• Basil Risbridger Davidson, historian and campaigner, born 9 November 1914; died 9 July 2010, aged 95

Source: Scotman.com

Journalist and historian who wrote several books on the current plight of Africa

A JOURNALIST, an expert on Portuguese Africa, historian, acclaimed writer and member of the British Secret Service, Basil Davidson managed to squeeze every last inch out of his 95 years.

Born in Bristol to Thomas and Jessie Davidson, Basil Risbridger Davidson harboured ambitions of being a writer from a young age. He left school at 16, but instead of following his dream he landed in the north of England working in banana advertising.

In 1931, after moving to London, he was employed by the Economist, which posted him to Paris as a reporter. His work took him all over Europe and Davidson showed a gift for languages.

He remained with the publication until the rise of Hitler and in December 1939 he joined the British Army, where his experiences and skills were identified by the Secret Service.

He was posted to Budapest, working for the Secret Intelligence Service, a section of MI6, under the guise of a news service commissioner.

His job was to rouse the resistance in Hungary, and in his enthusiasm to aid the war effort he fell foul of the British Ambassador, who was less than enthusiastic that Davidson was using the Embassy cellar to hoard high explosives.

The Nazi march across Europe forced Davidson to flee to Yugoslavia in April 1941, and shortly after he was caught and detained by the Italian army. His release came as part of a prisoner exchange and from 1942 he was chief of the Special Operations Executive in Cairo. He was also the supervisor of James Klugmann, who would go on to fame as a writer and historian of the British Communist Party.

Davidson was a tall and powerful individual, and such physical traits served him well as the war heightened in intensity. His job in Cairo was to operate Yugoslav agent logistics, sending operatives to both the royalists and Tito’s communists. It was the communists that Davidson would end up joining in the harsh terrain of the Danube valley, fighting with the guerillas.

Davidson was transferred to Liguria, Italy, in 1945 where he was liaison officer with the partisans. They managed to take Genoa while awaiting back up from Allied forces.

Despite his busy war, Davidson found time to marry Marion in 1943, shortly before he was posted back to the sharp end. They had three children; Nicholas, Keir and James.

Davidson’s military career came to a close at the end of the Second World War, by which time he had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel, received the Military Cross, the US army bronze star and had been mentioned in dispatches twice.

He returned to his chosen career and was the Paris correspondent for the Times until 1947, when he became European leader writer while continuing to write freelance.

His work for the Secret Service earned Davidson plaudits for his bravery, but the ease with which he worked with communists also gained him a reputation in the halls of government as a “fellow traveller” and he was once described by the Foreign Office as “dangerous”. This label followed his career, and the government put the brakes on his appointment as editor of Unesco, aware that his writings on Africa were popular in Moscow.

It was his writings on Africa for which Davidson’s reputation was largely built, and at the time of his death he had written more than 30 books on the continent. His style was predominantly that of a historian and it was African history and the consequences of external involvement that concerned him most of all. His textbooks are still in wide circulation in both east and west Africa.

Known for his attention to detail, Davidson wrote passionately about the pre-Colonial achievements of the African people, and the subsequent negative influence of European administrations. He was also particularly scathing of effects of the slave trade on Africans.

The liberation wars of the 1980s made African travel significantly more dangerous and Davidson turned his attention to the more theoretical questions concerning the future of the continent and its people.

In 1984 he branched out in to the world of television, producing the series Africa for Channel 4. His intention was to change the public perceptions of what they believed Africa to be: a largely famine ridden hell-hole run by corrupt and lawless dictators. He wanted to abandon the idea that Africa and its peoples were in some way backward, an unsophisticated.

The series won the Gold Award, at the International Film and Television Festival of New York in 1984. While it may have achieved its goal short term, the Band Aid appeal of the next year will have reversed that work as the world was then subjected to the horror of a starving Ethiopia. His writings included: The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (1992); the collection of essays The Search for Africa (1994); and his final book, West Africa Before the Colonial Era: A History to 1850 (1998).

Davidson was the recipient of many literary awards. In 1960 his The Lost Cities of Africa won the Anisfield-Wolf Award for best book. His dedication to African history won him the 1970 Gold Medal from Haile Selassies and in 1976 he won the Medalha Amilcar Cabral.

A respected intellectual Davidson, was recognised by universities around the world.

He was an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Oriental and African Studies and was awarded honorary degrees or appointments by the Open University, Edinburgh, Turin, Bristol, California, Ghana and Manchester.

Davidson is survived by his wife Marion and three sons.

Thank you for all your work… RIP

He was one of the few to tell the true story of Africa.

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Basil Davidson – Nile Valley Civilization (origins)

This is a MUST see!!!!!

White people don’t have to bring Africans OUT of Africa to MAKE the into Nigroes and Nigresses any more. They have been MANUFACTURING Niggers “Inside” Africa for a long time. – Isa Ibrahim.

…Truer words have NEVER been spoken. Sheep in wolves clothes that are black are sometimes more treacherous and dangerous than the oppressor. – Ras~

Where is the money?

Audit: US cannot account for $8.7B in Iraqi funds

BAGHDAD – A U.S. audit has found that the Pentagon cannot account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraq reconstruction money, spotlighting Iraqi complaints that there is little to show for the massive funds pumped into their cash-strapped, war-ravaged nation.

The $8.7 billion in question was Iraqi money managed by the Pentagon, not part of the $53 billion that Congress has allocated for rebuilding. It’s cash that Iraq, which relies on volatile oil revenues to fuel its spending, can ill afford to lose.

“Iraq should take legal action to get back this huge amount of money,” said Sabah al-Saedi, chairman of the Parliamentary Integrity Committee. The money “should be spent for rebuilding the country and providing services for this poor nation.”

The report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction accused the Defense Department of lax oversight and weak controls, though not fraud.

“The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss,” the audit said.

The Pentagon has repeatedly come under fire for apparent mismanagement of the reconstruction effort — as have Iraqi officials themselves.

Seven years after the U.S.-led invasion, electricity service is spotty, with generation capacity falling far short of demand. Fuel shortages are common and unemployment remains high, a testament to the country’s inability to create new jobs or attract foreign investors.

Complaints surfaced from the start of the war in 2003, when soldiers failed to secure banks, armories and other facilities against looters. Since then the allegations have only multiplied, including investigations of fraud, awarding of contracts without the required government bidding process and allowing contractors to charge exorbitant fees with little oversight, or oversight that came too late.

But the latest report comes at a particularly critical time for Iraq. Four months after inconclusive elections, a new government has yet to be formed, raising fears that insurgents will tap into the political vacuum to stir sectarian unrest.

In a sign that insurgents are still intent on igniting sectarian violence, at least six people were killed and dozens more wounded when a female suicide bomber blew herself up near a checkpoint in the holy city of Karbala, local police said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Thousands of Shiite pilgrims are converging on the city, 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad, for an important religious holiday marking the birth of a Shiite saint known as the “Hidden Imam” who disappeared in the ninth century. Such mass displays of devotion by Shiites have often been targeted by Sunni extremists.

Iraqi lawmakers met Tuesday, but for the second time this month failed to convene a parliament session, leaving wide open the question of when the new government will take shape.

Underscoring its financial challenges, the International Monetary Fund in March approved a $3.6 billion loan to help Iraq meet its obligations. Iraq is projected to run a deficit through 2011, according to analysts, with a possibility of a surplus following that hinging on oil prices.

Iraq took a financial hit in 2008 as oil prices plummeted on the back of the global financial meltdown. While those prices have since rebounded, Iraq remains at the mercy of international oil markets, with revenues from petroleum sales accounting for over 90 percent of its government budget.

The $9.1 billion in question came from the Development Fund for Iraq, which was set up by the U.N. Security Council in 2003. The DFI includes revenues from Iraq’s oil and gas exports, as well as frozen Iraqi assets and surplus funds from the defunct, Saddam Hussein-era U.N. oil-for-food program.

Iraq had given the U.S. authorization to tap into the fund, which is held in New York, for humanitarian and reconstruction efforts, withdrawing that approval in December 2007.

With the establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq shortly after the start of the U.S. invasion in 2003 until mid-2004, about $20 billion was placed into the account. The $9.1 billion audited by the Iraq reconstruction inspector general were funds withdrawn from that account between 2004 and 2007.

The report found that the Defense Department could not “readily account for its obligations, expenditures and remaining balances associated” with the DFI. At issue was $8.7 billion, or 95 percent of the withdrawn funds.

Of this amount, the Pentagon could not account at all for $2.6 billion, according to the audit.

Tracing the rest of the money is difficult because of a combination of lax financial controls and management, the failure to designate an organization to oversee the spending and the failure to set up and deposit the funds in special accounts, as required by the Treasury Department.

The Defense Department, in responses attached to the audit, said it agreed with the report’s recommendations to establish better guidelines for monitoring such funds, including appointing an oversight organization mostly likely by November.

The failure to properly manage billions in reconstruction funds has also hobbled the troubled U.S.-led effort to rebuild Afghanistan. About $60 billion have poured into Afghanistan since 2001 in hopes of bringing electricity, clean water, jobs, roads and education to the crippled country.

The U.S. alone has committed $51 billion to the project since 2001, and plans to raise the stakes to $71 billion over the next year — more than it has spent on reconstruction in Iraq since 2003.

An Associated Press investigation showed that the results so far — or lack of them — threaten to do more harm than good. The number of Afghans with access to electricity has increased from 6 percent in 2001 to only about 10 percent now, far short of the goal of providing power to 65 percent of urban and 25 percent of rural households by the end of this year.

As an example of the problems, a $100 million diesel-fueled power plant was built with the goal of delivering electricity to more than 500,000 residents of the capital, Kabul. The plant’s costs tripled to $305 million as construction lagged a year behind schedule. The plant now often sits idle because the Afghans were able to import cheaper power from neighboring Uzbekistan before the plant came online.

___

Associated Press writers Mazin Yahya in Baghdad and Robert H. Reid in Kabul contributed to this report.

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Israel and Palestine: Beyond Violence and Non-Violence: Resistance as a Culture

By Ramzy Baroud Resistance is not a band of armed men hell-bent on wreaking havoc. It is not a cell of terrorists scheming ways to detonate buildings.True resistance is a culture.It is a collective retort to oppression. Understanding the real nature of resistance, however, is not easy. No newsbyte could be thorough enough to explain why people, as a people, resist. Even if such an arduous task was possible, the news might not want to convey it, as it would directly clash with mainstream interpretations of violence and non-violent resistance. The Afghanistan story must remain committed to the same language: al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Lebanon must be represented in terms of a menacing Iran-backed Hizbullah. Palestine’s Hamas must be forever shown as a militant group sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state. Any attempt at offering an alternative reading is tantamount to sympathizing with terrorists and justifying violence. The deliberate conflation and misuse of terminology has made it almost impossible to understand, and thus to actually resolve bloody conflicts. Even those who purport to sympathize with resisting nations often contribute to the confusion. Activists from Western countries tend to follow an academic comprehension of what is happening in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. Thus certain ideas are perpetuated: suicide bombings bad, non-violent resistance good; Hamas rockets bad, slingshots good; armed resistance bad, vigils in front of Red Cross offices good. Many activists will quote Martin Luther King Jr., but not Malcolm X. They will infuse a selective understanding of Gandhi, but never of Guevara. This supposedly ‘strategic’ discourse has robbed many of what could be a precious understanding of resistance – as both concept and culture. Between the reductionst mainstream understanding of resistance as violent and terrorist and the ‘alternative’ defacing of an inspiring and compelling cultural experience, resistance as a culture is lost. The two overriding definitions offer no more than narrow depictions. Both render those attempting to relay the viewpoint of the resisting culture as almost always on the defensive. Thus we repeatedly hear the same statements: no, we are not terrorists; no, we are not violent, we actually have a rich culture of non-violent resistance; no, Hamas is not affiliated with al-Qaeda; no, Hizbullah is not an Iranian agent. Ironically, Israeli writers, intellectuals and academicians own up to much less than their Palestinian counterparts, although the former tend to defend aggression and the latter defend, or at least try to explain their resistance to aggression. Also ironic is the fact that instead of seeking to understand why people resist, many wish to debate about how to suppress their resistance. By resistance as a culture, I am referencing Edward Said’s elucidation of “culture (as) a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration.” When cultures resist, they don’t scheme and play politics. Nor do they sadistically brutalize. Their decisions as to whether to engage in armed struggle or to employ non-violent methods, whether to target civilians or not, whether to conspire with foreign elements or not are all purely strategic. They are hardly of direct relevance to the concept or resistance itself. Mixing between the two suggests is manipulative or plain ignorant. If resistance is “the action of opposing something that you disapprove or disagree with”, then a culture of resistance is what occurs when an entire culture reaches this collective decision to oppose that disagreeable element – often a foreign occupation. The decision is not a calculated one. It is engendered through a long process in which self-awareness, self-assertion, tradition, collective experiences, symbols and many more factors interact in specific ways. This might be new to the wealth of that culture’s past experiences, but it is very much an internal process. It’s almost like a chemical reaction, but even more complex since it isn’t always easy to separate its elements. Thus it is also not easy to fully comprehend, and, in the case of an invading army, it is not easily suppressed. This is how I tried to explain the first Palestinian uprising of 1987, which I lived in its entirely in Gaza: “It’s not easy to isolate specific dates and events that spark popular revolutions. Genuine collective rebellion cannot be rationalized though a coherent line of logic that elapses time and space; its rather a culmination of experiences that unite the individual to the collective, their conscious and subconscious, their relationships with their immediate surroundings and with that which is not so immediate, all colliding and exploding into a fury that cannot be suppressed.” (My Father Was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story) Foreign occupiers tend to fight popular resistance through several means. One includes a varied amount of violence aiming to disorient, destroy and rebuild a nation to any desired image (read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine). Another strategy is to weaken the very components that give a culture its unique identity and inner strengths – and thus defuse the culture’s ability to resist. The former requires firepower, while the latter can be achieved through soft means of control. Many ‘third world’ nations that boast of their sovereignty and independence might in fact be very much occupied, but due to their fragmented and overpowered cultures – through globalization, for example – they are unable to comprehend the extent of their tragedy and dependency. Others, who might effectively be occupied, often possess a culture of resistance that makes it impossible for their occupiers to achieve any of their desired objectives. In Gaza, Palestine, while the media speaks endlessly of rockets and Israeli security, and debates who is really responsible for holding Palestinians in the strip hostage, no heed is paid to the little children living in tents by the ruins of homes they lost in the latest Israeli onslaught. These kids participate in the same culture of resistance that Gaza has witnessed over the course of six decades. In their notebooks they draw fighters with guns, kids with slingshots, women with flags, as well as menacing Israeli tanks and warplanes, graves dotted with the word ‘martyr’, and destroyed homes. Throughout, the word ‘victory’ is persistently used. When I was in Iraq, I witnessed a local version of these kids’ drawings. And while I have yet to see Afghani children’s scrapbooks, I can easily imagine their content too. Ramzy Baroud is editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers and journals worldwide. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London). His newbook is, “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London).

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The Safe Cosmetic Act of 2010 is Not the Solution

July 30th, 2010