Allegations of apartheid

Arguments are sometimes made that the past or present actions of other nations are analogous to apartheid in South Africa, or constitute apartheid under the definition adopted in international law. The following are examples of use of the word Apartheid as an epithet used rhetorically for polemic effect, in reference to the original racial discrimination laws properly called "Apartheid", formerly used in South Africa and Namibia.

Australia

While there is no existing Australian government policy that segregates Aborigines, their poor socio-economic conditions typically leave them somewhat segregated from the rest of Australian society. This situation has led a number of commentators and civil rights groups to characterize the situation as Apartheid. [1][2][3] In fact, Australia's government policies are viewed by some as the original impetus for the Apartheid system in South Africa. [4][5][6]

Muslims in France

Muslims in France have recently been accused of apartheid due to their unwillingness to integrate into the French society. Many Muslim quarters in France are no-go areas for non-Muslims, and even the police avoids them. An internal security agency in France reported in 2004 that 300 communities across the country were marked by Islamic fundamentalism, anti-Semitism, and violence, coupled with hatred of France and the West. Some Muslims are already calling for the imposition of sharia in predominantly Muslim districts; in some areas, they have imposed Islamic dress, chase away French shopkeepers selling pork and alcohol, and shut down cinemas on the basis that they are "places of sin". [7]

Malaysia

Malaysia has an article in its constitution which distinctly segregates the Malays and other indigeneous peoples of Malaysia from the non-Malays, or bumiputra under the social contract, giving them special rights and privileges. This includes government-sponsored discounts and requiring even the private sector of the economy to preferentially treat bumiputras with economic priveleges and penalising companies who do not have a certain quota of bumiputra in employment. Furthermore, any discussion of abolishing the article is prohibited with the justification that it is seditious. This form of state-sponsored racial segregation is claimed as apartheid to opponents of the article. Supporters of the policy maintain that this is affirmative action for the bumiputra who had suffered during the colonial era of the history of Malaysia, using the concept of the Ketuanan Melayu that Malaysia belongs to the Malays.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia's practices against women have been referred to as "gender apartheid" and "sexual apartheid".[8] [9] [10] [11] Saudi Arabia's treatment of religious minorities has also been described as "apartheid".[12] [13] [14] [15] Until March 1, 2004, the official government website stated that Jews were forbidden from entering the country.[16]

Israel

Main article: Israeli apartheid (phrase)

'The phrase 'Israeli apartheid (or the terming of Israel an apartheid state) is a pejorative political epithet used by some Palestinian-rights activists[17], South Africans, some neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic individuals groups such as David Duke and Jew Watch, and some anti-Zionists to criticize Israel's policies by drawing an analogy between the policies of the Israeli government towards both Palestinians and Arab citizens of Israel to those of the apartheid-era South African government towards its Black and mixed-race populations. Critics of the term argue that it is historically inaccurate, offensive, antisemitic, and is used as justification for terrorist attacks against Israel.

United States

National issues

In the early 20th century, it was popular belief that the presence of "blacks" in a neighborhood would bring down property values. As a result, the US Government created a policy to segregate the country which involved making low-interest mortgages available to white civilian families through the FHA and white military families through Veteran's Admiminstration Housing Loans. Black families were denied these loans because the planners behind this initiative took maps and labelled every black area in the country "in decline". The rules for loans did not say that "black families cannot get loans" it said people from "areas in decline" cannot get loans. This meant there was no actual wording for the segregation, however it was clearly successful. Most suburbs are 70% or more homogenously white. Urban areas are largely black/minority.

In addition to encouraging white families to move to suburbs by giving them loans, the government savagely uprooted many established African American communities by building elevated highways through their neighborhoods. In order to build a highway, tens of thousands of single family homes were destroyed. Because these properties were summarily declared to be "in decline", families were given pittance for their property, and were forced into "the projects". In order to build the towering monstrosities, even more houses were demolished.

Highways cut apart cities, destroying wide swaths of homes and workplaces, disrupting and uprooting communities and forcing many into public housing.

From: The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt, Professor Mohl, University of Alabama at Birmingham

"When policy makers and highway engineers determined that the new interstate highway system should penetrate to the heart of the central cities, they made a fateful decision, but also a purposeful one. Indeed, the interstate system's urban expressways, or freeways, not only penetrated the cities but they ripped through residential neighborhoods and leveled wide swaths of urban territory, ostensibly to facilitate automobility. In retrospect, it now seems apparent that public officials and policy makers, especially at the state and local level, used expressway construction to destroy low-income and especially black neighborhoods in an effort to reshape the physical and racial landscapes of the postwar American city."

In sum total, a half-century of government-enforced segregation had left African American communities poor, and without 'wealth creation mechanisms'. Following two families, one white and the other black from 1940 til today, the following would be true:

• The white family would get a loan to move out of the mixed city into an all-white suburb. They would purchase a house. The house would represent a wealth-creation mechanism. Every time they added a bedroom, painted the side, added a garage, or otherwise invested in their property, the value would appreciate. Their children would be able to go to school because the family could take out a mortgage on the wealth generated by their house. Because local primary and secondary schools were paid for through property taxes, the rising wealth of the community would make it easier to invest in their children's education.

• The black family would be trapped in what was once a mixed city. In addition to the original, established, African American community, there would be an influx of African Americans from the South, as well as persons of Mexican, Caribbean, and Latin American origin. The members of the black family would have to compete against these new communities for jobs. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, City, State, and Federal governments would likely decide that the neighborhood that the family lived in was no longer worth keeping, and demolish their house. In the process, they would lose any money they invested in their home. They would then be put in public housing. Instead of owning their own property, they become wards of the state, locked in a tower, bounded by elevated highways that allow white families from the suburbs to come into the city to work. Without property, they cannot get a mortgage, and cannot afford to send their children to college. The neighborhood schools malfunction because property taxes cannot raise enough money to maintain the school.

Almost 70 years later, the white family would have a house in the suburbs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the black family would be locked in a public housing tower in a city.

From a study done by the University of Michigan:

The mean and median value of per family net worth (including home equity) increased from $219,000 in 1999 to $248900 in 2001, while the corresponding median value changed from $53,100 to $63,000. As indicated in Tables 2- 3, both African -Americans and white families benefited from the rise in the net wealth. However, the mean and median wealth for African -American families ($59,100 and $7,500 respectively) still remained disappointingly low when compared to that of white families ( $291,800 and $95,000 respectively).

More recently, the disparity between the racial composition of inmates in the American prison system has led to claims that the U.S. Justice system furthers a "new apartheid".[18]

Issues in the South

Racial segregation was the law in parts of the American South until the American Civil Rights Movement. These laws became known as Jim Crow laws and were similar to apartheid legislation in the forced segregation of facilities and services to black and white people, and prohibition of intermarriage. Some similarities between the situation in the Southern United States and South Africa were:

• The races were kept separate, with separate schools, hotels, bars, hospitals, toilets, parks, even telephone booths, and separate sections in libraries, cinemas, and restaurants, the latter often with separate ticket windows and counters. (See [19].)
• Laws prohibiting interracial sex and marriage (miscegenation) were passed between 1870 and 1884 in eleven southern states [20]
• The voting rights of blacks were systematically restricted or denied through suffrage laws, such as the introduction of poll taxes and literacy tests. Loopholes, such as the grandfather clause and the understanding clause protected the voting rights of white people who were unable to pay the tax or pass the literacy test. Only whites could vote in the Democratic Party primary contests. [21]

Some differences were:

• In the United States after the American Civil War (1861 - 1865), there was never a class of blacks who were not citizens (although it is certain that most were treated as second class citizens);
• There were no "homelands" in the United States (although some areas were informally designated black neighbourhoods, and as such were under-resourced and stigmatized), and families were not separated as they were in South Africa by not allowing men to bring their families with them to the areas where they worked.
• Blacks are a minority in the United States, but a majority in South Africa.
• In South Africa, voting rights were denied to blacks outright, by denying them citizenship. In the United States, denial of voting rights was enforced by local custom, by lynching and other forms of violence, or by poll taxes and selective enforcement of literacy requirements as described above.

The term genocide, meaning not only mass killing of a group but the intention to destroy a group of people, and is often used to describe the Holocaust. The Jim Crow laws were designed to disempower African Americans and characterised them as an inferior race, just as the Third Reich deemed Jewish people. The Jim Crow laws justified and perpetuated the use of lynchings against African Americans, particularly by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

The Civil Rights Congress (CRC) made a 1951 presentation on lynching in the United States to the United Nations entitled "We Charge Genocide," which argued that the federal government of the United States, by its failure to act to curb the lynchings, was guilty of genocide under Article II of the UN Genocide Convention.

Issues in the North

While it is commonly thought that segregation was a southern phenomenon, segregation was also to be found in "the North". The Chicago suburb of Cicero for example, was made famous when Civil Rights advocate Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a march advocating open (race-unbiased) housing.

See also

• Second-class citizen
• Discrimination
• Segregation