Bro,
Just look at Sudan and Mauritania,the way black people are treated in these countries,in our own age ,is among the most depressing events taking place daily in our continent.Remember ethnic cleansing in Mauritania,with more than 50 % of its population been Black African,have been going on for a long time now.And as you rightly pointed out,not a single African leader is marking it a political issue.Here too we have African leaders,like our own government,who do not even want to know of the suffering of our black brothers and sisters in these countries,instead they are more concern with the "check "diplomacy.Mauritanian diplomacy  in the Gambia can easily lead one to believed that they are concern with the educational development in our country,whiles denying black people in their own country everything that can make life easy for them and even to the extend of deporting them to Senegal claiming that they are migrants,many of these people could be found in refuge camps in Senegal and remember in this very country,Mauritania,lies the ruins of the Capital of one of the great African empires,the Ghana Empire.Sudanese have even been running an aid agency in the Gambia,whiles depriving millions of black people  living in that country their basic human rights,they are been starved,they are been murdered etc.Arab racism is an issue,that our black brothers and sisters in these countries(Arab dominated African Countries)have been struggling for decades to put  on the political agenda of our Continent.There are few of us out side these countries who are aware of the suffering of our poeple living in  these Racist countries and our leaders will not even want to know.How many Gambians are aware of the fact that more than 50% of the population in Mauritania are Black Africans.My first encounter with racism was in a so-called Arab country and in Africa.
Yes you are very right,there are People who claimed to be  Pan Africanist,and have done everything to deny Arab genocide and racism in the continent,their understanding of the African past is either corrupted or not deepen.Arab racism should be equally our concern as white racism,that is why it is the duty of all of us to make the voices of our struggling brothers and sisters in these countries be heard.

For Freedom
Saiks
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Hamjatta Kanteh 
  To: [log in to unmask] 
  Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2000 5:29 AM
  Subject: Between Tripoli and Banjul


  Here is a very depressing report from the Economist on the Libyan massacre of Black African immigrants in the recent spate of ethnic cleansing that Libyan RACISTS perpetrated on BLACK folks whilst sparing their ARAB cousins. It is interesting, that whilst we are busy condemning Jews for killing Palestinians [Arabs or Muslims] the same ethnic cleansing goes un-condemned in our own backyard. Interesting because the contempt that most Jews, at any rate in Israel, hold Palestinians is the same contempt that Black immigrants in Arab lands face each day. Ask anyone who has had the misfortune of going to Arab lands as an immigrant. Stories of human rights abuses, racism, slavery and the rest of the norms we thought the we had left with the 20th. century, abound in plenitude. Interesting again because when it comes to Arab racism and the history of how black people suffered from the hands of Arabs, we seem afflicted with historical amnesia; witness Pan Africanists discoursing slavery: Slavery for them is European marauders forcibly snatching off Africans to work in far-distant lands not equatable or even juxtaposable to the equally and morally disgusting Arab perpetration of slavery in the past and even to a lesser degree slavery in this supposedly modern age. If the stories we keep hearing from people who have been unfortunate enough to land themselves in Arab lands and from media outlets are true - as i have no doubt they are - then i will be very bold in contending that Black folks, at any rate in the modern age have had better treatment from White folks than from Arabs. It is a matter of every reality that the decency and respect that Blacks have earned in the West can never be equated with the pernicious and terminally incorrigible racial discriminiation Arabs feed our Black brothers on a daily basis. Read the attached report from the Economist and find out for yourself.
  Less visibly, and indeed, ironically, Black African leaders were not seen doing Jammeh-style rabid condemnation and indeed, largely mute on this massacre of their brothers and sisters in the hands of Arab racists in Libya. As the Economist reported, "Some African governments - the benefactors of the colonel's pan-African policy - have kept their critisism mute, amid allegations that ministers have pocketed Libya's offer of compensation." In effect they had already been bought by the cheque book diplomacy of the evil and tyrannous Gaddafi masquerading as a Pan Africanist. Where is our own Jammeh [another benefactor of Libyan cheque book diplomacy and the guy who went after the British for the murder of Biram Sey]? Busy reading trying to read his monthly Swiss Bank accounts statements of which no doubt Libyan bribery abounds? So, literally he had sold the life of any Gambian that has either died or sustained injuries in the hands of Libyan racists. Where is that indefatigible Jammeh mental wet-nurse and legendary pen pusher, Sidat "if the price is right" Jobe? Still drunk and snoring from the effects of his ill-gotten and corruptible influence in this morally degrading gov't? One thing we can be rest assured, is that Jammeh and his intellectual bandits wouldn't raise a voice in disgust at the callous murder of Black African immigrants in Libya recently. The devil in Tripoli has paid for the silence of the devil in Banjul.
  I, must pause however, to refute the Economists labelling of Gaddafi's policy towards Africa as Pan Africanist. Whatever else we choose to call Gaddafi's policy towards Black African countries, only a political naivete would call it Pan Africanist. As the Economist, in that very report subtly hinted at, Gadaffi policy towards Black Africans has been that of using them to further his own selfish ends. All Africans have to show for Gadaffi's morally and politically corrupt policy towards Black Africans is Liberia, Sierra Leone, Casamance, Gambia and Bissau. In virtually all the countries he had acted or intervened as a benefactor, it had either ended in a vicious cycle of civil wars or never-ending brutalisation and repression as the Sierra Leone and the Gambia evince as case studies in the latter and former attributes respectively.
  I can only hope sincerely that we will take heed and never flinch from condemning Arab racism as we are prone to when we hear reports of White racist acts of repression. And that, that most politically correct African, SA's president, Thabo Mbeki, would in the coming year call another tedious racist conference, this time focussing attention on the equally morally repugnant and stultifying Arab racism.
  Hamjatta Kanteh
   
  *****************************************
    
                                                       LIBYA and AFRICA
                                                                             FROM THE ECONOMIST October 14th. - 20th. 2000

   


   

  Planeloads of bodies, dead and alive, flew back to West Africa from Tripoli this week, after Libya's worst outbreak of anti-foreigner violence since the expulsion of Italians and Jews in Muammar Qaddafi's coup in 1969.  Survivors told of pogroms.

   

  Emeka Nwanko, a 26-year-old Nigerian welder, was one of hundreds of thousands of black victims of the Libyan mob.  He fled as gangs trashed his workshop.  His friend was blinded, as Libya gangs wielding machetes roamed the African townships.  Bodies were hacked and dumped on motorways.  A Chadian diplomat was lynched and Niger's embassy put to the torch.  Some Nigerians attacked their own embassy after it refused refuge to nationals without proper papers - the vast majority.

   

  Libyans sheltering Africans were warned that their homes would be next.  Some of Libya's indigenous 1m black citizens were mistaken for migrants, and dragged from taxis.  In parts of Benghazi, blacks were barred from public transport and hospitals.  Pitched battles erupted in Zawiya, a town near Tripoli that is ringed with migrant shantytowns.  Diplomats said that at least 150 people were killed, 16 of them Libyans.  The all-powerful security forces intervened by shooting in the air.

   

  African migrants, unfairly blamed for the disaster, were detained en masse.  They once numbered over 1m but diplomats say that they have mostly disappeared from the streets, and are in hiding or in camps pending expulsion.  Over the past forthnight, hundreds of thousands of black migrants have been herded into trucks and buses, driven in convoy towards the border with Niger and Chad, 1600km (1000 miles) south of Tripoli, and dumped in the desert.

   

  Migrants from countries without land likes to Libya, including 5,000 Nigerians and nearly the same number of Ghanaians, are being airlifted out.  Hundreds more are languishing in three scrubland camps ringing Tripoli airport waiting for flights.  There is no medical care for the black Africans, many of whom have broken limbs or stab wounds.

   

  Anti-black violence had been simmering for months, fired by an economic crisis.  Colonel Qaddafi heads Africa's richest state in terms in income per person.  This year oil will earn him $11 billion.  But Libyans, feeding their families monthly salaries of $170, see the money squandered on foreign adventures, the latest of which is the colonel's pan-African policy.  As billions flowed out in aid, and visa-less migrants flowed in, Libyans feared they were being turned into a minority in their own land.  Church attendance soared in this Muslim state.  So did crime and AIDS.

   

  A history of racism fanned the flames.  Libyans were slave-trading until the 1930s and, under Italian rule, they saw themselves as Mediterranean, calling Africans "chocalatinos".  Black-bashing has become a popular afternoon sport for Libya's unemployed youths.  The rumour that a Nigerian had raped a Libyan girl in Zawiya was enough to spark a spree of ethnic cleansing.

   

  Some African governments - the benefactors of the colonel's pan-African policy - have kept their critisism mute, amid allegations that ministers have pocketed Libya's offer of compensation.  Nigeria's minister for co-operation, Dapo Sarumi, has described the deportees as "an embarrassment".  Chad and Sudan have made robust protests.  But President Jerry Rawlings of Ghana was alone in taking action.  He flew to Tripoli on October 7th and brought 250 Ghanaian workers home the next day.

   

  Libyans will be hoping that they have just ousted the migrants, but have also ousted Qaddafi's hated pan-African policy.  Only last month, in front of 11 African leaders, he was preaching open borders and single currency.  The United States of Africa was due to be declared in his home-town of Sirte next March.  It is now hard to see African heads of state rushing back to Libya.

   

  Observers detect yet another U-turn in the offing.  As his Africa policy unravels, Colonel Qaddafi is back befriending the Arabs, with visits this week to Jordan, Syria and even his old foe, Saudi Arabia.  In their rampage on migrant workers, the Libyan mob spared Arabs, including the 750,000 Egyptians.  Now that the UN's sanctions have gone, the African states who dared break the air boycott have served their purpose.  The more lily-livered Arab states, who shunned Libya, can now perhaps be forgiven, under the latest banner, Arab-African unity.

   

   

   

   

   


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