Shining India

“Violence runs through this ’stable’ India, built on poverty and injustice“, writes Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian, “The country the west loves to call a peaceful, capitalist success has a terrorism death toll second only to Iraq.”

The Indian media tends obsess over the “foreign hand”, typically Pakistani, behind everything that ever goes wrong there, ever.  But India’s rapid development since its “liberalisation” in the early nineties has created massive inequality, and massive bitterness among the poor.  In the country, the maoist Naxalite insurgency provides an outlet for this (“the biggest internal security threat to India since independence”), but in the cities the conflict is more racialised.  The timely rise of violent Hindu nationalism has reinforced the racism of the security forces, and made sure that that the main enemies have always been the Muslims.  Thus has the War Of Terror been imported into the subcontinent.

What Africa Needs…

An invasion of Zimbabwe wouldn’t help anyone, I get tired of explaining. It was his role in the struggle for independence that won Mugabe the people’s trust in the first place, and it was through selling out to become the local enforcer of the IMF that he lost it in the mid 90s.

There’s a standard response to this kind of objection: do you want another Rwanda? Surely those savages wouldn’t have been able to kill each other in such numbers if the civilised folk of the “International Community” had rolled in with tanks and bombs.

Well, a report’s just come out from the Rwandan government, accusing France of directly aiding and taking part in the 1994 genocide. To what extent the report can be substantiated remains to be seen, but it has long been accepted that France, at the very least, turned a blind eye to what was being done by it’s proxies. “At a minimum”, says Amnesty International. Those who issued the report are and have been closer to the US. The rivalry between the francophone and anglophone empires have long been played out along ethnic lines, and those ethnic divisions, in turn, were at the very least exacerbated and entrenched by the Belgian Empire’s own version of apartheid rule.

So no, I don’t want to see another Rwanda. Ever. That’s why the boys in blue berets need to stay well away from Zimbabwe, Darfur and all. What Africa needs is not intervention from above, but revolution from below.