Stand With the Resisting African Workers
in Britain!
It is Right to Resist and Demand Answers!
On Saturday, August 6, 2011, rebellion filled the streets of Tottenham following the police murder of 29-year-old Mark Duggan, father of four. It must be confirmed that it is the police who violently started the ordeal by the gunning down of Mr. Duggan on Thursday, August 4, 2011 in broad daylight.
The police followed this murder with their contemptuous reaction to the demonstrators outside Tottenham police station, where they beat up a 16-year-old African girl with their batons. Things further escalated when senior police refused to talk to the peaceful protesters who were seeking “answers” on Mr. Duggan’s death.
The press and the police told lies about Mr. Duggan to justify his murder. They claimed that he was a drug dealer, and that he shot at the cops. However, now reports have surfaced in the Guardian newspaper that show the bullet that was lodged in a police radio during the shooting that they have attributed to Mr. Duggan was in fact a police bullet!
Police relations with Black people are worse than ever
This incident continues a long history of British police violence against the African community. The list of names of African men killed by police speaks for itself. Smiley Culture, Ricky Bishop, Derek Bennett, Michael Powell and Roger Sylvester are just a few of them.
The press, the police and white and Black politicians alike are united in condemning the youth rebellions for their response to the gunning down of Mr. Duggan by Operation Trident police. As usual, the ruling class press and the lap dog politicians are incapable of condemning the police’s murderous act and brutality against Africans and other oppressed and exploited communities.
When David Lammy, a Black MP for Tottenham, says that the relationship between the police and the Black community are better now than 25 years ago, he forgot to say that he was talking for the Black petty bourgeoisie not for the African workers, who bear the brunt of the police occupation of the Black community.
The primary job of the police is to contain the Black community and to maintain the colonial relationship that we have had, whether in Africa, the Caribbean, or the world over with the British ruling class and colonial society. There are constant Stop and Searches and DNA swabs of our Black men by the police.
Our community is under the siege of the drug economy that the government has imposed on us, with deadly consequences. The so-called Black on Black violence or horizontal violence is a direct expression of this.
Lammy and his class allies fail to see what the youth know very well: that the police are not friends of the Black community, but they are an assault force against our community. No one knows this better than Black men.
Tottenham rebellions are part of a global struggle led by poor peoples in oppressed nations and communities to reclaim our lives, resources, communities and future.
These disturbances are happening in a global context of struggles by oppressed nations to achieve freedom and human dignity and to regain control of their resources, lives and countries. This is the main rising trend in the world.
Black people in Britain represent a poor and oppressed community. We are a people behind bars. We are a people below the poverty line, where half of the households live below the national average income which, before the credit crunch, was between £11,000 and £12,000.
This is part of the struggle that is happening in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Bolivia and Venezuela. This is the incomplete struggle of African people of the sixties that was attacked and militarily defeated by the British, French, Belgian, U.S. and other imperialist governments to prevent our freedom.
These rebellious movements are happening in the context of a millionaire-led British government that is involved in the most vicious and deep social budget cuts, which are devastating to most of the poor people.
The so-called “rioters” are not criminals or thugs, but social victims of an unjust social system and its unjust social policies.
This system has no future for the vast majority of our people. It does not matter which party is in power—Tory, Liberal Democrat or Labor—they do not represent the interests of the African workers.
This system is built to only allow individual success in any form that does not challenge these colonial relations. But collective success, which can only happen at the expense of these colonial relations, is not allowed.
That is why the press and the ruling class are venomously condemning these rebellions. The poor people are having access to resources without the permission of the ruling class. This is a crime according to the law of the British bourgeoisie.
Police impunity, challenged by the people’s power
The killing of Mr. Duggan is not a one off, but part of a series of police murders in the Black community. It is a regular practice, but not a single police officer has ever been convicted.
The police know that they are covered by a policy of impunity when they are in the Black community. The Black community also knows that there is no justice in the hands of the British colonial ruling class.
The people have instead taken justice into their own hands. What they may not be fully aware of is that they have the right to do so, and to do so permanently by getting organized in pursuit of State power in our own hands, through our own political party and on our own terms.
These rebellions are people’s resistance to British government violence around the world too.
The British government denounces the rebellions as unacceptable violence. Meanwhile, the British government is involved in bombing Libya.
It is in Africa 24 hours a day, for seven days a week. It is involved in unjust wars in Afghanistan, and we have seen how the British rulers lied in front of the world to justify the aggression of Iraq, where they killed so many people.
The British government is not only a key financial supporter of the corrupt Ugandan and Rwandan governments, but sponsors and endorses the genocidal warfare that has claimed over six million lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Where are the condemnations of these atrocities that are happening at this very moment?
If violence is unacceptable in the streets of London, then it is also unacceptable in the streets of Libya, Congo, Somalia, and other places where the British government is directly or indirectly involved in imposing mass violence against the people.
From the members of the British parliament fiddling their expenses and lining up their own pockets with peoples’ monies; to the corrupted press hacking on peoples phones and telling lies; to the police accepting bribes from the press—they are in no position to address the Black community on morality.
Black young workers rebellion has broken the status quo
The trade unions did not do it. The press did not do it. The corrupted MPs could not do it.
It took the most deprived and despised community in Europe to stand up against the wide dissatisfaction that every poor and ordinary family or person is experiencing in this country. Unchallenged, the richer have been getting richer while the poor got poorer.
The bankers have been bailed out. The corporate managers and others are paying themselves millions in bonuses when most of us are confronted with endless rising cost of living in every aspect of society.
We do not need another Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) massage of our oppression. Africans decided not to wait on another IPCC investigation.
Africans need to get justice for ourselves. We need to speak for ourselves, and we need define the direction of our struggle.
Justice is overdue. We, the African working class, are a formidable and strategic social force that stretches from Europe to the Caribbean, from North America to South Africa.
That is why we, the African working class, are subjected to genocidal violence used to subdue us.
It is too late now. The African working class is waking up to fight to end all wars on Africa and African people.
These wars include the killing of Mr. Duggan and other Africans by the police in this country. This war includes the six million Africans killed in the genocide in the Congo.
It includes the massive jailing of Africans in the U.S. jails and the displacement of 2.5 million Africans from their fertile traditional land to arid sterile land in Colombia at gunpoint.
It is worldwide war on us, and our response must be part of a worldwide response.
This is the clearest signal that the colonized African working class community is ready to resist British imperialism. They may not be aware of their political and historical tasks and objectives, but nevertheless, they have rejected 25 years of status quo that has existed at our expense.
A lot of people are complaining about the loss of buildings, cars, etc. We want just to remind people that the entire modern capitalist economy has been built at our expense, on the foundation of centuries of African genocide.
British society built on violent theft of African labor and resources
British society suffers from a selective and collective amnesia. How can anyone in this society call Africans thieves, criminals, and thugs?
The British government and the rest of the European governments are involved in daily crimes against Black people everywhere. Our presence in Europe itself is a result of British criminality that stole us away from Africa.
We are here because the whole economy of Africa, the Caribbean and wherever else Black people live is based on the expropriation of our natural resources, unpaid labor and near free labor to benefit Europe and North America.
We cannot even begin to discuss the level of violence that comes with this colonial theft of our lives and resources.
Where do we go from here?
Every effort, every avenue of public domain must be engaged to equip our community with a clear program for action to change our miserable existence characterized by economic poverty, police oppression and massive imprisonment. We must discover our mission and fulfill it.
- We need to build a British front of an international party of the African workers, capable of mobilizing and organizing our community around its strategic interests in this country and around the world.
- We want access to the resources that belong to us in the first place.
- We demand the immediate and unconditional release of all those Black youth arrested as a result of the rebellion sparked by the police murder of Mark Duggan.
- We demand the immediate arrest of all police officers involved in gunning down Mark Duggan.
- We want community solidarity to benefit those African workers who have lost homes and clothes as a consequence of the rebellions.
- We want an abolition of Universities fees.
- We demand an end of the British government-imposed drug economy.
- We demand an end of stop-and-search and DNA swabs.
The struggle continues forward to oppose all wars on Africa and African people everywhere!
—UhuruNews, August 8, 2011
http://uhurunews.com/story?resource_name=stand-with-the-resisting-african-workers-in-britain