Allegations of apartheid

Allegations of apartheid have been made against numerous countries. The term apartheid historically referred to South African apartheid, a former official policy of political, legal, and economic separation of the races, targeting non-whites. More recently, the term "apartheid" has been used to describe alleged wholesale discrimination based on race, ethnicity, culture, religion, economic status, gender, sexual orientation or other characteristics, in contexts other than South Africa. These allegations are often hotly contested, and the term's use in this sense dismissed as an epithet.

Use

Gavan Tredoux writes in the bi-monthly magazine, PINC of the modern use of the word in post-apartheid South Africa:

Unfortunately, many things are meant by "apartheid", confusing any discussion of it. Since history is often politics by other means, the term has been used pejoratively to denote anything disliked. As the political climate has changed, so too has the meaning of apartheid, as it is assigned to new targets. Major uses of the word, in order of descending generality, are:

• Everything
• The White State
• Social Segregation
• Indirect Rule

A 1986 op-ed published by the Toronto-based Urban Alliance on Race Relations argued that "South Africa is not the only country where the Native population has been set apart legally, geographically and economically on a purely genetic basis," and maintained that Canadian state policies towards its indigenous people were similar in kind though not degree to those of apartheid South Africa :

For those who shy away from the suggestion that parallel exist between conditions in Canada and South Africa, it is important realize [sic] that "simply because the framework of apartheidism is not written into a constitution does not mean that it is not a component nor a reality nation." Although the laws and policies of the two countries are not the same as the existence of racial repression which allies them, and not the degree or extent to which it occurs. [sic] While the intensity of personal oppression varies considerably, the result is the same as in South Africa: "The native population has been herded on to reduced territories in order to make way for others."

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 July 2007, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has been ratified by 104 nations and signed by an additional 35 nations. The 58 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.

Countries

Afghanistan

See also: Taliban treatment of women

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

Allegations of apartheid based on race have been made against Australia. Though the White Australia policy, which had segregated Aborigines, no longer exists, their poor socio-economic conditions typically leave them segregated from the rest of Australian society. The situation in 1997 led one activist to suggest that the country could be led "back to apartheid". In fact, Australian government policy from earlier years is viewed by some as the original impetus for the Apartheid system in South Africa.

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".

People's Republic of China

Main article: Allegations of Chinese apartheid

Cuba

Main article: Allegations of tourist apartheid in Cuba

France

Main article: Allegations of French 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 disappearance of the practise in urban public life. Sociologists 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."

According to William A. Haviland, however:

Although India's national constitution of 1950 sought to abolish cast discrimination and the practice of untouchability, the caste system remains deeply entrenched in Hindu culture and is still widespread throughout southern Asia, especially in rural India. In what has been called India's "hidden apartheid", entire villages in many Indian states remain completely segregated by caste. Representing about 15 percent of India's population—or some 160 million people—the widely scatter Dalits endure near complete social isolation, humiliation, and discrimination based exclusively on their birth status. Even a Dalit's shadow is believed to pollute the upper classes. They may not cross the line dividing their part of the village from that occupied by higher castes, drink water from public wells, or visit the same temples as the higher castes. Dalit children are still often made to sit in the back of classrooms.

Iran

Iranian human rights activist Akbar Ganji has described Iran's government as "dangerous" because it "is willing to create gender apartheid in the name of religion." In an article titled "Islamic gender apartheid", the feminist human rights activist Phyllis Chesler asserted 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.."

Israel

Main article: Allegations of Israeli apartheid

Jordan

Jordan's 1954 law on nationality allows Palestinian nationals who were resident in Jordan (or the Jordanian occupied West Bank) from 1949 to 1954 to acquire Jordanian citizenship, unless Jewish:

The following shall be deemed to be Jordanian nationals: ...Any person who, not being Jewish, possessed Palestinian nationality before 15 May 1948 and was a regular resident in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan between 20 December 1949 and 16 February 1954.

— Law No. 6 of 1954 on Nationality

Jordan's laws against Jewish citizenship or land ownership have been described by Benjamin Natanyahu, Alan Dershowitz and Menachem Kellner as apartheid.

FLAME has accused the UN of ignoring Jordanian apartheid laws during its rule of the West Bank and East Jerusalem which prevented Jews from accessing the Old City of Jerusalem.

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

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".

Pakistan

Pakistan has a separate electoral system for different religions which has been described as 'political Apartheid'. Hindu community leader Sudham Chand protested against the system but was murdered [2].

Puerto Rico

History

Rose Clemente, a black Puerto Rican columnist wrote Until 1846, Blacks on the island had to carry a libreta to move around the island, like the passbook system in apartheid South Africa

Socio-economic

In Women in Asia: Restoring Women to History by Barbara N. Ramusack & Sharon L. Sievers, the comparison is made between the sterilization of Females in Puerto Rico and the South African apartheid governments birth control programs for blacks in South Africa.

In Puerto Rico one-third of the women of childbearing age were sterilized by the government in the 1960s in one the early attempts at widespread population control following policies initiated by the US government. The White regime in South Africa promoted 'birth control' among blacks as apart of the larger plan of apartheid.

Suzanne Irizarry de Lopez a Puerto Rican woman of the Eastern Research Services wrote an article ' The apartheid of American marketing ' In which she talks of the apartheid she suffered.

Relations with the US federal government

In the Caribbean Studies journal (Resea de "Foreign in a domestic sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion and the constitution") Carlos Ivan Gorrin Peralta describes the relationship between the United States and its territories, specifically Puerto Rico, as one that "compromises the founding values of the Republic by establishing an apartheid-like regime of "two constitutions."

Roberto Guzman of the The San Juan Star wrote of Puerto Rico and the United States argues against the position that the current status is the "best of both worlds" saying it is "nonsense that keeps Puerto Rico in a permanent state of political apartheid."

Alejandro Luis Molina, of the National Boricua Human Rights Network Coordinating Committee points out that Puerto Rico is a colony where the "incarceration rate for Black men in 2005 was higher than for Blacks under Apartheid South Africa."

During the Navy-Vieques protests, a newspaper article in the The San Juan Star was entitled Welcome to our cozy tropical apartheid arguing the violations of the civil rights of Puerto Ricans in Vieques - who are US citizens - by the US Navy constituted a form of apartheid..

Saudi Arabia

Main article: Allegations of Saudi Arabian apartheid

Former Soviet Union

Soviet writers 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 segregation 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

In Lombard v. Louisiana and Bell v. Maryland, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas described segregation in the American South as apartheid.

In American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton argue that while segregation is typically viewed as something that ended in the 1960's, it exists to this day. Massey and Denton cite the inequality in living conditions of American blacks compared to the rest of the populace, as well as the cultural desolation of black ghettos. The arguments of this book were found largely convincing by Nathan Glazer of The New Republic:

It seemed to me in 1974 that it was now basically up to the processes of social change, abetted by the expected continuing and increased economic and social mobility of blacks, to change the pattern of black segregation.... A decent respect for freedom of association and for the differences among people should be observed by government, and it should stand back from efforts to push the desired objective of integration. Integration would happen in any case, as a result of economic, political, and social changes that were inevitable.

These views, whatever evidence could have been collected to support them in the middle 1970s, now strike me as complacent. Some of these expected changes did take place. But the one area in which my seemingly reasonable expectations have remained unrealized has been housing and residential integration, and, as a consequence, school integration.

The facts have been developed most starkly and presented most effectively by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton in American Apartheid. Thirty years after the civil rights revolution and the revolutionary change in the legal posture affecting discrimination, the situation can only be described as extremely depressing. The authors develop measures of both "segregation" and "isolation, " calculated on different bases and reflecting somewhat different realities, but the picture for both indices reflects so high a degree of separation that it is hardly necessary to go into the details.

Jonathan Kozol at Pomona College April 17, 2003

The claim of "American apartheid" has also been used in reference to the disparity between white and black schools in America. Those who compare this inequality to apartheid frequently point to unequal funding for predominantly black schools. Jonathan Kozol covered these issues in depth in an article for Harper's Magazine entitled "Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid." Kozol wrote:

Many Americans who live far from our major cities and who have no firsthand knowledge of the realities to be found in urban public schools seem to have the rather vague and general impression that the great extremes of racial isolation that were matters of grave national significance some thirty-five or forty years ago have gradually but steadily diminished in more recent years. The truth, unhappily, is that the trend, for well over a decade now, has been precisely the reverse. Schools that were already deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years ago are no less segregated now, while thousands of other schools around the country that had been integrated either voluntarily or by the force of law have since been rapidly resegregating.

In Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, 87 percent of public-school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 percent of the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or Hispanic.

Even these statistics, as stark as they are, cannot begin to convey how deeply isolated children in the poorest and most segregated sections of these cities have become.

Kozol expanded on this topic in his book The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.

The "New American apartheid" refers to the allegation that US drug and criminal policies in practice target blacks on the basis of race. The radical left-wing web-magazine Z-Net featured a series of 4 articles on "The New American Apartheid" in which it drew parrallels between the treatment of blacks by the American justice system and apartheid:

Modern prisoners occupy the lowest rungs on the social class ladder, and they always have. The modern prison system (along with local jails) is a collection of ghettos or poorhouses reserved primarily for the unskilled, the uneducated, and the powerless. In increasing numbers this system is being reserved for racial minorities, especially blacks, which is why we are calling it the New American Apartheid. This is the same segment of American society that has experienced some of the most drastic reductions in income and they have been targeted for their involvement in drugs and the subsequent violence that extends from the lack of legitimate means of goal attainment.

In her 2007 book, Medical Apartheid. The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present, Harriet Washington describes past practices such as the "Tuskegee Syphilis Study," in which 400 black men with syphilis were left untreated for 40 years from 1932 until 1972.

Other allegations

Global

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.

Sexual

Sexual apartheid is 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. The term has also been used to describe differential treatment of women in institutions such as the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church.

Social

Social apartheid is a term used to refer to de facto segregation on the basis of class or economic status in which an underclass develops which is separated from the rest of the population. The term has become common in societies where the polarization between rich and poor has become pronounced and has been identified in public policy as a problem that needs to be overcome, particularly Brazil, where the term was coined to describe a situation where wealthy neighbourhoods are protected from the general population by walls, electric barbed wire and private security guards and where inhabitants of the poor slums are subjected to violence. It has also been used to refer to Venezuela where the supporters of Hugo Chavez identify social apartheid as a reality which the wealthy try to maintain

In France the term has also been used to explain and describe the ghettoization of Muslim immigrants to Europe in impoverished suburbs and as a cause of rioting and other violence. (See Allegations of French apartheid. In South Africa, the term "social apartheid" has been used to describe persistent post-apartheid forms of exclusion and de facto segregation which exist based on class but which have a racial component due to the fact that the poor are almost entirely African. "Social apartheid" has been cited as a factor in the composition of HIV/AIDS in South Africa.

Nuclear/scientific/technical

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".

Urban

In the context of apartheid in South Africa, urban apartheid was a component of the apartheid system and referred to "the spatial separation of the four racial groups according to the Population Registration Act of 1950 into group areas according to the Group Areas Act of 1950."[3]

Outside of South Africa it has been used to refer to ghettoization of minority populations in cities within particular suburbs or neighborhoods. The term has been used in France to describe the situation of largely impoverished Muslim immigrants being concentrated in particular suburban housing projects and being provided with an inferior standard of infrastructure and social services.[4]. This issue has been heavily discussed in the aftermath of the 2005 civil unrest in France.[5]. (see Allegations of French apartheid).

Water

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
• Sex segregation
• Religious segregation
• Crime of apartheid