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A SMALL town of 21,200 people in the State of Missouri in the United States of America has been turned into a virtual war zone following protests which erupted after the shooting to death of an unarmed 18-year-old black man by a white policemen on August 9.
Michael Brown, a high school graduate who was due to begin his freshman (first year) college studies in the town of Ferguson, died after Officer Darren Wilson pumped six bullets into his body for “walking in the middle of the street in the afternoon”. Witnesses said Brown had his hands up when he was shot having been originally stopped for “jaywalking”. However, police say Brown was shot as he reached for Wilson’s gun during an altercation inside a police car.

Since the shooting, the largely black community of Ferguson has poured out onto the streets and conducted daily protests, some of which have turned violent. There have been altercations between protesters and the police who have resorted to using teargas, stun grenades and armoured vehicles to disperse crowds and restore law and order. This heavy-handed response and the increasing militarisation of the police force has shocked Americans who are used to seeing such images flashing across their television sets in far-flung war zones such as the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

The outrage which followed the shooting and the resolve of the protesters have shocked the US government to the core and brought to the fore simmering tensions which have been boiling under the surface within the African-American community for decades.

Vernellia Randall, Emeritus professor of law at the University of Dayton, USA, yesterday said: “This isn’t about one boy being killed or about one town. It’s about the lives of all African Americans. What’s surprising to me is that there isn’t more protest and outrage. Just recently, in the town where I live, a black man, John Crawford, picked up a toy gun in Wal-Mart and he got killed by a policeman — even though this is an open carry state. People are in the streets demanding openness and it takes nearly a week to find out Michael Brown was shot six times.”

The defiance of the protestors in Ferguson points to a deeper problem of race relations in America and how the black community is yet to be accorded equal status to their white counterparts. To illustrate the yawning chasm between blacks and whites in Ferguson, the police department in that town is made up of 53 officers and only three of them are black in a town largely made up of African-Americans.

While President Barack Obama and his administration might want to appear shocked by the scale of the protests in Ferguson, the sad truth is that the problem of racial profiling is rife in America and black men in that country are often targeted for abuse by law enforcement agencies. They are most likely to be stopped on the streets for no apparent reason and this has seen them adopt a negative attitude to authorities.

While America might want to project an image of racial equality with the façade reinforced by the occupation of the White House by a mixed race president, the reality is that blacks still lag way behind their white counterparts in all spheres of life. The shooting of Brown has just accorded the black community an outlet to vent their frustrations and show the world the extent of the racial divide in their country. Until the US government addresses the deeper race relations issues in America, communities such as Ferguson will continue to burn.

In the meantime, the incident has embarrassed that country with the United Nations weighing in and calling for calm. As the protests intensify, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon on Monday urged all parties to exercise restraint and for authorities to respect the right to peaceful assembly. In a statement his spokesman said the Secretary-General hopes local and federal investigations “will shed full light on the killing and that justice will be done”.

Ban called on authorities to ensure that the rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression are protected. He also called on all to exercise restraint and for law enforcement officials to abide by “US and international standards in dealing with demonstrations”.

We hope the US will use this incident to evaluate its own human rights record before rushing to condemn other countries for alleged violations.

Zimbabwe is a victim of demonisation by the US and its Western allies for alleged heavy-handedness when dealing with demonstrations by the opposition. The US has even tightened sanctions on Zimbabwe on the basis of spurious human rights violations reports. It is better to remove the log in one’s eye before seeing the speck in another.