Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2006 1:18 PM
From: Kathleen Sheldon, UCLA
	ksheldon@ucla.edu

Carole J. L. Collins, a national leader since the 1970s in organizations
seeking global economic justice, a campaigner against South African
apartheid, and a writer specializing in African affairs, died at home in
Long Beach, California, September 22, from complications associated with
congestive heart failure.  She was 59.

Collins was an anti-apartheid leader in the 1970s (with the Chicago
Committee for African Liberation) and 1980s, and a crusader in the movement
for Third World debt cancellation in the 1990s.  After moving with her
husband and son from Washington, D.C. to Long Beach in 2002, she devoted
most of her energy to family.

Carole was associated with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)
for more than 20 years.  She served as AFSC's Harare, Zimbabwe-based
Southern Africa International Affairs Representative in 1986-90, and
traveled extensively in war-ravaged Angola and Mozambique, working with
women's producer cooperatives and other community-based organizations to
support grassroots reconstruction of war-ravaged communities.  For most of
the 16 years since her return from Africa, she has served on boards and
committees responsible for supervising AFSC programs on African and global
development issues.

On her first trip to Africa in 1976-77, she was a visiting lecturer on
Mideast politics at Uganda's Makerere University.

In 1981-83, as national coordinator of the Campaign to Oppose Bank Loans to
South Africa, she testified before city councils, state legislatures, and
United Nations bodies supporting often-successful efforts to sever
financial relationships with banks doing business in South Africa.

Collins worked as a policy analyst and advocate with groups including the
Interfaith Action for Economic Justice (1983-85) and Africa Faith and
Justice Network (2001-02).  She was a former visiting fellow (1981-83) at
the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. and she co-authored
_From Debt to Development: Alternatives to the International Debt Crisis_,
published by IPS in 1986.

Collins served as National Coordinator of Jubilee 2000/USA in 1998-1999,
leading the U.S. arm of an international movement demanding cancellation of
the debts of the poorest nations, and she co-authored "Jubilee 2000:
Citizen Action Across the North-South Divide" in Michael Edwards and John
Gaventa, eds., _Global Citizen Action_ (Boulder: Lynne Rienner,
2001).  During the June 1999 G-7 summit in Germany she joined the rock star
Bono, Honduran Archbishop Oscar Rodriguez, and women representing each
continent for a meeting in which they presented debt cancellation demands
to German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

As a writer, Collins was most closely associated with the National Catholic
Reporter, where she was an Africa Correspondent in 1985-86, UN/Diplomatic
Correspondent in 1991-3, and a contributing writer from the late 1970s to
late 1990s.  Her writing also appeared in journalistic and scholarly
publications worldwide, including academic and policy journals Africa
Confidential, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Le Monde, MERIP/Middle
East Report, In These Times, Ms., Multinational Monitor, the Nation,
Newsday, Pacific News Service, The Progressive, the Review of African
Political Economy, and the Weekly Mail and Guardian.  One of her more
recent publications was "Mozambique's HIV/AIDS Pandemic: Grappling with
Apartheid's Legacy" (2005), available from the UN Research Institute for
Social Development.  In recent years she also wrote extensively on the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (ex-Zaire).

Collins earned a BA with honors at Bryn Mawr in 1968, dropped out of the
University of Chicago Political Science Department while participating in
the 1968-69 student protests against the Vietnam War and earned an MA in
International Affairs at Columbia University (1993).

Since moving to Long Beach, California, in 2002, Carole devoted her time
principally to family, especially seven-year-old son Joseph Samora Collins
Askin.  She often referred to herself as "the oldest hockey mom."  She is
also survived by husband Steve Askin, two brothers and one sister.

The funeral will be at Forest Lawn in Long Beach, CA, phone 800-204-3131.

[Information from Steve Askin and UNRISD website].

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