Allegations of apartheid

Template:Allegations of apartheid Allegations of apartheid have been made against numerous societies. The term apartheid historically referred to South African apartheid, a former official policy of political, legal, and economic racial discrimination against non-whites, though its meaning has been extended to include any wholesale cultural, intellectual, religious, economic, or gender based discrimination. Apartheid is also a crime in international law. The application of the term to situations beyond South African apartheid is controversial, disputed, or regarded as an epithet.

Definition of the International Criminal Court

Main article: Crime of apartheid

According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, "'The crime of apartheid' means inhumane acts... committed in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime".

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court came into effect on April 11, 2002 when it was ratified by the minimum of 60 nations. As of October 2005, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has been ratified by 100 nations and signed by an additional 39 nations. The 57 remaining nations (of the 197 nations recognized by the United Nations) that have not signed it (or have unsigned it), notably the United States, Russia, China and India, are not subject to its jurisdiction unless the matter is referred to the International Criminal Court by the UN Security Council. For further details on national ratification and exceptions, see the list of states party to the treaty.

Allegations regarding countries

Afghanistan

Afghanistan, under Taliban religious leadership, has been characterized by feminist groups and others as a "gender apartheid" system where women are segregated from men in public and do not enjoy legal equality or equal access to employment or education. In 1997 the Feminist Majority Foundation launched a "Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan", which urged the U.S. government and the United Nations to "do everything in their power to restore the human rights of Afghan women and girls." The campaign included a petition to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and U.N. Assistant Secretary General Angela King which stated, in part, that "We, the undersigned, deplore the Taliban’s brutal decrees and gender apartheid in Afghanistan." In 1998 activists from the National Organization of Women picketed Unocal's Sugar Land, Texas office, arguing that its proposed pipeline through Afghanistan was collaborating with "gender apartheid". In a weekly presidential address in November 2001 Laura Bush also accused the Taliban of practising "gender apartheid". The Nation referred to the Taliban's 1997 order that medical services for women be partly or completely suspended in all hospitals in the capital city of Kabul as "Health apartheid". According to the Women's Human Rights Resource Programme of the University of Toronto Bora Laskin Law Library "Throughout the duration of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, the term "Gender Apartheid" was used by a number of women's rights advocates to convey the message that the rights violations experience by Afghan women were in substance no different than those experienced by blacks in Apartheid South Africa."

Australia

See also: White Australia policy

Brazil

Main article: Allegations of Brazilian apartheid

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Jonathan Steele of The Guardian has argued that Bosnia and Herzegovina is "a dependent, stifled, apartheid regime". In his view, the U.N. control of Bosnia under the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, which he described as "UN-sanctioned liberal imperialism", creates "dependency, stifles civil society, and produces a highly visible financial apartheid in which an international salariat lords it over a war-wounded and jobless local population."

Canada

Canada's treatment of its native peoples has been described as "Canada's Apartheid". In 1966, Thomas Berger stated:

The history of the Indian people for the last century has been the history of the impingement of white civilization upon the Indian: the Indian was virtually powerless to resist the white civilization; the white community of B.C. adopted a policy of apartheid. This, of course, has already been done in eastern Canada and on the Prairies, but the apartheid policy adopted in B.C. was of a particularly cruel and degrading kind. They began by taking the Indians' land without any surrender and without their consent. Then they herded the Indian people on to Indian reserves. This was nothing more nor less than apartheid, and that is what it still is today.

In the 1980s, the Urban Alliance on Race Relations compared Canada's practices to Apartheid, and stated "Perhaps the most severe and yet overlooked example of discriminatory practices towards Canadians is to be found in the treatment of our own indigenous people, the Native Canadians". Canada's citizenship laws (described as "apartheid laws") did not grant full citizenship to native peoples until 1985. Even in the 21st century, according to Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper, "Economically, socially, politically, culturally, we have come to accept a quiet apartheid that segregates, and thus weakens, native and non-native society", and in 2004 the Canadian Taxpayers Federation described Canada's Indian Act, and reserve system for native Indians, as "Apartheid: Canada's ugly secret". In November, 2006, Mohamed Ali Mohammed Saeed, who represented the Sudanese government at the U.N., chastised Canada for the "tragic situation" of its "indigenous peoples and migrants", stating that "Canada and New Zealand's support for the practices of slavery and apartheid are well known".

People's Republic of China

Main article: Allegations of Chinese apartheid

Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu drew comparisons between the fight to end South African apartheid and the Tibetan struggle for independence from the People's Republic of China. In a speech made while being honored by fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate the Dalai Lama and the International Campaign for Tibet, Tutu stated to the Chinese government "We used to say to the apartheid government: you may have the guns, you may have all this power, but you have already lost. Come: join the winning side. His Holiness and the Tibetan people are on the winning side." In 2001 representatives of Tibet succeeded in gaining accreditation at a United Nations-sponsored meeting of non-governmental organizations. On August 29 Jampal Chosang, the head of the Tibetan coalition, stated that China had introduced "a new form of apartheid" in Tibet because "Tibetan culture, religion, and national identity are considered a threat" to China. The Tibet Society of the UK has called on the British government to "condemn the apartheid regime in Tibet that treats Tibetans as a minority in their own land and which discriminates against them in the use of their language, in education, in the practice of their religion, and in employment opportunities."

China's houku system of residency permits, which has effectively discriminated against China's 800 million rural peasants for decades, has been also been described as "China's apartheid". According to Jiang Wenran, acting director of the China Institute at the University of Alberta, this system has been "one of the most strictly enforced "apartheid" social structures in modern world history." He states "Urban dwellers enjoy a range of social, economic and cultural benefits while peasants, the majority of the Chinese population, are treated as second-class citizens."

Cuba

Main article: Allegations of tourist apartheid in Cuba

France

The long-term policies of successive governments of France, and the current policies of Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, have been accused of constituting "urban apartheid" and "social apartheid" against the country's Muslim residents. According to Ralph Peters, France's "5 million brown and black residents" have "failed to appreciate discrimination, jobless rates of up to 50 percent, public humiliation, crime, bigotry and, of course, the glorious French culture that excluded them through an informal apartheid system." Le Monde diplomatique has stated that "universalist France has allowed a kind of educational apartheid to develop between its good and bad schools." More fundamentalist Muslims in France have also been accused of practising a form of "Muslim apartheid", based on their alleged "deliberate separatism". George Mason University law professor Harry Hutchison has warned that France's refusal to implement its 2006 First Employment Contract law will disproportionally harm poor youth, particularly immigrants; in his view, "France will continue to mirror apartheid-era South Africa". According to Tariq Ramadan, "France is disintegrating before our eyes into socioeconomic communities, into territorial and social apartheid."

India

India's treatment of its lower-class dalits has been described by UNESCO as "India's hidden apartheid". According to Rajeev Dhavan, of India's leading English-language newspaper The Hindu, "casteism is India's apartheid which will continue in its most vicious and persistent forms for decades to come." Eric Margolis has claimed that India "frantically tr[ied] to prevent its caste system, which is often called ‘hidden apartheid" from being put on the agenda of the 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durban.

Critics of the accusations point out the substantial improvements in the rights of Dalits (former "Untouchables") enshrined in the Constitution of India (primarily written by a Dalit, Ambedkar), which is the principal object of article 17 in the Constitution as implemented by the Protection of Civil rights Act, 1955 and the fact that India has had a Dalit, K.R. Narayanan, for a president, as well as the disappearence of the practise in urban public life.Thus, sociologists such as Kevin Reilly, Stephen Kaufman, Angela Bodino, while being critical of Casteism, conclude that modern India does not practice any "apartheid" since there is no state sanctioned discrimination.They write that Casteism in India is presently "not apartheid.In fact, untouchables, as well as tribal people and members of the lowest castes in India benefit from broad affirmative action programmes and are enjoying greater political power"

Iran

Iran has also been accused of implementing a "gender apartheid" system at the behest of religious leaders. In an article titled "Islamic gender apartheid" Phyllis Chesler asserts that:

"In a democratic, modern, and feminist era, women in the Islamic world are not treated as human beings. Women in Iran and elsewhere in the Islamic world are viewed as the source of all evil. Their every move is brutally monitored and curtailed. The smallest infraction – a wanton wisp of hair escaping a headscarf – merits maximum punishment: Flogging in public, or worse. This is happening in Iran even as we speak. In 2005, a hospital in Tehran was accused of refusing entry to women who did not wear head-to-toe covering. In 2002, in Saudi Arabia, religious policemen prevented 14 year old schoolgirls from leaving a burning school building because they were not wearing their headscarves and abayahs. Fifteen girls died."

Israel

Main article: Allegations of Israeli apartheid

Kazakhstan

In Kazakhstan non-Russians who violate the rights of Russians are tried under Russian law, not Kazakh law. Critics of this policy call it "legal apartheid."

Malaysia

Main article: Bumiputra

In 2006 Marina Mahathir, the daughter of Malaysia's former Prime Minister, and a campaigner for women's rights, described the status of Muslim women in Malaysia as similar to that of Black South Africans under apartheid. She was apparently doing so in response to new family laws which make it easier for Muslim men to divorce wives, or take multiple wives, or gain access to their property. Mahathir stated ""In our country, there is an insidious growing form of apartheid among Malaysian women, that between Muslim and non-Muslim women." According to the BBC, she sees Muslim Malaysian women as "subject to a form of apartheid - second-class citizens held back by discriminatory rules that do not apply to non-Muslim women." Her comments were strongly criticized: the Malaysian Muslim Professionals Forum stated "Her prejudiced views and assumptions smack of ignorance of the objectives and methodology of the Sharia, and a slavish capitulation to western feminism's notions of women's rights, gender equality and sexuality," and Dr Harlina Halizah Siraj, women's chief of the reform group Jamaah Islah Malaysia said "Women in Malaysia are given unlimited opportunities to obtain high education level, we are free to choose our profession and career besides enjoying high standard of living with our families."

New Zealand

New Zealand's treatment (both preferential and discriminatory) of its native Māori population has been referred to as "apartheid". In the 1950s the still-current practice of reserving parliamentary seats for Māoris was described by some politicians as "as a form of 'apartheid', like in South Africa". In June, 2000, Winston Peters, leader of the New Zealand First party, described New Zealand's "Closing the gaps" program, its allocation of almost a billion dollars for Māori and Pacific Islanders, as "social apartheid".

In November, 2006, Mohamed Ali Mohammed Saeed, the Sudanese representative at the U.N. chastised New Zealand for the "tragic situation" of its "indigenous peoples and migrants", stating that "Canada and New Zealand's support for the practices of slavery and apartheid are well known".

Saudi Arabia

Main article: Allegations of Saudi Arabian apartheid

Former Soviet Union

Soviet propaganda often used the term "apartheid" as a political epithet during the Cold War, in order to contrast the "rotting capitalism" as colonialist and racist, with declared advantages of Marxism-Leninism such as proletarian internationalism. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the pejorative is still being used in the political discourse, for example to describe national problems within Russia, or the status of ethnic Russian minority in the Baltic states or the situation in Crimea.

Sri Lanka

Some Tamils have accused the ruling Sinhalese government in Sri Lanka of discriminating against them, exhibiting attitudes identical to those of apartheid South Africa, and of collaborating with that government. According to People Against Sri Lankan Oppression (PASLO) "No matter how the Sri Lankan government tries to camouflage the discrimination against the Tamil people of Ceylon, it is exactly the same as apartheid was in South Africa. We firmly believe that due to the collaboration between the Apartheid government of South Africa and the Sri Lankan government, the Sri Lankan government have learnt and is using the same tactics used by the White Racist government. The Sri Lankan government cannot deny that they received arms from the Apartheid regime." Opponents of Tamil separatism have in turn have accused the Tamils of apartheid; the Australian Centre for Sri Lankan Unity has stated that Tamil separatists wish to create an "apartheid-style state called 'Tamil Eelam'", and that attempts at devolution are examples of "apartheid and racism".

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom has been accused of "sleepwalking toward apartheid" by Trevor Phillips, chair of that country's Commission for Racial Equality. Philips has said that Britain is fragmenting into isolated racial communities: "literal black holes into which no one goes without fear and trepidation and nobody escapes undamaged". Philips believes that racial segration in Britain is approaching that of the United States. "You can get to the point as they have in the U.S. where things are so divided that there is no turning back."

The BBC has reported that the latest crime statistics appear to support Phillips' concerns. They show that race-hate crimes increased by almost 600 per cent in London in the month after the July 7 bomb attacks, with 269 more offenses allegedly "motivated by religious hatred" reported to the Metropolitan Police, compared to the same period last year.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has likened the British government's detention of terrorist suspects without charge to South Africa under apartheid. Tutu told the BBC: "Ninety days for a South African is an awful deja-vu because we had in South Africa in the bad old days a 90-day detention law."

United States

Jonathan Kozol has described what he claims are rapidly re-segregating schools in American inner-cities as "Apartheid education" and "Apartheid Schooling".

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said arguments like those used by South Africa during apartheid were being used to justify holding the [[Guantanamo prisoners without trial. Tutu said that under apartheid, as at Guantanamo, people were held for "long periods" then released, adding: "Are you able to restore to those people the time when their freedom was denied them? If you have evidence for goodness sake produce it in a court of law. People with power have an incredible capacity for wanting to be able to retain that power and don't like scrutiny." Tutu said that he was saddened by the "muted public outcry," particularly in America.

Other allegations

The term "apartheid" has been used to describe differential treatment of women in institutions such as the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church. See, for example, Patricia Budd Kepler in her 1978 Theology Today article "Women Clergy and the Cultural Order".

Criticism of Islam has included use of the term Islamic apartheid to refer to alleged discrimination and segregation on the basis of religion or gender.

Sexual apartheid is also a term specifically used by some same-sex rights advocates to describe a legal system that "subjects lesbians and gays to separate and unequal treatment in terms of the laws governing sexual behaviour, marriage, employment, child adoption, membership of the armed forces and so on." The concept of "sexual apartheid" is used to argue against legal discrimination in age of consent between heterosexual and homosexual sex and the non-recognition of same-sex marriage or the advocacy of civil unions as a substitute are cited.

Global apartheid is a term used by some on the left to describe the First World's relationship to the Third World. It is defined as a "an international system of minority rule" in which a largely white minority in the West keeps the rest of the world, particularly Africa, poor. According to the theory an international mostly white minority enjoy greater access to human rights, economic wealth and power by virtue of structural racism endemic in the world economic system and the international power structure. Global apartheid makes acceptable the existence of inferior rights for a majority of the world's population due to their race, origin, location or gender.

Iran's foreign minister has described attempts to stop it from gaining nuclear capabilities as nuclear apartheid and scientific apartheid. In a November 2005 guest column in Le Monde, Manouchehr Mottaki said that the West's demands Iran "surrender its inalienable right to fully master nuclear technology" were "nuclear apartheid". In subsequent statements in February 2006 he insisted that "Iran rejects all forms of scientific and nuclear apartheid by any world power", and asserted that this "scientific and nuclear apartheid" was "an immoral and discriminatory treatment of signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty", and that Iran has "the right to a peaceful use of nuclear energy and we cannot accept nuclear apartheid". His words were later echoed in a June 2006 speech by Iran's deputy chief nuclear negotiator Javad Vaeedi, in which he claimed that "developing countries are moving towards destroying technological apartheid".

Kevin Watkins, the author of the 2006 United Nations Development Programme report (titled "Beyond scarcity"), has decried what he describes as water apartheid, the relative lack of access to clean water faced by poor people and people in poor countries. In his view, the reason little has been done about this, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, is because the children of the wealthy do not suffer from the disease and mortality caused by un-clean water.

See also

• Racial segregation
• Religious segregation