SPEAKING
FREELY China, Europe export gangsters
and low wages to Africa By
Emanuele Scimia
Speaking Freely is
an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say. Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
Africa is a
battleground for the geopolitical interests of
China and Europe. But despite Beijing's and
Brussels' claims about the distinctive features of
their respective approaches to developing
countries, Chinese and European companies treat
African workers badly in equal measure. Meanwhile,
transnational crime syndicates and criminal gangs
are spreading from the Old Continent and the
Middle Kingdom to many African regions.
Thirty-four miners shot dead by police at
a British-owned platinum mine in South Africa; a
Chinese manager killed by local workers
at a coal mine in
Zambia. Alongside the emerging heft of "Made in
China" criminality in Africa's Chinatowns are the
dramatic advances of criminal organizations from
Europe throughout the African continent.
Notwithstanding theoretical disputes over
distinctions between Western colonialism and
Chinese neo-colonialism, it seems that Europe and
China alike are exporting to Africa some of their
worst pathologies.
Demands for better
pay At the Marikana platinum mine in
Rustenburg, South Africa, miners were killed
during a strike over pay on August 16, while
asking for an increase in their minimum wage from
US$545 to $1,500 a month. The strike had begun a
few days earlier and 10 people, including two
police officers, had already died after fierce
clashes.
The Marikana mine is owned by
London-based Lonmin, the world's third-largest
platinum producer. South Africa is the largest
platinum producer and its mining sector is worried
that the latest unrest could affect the national
output in the short run. Apart from the Marikana
situation, Johannesburg-based Anglo American
Platinum, the world's top producer of the metal,
is also grappling with demands for pay raises.
Similar pleas have come from workers at the Royal
Bafokeng platinum mine just north of Rustenburg.
It is worth noting that the crisis
blasting South Africa's mining sector also springs
from uncertainty surrounding the domestic
political situation, notably infighting between
two trade unions, the National Union of
Mineworkers, which cultivates strong ties with the
ruling African National Congress, and the recently
formed Association of Mineworkers and Construction
Union.
The Chinese supervisor at the
Collum coal mine in Sinazongwe, Zambia, which is
run by a private company from Jiangxi province in
China, was killed in August by mineworkers during
a strike, again over wage demands. In 2011, the
government in Lusaka dismissed charges against two
Chinese managers who had fired on miners at the
Collum mine in the wake of an earlier salary
quarrel. In his successful campaign for the
Zambian presidency last year, Michael Sata seized
on the popular discontent over the nature and
measure of Chinese investments in the country.
South African and Zambian mineworkers are
asking for the same thing: better working and
living conditions. Speaking to the European
Parliament on February 21, the European Union's
high representative for foreign affairs, Catherine
Ashton, underscored EU support for the "Zambian
government's commitment to ensure compliance with
domestic labor laws", not least with regard to the
mining sector.
Baroness Ashton was bluntly
referring to the activities of Chinese mining
companies in Zambia. However, looking at the
latest events in South Africa, it would appear
that the EU had better focus on its own back yard
as regards the implementation of international and
European labor regulations. In reality, even in
the case of a stricter oversight of Brussels'
institutions over corporate social responsibility
practices by enterprises from the Old Continent, a
British company like Lonmin might make a narrow
escape if the Euro-skeptic Tories in the British
cabinet succeed in restoring an opting-out from EU
social policy, which is part of Britain's efforts
to renegotiate the terms of its membership in the
European Union.
Ashton co-chaired on
August 24 the 11th Ministerial Political Dialogue
between the EU and South Africa. The European
foreign-policy chief expressed deep sorrow at the
deaths of South African mineworkers and police
officers, but she had no word against Lonmin for
what happened at the Marikana mine. Indeed, it is
business as usual for the EU, which is the main
trading partner of Pretoria (overall trade worth
US$49 billion in 2010), the first foreign investor
in the country (77.5% of foreign direct
investment) and its most prominent development
partner (70% of all external assistance).
Exported gangsters and
traffickers In addition to reproducing in
Africa the labor environment characterizing its
own mining sector, with low wages and hard and
dangerous working conditions, much as elsewhere in
the world, not least in Europe, China is
witnessing a growing expansion of its home-made
crime syndicates across the African continent - an
unintended consequence apparently inherent in the
global projection of modern powers.
Angola
recently extradited to Beijing 37 Chinese
nationals under allegations of extortion,
kidnappings, hold-ups, prostitution and pimping.
China's Ministry of Public Security sent a special
police team to Luanda in July to help investigate
Chinese criminal gangs, the British Broadcasting
Corp reported on August 25.
However, the
most dangerous challenge for Africa in terms of
foreign criminal penetration is coming from
Europe. The organized crime groups in Italy
provide Somali warlords and pirates with small
arms in exchange for permission to dump waste off
the coasts of Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea,
according to French criminologist Michel
Koutouzis. The EU special envoy for Somalia,
Alexander Rondos, would be looking into the case,
the EUobserver reported on June 20.
But
there is much more. The 'Ndrangheta, at this
moment the most powerful crime syndicate in Italy
(and perhaps in the world), has large interests in
the trafficking of coltan (a metallic substance
used in mobile phones) in Congo and diamonds in
South Africa, as well as in controlling - along
with the Colombian drug cartels - the transit
routes in West Africa, which couriers use to
smuggle Latin American cocaine into Europe.
The US Drug Enforcement Agency is training
an elite unit of counter-narcotics police in
Ghana, and similar units will be created in
Nigeria and Kenya as well, the International
Herald Tribune reported on July 21. But Jeffrey
Breeden, the chief of the DEA section for Europe,
Asia and Africa, remarked that US security forces
would not play a greater operational role in
Africa against drug smuggling and that this task
might be up to European police forces for
historical reasons.
To minimize financial
and political losses, Washington sees the African
continent as a promising field for the outsourcing
of security duties to Europe. Yet the first
testing ground for this strategy, intervention in
the war in Libya, laid the EU's military
unpreparedness bare. Furthermore, there is yet
another problem: In light of the elusive nature of
criminal organizations, the fight against
transnational organized crime in Africa could
prove a much more complex job than a military
campaign against a diplomatically isolated
dictator such as Muammar Gaddafi.
Emanuele Scimia is a journalist
and geopolitical analyst based in Rome.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their
say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
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