building for city migrants is fuelling massive resentment in South Africa's poorest communities. South Africa is in the throes of the worldwide process of urbanisation. Given the lack of a workable plan for rural land reform, the tendency for rural dwellers to migrate to towns and bigger cities is rising steadily.
People moving in search of respite from the abject poverty and deprivation they experience in the countryside find no shelter and no means of subsistence in the urban areas.
The recent housing probThe 'Red October' campaign
launched last autumn by the
South African Communist Party
(SACP) under the slogan 'Land,
Food, Jobs' is generating tension between the SACP and
some social movements of
landless people.
The campaign's aim is to
build support for a governmentsponsored national land
summit which will debate ways
to speed up agrarian reform,
and for a people's land conference to enable people's organisations to craft a common
platform of demands for the
land summit. mal' in the county Somewhere along the line 1.6 million households are left out of the equation.
In 2004 the national housing department adopted a programme for upgrading informal settlements. Part of this programme involves the rolling out of a new 'human in accelerating the N2 Gateway project was prompted by the fire that devastated the Joe Slovo squatter camp. Under normal circumstances officials would have reasoned that they did not want to raise the expectations' of the homeless - some of whom have been on waitThe occupation forces have completely failed in their promise to reconstruct the country, despite putting aside huge sums from oil revenues Phil Hearse Iraqi Nation Security Advisor Mowaffak Al-Rubaie said on May 2 that US and allied troops could be out of Iraq by early 2006.
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"I would be very surprised if they (the US-led multinational forces) don't think very seriously of starting pulling out probably by the end of the first half of next year" AlRubaie said in an interview with CNN.
Such a statement defies everything we know about US intentions and the situation in Iraq. The US has no intention of pulling all its troops out of Iraq, even if the insurgency ends, because it wants 12 huge military bases to secure Iraqi oil and make Iraq the pivot of its military operations in the Middle East.
But of course the insurgency has not ended. US military deaths have topped 1500 and continue on a daily basis. Around 500 Iraqis are being killed each month, many of them Iraqi army of police trainees.
Jawad al-Khalisi, secretary general of the Iraq National Foundation Congress has a much more realistic account. Iraq today, he says is "a taste of hell created by the US project in the Middle East." Key aspects of the present situation are the following:
The new government
US troops meeting the people in the ruins of Falluja Insurgency keeps US forces bogged down Iraq's new president Talabani finally established at the end of April is a patchwork compromise, riven with contradictions, and cannot bring political stability.
The occupation forces have completely failed in their promise to reconstruct the country, despite putting aside huge sums from oil revenues, the whereabouts of which are unknown (probably spent on the military).
Millions of people lack basic services like water and sewage, millions are unemployed and millions live in dire poverty.
Many Iraqis claim that the US is following an active policy of promoting ethnic division, and further suspect that the sectarian bombings, aimed at Shias and Kurds, уПАТ are part of a 'strategy of tension in which the US is the main driving force.
Widespread military actions against the occupying forces are being concealed by the US military, and are not reported in the western media - whereas sectarian bombings are always fully reported. US military deaths now top 1500, with more than 800 being killed in the last year.
US and British forces are carrying out regular nighttime 'sweeps', involving huge numbers of house searches and arresting hundreds of
Desertions in the British and US armies are at a high point, for the simple reason that soldiers don't want to go to Iraq. The whereabouts of more than 500 British soldiers is currently unknown; the number of US desertions is not reported.
The • US's top soldier, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers, said at the end of April that Iraq's insurgency is about as capable as it was a year ago. He told a news conference on April 26 the level of attacks is fairly consistent, going up during some periods and down to a level of about 50 per day at other times, but not usually below that.
The new government of Shia Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari, formed at the end of April, contains three main forces - the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, the Democratic Patriotic Alliance of Kurdistan and various tiny groups of Corrupt proAmerican politicians.
Of course it is United Iraqi Alliance, whose main inspirer
is the senior Shite cleric Ali
al-Sistani, which is the majority and holds the whip hand.
A key factor will be the
unfolding of al-Sistani's strategy. His long-term objective is
the creation of an Islamic
state, on the Iranian model.
The real question is
whether this is compatible
with a long-term US military
presence, and whether Sistani
will trade Islamic law and
Shiite domination of social
life for US military bases and
US sovereignty over the oil supplies.
Such a deal is not impossible - the Saudi state is more fundamentalist and reactionary than Iran, and the ruling House of Saud has had no problem with US bases and oil companies in their country (give or take the odd local difficulty with a renegade from their number called Osama Bin Laden).
The new prime minister himself has said that US troops should stay as long as they are necessary, whether that means months, years or decades. It seems unlikely that he would adopt this position without the agreement of the al-Sistani and his team.
For al-Jafari and the Shite clerics who stand behind him, such a deal is incredibly risky. In early April hundreds of thousands of Shi'as from the Baghdad area demonstrated against the US occupation. They were mobilised by the Moqtada al-Sadr, head of the Mahdi army, and a strong competitor to the clerical hierarchy for dominance among the Shia masses.
In the event that Sistani does an open deal with the Americans it is highly likely that his base will crumble, and with it the prospect of a united insurgency against the US would loom large. It is this danger which drives the US to attempt the 'divide and rule strategy, bringing the Shiite into the centre of the Iraqi government.
The most amazing result of the two and half months of bargaining about the composition of the government is the inclusion of Ahmed Chalabi as oil minister.
Chalabi fell out of favour with the US a year ago, having been previously their key Iraqi politician. They raided his house and arrested him, accusing him of spying for the Iranians and stealing funds they had provided for building a pro-US political force (probably true on both counts).
This charlatan is now put
in charge of Iraq's oil; the
chances of the industry reviving in that country is now
minimised, and the further
disappearance of oil revenues
maximised.
Is the United States now
being seriously damaged economically by the occupation?
The figures are gigantic.
With Senate approval of the
latest spending bill, taxpayers
will have been forced to cough
up more than $300 billion for
the war to date - above and
beyond the annual $400-billion Pentagon budget.
Even if the United States
can lower its troop commitmeat to 40,000 troops in Iraq by 2010, as some Pentagon strategists optimistically anticipate, the war could still
end up costing US taxpayers up to $646 billion by 2015, according to senator John Sprat of South Carolina, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee.
If insurgency, corruption and incompetence continue to plague the US occupation as they have steadily for the last two years the number could surge to a trillion (one thousand million) dollars or more.
It is inconceivable that this will not damage the US economy, even if Bush can claw money back by closing down social security projects. At the same time, the US military is seriously overstretched, with 1.4 million soldiers on active service overseas.
To maintain troops strength the US military has blocked the departure from Iraq of more than 40,000 soldiers, about 16,000 of them National Guard and reserve members who were eligible to leave the service this year.
This is creating major recruitment difficulties, with recruiters getting a hostile reception on college campuses. Last month, a group of angry reservists in Iraq sent
an e-mail entitled "Chained in Iraq", complaining that their businesses and careers in the civilian world were being ruined by their enforced absence.
No prospect for peace; rising casualties; low morale in the armed service and recruitment difficulties; falling public approval rates for the president; huge financial costs spiralling out of control - it's all reminiscent of a war in south east Asia which finished 30 years ago, in ignominious defeat for the US.