Mumia: Making the World Safe for Capital Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR CAPITAL By Mumia Abu-Jamal Column #414 - Written 14 April 1999 The biases in international law that favored the powerful and prosperous also tended to protect and encourage persecutors, especially when these groups intertwined and overlapped. In fact, the social mechanisms of genocide- that is, how it is actually carried out-aborted the development of international law and precedents that might otherwise have restricted genocides, particularly after World War I. Thus, the law and crime became caught in a cycle in which the law facilitated the crime, and the crime, in turn, helped institutionalize a form of law with which it could coexist. The losers in this vicious circle were the ordinary people, children, and rebels who have always borne the brunt of tyranny.-Christopher Simpson, _The Splendid Blond Beast_ (1995) As death rains over the Serbian state in the former Yugoslavia, the corporate spinmeisters work overtime to convince the world that the rain of fire over the land is justified to protect the "ethnic minority" of the Kosovars. While it is indeed possible that the Kosovars are under severe Serbian repression, isn't it odd that the Western powers chose this conflict to "resolve"? Isn't it strange that these same powers have, for half a century or more, turned a blind eye to virtual holocausts throughout the charnel houses of Europe? Where were the Western powers when the Kurds have been savaged, herded and decimated by the border states of Turkey, Iraq and Iran? The fate of the Basques in the borders between France and Spain is, for all intents and purposes, off the table. National ethnic minorities continue to be treated like the trash of Euro-states; Consider the Roma (so-called Gypsies) who are seen, perceived and treated as the "white niggers" of Europe. Even as we see NATO dropping metallic death on Serbia because of their mistreatment of "ethnic minorities," the cities and towns of Europe are doing all that they can to make immigration as difficult as possible for people seeking asylum. According to CARF (the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism) [No. 49 April/May 1999] several European states have pursued a strategy of Exclusion, dispersal and state xenophobia. This is seen in the proposed Asylum and Immigration Bill before the British parliament, described by CARF as "draconian," which treats asylum-seekers as "non-persons in a segregated society" who come to their country only to "sponge off the welfare state" [CARF Editorial,p.3]. The Asylum and Immigration Bill presently going through parliament is a draconian piece of legislation which, by denying asylum-seekers access to mainstream benefits, renders them non-persons in a segregated society.... When the state says that it is natural to fear foreigners, because foreigners are indeed out to defraud our welfare state, then it puts its imprimatur on xenophobia and the racists at Dover have won. In the 1960s racism was institutionalised into the apparatuses of the state via the Immigration Acts. The same phenomenon is being repeated today, although now state racism is directed not just against black Third World asylum-seekers but the "lesser white breeds" of eastern Europe. The government can't face both ways: it can't fight institutionalized racism, on the one hand, while institutionalising xenophobia on the other. We have been here before. Never again. [fr. CARF EDITORIAL, "Fight State Xenophobia," p.3] While the rights of "ethnic minorities" is being bandied about to justify the bombing and strafing of the Serbian heartland, one is forced to wonder, how are the rights of "ethnic minorities" protected in the European nation-states? To most in America, the name of Semira Adamu is unknown, but this is not the case in Belgium. There, she was rejected as an asylum-seeker and "suffered a heart attack brought on by a brain hemorrhage" after Belgian immigration police attempted to deport her by using the notorious "pillow restraint method." They held the Nigerian woman down, as she tried to object, with "...gendarmes laughing and cracking jokes while suffocating Adamu with a cushion" (CARF, p. 12). According to CARF, out of a total of 45 deaths in 1998, 29 were of asylum-seekers or undocumented workers whose deaths arose as a direct consequence of immigration and asylum policies which deny individual rights. Of these, 7 were of Roma killed either by the cops or in racially motivated incidents in eastern or central Europe. Three deaths documented in 1998 were of Kosovar Albanians and occurred because Germany deported them back to Serbia, where they were greeted by a firing squad. This was just one instance of death by deportation. In Toulouse, France, a 17-year-old of North African origin was shot to death by police, while allegedly trying to steal a car. Habib Muhammed was shot to death by a cop who didn't even bother to report it. A passerby found the body of the teen lying in the gutter. The nation that we call Serbia exists today because of the intervention of France and Britain into the affairs of the Ottoman Empire. As noted Arab scholar Albert Hourani noted in "A History of the Arab Peoples" (Harvard, 1991), the Western European powers brought trade, but their interests were of colonial domination, for: "Behind the merchant and the sailor there stood the armed power of the European states" (p. 266). Serbia was thus established in 1830, after an anti-Ottoman revolt that was stimulated and provoked by Western European powers, to split the empire. The conquest was so complete that a French colonialist would come to say, "there is no longer an Arab people, there are now men who talk another language than ours." What is happening today in Serbia is an echo of what happened over a century ago. What is happening today in Serbia, is but a darker reflection of what is happening in all of Europe, where the foreigner is treated shabbily, and the stranger is excluded. Some "ethnic minorities" are favored, while others are damned to the ignominy of history. Copyright 1999 Mumia Abu-Jamal. 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