep down the colored peoples�[34].
As Connelly says:
Too often, alas, population projections are psychological projections … not that there are too many people but that there are certain kinds of people, with whom we feel uncomfortable, who there are too many of.
How frightening are these “frightening numbers”?
So far, so ghastly. But does that mean that the population-controllers were wrong to be concerned about population growth? Population did, indeed, rise at an astonishing rate in the years after World War II – largely due to falling death rates. But birth rates were also starting to decline – even in countries that hadn’t been subjected to the campaigns. UN Population Division (UNPD) data show almost identical rates of decline between 1950 and 2000 both in countries that had been subjected to “strong birth-control�, and in ones that hadn’t. “It turns out that about 90 percent of the difference in fertility rates worldwide derived from something very simple and very stubborn: whether women themselves wanted more or fewer children.�[35]
The “Population Crisisâ€� seems to be one of those persuasive illusions that somehow seem to become all the more convincing the more they fail to come true. No famine has ever, it seems, been caused by overpopulation. The evidence for environmental damage is similarly weak (see below). But maybe, like the one roulette number that’s failed to come up all night, the hour really is nigh, at last, when these fears will be justified. We are in new times after all: the oil really is running out, and climate-change is a stark and quite unprecedented reality.
World population was approximately 6.8 billion in 2008[36] and expected to plateau in mid-century at around 8.9 billion, staying at around that level till 2300 or beyond[37]. This is a projection, not a prediction, but even the Optimum Population Trust accepts that it is probably about right: birth rates are falling and have been doing so for a long time, in more and more countries.
The trend to lower birth rates began as long ago as the early 19th century, in France after the Napoleonic Wars (incidentally, without modern contraceptives). By 1918 it was a Europe-wide phenomenon and governments were panicking that there would not be enough soldiers for future wars – hence the ‘natalist’ policies of Hitler, Mussolini and others, to encourage large families, while outlawing birth-control. These campaigns failed just as miserably as more recent population-reduction campaigns; in Italy’s case, birth-rates fell despite the intimate and persistent attentions of a fascist state and the Roman Catholic Church. Today, 70 countries’ fertility is below replacement level (2.1 children per couple). As early as 2025, global fertility will probably have fallen to replacement level[38].
Certainly, 8.9 billion is a lot of people. It may seem an “alarming figureâ€� – but by what criterion? Billions of people do not take up as much space as the alarmist picture suggests: at present, the world’s entire human population would all fit into former Yugoslavia at the same population density as Manhattan – which is not a bad place to live, and has quite a bit of open space; too little for self-sufficiency but excellent for providing services and limiting energy-use.
And self-sufficiency should not present a problem. Most or even all Chinese cities were “completely self-sufficient in food production� until the market reforms of the 1980s (and even into the early 1990s[39]). Till the mid-1990s, Shanghai, which had a population of over 13 million at the time, was largely self-sufficient in vegetables and grain[40]. So, at the same population-density as Shanghai (2,588 people per square kilometre), the current world population should be able to feed itself perfectly well within a land area a little smaller than the Democratic Republic of Congo. For comparison, DRC’s total land-area, 2.35 million km2, is less than a fifth of the earth’s currently-cultivated area – 13.6 million km2 – which is itself capable of considerable expansion[41]).
So where do these predictions of disaster come from. How do they gain such credibility? And why does the world seem so overcrowded to so many people?
Part of the answer is that there are, as Connelly suggests, too many rich people. The “tiny overcrowded islandâ€� of Britain would indeed be rather small if its wealthy landowners upped sticks and went, taking their private estates with them. It’s hard to say exactly how small – “Who owns Britainâ€� is one of the world’s great mysteries – but half of it has been held in private hands since long before records began. And if Britain’s entire population had to live within the same constraints (an area 200 x 200 metres) as the young, low-income men interviewed in a 2008 Rowntree Foundation report we would all fit into the Isle of Man. For similar reasons, even Brazil is a “tiny overcrowded islandâ€�, as far as a great many of its citizens are concerned.
Some facts about famine
Some people have always been quick to blame famines on overpopulation but whenever the facts of any particular famine are examined it always turns out that starvation was not caused by any actual shortage of food.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has shown that in every single famine for which records exist, there has always in fact been a surplus of food. Meat and grain continued to be exported right through the Irish famine of the 1840s, in India, China and Peru in the 1870s; and there were surpluses in East Bengal in the 1940s. The problem has always been one of distribution: the food was there, but it wasn’t getting to the poor; they’d been priced out of the market, so they died[42].
Overpopulation has even been blamed for the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s – yet Ethiopia is sparsely-populated, has an abundance of arable land, much of it still unused, and produces surpluses even in times of drought[43].
It is said that, even though people may not have run up against the earth’s “carrying capacityâ€� in the past, they are bound to do so soon, as global warming causes sea-levels to rise. But it is hard to see how even worst-case scenarios could cause such a thing. At present, vast (and growing) areas of arable land are still being diverted to raising cattle for the unhealthy, high-meat/junk food diets of the developed world. 50% of the world’s wheat and barley, 80% of its maize and 90% of its soya are fed to livestock. “By 2050, when the human population numbers 9 billionâ€� says ecologist Colin Tudge[44] “our livestock will be consuming enough good grain and pulses to feed another 4 billion.â€� Meanwhile, we already throw away enough food to feed most of the current world population: up to half of all food sold in the UK and USA goes to landfill. Huge amounts of good-quality arable land are still being given over to speculative housing, covered with roads, with golf-courses (which now use enough water every day to meet the needs of 4.7 billion people[45]) or simply fenced off by landowners to protect privacy, or to stop other people using it.
Even if the world population reaches 9 billion and sea levels rise as predicted, there should still be no excuse for anyone to live any other way than well – if we plan things properly (i.e., treat each other as if we were equally human). Tudge concludes that feeding the world “should be eminently do-able, even in the face of global warming and diminishing oilâ€�.
But what about the environment?
It is said that “too many peopleâ€� inevitably cause environmental degradation. This has been a major theme of the population-control movement since environmentalism itself. The USA’s leading environmental organisation, the Sierra Club, played an important part in ramping up the hysteria when it published Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, in 1968. Major birth-control campaigns have been launched specifically to protect the environment. The showcase for this effort should be Puerto Rico, testbed for US birth-control agencies and contraceptive pill and implant manufacturers for decades. One third of all Puerto Rican women had been sterilized by 1968. But today Puerto Rico has one of the most polluted environments in South America – thanks not to its population but to the activities of US oil companies[46].
Population is blamed for the the destruction of tropical rain-forests, and this has been used to justify brutal population control campaigns thoughout Indonesia and the Philippines. Meanwhile, the forests in each case were sold for export over the people’s heads by (respectively) the Suharto and Marcos dictatorships. And these weren’t one-off, freak events.
In 1997-98 forest fires claimed 8 million hectares in South-East Asia, mainly in Indonesia, whose government immediately blamed indigenous people and peasant farmers; satellite evidence however showed that the overwhelming majority of the fires had started on large-scale plantations, often belonging to multinationals, using burn-off to clear land cheaply.[47].
In the Philippines, the environmental destruction has accelerated since Marcos. Describing the havoc wrought by western mining companies, ex-UK aid minister Clare Short says: “I have never seen anything so systematically destructive. The environmental effects are catastrophic, as are the effects on people’s livelihoods. They take the tops off mountains, which are holy, they destroy the water sources and make it impossible to farm.�[48]
Today in West Papua (illegally occupied and exploited by the Indonesian army, which largely finances itself by this kind of entrepreneurship) vast areas of pristine forest are being cleared, along with the people who live there and care for it, to make way for bio-fuel crops. Amnesty International estimates that one-sixth of the population has been killed to facilitate the destruction.
Brazil’s rainforest is being destroyed by a deadly combination of large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness, grotesquely unequal land-distribution, aid-backed roadbuilding schemes (e.g. the Pan-American Highway) and a policy of resettling the poor in the forests as an alternative to land reform[49]. What’s more, the destruction began in earnest well after Brazil’s birth-rates had started to fall (which they did without population-control campaigns).
In Kenya, deforestation is the result of decades of structural adjustment programmes that sacrificed self-sufficient peasant agriculture for large-scale tea-plantations and game-parks, “with the family woodlots grubbed up to plant tea and the hills all around denuded for firewood�.[50]
In addition, it’s estimated that a fifth of all environmental degradation globally is due to military and related activities[51].
The problem is neither human numbers nor human nature, but human inequality.
“The great irony,� says Betsy Hartmann, “is that in most cases population growth comes down faster the less you focus on it as a policy priority, and the more you focus on women’s rights and basic human needs.�[52]
If even a fraction of the energy that’s been put into population-control rhetoric were to be spent examining the detailed record and achievements of the population-control movement, it would collapse like a house of cards; indeed, it has almost done that on a number of occasions already. It is a highly dangerous distraction from the world’s real problems, which are now becoming globally life-threatening.
When a population “explodesâ€� (or collapses) it indicates that the people’s lives have been made precarious. The British population explosion of the 18th-19th century happened among a traumatised people, made suddenly dependent on their, and their children’s wage-labour. This “development modelâ€� was subsequently inflicted on the rest of the world, and still hasn’t finished playing out.
Population can, of course, also collapse if people are pushed hard enough. To some extent, the decline is due to an insecure, high working-hours, high-cost existence: experienced both by slum-dwellers in Rio and by young professionals in London and Paris.
But when people’s security is restored, normality is soon restored. In recent decades, it has become possible to observe the process almost in real time: in Costa Rica, population-growth had levelled off after the creation of a welfare state, but took off again after 1975, when its welfare state was scrapped[53], as it also did in Sri Lanka (under pressure from the World Bank) after 1977, and for the same reason. In China (whose one-child policy was lauded by Western population-controllers) birth-rates were falling well before the policy was instituted. But then in the 1980s came the market reforms and sudden loss of security for millions.
However, where equality prevails, humans and their environments thrive. Examples include present-day Cuba: the only country in the world that meets its UN Human Development targets within a sustainable ecological footprint and where health outcomes are better in most respects than in the USA, but without the USA’s massive environmental cost.[54].
Of course, we think it would be very difficult to run capitalism without “volunteering� significant numbers (a majority, in fact) of humanity to untermensch status. But that is a problem for the capitalists to solve, not ours. If they can find a way of doing capitalism in which “we� really does mean “all of us� and “equality� means just that, we will welcome it with open arms: they will have achieved socialism.
Till then we must resist all their attempts to distract attention from their foul-ups by pitting “us� against “them�.
The problems that the population-controllers blame on the poor are much more readily attributable to the rich. It is the rich, overwhelmingly, whose overconsumption drives environmental degradation and global warming. It is not just the impact of all those cars, houses and plane journeys, but also of the work that the world’s poor are increasingly obliged to do, supplying their needs and whims; and the natural resources that are required to satisfy those needs and whims; and the devastation that’s needed and the wars that have to be fought to secure those resources. And so on. So “it can be said with confidence that the world’s richest people cause emissions thousands of times that of the world’s poorestâ€�[55].
According to Danny Dorling:
it is almost certainly an underestimate to claim that the richest tenth of the world’s population have a greater negative environmental impact than all the rest put together. [...] And, of the richest 10th of the world’s population, the richest 10th consume more, even than the other half a billion or so affluent.[56]
1 percent of the world’s population is a very tiny, irresponsible minority. It would take very little oppression to resolve the problems they create, and of a very much milder nature than the sheer cruelty visited on poor people, in vain attempts to stop them migrating and having babies.
The whole population-control bandwagon looks very much like a cheap and cowardly getout to avoid confronting that inconsiderate, but unfortunately rather powerful, few.
No One Is Illegal, 10 January 2010
Major sources:
• Reproductive Rights and Wrongs; Betsy Hartmann; South End Press, Boston 1995;
• Fatal Misconception: the struggle to control world population; Matthew Connelly; Belknap Press, Harvard 2008;
• The website of the Population and Development Institute (Popdev) at Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass. http://popdev.hampshire.edu
[1] This is the definition of “reproduction� used by DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era) in 1984 – quoted by Matthew Connelly in “Fatal Misconception� p.360 (see endnotes)
[2] E.g., “When the world is at stake, personal rights and sovereignty aren’t perfectly clearâ€�; Joseph Chamie; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 18th 2008.
[3] Sunday Times, 8/2/09
[4] e.g. John Feeney: “Population: The elephant in the room�
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7865332.stm
[5] “Immigration to be cut as unemployment soars�; The Times, 18/10/2008:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4965433.ece
[6] Paul Kingsnorth; “Immigration: truisms vs cliches�; October 2008: http://www.paulkingsnorth.net/2008/10/immigration-truisms-vs-cliches.html
[7] The Times, 22/3/09
[8] OPT website: to achieve a ‘modest’ world footprint the world population needs to be reduced to between 3.4 and 2.7 billion, depending on the provision allowed for biodiversity: http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.optimum.html.
[9] Attributed to ex-Prime Minister Sadiq al Mahdi by Harry Verhoeven: “War, famine and displacement in Sudan� (Talk given at Exeter College, Oxford, 19/5/2009)
[10] BBC Radio 3 Nightwaves, Wednesday 19 March 2008
[11] Quoted by Priscilla Huang; “10 Reasons to Rethink the Immigration-Overpopulation Connection�; DifferenTakes 59, Spring 2009; popdev.
[12] See his chapter “The Demography of Social Class� in Nicholas Mascie-Taylor’s “Biosocial Aspects of Social Class�; OUP 1990
[13] David Coleman; “‘Replacement Migration’, or why everyone’s going to have to live in Korea�; Galton Institute Newsletter, March 2001. David Coleman and Robert Rowthorn; “The Economic Effects of Immigration into the United Kingdom�; Population and Development Review 30/4, Dec 2004).
[14] e.g. by Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer in “Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population� – critiqued by Betsy Hartmann in “The Testosterone Threat: Sociobiology, National Security and Population Control�; DifferenTakes 41, Fall 2006; popdev.
[15] Gunnar Heinsohn; “Why Gaza is fertile ground for angry young men�; Financial Times: June 14 2007
[16] For more on human altruism, see Robert Axelrod, “The Evolution of Co-operation�; Basic Books 1984.
[17] Malthus first published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, revised and expanded it in 1803, and several further editions till his death in 1834. He asserts that: “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.�
[18] The “perversity thesis�, described by Albert O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction (Harvard 1991), states that if you try to improve things you will inevitably make things worse.
[19] Hereditary Genius, 1869
[20] see Connelly; also Mike Davis, “Late Victorian Holocausts�.
[21] Connelly, pp 34-36
[22] Fighting poverty in the US and Europe: a world of difference, by Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser, 2004
[23] R.W. Davies; “Soviet Economic Development from Lenin to Khrushchev�; Cambridge University Press, 1998.
[24] Connelly, pp 173-4
[25] Hartmann, pp 211-212
[26] Hartmann p 104
[27] Hartmann, p 252
[28] A director of family planning in Maharashtra, quoted in Connelly p321
[29] Connelly pp 233-4
[30] Hartmann, p 252
[31] Hartmann p 236
[32] Hartmann p 127
[33] “Like house prices, immigration could fall too�, David Aaronovitch, The Times, 9/9/2008. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/david_aaronovitch/article4709591.ece
[34] Connelly p 121
[35] Connelly p 373
[36] World Population Prospects, The 2008 Revision; UNPD 2009.
[37] UNPD (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division); “World Population to 2300�, 2004.
[38] UNPD, p 32
[39] Jennifer Pepall; “New Challenges for China’s Urban Farmersâ€� IDRC Reports, Vol 21, No 3, Oct 1993
http://idrinfo.idrc.ca/archive/ReportsINTRA/pdfs/v21n3e/109071.htm
“Mixing farming and urban activity is typical of Chinese cities, each of which is completely self-sufficient in food production.” … “A 1953 study shows that by the early 1930s, Shanghai was able to feed its three million people with food produced within a 100-km radius. The Chinese government has built on this concept of self-sufficiency to keep pace with a growing urban population.”
(Area = 31,425km2/3million = 3000000/31425 = 95.4653937947/km2)
[40] Peter Newman and Isabella Jennings; “Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems�; Island Press 2008
[41] World Bank data from nationmaster.com. See also Joel Cohen; “How many people can the earth support?�, Norton, 1995, p177 and 186.
[42] Sen, A. K. (1999). Development as freedom. Oxford ; New York, Oxford University Press.
[43] Girma Kebbede – Cycles of famine in a country of plenty: The case of Ethiopia (GeoJournal, July, 1988)
[44] Tudge, C. (2007). Feeding people is easy. Pari.
[45] David Molden; Solution for the World’s Water Woes; BBC “Green Roomâ€� article, retrieved March 2009
[46] Hartmann p 248
[47] Friends of the Earth: Briefing on Indonesian Forest Fires, 1997 (updated 2002)
[48] Quoted by John Vidal; “We are fighting for our lives and our dignity�; The Guardian, 13/6/2009
[49] Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, p. 27
[50] Wangari Maathai interviewed by John Vidal, Guardian, Saturday 30 May 2009.
[51] Hartmann, p 26
[52] Hartmann, p 303
[53] Hartmann, p 293
[54] WWF Living Planet Report, 2006
[55] J. Timmons Roberts; “Global Inequality and Climate Change”; Society and Natural Resources, 14:501 – 509, 2001
[56] Danny Dorling, personal communication 28/9/2007, citing Worldmapper.org and WWF Living Planet Report data. See also Dorling; “Injustice: why inequality persists� (Policy Press, April 2010).
Immigrants Are Fighting The Same Bosses
Posted on October 29, 2009
From the NPA website, translated by Workers Liberty.
A new wave of undocumented migrant workers’ strikes, bigger than that of April 2008, began on the 12th of October. Strikers are determined to get papers for all. To win that, solidarity from all workers is necessary.
“Colonised yesterday; exploited today; tomorrow, regularised”
That is the slogan of the thousands of undocumented migrant workers who are taking part in the new strike wave, initiated by the CGT, CFDT, SUD, FSU and UNSA unions and supported by associations such as the Ligue des droits de l’homme [human rights league], Cimade, RESF [a campaign to defend undocumented migrant school students and their family], Femmes Égalité, Autremonde, and Droits devant!!, etc. Since the 12 of October the movement has steadily grown, from 1,000 on the first day to 3,000 a week later. There has been a qualitative and quantitative leap from the strike wave of April 2008, which involved 600 workers and won 2,000 regularisations.
After several days, over 700 “isolated” workers, i.e. workers employed by unscrupulous employment agencies, invaded the Synergie and Adecco agency offices in Paris, 400 occupied the bosses’ canteen, and 380 occupied the offices of a national federation of construction employers. More than 30 workplaces are occupied. On the picket lines which “isolatedâ€� workers have organised, workers of all trades are coming to participate – butchers, bakers, gardeners, etc. At Vitry-sur-Seine (Val-de-Marne), the migrant workers have occupied a tax office in order to denounce the complicity of the state which pockets the taxes and social security contributions of undocumented migrant workers without giving them access to the basic rights of citizens. It is without a doubt the biggest movement of precarious workers ever organised in France.
Undocumented migrant workers are catapulting the inhuman working conditions and exploitation suffered by hundreds of thousands of people into broad daylight. They are highlighting the way capitalism puts workers in the most precarious situations in order to create maximum profit. They are at the heart of the system, employed by both public and private sector bodies, to renovate the Paris Metro or the tram tracks, in 19th Century working conditions. In the security sector, of 150,000 workers, 15,000 have no papers.
This exemplary movement perfectly illustrates the contradictions of capitalism. In order to maintain its profits, this system has for years implemented a policy of the outsourcing and casualisation of labour. This logic is pushed to its extreme with undocumented migrant workers. They suffer a growing state and police repression as Fortress Europe develops – a racist Europe, which lauds the free circulation of capital and allows thousands of people to die every year in the Mediterranean. There have been far more deaths at Gibraltar than at the Berlin Wall, which fell 20 years ago, but has been rebuilt across southern Europe. This situation also gives rise to resistance and revolt!
The striking workers and their supporters oppose the government’s immigration policy. The unions want Besson to formally put an end to the treatment of migrants on a case by case basis by the local prefectures. This is a first step, but the only real solution, to put an end to hyperexploitation, is papers for all. That is an advance that migrant workers cannot win alone. They need the broadest support.
The CGT’s strategy has evolved positively since the April 2008 strikes. From the outset, the movement has been larger and the CGT has been favourable to the setting up of support committees, even if the CGT leaders do not want to be overtaken by events and lose “control”. On different sites, solidarity committees have been set up. In this way the occupation of the Paris tramway was able to continue for a week. The organisations and associations of the 19th and 20th arrondissements brought tents and duvets to the strikers from day one, and the “Chorba for all” organisation supplied food. Without this, it would have been difficult to resist the pressure of the police and the bosses. At Vigneux-sur-Seine (Essonne region), a collection of money was organised, and at Boissy-Saint-Léger, the CGT organised a solidarity barbecue. We must spread these initiatives.
The workplace occupations put the bosses and government in a difficult situation on the question of immigration. It is possible to win victories and regularisations. This strike wave must create a general consciousness that immigration is not a problem. The left must rally around the migrant workers and take up in its turn the old slogan, “French workers; migrant workers; same bosses; same fight!� Migrant workers are opening the way.
Antoine Boulangé
Fresh Concerns For Iranian Trade Union Leader
Posted on October 7, 2009
Deteriorating eye sight prompts fresh concern for the fate of Iranian trade union leader, says Unite
Unite, together with Amnesty International, the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) and the wider international trade union movement, has been actively campaigning for the release of Mansour Osanloo, the Iranian Bus Workers’ trade union leader, and his union deputy, Ebrahim Madadi since their arrest and imprisonment two years ago.
At that time, Mansour was sentenced to five years in prison purely for carrying out his legitimate trade union activities as leader of the Tehran Bus Workers. Madadi received three and a half years on the same charges. Mansour’s arrest was brutal and he suffered serious injuries. It took an international campaign to ensure he had access to the appropriate treatment, which came belatedly, when he was in severe danger of permanently losing sight in one eye.
Mansour is a prisoner of conscience, yet he has been moved to a prison where he is in the midst of criminals convicted of serious crimes such as murder. His health has again deteriorated and yet he has been denied permission to leave the prison for treatment – for his pre-existing conditions – and for the new ones gained through the denial of access to treatment. This is in spite of the fact that the prison’s medical examiner has called for medical leave for Mansour to be treated outside prison. Likewise, Madadi also has eye problems and is suffering from a prostate condition and diabetes.
Graham Stevenson, Unite national organiser for transport, and member of the ITF Executive Board, said: “Unite is appalled to hear this sad news with regard to our good friends and colleagues, Mansour and Ebrahim. We call on the Iranian authorities to grant them immediate access to medical treatment and to free them unconditionally from jail.
“They have committed no crime, but were unjustly arrested as they carried out their trade union duties in representing the bus drivers of Tehran. It is now time to show compassion and release both Mansour and Ebrahim before their health is damaged irreversibly.
“I call on our members to send off a message, via the Amnesty International website, to the Iranian authorities deploring the treatment of Mansour and calling on the Iranian authorities to free him unconditionally.�
The link is http://amnesty.org.uk/actions_details.asp?ActionID=628
ENDS
For further information contact Moira O’Shaughnessy (International department) on 020 7611 2631 or Ashraf Choudhury in the Unite Press Office on 020 7420 8914 or 07980 224761.
COP15 No Borders Call To Action
Posted on October 7, 2009
This is a call out to action to international no borders groups during the COP 15 in Copenhagen!
Starting December 7, 2009
Climate change is now the ULTIMATE Shock and Awe. It encompasses all of life now, and is the new spectacle. The climate change spectacle is the complete reconstruction and revitalization of capitalism and all of its domination, hierarchies, exploitation, racism, sexism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, commodifications, privatizations, oppressions, repressions, murders, lies, and greed. Climate change will be used to terrorize us in every way we have been terrorized before, but encompassing all the single factors into one. In the name of security, everything that living things depend is on its way to being commodified and privatized, to push us even further and possibly completely into pure Milton Friedman ‘Chicago School’ of fundamental capitalist corporatism.
We can’t not just think of this as a climate issue, it is much much more. Water, air, food, and genetic life is being privatized before our eyes. And these human rights are and will be used under the climate change banner to put up borders and go to war. Complex surveilance systems are being put in place to keep the people from below away from its privatized riches. Indigenous, small farmers and people from below are being pushed off their lands by corporations, and massive natural disasters that are making people escape to safer regions. Also, their is the prospect of military intervention in the future to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics. Military experts are saying that climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions. Sections of the political and military establishment are planning for the consequences of climate change and are developing military strategies to deal with it.
The debate over climate change and global warming management at the UN is a struggle among the national ruling establishments for their own interests on the international diplomatic stage. While there is concern that climate change can have unforeseen political and economic consequences, these competing capitalist states have no means of seriously addressing the issue, other than making preparations for cracking down on social unrest.
So, in closing. If we don’t start attacking climate change from its roots, and seeing that the system we are in cannot and never intended to solve climate change, then we will be doomed to even more repressive and oppressive regimes, and even a rollback on the rights that were worked so hard for by our comrades in the past and it is already happening! They have divided and conquered us for a long time! But now we have a chance to come together and fight this under the same banner to stop the revitalisation of capitalism and the borders in which it creates.
See You On The Barricades!
European Immigration Policies: Human Rights Abuses Denounced
Posted on September 24, 2009
Fortress Europe reinforces its borders.
« go back — keep looking »European Ministers in charge of immigration met Monday in Brussels. French Immigration Minister, Eric Besson, announced that he favoured the creation of an European immigration police. The project has been criticised by human rights organisations who have pointed out loopholes in the plan’s related policies. UNHCR has also expressed serious reservations about the same issue, while warning France about its decision to dismantle “the jungle”, a makeshift immigrant camp in Calais, this week.
Already a fortress, Europe is still reinforcing its borders. French Immigration Minister, Eric Besson Monday presented a project proposal on the creation of an European border police to his European counterparts. The proposal indicates that the unit would be attached to Frontex, — otherwise known as Frontières extérieures or External Borders and officially called European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union — established in 2005 and based in Warsaw, Poland. Frontex is in charge of the European Union’s border security. Currently the agency has under its umbrella two main units; Rapid (land) Border Intervention Teams (RABITs) and Coastal Patrols known as European Patrols Network (EPN), composed of border guards from the various Schengen member states. “The plan does not offer anything new, it rather deepens and consolidates a process” whose motivational force “we strongly condemn,” said Patrick Delouvin, a director from the French division of Amnesty International.
Amnesty International is particularly critical with respect to the deportation of refugees to Greece in accordance with the Dublin II Regulation. The regulation requires asylum or illegal immigrants to be processed in the first European Union member state they come to. Greece, according to a communiqué from the NGO, has “deficiencies” in its asylum procedure.
Loopholes that have caused numerous human rights breaches are generally blamed for the lack of cooperation among many EU peripheral states. Monday, both the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the European Commission criticised the deportation of migrants to Libya, a country that is neither signatory to the Geneva Convention for the protection of human rights nor has the “required conditions” to accommodate them. Human Rights Watch has also denounced the “mal-treatments and beatings” of immigrants in “overcrowded camps with appalling sanitary conditions.” All these conditions did not serve as a deterring factor when Eric Besson decided to “ask Libya to participate in Frontex operations in the Mediterranean”, Patrick Delouvin denounces. In a rather contradictory move at a press conference Monday in Brussels, Mr. Besson demanded for more to be done to strengthen the role of UNHCR in Libya and Turkey, two countries highly criticised for their poor human rights record.
The jungle cleared
The European ministers’ meeting took place in the backdrop of a controversial remark that was made, last week, by the French Interior Minister and former Immigration Minister Brice Hortefeux. The remark, deemed racist by many, was made as he posed for photographs with a young man of north African descent during a party function. Before the Minister’s remark, someone was heard in the background saying “Amin is Catholic. He consumes pork and drinks alcohol.” The minister responded: “He doesn’t match the prototype. We always need one. It is when there are lots of them that there are problems.” The remarks have been widely condemned as racist, but according to Mr. Hortefeux he was only referring to the number of photographs that was being taken and nothing else.
The meeting also coincides with a September 17 announcement about the closure of the “jungle” by the end of the week. The “jungle” is a makeshift migrant camp in Calais, northern France. The main objective of migrants at the camp is to reach the United Kingdom.
According to Patrick Delouvin, “the repeated crackdowns against makeshift shelters inhabited by refugees have been a cause of concern since April.” The number of refugees around Calais has, reportedly, gone down from 700 to 300, and the destruction of the remnants of their makeshift camps cannot resolve the bigger problem, according to benevolent organisations that take care of them.
Quoted by Nouvelobs.com, Father Jean-Pierre Boutoille, member of C-sur, points his finger at French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had ordered the closure of a shelter at Sangatte “without making room for a replacement, without finding another solution.” In a meeting with Eric Besson, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres “insisted” “on the need to protect” refugees “particularly the several unaccompanied minors,” reports the UN. A statement released by French ruling party UMP gives a somewhat different version. The end of the Red Cross camp, according to Nicolas Sarkozy, marks “the beginning of the fight against the exploitation of human misery and its (related) consequences.”
