My old tabs

Time to close all open tabs in my laptop. Before I do, here they are, old but useful: 

1) How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years

See here: How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years 

Between 1880 to 1920, British colonial policies in India claimed more lives than all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China and North Korea combined. 

By  Dylan Sullivan and  Jason Hickel , 2 Dec 2022 in Al Jazeera 

2) What to expect as US-Africa summit kicks off in Washington 

US President Joe Biden seeks to boost trade opportunities and build trust with African leaders during three days of talks.

Remember this? What came of it? Nothing. Now since Trump is here, we see how much more honest the relationship is, as African leaders offer up their mineral resources, South Africa has to be embarrassed for white genocide, tariffs, etc. 

3) DRC: Monusco’s future is becoming increasingly uncertain 

By Romain Gras , on August 8, 2022 

I've stopped caring much for Africa Report as there are more useful sources for news and analysis. Since then, the US has brokered some kind of a 'peace deal' between DRC and Rwanda under Trump . 

4) Protests against UN in eastern Congo highlight peace mission’s crisis of legitimacy:

July 31, 2022 in 

 The United Nations mission in the Congo has long suffered a crisis of confidence among local communities. It has been accused of failing to protect civilians and improve security in the region, despite a presence spanning more than two decades.

5) Imperial Salaams “Mainstreaming” gender, forced handshakes, and colonial violence in Afghanistan.  ANILA DAULATZAI, Spring 2022 in https://adimagazine.com. 

This was a really good piece. 

As I observed as a researcher in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2013, gender as a secular, liberal (read: white) feminist ethic was “mainstreamed” into the lives of Afghans over the course of the US occupation. “Mainstreaming” is the official development and policy term for how particular conceptions of gender were imposed upon a subaltern population by an occupying power, largely via multi-million dollar programs meant to “empower” women and girls. While purporting inclusivity, these initiatives often ended up alienating women and demonizing men. Thus the word “gender,” used in both Dari and Pashto in its untranslated English form, acquired negative connotations, laden with confusion, expectation, ambivalence and inextricably linked to the vast military-development nexus that has shaped Afghanistan over the past 20 years. 

6) It is time to end extractive tourism by Vijay Kolinjivadi in Al Jazeera Opinion, 18 Feb 2021

I really loved this piece written in the Pandemic context. It's idea about the "right" of privileged classes to holiday abroad, especially in the Global South, can be extrapolated to the Aid and Development Industry. Conversations with Western friends who work in Development, Emergency or Humanitarian contexts (funded mainly by Western donors, former colonial powers and the American Empire) feature very little political and historical understanding and, rectification. There is little to no critique of neo colonialism within this work. Frustratedly, they end up projecting their 'right' to work in the Global South where the money and international traveling is. 

This column rings true in terms of impact of tourism today, too. European capitals like Paris faced a backlash against mass tourism. Louvre shut down because there are too few museum workers and it's too hot. Other cities too saw protests against tourists who overwhelm their spaces and drive up prices. 

We have the same issues of unregulated tourism in Northern Areas in Pakistan. 

These are a few snippets from this column: 

Capitalist forces have convinced the increasingly overworked middle-class labour force in the West and elsewhere that to “relax” it needs a vacation abroad with all comforts provided. As a result it is willing to pay significant sums of money to be mass transported south and east to enjoy a week of leisure at the expense of local communities who suffer from the abuse of their land and resources by tourism corporations and their local partners.

So what can we do to stop the extractive tourism industry from worsening the effects of the pandemic? We can act to curb the demand for escapist mass tourism and give control over historical and natural sites back to the communities they belong to.We should follow the example of social movements like La Vía Campesina which are calling for food sovereignty demanding that food production be controlled through democratic processes by those who directly work the land. Likewise we should call for sovereignty in labour and leisure. 

 6) Illusions of empire: Amartya Sen on what British rule really did for India

By Amartya Sen, Tue 29 Jun 2021 in The Guardian 

Excerpts: 

I was persuaded that Marx was basically right in his diagnosis of the need for some radical change in India as its old order was crumbling as a result of not having been a part of the intellectual and economic globalisation that the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution had initiated across the world (along with, alas, colonialism).There was arguably however a serious flaw in Marx’s thesis in particular in his implicit presumption that the British conquest was the only window on the modern world that could have opened for India. What India needed at the time was more constructive globalisation but that is not the same thing as imperialism. The distinction is important. Throughout India’s long history it persistently enjoyed exchanges of ideas as well as of commodities with the outside world. Traders settlers and scholars moved between India and further east – China Indonesia Malaysia Cambodia Vietnam Thailand and elsewhere – for a great many centuries beginning more than 2000 years ago. The far-reaching influence of this movement – especially on language literature and architecture – can be seen plentifully even today. There were also huge global influences by means of India’s open-frontier attitude in welcoming fugitives from its early days.

As a child growing up in Burma in the 1930s I was taken by my parents to see Zafar’s grave in Rangoon which was close to the famous Shwedagon Pagoda. The grave was not allowed to be anything more than an undistinguished stone slab covered with corrugated iron. I remember discussing with my father how the British rulers of India and Burma must evidently have been afraid of the evocative power of the remains of the last Mughal emperor. The inscription on the grave noted only that “Bahadur Shah was ex-King of Delhi” – no mention of “empire” in the commemoration! It was only much later in the 1990s that Zafar would be honoured with something closer to what could decently serve as the grave of the last Mughal emperor.

How successful was this long phase of classical imperialism in British India which lasted from the late 18th century until independence in 1947? The British claimed a huge set of achievements including democracy the rule of law railways the joint stock company and cricket but the gap between theory and practice – with the exception of cricket – remained wide throughout the history of imperial relations between the two countries. Putting the tally together in the years of pre-independence assessment it was easy to see how far short the achievements were compared with the rhetoric of accomplishment.

Indeed Rudyard Kipling caught the self-congratulatory note of the British imperial administrator admirably well in his famous poem on imperialism:

Take up the White Man’s burden 

–The savage wars of peace –

Fill full the mouth of famine 

And bid the sickness cease

Alas neither the stopping of famines nor the remedying of ill health was part of the high-performance achievements of British rule in India. Nothing could lead us away from the fact that life expectancy at birth in India as the empire ended was abysmally low: 32 years at most.

I haven't seen any mention of mention of Amartya Sen recently in wake of the Genocide in Palestine and the starvation. It was Amartya Sen who wrote on how famines are man made. 

7) Why we’re protesting against UN peacekeepers in DR Congo 

by Claude Sengenya, Freelance journalist based in Butembo in the Democratic Republic of Congo : https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/2022/08/18/why-we-re-protesting-against-un-peacekeepers-dr-congo

UN peacekeepers have been a permanent presence in the life of Congolese activist William Mbokani. The 22-year-old was born shortly after the blue helmets and their white tanks first rolled into his country – 1999.But Mbokani says the UN troops have consistently failed him: His mother was killed in 2019 by an Islamist militia called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) while insecurity around his village in eastern Beni territory means he can’t access his family’s fields.“For nearly 25 years we have kept renewing the mandate of a mission that is struggling to do its job” Mbokani told The New Humanitarian from the nearby town of Butembo where he is now living. “Instead of the situation improving it is only getting worse.”