Although crossings between Africa, Asia and Europe are as old as settlement along its shores, in the modern era, restrictions on travel and violent border security have turned the sea into a mass graveyard, where countries would rather return vulnerable people to death or near-certain slavery than allow for a measure of safety. Almost all of Europe is complicit in turning people away at their most vulnerable, including by intimidating boats defying the fortress that Europe built.

The deaths on the Mediterranean Sea have wrongly been framed as an African, a Syrian or even a Libyan crisis; as being about migration. While Europe has been quick to hijack the discussion and declare this a crisis of the European border, in fact it’s a crisis of the European state—one that has everything to do with the history of conflict and division within that continent. So much of how the world’s states function and fear comes from Europe’s bloody and violent history.

There are three main routes that will get you across the Mediterranean from Africa or Asia into Europe. These routes have been used for almost as long as travel across the Mediterranean has been documented. Scattered across the coastline is the detritus of ancient civilisations that fed into the birth of the modern age—Sparta in Greece, Carthage in Tunisia, Alexandria in Egypt, historical Athens and Rome—telling a story of societies that have been in constant if not always friendly contact with each other.

If Western philosophy is a cornerstone of Western politics and society, it’s worth noting that many of the most notable products of Western philosophy are in fact products of the free movement of people and ideas across the water. Augustine of Hippo was an African man whose theology and philosophy are at the heart of modern Christianity and Western political thought. His theory of the just war is still taught in international relations and political science classes all around the world. Historians say that Augustine was Berber—from a pastoralist people—and so migration and mobility were central to his worldview even before he moved to Rome and Milan to continue his work. Movement has always been central to the Mediterranean region’s intellectual fertility, and modern hostility to it is only contributing to its decline.

If Western philosophy is a cornerstone of Western politics and society, it’s worth noting that many of the most notable products of Western philosophy are in fact products of the free movement of people and ideas across the water

It’s not that there has never before been hostility between the communities of the Mediterranean. Remember: Europe has always been a violent place. But as Europe has coalesced into an enormous social and political project, the scope of the damage has become greater. Bertrand Russell once wrote that leaders have always been stupid, but they have never been quite so powerful before; he was writing of the period between the world wars, but the same can be said today. The human capacity to inflict harm is greater than it has ever been, which makes historical tensions and hatreds all the more dangerous. Alarming numbers of people are now dying while using routes that have been in place for hundreds of years.

The 1990 Schengen Convention found a way to keep both the historically open and the historically closed countries happy, despite the new system abolishing internal visa controls and agreeing common visa policies (to reduce bureaucracy at many European countries’ borders). The compromise was an invasive, humiliating and even violent process of scrutiny for people coming from countries considered to be too poor, and thus a risk for immigration.

Humanitarians will tell you that one thing the Schengen system did with alarming efficiency was to close off all humane routes into Europe for citizens of these unwanted countries who could not meet the required thresholds. For a young man or woman from Senegal or Sudan who couldn’t find work in a village ravaged by climate change, or a collapsing economy, the Schengen regime left no legal way to seek low-wage work in Europe. Of course, it was not ideal that people had been boarding flights to Europe and then claiming asylum or overstaying their tourist visas. But at least they’d been arriving alive. What the architects of Schengen seemed to ignore was the sheer number of people who would now be driven towards smugglers and clandestine routes instead. When people see their options as certain death while standing still, versus a minute chance of success if they move, they will move.

It’s not that there has never before been hostility between the communities of the Mediterranean. Remember: Europe has always been a violent place. But as Europe has coalesced into an enormous social and political project, the scope of the damage has become greater.

Whenever I make this argument to Europeans, I always get a version of “So why don’t the people in those countries just take charge of their politics and make their countries better?” Of course, that would be the better and even the ideal option. But go back to Wallerstein and the use of borders to export instability out of the West. Look at the twentieth century in Africa alone. First the violence of colonisation and invasion. Then the wide-spread, targeted assassination, with the collaboration of Western governments, of visionary leaders like Thomas Sankara and Patrice Lumumba. Then decades of active economic interference and sabotage, culminating in the Structural Adjustment Programs of the late 1980s: loans from the IMF and World Bank to economies in crisis, on condition of structural reforms. Now, we have digital colonialism and Western governments providing cover for private Western corporations to interfere in the politics of developing countries. Do you still think it’s fair to place responsibility on civilians for choices made by states? Why don’t the countries manufacturing and selling weapons to poorer governments just stop doing it? Why don’t governments just stop supporting dictators? Emigration doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

The number of people taking to the seas to get to Europe hasn’t just been increasing because there are simply more people. It’s because legal and safe passage to Europe has disappeared, for all but a small sliver of the world’s population.

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This article was first published by Progressive InternationalProg

Since taking power in 1986, President Yoweri Museveni has enjoyed total bipartisan support from six American administrations. Along with America’s help, Museveni’s domestic repression has grown steadily, stymying Uganda’s fledgling democracy. Uganda’s next general election will take place on 14 January 2021, a week before President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The Biden administration must not give Museveni carte blanche but should instead make America’s continued support contingent on good governance and accountability.

When he first became president five years after launching a rebellion against President Milton Obote over the disputed December 1980 election, Museveni portrayed himself and his movement, the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) as the antithesis of all previous groups. After 33 years at the helm, Museveni and the National Resistance Movement are indistinguishable from the people he launched a rebellion to dislodge from power.

The speech and the memo

A speech given and a memo written 13 years apart, laid out the vision and the contradictions within the NRM, and more broadly within Uganda, and cast the authors as protagonists in the struggle for democracy in Uganda. The speech was given by Yoweri Museveni in 1986, shortly after he seized power. Kizza Besigye issued the memo on 7 November 1999.

The speech, often referred to as the “fundamental change” speech, laid out the future of Uganda under the NRM, while the memo, “An insider’s view on how NRM lost the broad base”, was the most realistic appraisal of the NRA/M 13 years after it took power.

When he delivered his speech on 29 January 1986, Museveni said, “No one should think that what is happening today is a mere change of guard: it is a fundamental change in the politics of our country.” Museveni added,

“The people of Africa—the people of Uganda—are entitled to democratic government. It is not a favour from any government: it is the right of the people of Africa to have a democratic government. The sovereign power in the land must the population, not the government. The government should not be the master, but the servant of the people.”

Regarding democracy, Museveni said, “It is a birthright to which all the people of Uganda are entitled.”

In November 1999, while still a serving army officer, Col. Kizza Besigye offered an opposing view of the NRA/M when he said, “All in all, when I reflect on the Movement philosophy and governance, I can conclude that the Movement has been manipulated by those seeking to gain or retain political power in the same way that political parties in Uganda were manipulated.” Besigye went further to say that, “[W]hether it’s political parties or Movement, the real problem is dishonest, opportunistic and undemocratic leadership operating in a weak institutional framework and a weak civil society which cannot control them.”

Museveni’s vision of “fundamental change” has produced “no change” and the servant leadership and democracy espoused in his speech are illusory. Besigye’s assessment of the selfish, opportunistic and undemocratic leadership within the NRA/M and in Uganda is all too familiar and the competing realities embodied by Museveni and Besigye have dominated Ugandan politics for over a decade.

A central plank of the NRM was the establishment of a broad-based government and the elimination of all forms of sectarianism. To make good on its promise, the NRM introduced an anti-sectarian law in 1988.  The NRM also instituted a no-party system where elections were contested on personal merit rather than party affiliation. For Museveni and the NRM, political parties were the root cause of Uganda’s crises since independence—as they inherently promote “sectarianism”, unlike the Movement, which “fosters consensus”.

Three elements have sustained Museveni’s vice-like grip on power in Uganda: the use of the security apparatus to suppress the opposition, the passing and selective application of laws—even when the courts strike them down—and America’s generosity despite Uganda’s dubious human rights and governance record.

Electoral violence 

Three years after publishing the memo, Besigye ran against Museveni in the 2001 general election. The electoral commission declared Museveni the winner. The run-up to the election saw the arrest and assault of Besigye’s supporters.  A Select Parliamentary Committee established to examine electoral violence stated that, “violence experienced in elections includes physical assault and shooting, intimidation, abduction and detention of voters”. In all, according to the commission, 17 people were killed and 408 arrests were made.

A few months after the election, Besigye was detained and questioned by the Criminal Investigations Division (CID), allegedly in connection with the offence of treason. Besigye left the country In September 2001, citing persecution by the state. He returned on 26 October 2005.

Unlike in the 2001 elections, in 2006 the state was keen to derail Besigye’s candidacy through legal manoeuvres from the outset to prevent his name from appearing on the ballot. The police filed a case in court accusing him of rape and treason, and arrested him on 12 November, barely a fortnight after he returned to Uganda from exile, and a few months before the election scheduled for March.

When the military realised that the civilian court would grant bail to Besigye and his co-accused, the military prosecutor brought terrorism and weapons offences charges. The court eventually acquitted him of the rape charge. In dismissing the case, high court Judge John Bosco Katutsi said, “The evidence is inadequate, impotent, scandalous, monstrous against a man who brought himself up to compete for the highest position in this country.”

Despite already competing in an election with the odds stacked against him, Besigye lost six weeks to legal fights in the courts where he spent as many days as he did on the campaign trail.

The defiance campaign 

After losing two elections, Besigye realised it was almost impossible to beat Museveni at polls which were neither free, nor fair, nor peaceful, or by having the courts overturn the election results and sought to employ other means.

In 2011, Besigye joined other activists in a Walk to Work campaign, a simple yet profound form of protest that highlighted the stark economic realities in Uganda. Even as many Ugandans were struggling to meet their daily needs, the country bought at least eight fighter jets and other military hardware worth US$744 million. Museveni’s inauguration ceremony cost US$1.3 million. That the protest came a few weeks after the electoral commission declared Museveni the winner of the election with over 60 per cent of the vote illustrated the hollowness of Museveni’s victory.

The election took place against the background of the Arab Spring and its potential for contagion, with Museveni viewing the remarkably benign act of people walking to work instead of driving an existential threat. Museveni and the security agencies could not countenance the Walk to Work or other similar activities turning into a popular movement. The 2013 Public Order Management Act and its convenient interpretation came in handy.

Museveni fell back on the template set during the 2001 election. Security agencies visited unspeakable violence on Besigye and his supporters during the election campaign and Museveni was declared the winner by the electoral commission. Besigye contested the validity of the election in court but, while it recognised that there were irregularities, the court ruled that they were not sufficient to modify the outcome of the election.

Enter Bobi Wine

State violence against Besigye and his supporters has been a constant in the Besigye-Museveni contest but for the first time, Museveni‘s opponent is not Besigye. He will be competing against the Kyaddondo East Member of Parliament, Robert Kyagulanyi, popularly known by his stage name Bobi Wine. Kyagulanyi was four years old when the NRM came to power in 1986.

And just like with Besigye, Bobi Wine has been at the receiving end of the violence of the state agencies ahead of 2021 election. The police have disrupted his campaign and detained him several times and he has on occasion suspended his campaign in protest at the violence meted out against him and his supporters. He was recently arrested for defying the COVID protocol while campaigning. Predictably, the protocol does not seem to apply to President Museveni, who has been campaigning unimpeded.

America’s support 

Museveni’s ascension to power also coincided with the deterioration of the security situation in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and with Muammar Gaddafi’s actions to prop up various African regimes. An astute political entrepreneur, Museveni put Uganda at the service of America and in return, successive American administration gave him political support and financial backing.

When President Ronald Reagan warned him to be wary of Gaddafi’s activities during their first ever meeting, Museveni told Reagan that he had fought Gaddafi before the Americans started fighting him, to which Reagan replied, “I am preaching to a choir.”

Since then, Museveni has made himself indispensable to America’s security calculus in the region. During her visit to Kampala in 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright called Uganda a “beacon in the central African region.”

Uganda is among the largest beneficiaries of the Department of Defense “Train and Equip” programme. The Department of Defense has notified Congress of over US$280 million in equipment and training for Uganda since the 2011 financial year, over US$60 million in joint support to Uganda and Burundi for AMISOM and significant funding for the 2011-2017 counter-LRA effort (Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency). Additionally, Uganda also receives counterterrorism aid through State Department funds. It received over US$30 million in support via the African Peacekeeping Rapid Response Partnership (APRRP).

The state is coming down hard on Bobi Wine because he is tapping into and articulating the latent discontent among the vast majority of Ugandans, those under under 30 who make up over 70 per cent of the country’s population and who cannot relate to Museveni’s self-aggrandising rendering of the Bush Wars or the Idi Amin scarecrow. America has a choice: to side with most Ugandans who would like to see democracy take root in Uganda or with Museveni under the pretext of maintaining stability.

In October 2019, the people of Ecuador rose up against the International Monetary Fund and the austerity demands attached to a $4.2 billion loan to the government of Lenín Moreno. Marching through the streets of Quito, demonstrators called to end the brutal cuts imposed as conditions of IMF support. “What the government has done is reward the big banks, the capitalists, and punish poor Ecuadorians,” a trade unionist told Al Jazeera. “Out with the IMF!” said another.

The IMF, however, has stayed. Following a year of deadly unrest, the IMF and the Ecuadorian authorities continue to advance budget cuts, salary reductions, and sell-offs in exchange for bail-out funds to the government. On 15 December, the newest Ecuador program — a $6.2 billion Extended Fund Facility — will undergo a revision ahead of a fresh disbursement of $2 billion. The revision offers a critical opportunity for the IMF to reflect on the failures of its austerity agenda, and to respond to rising discontent across the country. We worry, however, that this will be yet another opportunity missed — for which the people of Ecuador will suffer the most.

As the early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic in Latin America, Ecuador has already suffered an historic year of poverty, unemployment, and disease. Thousands of lives and millions of livelihoods were lost as Covid-19 spread through the country. The city of Guayaquil became a global symbol of the human costs of the coronavirus, with stories of overwhelmed hospitals and street-side corpses reported widely.

But the tragic outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic were not incidental. On the contrary, they follow directly from the austerity reforms attached to IMF money. To take one striking example, the IMF bailout resulted in the dismissal of 3,680 public health workers. The impact of these cuts on pandemic preparedness were all too predictable.

The IMF has promised to break with the dogma of austerity in response to these unprecedented conditions. “Spend what you can but keep the receipts,” President Kristalina Georgieva has instructed IMF member-states, giving the green light for major spending increases. “Exceptional times call for exceptional measures.”

In Ecuador, however, there is little evidence of this change of heart. The general objectives of the new Extended Facility, currently under review ahead of the 15 December deadline, appear to incorporate the concerns of Ecuador’s aching communities, calling for greater protection of life and livelihoods during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.

But the IMF’s apparent sensitivity to these struggles is immediately undermined by the agreement’s call for a drastic fiscal adjustment of 5.5% of Ecuador’s GDP until 2025. Our research on the new agreement suggests instead that the IMF remains committed to the very same austerian principles that rocked the country one year ago.

Consider its provisions for Ecuadorian workers. The new agreement calls for the “rationalization” of wages, adjusting the basic salary to more “competitive” levels. But the call to “rationalize” workers’ wages violates Ecuador’s own Constitutional Article 328, which establishes the obligation that “remuneration will be fair, with a living wage that meets the basic needs of the working person as well as that of his family.” The IMF — and the government of Lenín Moreno — has a legal obligation to respect these articles and ensure that the people of Ecuador can access their constitutional rights to a fair wage.

Consider also the agreement’s changes to Ecuador’s central banking. The IMF is calling for a reform of the Monetary and Financial Code to establish greater “autonomy” for Ecuador’s Central Bank — in short, to disassociate it from the executive branch and pass it into the hands of a Board with the participation of private actors. But this “autonomy” would take away the tools of liquidity management that allow governments to protect the lives and livelihoods of the population. Here again, the ‘good governance’ agenda advanced by the IMF threatens to undermine the democratic accountability — and capacity — of the government on the other end.

Finally, the IMF is obliged by its Articles of Agreement to ensure that there are no significant outflows of capital in the countries that are undergoing its programs. The IMF understands well this is a particular problem for Ecuador, given its dollarized economy. But the IMF program in Ecuador excludes this. Paradoxically, the same day the agreement was approved, the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office released their capital flows report suggesting that controls should be strengthened to address the problem of dangerous outflows. Will the IMF listen and learn, or look aside once more?

15 December should mark a critical juncture in the IMF’s relationship to the people of Ecuador: a chance for reflection, a fresh start in a new year, an opportunity to deliver on President Georgieva’s new promises of social protection.

But the IMF can only realize this opportunity with a clear and honest review of the impacts of its austerity measures, and a fundamental realignment of its policy agenda to respect the constitutional rights of the Ecuadorian people. Only with careful concerns for the human cost of Ecuador’s capital outflows, fiscal consolidation, and wage ‘rationalization’ can the IMF make good on the bloody legacy of its program in Ecuador, and ensure that its call for consultation is not simply a dialogue of the deaf.