by PATRICK BOND
Leaders of BRICS countries during a summit in March 2012. From left, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia, Manmohan Singh of India, Hu Jintao of China, and Jacob Zuma of South Africa. PHOTO/Merco Press
Rising ‘sub-imperialism’ as newest threat to the people and planet
The heads of state of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa BRICS network are coming to Durban in four months, meeting on 26-27 March at the International Convention Centre (ICC), Africa’s largest venue. Given their recent performance, it is reasonable to expect another ‘1%’ summit, wreaking socio-economic and ecological havoc. And that means it is time for the first BRICS counter-summit, to critique top-down ‘sub-imperialist’ bloc formation, and to offer bottom-up alternatives.
After all, we have had some bad experiences at the Durban ICC:
· in 2001, in spite of demands by 10,000 protesters, the United Nations World Conference Against Racism refused to grapple with reparations for slavery and colonialism or with apartheid-Israel’s racism against Palestinians (hence Tel Aviv’s current ethnic cleansing of Gaza goes unpunished);
· the African Union got off to a bad start here, with its 2002 launch, due to reliance on the neoliberal New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) promoted by Pretoria;
· the 2003 World Economic Forum’s African regional meeting hastened governments’ supplication to multinational corporate interests in spite of protests;
· in 2011, Durban’s UN COP17 climate summit – better known as the ‘Conference of Polluters’ – featured Washington’s sabotage, with no new emissions cuts and an attempted revival of the non-solution called ‘carbon trading’, also called ‘the privatization of the air.’
Eco-disasters made in Durban
“The Durban Platform was promising because of what it did not say,” bragged US State Department official Trevor Houser to the New York Times. “There is no mention of historic responsibility or per capita emissions. There is no mention of economic development as the priority for developing countries. There is no mention of a difference between developed and developing country action.”
The Durban deal squashed poor countries’ ability to defend against climate disaster. With South African foreign minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane in the chair, the COP17 confirmed this century’s climate-related deaths of what will be more than 180 million Africans, according to Christian Aid. Already 400 000 people die each year from climate-related chaos due to catastrophes in agriculture, public health and ‘frankenstorms’ like last month’s Sandy.
Degeneration of global governance is logical when Washington unites with the BRICS countries, as was first demonstrated three years ago with the Copenhagen Accord. At that COP, Jacob Zuma, Brazil’s Lula da Silva, China’s Wen Jiabao and India’s Manmohan Singh joined Barack Obama to foil the Kyoto Protocol’s mandatory emissions cuts, thus confirming that at least 4 degrees global warming will occur by 2100. “They broke the UN,” concluded Bill McKibben from the climate advocacy movement 350.org.
The negotiators were explicitly acting on behalf of their fossil fuel and extractive industries. Similar cozy ties between Pretoria politicians, London-based mining houses, Johannesburg ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ tycoons and sweetheart trade unions have since been exposed at Marikana, with another blast against climate anticipate as fracking begins in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal’s Drakensburg Mountains, driven by multinational corporate oil firms led by Shell.
The 2012 Yale and Columbia University Environmental Performance Index showed that aside from Brazil, the other BRICS states are decimating their – and the earth’s – ecology at the most rapid rate of any group of countries, with Russia and South Africa near the bottom of world stewardship rankings.
Looting Africa
Like Berlin in 1884-85, the BRICS Durban summit is expected to carve up Africa more efficiently, unburdened – now as then – by what will be derided as ‘Western’ concerns about democracy and human rights. Reading between the lines, its resolutions will:
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