De facto apartheid, Desertification, Extinction, Airstrikes...Another beautiful day!

It has been noted by many commentators that 9/11 is not only a notorious day in the United States. On 9/11/1973, in a military operation coordinated with the CIA, the Chilean military bombed the Chilean presidential palace, precipitating the suicide of Salvador Allende and allowing General Augusto Pinochet to take power.

On 9/11/1977, white South African security forces beat black activist Steve Biko in his prison cell in Port Elizabeth. He was found dead the next day. South African president Thabo Mbeki paid tribute to Biko on the 30th anniversary of his murder by the apartheid regime in a memorial lecture in Cape Town yesterday. He said:

"I speak here of the challenge to defeat the centuries-old attempt to ... treat us as children, to define us as sub-humans whom nature has condemned to be inferior to white people, an animal-like species characterised by limited intellectual capacity, bestiality, lasciviousness and moral depravity."
[...]
"We must ask ourselves whether the majority of our people, for whose freedom Steve Biko sacrificed his life, are truly aware that they too are people and whether they do not still regard themselves as appendages of our self-appointed superiors.
"Has the majority taken advantage of its victory in 1994 to repudiate the practice of resorting to forced gestures of friendship it does not desire?"

Forced gestures, indeed. Who can make "friends" when white economic domination continues in South Africa today, 13 years after the official end of apartheid? According to a UN FAO report from July 2007, some 57,000 white South African farmers currently own 80% of the arable land in the country. White-owned farms in South Africa take up 1,300 hectares on average, and are 250 times the size of the average black-owned farm (which is usually on more arid land). They employ over a million workers, or about 11% of the entire formal sector workforce in South Africa. Meanwhile, about half of all black South Africans fall below the government's official poverty line of R354, or the equivalent of less than $50 per month. While over 60% of black South Africans are poor, only 1% of white South Africans are poor.

Similarly, the white minorities in Namibia and Zimbabwe still own about half the arable land in those countries. In Zimbabwe, what land reform has taken place under Mugabe has elicited political interference from Britain and the U.S., including funds for opposition parties and perhaps coup attempts. (Not to mention bizarro-world tantrums about Mugabe's "reverse racism" in the Euroamerican media. It's as if the descendants of black colonizers controlled half the arable land in western Europe and the U.S.) Just imagine what they'd do if land reform in South Africa became an actuality?

These issues will only become more urgent in the coming years, as (largely Northern-induced)climate change decreases the quantity of arable land on Earth. Last Friday, M.V.K. Sivakumar of the U.N. Meteorological Organization told a U.N. conference in Madrid that desertification caused by climate change would threaten the global food supply in the 21st century:

"Today we feed the present world population of 6.3 billion from the 11 per cent of the land surface that can be used for serious food production. The question is: Will we be able to feed the 8.2 billion that we expect to populate the globe in 2020 if even less land is available for farming?" he said.
[...]
Sivakumar said that in some regions the spread of deserts and the salination of once arable land was already well under way. In the future it would be most widespread in drier areas of Latin America, including in farming giant Brazil.

In Africa, increasing climate variability would create major problems for farmers, who are likely to see their growing seasons getting shorter and crop yields cut, especially in areas near already arid and semi-arid regions. [end quote]

Simultaneously, "development" experts continue to push the cultivation of cash crops for export rather than food crops for consumption. As Iain Boal pointed out in an interview published at Counterpunch, people are starving in Zimbabwe while planes full of cut flowers leave Harare for the European market.

In other climate change-related news, The World Conservation Union just published its annual Red List, according to which over 16,300 species (out of the 41,415 species considered) are threatened with extinction. List manager Craig Hilton-Taylor told Reuters that the estimate, which calculates an extinction rate 100-1,000 times higher than normal, is "just the tip of the iceberg."

And it turns out that Syrian accusations about an Israeli airstrike on September 6th were true. U.S. officials told Reuters that the strike was aimed at Iranian weapons being smuggled to Hezbollah through Syria. According to CNN, the strike was coordinated with Israeli ground forces, apparently explaining the mobilization at the Golan border. The above-quoted "U.S. officials" also practically announced that U.S. forces helped coordinate, or at least were privy to, the operation: "Sources in the U.S. government and military confirmed to CNN's Barbara Starr that the airstrike did happen, and that they are happy to have Israel carry the message to both Syria and Iran that they can get in and out and strike when necessary." Or: our attack dog is ready to bite again.