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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 11/11/09

Three Reasons to Support African Greens

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I sent invitations to join the Facebook group "We support the African Greens" to Green Party members and others who might, whether members of the Green Party or no.

For three reasons:

1) In December 2007, Africa surpassed the Middle East as a source of U.S. oil imports. Africans have contributed least to global warming, but they're already suffering most.

Sustainable practice is one of the Greens' ten key values everywhere.

2) African Greens are the only trans-African party which, like the Global Greens, stand for LGBT rights, even amidst the extremes of homophobic hysteria stirred up by the U.S.A.'s de facto Ambassador to Africa, Reverend Rick Warren, who made Rwanda his first "purpose driven nation," in accordance with his best selling manual, "The Purpose Driven Life," then moved on to Uganda. Uganda is now considering the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality."

Diversity, including sexual diversity, is one of the Greens' ten key values everywhere.

3) Africa is wracked by the violence of myriad warring factions and militias as foreign interests import arms and engineer conflicts to displace Africans from their homelands and natural resources, including oil and gas, timber, fish, hydropower, cropland, precious minerals, and industrial minerals, including the cobalt and uranium essential to nuclear and other military industrial production.

Nonviolence is one of the Greens' ten key values everywhere.

Those of us, Green or no, from outside Africa, can stop sending our soldiers and arms to the continent, and resist Africom, the expanding U.S. Africa Command.

And, we can listen and follow the lead of Africans engaged in grassroots democratic organizing on the ground, including the African Greens.

Global Greens are now focusing on the Rwanda Greens struggling for political rights in Rwanda's 2010 election, even after Rwandan police shut down their fourth attempt to convene in Kigali, on 10.30.2009. The Rwanda Greens now plan another attempt to convene, again in Kigali, on 11.20.2009.

BBC Radio-Kigali, 10.30.2009:

Rwanda opposition party launch halted

KPFA Radio-Berkeley, 11.01.2009:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoAnoYqbIro

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Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached (more...)
 

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