Apartheid

54
and who might even have brought some of the most extreme patriarchal modes of oppression
to Afghanistan in the wake of Alexander’s conquest. In any event, as in South African
apartheid, there was in Taliban rule the imposition of strict separation between population
groups which were biologically and pseudo-biologically defined, as well as discrimination
against the country’s majority.
‘Gender apartheid’, however, is different from South African as well as all other kinds
of apartheid, in which the oppressed ethnic group, consisting of both men and women, earned
money, though hardly ever enough of it. Moreover, women and men are equally indigenous to
Afghanistan. There was no invading ethnic minority behind this kind of ‘apartheid’, although
a few Taliban leaders, who appear to have joined the movement after it gained power, seem to
have been foreigners (among them, mainly Pakistanis and Arabs). In South Africa prior to
1652, furthermore, Blacks ruled sovereign political and economic entities, unchallenged by
other ethnicities, enjoying power and privileges. There is no evidence that I am aware of to
that effect for women in Afghanistan. The women certainly did not rule the country when the
Taliban took over power. The languages of the country and much of the culture in general also
remained the same after the Taliban had won.
In ‘real’ or ‘original’ apartheid, people are replaced or cleansed: politically,
economically and physically, and new power is ultimately established by invaders from afar.
Indigenous culture is also replaced by the settlers’ culture. In Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, on
the other hand, old power was extended. Lastly, there was no crucial demographic dynamic in
Afghanistan like the one in South Africa, where Whites produced fewer children the richer
they became, and Blacks produced more children the poorer they became. This dynamic was
one of the main factors that would eventually bring down apartheid in South Africa, and a
corresponding development might well eventually have precisely the same consequences for
the Israeli version of apartheid. 64 ‘Gender apartheid’ thus seems to have less to do with South
African apartheid than any of the forms of oppression we have encountered so far.
Environmental and Global ‘Apartheid’
Recently, a global kind of apartheid – so-called ‘environmental apartheid’ – has
become a further focus of attention. Here, so-called ‘First World’ corporate networks and
states profit from ‘artificially’ low (i.e. not purely market-induced) raw material prices, move
their most polluting industries to the developing countries in the so-called ‘Third World’,
export their most toxic waste to be dumped there, and steal ‘the very basis and processes of
life’ legally through patent enforcement from ‘Third World’ farmer communities. 65 Instances
of most constituent parts of apartheid are indeed present in some form or other in this
phenomenon. They include ethnicist practices such as structural violence, population
activities, land appropriation, exploitation, differential access, and racist ideologies.
Yet, there is no invasion in a military sense, and therefore not necessarily any direct
violence. Furthermore, the land is bought or leased – though cheaply and often illegally –
rather than directly stolen, and only very little of it needs to be bought or leased, for factories
and waste dumps, anyway. (A great deal more of the land, however, is of course affected
ecologically.) The repopulation activities are narrowed down to a few on-site First World
corporate executives and engineers, who are perceived by those on the very top, in their First
World corporate headquarters, as necessary to oversee operations and to keep certain
advanced technologies and other secrets unavailable to industrial spies from competing
corporations, not to mention the indigenous people. The population activities are therefore
actually much more similar to colonialism than to apartheid. The (apparently rather heavy)
64
Ibid. See also N.N.: Gender Apartheid, no date. See Section II.2, below, on the demographic dimensions of
apartheid.
65
Shiva: The World on the Edge, 2000, 112-129, quotes: 113ff, 119. See also Shiva: Deconstructing Market
Access: Whose Market, Whose Access?, 2002; Commey: Biopiracy: The New Scramble for Africa, 2003: 12-17;
Jere-Malanda: Biopiracy: Neem: The Wonder Tree, 2003: 18.