Gwynne Dyer remains one of my go-to reporter/analysts on the international scene. Here he brings three recent, revealing and concise snapshots.
Three famines: Gaza, Sudan, and Haiti
Gwynne Dyer
There are three incipient famines in the world today, and politics is at the root of all of them.
That’s not unusual, actually: Famines are almost always political events.
My family is descended from the Catholic Irish diaspora, and when I was a boy in Newfoundland we would sometimes play the game of “potatoes and point” at the dinner table. We’d point at the potatoes (there was always a bowl of boiled potatoes with the main meal) and say, “May I have a slice of beef” or “I’ll have some more carrots, please.”
It was a distant echo of the Irish famine of 1845-52 that halved the country’s population (a million dead, 3 million fled). Potato blight killed the potatoes, but it was politics — an ideologically driven British government that refused to interfere in the working of the free market by giving the starving Irish free food — that killed the people.
In order for a mere political decision to topple a country into famine, it has to be food-stressed already. But politics provides the final push: That’s what is really killing people today in Sudan, Gaza and Haiti.
The “politics” in question is generally a war of some sort — and in most cases the starvation is a byproduct of the war, not even the main event.
That is certainly the case in Sudan, the biggest of the current famines. According to the United Nations’ World Food Program, nearly 18 million people in Sudan are facing “acute food insecurity” as a result of the civil war between two parts of the army that broke out in April 2023.
Haiti’s situation is much the same. The capital, Port-au-Prince, has been overrun by armed gangs, and the gangs have taken control of the port and the roads to block food supplies from entering the city. Starving people provide excellent political leverage.
Most of Port-au-Prince’s 1.4 million people are going without food for days at a time, and there is plenty of almost random killing, but famine is probably several months away in most parts of the country.
The Gaza Strip is also clearly a man-made famine, in the sense that without the war it would not be happening. It was Hamas that started the war, and it undoubtedly intended to trigger a massively violent Israeli retaliation. It would then use the Palestinian victims created by that response to further its own political agenda.
That’s standard guerrilla strategy, so the Israelis knew what Hamas wanted them to do. The fact that the Israeli Defense Forces did it anyway was a deliberate decision by the Israeli government. So what did Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government hope to gain from the destruction and the food blockade?
There is a deliberate food blockade, although Jerusalem denies it. Aerial photos from late last month show 2,000 trucks waiting to cross at Rafah. Most are still there now, containing enough food to feed everyone in Gaza. Some have been waiting for as long as 90 days. This is not Israeli incompetence. It is Israeli policy.
There are already children dying of starvation every day in the northern Gaza Strip, and the consensus of the IPC (the major food aid organizations) is that “Famine is imminent in the northern governorates of the Gaza Strip and projected to occur anytime between mid-March and May 2024.”
Random air drops of food and a new pier in a couple of months’ time for food deliveries by Israel’s “allies” will not prevent that outcome. So is the Israeli policy merely one of taking vengeance on the innocent, or is it intended to empty the Gaza Strip of its Palestinian population?
I never thought I would write that sentence, not because I thought Israelis are more moral than other people but because I believed they were not stupid. There is nowhere else for those 2.4 million Palestinians to go, and Israel’s allies, especially the United States, would never condone such an act.
But then again, I didn’t think that Putin’s regime would be stupid enough to invade Ukraine, either.
Non-white Britain exists; is it real progress?
Gwynne Dyer — March 20, 2024
Nobody planned it, hardly anybody realised it was happening, and suddenly there it was: done. In the space of less than two years, the entire senior leadership of Great Britain has become non-white.
I’m choosing my words carefully here, because the country as a whole is called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It contains four nations, and one of them, Northern Ireland, still has a white person running the government. She is a Catholic woman, which is a double first, but Michelle O’Neill is indisputably white.
However, on the island of Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland), it has been a clean sweep.
Humza Yousaf, a Muslim born in Scotland of Punjabi descent, succeeded Nicola Sturgeon as the leader of the Scottish National Party just a year ago. Since the SNP is the governing party in Scotland, that automatically made him first minister, too. (“First minister” is the title of heads of government in the “devolved” nations.)
Six months before that, Rishi Sunak, a Hindu of Indian heritage born in Southampton, became the prime minister of the whole country. (England contains more than four-fifths of the entire UK population but it does not have an exclusive national government of its own, so Sunak is all England has by way of a national leader.)
Finally, late last week, Vaughan Gething, born in Zambia 50 years ago to a Zambian mother and a Welsh father and brought to Wales at the age of two, became the First Minister of Wales. Game set, and match.
The cherry atop that cake is the fact that the mayor of London, ever since 2016, has been Sadiq Khan, a Muslim Londoner of Pakistani heritage. London contains about a fifth of the British population, and Khan is about to be re-elected to a third term by a large majority.
Obviously, there is an element of coincidence in all this. Non-white people make up only 18% of the UK population, so there may never again be four non-white people in these four posts at the same time. But it is striking that hardly anybody noticed until the process was nearly complete—and when it did happen, almost nobody was upset.
It’s hard to explain why this has happened in the UK, because in most respects it is a political disaster area. The Conservative government led by Rishi Sunak knows in its heart that it is going to lose the forthcoming national election by a landslide. Thrashing around in despair, some of the Party’s leading members have turned very nasty indeed.
The Party’s former deputy chair, Lee Anderson, gave a splendid example of that last month: “I don’t actually believe that the Islamists have got control of our country,” he said, “but what I do believe is they’ve got control of Khan, and they’ve got control of London. Khan has given our capital city away to his mates.”
Some of Anderson’s fellow Conservatives defend him by saying that he’s not racist, just Islamophobic, as if that excused his behaviour. In the end he was expelled from the Party, but the question remains: how can a party with people like that in it preside over a country that is undergoing such a radical transformation? For Anderson is certainly not alone.
Early last week it was revealed that the Conservative Party’s biggest donor, Frank Hester, had declared his undying hatred of Diane Abbott, who 37 years ago was the first black woman elected to the UK parliament.
She’s still in Parliament, and Hester can’t stand her: “You just see Diane Abbott on the TV and you’re just like, I hate, you just want to hate all black women because she’s there…I think she should be shot.” This caused much outrage and uproar, of course.
Rishi Sunak eventually said Hester was “racist and wrong”—but refused to reject Hester’s money (about $12 million last year and already another $6 million this year) because it amounts to about one-quarter of all donations to the Conservative Party and there is a national election coming this autumn.
And by the way, Diane Abbott herself is currently suspended by the Labour Party for saying that Jewish, Irish and Traveller people are not subject to racism “all their lives”, whereas black people are. (No, I don’t want to enter that minefield either.)
The United Kingdom has not turned into a colour-blind paradise where everybody lives happily ever after. Far from it. The claim that it is the best (or rather, the least bad) place to be a black person in Europe may be correct, but that is hollow praise.
Nevertheless, this really is a remarkable moment, and all the more so for the fact that it was not some officially ordained goal or programme. It just sort of happened.
—Author Gwynne Dyer is an international journalist based in London.
Dyer: Haiti’s violent history not likely over
Barbecue (the name allegedly refers to his habit of incinerating his victims) is not confused. He is deadly serious about fighting a revolutionary race war against “the arabs and the mulattoes” whom he sees as the oppressors and exploiters of black Haitians.That’s a vast over-simplification of Haiti’s real social structure, but there is just enough truth in it to convince the angry, illiterate young men in the gangs that now control 80 per cent of the capital, Port-au-Prince.Cherizier and his G9 Family and Allies coalition of gangs have come together with the rival G-Pep coalition to oppose yet another international attempt to bring in foreign troops and police to stabilize the country. (The lead country this time would be Kenya.)There has never been a slave-owning society worse than the one that flourished in Haiti under French rule in 1625-1791. Slavery was practically universal in the world at the time – about a third of West Africa’s population were slaves – but what happened in Haiti was particularly efficient and murderous.
The African slave traders were glad of the new customers (previously the export trade had all been north across the Sahara to the Islamic countries on the Mediterranean). The demand never slacked, and at least ten million slaves were sent west across the Atlantic in the next two centuries.The ones who went to Haiti died very fast, because it was cheaper to work them to death and just buy more. “Turnover” was so high that when revolution came to Haiti two centuries later (as part of the great French Revolution of 1789), slaves were almost 90 per cent of the population, but most of them were still fresh out of Africa.However, there was also a significant number of mixed-race “mulattoes.” European women were scarce in Haiti in the early days, and the white fathers of these mulattoes mostly looked after their children, so they grew up free, educated, and in many cases slave-owners themselves.
It’s still possible. History is a burden everywhere, but in Haiti it’s a curse.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London.