Tony Chocolonely - slave-free chocolate

Slave-free chocolate, something different from Fair Trade chocolate and a very interesting story which had been going on here in the Netherlands. Teun van der Keuken (Tony) runs a consumer programme here and a few years ago he came across information which suggested that child slaves were being used on cacao plantations in West Africa, most importnatly in Ivory Coast, where a large proportion of the world's cacao production is located. These slaves are mostly boys/young men from the neighbouring countries of Togo, Benin and Mali from where they are sold into slavery, sent to the plantations and are treated verty very badly for little food and no money. This pracrice has apparently been confirmed by UNICEF and various independent research projects.

Tony decided that he would try to create a brand of slavery-free chocolate, avoiding, in the main any cocoa beans coming from Ivory Coast and tried to launch this at the premiere of Charlie and Chocolate Factory in London in 2005, but was prevented from doing so, leading to the commercial introduction of the Tony Chocolonely chocolate bar.

Taking the campaign further, he reported himself to the police for having knowingly consumed a product which was made illegally (i.e. by child slaves). The Dutch authorities refused to prosecute, saying they had other things to do with their time. In the meantime, he managed to upset quite a few of the large chocolate makers in Europe, with one (Nestle) saying that there is no such thing as slave-free chocolate. He was also very disappointed to note that so-called Fair Trade chocolate being made and sold by Max Havelaar in Holland also included cocao shipments from Ivory Coast which could NOT be guaranteed to be slave-free.

Anyway, during the trial, he was able to produce an ex-slave, one who was fortunate enough to have been able to run away who told the story of how he was sent from Ghana to Ivory Coast as a young man of 15, sent to work in the cocao plantations and was treated very badly. However the outcome of the process was that the Dutch state would allow him to call his own chocolate slave-free but he would not be prosecuted for knowingly buying a product which had been produced illegally. A pity, as it would have represented a major challenge to the large cocoa traders and chocolate makers if they were forced to protect their consumers by avoiding cocao harvested by slaves.

However, whatever else, it was a very brave attempt and a very effective way of publicising this problem.

Tags: Tony Chocolonely, slave-free chocolate, chocolate, slavery, Ivory Coast, cocao

Discrimination

Blijburg - hands, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

A change of season here, back to the hot hot days of summer on Blijburg beach for us to consider what the new government wants to do. Namely, it wants to allow civil servants the right to refuse to officiate at weddings where both partners are of the same sex. I will not call this a gay wedding, because here in Holland, we do not have a separate concept of a wedding for gay people and adifferent wedding for straight people. There is one type of wedding and it is open to any two people, albeit they are over a certain age.

So, to repeat. thanks to the religious Christian influence in the government, they want to allow civil servants to REFUSE to officiate at certain weddings, even though this is their job.

To put this into perspective, we heard that last week in Belgium a (straight) couple refused to be married by a BLACK civil servant, because they did not like black people. This was, rightly, condemned as unacceptable racism.... how could people DARE to think like this in this day and age?

Is it really any different to discriminate against gay people in the same way? And to allow professional people to discriminate? I don't think so and I know that the only reason why they are allowed to do so is because they cling to some outdated ideas which go under the name of religion.

Censorship and repression in Ethiopia

Downtown Sodo, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

Here is an everyday scene from a town in Ethiopia, this one being Sodo, in the south of the country, a place we stopped off for lunch, after our coffee in Shashamane, on our way to meeting the boats at the Bele Bridge on the road towards Jimma, near the Sudanese border.

We spent five weeks in Ethiopia and during that time almost every single person we met and spoke to about politics was very against the government, especially as they seemed to have cheated on the first parliamentary elections ever held in the country, which were held earlier in the year. We had chiiling experince as well of the repression in Ethiopia, arriving in the capital a day after government forces had killed over 40 people on the streets and arrested many thousands more.

It seemed that the British Government reacted in an appropriate manner by ending friendly relations with Ethiopia, providing money only to non-governmental organisations in the country, by-passing the repressive government. Earlier in the year, the Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi was a member of Tony Blair's Africa Council, looking at ways of helping Africa out of its many predicaments. Killing ones own citizens, locking up the opposition and journalists was not what Tony Blair had in mind and, by all accounts, Tony Blair feels very let down by these subsequesnt events

However, the mighty US sees Ethiopia as a Christian stronghold in a largely Islamic area and therefore a major ally in its self-declared War on Terrorism. So, again, as it had in Iraq and in various South American countries, the US prefers to support a "strong man" than be bothered too much about how such strong men treat their own citizens, while supposedly fighting for the forces of law and order. The Ethiopian Government have been given arms and training, while these very weapons are used against its own people. This is called pragmatic foreign policy, not idealistic foreign poicy (which is apparently what some people call Bush's policy with respect to ousting Saddam). I don't know which one is worse; surely there must be a better way to conduct foreihn policy.

There was a very interesting report in the NRC newspaper here during the week which reported how the Ethiopian Government tried to use the situation in Somalia to focus the people's attention away from the domestic situation, towards a so-called common enemy, namely Somalia, one of the poorest countries in the world. Hmmm... well, according to the NRC, the Ethiopians are having none of this and are feeling ever more betrayed by the West which continues to support Meles, the monster in charge.
Anyway, we have dealt with all this a number of times before on this blog. Just a couple of extra points to make:

1 there are two excllent reports on the Make Dictatorship History site, one from Reporters Without Frontiers and the other by Human Rights Watch, which detail the repression in Ethiopia

2 a visitor to this site, Mark, mentioned that the reason why we have not been getting any visitors to the blog from Ethiopia recently is probably because the Ethiopian Government has blocked access to blogspot. This possibility is mentioned in the Reporters Without Frontiers report on Ethiopia.

Eritrea seems to be just as bad, if not worse than Ethiopia, according to these reports, but at least the Eritrean Government is not receiving arms or support from the West, not that they actually want it either.

Tags: Ethiopia, Shashamane, africa, human rights, abuse, make+dictatorship+history, human rights watch, reporters without frontiers

Onto the Last Battle

Hanoi - Christian church, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

The last battle between the forces of modernity, morality and mutual respect against the dark forces of superstition, hate and bigotry.

It is up to the UK Government to decide and a decision will have to come soon. It is in respect of the Equality Bill which is due to pass into law for England and Scotland in April. The Bill quite simply makes it illegal to discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation in the provision of goods and services. I wrote about this in the blog of 10th January.

The point is that public morality has moved on and just as it used to support slavery or race discrimination or sex and changed its mind, the same is happening with sexual orientation, whereby the majority of people do not think it is right to discriminate on the basis of whether or not they may be gay, straight or lesbian.

The problem we are facing now is that the Catholic Church, now vociferously supported by the Anglican Church in the UK, are claiming the right to continue to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and are presuring the Government to be exempted from the new law. Basing their morality on the discredited readings and interpretations of their sacred books, written for the best part over 2,00 years ago, they have been unable to keep up with the general development of morality within society. It is the same with rights for women, where especially the Catholic Church continues to discriminate shamelessly, mainly only within their internal organisation.

What they seem to be wanting to do here is not just discriminate internally, but also discriminate within the public domain, a public domain guided by democratic values, where questions of morality are viewed very differently. The Government wants to outlaw discrimination within the public domain

So we have a clash of values and it is going to be very interesting to see how it goes this time.

Lined up with the Catholics, we have the minister in charge of the Bill, Ruth Kelly who is a hard-line Catholic herself, allied with the Catholic-sympathiser Tony Blair (his wife is Catholic and his children went to a catholic school). Against, I think we have the rest of the Cabinet, a Labour cabinet, which if it stands for anything should stand for equality.

The Catholics had their way last year when they managed to stop new legislation which would affect the way they run their schools. I don't think the Governement will want to be seen to be changing their mind again. We will be back to the 1970's when the question was often asked 'Who Runs Britain?' - the Government or the unions - to be replaced by The Government or the Catholic Church.

I am confident that the Government will win this one and that Britain will take a major step along the road towards modernity. It will be hard for the Catholic Church to win many more battles after this.

Good news!

Bangkok - young love, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

The dark forces of outdated hate-inducing religion received a big setback when an attempt by an Irish peer to rescind the Sexual Orientation Regulations in Northern Ireland failed last night. The House of Lords voted three-to-one against the motion put forward by Lord Morrow despite a protest of a thousand religious bigots, of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish persuasion, outside the Houses of Parliament.

The SOR simply makes it illegal to discriminate against gay people in the provision of goods and services (such as a hotel room or the hire of a village hall for a party). Apparently, the bigots felt that their religious beliefs should take precedence over a law requiring all people to be treated the same. In other words they wanted to retain the right to discriminate in modern day Britain, claiming that their right to hold and act upon their hateful beliefs should take precedence. The campaign they waged was described as a highly inflammatory and well-funded campaign to oppose these much-needed protections reached depths of unpleasantness which we haven’t seen for some years, by Ben Summerskill of Stonewall.

In the debate, Lord Chris Smith, the first openly gay MP and a former cabinet minister, told his fellow peers that, "It seems to me, in my simplistic way, that what they are arguing for is quite simply the right to discriminate and the right to harass. And those arguments are being made in the name of Christianity" (also Islam and Judaism).

Well, the Lords knew what to do and they gave these forces of darkness short shrift, giving a gay-related measure its biggest ever majority in either House.

It is now expected that Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly (albeit a member of Opus Dei) will announce the detail of similar robust protections for the rest of Great Britain very swiftly, there being clear evidence that they will not meet parliamentary opposition.

In the meantime, not such good news from the Netherlands where a Christian school in Amsterdam has said it will not recruit openly gay teachers as they regard being gay as a sin. Also, in another article, we read that three Christian schools in the area of Ede have refused to admit three Burmese children ot their schools. It turns out that the Christian schools in that area are cherry picking white (ie native Dutch) people, leaving the state schools to educate more-than-their-fair-share of non-native Dutch people. Of course, it goes without saying that the Christian schools obtain the vast majority of funding from the State, from taxpayers like myself.