African and S. American presidents to "counter NATO"
Ralph Mutema
Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:22:00 +0000
VENEZUALAN President Hugo Chavez, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi and 28 other leaders from South America and Africa called for new links between the continents, including joint military, banking and mining efforts.
Chavez and Qaddafi proposed a military alliance mirroring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to counteract the influence of the U.S. and Europe. Chavez called for a unified mining company, oil company and bank as leaders including President Robert Mugabe highlighted their countries’ resources.
“For African countries, it’s closer to visit our brothers in South America. We share the same interests of liberation and revolutionary ideals,” Qaddafi said yesterday at the Second Africa-South America summit, on the Venezuelan tourist island of Margarita.
“Colonialism humiliated us, insulted us and robbed us of our riches.”
Hosting the summit plays into Chavez’s goal of diminishing what he calls “imperial” influences and boosting ties with allies including Angola and Nigeria, which, like Venezuela, are members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
“It’s a new hour in our history,” Chavez said today. “We have many great leaders, many of them here today.”
Joint Projects
More than 60 delegations planned to sign accords on trade, energy, mining and agriculture, Venezuela’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
Chavez announced accords with several African countries on joint mining and oil projects.
“We have the biggest permanent reservoir of clean water in the world and they call us the poor,” Ecuador President Rafael Correa said. The countries talked of working together to develop natural resources to reduce reliance on former imperial powers.
Along with a joint statement touching on concerns from reform of the U.N. Security Council to shipping piracy, countries also sought bilateral agreements. Venezuela signed a memorandum of understanding with Sierra Leone to create a joint mining company and will sign similar agreements with Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Namibia, Chavez said.
Venezuela also is working with Angola, Tanzania and South Africa on mining agreements, Mining Minister Rodolfo Sanz said in a statement. Chavez wants Venezuela to build small steel mills in Mauritania and Tanzania, Sanz said.
Venezuela will propose a joint state mining company for whatever countries in Africa and South America want to join, Chavez said.
“A state mining company of our own,” he said. “Here, we have recovered gold mines, iron mines. These important resources were in the private hands of the local bourgeoisie and multinationals and smugglers of all sorts.”
Chavez said his mining industry recently got “several billion dollars” in financing to be paid by dedicating a portion of gold, steel and diamond revenues to the debt. He didn’t give further details.
Oil Agreements
Venezuela is interested in forming a joint state oil company among countries on the two continents, especially smaller producers, Chavez said. He said his country signed an accord with Mauritania to work together on oil refining and transport of refined products, and with Niger on joint oil production.
Venezuela is the biggest oil producer in South America. China National Petroleum Corp. is spending $5 billion in Niger to make the central African nation an oil producer.
Attendees to the summit, the second of its kind after a 2006 meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, ranged from Chilean President Michele Bachelet, who spoke about the global financial crisis, to President Mugabe, who highlighted Zimbabwe’s mineral riches.
Libya will host the next summit in 2011.
Labels: AFRICA-SOUTH AMERICA SUMMIT (ASA), NATO
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Africa can’t to forget colonialism – Chavez
Written by Larry Moonze in Isla Margarita, Venezuela
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 4:54:32 AM
VENEZUELAN President Hugo Chavez has said Africa cannot afford to forget colonialism and imperialism if the continent intends to own its fate. And President Chavez has urged Latin Americans to learn the history of Africa including studying nations of the African continent.
President Chavez said the just-ended second Africa and South American heads of state and government summit (II ASA) held in Isla Margarita was of unquestionable significance in the battle of ideas.
“The memory of Africa is a deep wound,” President Chavez said. “It is too easy to affirm that the future of Africa depends on the Africans, and then ask them to forget colonialism and imperialism. Mother Africa cannot forget, not even our America. No people can be the owner of their fate if they forget.”
He said South America was standing up, opening its arms and strengthening bonds with the African peoples because it understood that in both parts of the Atlantic, the blood, history and hope were the same.
“This week has had an unquestionable significance for the battle of ideas fought by Venezuela every day, together with the peoples from the South, in the international field,” President Chavez said.
“This has been the spirit of the II Africa-South America Summit. A spirit that encourages us to find the political, social and economic union with Africa by focusing on the new multipolar world order. We have the duty of building this new order if we want to sing the common anthem of true justice and real fraternity in the planet.”
He said Africa and South America were essential in the foundation of a new universal balance.
President Chavez said that balance included the union of wills and the proposal of new common and feasible goals.
“He who wants honey has the courage to confront the bees,” said President Chavez, quoting an ancient Senegalese proverb. “We want the sweet honey for our children, and the children of our children. We have more than enough courage. We will move forward and confront the bees.”
President Chavez said it was important that South Americans know Africa.
He said he was concerned that about 90 per cent of South Americans knew little or nothing about African states.
President Chavez said Africa was more of the mother to Latinos than Spain, the coloniser.
“The historians of 19th Century were in charge of falsifying the African continent and planting it with misconceptions, which have been reinforced by the media,” President Chavez said.
“They sold us perverse ideas such as the one telling us that the history of the African peoples started with the European presence, that they are inferior, violent, and ignorant due to their race, that they are lazy and have not known how to use their resources, that they do not have modern states because they have preferred to be dependent and backward. This distortion of reality, we have to say it, has been planned to reproduce the discourse and praxis of the most brutal domination by colonisers from the past and today’s transnational capital. They do not know the African strength and cultural legacy because ambition and attacks still survive in the soul of the manufacturers of lies.”
President Chavez said Africa and South America should seize the opportunities and make the 21st Century their era.
Labels: AFRICA-SOUTH AMERICA SUMMIT (ASA), COLONIALISM, HUGO CHAVEZ
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End Zim, Cuba sanctions: ASA
Tendai Parirewa
Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:40:00 +0000
THE presidents who attended the second Africa-South America Summit (ASA), which ended on Sunday on Venezuelan resort island Margarita, publicly demanded the end of illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe and the economic blockade on Cuba.
In his speech to the summit plenary, Rupiah Banda, President of Zambia, tabled a motion demanding an end to sanctions which affect Zimbabwe and Cuba.
Banda's speech followed an impassioned one backing the same policy earlier in the plenary by host President Hugo Chavez, who said that President Robert Mugabe had become the target of an international campaign.
"I wish to give our moral, spiritual and political support to Mugabe and the people of Zimbabwe," Chavez said. "They seek to make Mugabe pay for being anti-colonialist," he added.
"We have to line up in defense of him, his government," Chavez said.
Chavez blamed the economic downturn on "the countries of the North" and said the crisis reveals the failures of "speculative, plundering" capitalism.
"We have to create a new international system, and we're doing it," the socialist president said. "The solution is in our hands. It's not in handouts from the North."
"South-South" cooperation was a buzzword at the summit, which brought together both the African Union and the South American bloc Unasur.
In his speech, President Mugabe said that Africa's industrial development had "been difficult because of a reliance on the very powers that colonized us," he said. "They do not want really to see us industrialized" but we "are proceeding nevertheless".
On the sports front, President Mugabe suggested the ASA (South America-Africa) nations meeting should hold their own World Cup-style soccer tournament.
African leaders including South Africa's Jacob Zuma and Algeria's Abdelaziz Bouteflika attended the summit alongside eight South American presidents from Argentina's Cristina Fernandez to Bolivia's Evo Morales.
Labels: AFRICA-SOUTH AMERICA SUMMIT (ASA), CUBA, SANCTIONS, ZDERA, ZIMBABWE
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African and S. American presidents to "counter NATO"
Ralph Mutema
Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:22:00 +0000
Venezuelas President Hugo Chavez (C) speaks during the 2nd Africa-South America Summit (ASA) in Porlamar, Margarita Island, northwestern Venezuela, on September 27, 2009. Chavez, who has long sought to improve relations among non-Western nations, opened the meeting in the locked-down scenic resort of Isla Margarita, where the Venezuelan military has set up checkpoints and banned all weapons. AFP/Getty Images
VENEZUALAN President Hugo Chavez, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi and 28 other leaders from South America and Africa called for new links between the continents, including joint military, banking and mining efforts.
Chavez and Qaddafi proposed a military alliance mirroring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to counteract the influence of the U.S. and Europe. Chavez called for a unified mining company, oil company and bank as leaders including President Robert Mugabe highlighted their countries’ resources.
“For African countries, it’s closer to visit our brothers in South America. We share the same interests of liberation and revolutionary ideals,” Qaddafi said yesterday at the Second Africa-South America summit, on the Venezuelan tourist island of Margarita.
“Colonialism humiliated us, insulted us and robbed us of our riches.”
Hosting the summit plays into Chavez’s goal of diminishing what he calls “imperial” influences and boosting ties with allies including Angola and Nigeria, which, like Venezuela, are members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
“It’s a new hour in our history,” Chavez said today. “We have many great leaders, many of them here today.”
Joint Projects
More than 60 delegations planned to sign accords on trade, energy, mining and agriculture, Venezuela’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
Chavez announced accords with several African countries on joint mining and oil projects.
“We have the biggest permanent reservoir of clean water in the world and they call us the poor,” Ecuador President Rafael Correa said. The countries talked of working together to develop natural resources to reduce reliance on former imperial powers.
Along with a joint statement touching on concerns from reform of the U.N. Security Council to shipping piracy, countries also sought bilateral agreements. Venezuela signed a memorandum of understanding with Sierra Leone to create a joint mining company and will sign similar agreements with Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Namibia, Chavez said.
Venezuela also is working with Angola, Tanzania and South Africa on mining agreements, Mining Minister Rodolfo Sanz said in a statement. Chavez wants Venezuela to build small steel mills in Mauritania and Tanzania, Sanz said.
Venezuela will propose a joint state mining company for whatever countries in Africa and South America want to join, Chavez said.
“A state mining company of our own,” he said. “Here, we have recovered gold mines, iron mines. These important resources were in the private hands of the local bourgeoisie and multinationals and smugglers of all sorts.”
Chavez said his mining industry recently got “several billion dollars” in financing to be paid by dedicating a portion of gold, steel and diamond revenues to the debt. He didn’t give further details.
Oil Agreements
Venezuela is interested in forming a joint state oil company among countries on the two continents, especially smaller producers, Chavez said. He said his country signed an accord with Mauritania to work together on oil refining and transport of refined products, and with Niger on joint oil production.
Venezuela is the biggest oil producer in South America. China National Petroleum Corp. is spending $5 billion in Niger to make the central African nation an oil producer.
Attendees to the summit, the second of its kind after a 2006 meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, ranged from Chilean President Michele Bachelet, who spoke about the global financial crisis, to President Mugabe, who highlighted Zimbabwe’s mineral riches.
Libya will host the next summit in 2011.
Labels: AFRICA-SOUTH AMERICA SUMMIT (ASA), HUGO CHAVEZ
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