Rent bank runs out of money

Emergency housing agencies across Ontario are scrambling to help families facing eviction in the wake of news this week that funding for the province's rent bank program has officially run out.
Read more [The Star (Top News)]

Beijing Olympics: last man standing

There are 100 days until the Olympics - but one family awaits only bulldozers and eviction
Read more [The Guardian (International + UK)]

DTES COMMUNITY MEETING

[ May 7, 2008; 5:30 pm; ] ++++++++++++++++++++++++ DINNER & COMMUNITY MTG @ DTES WOMEN CENTRE (302 COLUMBIA) MEN WELCOME +++++++++++++++++++++++ OPEN TO ALL CONCERNED DTES RESIDENTS AND COMMUNITY MEMBERS DINNER SERVED! DTES RESIDENTS ARE EXPERIENCING: . Rapid Hotel/SRO closures and Evictions . Ticketing and Arrests under Project Civil City . [...]
Read more [Save Low Income Housing Coalition]

Free Trading USA

Intermingled amongst brand new hotels and entertainment swag are the ghosts of New Orleans. Abandoned buildings with boarded up windows are on every side street off Canal. Hidden only by the busy flickering of neon lights and bars begging for your undeserved business. One needs only to turn to any of the buildings behind the flashy palm trees to see Katrina leftovers.

Hidden also, though beating through the heart of this city is its intense poverty and racism. It is swept under the bridges and sheltered in back alleys. It is beaten away from the sight of tourists and entertainers by batons and vacational apathy.

While thousands await the return to their native city, hundreds lining its streets in shelters and tents, the busy Bourbon street continue to party. Quite a bit of thought and design went into the sweeping away of the life and reality of this city. Benches in the entertainment district- the French Quarter- are curved downward to make them impossible to sleep on. Similarly benches at major tourist squares are dividied by bars to prevent lying down. Lights are granted only there where the tourist industry wants foreign attention. The resistance to the gentrification, systemic discrimination, and outright ethnic cleansing is conveniently relocated.

Subsidized and affordable housing has been sustaining an intense attack by the city, the state, the government, and private enterprise. Demolitions have forced hundreds onto the streets and eviction notices are handed out like pamphlets. Once enough people are evicted, the housing is torn down to build hotels, condominium apartments, and bars.

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Real England? Reflections on Broadway Market , Patrick Wright

When I lived in east London in the early 1990s, there was one street above all that seemed beyond hope of improvement or recovery. It was spurned even by its own graffiti, which declared "Broadway Market is not a sinking ship. It's a submarine."Patrick Wright is a cultural critic, historian, and broadcaster, and professor of modern cultural studies at Nottingham Trent University. Among his books are On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (Verso, 1985), The Village that Died for England: The Strange Story of Tyneham (Jonathan Cape, 1995), Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (Faber, 2000), The River: the Thames in Our Time (BBC Worldwide, 1999), and (as co-author) Stanley Spencer (Tate, 2001). His latest book is Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Patrick Wright's website is here

This essay also appears in Made in England, a website based on a collaboration between the BBC and Arts Council England, and launched on 23 April 2008

Also by Patrick Wright in openDemocracy:

"The stone bomb" (8 April 2003)

"Iron Curtain: a century restaged" (24 October 2007)

Recently, however, the submarine has surfaced. Broadway Market now boasts a new independent bookshop, an art gallery, various cafés, craft and bric-a-brac shops, including one that appears to find its niche in 1960s furnishings imported from France and Germany. The stalls in the relaunched Saturday street-market offer artisanal bread, Kentish apples, olives and other such provisions to a mixed and multilingual throng, whose members are by no means all clad in inner-city hiking boots or Converse trainers. Neither are they all forking out £10, as I found myself doing, for a single piece of Italian cheese.

To the shopkeepers in Broadway Market, the busy Saturday market may no longer seem like a miraculous relief operation. I, however, was astonished by the transformation the first time I saw it. "Is this real?" I wondered as I wandered among the milling crowds: "Do these people have any idea where they are?"

Yet the sense of dislocation was my own. The market, as one of its organisers assured me, is certainly not just another "farmers market" of the picturesque variety often used to decorate gentrification schemes. Rooted in local initiative and managed by the Broadway Market Traders and Residents Association, it is run to complement rather than rival the local shops and also the much larger street-market in nearby Ridley Road.

What takes place here on Saturdays is as much a weekly resistance movement as it is a street-market with an alternative, organic air about it. The revival has been achieved by local people against powerful opposition. The first enemy, as so often in these parts, is easily identified as Hackney council, which, as the organisers claim, first tried to stop the street-market happening and then, when it emerged as successful, turned round and attempted to take it over. The second is the developers favoured by the council's officers as they prepared to sell off the street's shops and buildings.

Hackney's officials appear to have recoiled in dismay when local traders defied expectation by scraping together the resources and offering to buy their long-rented buildings. Their preferred buyers are developers of an absentee and sometimes also offshore variety: people whose manoeuvres as they assemble sites for demolition are even less encumbered by respect for local life. The campaign for Broadway Market has been accompanied by a vigorous defence of local traders faced with eviction. This time the graffiti has declared "We want our café not yuppie flats".

Though only a local affair, the battle has gone into wide circulation as an encouraging story proving that the spirit of England is not entirely dead. It is celebrated as such in Paul Kingsnorth's newly published manifesto, Real England: the Battle Against the Bland (Portobello, 2008). An anti-globalisation campaigner, Kingsnorth hails Broadway Market for resisting the commercial and political powers that have already unleashed "a virtual holocaust of small, independent and local retailers". He commends the initiative as one in the eye for the World Trade Organisation and a blow against the homogenisation that so often passes for urban regeneration in a world dominated by brands.

As a place where apples aren't necessarily all the same shape and the beans aren't flown in from Kenya, Broadway Market confirms the vision of Common Ground, the environmental campaigners who raised the banner of "local distinctiveness" over a decade ago and who continue to recommend "reinventing the marketplace" as the "convivial heart" of our communities. Strongly anti-racist in outlook, it might also be taken as an expression of the "progressive patriotism" advocated by Billy Bragg, a kind of patriotism that rejects chauvinism for an altruistic commitment to the interest of the wider community.

Broadway Market fits the present-day activist's idea of a resurgent England. In my mind, it also prompts questions about the ways in which we are accustomed to imagining our nationality. Given that England has no separate constitutional existence within the British state, it may make sense that many attempts to define this elusive identity over the years have proceeded by listing characteristic traits, images and sensations.

A landscape of threat
Also on English national identity in openDemocracy:

Roger Scruton, "England: an identity in question" (1 May 2007)

Neal Ascherson, "Who needs a constitution?" (22 May 2007)

David Hayes: "Ozymandias on the Solway" (7 July 2007)

Plus: don't miss the lively daily commentary and debate on the question of England - and the future of Britain - in OurKingdom
The Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin came up with the most famous Tory version in 1924, converting the rural Worcestershire in which he was at home into an idyll offered up as the timeless inheritance of all English people: "The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe on the whetstone, the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill..."

Writing in 1940, the year of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, George Orwell famously came up with a different list in which the sound of clattering clogs featured alongside cricket on the village green and a (subsequently much cited) maiden aunt bicycling to communion. Orwell's list was thrown wide to include the north as well as the south, and the industrial working class rather than just the traditional countryside.

Yet, the characteristic images listed are only half the story of these attempts to define and rally the English. Just as the "real England" of Broadway Market has been achieved in defiance of the local authority and its developers, the England invoked in earlier times has often been thrown into relief by a burning sense of imminent danger. This is easily understood at times of war, when the threat is palpable. Yet it is by no means only at such moments of righteous emergency that Englishness has been a defensive stance. Even in peacetime, being English can feel like a perpetual Dunkirk, in which everything that is valued is polarised against "encroaching" developments that promise only nullification and destruction (see "Last Orders", Guardian, 9 April 2005).

This pattern was established in the first years of the 20th century by the writer GK Chesterton and his friend Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton and Belloc espoused the cause of "Little England", which they tried to separate out from the larger identity and purposes of the British empire. While Rudyard Kipling might wander the globe as the poet of British imperialism, the true Englishman, so Chesterton suggested, stayed at home, content in his local place, even if it only amounted to a few cottages, an unmodernised pub and a couple of fields. He was slow-thinking, rooted in his liberties as well as his place, and instinctively wise. He might look out over nothing more than a cabbage-patch but he still grasped more about life than the footloose British traveller, who saw nothing but scenery and for whom no place was more than a "destination".

Reading Chesterton's defence of the traditional English pub with its real ale we may rightly sense a distant anticipation of the "slow" movement of our own time. Yet there are, I think, also reasons to be cautious about this way of thinking. It defines England not as a present political society with its own varied and also disputatious population, but as an inherited way of life that is under constant threat of being closed down and thrown irretrievably into the past by hostile modern forces pressing in from outside.

Anyone wanting to review the encroaching threats arrayed against Chesterton's browbeaten English folk and their traditional liberties might start with The Flying Inn, a comic novel written shortly before the first world war. The enemies here include the British state, with its arbitrary rules and systems of administration. Academic learning is on the list, with its abstracted expertise, and its rejection of grounded commonsense. So too is Islam, presented as the alien creed of a "prophet" who, through the influence of overeducated upper-class disciples, manages to get an alcohol ban imposed over England. Then comes the rest of the metropolitan elite, with its secularism and its crazy taste for avant-garde pictures. Other threats included big business and department stores, which Chesterton finds guilty not just of displacing the small shopkeeper but of corrosive cosmopolitanism and luxury. Like Belloc's, his defence of England was tinged with anti-semitism too.

A heritage in danger

This way of valuing England as a deeply settled way of life that is critically at odds with modern developments, would go on to find many variants during the course of the 20th century. It was harnessed by rural preservationists, as they tried to defend the traditional countryside against mechanisation, ribbon development, BBC English and other alienating forces: "England and the Octopus" as one of the campaigning tracts of the inter-war period put it. It found benign expression in the Ealing comedy film Passport to Pimlico (1949), in which the inhabitants of a bombed-out area of London discover an ancient charter licensing them to secede from drab old post-war Britain with its snoops and its rationing bureaucrats, and to set up their own independent country (complete with vibrant street-market). It's surely also informs JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, where the opposition between rural England and the industrial state is recast as the war between the Shire and Mordor.

The spirit of England would be invoked against numerous mistrusted acts of modernisation after the 1950s too. There was Beeching's closure of so many railway lines, decimalisation, the relentless advance of the road system and industrial development, the reckless destruction of town centres, and the high-rise corruption of public housing. The thought of endangered England has been rallied repeatedly against the perceived threat of colonial immigration, against the European Community, with its federally defined rules and regulations, against asylum-seekers and migrant workers. It has also been stirred by BSE and foot-and-mouth disease: the latter being genuine emergencies that were, nevertheless, accompanied by an excessive, panic-ridden symbolism.

In case anyone is inclined to think this is primarily a problem of the Conservative imagination, it is worth noting that there are leftwing versions of this beleaguered Englishness. In the 1980s, for example, Margaret Thatcher prompted some socialists to develop a strong compensatory interest in the England of Robin Hood and the 17th-century Diggers and Levellers.

This is indeed a confusing and contradictory list. Many of the perceived threats provoking these defensive reactions were real enough, and the alarm and argument they provoked perfectly legitimate. Others, however, were surely not, and should prompt us to think twice about conceiving England as a heritage in danger (see The Village that Died for England: The Strange Story of Tyneham [Faber, revised edition, 2002]).

I realised this when researching a curious network named "The English Array", which set about trying to revive the English countryside in the late 1930s. Members espoused organic farming, compost heaps, the Alexander technique and Morris-dancing, but the leaders, who included a cousin of GK Chesterton's, were also fiercely anti-semitic in their hatred of chain stores, loathed the urban population as degenerate, and thought Adolf Hitler had some pretty interesting ideas.

A message in the market

I would gladly write that off as a remote and inconsequential eccentricity. Yet the same sense of confusion has appeared in more recent examples.

In the mid-1990s, I talked with a founder of a distinctly Chestertonian Movement for Middle England, a devolutionary campaign which urged the English to consider "taking root in your region and helping to run it". Since relaunched as "England Devolve!", this campaign was founded partly a response to the perceived vibrancy of immigrant life. Britain's Afro-Caribbean, Irish and Asian communities had their own culture and a sustaining sense of where they came from, and the English should surely emulate them in recovering their regional roots and traditions.

The founders seem to have been of a cooperative and strongly democratic persuasion. And yet, when they started to attend meetings and rallies with their flag showing a carefully fragmented cross of St George, they found people backing off as if they were motivated, as the England Devolve! website now recalls, by "chauvinism, nationalism or worse".

Even more recently, while driving through Oakham, the county town of Rutland, one evening in 2006, I turned on the radio to hear a rousing song called Roots, by the west-country folk band Show of Hands. The song lamented the fact that, unlike the Celtic nations and Britain's immigrant communities, the English have lost their culture or traded it for a few mind-sapping American songs played on a jukebox in a forlorn, and probably also lager-filled public bar.

The song went on to become something of a popular anthem, and yet here too the reception was mixed. The next time I heard Show of Hands on the radio, they were at some pains to distance their song from the British National Party, members of which had turned up to reveal their enthusiasm for it at a recent concert at the Albert Hall.

I am not seeking to condemn either that song or the Movement for Middle England, both of which have usefully demonstrated the importance of sorting out our ideas. The imagery of endangered England has undoubtedly served good causes over the years. Yet it has also justified the apprehension of those members of British immigrant communities who have expressed their reluctance to identify themselves as English, suspecting that this is really a hostile ethnicity in disguise. It is on the same account that some Labour ministers have lately felt licensed to dismiss all thought of post-devolutionary political reform in England, using the racist and Europhobic expressions of English nationalism as their justification.

Meanwhile, current events on Broadway Market are encouraging. They suggest that while defensive battles may remain necessary, they can be conducted in the name of a mixed and present-day local community rather than a mummified set of ancestral roots. It's possible to be vigorously English without resorting to mournful elegies, or without having to prove your descent from the ancient Iberian or Celtic stock that Hilaire Belloc, writing a century ago, described as "the permanent root of all England".

As for the organic metaphor, which so many embattled English folk have ended up applying to their own endangered way of life, Broadway Market has a message there too. While it should certainly not be applied to mixed human populations, it remains just fine on the fruit-and-vegetable stall.

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Raise the Rates Petition

Sign the Petition for a 40% Increase on Social Assistance in Ontario

View the Signatures

Under the Harris Tories and McGunity Liberals, hundreds of thousands of people in Ontario have seen the spending power of their social assistance cheques fall by 40%. People can only pay their rent by going without proper food. They can only put food on the table by facing the threat of eviction from their housing.

West End landlord accused of evicting tenants to raise rents

VANCOUVER - Tenants living in the Glenmore Apartment building on Barclay Street say they are planning to appeal a mass eviction by Hollyburn Properties Group.
Read more [The Vancouver Sun (West Coast News)]

Illegal Invaders Turn Violent to Resist Eviction

A small group of rice farmers illegally occupying indigenous lands in the Brazilian state of Roraima have recently turned violent in an effort to resist their eviction. Survival International explains in a recent release that at least one person has been injured, a local Indigenous Leader in the community of Barro, after the farmers [...]
Read more [Intercontinental Cry]

Zimbabwe's unfolding drama, Wilf Mbanga

Wilf Mbanga is founder, editor and publisher of The Zimbabwean, an independent newspaper based in England and circulated widely in southern Africa

Also by Wilf Mbanga in openDemocracy:

"The African Union: what's in a name?" (27 January 2006)

"Happy Birthday, Robert Mugabe" (21 February 2007) openDemocracy has published many articles in collaboration with The Zimbabwean; for a list click here

It has been a momentous week in Zimbabwe's longstanding and agonising drama. Only nine days ago, Zimbabwe's beleaguered people were preparing to vote in the country's presidential and parliamentary elections on 29 March 2008 - and in so doing face down the might of a Zanu (PF) regime prepared (as in the house of assembly elections of March 2005) to use every available trick to manipulate the process and the result in order to preserve it and its leader Robert Mugabe in power.

There was much to suggest that this time, the precedent of a fraudulent election would be repeated. After all, the evidence of the 84-year-old tyrant's iron fist was everywhere - a figure portrayed on ubiquitous election posters and present by association in the tanks, water-cannons, rocket-launchers and armoured personnel-carriers menacing city streets. In the traditional Mugabe stronghold of the countryside, too, the regime's commitment to extend its hegemony was manifest in rampaging gangs of "green bombers" - the unemployed, ill-educated, indoctrinated youths who, since 2001, have terrorised the rural population with vicious beatings and rape.

Nine days on, Robert Mugabe is still there, Zanu (PF) rule has not ended - and the official results of the presidential election have still not been declared. But the political landscape looks very different, thanks to the bravery and commitment of Zimbabwean voters. For the weight of their choices eventually forced an admission that the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) had won a majority of parliamentary seats, and forced the regime to announce a second round in the presidential election - a tacit admission that the "old man" had failed to receive the popular backing he needed for an unwarranted claim of victory to be persuasive.

The people's hopes for change thus led them to vote in such numbers that even Mugabe's minions were unable to rig the poll in the way they had done before. The weapon of democracy - of one-person-one vote - that had been won for Zimbabwe in the wake of the liberation struggle in 1980 was put in the service of Zimbabweans against the masters who had so disappointed them.

The quarter of Zimbabweans who had fled the country as economic migrants and political refugees shared in the collective moment, as they followed the event via the internet, TV, radio or mobile phones from around the world. The diaspora - forbidden to vote, but equally desperate for change and good news also had a huge economic as well as personal and emotional stake in what was happening at home. It was their remittances that have enabled the Mugabe regime to stay afloat, even in the face of an almost complete collapse of the country's once-vibrant agriculture, mining and manufacturing industries, and an unprecedented inflation-rate of 100,000% that makes even daily transactions calculable only in millions of (Zimbabwe) dollars.

Indeed, without the ability of Zimbabweans abroad to sustain a familial and personal support of their compatriots at home - bypassing a corrupt and discredited state in the process - the everyday condition of people at home would be even more degraded. The country's economic meltdown has inflicted devastating consequences on Zimbabweans' health and capacity to function as normal citizens. The bare statistics - unemployment at 80%, the price of a loaf of bread at 50 million Zimbabwe dollars ($1), around 45% suffering from malnutrition (with 30% of children in rural areas suffering long-term malnutrition), and a life-expectancy of 34 for men and 37 for women - can only indicate the depth of the crisis consuming the country.

A shift of mood

This background of deep economic and social trauma and cautious political hope explains why the days since the election have seen Zimbabweans experience such a kaleidoscope of emotions. The delay in announcing the results was first greeted as confirmation that Zanu (PF) had suffered - and knew that it had suffered - a decisive loss. But as the days wore on and the organs of the regime were clearly calculating how best to adapt to the situation without acknowledging their defeat, the sense of optimism has begun to give way to foreboding.

The partisan Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) contributed to the shift of mood by delaying the announcement of the results of the house of assembly election, and then releasing them at a glacial pace. It took until the evening of 2 April - four days after the vote - for the final batch of carefully orchestrated parliamentary results to be declared. The ZEC promised presidential and senate results by the following evening, but at the last minute postponed the announcement, citing "logistical problems".

Among openDemocracy's many articles on Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe:

Bev Clark, "Mass evictions in Zimbabwe" (13 June 2005)

Netsai Mushonga, "Two nights in Harare's police cells" (5 December 2005)

Andrew Meldrum, "Zimbabwe between past and future" (23 June 2006)

Conor O'Loughlin, "Zimbabwean travails" (13 September 2006)

Stephen Chan, "Farewell, Robert Mugabe" (20 March 2007)

Michael Holman, "Dizzy worms in Zimbabwe" (13 September 2007)

The Zimbabwean, "Zimbabwe votes - and waits" (31 March 2008) In any event, many of the results had been displayed outside the individual polling booths since midday on 30 March. The opposition MDC (led by Morgan Tsvangirai) was finally confirmed by the ZEC as having won a majority in the house of assembly of ninety-nine seats - with Zanu (PF) on ninety-seven, Arthur Mutambara's breakaway faction of the MDC on ten, and one independent. The MDC also made its own tally and released the figures. At that statge, many Zimbabweans tentatively began to rejoice. But heavy-handed police soon put a stop to public displays of celebration.

By 2 April, Zimbabweans - a peace-loving and tolerant people in the worst as well as the best of circumstances - were growing restive at the lack of official confirmation of what everybody already knew: the MDC had won. The international community demanded that the ZEC release the results. Even the "friendly" observers from the southern African community, the African Union, Iran, Russia and China - handpicked by the Mugabe regime - began to express reservations about "irregularities" and delays in the vote-counting process.

Until this point, Robert Mugabe himself and his senior officials had been quiet. It was evident that they had been stunned by the extent of the anti-government vote. In the void, wild rumours had begun to circulate - that Mugabe had fled to Malaysia, that the service chiefs were going to stage a coup. Both were dust in the people's eyes - for suddenly the leadership came out with guns blazing, by accusing the MDC of "attempting a coup" in prematurely announcing the results.

A key image in the shift in the people's mood arrived on 3 April, when Mugabe appeared on state television bidding farewell to the African Union delegation - looking fit and cheerful. The much-reviled minister for state security, Didymus Mutasa, announced a politburo meeting for 4 April. Mugabe's spokesman, George Charamba, warned the MDC of "consequences" for its having released unofficial election results. The deputy information minister, Bright Matonga, started talking of a rerun of the presidential election (within twenty-one days, as the law demands) - even though the results of the actual vote had not even been announced yet!

At this point, other rumours abounded. - that police had been instructed to collect their weapons from armouries countrywide, that "war veterans" had been called on to gather and report for duty. This time, there was more substance to the whispers - for it was becoming clear that a regime fightback was underway. The politburo meeting was indeed significant in this respect; it was indeed decided there to call for a second round of voting in the presidential contest, and to mobilise the state's security forces (official and unofficial) to help ensure that Robert Mugabe and Zanu (PF) got the "right" result this time.

A time of trial

These political tactics were, to veteran Zimbabwe analysts and Robert Mugabe-watchers, as familiar as they were chilling. The similarities with 2000, shortly after Mugabe lost a referendum on constitutional amendments that he himself had proposed, are uncanny. Then, immediately after the results had been announced, he had appeared on state television looking subdued and reconciliatory. Soon after, gangs of war veterans and ruling party thugs were invading commercial farms, killing and beating white farmers and their workers, torching staff accommodation and slaughtering farm animals. The lesson, in 2008 as in 2000, is that a politically wounded Mugabe can be as or even more dangerous than a complacently triumphal one.

The cycle of events in the days since the election thus fits the pattern of Zimbabwe's recent political history. The ungrateful voters have backed their president into a corner, and his response is to fight even more viciously. His two-pronged strategy is to deploy the fused party-state institutions and the threat and/or reality of force to ensure that his re-election can be made official. His vicious militia, together with the police and army - who have been reduced to little more than an armed wing of Zanu (PF) - will attempt to terrorise the population into voting for him; and his minions in the ZEC can be relied on to fix the ballot if and when the tally again needs to be corrected in his favour.

Will it work? It has worked before. But this time, it could backfire. Zimbabweans are heroically patient, but they have also had a glimpse of hope and freedom - two of the most potent forces on the planet. They know that their first-round vote made the regime wobble; they know that this chance will, for many of them, be their last; they know that a clear majority of them wishes to see the end of a regime that has inflicted such misery. If they do indeed repeat their first-round decision and vote massively for Morgan Tsvangirai, they may find too that many of the police and army rank-and-file will join them at last. After all, the regime's footsoldiers also have to queue for hours to buy the basic provisions of life, and to rely on begging or bribery to feed their families.

The best outcome then would be for Robert Mugabe to retire with as much as grace as he has left, and accept the offer of a protected retirement - at home or in exile. But the "old man's" intransigent character - and political persona that so identifies his wishes with the interests of Zimbabwe that he is blinded to the damage he has wrought - may impel him to defy the people's wishes fight to the end. This would indeed be a tragic outcome that would make Zimbabwe's much-needed internal reconciliation even more difficult. In that event, the polarised attitudes and lack of forgiveness that would ensue could consign Mugabe to a far less comfortable fate: being handed over to the international court in The Hague, to answer for crimes against humanity.

The Zimbabwean people have spoken - and Robert Mugabe has refused to listen. Now, under circumstances of extreme and dangerous pressure, they are being asked to raise their voice again. It is an occasion for the world to stand with Zimbabweans in what is for them both a moment of democracy and a time of trial.

Predictive Markets: Will Robert Mugabe still lead Zimbabwe on May 1st? market on the openDemocracy Inkling Markets.

Married seniors face eviction, separation

A married couple in their 80s have been given until Aug. 29 to find a new home after getting notice the Mission care home where they have lived for 19 months is closing.
Read more [The Province]

Zimbabwe votes - and waits, The Zimbabwean

Francis Mushangwe tied his chicken to the fence around the polling station on the outskirts of Makonde before casting his vote in Zimbabwe's sixth general election on Saturday 29 March 2008.

This article was first published in The Zimbabwean, an independent newspaper based in England and circulated widely in southern Africa

openDemocracy has published many articles in collaboration with The Zimbabwean; for a list click here

An over-officious and unsympathetic policeman had told him that he could not take the chicken into the polling-station. Francis had to choose between running the risk that his chicken might not be there when he returned or not vote at all.

But like millions of Zimbabweans he was determined to vote. On emerging from the polling station and relieved to discover that his chicken was still there, he whispered the opposition slogan: "Chinja - I have voted for change."

Mashonaland West is no place to advertise one's opposition to President Robert Mugabe's rule - notwithstanding the fact that early independent reports of the voting results appear to confirm pre-election predictions of a win for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) presidential candidate Morgan Tsvangirai. During the terror that swept the countryside in the past two months, scores of opposition supporters have been harassed by marauding bands of self-styled "war veterans" and "green bombers".

The intimidation has been felt in Zvimba, Mugabe's home village sixty-five kilometres west of the capital Harare, where a mob supporting the ruling Zanu (PF) razed an opposition candidate's home to the ground before the election. Mashonaland West also encompasses Chegutu East, one of the constituencies where the tally of voters on the roll (25,059) does not tie up with the number of voters listed on the official Zimbabwe electoral commission (ZEC) rolls (31,226).

Among openDemocracy's many articles on Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe:

Bev Clark, "Mass evictions in Zimbabwe" (13 June 2005)

Netsai Mushonga, "Two nights in Harare's police cells" (5 December 2005)

Andrew Meldrum, "Zimbabwe between past and future" (23 June 2006)

Conor O'Loughlin, "Zimbabwean travails" (13 September 2006)

Stephen Chan, "Farewell, Robert Mugabe" (20 March 2007)

Wilf Mbanga, "Happy birthday, Robert Mugabe" (21 February 2007)

Michael Holman, "Dizzy worms in Zimbabwe" (13 September 2007) The Zimbabwean was told on election-day that "re-education camps" were organised in this region to bludgeon the electorate into voting for the ruling Zanu (PF).

Karemba Jephat, the house-of-assembly candidate in Makonde of the Morgan Tsvangirai-led MDC, has been under constant harassment by a suspected Zanu (PF) mob. He is standing against newspaper publisher Kindness Paradza, an independent candidate formely with Zanu (PF), Risipa Kapesa of Zanu (PF), and Sibangilizwe Mhlani of the faction of the MDC led by Arthur Mutambara.

At a rural shopping-centre in Makonde, a dozen so-called war veterans and green bombers in brand new Zanu (PF) T-shirts had built their campfire near the polling-station.

Staring menacingly at the long queue of voters, which snaked its way round the breeze block shacks, they contented themselves with drinking the local brew, Scud. Their work had already been done. "You are wasting your time. The MDC will never rule this country", a bloodshot-eyed war veteran in a filthy red beret shouted. "We will never allow it."

For hours the voters ignored the rambling Zanu (PF) mob and continued queueing, sheltering from the blistering heat under the lemon trees, waiting for their turn to vote. The lines moved painfully slowly, but never seemed to diminish. They kept coming in their thousands: women with babies strapped to their backs, old men hobbling on wooden sticks, and huge numbers of young people, few of whom have jobs and all of whom are voting for the first time.

Many were turned away after being told they could not vote because they were not on the electoral roll, their identity papers were not in order, or because the supplementary electoral roll (which records late registrations) had failed to arrive.

The dutiful ZEC officials meticulously recorded their details on forms headed "Particulars of Persons Denied the Vote".

A rowdy gang of Zanu (PF) green bombers showed up at the polling-station with orders to scare away the hundreds of voters waiting patiently at the school gates. The youth militia noisily and provocatively jumped the queue, then peeled off their jackets to reveal identical T-shirts emblazoned with Mugabe's face.

Punching the air, they chanted Zanu (PF) slogans and jabbed their boots towards young women crouched on a grass verge, accusing them of being opposition supporters.

For a few moments the hum of conversation was stilled. Then an elderly man who had been sitting on a brick wall stood up and shouted at the green bombers: "Your time is up, you are finished. It's the end of the road for your regime."

The militia scanned the faces of the crowd staring back at them. Only days ago these people would have run. Not any more. They stood their ground and the green bombers walked away.

The elderly Moses Chigwango, the man who had confronted the Zanu (PF) youths, told how thirty years ago he and Robert Mugabe were guerrillas in exile in Mozambique, fighting the chimurenga (war of independence).

When this father of eight is asked what he thinks of his old comrade now, his answer is to spit on the ground and say "traitor": "I never thought I would see the day when we buy a loaf of bread for 20 million Zimbabwe dollars."

The scores of people around him nodded; several shook his hand. There is a sense that the months of intimidation have failed to dent most Zimbabweans' desire to rid themselves of Mugabe's regime, even here, a place touted as a ruling-party stronghold.

By marking their cross on the four ballot-papers on election-day, some here risked their lives. At 7pm sharp, the polling-station closed. In this single corner of Zimbabwe, many said they eagerly await the results that they feel could change their lives forever.

See also: Will Robert Mugabe still lead Zimbabwe on May 1st? market on the openDemocracy Inkling Markets. 

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"It's All About The Land"

Source:http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/1738Lede picture:Subhead:

Native Resistance to the Olympics

"We are preparing to disrupt the Olympics any way that we can. We want to let the world know that our land is not for sale," said Kanahus Pelkey, at a February 1 talk held at the Native Friendship Centre in Montreal.

It was one of many stops on an extensive speaking tour of the Great Lakes and East Coast regions of Canada. The speakers included Pelkey, of the Secwepemc and Ktunaxa First Nations, and Dustin Johnson, of the Ts'mksiyen First Nation -- both members of the Native Youth Movement (NYM) in British Columbia. The packed room saw many people sitting on the floor or standing for several hours.

The aim of the tour was to raise awareness about Native resistance to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, while underlining the importance of restoring traditional Indigenous knowledge and arousing a sense of responsibility in First Nations youth to defend and maintain their people and territories.

The quickly approaching mega-sporting event is acting as an unwelcome catalyst for many First Nations people living in B.C., a number of whom have been embroiled in bitter land rights battles with the Canadian government for most of their lives. Vast areas of unceded land that Indigenous communities depend on for hunting, fishing and general survival are at risk. Rivers, mountains and old-growth forests are being replaced by tourist resorts and highway expansions spurred by the 2010 games. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to build new resorts and expand existing ones in order to attract and accommodate tourists, Olympic athletes and trainers.

Indigenous communities in the Interior and on the coast of B.C., including the Secwepemc people of Skelkwek'welt and the St'at'imc people of Sutikalh, have long voiced their opposition to the establishment of Sun Peaks and Cayoosh ski resorts on their land. Strong and organized shows of resistance have been disregarded, ignored and covered-up by the B.C. government in attempts to capitalize on territory for which treaties were never signed. One of many examples of this occurred in 1990, when the province began an expansion of Highway 99, upgrading a logging road that cut through the Melvin Creek watershed. In order to complete this project, it was necessary to expropriate a portion of the Mt. Currie reserve. When the Lil'wat people of Mt. Currie blockaded the road, 63 arrests were made and highway construction continued. Not long after that, the government announced it was seeking proposals for a ski resort in the area -- a project that would only be made possible with the expansion of the highway.

Plans for the Cayoosh Ski Resort on St'at'imc territory were begun in 1991 by Nancy-Greene-Raine Resort Consultants Inc. (Greene-Raine is an Olympic medalist and former board member on Vancouver's Olympic Bid Committee). What many refer to as a 'camp' was set up at Sutikalh in May 2000 to stop construction of the $530-million ski resort. Eight years later, Sutikalh is one of the only re-possessed Territories where people live 365 days a year, even now, in five feet of snow. It is a village and not a camp, far from the government-sanctioned reserves.

One NYM member remarks: "It is a strong point of Indigenous resistance and serves as a great example to Native people that we can still survive on our land, free of the system.

"Sutikalh needs more attention. The resort is still planned for the area. Many times the word is not spread about the struggle on the land because all those involved are on the land where there is no form of electrical communication, so a network must be put in place to help give an international voice to those isolated places that need the most support and resources." *

Sun Peaks Ski Resort, on the other hand, has forcibly pushed ahead with construction on Secwepemc territory, including the thorough clear-cutting of mountains to make way for ski runs, development on the drainage basin for commercial and residential real estate, and an 18-hole golf course. Invaluable mountain lakes, creeks, trap lines, hunting grounds, salmon stocks, animal habitats, sacred sites and important food and medicine harvesting areas have been destroyed.

"Right now they're using recycled sewage waste to make man-made snow for their ski resorts," says Pelkey.

There have been over 70 arrests in the fight against Sun Peaks. Most of these have been elders, women and youth from the NYM.

"The province bulldozed our home on International Human Rights Day. They hired Sun Peaks employees to tear down our sweat lodges. So you get an idea what happens when Native people stand up and fight for their freedom. We announced it to the media, and all the corporate media, they showed up at Sun Peaks, but the roads were deactivated. They [Sun Peaks] made big, huge ice blockades so no vehicles could get through. And Sun Peaks resort has many, many snowmobile businesses, but all the businesses were given orders by Sun Peaks not to rent any snowmobiles to any media, or anybody that day," said Pelkey.

A log cabin that the Secwepemc had built on the outskirts of Sun Peaks to fight encroachment on the untouched land from other directions, "...was burnt down to the ground," she said.

The Secwepemc people, rendered homeless and faced with the threat of arrest if they continued living on their land, retreated. Many had endured previous arrests for similar involvements and did not want to risk imprisonment with no chance of bail.

When fresh ski trails were inaugurated shortly thereafter, the public did not hear about what had come to pass between the Secwepemc First Nation and the B.C. government. The provincial and federal governments have refused to accept Aboriginal title or even enter into negotiations to create co-jurisdiction, despite legally binding promises to do so.

The Secwepemc held a protest at the Sun Peaks Resort on this season's opening day, November 17, 2007. As well as protesting the resort, they also called on the Austrian National Ski Team to boycott Sun Peaks because of the many human and Indigenous rights abuses the resort continues to perpetrate. The team had chosen Sun Peaks as a training facility leading up to the 2010 Games. Despite being confronted by Arthur Manuel of Indigenous Networks on Economies and Trade, who visited Austria in June of that year to expose the team to the abuses taking place on Secwepemc territory, Austria opened the 2007 ski season by formally inviting Felix Arnouse from the Little Shuswap Indian Band (representing few, according to an international statement issued by the Skwelkwekíwelt Protection Centre) in a media stunt to conceal the opposition of the Secwepemc First Nation.

In what many First Peoples see as an additional display of public disrespect and mockery of their cultures, the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) created a trio of Olympic mascots that happen to be misappropriations of beings sacred to many Native people: a Sasquatch, a sea-bear and an animal guardian spirit.

"They know that's the way that it's going to make money. People want to come from all over the world, 'Oh, Native American, oh, what are the Native Americans doing?' But we want them to know that we're protesting," says Pelkey.

According to the 2005 Greater Vancouver Homeless Count, there are 300,000 (official) homeless in Greater Vancouver, 30 per cent of whom are First Nations people, despite the fact that they make up just two per cent of the city's total population.

"The UN human rights index will show Canada [ranked] right near the top, but registered Status Indians will be in the 50s, near any third world country," says Pelkey.

The number of homeless in Vancouver is predicted to triple by 2010 due to the large-scale closure of social housing and low-income hotels in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES). Closures have been spurred on by the Olympics in an effort to create more space for tourists and corporate investors. Three hundred low-income housing units have been lost in the last two years alone due to rent increases. (The province of B.C. does not impose rent controls.) According to the 2001 Canada census, over 126,000 people in Greater Vancouver are at risk of homelessness.

Dustin Johnson traces the Olympic tradition back to ancient Greece in identifying the birth of current patterns of marginalization: "All the lower classes, slaves and women were prohibited from participating... You go back that far, you can trace exactly the kind of effects that imperialism has had on our people... The worst forms of colonial culture are being promoted by the 2010 Olympics. Crass materialism, selfishness, outright greed. It's dangerous [if] you maintain these cultures, you maintain a disconnection from our territories, from our land, from the spirit world and from our cultures."

A June 2007 report by the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) found that two million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced in the last 20 years to clear space for the Olympic Games.

When deciding where to hold the 2010 Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) faced a choice between Pyeongchang, South Korea, and Vancouver. While South Korea pitched itself as the 'peace' candidate, Vancouver sold itself as the 'safety and security' candidate, presenting the province of B.C. as a place where everybody gets along; rich and poor, rural and urban, Native and non-Native. Crafted for the purpose of fashioning just such an image, Mayor Sam Sullivan's November 2006 innovation, "Project Civil City," proposed to "eliminate" homelessness, the open drug market and the incidence of aggressive panhandling, with the goal of reducing all of these by 50 per cent by 2010. There have already been severe security crack-downs on the street; however, in an effort to accomplish this goal on time, over 10,000 police, military and security personnel will occupy Vancouver and Whistler during the Games, creating what many First Peoples have come to perceive as nothing short of a police state.

"You may think that Canada is a free country, but to us it is not. When you go out into the city, it's no different than prison, because the police can come and arrest you at any time," says Pelkey.

In 2003, Pelkey, forcibly separated from her baby boy, spent two and a half months in prison for her involvement with the Sun Peaks blockades. During her time there, she met many First Nations women who had been imprisoned for prostitution and drug abuse. Most of the women's stories involved sexual molestation during childhood; many women had experienced these abuses in residential school environments, while others were the children of residential school survivors.

The Olympic tradition of catering to the elite as a means of social control is can be described as a policy of "sex, screens and sports," a phrase coined in reference to the 1988 Seoul Games, according to Johnson. A massive influx of prostitution, coupled with the pseudo-legalization of the sex industry for the benefit of businessmen and elite athletes, has always been an Olympic tradition, the Seoul Games and the 2004 Games in Athens being prime examples.

Among those who continue to be brutally criminalized by the police and simultaneously marginalized and taken advantage of by society in general are the city's sex workers, a community in which First Nations women are vastly overrepresented.

There are currently 500 (documented) First Nations women missing across Canada, 76 of whom are from B.C.

"They're not all completely dysfunctional and degraded human beings," said Johnson. "Some of them are from good families, who've just been kidnapped outrightly by the most depraved, colonized peoples.

"You actually see, at some of the elementary schools in Vancouver, sexual predators, just waiting around to try to kidnap young Native kids. Some of these kids end up in the sex-slave industry, they get shipped all over the world. This is the kind of industry that VANOC and the people that are organizing the Olympics in Vancouver are trying to continue; they're trying to increase that just for the purposes of the 2010 Olympics. This is something that needs to be not only exposed, but stopped."

Meanwhile, the B.C. Coalition of Experiential Communities (BCCEC), the first sex worker cooperative in Canada, has been attempting to pressure the government to create legal brothels for the upcoming Winter Olympics in 2010. The move had the support both of Mayor Sullivan and VANOC, but has been refused by Canadian Justice Minister Rob Nicholson. Despite the decriminalization of sex workers being one of the BCCEC's primary motives, the issue is controversial both among Canada's political elite and among sex workers themselves.

Pelkey and Johnson stressed that their concerns are about much more than the 2010 Olympics and its effects. They acknowledged that "the Olympics will come and go," choosing instead to emphasize the fact that this globalized event can be used as a powerful tool for mobilization. Drawing attention to First Nations resistance, dating back to the 15th century and very much alive today, is among their top priorities. According to Johnson, Native resistance to the 2010 Games grew significantly following the death of Aboriginal Rights activist and respected Elder Harriet Nahanee in February 2007. The 73-year-old Pacheedaht woman died a week after serving a prison term for her protest of the Olympic-driven Sea-to-Sky Highway expansion, causing an uproar among youth in Canada's Native activist community.

Indeed, some of the effects of the powerful, growing Native opposition to the Games can be observed in the increasingly restricted access to Olympic events leading up to 2010. Due to the consistent disruption of VANOC/ IOC-organized celebrations by protests and demonstrations, many high-end hotels are now reserved exclusively for corporate sponsors like Visa and Coca Cola, and are entirely closed to the public.

In one of Vancouver's better-known anti-Olympics rallies held in February 2007, VANOC and the Vancouver Board of Trade were celebrating the unveiling of a "three-year countdown clock" in the downtown business district. Native people from all over B.C. participated in an anti-Olympics rally at the event, together with non-Native members from the Anti-Poverty Committee (APC). In a move garnering much sought-after media attention, a masked protester jumped on stage and grabbed the microphone from a VANOC official, shouting "Fuck 2010! Fuck Your Corporate Circus!" before being cut off and arrested.

Non-Native shows of solidarity with the First Nations anti-Olympic movement continue to grow, evident by the emergence of demonstrations such as the first annual Poverty Olympics, held on February 3 in Vancouver's DTES; with staged events like the 'poverty-line high jump,' 'the welfare hurdles,' and 'the broad jump over bedbug-infested mattresses,' to name a few. The objective was to embarrass the province into taking action against increasing poverty rates. Among other events being organized for the purpose of strengthening essential connections between Canada's First Nations and outside communities is the Massive Convergence scheduled for February 2010. Thousands are expected to arrive in Vancouver, many coming all the way from Mexico, for the purpose of banding together to counteract Canada's racist policies, to come up with solutions, and to commit to action.

Pelkey remarks that many non-Native people she has encountered on the tour have expressed bewilderment at what the best way to show their support might be.

"It's all about land and that's what everyone has to understand here," she replies. "It's about land and freedom. Non-Indigenous people should support that. Not always just the physically being there in the communities, sometimes that might be intrusive... understand the Nations that you're in, know what Nation you are occupying... and respect that."

"Building a collective, open movement from the ground up," adds Johnson. "That's what really needs to happen, in a lot of people's opinions and their beliefs, and it's really helping because it's promoting the culture of the human."

*On May 1 the eight-year anniversary of the re-possessed Sutikalh territory will be marked with an annual gathering. Anyone wishing to show support is welcome and encouraged to come. For more information, write to nymcommunications [at] hotmail.com.

CANADA: High Housing Prices Swell Ranks of Homeless

Source:http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41169Lede picture:Subhead:

VANCOUVER, Feb 12 (IPS) - Canada is continuing to see increases in homelessness and precarious housing situations across the country as rents increase and incomes stay level, but intergovernmental bickering over housing policy is overshadowing the need to take leadership on the issue, according to critics.

The Toronto-based Wellesley Institute released a report card in early February which raised the issue of growing housing inaffordability -- a leading cause of evictions and homelessness. Renting costs outpaced renter incomes in six of the 10 provinces.

Though new home construction reached near-record levels in recent years, there was very little affordable rental and almost no new social housing built.

The federal government cancelled its national social housing programme in the early nineties in an era of deficit cutting. Even with annual surpluses restored, senior levels of government have not responded to the calls for action by the large urban centres in Canada where the strains of homelessness are exacerbated.

Though there are no verifiable figures of how many homeless people are in Canada, the number is likely to be in the 200,000 range. Approximately 65,000 of the homeless are between the ages of 16-25. In fact, the federal government does not do an official homelessness count in the country, nor are provincial governments obligated to do one.

Civil society advocates are also arguing that Canada is leading the charge in trying to stop international institutions from adopting complaint procedures for optional protocols which set human rights obligations on housing.

During a visit to Canada in October of 2007, Miloon Kothari, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, wrote in his general observations, "Everywhere that I visited in Canada, I met people who are homeless and living in inadequate and insecure housing conditions."

"On this mission I heard of hundreds of people who have died as a direct result of Canada's nationwide housing crisis," he said, noting that the United Nations had recently labeled homelessness and inadequate housing as a "national emergency".

Nations that sign on to optional treaty protocols such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights often invoke the term "progressive realisation" to justify the time lag between domestic policies meeting international standards. Scott Leckie of the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions has written that progressive realisation is used as "an escape clause from the obligations generated under the Covenant."

Canada, along with other G-8 countries, has openly worked within the international system to deny a complaint mechanism on option human rights protocols related to economic, social and cultural rights.

The Maastricht Guidelines on Violations of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights contend that, "As in the case of civil and political rights, States enjoy a margin of discretion in selecting the means for implementing their respective obligations...the burden is on the state to demonstrate that it is making measurable progress toward the full realization of rights in question. The State cannot use the 'progressive realisation' provisions in Article 2 of the Covenant as a pretext for non-compliance."

Canadian law professor Craig Scott has written, "Canadian governments have long invoked averages and medians as adequate accounts of the state of human rights enjoyment in Canada, thereby showing how little understanding (or sincere attempt to understand) there is of the very nature of human rights...That Canadians on average are not homeless, on average have adequate nutrition, on average go to adequate schools, or on average raise their children in a dignified way says nothing at all about whose human rights are being respected and whose are being violated."

According to Michael Shapcott of the Wellesley Institute, only one out of every 100 new homes being built in Canada today can be considered affordable. The incomes of renters are decreasing while rents are rising in urban centres beyond the cost of inflation. Despite surplus budgets, 20 percent of Canadian families live in poverty, with aboriginal people, women and recent immigrants disproportionately represented.

The federal government has been cutting housing policies since the early nineties. In 1993, the government cancelled funding for new co-ops and non-profit housing and capped its expenditures at two billion dollars annually, according to the Wellesley Institute.

Earlier this year, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities released a report describing the situation in Canada and called for the federal government to step in. The federation issued a national action plan urging federal and provincial governments to adopt policies to support middle-class housing and finance houses for the poor and homeless.

The plan called for a five-step, 10-year programme to eliminate "chronic homelessness" and urged the federal government to continue financing housing programmes due to expire this spring.

Gary Jobin, a coordinator with Bladerunners, an aboriginal youth construction training programme in Vancouver's inner city that is involved with the national Raise the Roof Campaign to end homelessness, told IPS: "Ninety percent of our kids that enter our programme are homeless or couch surfing. It's a national travesty."

"Through this program we can get them a damage deposit and secure stable housing for them as they earn their first paycheques. As a resident of the Downtown Eastside, more and more people are on the street including children and families. Homelessness has doubled in this region," he said. "There are kids with kids living in basement suites who need school supplies in September. There are kids going to school hungry."

"We have enormous drop-out rates by grade eight. Thirty-seven percent of kids in the inner city have visible signs of tooth decay by age five compared to four percent on the west side of Vancouver," Jobin said.

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