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The
mass explosion and conflicts that followed the obvious falsification of
the results of the Dec. 27 Kenyan presidential election have raised
many questions. But one thing is absolutely clear. Kenya can no longer be
held up by the imperialist governments and publicists as a model of
stability and prosperity for post-colonial Africa.
It
is now just another story of the ruin and hopelessness that is
afflicting the neocolonial states of the continent, of the effects of
the continued dominance of the world capitalist economy over these
countries even after their imperialist masters ceded formal
governmental responsibility to local rulers.
Most
fundamentally, the slaughter and destruction in Kenya are the
consequence of the stagnation and inequality to which world capitalism
condemns such countries. In this situation, small advantages for
different groups become matters of life and death, something for which
elements of the population are ready to kill and rob their neighbors.
This
perverse logic is reinforced by the failure of the neocolonial
governments to provide any perspective for economic improvement for
all. In fact, if any government tried to offer such hope, the
imperialists would use their resources to plunge that country into
blood and fire. The examples of the Lumumba government and later the
Kabila government in the former Belgian Congo demonstrate that.
Kabila
was a follower of Lumumba, a radical anti-imperialist leader who was
overthrown and murdered with United Nations complicity in 1961, shortly
after Belgium had granted formal independence to the country. After the
liquidation of Lumumba, Kabilia led a long-lasting guerrilla war
against the Mobutu regime, another pillar of neocolonialism in Africa,
until he finally defeated the dictator in 1997.
Because
of his history Kabila was not trusted by the imperialists, and his
nationalization of one railway apparently was enough to put them on the
warpath. Only a year after Kabila's forces marched into the Congo
capital of Kinshasa, imperialist interests were able to sponsor a
rebellion against his government that launched a still continuing civil
war.
To
date, this war of rapine and robbery has claimed the lives of more than
5 million people and thus dwarfs the conflicts in Kenya. That is the
prospect facing any African government that dares try to offer its
people any future other than one dictated by world
capitalism.
In
Kenya today, one of the centers of the worst ethnic clashes is the Rift
Valley, in which the evils of the British colonial heritage have merged
with the abuses of the corrupt neocolonial regime that succeeded
British rule. In their attempt to crush the nationalist rebellion of
the early 1950s, the British forcibly deported populations from this
area, giving much of the land to white settlers.
When
the British finally gave Kenya independence, being no longer able to
afford the costs of holding the country by force, many of the
dislocated people returned to their homes to find others in possession
of what they considered theirs. Then the government of Jomo Kenyatta,
Kenya’s first president and a leader of the Kikuyu (who had been the
backbone of the uprising against the British), granted land in the area
arbitrarily to his followers. This created seething resentments among
those not so favored, some of whom
are
out for belated revenge now. Kenyatta's successors continued playing
the patronage game.
Kenya
remained a one-party dictatorship up until 1992, and a multiparty
system was not really established until 2002 when an opposition
coalition ousted the old ruling group. The victors included both the
incumbent president, Kibaki, now trying to maintain office by
fraud,
and his rival, Raila Odinga. The opposition, however, offered no social
and economic alternative to the old government, and thus it rapidly
became a replica of it.
Today,
Odinga, a populist politician whose father was a famous liberation
fighter, has become the focus of some demands and aspirations of the
poor, and is therefore regarded as "a dangerous man" by the
crony capitalists behind Kibaki and their allies.
But
so long as Odinga offers no real alternative to the capitalist economy,
he will be destined to replicate Kibaki, just as that former
oppositionist came to replicate the former neocolonialist strongmen.
The
example of the Congo shows the danger of halfway alternatives. Kabila
opened the way for the imperialist-sponsored civil war by failing to
mobilize the masses behind a socialist program and trying to save
himself by making alliances with various neocolonial states and
leaderships.
A
recent development in the Kenyan conflict is accusations that the
inter-ethnic violence is being organized by politicians, mostly
Odinga's opposition coalition. In this situation, unscrupulous
politicians will almost certainly try to exploit the ethnic antagonisms
for their own benefit. It will also be hard to determine specific
responsibilities. The real test of the political forces will be whether
any offer a solution to the inter-ethnic conflict.
It
is an oversimplification to call the Kenyan ethnic groups “tribes,” the
usual term employed by the mass media in the West. Some of them number
in the millions and have their own languages and distinctive economic
profiles. But they are not nations either, although they represent a
stage in nation formation.
The
development of antagonistic nations is a result of the uneven
development of the capitalist economy, which led some ethnic groups to
dominate others. But this process is not far enough advanced in general
in Africa, and specifically not in Kenya, to speak of
oppressed
and oppressor nations, even if it is necessary for principled
anti-imperialist leaders to avoid appearing to favor any ethnic group
over another.
Furthermore,
much of the killing in Kenya cannot be attributed to ethnic clashes but
are simply atrocities committed by police and paramilitary forces
formed by a long history of repressive rule. Recently, Kenyans were
outraged, for example, when TV showed that the
police
deliberately and cold-bloodedly murdered an unarmed demonstrator. The
local and international press has already documented more than 60
killings by state forces, and such murders are probably a large
proportion of the over 600 reported dead.
The
blatant falsification of the election results in Kenya, following soon
after the less blatant but obvious election fraud in Mexico,
demonstrates that bourgeois-style elections tend not to produce results
that can be seen as legitimate in neocolonial countries and therefore
give rise to deep-going political crises.
Such
elections are essentially huge expensive big-business-financed
publicity campaigns designed to justify a sort of serial monarchy. When
a government is elected, it has control of the patronage machine for
years. It cannot be removed for a long time, even if it is quickly seen
to be corrupt and to have reneged on its election promises.
Bourgeois
elections are not democratic in the advanced countries either, but in
such countries in normal times, the social contradictions are less
explosive and they not so quickly discredited.
The
more turbulent circumstances in neocolonial countries are showing the
masses there that they need another means of choosing their political
representatives—that is, direct elections based on their own social
organizations, like the People's Assembly advocated by the trade-union
movement in Bolivia. This was the model of political representation
demonstrated by the world's first successful socialist revolution, the
Russian workers’ councils, or “soviets.”
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