April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

Health School study showed.
To his credit, Zuma reversed course by 2003 (rather late in the day) and
endorsed public supply of AIDS medicines, as public pressure arose from
the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and its international allies. TAC
continued to condemn Zuma, in part because of misogyny during his 2006
rape trial.
It is that sort of intensive pressure that local activists in Climate Justice
Now! SA are aiming to repeat, at the risk of otherwise allowing Zuma to
remain a signatory to a far greater genocide.
The COP 17 in Durban’s International Convention Centre, from November
28-December 9, is a chance for civil society to hold Pretoria to account.
The last such opportunity was in 2001 when the World Conference Against
Racism attracted more than 10,000 protesters angry that Mbeki had agreed
with Washington, to remove from the UN’s agenda their demands for
apartheid reparations and for a halt to Israeli apartheid against Palestine.
This year, as in previous COPs, civil society will demand that political
elites cut emissions 50 percent by 2020 (as science requires),
decommission the dysfunctional carbon markets, pay the North-South (and
SA-African) ‘climate debt’ and transform to a post-carbon economy.
The negotiators from Pretoria, along with those from Washington, Brussels
and Beijing, will not stand up to the challenge, as they’ve proven again
and again. As in earlier conflicts, then, the spirit of anti-apartheid
resistance and lessons of AIDS medicines access are amongst the weaponry
civil society will need, in order to save the species’ and the planet itself.
The strategies and tactics they will deploy are already being hotly
debated.
Repression and Poverty Underpin the Uprising in Egypt
Samer Shehata interviewed by Amy Goodman 1 February 2011
Recent events in Egypt could be an opportunity for the United States to
support the people of Egypt, but no Obama administration official has
recommended publicly that President Hosni Mubarak should step down. We
speak with Samer Shehata, assistant professor of Arab politics at
Georgetown University, about the U.S.-backed Mubarak regime and the
record inflation and poverty that underpin the ongoing protests. "In Egypt,
from 2004 until the present, the government and its reforms were
applauded in Washington by World Bank, the IMF and U.S. officials,"
Shehata says. "But what all of that masked was what was going on at the
level of real people and ordinary lives."
AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our special coverage of the mass protests
in Egypt, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by Samer Shehata to talk
about how the Obama administration is responding to the protests. He is a
professor, assistant professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University.
His most recent book is Shop Floor Culture and Politics in Egypt.
Your observations of this massive popular rebellion in your country, in